A Beatles reunion in 2013.
Watch out, Ringo…TRUCK!
You are currently browsing the yearly archive for 2013.
I’m always fascinated by memory, especially in the extreme. Those who have the rare ability to stretch what is seemingly inelastic are fascinating, but so are those with huge potholes in their past. And some of us consistently reorder what’s transpired to suit us, seemingly a reflexive, subconscious defense mechanism.
Because I don’t have amnesia, I was just thinking about an obituary I read several years ago about Henry Molaison, who was a profound amnesiac. From Benedict Carey in the December 4, 2008 New York Times:
“He knew his name. That much he could remember.
He knew that his father’s family came from Thibodaux, La., and his mother was from Ireland, and he knew about the 1929 stock market crash and World War II and life in the 1940s.
But he could remember almost nothing after that.
In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain operation in Hartford to correct a seizure disorder, only to emerge from it fundamentally and irreparably changed. He developed a syndrome neurologists call profound amnesia. He had lost the ability to form new memories.
For the next 55 years, each time he met a friend, each time he ate a meal, each time he walked in the woods, it was as if for the first time.
And for those five decades, he was recognized as the most important patient in the history of brain science. “
Tags: Benedict Carey, H.M., Henry Molaison
Ron Paul, who has frequently been elected President of straw, seems like a good idea to some college kids and many baristas. Sacha Baron Cohen’s bedroom guest just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few exchanges follow.
________________________
Question:
How do you feel about Texas banning the sale of Tesla cars? Doesn’t seem very American or Libertarian.
Ron Paul:
It’s un-American and it’s unpatriotic and it’s bad economic policy, and it should not be any business of the government what car you can buy.
________________________
Question:
Is there anything that Obama has done that you DO support?
Ron Paul:
That’s a narrow question. How long since it’s been since I’ve strongly supported what ANY president have done? Unfortunately our Presidents and our Congress have been systematically moving in the wrong direction. They have been undermining our freedoms and bankrupting our country and supporting perpetual war.
________________________
Question:
What are your thoughts on free migration? Do you think restrictions against immigration violate the non-aggression principle? Do you agree with economists who say that the World’s GDP would increase by magnitudes if you allowed free migration?
Ron Paul:
That might be the ideal to seek and it should be talked about and maybe someday we can reach that. That is essentially what our 13 Colonies set up under the Constitution – we could move back and forth as freely as possible, and it’s worked out rather well. The problem that we have today deals with the economy and the Welfare State. Because if the doors are wide open and you let all individuals in, all individuals suddenly qualify for welfare benefits – and you are looking for lots of problems. In a free society that is prosperous, the doors should be open as wide as possible. Even today we could do that if we could say “Come and work, come and play, but you don’t get automatic citizenship or benefits.” Those open doors would be very beneficial to us, but it’s been messed up because of the demagoguery and welfare state. But in an ideal world, there would be an economic benefit to it.
________________________
Question:
While I highly agree with many of your policies, can you give us an official response on your stance of separation of church and state?
Ron Paul:
Yes. The church should never run the state. They should never be synonymous. And the state should never interfere with the church. The responsibility of the government should be to protect the right to free choice, whether it is religion, philosophy, or our personal habits.
________________________
Question:
Dr. Paul, we have seen the expansion of Libertarianism over the past several years. How much of it do you think is enabled by the internet, and what are your thoughts on the recent, repeated attempts to limit the freedom of the net and our right to privacy?
Ron Paul:
Well that’s a great threat – the attack on the internet – because the internet is our best vehicle. It has been the best thing for us to have to spread our message. So it has been VERY instrumental in being able to get the message of Libertarianism out. The other thing that has helped us with this message is the evident failure now of our Keynesian economic system which we’ve had now for close to 100 years, and also the obvious evidence that our foreign policy is a complete failure and people are looking for answers, especially the young people, because they see it deeply flawed.
________________________
Question:
Why did you name your son Rand?
Ron Paul:
My wife had the children and she had the privilege of naming the children. Afterwards there was a little bit of discussing with her husband, namely me.
But his name is not after Ayn Rand. His name is RANDALL despite some things that have been around on the Internet. He was called “Randy” at home, and he became “Rand” after becoming a physician.
••••••••••
“So tell me, who are you wearing?”:
Tags: Ron Paul, Sacha Baron Cohen
The Clash, that group of talented poseurs, is profiled in this 1980 piece of PM Magazine-style anthropology.
I interviewed Nick Nolte, one of my favorite actors, nearly a decade ago, and he told me about his regimen of taking human growth hormone as a way of trying to repair the damage he did to his body with a variety of excesses. It seemed an unusual anecdote at the time, but no more.
PEDs have, of course, never been just for athletes. Among numerous others, students, classical musicians and Hollywood actors all indulge to enhance their performance. In the latter community, you can add to botox and collagen a heavy usage of HGH and steroids. The opening of an article on the topic from Tatiana Siegel in the Hollywood Reporter:
“In 2005, a 30-something actor on the precipice of superstardom began prepping for a lead feature role that required ample spotlight on his abs. The actor met with the film’s trainer and outlined the performance-enhancing drugs, including human growth hormone (HGH), he already had been taking. The trainer, a firm believer that a chiseled physique should be achieved naturally, recused himself from working with the actor.
‘He told me that HGH made him feel like nothing else ever made him feel,’ recalls the trainer, who declined to be identified out of respect for trainer/trainee confidentiality. ‘He was basically addicted. I told him to find another trainer. He did.’
That actor, now an A-lister who continues to cash in on his impressive torso, is just one of Hollywood’s growing list of stars who turn to injectable HGH and other performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) amid the ever-competitive world of looking great at any age.
With its fountain-of-youth promise, HGH quietly has become the substance of choice for Tinseltown denizens looking to quickly burn fat, boost energy and even improve complexion.”
Tags: Tatiana Siegel
Like a lot of comedians, Abbie Hoffman was sad. After gaining international fame for railing against capitalism and the American war machine during the 1960s, he lived on the lam (wanted but not desired), was covered in an avalanche of blow, suffered from clinical depression and was unable to reinvent himself when he finally resurfaced. He didn’t want to live in the past but couldn’t seem to find a place in the present. His was a great trick that couldn’t be performed twice. Sad and broken, he took his own life in 1989. From the People article “A Troubled Rebel Chooses A Silent Death“:
“In the sunny, plant-filled apartment where Abbie Hoffman ended his life with a massive overdose of phenobarbital, the artifacts on the wall bespoke decades of rebellion: a poster of the Grateful Dead, another of a raised fist with the word STRIKE!, a bumper sticker reading VOTE REPUBLICAN. IT’S EASIER THAN THINKING, a photo of a young Hoffman wearing a Chicago policeman’s shirt.
Summoned to this corner of pastoral Bucks County, Pa., six years ago by an environmental group that wanted his help battling the diversion of the Delaware River water to cool a nuclear reactor, Hoffman told an interviewer in 1987 that he was happy to ‘live and die here fighting the Philadelphia Electric Company-it’s just like the ’60s for me.’
But it was not just like the ’60s. In that theatrical era, young Abbie Hoffman held center stage. A self-styled ‘Groucho Marxist’ and co-founder of the Youth International Party (supporters were dubbed yippies), which existed mostly in his imagination, he was the antiwar movement’s mad genius of media events. He disrupted business on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange by tossing dollar bills from the balcony. He rallied 50,000 anti-Vietnam War demonstrators to levitate the Pentagon. He nominated a pig—Pigasus—for President when thousands of protesters converged on Chicago to demonstrate at the 1968 Democratic Convention. The violence in the streets there led to the most famous political trial of the decade, as Hoffman and his Chicago Eight co-defendants were charged in 1969 with conspiracy to incite riot.
They ultimately beat the charges but not before turning Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom into a countercultural circus: Abbie somersaulted into court one day and wore judicial robes another. ‘Where do you reside?’ his lawyer asked him on the witness stand. ‘I live in Woodstock Nation,’ he replied. ‘It is a nation of alienated young people. We carry it around with us as a state of mind…. It is a nation dedicated to…the idea that people should have better means of exchange than property or money.’
Just what that ‘better means’ should be was never clearly spelled out, but it didn’t matter then. ‘F—the System!’ was program enough so long as it left room for lots of sex and drugs and rock and roll. ‘He used to say, ‘All I care about is who’s bringing the ice cream to the demonstration,’ recalls fellow yippie Jerry Rubin, 50. ‘Essentially, he wanted to have fun.’
Now, those alienated young people are no longer young, and Woodstock Nation is a memory. But ‘Abbie wasn’t interested in nostalgia,’ says Al Giordano, 29, a journalist who knew him well. ‘He was interested in battling the power structure. He had learned that nostalgia is just another form of depression.’
The last thing Hoffman needed was more forms of depression.”
__________________________
Abbie makes gefilte fish, 1973:
Tags: Abbie Hoffman
From Hannes Eder’s Literary Platform essay about the Swedish model for settling the dispute between publishers and libraries in the age of e-book lending:
“Again and again e-books just won’t behave like their print counterparts. And not only when it comes to libraries for that matter; when you click the ‘buy now’ button on Amazon the fine print shows what’s really going on. The following comes from the Kindle store’s Terms of Use:
‘Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider. The Content Provider may include additional terms for use within its Kindle Content. Those terms will also apply, but this Agreement will govern in the event of a conflict.’
If treating ebooks like physical books is beginning to feel a bit like trying to push a square peg through a round hole, that feeling is confirmed by the the letter of the law. In a legal sense e-books aren’t goods. That’s why the right of first sale-doctrine doesn’t apply to them, which in plain English means that you can’t do what you want with an e-book just because you payed for it. Instead e-books are considered services, and services are licensed on terms that need to be negotiated between the licensor and the licensee. That’s why libraries and publishers now need to sit down to negotiate, where before there was really no need to talk.
Some say the war over e-books can’t be solved since libraries lack enough of a value proposition to make publishers even want to sit down at the table. New York-based business analyst Mike Shatzkin has made this point, and perhaps it holds true in America where the war is raging most ferociously and where none of the biggest publishers are now making their full e-book catalogs available to libraries.
But what’s true in America doesn’t have to be true in Europe, which the example of Sweden clearly shows.
Sweden has a long tradition of building community based cultural infrastructure that is controlled in full neither by the state nor by private interest. To mention just one of many examples: Ingmar Bergman probably wouldn’t have had such a tremendous reach if he hadn’t been backed by the Swedish Film Institute, in which the private film industry pools its resources together with state money.
The book industry is no different. Just over a decade ago publishers and librarians formed a joint task force that came up with a model for e-book lending which still to this day seems unique in the world: transaction fees for every loan; no cap on the number of concurrent loans; and access to full catalogs without entry fees. In short, e-books are treated as services.”
Tags: Hannes Eder
“No joke.”
i have a very weird unusual desperate ?
where can i sell my soul to the devil?? or where can i meet a demon?? plz help. want something from satan. no joke.
The Incredible Hulk abandoning his family.
I’m going out for a pack of cigarettes.
But you don’t smoke, Dad.
Debbie Harry selling Gloria Vanderbilt jeans in 1980, during denim’s first designer heyday.
Tags: Debbie Harry, Gloria Vanderbilt
In an automated society, there are supposed to be fewer bullshit jobs, the drudgery passed on to machines. But that hasn’t happened in our brave new world. There’s just as much toil now, and even the few excruciating tasks that have been largely disappeared–phone operator, for instance–have just resulted in the shifting of responsibilities. Twice this week I’ve heard people publicly cursing into their cells as they tried to get through a series of prompts to attain some information or other. The salaries vanished but the work did not.
The first two paragraphs from David Graeber’s excellent Strike! magazine essay, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs“:
“In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.”
Tags: David Graeber, John Maynard Keynes
The Ray Kurzweil writing that spurred Bill Joy to pen his famous 2000 Wired article, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” in which he worried about a utopia that seemed to him dystopic:
“THE NEW LUDDITE CHALLENGE
First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.
If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite – just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes ‘treatment’ to cure his ‘problem.’ Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them ‘sublimate’ their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.”
Tags: Bill Joy, Ray Kurzweil
A jacked-up Mel Gibson on his way to yank Baby Jesus 2.0 from the womb.
I can’t wait any longer for you, my Savior.
From the August 16, 1921 New York Times:
“Paris–When a landlord at Lille called for his rent his tenant, Jean Batiste Caillaux, bit off his nose. For doing so Caillaux was yesterday sent to prison for three months and fined 100 francs.
According to the landlord’s story, he had had trouble for some time past about collecting the rent from his tenant, and the agent having failed, he went himself to do it. From words the two passed to blows and from blows to a wrestling match, in the course of which Caillaux got his teeth well into the other’s nose and bit off a considerable piece. That stopped the fight.
Caillaux was considerably embarrassed by his mouthful and spat it out on the ground, whereupon the owner of the nose made a grab for it. Carrying it in his hands, he ran to a doctor and got it successfully sewed on again.”
Tags: Jean Batiste Caillaux
Crowd-scanning is still a chore for technologists, but you know it will be perfected–and soon. No more being just another face in the crowd, no more being lonely, no more being left alone. From Charlie Savage in the New York Times:
“WASHINGTON — The federal government is making progress on developing a surveillance system that would pair computers with video cameras to scan crowds and automatically identify people by their faces, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with researchers working on the project.
The Department of Homeland Security tested a crowd-scanning project called the Biometric Optical Surveillance System — or BOSS — last fall after two years of government-financed development. Although the system is not ready for use, researchers say they are making significant advances. That alarms privacy advocates, who say that now is the time for the government to establish oversight rules and limits on how it will someday be used.
There have been stabs for over a decade at building a system that would help match faces in a crowd with names on a watch list — whether in searching for terrorism suspects at high-profile events like a presidential inaugural parade, looking for criminal fugitives in places like Times Square or identifying card cheats in crowded casinos.
The automated matching of close-up photographs has improved greatly in recent years, and companies like Facebook have experimented with it using still pictures.”
Tags: Charlie Savage
Patti Smith in 1978 visiting Mike Douglas to allegedly promote her book, Babel. Mike doesn’t approve of her looks. She didn’t have to put up with that crap in Penthouse. The host and guest surprisingly spend time discussing Muhammad Ali losing to Leon Spinks. Smith was apparently friends with Ali.
Tags: Leon Spinks, Mike Douglas, Muhammad Ali, Patti Smith
At the New Yorker Elements blog, NYU psychology professor Gary Marcus has a post about the AI community, which seems more interested in creating machines that are better at sleight of hand than depth of thought. An excerpt:
“In a terrific paper just presented at the premier international conference on artificial intelligence, [Henry] Levesque, a University of Toronto computer scientist who studies these questions, has taken just about everyone in the field of A.I. to task. He argues that his colleagues have forgotten about the ‘intelligence’ part of artificial intelligence.
Levesque starts with a critique of Alan Turing’s famous ‘Turing test,’ in which a human, through a question-and-answer session, tries to distinguish machines from people. You’d think that if a machine could pass the test, we could safely conclude that the machine was intelligent. But Levesque argues that the Turing test is almost meaningless, because it is far too easy to game. Every year, a number of machines compete in the challenge for real, seeking something called the Loebner Prize. But the winners aren’t genuinely intelligent; instead, they tend to be more like parlor tricks, and they’re almost inherently deceitful. If a person asks a machine ‘How tall are you?’ and the machine wants to win the Turing test, it has no choice but to confabulate. It has turned out, in fact, that the winners tend to use bluster and misdirection far more than anything approximating true intelligence. One program worked by pretending to be paranoid; others have done well by tossing off one-liners that distract interlocutors. The fakery involved in most efforts at beating the Turing test is emblematic: the real mission of A.I. ought to be building intelligence, not building software that is specifically tuned toward fixing some sort of arbitrary test.”
Tags: Gary Marcus, Henry Levesque
“A number of years ago he became interested in the subject of cremation.”
Water worried Dr. Francis Julius LeMoyne, but he was fine with fire. The nineteenth-century Pennsylvania doctor thought that washing the skin was hazardous and that bodies buried in cemeteries were poisoning the drinking water. This latter belief drove him to found America’s first crematorium. Not even four dozen bodies were reduced to dust at the LeMoyne crematorium during its 25 years of existence, but it still was a landmark operation. From an article about the physician in the February 14, 1878 New York Times:
“Mrs. Jane Pitman, of Cincinnati, who is to be cremated in Dr. Le Moyne’s cremating furnace at Washington, Penn., to-morrow, will be the first woman who has ever been cremated in this country, if not the first in modern times. The only cremation of note that has ever taken place in this country, was that of Joseph Henry Louis, Baron de Palm, of New-York, whose body was burned in the same retort, on the 6th of December, 1876. This furnace is the only one if its kind in the United States. It was built in the Fall of 1876 by Dr. F. Julius Le Moyne, a wealthy and eccentric citizen of Washington, Penn. Dr. Le Moyne’s father was a French physician, who settled in the little town of Washington in the early days of Western Pennsylvania, soon acquired a large practice among the mountaineers who then inhabited that part of the country, and died leaving a large fortune. The son, the present Dr. Le Moyne, has for years been well-known throughout the Western part of Pennsylvania. He was a rabid Abolitionist, and in 1844 was prominently named on the Liberal ticket as a candidate for the Vice-Presidency, Gerritt Smith heading the ticket; but Dr. Le Moyne declined to run. A number of years ago he became interested in the subject of cremation, and, after giving the question long consideration, decided that when he died his body should be burned. He proposed to the owners of the Washington Cemetery to build a cremation furnace on their grounds; but as they declined the offer, he built one on his own land, on a high hill about a mile and a half from the village, known as Gallows Hill, it having formerly been the place of execution for Washington County.
The building is a small brick structure, divided into two rooms, one for the reception of bodies, containing a cabinet for holding the ashes of cremated bodies, and the other containing the furnace proper, a huge gas retort substantially built over a long, deep furnace. The door of the retort does not swing on hinges, but is held in place by strong iron screws, and when a body is put in it is ‘luted’ with cement, to make the chamber perfectly air-tight. At the time of the cremation of Baron de Palm the furnace fire was started at 2 o’clock on the morning of the 5th, and was kept in full blast till 8:30 o’clock on the morning of the 6th, when the body was put in. The retort is made of fire-brick, and by noon of the first day it was at white heat. Baron de Palm’s body was laid in an iron frame shaped like a cradle, carefully wrapped in a winding sheet soaked in alum water, to prevent it from burning rapidly. When it came time to put it in the retort, there was a discussion between Dr. Le Moyne and Col. Olcott as to which end should go in first. Col. Olcott thought the feet should go first, but Dr. Le Moyne insisted that head first was the proper way, and head first it went. As the body was shoved into the furnace, there was a little smoke and a slight smell of burning flesh, but after this no odor was perceptible. The door was immediately fastened on, and the cremation began.
“He is said to believe that the application of water to the body is injurious to the health.”
A small hole through the door of the retort afforded a chance to watch the progress of the experiment. Five minutes after the body was put in the furnace was dark inside. In seven minutes a thick white smoke could be seen. In 15 minutes the retort was lighted up, and the body could be seen distinctly. By 9:45 the head had separated from the body and rolled to one side; the flesh had all disappeared, and all the bones but skull were red-hot. At 11 o’clock, after two and a half hours of burning, the skeleton was almost entire, and white hot in every part. It was a skeleton of fire. Soon afterward it began to show signs of crumbling, and by 12:30 the cremation was pronounced complete. Some of the larger bones still retained their shape, but they needed only a breath of air to reduce them to ashes. …
The first body cremated in the furnace was that of a sheep, which, Dr. Le Moyne burned for a trial. It was even reduced to grayish ashes, and now ornaments one of the counters in Dr. Le Monye’s office. done up in a glass jar. Dr. Le Moyne has another theory, almost as singular as that of cremation. He is said to believe that the application of water to the body is injurious to the health, and to carry out his theory he recommends an occasional scraping with the back of a table-knife instead of the usual ablutions.”
Tags: Baron de Palm, Col. Olcott, Francis Julius Le Moyne, Francis Julius LeMoyne, Gerritt Smith, Jane Pitman, Joseph Henry Louis
Your cat’s used litter from litter box – $1 (Brooklyn)
I read somewhere that used cat litter that has cat smell/urine smell on it can be a deterrent for the rodents. They smell cat litter and run away.
Please let me have some.
As the A-Rod drama reminds us, the whole steroid hysteria surrounding Major League Baseball is a perplexing thing. It’s not that anyone should use steroids. Almost all available evidence tells us that they’re dangerous. But football players are about twice the size of their MLB counterparts, yet no one seems to care. Hockey and basketball players are also much larger, but there’s very little noise about it.
I would assume baseball received special attention (even Congressional hearings) because the Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds years saw the obliteration of the single-season and career home-run records, which were considered “sacred” for some reason. (Even when Roger Maris nosed out Babe Ruth’s record in 1961 with no suspicions of cheating, he was reviled. Hank Aaron, a great gentleman, received death threats when approaching Ruth’s career record, though those were motivated mostly by racism.)
Some sportswriters with a particularly moralistic bent have been unleashing fire and brimstone, reminding us about an earlier, cleaner era of baseball which never existed. Baseball has always been rife with drugs and cheating. Just because the drugs have gotten more effective doesn’t really change that. Some of the most famous players in history used amphetamines. Bob Costas may have arranged it in his head that amphetamines are “performance-enablers” and not “performance-enhancers,” but that isn’t so. It’s just a rationalization. (I think the best description of Newt Gingrich likewise suits Costas: He’s a dumb person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.)
All this hand-wringing over a lost idyllic past is not dissimilar to politicians who sell nostalgia for an earlier, more-perfect America. You know, the one with much more racism and sexism and inferior medicine and science. It’s not that baseball shouldn’t try to keep the sport as drug-free as possible just because PEDs have always been used, but it shouldn’t be a dishonest, moralistic pursuit of a history that simply didn’t occur.
From Scott Lemieux at Deadspin:
“Singling out Rodriguez is a perfect symbol of anti-PED hysteria. First, there’s the singling out of baseball players in general. Almost nobody cares about NFL players who use PEDs, although PED use in the NFL can actually result in players better able to inflict injuries on each other. This should make it clear that whatever our anti-PED hysteria is about, it’s not about a concern for the health of the athletes. People who (like me) watch the NFL—let alone people who make a good living covering it—really can’t get on their high horse about the health effects of PEDs. Injecting yourself with Human Growth Hormone is certainly a lot safer than playing a sport in which the normal course of action results in hits that might slowly turn your brain to mush. Nor is it obvious why taking PEDs is considered highly objectionable but taking cortisone to play through terrible knee or back injuries is considered part of the game.
The anti-PED hysteria isn’t about the cheating, either. High-level athletes will always seek an edge. “
From “Why Silicon Valley Funds Instagrams, Not Hyperloops,” entrepreneur Jerzy Gangi’s astute critique of America’s contemporary idea factory:
“As an entrepreneur, I began to wonder, ‘Why hasn’t anyone proposed this already?’ It’s a great idea, but… Elon Musk can’t be the first person to think of it.
In doing some research online I found out that other American inventors have had similar designs and proposals for a decade. However, none of them were able to get taken seriously or obtain funding.
Why did that happen?
I want to tell you my answer.
MY THESIS
My thesis is simple. We haven’t seen Silicon Valley develop a company like Hyperloop — even though the plans have been out there for over a decade — because there’s a systemic failure in the startup ecosystem. In short, Silicon Valley has killed major innovation.
In all of the hype around companies like Facebook and Instagram — what really are just glorified websites — we’ve lost sight of some real innovation opportunities, most of which occur in the offline world.
The entire culture of Silicon Valley, and entrepreneurship around the globe, has taken on a groupthink that prevents truly novel inventions, like the Hyperloop, from reaching the market.
The result is a major loss. It’s a loss to our society. It’s a loss to our capital markets. It’s a loss to private investors. And it’s a loss to entrepreneurs.”
Tags: Jerzy Gangi
A couple of punks and writers, Nick Tosches and Patti Smith, got together in 1976 as the former interviewed the latter for Penthouse, that classy journal published by Bob Guccione. An excerpt:
“Penthouse:
Has the women’s movement had anything to do with your growth as a poet?
Patti Smith:
No. I remember getting totally pissed off the first time I got a letter that started off with ‘Dear Ms. Smith.’ A word like Ms. is really bullshit. Vowels are the most illuminated letters in the alphabet. Vowels are the colors and souls of poetry and speech. And these assholes take the only fuckin’ vowel out of the word Miss. So what do they have left? Ms. It sounds like a sick bumblebee, it sounds frigid. I mean, who the hell would ever want to stick his hand up the dress of somebody who goes around calling herself something like Ms.? It’s all so stupid.
I don’t like answering to other people’s philosophies. I don’t have any philosophy, I just believe in stuff. Either I believe in something or I don’t. Like, I believe in the Rolling Stones but not in the Dave Clark Five. There’s nothing philosophic about it. Whenever I’m linked with a movement, it pisses me off. I like who I am. I always liked who I was and I always loved men. The only time I ever feel fucked around by men is when I fight with a guy or when a guy ditches me. And that’s got nothing to do with women’s lib. That has to do with being ditched.
I don’t feel exploited by pictures of naked broads. I like that stuff. It’s a bad photograph or the girl’s ugly, then that pisses me off. Shit, I think bodies are great.
Every time I say the word pussy at a poetry reading, some idiot broad rises and has a fit. ‘What’s your definition of pussy, sister?’ I dunno, it’s a slang term. If I wanna say pussy, I’ll say pussy. If I wanna say nigger, I’ll say nigger. If somebody wants to call me a cracker bitch, that’s cool. It’s all part of being American. But all these tight-assed movements are fucking up our slang, and that eats it.
Penthouse:
Do you have many encounters with groupies?
Patti Smith:
Yeah, but they’re almost always girls. They’re usually pretty young, too. They try to act heavy and come on like leather. I always act as if they’re real cool. I never go anyplace with them. They bring me drugs and poetry and black leather gloves and stuff like that. It’s pretty funny. I don’t really know what they want. I mean, I think they’re actually straight girls.
The guys that I get, they’re always such great losers. Really pimply faced fuck-ups with thick glasses, but a lot of heart, y’know? My heart really goes out for those kids ’cause I can still taste what it feels like to be sixteen and totally fucked up. I remember everything. And I figure if I came out of it okay, then these kids are going to be okay, too. They just need to be told that they’re going to be okay, that’s all.”
Tags: Nick Tosches, Patti Smith
I never knew about this: In 1963, the U.S. government apparently blasted a ring of copper around the Earth, fearful that the Soviet Union could compromise its communications abilities.The opening of an article on the topic from Joe Hanson at Wired:
“During the summer of 1963, Earth looked a tiny bit like Saturn.
The same year that Martin Luther King, Jr. marched on Washington and Beatlemania was born, the United States launched half a billion whisker-thin copper wires into orbit in an attempt to install a ring around the Earth. It was called Project West Ford, and it’s a perfect, if odd, example of the Cold War paranoia and military mentality at work in America’s early space program.
The Air Force and Department of Defense envisioned the West Ford ring as the largest radio antenna in human history. Its goal was to protect the nation’s long-range communications in the event of an attack from the increasingly belligerent Soviet Union.
During the late 1950’s, long-range communications relied on undersea cables or over-the-horizon radio. These were robust, but not invulnerable. Should the Soviets have attacked an undersea telephone or telegraph cable, America would only have been able to rely on radio broadcasts to communicate overseas. But the fidelity of the ionosphere, the layer of the atmosphere that makes most long-range radio broadcasts possible, is at the mercy of the sun: It is routinely disrupted by solar storms. The U.S. military had identified a problem.”
Tags: Joe Hanson
James Lipton interviewing Sean Penn’s condom.
What is your least favorite word?
When bitterly trying to push buttons, Malcolm X said some ridiculous and hurtful things. But I think he said as many startlingly true things as any American in the second half of last century. He was at his best and worst in a 1963 Playboy interview, which was conducted by Alex Haley. An excerpt:
“Playboy:
You say that white men are devils by nature. Was Christ a devil?
Malcolm X:
Christ wasn’t white. Christ was a black man.
Playboy:
On what Scripture do you base this assertion?
Malcolm X:
Sir, Billy Graham has made the same statement in public. Why not ask him what Scripture he found it in? When Pope Pius XII died, LIFE magazine carried a picture of him in his privatestudy kneeling before a black Christ. What was the source of their information? All white people who have studied history and geography know that Christ was a black man. Only the poor, brainwashed American Negro has been made to believe that Christ was white, to maneuver him into worshiping the white man. After becoming a Muslim in prison, I read almost everything I could put my hands on in the prison library. I began to think back on everything I had read and especially with the histories, I realized that nearly all of them read by the general public have been made into white histories. I found out that the history-whitening process either had left out great things that black men had done, or some of the great black men had gotten whitened.
Playboy:
Would you list a few of these men?
Malcolm X:
Well, Hannibal, the most successful general that ever lived, was a black man. So was Beethoven; Beethoven’s father was one of the black moors that hired themselves out in Europe as professional soldiers. Haydn, Beethoven’s teacher, was of African descent. And Solomon. Great Biblical characters. Columbus, the discoverer of America, was a half-black man. Whole black empires, like the Moorish, have been whitened to hide the fact that a great black empire had conquered a white empire even before America was discovered. The Moorish civilization–black Africans–conquered and ruled Spain; they kept the light burning in Southern Europe. The word ‘Moor’ means ‘black,’ by the way. Egyptian civilization is a classic example of how the white man stole great African cultures and makes them appear today as white European. The black nation of Egypt is the only country that has a science named after its culture: Egyptology. The ancient Sumerians, a black-skinned people, occupied the Middle Eastern areas and were contemporary with the Egyptian civilization. The Incas, the Aztecs, the Mayans, all dark-skinned Indian people, had a highly developed culture here in America, in what is now Mexico and northern South America. These people had mastered agriculture at the time when European white people were still living in mud huts and eating weeds. But white children, or black children, or grownups here today in America don’t get to read this in the average books they are exposed to.
Playboy:
Can you cite any authoritative historical documents for these observations?
Malcolm X:
I can cite a great many, sir. You could start with Herodotus, the Greek historian. He outright described the Egyptians as ‘black, with woolly hair.’ And the American archaeologist and Egyptologist James Henry Breasted did the same thing. Read Pliny. Read any of the ancient Roman, Greek and, more recently, European anthropologists and archaeologists.”
Tags: Alex Haley, Malcolm X