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May 17th, 2008
09:32 pm - Real Business Cycle Models of the Great Depression: a Critical Survey
The general conclusion Real Business Cycle (RBC) authors have reached in analysing the Great Depression is that it was a normal business cycle whose persistence was due to the distorting intervention of the State, in a vain attempt to improve the general economic performance. So, while New Deal policies and the like are traditionally seen as the starting point of the recovery phase, in the RBC interpretation the position is completely reversed. Such economic policies are, in fact, blamed for having been, not simply ineffective, but actually harmful and responsible for the absence of recovery.
http://edoc.bib.ucl.ac.be:83/archive/00000316/01/2005-5.pdf
Two things. First of all, according to a lot of the models quoted in this survey (there are plenty of models to choose from by the way, and they don't all agree), if Hoover had just relaxed the monetary supply at the start of the Great Depression, it would merely have been an ordinary business cycle. That is, like the internet boom and bust, one of those cycles that you can't help but have in any capitalistic society, due to various exogenous shocks to the economy.
Second of all, the real problem with the great depression was not the stock market crash and the following economic bust. That would have been again, just another economic boom and bust, with a relatively quick recovery after a couple of years. The real problem was that the state turned an ordinary business cycle into the great depression. The atypical problem of the great depression is not the stock market crash, not the deflationary economic problems nor the runs on the banks, but that for over a decade families starved to death because they couldn't find jobs. It's the length of the great depression which is the underlying difference between it and a typical business cycle. And according many of the RBC economists, this was caused by that great hero FDR, in particular the very governmental organizations meant to halt the great depression created a decade of misery for families by undercutting a normal economic recovery: the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), and the National Labour Relations Act (NLRA).
I think we are at the point, politically where both the democrats and the republicans believe the same mythology in regards to Franklin D. Roosevelt, (whom even Ronald Reagan paid homage to) which is, his policies are the same ones which should be undertaken once again if we ever enter the same sort of economic problems we faced during the great depression. George Bush has said before that the trillions of dollars we are spending on Iraq helps the economy because of this artificial intervention of the state on the wages and labor pool, by paying a bunch of soldiers trillions to fight a war. This to me seems absolutely absurd but both democratic and republican politicians seem to believe war, which in the past has bankrupted entire nations, now somehow helps our economy.
One "problem" with the great depression is that it only happened once. So we can't really tell for sure why exactly it was so terribly long and harsh, compared to other business cycles.
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02:17 pm - my problem with feminism
I think my problem with feminism began in the 70's. That is the era when this unholy of alliance of marxism and feminism really took off. My view on marxism itself is incredibly dim. I consider it one of the single most intellectually bankrupt philosophical theories ever created, right next to freudian analysis and homeopathic medicine. The basic problem with marxism is that it is not a theory. You can't posit ideas, test them, and then if the theories are wrong disprove them. It's not scientific. Instead it is a way of thinking, where you prove why something happened after the fact, and then use this as a basis for political and social engineering. And then no matter what happens, marxism has always succeeded. Even when it fails, it never fails because it is wrong, it fails because it wasn't done in a "pure" enough fashion.
A theory which is never wrong it never right. Marxism also has no limits on its applicability. Marxism never says that there are certain conditions where it just can't say anything. You can usually tell when a theory well formulated when you can easily decide when to apply a theory and when it just doesn't apply. So for instance, when you have a theory that says global warming causes decrease of the polar ice and this means we have less polar bears because they need ice to hunt seals, this is a pretty good theory. We can measure temperatures, figure out how much the sea ice is warming up, count the polar bears. But if it rains in Kalamazoo for 10 days in a row, you can say, that's not part of the theory, it just doesn't apply. On the other hand, take this idea that global warming is causing more "chaotic weather events." Now, this is actually a very badly formulated theory. Because no matter what happens anywhere in the world, ice packs in the polar sea, a hot day in Juno, or if it rains 10 days in a row in Kalamazoo, this theory could apply. You have to narrow a theory like that down to make it useful.
Marxism is actually one of the worst theories ever created. It's been slow to die of course. Because, like religions, you just can't disprove it. It's impossible, because it never posits things which can be disproved, it's a way of looking at events which means everything. And meaning everything it means nothing.
But as slow to die as Marxism has been, it has left traces of itself in other fields. Specifically in feminism. Feminism took up this structural idea of history and incorporated marxist ideas into itself in the 70's. And that's where the damage was done.
today feminist studies are a vibrant and interesting field, but it is polluted throughout by this poisonous ideology that it acquired from marxist thought.
Often it takes this idea that there is a patriarchal mode of thought in the world (the default, where man's values run things, and this creates a world view of patriarchy) and there is an alternative viewpoint of feminism which recreates the history, events and ideas of the world through a new view. Sometimes feminism even disputes rationality, and science as being patriarchal. The problem with this sort of view it that it has unprovable assertions, like marxism, and it creates verities. It's a way of looking at the world which purports to explain everything. You can tell immediately it is a problem because this type of feminism isn't able to limit itself. It explains every event in history, every human interaction, every social, political and religious experience. Like I said, that's an immediate flag that there is a problem with this type of feminism.
Now that's not all there is to feminism of course. There is the sort of woman's issues feminism, the type where studies are done as to whether or not doctors treat women with the wrong drugs because when studies are done, they tend to look at effects on men, instead of both men and women. There are studies done about why a woman gets paid less than a man, how much less they get paid. Basically these sorts of issues are what any group which is interested in the welfare of their members does, from the NAACP to the NRA. It's not about any particular ideology it's about women's issues. There's a lot of great work done with these sorts of issues. And of course there are many feminist critiques which are useful and interesting because they are able to limit themselves to provable and disprovable issues.
But there is this strain of feminism that I have a problem with, this ideological feminism. There is also an unnerving tendency toward censorship that this particular strain of feminism has. For instance, there are certain questions which can't be asked. Such as, "Is Hillary Clinton being attacked not because she is a woman, but because she is a liar?" You can't even ask these sorts of questions. If you do, it will be received as if you are a part of a patriarchal system, so that the question has no validity. This makes me very uneasy. Anytime I see censorship of ideas for philosophical reasons, it makes me question the basis of that philosophy. Hillary's presidential bid has really brought out feminists who were steeped in the 70's marxist ideology.
I think it is unfortunate that when marxism died as a relevant social ideology it didn't die entirely, but left lingering seeds of its poison in other fields, specifically, in linguistics and feminism.
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May 16th, 2008
10:21 am - donald trump on cnbc
i like watching donald trump on cnbc. first of all the people on cnbc are miserable suck ups. They parrot big corporate talking points on every issue, have no idea about real businesses, will support the paper companies, financial, insurance and banks over all other companies (like agriculture, tech, education, you name it), and always take incredibly short term views, I mean are stock prices higher today than yesterday, they don't even talk about taking a view that is 4 months long. And the donald rips them up.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=742027959&play=1
Don't get me wrong, the donald is also a big corp man, he's no real friend to actual honest small business, real business. But he is not a miserable suckup, and I like how when he attacks the cnbc talking points, they dont know what to do. Suck up to the donald (because he's rich) or suck up to the cnbc talking points.
"I hear you talking about the short traders. We don't have a president who can talk to opec and say the oil price is coming down and coming down now. I would put heavy taxes on the oil companies and they would still make plenty of money. every time the interest rates goes down they raise the oil prices.
I listen to the folks on your show who say we are not in a recession and I say who are these morons."
the donald
I actually am not on board with his idea that we should force the middle east to bring down oil prices through political pressure, I just like watching the cnbc hosts squirm.
the guy on cbnc was taking such a beating I think he almost cried when trump left with his final barb, after being asked to appear live
"I only do network."
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May 14th, 2008
08:11 pm - the mystery of the home teams
the NBA this season has teams where the home team wins 9 times out of 10. There are a lot of theories about why this is so. The one I hear the most is that all the teams are very close in terms of talent, due to salary caps and free agency, and because they are so close, there is this roar of the crowd the home team roar that fires up the home team and gets the player's blood boiling gets the players off the bench going, and that is why the home teams win so much.
I don't think that's it. I think there is this limit. Like you see in those japanese video action games, you reach your "limit" and you are done. This limit is defined somewhat vaguely, because really it is somewhat vague. If you are going through a bad divorce and playing sports, your game will suffer because you lack mental focus. If you are fighting with the head coach, you will be spending mental energy against him instead of playing the game. In fact, when you fire the neurons in your muscles, this requires a neurological force, it's not just the muscles, the brain itself has to activate those neurons, a neuromuscular force has to happen. And it seems that there is a real scientific basis to believe that mental energies spent, on anything, emotional problems, even having to work out financial details the day of a game, anything like this, theoretically could decrease the efficiency of the muscles.
So there is this combination of things, endurance which can be leached, mental focus, neuromuscular efficiencies, and any time you are fighting other problems in your life, your game will suffer.
So what I think is that when a team is at home, they get home cooking, they sleep in their own beds, and they have sex with their wives. On the road, these NBA stars will have unfamiliar food in restaurants, they will be chasing exotic tail, and sleep in an unfamiliar bed. I don't think you even have to stay up late to have this sort of effect.
If my theory is right there is a way to almost completely eliminate the home team advantage. First of all, all year, feed the NBA stars for free, on the team's dime. Hire whatever cooks you need, this is not a benefit, this is to help the team. Make sure the stars love this cooking whatever it is. And bring this team of cooks with the team on every away game. Instead of having the team stay in hotels, buy some of the best, most elite home trailers you can find. Make sure that the team will like them enough that they will enjoy staying there. Then on every away game you can possible do it with, use those trailers in the regular season, so much that it seems like home. And encourage the players to bring their wives on the road.
Basically make every away game a sort of home away from home, comfortable, familiar, low stress, ordinary. So the team can use all their mental and physical energies on the game itself.
One reason this home team crowd idea never made any sense to me is because, sure being the home team is nice. It's nice to hear them roar when you make a shot. It's nice when they root for you. It's ok. But there is nothing on earth as great as to be in a place like the Boston Garden and hear the gas go out of the crowd, to hear the roar diminish until you can hear a pin drop. However much it motivates the home team to play better, the away team gets even more satisfaction to hear the despair and wailing from the men women and children in their own house. If the players didn't enjoy stepping on the throats of their opponents and hearing them whimper in defeat, they wouldn't be professionals in the first place.
Of course if you are an announcer, you can hear the crowd, you can feel it roar, so it seems like an easy explanation, that's why you always hear that the crowd is the reason. It seems self evident. If you're an announcer, you don't see the unfamiliar food, the uneasy rest in a strange bed, and the booty chasing the night before, so they never talk about it.
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10:25 am - hillary speech from yesterday: real life as a metaphor for real life part #2
And I will be back. As we move on now to the next contests, in Kentucky and Oregon, in Puerto Rico, in Montana and South Dakota, tonight I’m thinking about Florence Steen from South Dakota, eighty-eight years old and in failing health when she asked that her daughter bring an absentee ballot to her hospice bedside. Florence was born before women had the right to vote, and she was determined to exercise that right, to cast a ballot for her candidate who just happened to be a woman running for president. Florence passed on a few days ago, but I am eternally grateful to her and her family for making this such an important and incredible milestone in her life that means so much to me. I’m also thinking of Dalton Hatfield, an 11-year-old boy from Kentucky, who sold his bike and sold his video games to raise money to support my campaign.
Hillary
http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/05/13/you-blew-them-away-hillary/
You can't make this stuff up.
An 88 year old woman votes for Hillary and as soon as the ballot gets counted, she drops dead.
Hillary funds her campaign from a boy who sells everything in his life that provides joy.
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May 13th, 2008
10:32 am - guitar + ferret
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May 12th, 2008
11:38 pm - Charades
the grand unified theories, Koenig writes, are difficult ot verify experimentally. Nevertheless, they illuminate our understanding of elementary-particle interactions so elegantly that many physicists find them extremely attractive.
"What an extraordinary sentence," she says.
He is deeply startled and spins full circle, almost pitching his desk chair off its base and virtually colliding with her. "Good God!" he says. "How --?"
"So elegantly." The girl brings her hands together in an odd gesture of wonder. A mass of hair, which is fair and unruly though tamed into a single thick braid, falls over one shoulder. Her eyes are a curious color, a kind of borderline blue, intense; or perhaps (it is the middle of the night, and the desk lamp casts odd shadoows) a sort of sea-green.
"So elegantly," she repeats, opening her hands, looking at them as if the words, mysterious and glittering, were cradled there. Her smile is speculative, dry, possibly mocking. "elegance as scientific methodology?"
those are some sexy paragraphs. To me at least. I'm not sure who else might find them sexy.
Charades Janette Turner Hospital, 1989
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May 11th, 2008
02:05 pm - insightful tutorial on eq-ing your mix with cubase
Andi Vax wrote this in september of last year
original location: http://www.andivax.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=59:andi-vax-qmixing-secretsq&catid=34:news&Itemid=1
click here for the google streaming video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5542874546813497154&q=Andi+Vax&ei=aD8nSO-5KZW05AKSsIDgCQ&hl=en
This is a fantastic tutorial on how to master your final eq in cubase. I think I learned one thing by watching this video: those engineers get paid to re-master your songs for a reason. If they know what they are doing, they can make it sound fantastic.
His english is a bit hard to understand, you might want to download his PDF which contains subtitles.
Every producer has the same problem: all instruments sound perfect separately, but together it is “soup”. This “soup” is a result of acoustical masking.
Spectral analyzer shows us a total spectrum of all instruments on a certain frequency, but our ear hears only the loudest sound on this frequency.
Our mission is to cut all superfluous frequencies in instruments for each of them sounds in their range.
Conclusion: It is absolutely not important if instruments separately sound awful, important how they will sound together in mix.
I think he might be wrong with his next statement:
In my opinion to do mastering at home is impossible and dangerous. Reasons are the same – you need a wide producer’s experience, good acoustic design and great control acoustics
The problem is that really, there are so many really terrible music producers in the world that a lot of music professionals would be better off just making their own masters. It does no good to have an engineer who knows everything about frequencies and the biology of human hearing if he doesn't have this thing called "musicality" that is, if he can't tell the difference between a good sound and a bad one.
A voice’s equalization is the most dangerous thing. It is very easy to make it “flat”, “sharp” and “unnatural”. Think twice before equalize it. If you don’t like the sounding of the voice, you should change your vocal microphone or your vocalist
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May 10th, 2008
08:01 pm - inflation and the GDP
they are all in cahoots by the way the businessmen who want to pay less wages to employees (not that I blame them), the government bureaucracy who constantly deflate inflation indicators in order to get re-elected (not that I blame them), and the financial advisers for mutual funds banks and government workers who do not blow the whistle on these shenanigans because they don't get money by being right (I blame them the most). Every financial adviser you see in tv or in print will explain how the consumer price indicators show that there is little or no inflation and the reason they do this is because they don't get paid to be right, they get paid on a commission basis, but honestly, have some balls, and just tell the truth. I can just think of one financial adviser who has told the truth: Robert Schiller. Really. If you are a financial adviser have at least a shred of dignity. Quit lying to the public about inflation.
The truth is that the united states economy is shrinking, it has been shrinking and it will continue to shrink. Your kids will have worse lives than you will, they will make less money they will have to work longer hours, and they will be lied to about it, even as the price of eggs, milk, and gasoline rise straight up, while house values continue to plummet.
I was going to write a whole thing about this inflation problem but luckily Kevin Phillips did it already on Friday. So I'll just quote the most important paragraphs.
The federal government's vaunted Consumer Price Index or CPI: Americans understand that this indicator has its own share of gimmicks not unlike a sub-prime mortgage. Some of these CPI ingredients -- product substitution weightings, "hedonics", and use of owner's equivalent rent (instead of home ownership costs) -- have a comic aspect. If the current inflation rate is really 6-9 percent instead of the 2-3 percent claimed by government, then Washington's official estimates that the economy still grew at a rate of some 0.6 percent in the first quarter of 2008 become nonsense. An economy that was deteriorating and shrinking, not growing. Democratic presidents have been involved in the numbers game along with Republican administrations. Neither party has clean hands.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-phillips/washingtons-great-no-infl_b_100719.html
The american economy is current deflating at a rate of about 5 percent per year. Our politicians, financial advisors, and corporate businessmen think that if Americans think happy thoughts, we won't notice.
The decline of the American empire could have taken many forms. We could have become ironic like the British, insufferable and in denial like the French, or snuff out like an old candle. It appears that instead of any of those things, Americans will instead be fiddling while Rome burns.
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May 8th, 2008
11:08 am - the great filter
http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=20569
the evolutionary path to life-forms capable of space colonization leads through a "Great Filter," which can be thought of as a probability barrier. You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing. If the filter is in our past, there must be some extremely improbable step in the sequence of events whereby an Earth-like planet gives rise to an intelligent species comparable in its technological sophistication to our contemporary human civilization. The other possibility is that the Great Filter is still ahead of us. This would mean that some great improbability prevents almost all civilizations at our current stage of technological development from progressing to the point where they engage in large-scale space colonization.
If we discovered some very simple life-forms on Mars, in its soil or under the ice at the polar caps, it would show that the Great Filter must come somewhere after that period in evolution. This would be disturbing, but we might still hope that the Great Filter was located in our past. If we discovered a more advanced life-form, such as some kind of multicellular organism, that would eliminate a much larger set of evolutionary transitions from consideration as the Great Filter. The effect would be to shift the probability more strongly against the hypothesis that the Great Filter is behind us. And if we discovered the fossils of some very complex life-form, such as a vertebrate-like creature, we would have to conclude that this hypothesis is very improbable indeed. It would be by far the worst news ever printed.
Yet most people reading about the discovery would be thrilled. They would not understand the implications. For if the Great Filter is not behind us, it is ahead of us. And that's a terrifying prospect.
So this is why I'm hoping that our space probes will discover dead rocks and lifeless sands on Mars, on Jupiter's moon Europa, and everywhere else our astronomers look. It would keep alive the hope of a great future for humanity.
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May 7th, 2008
06:47 pm - quotes from the afterlife diet by david pinkwater
a letter to the protagonist from his editor
fat people are out. Sorry. You and I are both chubbies, so you know this is house policy, and nothing to do with me. Another thing we never do is include hard science, so they shouldn't discuss Math. Sad commentary, but our readers won't get it. Stick to "dilithium crystals" and "warp fractals" sort of thing -- and keep the explanations short!
So true. sci fi readers don't know any math. But neither do the writers, so I guess it doesn't matter.
Following is a somewhat pejorative description of a diet counselor
Phyllis was a small woman in an expensive-looking suit. As she spoke, she constantly ran her hands over her slender hips, her flat belly, her small, pointed breasts, and tiny buttocks. She also smiled -- perfectly applied lipstick framed perfectly capped teeth. Her makeup was without flaw. She wore a tasteful amount of tasteful jewelry. She did not appear to be fifty-seven years old. She appeared to be brand-new.
That single sentence is killer: "She appeared to be brand-new." Great context, with a powerful short punch. That is the kind of sentence when I read it I go, "This writer knows how to write."
i cant resist just one more quote from this book
In the clear desk light, he saw the thin threads of rubber cement, his booby trap for negligent and dishonest publishers. They were intact along the edges of the paper. Not a single page had ever been turned. Not even the plagiarist had bothered to read it.
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11:12 am - delegate count
after NC and indiana the delegates are
1212 obama, 1049 clinton
if you add florida and michigan, it's
1279 Obama, 1227 Clinton
Howard Dean has said that the michigan and florida delegates will be seated. It is clear now that Dean believed that Obama would be so far ahead that Dean could just add the delegates from Florida and Michigan and it wouldn't make a difference, Obama would still win.
If Hillary concedes, and then Dean seats Florida and Michigan, she would have to unconcede because the race would be a statistical tie.
Actually I think it would be tactically brilliant for Hillary to concede, wait for Dean to seat Michigan and then unconcede. That's what I would do if I were Hillary. Talk about a ball busting political move.
I can already hear the first lines of her unconcession speech now. . . .
"there's an announcement from Hillary today, we are expecting to hear about her feelings about the VP candidates for democratic nominee Barack Obama, and from Washington DC here's Hillary . . .
I'm BAAAAACKKKKK!!"
If she does end up using these political tactics she should totally use that line for her comeback speech.
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May 6th, 2008
12:49 pm - fat monkey
( Read more... )
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May 5th, 2008
05:09 pm - the iraq silver lining
they say there's always a silver lining to any dark cloud. For me the silver lining on this entire iraq disaster has been the incredible boon to literature it has been. I don't know if anyone else has been keeping track, but there has been an incredible drought of political ideas in the past 200 years in terms of american political thought, and, necessarily, american fiction.
Fiction writers don't write fiction. They write about what is going on around them, about real life. Then they put strange alien bikinis on their alien women, and strange bulging prosthetic forheads, dress them in space age microfibers, and call it futurism. Sci fi is not about tomorrow it is a reflection of either our common mythologized history or of modern day. Star Trek's Klingons were Russia and the cold war. The freedom fighters in star wars were american revolutionaries. It's all the same, over and over again. Freedom is good. It's the most important thing. And winning is a hard thing but once you have won, you will have a New America. The enemy is a giant evil sameness, a Russian cold bear. It always has been and always will.
We went into Iraq believing that Al Qaeda was another big russian bear (republicans still believe this, that we need to "win" in Iraq to defeat the "terrorists" for "victory" just replace everything they say and pretend that they are fighting Stalin and the cold war, and it will make a lot more sense, trust me).
We finally, finally understand, after vietnam the lesson didn't take, but now we get it. Politics is a messy business. there aren't always two sides. And sometimes the winner of the war is not the Good Guys (america), not the Bad Guys (Saddam Hussein/Al Qaeda/the insurgents), sometimes the winner is the guy who when he first saw the fight break out just sat on his hands and let the two beat each other up (Iran).
We finally understand that it is not enough to have freedom and democracy, that sometimes stability is more important. That it is more important to have bread on the table, and not die get shot in the head by some random idiot waving an AK-47, to be able to bring home money from your job and not be robbed, kidnapped, and then ransomed back to your own family, and then have to leave your native country or face watching your own sons and daughters die or starve to death.
In Poker, or any gambling by the way, there is something worse than losing. It's actually the worst thing that can ever happen to a gambler. And that is . . . the first time you enter a casino, you win, you win big, you win at everything you do. If you are a poker player, you will automatically assume that you are knowledgable about poker, and you know everything. And you decide, hey I don't have to learn any more about poker, I'm already the bees knees. If you go in and win at slots, you might figure that you are lucky at slots, it doesn't matter, the problem is that winning big when you gamble that very first time means that you have learned a very very bad lesson.
And it will take not one, not two, but dozens or more sessions, maybe even complete and utter bankruptcy for you to learn the real lesson . . . you got lucky. The best thing that can happen you go to a poker table or a casino, is that you lose everything you have, every last cent. That's the best lesson.
America is like that gambler. We won the american revolutionary war. At a ridiculously low cost. In france with their revolution, heads rolled, and the very revolutionaries that were in charge after the revolution were ill-suited to running it. Face it, revolutionaries as a bunch are some of the most reprehensible, vilest people on earth, oh sure they have great ideals, but their ideals are all about chopping the heads off of people that don't agree with them from jean-paul marat to che guevara to robert mugabe, a revolutionary is almost always a single step away from being a petty dictator.
We walked into the casino and won big. That's a problem.
We were on the winning sides of world war i and ii covered with glory, but unlike the european allies we weren't covered in blood, unlike the millions who died in russia to stop germany's push.
We walked into the casino and won big. A second time.
That's another problem. All these issues americans have, politicians in america have they are shared by the fiction and sci fi writers in america. You can look at star wars, star trek, and in them you will find the forces of good (america) forces of bad (the russians/muslim terrorists), and the revolutionaries (symbolizing the american revolution). These stylizd mythologies are finally getting broken down by the disaster in Iraq, and giving our fiction a fresh and better perspective.
Looking back at star wars now, from the vantage point 5 years in Iraq, it is much easier now to see Darth Vader's point of view. True, Vader had to share his power with evil incarnate but if that is the price of peace and prosperity, is that choice any different than the one that the russians have made on their own free will, of throwing in their lot with Putin, the price for a better standard of living, peace, and prosperity. If star wars were written today, and Darth Vader a symbol of Saddam Hussein, we would see that the movie doesn't end with the overthrow of his regime. That's actually the beginning of a hard and difficult time, where simple star freight haulers like Han Solo would bitch and moan how it used to be better back when Darth Vader was in charge.
there is a heightened sensitivity in sci fi now to the problems of the "quick fix" of the easy and simple revolution, there is more awareness than you can't just throw down an old order and throw up a new one and it will just work. There's awareness of the tradeoffs of political alliances, that you can't force "freedom" on a people without asking their permission first. That there is not great evil and great good battling to the death. There are just two nations fighting to the death, and the winner is the guy who wasn't in the fight.
I'm not terribly hopeful for the politicans in america's future to learn these lessons by the way. What did I say? After a big win in a casino, it takes a dozen or more losing trips to finally figure out that you lucked out in the first one? How lucky was america when George Washington declined the crown of kingship. That was a close thing. We still don't understand in our bones how incredibly unlikely it is for a revolutionary war hero that is offered the crown to turn it down. So we will have to learn that sort of the lesson the hard way now. I guess we have 10 more Iraqs and Vietnams before we finally learn the lesson that every war is a gamble.
But as for fiction? We are already seeing the results, with better political dynamics in modern sci fi.
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May 4th, 2008
01:43 pm - real life as metaphor for real life
obama picked the favorite big brown (8-5) to show (3rd place) and two other horses to win and place in the kentucky derby. Hillary picked a long shot filly to win place and show Eight Belles. The odds were 20-1, odds which were close to hillary's own odds to win the democratic nomination, and Hillary had said that she identified strongly with the filly Eight Belles.
Big Brown won the race outclassing the rest of the field, and Eight Belles came in second, but the news at the derby was not about Big Brown's win. The news was about Eight Belles who broke her ankles in a glorious but futile attempt to chase down Big Brown in the home stretch. She had to be euthanized shortly after the race.
On MSNBC before the race, Joe Scarborough had said (jokingly) that since Hillary had picked Eight Belles, they would have to end up killing her at the end of the race.
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May 3rd, 2008
09:42 pm - one more thing about ghetto detroit
i just want to say one more thing about detroit. the city council is ghetto, the mayor and all his friends are ghetto, these people are crooks thieves and sanctimonious liars. But the city itself, the people who work there, most of the ordinary people living in Detroit are honest hard working individuals. Unfortunately the political leadership of the city is never going to give up their positions, they are hard to kick out of office, for a variety of reasons one of them being that even if you are known as a crook, a hip hop thief like kwame is, you will still get a lot of votes for name recognition, voters that will pull the lever for him, sure sure he's corrupt, sure he's a crook, but at least you know, I understand what kind of thief he is, he's a small time one, and there's always the worry that if you pull the lever for the other guy . . . it could be worse.
I sometimes wish that anyone on the pistons team could run for city council, they are all great leaders, from the great joe dumars down to the rookie rodney stuckey, but none of them can run for major or city council because you see . . . none of them actually live in detroit. They all live north of 8 mile. They got kids. I can't blame them not wanting their kids to grow up in a detroit school. Also, the palace, is way up north of the city, so if they want to live close to work, they get houses in places like rochester hills, bloomfield hills, so none of them could run for city council.
I just wanted to make it clear when I'm bashing detroit for being so ghetto that it's not the people, or the city, it's a problem with a bunch of ghetto politicians that care more about their rep getting bigger than the city they live in.
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02:13 pm - short book reviews
queen of candesce by karl schroeder
creative worlds are far and few between in science fiction. schroeder does it with humans living in a niven like world tree construct except there's no tree, just a big space with air and artificial suns, with a bloody minded heroine crashing through a fragile closed cylinder in this air world. a good read.
michael swanwick's the dragons of babel
this is a fantasy rock and rock babel, gritty and unique. it is like piers anthony for grownups. a good read.
ra salvatore's the ancient
i think this series is where the magic the gathering card murderous recap comes from, there are these murderous redcaps in the book. the book reads like a d&d campaign where the hero really doesn't want to have to kill the kobold women and children, but, well, he needs the experience points. the religious leaders in this series aren't evil or good, but flawed and gray. a good read.
michael stackpole's the new world
take the gods of olympus mythos with all their own agendas, and transform them with new names, capabilities, races, nations, magic you have the new world. this book made me think. Suppose you were a god, surrounded by gods with overpowerful magic. What would you all do? it's no fun when magic does everything and the world is just too easy, it's like having the cheat codes for every game you play. The only solution is to nerf everything down to lowest level possible. Maybe one day humans will be like gods. nanotechnology so sophisticated and powerful every wish is a command. And the only relief from this tedium would be to create a limited world with weak puny humans bathed in misery. A world like the one we live in today. The characters in "The New World" are too powered up, stackpole had nerfed his heros in the previous books, but by the time of "the new world" everyone is just too powered up. an ok read.
sarah zettel's the sword of the deceiver
i kept wanting the heroine of this story to lose an eye or get robbed and beat up, such an annoying character (is it still legal to use the word "bitch"?), but it didn't happen so I quit reading. This is a cheesy romance with with ren fair trappings. bad read.
allen steele's galaxy blues
I think I'm the only one in the world that gets annoyed at physics conventions in sci fi books. You know, like the "wormhole". Like, physics says worm holes can exist but if you travel through space you travel through time. Its annoying that time contraction and dilation in einstein's relativity is completely ignored with magic wormholes. Or how about getting a 1 gravity burst for 1 hour and that's enough to fly from the earth to jupiter. Right. How about 8 years. How about pilots that look out the window of the spaceship, and "fly by the seat of their pants". Or how about being a few miles from an active black hole and not getting fried by super high energy cosmic radiation. Depending on how close you were, you would need several miles of pure lead. This book by the way is "serious" science fiction (with a bit of humor), in that the readers, the author, and the reviewers all think that the sci-fi in the book is state of the art. I finished it, the book is good, I just get annoyed by fantasy that pretends it is hard core sci fi. The book even had air locks, decompression chambers, sterilization procedures, all the tiny little details that say this is real hard core sci fi to ordinary readers but to me are like putting vanilla icing on a shit sandwhich. good characters, the hero of this story is an especially lovable scad, he's the kind of man we all wish we could be.
lost truth by dawn cook
maybe I don't get fantasy romance. the heroine is a super dragon and the plot is retarded, she is chased by 4 or 5 or more men all at once who breathlessly wait on her, I guess the only reason is that she has super dragon powers. I got as far as when the heroine goes to sea with this captain she met randomly and had to quit because the plot had gotten to ridiculous for me to proceed. Here's what happened. she randomly goes to this inn, where randomly one of her traveling companions is paid for all the food and lodging by singing a few ballads, when randomly she meets a captain for her mission who randomly is in a contentious marriage where he can't get divorce because he doesn't want to give her the ship he owns in the divorce so the captain randomly decides that heroine would be the best person to destroy the wealth of his boat, and the heroine randomly has super dreams that tells her where to go in the boat. and she randomly is able to pay for everything she wants because she has six bells on her leg that she can shake (instead of 2 or 3 that less desirable woman have), and that is when I said oh forget it. bad read.
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May 2nd, 2008
12:49 pm - food porn 22 peanut butter hummus
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May 1st, 2008
10:54 am - kwame kilpatrick the first hip hop mayor
Beatty: "No response needed to this, but when held me in your arms and looked me in my eyes and said I was your woman. All was right with the world. I love you."
Kilpatrick: "Damn! Thank you."
Beatty: "Can you promise me that I will always be that?"
Kilpatrick: "You were my girl for as long as I can remember. I was too young and stupid to know. I promise for the rest of my life you will be my girl."
Beatty: "Ahh. I'm about to cry. Thank you for that. You need to know that you are the man in my life that I depend on most. Or I could have just stopped at 'the man in my life.'"
I like the hip hop music. But the lifestyle? This idea that you're THE MAN and when you're THE MAN you need to be respected and everyone should give you props, it's just retarded to me. It's not funny though, when you have a hip hop mayor.
This guy, I guess they released some more text messages today, basically love messages between kwame and someone that works for him Christine Beatty. It seems sweet, you know kwame is all about I love you, no matter what you're the love of my life, and she is all in love with him, and asking when he's going to leave his wife, basic affair stuff. I guess he really did love her. And plenty of other women, he had a harem going on. One of the women he might have loved got killed, this "Strawberry" dancer girl. Some speculate that kwame ordered the police to kill her, because the stripper attempted to blackmail kwame, but really nobody knows for sure yet.
Any time by the way that kwame gets caught using city funds for his private life, like leasing that red navigator for his family on the city money, or being caught paying off police officers with city money so they won't investigate him, he gives the same tired speach, that the white man is out to get him, that it's a lynching by those whites from the wealthy suburbs. That's your hip hop culture right there. It's the culture where the fool is not kwame for being the hip hop mayor. No, oh no. He's the man. He deserves anything he can steal. The fool is you. Because when he lies to you, and you believe it, you're the one who's being dumb. He's got the moral high ground because no matter how many ethical lapses he has, if he gets away with it, it's not his fault, it's you and me and the voters and the city council (another bunch of thugs and crooks) that is to blame.
I actually don't think Kwame is at all racist by the way. Even when he says that the only reason he is in any trouble at all is because all the white newspaper owners are out to bring down the black man. I don't think that's racism. I think it's Kwame being a player. If you think it's about race, you're the one who's being stupid, because you've been played. It's about Kwame being THE MAN.
By the way, most of the evidence against Kwame comes from this organization called the Executive Protection Unit. This organization as far as I can tell is a bunch of thugs that kwame put on the detroit payroll because they were his buddies. These same buddies, I read on some blog, attempted to blackmail kwame about his affairs, and then when kwame didn't want to pay up, they went to court, and instead of getting a million both gary brown and harold nelthrope got paid 6.5 million dollars in a settlement.
There aren't any good guys here. You have a thug mayor, corrupt city council, members of the mayor's posse that blackmail him and because of this, the whole mess gets into the national news, a stripper that was killed. So now the city council and the county prosecutor want him gone. But Kwame isn't going.
I understand a lot of kwame's attractiveness is because the city is tired of being second fiddle to the suburbs, and Kwame represents part of that resentment. But, fact is, Kwame is the worst mayor of detroit all time.
You see, I think kwame has it right. It's not his fault if people believe him when he lies to them. If he is able to scam the city and fund vacation trips on the taxpayer's dime, how is it his fault if the city council lets him do it. If he is THE MAN and he is so smooth that he is able to create a little empire in Detroit and he gets away with it, how is that his fault? But, you see . . . he didn't get away with it. Every time Kwame has tried to be big pimp, to be the top dog thug, to smooth things over with a bribe here, and some threats there, every single thing he has done has come out. If he was a half decent crook, he would not have left a thousand text messages detailing his every move using the city provided pager. At the very least he would have gotten him and his lover some pagers out of his own pocket money, so that the texts would never have come to light. Kwame thinks he is THE MAN, that he's smooth and he gets away with everything he does. The truth is that he's some low level thug that can't keep his personal business separate from his public business, he nickle and dimes the city with low level thievery and gets caught on every single crooked thing he has done.
He'll probably remain the detroit major for a long time. And don't look for the state of Michigan to come to Detroit's aid, they want no part of this racially charged mess.
Notice that basically every problem Kwame is in stems from this hip hop attitude. there's this attitude that rep is everything. Your rep is worth more than money, more than someone's life even. Everyone is out protecting their rep. so when something threatens this rep, like people talking about kwame's affairs, the hip hop attitude is you have to shut that up no matter what, even if it means putting a bullet in someone, or paying off huge bribes.
kwame from the very start could have admitted everything, admitted the parties, admitted the affairs, admitted the red navigator was purchased inappropirately and there would be nothing here at all. You can't blackmail a man who is not afraid to air his dirty laundry. This whole thing from start to finish is all about a hip hop mayor needing to protect his rep because he's THE MAN. That's why hip hop culture disgusts me.
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April 29th, 2008
04:18 pm - that growth hormone gut
steroids arent that bad for you if you're a bodybuilder, especially taken in small quantities. They drop the amount of fat on your body, increase your muscle mass, and if you choose the right steroids to take, pose little risk for liver damage. Personally I have no desire to take steroids, but I am interested in lifting weights just to stay in shape, and it's nearly impossible to not notice the freaks of nature walking around today because of steroids and other drugs.
You can see pretty dramatically what happened when body builders first started using steroids. Remember that testosterone is a steroid and one of the most effective ones so ever since the 50's bodybuilders have been on some sort of steroids. You have to go back pretty far to find natural bodybuilders.
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