Real Child Of Hell (Remixed Outtake) - X
Greatest Story Ever Told - Grateful Dead
Frenz - The Fall
Spectre Vs Rector - The Fall
Kathy's Song - Simon & Garfunkel
It's a Beautiful Day - Pizzicato Five
Alone - Blues Traveler
Splish Splash - Bobby Darin
End - Big Audio Dynamite
Get That Girl - Joe Jackson
Not too bad. Must sleep. Old.
Friday, October 28, 2005
This is a test!
This has been a test of the Blogger Photo Upload System. Had this actually been Gamera, you would have been told to put your head between you legs and kiss your ass goodbye.
Thank you.
Word Verification for Comments is ON!
Well, it didn't take me long to get sick of comment spam (spamments?), so I enabled the 'Word Verification' feature in Comments. Please pardon the slight inconvenience; it keeps the undesirables out.
Startup pic
NOTE: Image upload failed; please try again later.
Update: -- Looks like I picked the wrong day to start photoblogging.
Update: -- Looks like I picked the wrong day to start photoblogging.
Clambake
Since I blogged on Scientology, at any moment now I'm now going to get hit with a barrage of abuse and lawsuits. So I might as well post a link to the mother of all anti-Scientolgy sites, Operation Clambake. If you need any info on the nefarious doings and sordid history of the Hubbardites, this is the place.
Also, check out 'The Bare-Faced Messiah', a nifty biography of Hubbard which is actually a pretty fascinating look at a sociopath.
Also, check out 'The Bare-Faced Messiah', a nifty biography of Hubbard which is actually a pretty fascinating look at a sociopath.
I Say the Morons Have No Right On Broadway
The Scientologists have been offering their bogus 'Stress Test' at several tables down in the Times Square subway station. Can any religion [ahem! grahempf!] proselytize in the subway like that? Do they rotate on some kind of schedule? IS THIS LEGAL??!! Or have the Clams wangled some kind of special privileges again. I'll try to find out more. And I'll try to post a picture soon.
"Sir, we've examined your Stress Test results, and have determined that the source of your stress is money. So you should give it all to us."
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
More GM Food Trepidation
This was a comment I left on Skeptico, where a GM food debate has been simmering.
One aspect of capitalism is that there is a powerful structural incentive for participants to enhance profits by working at the edge of, and on the wrong side of, legal and ethical codes of conduct. Additionally, there is no incentive to minimize negative effects that have no immediate impact on the bottom line. Agricultural conglomerates have proven themselves capable of antisocial behavior many times (think ADM and price-fixing). Government oversight is nescessary, but often inadequate (and the trends do not look good). GM foods do harbor the potential for widespread ecological damage. The estimation of these risks may be an intractable problem; we may not be able to predict them with any level of certainty. Add to all this the increasing tendency of corporations to use copyrights and patents to muscle consumers and small players into playing the game their way.
I believe all this indicates two main dangers from entrusting these businesses with the development of GM crops and control and monitoring thereof. The first is technological, the second is commercial.
The first is that they will not consider, or give adequate weight to, potential ecological downsides from their products. Only when something affects profits will they act, and that would almost certainly be too late for containment. If government is not able or willing to conduct (and fund) controls, regulations and inspections, there may be no good institutional solution to this problem.
The second problem is that the large agricultural concerns will use technology and IP law to structure the market so that farmers and consumers have no hope of having any input in the process, and the world's food supply will be 'managed' by a couple of untrustworthy conglomerates, secretly cooperating to some degree behind the scenes.
The corporation is one the fundamental bases of a capitalist economy. But there's no reason you should trust them further than you could throw them. Think of them as a class of bright high-schoolers constantly trying to test the limits of what they can get away with. Except that they can kill you.
One aspect of capitalism is that there is a powerful structural incentive for participants to enhance profits by working at the edge of, and on the wrong side of, legal and ethical codes of conduct. Additionally, there is no incentive to minimize negative effects that have no immediate impact on the bottom line. Agricultural conglomerates have proven themselves capable of antisocial behavior many times (think ADM and price-fixing). Government oversight is nescessary, but often inadequate (and the trends do not look good). GM foods do harbor the potential for widespread ecological damage. The estimation of these risks may be an intractable problem; we may not be able to predict them with any level of certainty. Add to all this the increasing tendency of corporations to use copyrights and patents to muscle consumers and small players into playing the game their way.
I believe all this indicates two main dangers from entrusting these businesses with the development of GM crops and control and monitoring thereof. The first is technological, the second is commercial.
The first is that they will not consider, or give adequate weight to, potential ecological downsides from their products. Only when something affects profits will they act, and that would almost certainly be too late for containment. If government is not able or willing to conduct (and fund) controls, regulations and inspections, there may be no good institutional solution to this problem.
The second problem is that the large agricultural concerns will use technology and IP law to structure the market so that farmers and consumers have no hope of having any input in the process, and the world's food supply will be 'managed' by a couple of untrustworthy conglomerates, secretly cooperating to some degree behind the scenes.
The corporation is one the fundamental bases of a capitalist economy. But there's no reason you should trust them further than you could throw them. Think of them as a class of bright high-schoolers constantly trying to test the limits of what they can get away with. Except that they can kill you.
Asshole Words Update
Reader 'cufflink' has two submissions for our list of Asshole Words:
Irregardless
Touch base
'Touch base' is certainly up there, as are most sports-related phrases, such as 'Keep your eye on the ball'.
'Irregardless' may fall more into the category of annoying phrases that are either misused, mispronounced or made up entirely, such as pronouncing 'mischievous' as 'mis-cheev-ee-ous', with an extra 'ee' sound added before th 'ous'. Lately, I've noticed that a lot of blogs use 'anyways' instead of 'anyway', as if everyone in the blogosphere suddenly acquired a Brooklyn accent. Use (and misuse) of these words and phrases can certainly put the mark of 'Asshole' on your forehead.
Irregardless
Touch base
'Touch base' is certainly up there, as are most sports-related phrases, such as 'Keep your eye on the ball'.
'Irregardless' may fall more into the category of annoying phrases that are either misused, mispronounced or made up entirely, such as pronouncing 'mischievous' as 'mis-cheev-ee-ous', with an extra 'ee' sound added before th 'ous'. Lately, I've noticed that a lot of blogs use 'anyways' instead of 'anyway', as if everyone in the blogosphere suddenly acquired a Brooklyn accent. Use (and misuse) of these words and phrases can certainly put the mark of 'Asshole' on your forehead.
Nepotism !?!
I keep hearing Joe Wilson's trip to Niger described as nepotism, that his wife, Valerie Plame, 'got him the job'. But he only got paid expenses! No matter how much you don't like Wilson and his wife, it would be difficult to see them as being stupid enough to waste professional capital on nepotism with no payoff. Money? None. Prestige? None. Influence ? None.
People who actually believe this must think that they concocted, from way back, a devious plan to discredit the Bush admin by taking advantage of a bogus intelligence report. They knew Bush and the neocons would snap up the bait that was dangled before them. All they had to do was manouver Bush & Co. into an unjustified war with Iraq, wait for the war to go south, then use it to leverage the complete destruction of the administration. Brilliant! How fortunate that those forged documents popped up when they did!
Or maybe they just think Wilson wangled himself a free dream vacation in Niger, that well-known, hedonistic playground of the rich and famous.
Say, my uncle's in the Peace Corps. Maybe he can get me a volunteer position digging wells in a poverty-stricken village somewhere. Sweet!
People who actually believe this must think that they concocted, from way back, a devious plan to discredit the Bush admin by taking advantage of a bogus intelligence report. They knew Bush and the neocons would snap up the bait that was dangled before them. All they had to do was manouver Bush & Co. into an unjustified war with Iraq, wait for the war to go south, then use it to leverage the complete destruction of the administration. Brilliant! How fortunate that those forged documents popped up when they did!
Or maybe they just think Wilson wangled himself a free dream vacation in Niger, that well-known, hedonistic playground of the rich and famous.
Say, my uncle's in the Peace Corps. Maybe he can get me a volunteer position digging wells in a poverty-stricken village somewhere. Sweet!
Friday, October 21, 2005
I See Dumb People...
There was an annoying interview (subscription req'd.) in Salon magazine today with Mary Roach, author of a new book on research into an afterlife. I like Salon in general, but they come up with some real turds occasionally.
The book, "Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife", examines the research and conclusions of various 'scientists' who are concerned with life after death. The author displays a fairly light-hearted attitude towards the subject herself, with a kind of wishy-washy 'I think it's silly, mostly, but maybe there's something to it' take. Just your average person who can't quite avoid magical thinking sometimes.
The books looks at, among others, a Dr. Kirti S. Rawat, who looks for evidence of reincarnation in India, and Gary Schwartz, a psychology professor at the University of Arizona who investigates mediums in a laboratory setting. It recounts the story of Duncan Macdougall, a Massachusetts doctor who attempted to weigh people just before and just after death. A difference in weight would be attributed to the departure of the soul. He came up with an average of 21 grams. I never thought souls were that heavy!
She apparently is aware that the field of paranormal research and practice is filled with quacks, cranks and con men. The interview even bills her as a skeptic, writing for skeptics who seek real evidence for an afterlife (and it's not just wishful thinking! No, really!). However, Ms. Roach is no skeptic. She manages to consider the subjects of her book as sincere and talented. The book actually looks entertaining and I don't want to criticize it without having read it. However, the interview grated on me in a couple of my more skeptically-sensitive areas.
First, there's the usual over-reliance on anecdotes. Why, if almost anybody you meet has had a paranormal or out-of-body experience they want to tell you about, then there must be something going on, right? Well, no. Maybe, just maybe, people are prone to interpreting unusual events or sensory glitches as mysterious occurrences. Maybe our built-in drive to explain everything we witness, usually a positive thing, can work just a little too hard, sometimes, and give us bogus results. Which seems more reasonable: that people read too much into anomalous events, or there's a whole parallel, unexplained universe interacting with our own, and that can be detected by people with a 'special sensitivity', but not by any objective, scientific means available to us? You decide.
Second, she takes an obvious sucker-hit from Allison DuBois, a relatively well-known medium. The interviewer recounts:
Sorry, we don't even need to call science into the room for this one. She got pwned.
Later in the interview, Roach touches on this, saying:
She gets it exactly backwards! The medium's performance is poor except for the hourglass hit. So, instead of assuming that she's just taking shots in the dark, and lucked across the hourglass topic (or Googled the author in advance and happened upon the fact that her brother collected hourglasses that way), she rationalizes it by saying that mediums pick up mostly noise except for a few good transmissions with useful information. Wow, she should open up a PR firm for psychics as a sideline.
Another annoying thing is that, up front, she disclaims any knowledge of science and any hope of scientifically-literate skepticism:
Modern soul theorist. Right.
But later, she admits how impressed she is by all that scientifical-sounding stuff:
Yeah! Dump all that New-Agey hippy talk of crystals, auras and karma. It lacks credibility in this, the Age of Reason! Be sure to couch your bullshit in the terms of quantum mechanics (which has almost become a New-Agey term itself), it sounds much more convincing. P.T. Barnum just wiped some drool off his chin. At least she's embarrassed by the term 'energy field'.
She's also partial to Argument from Authority:
The first sentence is the wisest thing she says in the interview. Hey, read the book if you have the inclination. It's probably a fun read and a good catalog of deception and self-delusion in the world of paranormal research. But don't call it science.
The book, "Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife", examines the research and conclusions of various 'scientists' who are concerned with life after death. The author displays a fairly light-hearted attitude towards the subject herself, with a kind of wishy-washy 'I think it's silly, mostly, but maybe there's something to it' take. Just your average person who can't quite avoid magical thinking sometimes.
The books looks at, among others, a Dr. Kirti S. Rawat, who looks for evidence of reincarnation in India, and Gary Schwartz, a psychology professor at the University of Arizona who investigates mediums in a laboratory setting. It recounts the story of Duncan Macdougall, a Massachusetts doctor who attempted to weigh people just before and just after death. A difference in weight would be attributed to the departure of the soul. He came up with an average of 21 grams. I never thought souls were that heavy!
She apparently is aware that the field of paranormal research and practice is filled with quacks, cranks and con men. The interview even bills her as a skeptic, writing for skeptics who seek real evidence for an afterlife (and it's not just wishful thinking! No, really!). However, Ms. Roach is no skeptic. She manages to consider the subjects of her book as sincere and talented. The book actually looks entertaining and I don't want to criticize it without having read it. However, the interview grated on me in a couple of my more skeptically-sensitive areas.
First, there's the usual over-reliance on anecdotes. Why, if almost anybody you meet has had a paranormal or out-of-body experience they want to tell you about, then there must be something going on, right? Well, no. Maybe, just maybe, people are prone to interpreting unusual events or sensory glitches as mysterious occurrences. Maybe our built-in drive to explain everything we witness, usually a positive thing, can work just a little too hard, sometimes, and give us bogus results. Which seems more reasonable: that people read too much into anomalous events, or there's a whole parallel, unexplained universe interacting with our own, and that can be detected by people with a 'special sensitivity', but not by any objective, scientific means available to us? You decide.
Second, she takes an obvious sucker-hit from Allison DuBois, a relatively well-known medium. The interviewer recounts:
DuBois, supposedly communing with Roach's dead mother, says a lot of vague and unlikely things, until she mentions an hourglass in connection with Roach's brother -- who, unbeknownst to DuBois, collects hourglasses. How can science explain that?
Sorry, we don't even need to call science into the room for this one. She got pwned.
Later in the interview, Roach touches on this, saying:
I say in the book that I was startled and impressed. But there were so many other things she said that were vague or didn't fit my mother at all. So I was trying to reconcile the two and the best I could come up with is that if mediums are tuned some ways that others aren't, it's almost sort of like a radio receiver, and most of the time you're just getting static, but every now and then something would come through. If that were the case, it would be frustrating to convince someone, because so much of what you're getting is wrong, but every now and then you'd hit a home run. So some people focus on the home run and some people focus on the things that were wrong. I could almost imagine that scenario being real.
She gets it exactly backwards! The medium's performance is poor except for the hourglass hit. So, instead of assuming that she's just taking shots in the dark, and lucked across the hourglass topic (or Googled the author in advance and happened upon the fact that her brother collected hourglasses that way), she rationalizes it by saying that mediums pick up mostly noise except for a few good transmissions with useful information. Wow, she should open up a PR firm for psychics as a sideline.
Another annoying thing is that, up front, she disclaims any knowledge of science and any hope of scientifically-literate skepticism:
"My ignorance is not merely deep, it is broad; it is a vast ocean that takes in chemistry, physics, information theory, thermodynamics, all the many things a modern soul theorist must know," she writes.
Modern soul theorist. Right.
But later, she admits how impressed she is by all that scientifical-sounding stuff:
Yes! I am so put off by the way people write first-person experiential pieces about trips to the afterlife, or angels. The way that they write about it makes them sound so naive. Sometimes when I'm talking about this book I'll have to use a term like "energy field," and I feel really embarrassed. I'm much more comfortable with the language of quantum mechanics. Negentropy, I don't even understand what that is, but I'm comfortable saying "negentropy" and I'm not comfortable saying "energy fields." It's very much tied up with language.
Yeah! Dump all that New-Agey hippy talk of crystals, auras and karma. It lacks credibility in this, the Age of Reason! Be sure to couch your bullshit in the terms of quantum mechanics (which has almost become a New-Agey term itself), it sounds much more convincing. P.T. Barnum just wiped some drool off his chin. At least she's embarrassed by the term 'energy field'.
She's also partial to Argument from Authority:
I think everyone who tries to write about this thinks they're an unbiased, neutral observer. I tend to think of myself as the only person standing here in the middle, but Gary Schwartz thinks of himself that way, and everyone I spoke to thinks of themselves that way. But if someone has a Ph.D. and a background in quantum mechanics, I'll listen to them. I take them more seriously than someone who doesn't have a degree. So that's a bias of sorts.
The first sentence is the wisest thing she says in the interview. Hey, read the book if you have the inclination. It's probably a fun read and a good catalog of deception and self-delusion in the world of paranormal research. But don't call it science.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Asshole Words
I remember that National Lampoon magazine once ran a series of articles (actually Letters-to-the-Editor kinda things) containing lists of asshole words. That is, words, or phrases, which mark you as an asshole if you use them (unironically). This list affects my diction to this day, but I don't have it in print anymore. I had no luck in Googling anything.
So, I figured I'd start off a new list here, updated for the new millenium. Please feel free to make your own additions; everyone has their own personal definition of 'asshole' and their own pet asshole words and phrases. Usually, asshole is defined by everthing that you are not.
In no particular order (yet):
Tasty
Hunky-Dory
Excellence
Ciao!
Empowered
Soft Drink
Luscious
Delectable
(Get your) Ducks in a Row
Beverage
Proactive
Reach Out
Lash Out
Stay tuned... More to come soon!
So, I figured I'd start off a new list here, updated for the new millenium. Please feel free to make your own additions; everyone has their own personal definition of 'asshole' and their own pet asshole words and phrases. Usually, asshole is defined by everthing that you are not.
In no particular order (yet):
Tasty
Hunky-Dory
Excellence
Ciao!
Empowered
Soft Drink
Luscious
Delectable
(Get your) Ducks in a Row
Beverage
Proactive
Reach Out
Lash Out
Stay tuned... More to come soon!
Friday, October 14, 2005
Friday Random 10
A week without a post. Pathetic.
Smokestack Lightnin - Grateful Dead
Universal Corner (Live Country Club 1982) - X
I Fall Up - Brian Eno
Dr Faustus - The Fall
Water - PJ Harvey
Shatterproof - Billy Bremner
Hostile Mascot - Mekons
Try (Just A Little Bit Harder) - Janis Joplin
Natural Mystic - Bob Marley And The Wailers
Invisible Rays - Shriekback
Smokestack Lightnin - Grateful Dead
Universal Corner (Live Country Club 1982) - X
I Fall Up - Brian Eno
Dr Faustus - The Fall
Water - PJ Harvey
Shatterproof - Billy Bremner
Hostile Mascot - Mekons
Try (Just A Little Bit Harder) - Janis Joplin
Natural Mystic - Bob Marley And The Wailers
Invisible Rays - Shriekback
Friday, October 07, 2005
Friday Random 10
If I Didn't Love You - Squeeze
Smokin' Hole - The Radiators
Licking The Palm For Guava - Ween
No Letter In The Mail - Bill Monroe
I'm A Hog For You - Clifton Chenier
Funky Cold Medina - Tone Loc
Peace Frog - The Doors
Detroit City - Bobby Bare
Canadian Rose - Blues Traveler
Oblivion - Mekons
I generated the list with a little AppleScript I wrote that writes a Smart Playlist named "Random10" directly to an HTML file (although I pasted plain text into the Blogger console). So far, I couldn't see a way to refresh the playlist, or delete all the tracks, from the script. I had to do that from within iTunes. Still handy, though. I think I'll try an HTML table instead of an unordered list next.
Smokin' Hole - The Radiators
Licking The Palm For Guava - Ween
No Letter In The Mail - Bill Monroe
I'm A Hog For You - Clifton Chenier
Funky Cold Medina - Tone Loc
Peace Frog - The Doors
Detroit City - Bobby Bare
Canadian Rose - Blues Traveler
Oblivion - Mekons
I generated the list with a little AppleScript I wrote that writes a Smart Playlist named "Random10" directly to an HTML file (although I pasted plain text into the Blogger console). So far, I couldn't see a way to refresh the playlist, or delete all the tracks, from the script. I had to do that from within iTunes. Still handy, though. I think I'll try an HTML table instead of an unordered list next.
How's that workin' out for ya'?
Any news on how the NY Times is doing with their fucktarded 'Times Select' scam? Are readers staying away in droves? The sudden disappearance of NYT OpEd from the blogosphere is breathtaking. Good.
So Much Good Stuff
There's so many good things hapenning now that you just can't keep track. I'll have to devise some kind of hierarchichal data structue to map all the scandals, indictments, embarassments, eruptions, altercations, flounderings and sputterings now plaguing the BushAdmin and the Republicans. No, it could only be an undirected graph, I think. With cycles.
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