Economist Charts: Defense Spending
I know this is kind of Bryan’s thing, but this chart basically sums up the state of affairs. No use elaborating.
From “The Hobbled Hegemon”, a recent Economist article which was much more dubious than the bare numbers.
Reflections on Free Agents
Interesting post and discussion over at An und für sich. Here’s an excerpt:
Thus, brain size, etc., is still important to be able to accurately map the world and predict phenomena; but the shift from consciousness to self-consciousness is necessarily a qualitative, not quantitative one. The addition of this reflexive element is purely formal and virtual, adding what appears to be only a quantitative improvement to the mapping faculty, but once it is introduced, it reorganizes the “same” raw materials into a new kind of structure whereby the organism can consciously make itself do stuff, or at least try to, by means of its ability to “perceive” itself.
New Karl Pilkington Book on the Way
Posted at 1:29 PM
If you haven’t heard the Ricky Gervais Show podcasts, you may not know who Karl Pilkington is, but you should as he’s one of the most amazing men on earth. There is no brain like his. His last book, The World According to Karl Pilkington, was basically just transcripts from the podcast with some drawings, and that alone was amazing, so I have high hopes for his next book, which is a travel guide apparently.
If you don’t know Karl Pilkington, here are some reasons you should:
His Past
He remembers receiving a computer for Christmas at about the age of 8, he wanted a ZX Spectrum, but was given the inferior ZX81. He tried to play a game, but was thwarted by the absence of a required accessory. He recalls that he vomited due to stress of the situation; one of the factors he attributes towards his baldness.
Karl’s neighbourhood contained other strange and eccentric personalities, such as a woman who rode around on a tricycle with her husband sitting in a basket attached to the end of it; a family who kept a horse in their front room; an elderly witch with a penchant for dishwashers and a woman who pushed a pram around with a bucket that had a face drawn on it, instead of a real baby.
He once claimed that he was given an award for attendance and speculates that this award was merely invented by his teachers to try and persuade him to spend more time at school. He also claimed that his teachers never once said “Well done” to him and that, on parents evening, his parents were informed by one of his teachers that he “Will never be a high flyer”.
His Philosophy
“We came from the sea originally, now we’re going back in it. Don’t go in it, unless you’re in a boat.”
On dopplegangers - “How would I know which one I was?”
“They say it all started out with a big bang. But, what I wonder is, was it a big bang or did it just seem big because there wasn’t anything else drown it out at the time?”
“The world is getting more and more scruffier, innit?”
Advice for chameleons - “Stay green. Stay in the woods. Stay safe.”
“Does the brain control you or are you controlling the brain? I don’t know if I’m in charge of mine.”
His Unexplainable Entertainment Value
His Poetry
Me Belly-Ache
For god’s sake, me belly-ache
The doctor said it’s me kidney
He said he’s got to stick a tube up me knob
I said you’ve gotta be kidding me
For god’s sake, knob-ache.
Me Ward
Me, a Chinese fella, and an old bloke
who looked like Mr. Burns from ‘The Simpsons’
Don’t know what was wrong with im
but brakin’ wind was the symptoms
No one visited him or called him; he seemed quite lost to me
As well as wind problems, he had a colostom
When I left, I said ‘See ya’ to the old man
Turns out the other fellow wasn’t Chinese, he was from Japan.
Jellyfish
It would be spiteful to put jellyfish in a trifle.
Get Your Theme On
This site has every episode of the great program “Theme Time Radio Hour with Bob Dylan”. A fantastic hodgepodge of everything you need to know about American music through the eyes of mamas, food, telephones, guns, leftovers and Tennessee. If you don’t know what you want to listen to, this is probably it.
Me? I like “food” and “New York”.
An English translation is provided below.
No one knows what the fate of thinking will look like. In a lecture in Paris in 1964, which I did not give myself but was presented in a French translation, I spoke under the title: “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.” I thus make a distinction between philosophy, that is metaphysics, and thinking as I understand it. The thinking that I contrast with philosophy in this lecture—which is principally done by an attempt to clarify the essence of the Greek “aletheia” (unhiddenness) — this thinking is, compared to metaphysical thinking, much simpler than philosophy, but precisely because of its simplicity it is much more difficult to carry out. And it calls for new care with language, not the invention of new terms, as I once thought, but a return to the primordial content of our own language, which is, however, constantly in the process of dying off.
A coming thinker, who will perhaps be faced with the task of really taking over this thinking that I am attempting to prepare, will have to obey a sentence Heinrich von Kleist once wrote, and that reads “I step back before one who is not yet here, and bow, a millennium before him, to his spirit.
Dreams for Hip-Hop
Posted at 11:33 AMHip-hop, one of the greatest 20th century innovations in music (and probably the century’s greatest innovation in poetry), is destined to some day expand out of the American ghettos where it started. It’s simply too fresh and too big not to, and it would certainly not be the first genre to start out as an African-American innovation and end as a worldwide phenomenon. Something about this process is definitely nefarious (stealing a form of music that started as a very specific protest and turning it into something completely different), but at the same time, it’ll be nice to hear a more diverse set of ideas put forth by hip-hop. I’m interested in what Russians might want to rap about.
Dizzee Rascal might represent the internationalization of hip-hop. He may just represent a wicked rapper who pronounces everything with a delightful British-via-Ghana accent. Most things about him should be pretty familiar by now. His upbringing, in East London council housing and with a single mother, is not very different from most American rappers, and he does rap in English. Still, he is one of the first foreign rappers to make it big, and that’s gotta mean something. Dizzee, born Dylan Mills, has not yet made it into the hall of fame, and it remains to be seen whether or not he is the start of something. Will his dream come troo?
Of course, Dizzee is on his third album, and his first was the most popular (you have not seen this video on MTV). This isn’t exactly a new trend, and he doesn’t represent the epitome of it anyway. Most international hip-hop that has made it to America so far has been of the one-hit wonder variety (Lady Sovereign, Punjabi MC). Still, there has been an undeniable growth in attention paid to international hip-hop; you know that a phenomenon has made it into the collective unconscious when National Geographic is writing about it. It’s a slow and steady build-up.
Mainly I’m just writing this to post up this video, which is ill.
Wired Interviews Brian Eno
Brian Eno is definitely one of my favorite Advanced artists. Here’s a nice excerpt from the beginning of the interview in regards to generative music:
Wired News: What drew you toward working with generative art and generative music?
Brian Eno: Well, part of it is that it’s an extremely good value (laughter) because it was possible to make a lot of work from a very small amount of original material. That was one thing I found very interesting, because once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music — not like a record that you’d put on and which would play for a while and finish. I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn’t want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. Discreet Music was like that and Music for Airports. What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out. Theoretically, the processes were infinite but unfortunately, recordings aren’t of infinite length. So you sort of had a diagram, or really you got a “still” from the piece. That was really the best way of explaining it.
(Via Advanced Theory.)
Soft on Crime
Judging from his decision yesterday to commute the 30-month sentence of I. Lewis Libby Jr. — who was charged with perjury and convicted — untarnished ideals are less of a priority than protecting the secrets of his inner circle and mollifying the tiny slice of right-wing Americans left in his political base.
(Via Daring Fireball.)
Worthwhile Campaigns
Posted at 4:09 PMEver since the rise of the conservative “backlash” in the 1980’s, which has brought America such polarizing campaigns against abortion, gay-rights, and the separation of church and state, patriotic Americans have continued to lash out against the moral decay that is corroding the soul of this country. I recently encountered the newest “push” while driving on a highway to a small-town called Norfolk, NE.
I’m not sure why, but for some reason this sign seems counter-intuitive when your audience is driving by at 75 mph.
Another comment on the “backlash” mentality, as Thomas Frank put it in his book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?:
It’s ironic that Americans concerned with the moral decay of this country continue to vote for candidates who are in favor of free-market policies, which are the very source of the blasphemous material that pollutes the media—the market will always strive to break new ground, no matter how scandalous, to reach new customers.
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