Gad How I Love the 21st Century

Resolutions

2010-01-01T16:16:45Z

#1 Drink more beer.

#2 Stay on UI as long as possible.

#3 Really learn at least one of Java or C#/.NET. That's the skills the shirts are looking for and though the languages are both easy, the huge class libraries behind them are a killer to master.

#3.5 (Optional) Learn Haskell. And the categorical algebra behind it. Time permitting.

#4 Read Kant and Hegel with real understanding.

#5 Master measure theory.

#5.5 (Optional) Master set-theoretical forcing techniques.

#6 Cut way back on the web browsing - it's the only way I have a chance in hell of doing 3-5.

#7 Cut back on the beef. Now it makes me ill no matter where it comes from - when I cook it myself and I still feel poisoned afterwards, something is wrong.

#8 Stop being such a freakin' hermit. I'm sick of calling old friends and them asking 'Who is this?'

Happy New Years one and all.

On Escalation

2009-12-08T13:55:23Z

Herman Kahn reference intended.

Jean-Paul Sartre, mescaline and crabs

2009-11-11T12:54:14Z

I don't think I was the only person who read Roquentin's encounter of naked existance in Nausea and thought the guy was tripping. Now we know.

Huis claws

jean-paul sartre: At Normale, there were some ten of us who ran around together. The great thing about group activity is that the decision-making process is generalized to the group. So when we decided to take over a bar and that led to confrontations, yes, each of us was responsible, but it was a common act. Of course, there were some individual disasters too. Well, not disasters, I’m exaggerating, but when we decided to experiment with drugs, I ended up having a nervous breakdown.

john gerassi: You mean the crabs?

sartre: Yeah, after I took mescaline, I started seeing crabs around me all the time. They followed me in the streets, into class. I got used to them. I would wake up in the morning and say, “Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?” I would talk to them all the time. I would say, “Okay, guys, we’re going into class now, so we have to be still and quiet,” and they would be there, around my desk, absolutely still, until the bell rang.

gerassi: A lot of them?

sartre: Actually, no, just three or four.

As an additional bonus, mescaline is notorious for inducing nausea in the experimenter. XD

Buzz off, Apple

2009-09-15T22:31:37Z

No, I do not want to upgrade iTunes to version 9.0. I want you to play the frickin' music now, not twenty minutes from now. So shut up and get to work!

That is all.

The difference between the parties

2009-09-13T01:05:58Z

Thank you, Cannonfire.

Remembering 9/11

2009-09-11T16:07:37Z

September 11, 1973: A U.S. orchestrated and financed coup d’état overthrows democratically elected President, Salvador Allende, to install military dictator, Augusto Pinochet. Augusto Pinochet ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990. During that time he was responsible for the disappearance of over 3,000 Chileans, murders, concentration camps, and torture.

Redneck Woman (Reality Remix)

2009-08-09T20:01:34Z

If the South wants to secede again, I say let 'em. As long as we keep all the nukes in the blue states.

My Background is no longer a secret

2009-08-06T17:25:58Z

You know what to do.

Lunch of champions

2009-08-05T16:41:14Z

Ahhhh summer plus good vegetable market (Russo's in Watertown) equals delicious healthy eating.

Corn, green peppers, carrots, green beans and a raw jalapeno. Watermelon for dessert.

It's the only way to fly.

Karl, I pwn3d you!

2009-08-04T13:02:14Z

Finished Volume 1. 1084 pages cover to cover.

If I have the gumption for a re-read, I should take notes. But three observations. 1) It does sometimes read like a Victorian novel. 2) Marx does not once use the words 'socialism' or 'communism'. It really is just a historical/philosophical critique of capitalism. 3) Sometimes he really does write like a German philosophy professor i.e. not using a single word when a whole paragraph will serve. Did he get paid by the word? XD

On to Volume 2. This seems to be much more technical - the theory of how a capitalist economy reproduces itself. Being written in the 19th Century, he didn't have linear algebra at hand which would have been of great use. Oh well, a math geek like me can fill in those details.

I am immortalized on the intertubes

2009-07-08T02:24:33Z

Check out the handsome militant devil second from the left.

Actually, I'm not SP-USA and never was - I just liked hanging out with them at peace actions, they are the coolest socialists you'd ever want to meet.

Robert Strange McNamara - amerikan mass murderer - 1916-2009

2009-07-06T18:29:04Z

Burn in hell forever, war criminal.

Noam Chomsky on McNamara

Speaking of anti-work

2009-07-04T22:12:09Z

Back to the classics! The Abolition of Work - Bob Black

Abolish Restaurants

2009-07-04T21:12:38Z

A worker's critique of the food service industry

A very nice illustrated story style pamphlet on the nature and experience of restaurant work. A well done and fairly painless introduction to marxist political economy with a strong 20th century style emphasis on alienation, anti-work and direct action.

Taking Jen's meme and running it back forty years

2009-06-30T23:44:09Z

Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Try not to repeat a song title.

Pick Your Artist:
Jefferson Airplane/Starship

Are you male or female:
Hey Frederick

Describe yourself:
Greasy Heart

If you could go anywhere, where would you go?
The House At Pooneil Corners

What's the weather like:
Bear Melt

Favorite time of day:
Turn Out the Lights

Feelings on high school:
The Farm

Feelings on college:
Wild Thyme

What is life to you:
3/5ths Of A Mile In Ten Seconds

What is the best advice you have to give:
Won't You Try/Saturday Afternoon

If you could change your name, what would it be:
Mau Mau (Amerikon)

What did you/were you doing last night:
Plastic Fantastic Lover

Immortal Technique - 3rd World (2008)

2009-06-16T17:37:11Z

Angry. Awesome.
"Seven hundred children die by the end of this song."

Heh. Someone is not totally asleep.

2009-06-05T13:36:40Z

Walter Trout - They Call Us The Working Class (But We Ain't Working Any More) (2009)

How wonderful to post a song and not have to type (197?) beside the title :-)

The USA's version of the Tiananmen Square Massacre

2009-06-04T20:44:31Z

Herbert Hoover and Douglas McArthur suppress the Bonus Army in Washington in 1932.

Lest the red-white-'n'blue crowd be feeling too smug today.

Herdspeople love to read books by Marx and Lenin

2009-06-03T19:22:05Z

The old Chinese posters are marvellous!

Is that lady in pink to the right shoplifting?

Apropos of nothing in particular

2009-06-02T12:14:37Z

Just a pretty Joni Mitchell song from 1970.

Continuing the Memorial Day Festivities

2009-05-26T18:38:58Z

Taking a break from Karl, almost finished with Ch. 14 - The Division of Labour and Manufacture and coming up on a real long chapter, so it's kick back with utoob time.

Randy Newman - Rednecks

Gram Parsons - Drug Store Truck Driving Man (If you don't want to hear the zonked out rap, forward to 1:15.)

A. Whitney Brown supports the troops - kinda sorta maybe

Sex Pistols - The Great Rock and Roll Swindle

Happy Memorial Day

2009-05-25T21:54:32Z

Oh what fun. I wrapped some Afghan and Pakistani babies in bacon printed like the 'murrican flag, barbequed them and ate them with my bare hands and teeth, the blood and fat dripping down my grinning chin.

A few hours later, I shat out a pile of greenbacks and tomorrow I'm going to buy a SUV bigger than a Mac Mansion that gets one mile per ten soldiers, and go out running down the unemployed, homeless and crippled.

I am really and truly a true amerikan! All hail Emperor Obama! Praise GI Geeeeeezuz! Yee haw!

I give you the incandescently truthful Arthur Silber on why I do not support the troops.

On the occasion of this Memorial Day and on the days to come, all of which promise to be deeply tragic and murderously bloody so long as the goals of the American ruling class remain unchanged, the objects of your reverence must be severely restricted. That reverence must be reserved for innocent lives, and especially for those innocent lives ended, maimed and altered forever by needless, futile, endlessly destructive war, past, present and future.

The historical and contemporary record makes possible only one conclusion: those needless and futile wars are not just "a few" or only "some" of them, and the trail of devastation is not the result of "regrettable misjudgments" for which amends have been made, or are even possible. No, almost every single war ever fought by the United States was entirely unnecessary in terms of any justifiable conception of self-defense; this is unquestionably true of every intervention since World War II. The murders are the result of intended and intentional policy, reached after deliberation and in service to the goals of the ruling class: power, wealth, dominion and control -- and always more power, wealth, dominion and control. To challenge those goals and to begin to alter them, you must challenge every assumption underlying the myths upon which the United States feeds, as it continues to brutalize and kill in vast numbers. One of the key assumptions that you must question and finally reject is the demand for glorification of "the troops."

This time, the revolution will be cute

2009-05-18T15:41:34Z

Hatsune Miku sings the Internationale in three languages.

A random thought on Derrida

2009-05-03T23:32:51Z

If his purpose was to decenter logocentricism, then was it his strategy to produce such impenetrable text as to discourage readers from reading any more?

Just asking.

The Pope digs Marx

2009-04-28T19:48:18Z

The Sark is reading him also. And the old mole is the hot thing with young Japanese too.

So why should I be shy to say I'm up to Chapter 8 in Volume I of Capital? :-)

(I took the advice of Harry Cleaver and skipped ahead to Part VIII: Primitive Accumulation first. Was excellent advice as that was a nice example of the historical materialist analysis that Marx wanted to do with the heavy machinery he developed in the earlier part.)