Epistemic Ingemination

It’s just beautiful in its simplicity. A life changer for a guy who cooks with garlic all the time.

“As for the Republicans, how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical American heritage) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.

— H. P. Lovecraft

Postulate: We are going through the second grand Know-Nothing Movement in our history (stipulating a few nuanced differences in the various hatreds, loyalties, and choices of subjective ignorance of factual information.)

It’s still about White, Christian, Protestant Real Americans. We’ve been there.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Nothing

This year’s Pwnie awards have been announced at the Blackhat Convention. (These are for worst bugs in computer code every year.) Sony takes the big prize, with its epic failure and meltdown(s) in the Playstation and Online Entertainment divisions. Epic Ownage goes to the Stuxnet worm.

More Google Earth geekery. If you want to play around with the same computer modeling that NOAA uses to predict hurricane paths, they live over here, added in real time as they become available. A very nice service; your government at its best.

Regarding the debt ceiling foolishness:

Look. There is no unavoidable crisis here. The “debt ceiling” debate is a canard; it is a will o’ the wisp. A false flag operation.

It is a myth, manufactured. By — And Only By — The Republican Party.

All that we are seeing is the end game of a decade of thievery.

You — all of us — have just gone through the most monstrous (and the most successful) plundering of a public treasury in the history of the world. Ask yourself: where did that money go? It is a massive amount of money — $5 trillion dollars in ten years. That’s 41.6 billion dollars a month over the 120 months. Somebody received that money.

Did you see any of it? I think not.

It went to military contractors; big pharma; insurance companies; huge reinsurance firms; big oil; big banks; big investment banks. And the politicians who enabled the plunder: they have their share of the booty, too; rest assured.

It was such a excessive orgy of theft that it crashed the world economy. It was such an excessive orgy of theft that the Pentagon can’t account for over a trillion dollars that it spent. It was such an excessive orgy of theft that the State Department can’t account for over a billion dollars in *cash* money that it ferried to Iraq. It’s all just “gone.”

Where do you think that it went? Someone has your money, citizen. *Your* money. And it’s not you.

Now that the numbers are in, we are fretting about the horrific results of our lack of engagement with this treasonous behavior. I’m not seeing so much flag-waving at the moment from you, eh, Patriots? Feeling proud now?

Well, you know what? There’s an elephant in the room, and it is not a Republican.

If we do nothing, the Bush tax cuts automatically expire, and we are well on our way to a budget surplus within fifteen years. If we do nothing at all. That is a CBO-vetted fact.

Except. At this time, we need to pass a normal bit of housekeeping that is a standard part of governing: a debt ceiling increase. It’s wholly routine. It has been a routine vote many, many times in the past. All this does is allow the treasurer to borrow money to execute mandates that have already been allocated by Congress. The money is already spent. It has to be spent. By law. Since it has to be spent by law, we have to issue bonds to do it. Pretty simple stuff.

Or perhaps not so simple, in these extraordinarily dense times. Let’s ratchet back. Let me rephrase.

The Republican party stole your money and gave it to their friends. You are on the hook for it. Now the Republican party says that you need to pay it back by giving up your retirement and your healthcare — for which you have been paying all your life. SS and Medicare are not some “government handout” for which you’re being billed. They are insurance that you’ve been paying for, for all of your working life, and the benefits are rightfully due you. The Republicans have no problem with stealing that as well – so that their patrons can keep your money.

The Republican Party is trying to take these entitlements away from you, to try to make up the deficit that they assisted others in stealing. They are crying ‘foul’ on a false, rigged game that they themselves rigged, falsified and have now declared fouled.

…

I run into politically angry people all the time. Fox News Angry. Uninformed angry. I hear them in the grocery line; I hear them at the convenience store; in the bank. Sitting next to me drinking shots at the bar. Family emails. Customers at places I work. Cigarette smokers out in the parking lot.

I don’t usually do politics in social situations; it’s a recipe for heartache. But I have someting to say to such people.

To you flag-waving patriots; you “libertarians”; you “they’re all the same” folks; you “working man” folks; you “America first” compadres; you “American exceptionalism” people; you “free market capitalism” contingent; you “might makes right” folks, and especially you “no taxes” people:

You think that I am calling you stupid. I am not. I hang with you every day, and you are wonderful, intelligent, talented and thoughtful folks, one-on-one. But as a group you are an absolute horror.

I am not calling you stupid; I am calling you much worse: I am calling you a fool. You are an intelligent, thinking human being, and all you do is vote for the best advertised bucket of chicken that stokes your anger and divides your power. I use such a strong word because you don’t take the time to figure out who is on your side. You vote against your own interests again, and again, and again. You vote for the politician who makes you the most pissed-off at the other politician — and that is invariably the politician who is interested in nothing but acquiring your power and your wealth. They are certainly not interested in governing for your best interests.

People you elect make *public policy.* Public Policy affects your life. Whether you choose to believe this or not, it is a fact. Facts do not change whether you choose to believe them or not.

Guess what? The people you vote for don’t care about facts. And if you elect people who make up their own facts, you do not have public policy based upon factual information. Your country is dying, and your hallowed flag is becoming meaningless, because you did not do your job as a Citizen of the country that you so love.

Engage yourself in your own future, fool. Vote for people interested in public policy and facts first and foremost; vote for those who most represent your political interests. And if you can’t do something as simple as that, then don’t vote at all. Because you are killing the country that we BOTH love.

Are we all clear now?

I think that Google Earth is one of the neatest pieces of software ever written. When you try to imagine all of the interlinked technologies that had to exist to make it possible, it is nothing short of amazing. I use it as a recreational diversion quite often.

But as with all things that we get used to, I discovered some aspects that disappointed me, too. To be specific, I wanted river names to pop up in my explorations. Enter the Geonames Features Network add-on. It rocks.

This little KML file adds configurable name data for just about everything. Mountains, rivers, streams, canyons, springs, mesas, stock tanks, caves, factories, airports, railroads, etc, etc, etc. Highest recommendation on this one. It easily enhances the joy of exploring around by an order of magnitude for me.

Open up Google Earth, and then click the following to add Geonames to your setup. (When your browser asks you what to do with the file, tell it to let Google Earth open it.)

http://www.geonames.org/kml/feature-networklink.kml

If you like it, then drag it out of “Temporary Places” in Google Earth up into “My Places” in the left panel. That will make it a permanent feature. Enjoy.

A good review of a couple of Richard Feynman bios; a better review of Richard Feynman, from someone who worked closely with him. Over here.

We live in a country half composed of mindless idiots.

You waved your flag for a decade, as the greatest plundering of a public treasury in history took place, destroying the middle class in the process. Now you want to default on your obligations and destroy the world economy, while you balance your thievery on the backs of the poorest and most vulnerable in our society.

Give me a 100% tax on the profits of investment banks, oil companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and military contractors (and their subsidiaries, and all of the bonuses and stock options paid to executives in these industries) until the entire debt is paid off. Then we can talk.

…to take look at the quotations page.

Been updating it lately.

Our Discussion

Glenn Greenwald puts *everyone* on the chopping block with regard to Wikileaks. Virtually every sentence in this long piece is interesting; I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a more well articulated opinion column. Highly recommended.

WikiLeaks reveals more than just government secrets – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com

Truth becomes known, always.

In this case, it becomes known about 30 years earlier than it might’ve normally been known after being begrudgingly declassified. This is realtime. It is an amazing moment.

Since we own this truth that is done in our name, and since it is a bucket of icewater in the face of business as usual, I strongly support it.

We *have* to work together with those people. They *have* to work together with us. Now we know what we’re working with. All of us.

Damage? There’s no “damage” done here. There’s inconvenience done here. There’s exposure for gamesters. Perhaps some folks might have an early end to their life due to this. But I am inclined to think that no innocents will see that fate.

The net result will be a foundational change in the manner that business has been done. If we have the horse sense to see what this represents.

Spread it far and wide; yell it from the rooftops.

Apropos of the Realist post a couple of days ago; an interview with Lenny Bruce. Starts on page one and you then have to jump to page three. This was 1960, and it has more concentrated insight than is possible these days. And it is as contemporaneous to our time as it can be.

The Realist interview with Lenny Bruce

This is neat. We now have an archive of every issue of Paul Krassner’s The Realist magazine.

THE REALIST ARCHIVE PROJECT

Just a step forward into reality after the election. A very good read — and a correct one.

Democrats didn’t lose the battle of 2010. They won it. – By William Saletan – Slate Magazine

Hello world…

Well, I’ve come back over here and moved this to a new server (or rather a new webserver instance.) Man. A guy goes away for a few months an all of a sudden ~300 spammers have registered as users and 37,000 posts are awaiting moderation.

What I did was delete all of the users except me; your comments should still be up. (There’s not really any need to register as a user; I’m not selling anything, and as soon as your first comment is approved, you can comment freely from there on out.)

Anyway, it’s my intent to start writing over here again. I got caught up in Facebook for a while, and while that fun & such, I like this format better. It’s difficult to express oneself in 720 characters or less, and ultimately one ends up inside the digital equivalent of a chicken coop. Perhaps I’ll muse upon that subject at length sometime, but tonight is not the night.

In any case, I am looking forward to seeing all of you again as you stumble back over here and check in now & then.

Here’s Jonathan Jackson’s time-lapse of the Pearl Jam taping at ACL. I was the stage manager on that one; that’s me in the black shirt and long light blue jeans.

I miss doing big road work sometimes…

Pearl Jam / Austin City Limits TV Taping / Time Lapse from Jonathan Jackson on Vimeo.

Truer words never spoken.

[Addendum, after a couple of emails]

Yes, I still want to be Keith Emerson.

Missed it. Yesterday was Greg Lake’s birthday.

Baby played me Lucky Man on the radio; I’ll just have to refer you to this. In any case; Happy Birthday. Changed my world, This English Man, he did.

This kind of thing is what makes it all worthwhile in my little world.

I’m voting against 1 and 2 and for everything else, F.W.I.W…

Chronicle’s explanations and endorsements are here.

I think that I’ll just let my partner-in-the-dance Eddie Wilson take the helm today… he says it better than I can hope to.

It took all day Thursday for Wednesday night sink in. Earl Poole Ball’s musical talent, combined with his years of experience at the helm of modern American music is turning the rekindling of “Sittin’, Singin’ and Supper” into pure magic.

Old friends and new joined in the round robin of picking and harmonizing and they played like Threadgill’s Old Number One was Carnegie Hall.

Chojo Jacques is back in Austin after three decades and came by to visit Randy. Thirty-five years haven’t done Chojo any visible damage. I recognized him before we could shake hands. His fiddle playing is about as good as it gets. He recently released a CD with Billy Bright and has been touring with Slaid Cleaves.

Stonehoney and Josh Zee of the Mother Truckers made newcomers to the Hump Day Supper Session wonder if they’d waked up in Heaven. When they sang perfect four-part harmony on a version of “She,” Gram Parson’s love note to Emmylou, it was especially poignant given that Earl was the piano player on the original recording with Gram.

Barbara K and Rich Bowden performed a couple of beauties including the gorgeous Blaze Foley classic, “If I Could Only Fly” with Threadgill’s own beautiful veteran manager, Melanie Bounds.

The audience was filled with the kind of people that keep me from ever staying away for more than a heartbeat; Stan Alexander, who hooked me on music at Threadgill’s in 1961, promised to bring his guitar this Wednesday; Ann Seaman, working on a film follow up to her huge biography of Madelyn Murray O’Hare; Dorothy Martin, sister of pal Don Hyde, one of the most important and overlooked figures in the development of Austin’s counterculture; too many more to mention now because I have puppy duty in the park and it is a glorious day. Hallelujah and I hope to see you on Wednesday evening and any time between now and then that you happen upon a hunger.

P.S. Stonehoney said they are putting together a Gospel Brunch set and I let them promise to the heavens that they intend to show up and play. I didn’t break it to them that Brunch is before noon on the morning that immediately follows Saturday night. We’ll see.

Chojo will be there on Sunday morning (11-1) as well; it’s going to be extraordinary. We’ll be doing the Wednesdays for a long, long time, 7-9 PM. Add ‘em to your weekly sanity maintenance routine. It’s pure, real Austin music wonderfulness.

I have a bean! I might get two!

So, it’s the summer of 1970; I am newly 12 years old, at my uncle’s house in Dallas with Not A Lot To Do; it was a great vacation. One afternoon, I go and poke around my college-freshman cousin’s record collection. He was off at South Padre with his custom dune buggy. Or something similar.

Anyway, I came across an album with a very disturbing cover. Cool. I put it on. Listened to both sides. Listened to both sides again. And a third time.

You have to understand that the #1 song in the country was “Close To You” by The Carpenters at that time; it was what I knew. This thing kicked me in the side of the head like a mule, and changed the game forever.

Saturday, Oct. 10th, 2009 is the 40th anniversary of the release of the album entitled “In the Court of the Crimson King (an observation by King Crimson).” I still have it on vinyl, and in great shape. One of my few material possessions that I’ve taken care of over the years.

Enjoy.

King Crimson – In The Court Of The Crimson King

Let’s see. What have I been doing, besides Not Posting To My Blog?

Lots of stuff. Most importantly, I have been pulling away from political concerns. (Finally!) The level of political discourse in this society has reached a point where even a self-aware ten-year-old can see the lies. I’ll have none of it for the time being. It’s as if the most pressing, serious problems in this country are being debated by blind deranged monkeys playing whack-a-mole. I’m not strong enough to wade into that level of effluvia every day, and I am a better man for it. I’ve even signed off of the most intelligent mail list with which I’ve ever been associated. I just can’t do it for now.

Music stuff has been going great. This year I’ve worked with M.Ward, St. Vincent, James Polk, Hayes Carll, James McMurtry, the Dave Matthews Band, the Southwest Regional Folk Alliance, XM Radio, Jimmy LaFave, Kerrville, Iron & Wine, the Folk Alliance, Pearl Jam & Barbara K. Many others. I am a very, very lucky guy to have the privilege. I love to enable genius; it’s what I do best. They all seem to like me okay, too. Maybe I’ll be a success at this stuff someday.

Home stuff is cool, for the most part. We’re finding our feet en re education. I don’t want to invade my son’s personal space too much; let’s just say that we’re engaging in an applied philosophical experiment that I’ve talked about before. Even if we fail, he ultimately wins.

I can recommend without reservation a “cookbook” called Ratio, by Micheal Ruhlman. It is the most remarkable foodie book that I’ve ever encountered, and it is quickly becoming as essential in the kitchen as a knife to me.

My buddy Gunnar is in town, and he brought lobsters, which we ate with relish (the adverb, not the noun) last week. Clarified butter, smoked-sea-salted asparagus and dill-bacon baby potatoes accompanied. A lobster stock was forthwith contrived, which, a few days later, turned into the best seafood gumbo that’s ever magically appeared in my kitchen. The Foodie Gods have smiled upon us this week.

My girlfriend is the most kind and tolerant person you’ve ever seen, even in the face of gawdawful Male Stupidity, and she has the prettiest eyes in the history of the human race.

That’s all for now.

Keith Olbermann clears things up nicely. A really remarkable video:

Go to youtube.com and type in the search term “bloopers”.

Ignore the first twenty or so. The coolness is further in. Have fun.