Author's posts
Sep 01 2009
THE IDEA OF ORDER IN THE CELESTIAL CLOCKWORK.
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.–Wallace Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West
The Organization of Life
Living systems are self-sustaining, dynamic, adaptive, and economical. The adaptive fit of organisms to the environment has been marked by increasing complexity of structure and function, from single to multi-cellular organisms, from prokaryotic to eukaryotic organization, to the development and differentiation of a variety of meta-structural internal organs and scaffoldings, to arrays of sensory filters and motor effectors, to immense varieties of population dynamics, to the springs, gears, and pendulums of the mind. How do great (and repeated) proliferations and radiations of organisms reconcile their idiosyncratic, yet dynamic or adaptive ranges with an economy of biological organization? Does a principle of organization exist that scales from the level of the sub-cellular to entire populations, from milliseconds to years, even across great extinction events? You bet.
Aug 28 2009
Law is for Losers. (MASSIVELY UPDATED!)
Those who obey “laws” are losers. Those who game the laws are winners.
Law is for losers; Game Theory for winners.
Seems a parsimonious explanation, e.g., Wall Street, War Crimes, eh?
discuss.
I specifically invite IOZ and Greenwald, but please be inclined to a FREE-FOR-ALL.
Please also include human nature, as opposed to “rationality,” as a causal factor.
An intro to “selection pressures versus markets” would also be desired.
Thenk Q.
(Suppositions due by my birthday.)
MASSIVE UPDATE: IOZ’s opening statement:
WASHINGTON – The Obama administration will largely retain Bush era airline safety policies, the White House announced. Officials explained that these old policies were necessary to protect the future from the threats of the past.
“Everything that is currently happening will immediately reach a state of having happened,” said Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. “Therefore, it is in our vital interest.”
In a statement released later in the day, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said that “in an increasingly legal world, we need to take every lawful illegal step possible to ensure that action is taken.”
The civil liberties community gesticulated and made several sounds indicating frustration.
However, administration officials remained committed. “Obviously it is impossible to wage cyberwar against the United States from outside of the United States,” said a spokesman. “But if you can get a laptop physically inside of American borders, all bets are off.”
The Internet could not be reached for comment by press time.
Aced. 15-love (l’oeuf).
(And I wasn’t expecting anyone to even rsvp.)
Aug 25 2009
Hey, IOZ, shut your fucking trap!
When I want to be dazzled by human intellect, I read IOZ. He delivers. In a similar vein, I love Bernard Chazelle’s posts on music: they make me feel edified in the absence of my own personal knowledge on the topic. Thus, despite my shortcomings, I feel lifted by them, each in their own way.
However, fuck the fuck off, IOZ, you bitchy fucking cunt. Gratuitously attacking Glenn Greenwald based on John Caruso’s misplaced bitchiness? Please, don’t be a spiritless bitch.
IOZ may dazzle, but Glenn Greenwald moves mountains.
Aug 25 2009
WTFF?? The Fed is trading in derivatives????
What the fucking fuck??? Say it ain’t so!
Zero Hedge is reporting that the Fed has been betting its shit on the big crap table.
One-point-some-odd trillion in March alone.
Box cars working, people.
WTFF??
If true, this is government on drugs, flying saucer, four-way-window-pane.
Jun 25 2009
Bombing funerals is “overkill.”
President Pretty Mouth likes to stick his tongue in our collective ear about the universality of human dignity, freedom from coercive repression, and justice, but it feels utterly inappropriate.
Jun 20 2009
No such thing as opaque democracy.
Tom Paine argued that legitimate government arose only from a compact between inherently sovereign individuals in The Rights of Man:
We have now to review the governments which arise out of society, in contradistinction to those which arose out of superstition and conquest.
It has been thought a considerable advance towards establishing the principles of Freedom to say that Government is a compact between those who govern and those who are governed; but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with.
The fact therefore must be that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.
To possess ourselves of a clear idea of what government is, or ought to be, we must trace it to its origin. In doing this we shall easily discover that governments must have arisen either out of the people or over the people.
Clearly, this sort of agreement between sovereign individuals was precisely the sort of legitimate government envisioned in our Constitution.
A ruling elite governing through coercion or superstition, that is, arbitrarily without accountability to the inherent sovereigns, is by definition illegitimate.
Jun 18 2009
When yesterday had a future.
Buhdy is probably going to ban me sooner or later for lazy blogolalia (like echolalia, only blog-centric). Peter Schiff, who predicted much of the economic whirlwind that Obama is intending to put back in Pandora’s box, showed up in comments asking WTF the proprietors at The Automatic Earth, Ilargi and Stoneleigh, ever predicted. After all, he is Peter Schiff!
Stoneleigh responded, and because the TAE feel free to post articles whole, this will be one of the few times that I re-produce Stoneleigh’s part of the post in its entirety, fair use be damned (They can feel free to sue me for all my debt obligations, then put me to work as an indentured slave milking goats). As a one-time practicing scientist, I would consider the predictions made to be of the “strong” variety.
Jun 17 2009
Begging for hope: The new power.
Jun 15 2009
Finally: Freedom
They once were terrorism suspects, but even after U.S. authorities determined the men weren’t a threat to the United States, they were kept at the Guantanamo Bay prison for years because no nation would take them – until a few days ago, when Bermuda agreed to let them in as refugees.
“When we didn’t have any country to accept us, when everybody was afraid of us … Bermuda had the courage and was brave enough to accept us,” said Abdulla Abdulgadir, who at 30 is the youngest of the four men who relished their first weekend of freedom in seven years.
Abdulgadir eagerly embraced his new island home. “We are not moving anywhere,” he said.
Jun 15 2009
Progressive assholes.
The number 1 rec’d diary at DKos contains the following formulation:
Things are so bad for “President-Elect” Ahmadinejad and “Supreme Leader” Khamanei right now that there would be few tears shed for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. That’s not a suggestion that the U.S. should get near Iran with a ten-foot poll (sic), only an observation that the establishment wouldn’t gain much sympathy if not a whole lot of blame and further destabilization of their illegitimate(and it is) regime.
All I can say is, What The Fuck? And I’m not talking about the incoherence of that second sentence. What The Fuck do Iran’s fucked up elections have to do with a massive bombing campaign? That’s really quite revealing all by itself. That’s how fucked-in-the-head people (progressives!!!) can be.
Indeed, I have noticed all over the tubes today that wingnuts on both sides of the aisle are aching for destabilization in yet another oil-producing country.
Seriously: Fuck the fuck off people.
Jun 14 2009
Dennis Ross: The short fuse on US/Iran diplomacy.
Dennis Ross is Barack Obama’s special advisor on Iran. Dennis Ross is a pro-Israel hawk. The dude made almost a million bucks last year making speeches to wingnut welfare think tanks. Last year, Ross made more than $100,000.00 for shoveling propaganda on Fox News alone. Ross’s only interest in negotiations with Iran is to get them out of the way quickly in order to neutralize a public clamoring for peaceful negotiations, i.e., “alas, we tried negotiations, but that failed,” so that the US can go “kinetic” and bomb the bejeezuz out of the Iranians.
By Robert Dreyfuss’s account, Dennis Ross is the last guy who should be in charge of negotiations with Iran.
Widely viewed as a cog in the machine of Israel’s Washington lobby, Ross was not likely to be welcomed in Tehran–and he wasn’t. Iran’s state radio described his appointment as “an apparent contradiction” with Obama’s “announced policy to bring change in United States foreign policy.” Kazem Jalali, a hardline member of the Iranian parliament’s national security committee, joked that it “would have been so much better to pick Ariel Sharon or Ehud Olmert as special envoy to Iran.” More seriously, a former White House official says that Ross has told colleagues that he believes the United States will ultimately have no choice but to attack Iran in response to its nuclear program.
Dennis Ross is a hardcore wingnut to the bone. Dennis Ross pals around with war-mongering wingnuts, like Paul Wolfowitz and Andrew Marshall, and helped Martin Indyk of AIPAC fame launch the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP).
Jun 10 2009
We’ve already blown past the worst-case scenario.
With all the bullshit being broadcast, you would think that some green shoots would indeed be sprouting somewhere sooner of later, but somehow it’s not all that convincing. Remember those “stress tests” used to determine the health of the banks spreadsheets under various scenarios of economic growth and unemployment? Hot damn! What a confidence booster. The banks passed them after renegotiating their grades. Even though the then-current economic conditions were already worse than the worst-case scenario envisioned. We can attribute that to “lag time,” or something. In defense of the Masters of the Universe, things really are moving faster than the speed of thought.
At least someone in charge is catching up after the fact. The woman in charge of overseeing the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program–what a sweet-assed name for a broken apocolypse condom!), Elizabeth Warren, suggests that we need to re-run the stress tests “right now” based on current conditions, because:
We’ve already blown past the worst-case scenario on unemployment.
In other words, the stress test results are about as valuable as the paper in the bank vaults. Less than not very much at all. We have already “blown past” those sunnier scenarios.
I appreciate Warren’s candor, which is certainly at odds with what we’ve been hearing from Obama and the MoUs.