Possibly the Most Illogical Statement Ever Made

"It's clear they are two different theories," Mr. Thompson said. "Creationism normally starts with the Holy Scripture, the Book of Genesis, then you develop a scientific theory that supports it, while intelligent design looks at the same kind of empirical data that any scientist looks at," and concludes that complex mechanisms in nature "appear designed because it is designed."

So fucking retarded.

Two very powerful sentences.

"We are becoming like the countries we criticize and pity, places where the state and the society have less and less to do with each other. We are on our own, but then black people have always known that." - Darryl Pinckney in The New York Review of Books. 9 September 2005

Good comment at Brad DeLong's

The belief that our media problems are the result of the coincidental incompetence of a very large number of separate individuals is quite a silly one, no?

As long ago as 1984 I starting realizing that the vast majority of bright Ivy Leaguers think of school primarily as a place to have fun and to "network". They had only a moderate work ethic and no high intellectual ambitions, but definitely wanted the good life. They may have respected a Nobel physicist earning $200,000 a year slightly more than a TV personality earning the same amount, but they knew they were too lazy and dumb for physics.

But they were verbally fluent and quite rightly felt that they would be able to figure out what the audience wanted and what the bosses wanted. The best of these floated to the top, and the American hive mind is, in fact, being massaged very effectively. And that sells a lot of advertising.

And even smart, hardworking people often would rather be celebrities than scholars. I blame the counterculture and drug use.

I agree with everything the commenter says, except the last sentence. I blame the culture of America: capitalism.

Another quote

"What I want above all is to destroy the idea of culture. Culture is an alibi of imperialism. There is a Ministry of War. There is a Ministry of Culture. Therefore, culture is war." - Attributed to Jean-Luc Godard

Quote of the Day

"That's what I always said: publish or perish." - Homer Simpson

"Thomas Pynchon loved this book almost as much as he loves cameras!

Hey! Over here! Have your picture taken with a reclusive author! Today only, we'll throw in a free autograph!" - Thomas Pynchon

Homer knows how to survive in academia.

Beauty

Bikes are Beautiful.

Let Idiocy Reign.

For Mrs. Hied, a meter reader, and her husband, Michael, an office manager for a local bus and transport company, the Dover school board's argument - that teaching intelligent design is a free-speech issue - has a strong appeal.

"I think we as Americans, regardless of our beliefs, should be able to freely access information, because people fought and died for our freedoms," Mrs. Hied said over a family dinner last week at their home, where the front door is decorated with a small bell and a plaque proclaiming, "Let Freedom Ring."

A Sampling of Beers

I started with a Dogfish Head Raison d'Etre, followed it with a River Horse Hop Hazard, and concluded with a Samuel Smith's Lager. All in all, a very tasty sampling. I wish I could write more. I am feeling pretty nervous about going to Europe. I procrastinated too much, and I missed the fall session to enroll in an intermediate French langauge class. Maybe learn some Spanish then head to France to finish learning French, and finally to Germany to start from scratch and learn German? So many options. It's so damn hard to choose which one is the optimal choice. Maybe there isn't an optimal choice. All I know is that I want to go to Duke's Literature PhD program. Fred Jamesom, Michael Hardt, and very good philosophy of science professors. Sweet.

Public Relations

"Did anyone else find it ironic that, by having their PR professionals handle the questions instead of the engineers, the interview resulted in terrible PR for Blizzard?"

Good point.

Image of the Day

Can anyone tell what's going on here?

Brilliant Idea: Find a Human

Talking to machines suck. Find out how to talk to a human.

Bob Somerby is the best.

Why does any of this matter? Because we think individuals (and political movements) owe a trust to average, ordinary, normal people—the kind of people we were raised by, the trusting kind, who are easily fooled. Over the course of the past fifteen years, the average voter has been played for a fool by the Koppels, the Mitchells, the Matthewses, the Riches. (And the Gerths, the Cecis, the Kits and the Brunis.) We think liberals owe those voters a trust—a trust that, when they come to our sites, they won’t be met by embellished facts and by the stupidest possible “logic.” (We found a single photo caption! We think you should be totally furious!!) We’ve been disgusted, in the past dozen years, to see the public abused as it’s been. And yes, it fills us with disgust when we see our side adopting these practices. We can be just as dumb as they are, our conduct sometimes seems to portend.

I'm going to see him on Wednesday (Devendra Banhart)

Know More

"My own feeling is that the right approach is to build on the strengths: to recognize what's healthy and solid about having not hundreds, but thousands of flowers blooming all over the place--people with parallel concerns, maybe differently focused, but at the core ... similiar values and a similiar interest in empowerment, in learning, in helping people understand how to defend themselves against external power and take control of their own lives, in reaching out your hand to people who need it. All the things that you people have talked about--that's a common array of concerns. And the fact that there's a tremendous diversity can be a real advantage--it can be a real way of learning, of learning about yourself, and what you care about, and what you want to do, and so on. But of course, if it's going to bring about real change, that broad array of concerns is going to require some form of integration and inter-communication and collaboration among its various sub-parts...

...in the end, there really are only small changes that can be made within the existing institutions--because they've got their own commitments, which are basically to private power. In the case of the media, they have a committment to indoctrination in the interests of power, and that imposes pretty strict lmits on what they can do.

So the answer is, we've got to create alternatives, and the alternatives have got to integrate these lots and lots of different interests and concerns into a movement--or maybe not one necessarily, which somebody could then cut the head off of, but a series of interconnected ones: lots of associations of people with similiar concerns, who've got in mind the other people next door who have related concerns, and who can get together with them to work for changes. Maybe then we can ultimately construct serious alternative media... serious in scale, at the point where they can consistently present people with a different picture of the world, a picture different than the one you get from an indoctrination system based on private control over resources."

-Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power

Is this sexist?

German advertising, I guess.

Talk about local NJ reporting!

At the Royal Sonesta, the hotel employees and two German tourists still there are sleeping on thick mattresses covered with clean sheets.

At the Convention Center, Diane Lee and her family have been sleeping on the sidewalk rather than sleep inside near the dead bodies.

"We're living like dogs," Lee said. "And we're being left to die like dogs."

Quote of the Day

"As of this month, George W. Bush has sent a soldier to die for every day he has been in the White House."

Xiu Xiu and Frog Eyes

Wow!!!!! One of the best concerts of my life.

Image of the Day

My sentiments exactly!