I am a fucking huge gnarls barkley fan. Maybe they'll never play together again, but then again maybe their relationship will return to one another on the tips of the wings of the wind.
But, when I went to their website the other day I found it as I'd last seen it--as it was before I saw them. At their show I was wearing my Lightnin Hopkins tshirt and this chick comes up to me and is all like "how many tattoos do you have??" I told her none. She bet her friend three. Hot.
I was on the Gnarls website and I thought: Let's say they never play again. Will one day future people take a digital dinosaur brush and uncover gnarls barkley anew for a new generation to whom the genius of cee-lo and danger mouse combined was thitherto unknown??????? Will the data deluge ever put us that far under? Or will the googlers of today find a way to classify and make available all this in some intelligible way? Maybe it seems unthinkable that humans could ever handle all this information, but to some it's not unthinkable. And so often with human beings that's all it takes. Let's just all hope we survive 2012.
Here's the [link] to Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not be Televised". As someone who squirms often when popular TV shows are discussed because he knows nothing about these shows, this song is a comfort. Gil Scott-Heron is featured on the last track on Kanye West's latest album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which itself is one of the greatest things I've heard in a while. The poem that is sampled is Comment #1. If you think Kanye is an asshole, yeezy has his retort ready for listening on the album. Kanye was specifically looking for cover art that would be censored, and it was. Check the wikipedia article about the making of this album. There's probably a lot of other great articles out there about it, but I haven't had the chance to check them out yet. I also strongly suggest listening to Kanye's first big single "Through the Wire" and reflect on the line "history in the making." To me, Kanye exemplifies what it means to have a vision and follow it. This work, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was a lifetime in the making.
Here is my poem, I call it "Spaced Poetry #1"
because the helium had run out, and venus was too hot to touch from the
never ending rub of the sexy sun, computers stood still, moore’s law found a singularity,
for a hundred years man fought wars
for control of information technology.
David returned from immortal bliss, back to the earth he took a piss
when he first arrived, it was a long ride.
The slingshot today replaced by data streams and democracy dreams sloshing in the pool of human thought
and harnessing of the elements, our thoughts are bounded by the media to represent them.
Thoughts need not be so chained, indeed the brain
can fly, in itself contain
an entire universe, higher dimensions, dharma visions and cosmic collisions.
Hydrogen fission they said, that’s where it’s at.And I was growing up like Casey at the bat,
the American dream one day struck out.Mudville was never the same.Fission gives way to fusion
in the right circumstances, you need a veiled tribe of gypsy dancers,
Weeks ago I had a grand vision for my next great blog post that would change the world. It would be a review of all the events I'd read about, plus it would reflect what's happened in the last century, and what's happening today, in the USA. What follows is an incomplete summary of a few month's worth of study and thought, grounded in the recent events in Wisconsin and Egypt. If nothing else watch the Michael Moore speech at the bottom of this.
Speaking of the Tea Party (bowel) movement, if you had any doubt that the Tea Party is a racist organization, check this out from Daily Kos. Here elected federal officials openly fan violence and hatred, making oblique threats against Muslims everywhere. These are the same people who compare Obama to Hitler, but the obvious parallels are ignored, washed out with an incredible amount of mind-bending and -destroying rhetoric whose exact purpose is to obscure the facts and inundate those who would listen with fear and hatred, oh and to keep the zombies glued to the tube so they can sell some anti-depressants, potato chips, disneyland, and everything else.
Luckily the GOP's front is showing fissures, and it might be a good thing the financial industry is running things since they have no reason to replace good boy Barack Obama. The election of any one of these reactionary "libertarians" would be a disaster, with the one possible exception of Ron Paul, who is, in my opinion, much closer to a true libertarian. Not to say Paul wouldn't raise serious concerns, but that is too much to think about for now. These others are libertarians only in the sense that they want to be free t0 fuck over whoever they need to, even maybe the whole world. By the way, oil production in the US is up, but so is the cost of gas. Apparently we can't solve every problem through American know-how and self-effacing hard labor.
Meanwhile Bradley Manning, after languishing in solitary confinement in conditions that have prompted a UN investigation and complaints filed by Amnesty International, has been formally accused of a slew of crimes. He has, among other charges, been charged with aiding the enemy, apparently directly, among other things. But what enemy, exactly? No one seems to say. And no matter what comes of the charges, I applaud his bravery and am gracious for the essential knowledge he has delivered to the whole world. Whether or not you think what he did is a crime, you cannot ignore the new information, the truth he has enabled others to see. Everyone needed to see the video he allegedly leaked, "Collateral Murder," below, in which an American death squad circles a group of unarmed men, two of whom were AP journalists, fires on them, and when some are seen struggling to a van that came to try to help the survivors, the copter opens fire again. The Army has defended the actions of the servicemen that day. Is it our "way of life" they hate?
Manning also allegedly disseminated secret diplomatic cables to Wikileaks. Many government officials are calling for Wikileaks to be declared a terrorist organization and/or bring up Julian Assange on conspiracy charges. Good ole Joe Biden said Wikileaks actions are "close to terrorism" whatever that means. However Wikileaks is performing a service that no media outlet in America, and I suspect few in the Western world, would do. The fact that Wired has been withholding chat conversations between Bradley Manning and Adrian Lamo, his accuser, is a case in point. Furthermore, as leaders of a country whose government carries out and oversees some of the worst terrorism on Earth.
The American official response to the events in Egypt were worrying, especially in light of the leaked diplomatic cables which, Noam Chomsky argues on Democracy Now!, and I agree, reveal a "profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership." The interview will be a great starting point for anyone who is confused about what's going on in the Middle East and how it relates to US foreign policy, especially regarding Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Palestine, and Israel.
For some help understanding the dense, seemingly impenetrable world of Wall Street and the financial crisis, check out Matt Taibbi's excellent book Griftopia. It reads like a crime drama, but it is a totally non-fiction account of the "big con" that started decades ago with Regan deregulation, and continues today in the complex web of home, and even disturbing public service, foreclosures, many of which are happening not to delinquent, irresponsible homeowners buying beyond their means, but to victims of deeply systemic fraud. A video of Taibbi discussing the book's contents can be found here.
Bringing it all together, mix together that "profound hatred for democracy" among those in power with apathy among large swaths of the population stemming directly from being either too comfortable or too defeated to begin to fight, and you get the scary situation we are in today.
Extremism is not something to be ashamed of in itself, but extremism that does not accept the equality of man as a fundamental tenet is something to be ashamed of. Whether it be the Koch brothers, the Wall Street grifters, the neo-Nazis and other varied racists of the United States, or brutal, violent, oppressive dictators and warlords in the Middle East and Africa, any of them, are evil counteracting the progress that the human race has made. Certainly militant self defense as endorsed by Malcom X is a reasonable response to a state of affairs where those in power threaten to block basic rights and resources for and/or steal from the people. His words resonate today, black men and hispanic men are incarcerated at incredibly unequal rates, just for one obvious example that is regularly ignored. The 'racialists' Malcom X talks about are still here today, "deceitful, deceptive," and indeed we need to start talking their language because otherwise democracy in America will be completely in name only, worse than the Hollywood hologram it is today.
In closing, it is clear that many of the powerful elements of America today truly do hate democracy, and I posit the reason is democracy will hurt their personal interests. They have gotten away with all sorts of thievery and unlawful, unethical manipulation because so many Americans want to be just like them, with a sexy gorgeous spouse and electric sex life, ten cars, private jet, maybe a private island if you're lucky, just generally living the "good life". Even if they don't actively want to be like them it's assumed that the wealthy and wicked "earned it" and that the poor must be shiftless and lazy, especially if they're black or latino. If they're Chinese or Arab and successful it's because they're planning a communist coup or jihad. It's phallic the way Americans need to believe that American military might and intervention is necessary and just, but it's actively bankrupting the people of this nation. People get lost in television where no real thought need occur because of the desire we all share sometimes, the need to "escape reality."
Reality, though, is complicated, and requires all our attention to even try to understand a small fraction of it. You can't get it all just from one source, not even Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. But knowledge is power, so I suggest that for Lent you give up television and eat more bacon if you must. The mind is a terrible thing to waste, and as we waste our minds we at least passively destroy the future of mankind. Democrat/republican = coke/pepsi. I do prefer coke, but mostly I don't drink soda. Just because our options appear limited, the world and our minds are limitless, so don't ever let anyone else limit your mind.
Read this report today, didn't check out the actual arXiv paper. The arXiv blog had this report on a new paper that employed a Bayesian statistical test on all the models that could possibly describe the universe and took into account many of the accepted observations to date. From the arXiv blog: "Bayesian model averaging automatically guards against this. Instead of asking how well the model fits the data, its asks a different question: given the data, how likely is the model to be correct. This approach is automatically biased against complex models--it's a kind of statistical Occam's razor."
The Universe whose light has made its way to Earth, the "visible Universe," is 90 billion light years across. However, this study finds that based on all the available information, the Universe is at least 250 times larger than the visible Universe. The nearest galaxy, Andromeda, is two million light years away. The nearest star, proxima centauri, about four light years travel.
When I think about these things, my mind often wanders to slogans I've heard from politicians, army and fraternity recruiters, and preachers. We are truly part of something bigger than ourselves. In fact it is so big that we are physically insignificant, and it seems that one consequence of human progress is to repeatedly discover that we are relatively smaller than we once thought.
Yet, if we consider that the mind extends beyond our bodies, which I certainly believe it does, look at hard drives that extend our memory and computer processors that compute faster than we ever could and the collective human consciousness as concrete examples, then we can conclude that we are in fact enlarging ourselves as we discover new realms of the cosmos.
Coincidentally I just watched this Cosmos video, The Edge of Forever. We need another shaman scientist.
