Scraps from My Aging Firefox Tabs

• Strategic essentialism, or how the Irish stopped being white:

  Ireland’s investment recruitment agency is now crowing about the virtues of “the Irish mind” in a series of print ads. The most popular ad, using a drawing of the Irish rock star Bono, declares: “The Irish. Creative. Imaginative. And flexible. Agile minds with a unique capacity to innovate, without being directed.”

• A headline begging to be ripped from:

  Criminals in Baghdad are stealing corpses from the scenes of car bombings and murders in order to extract "ransoms" from grieving relatives.

  In a macabre off-shoot of the capital's kidnapping epidemic, the gangs pose as medics collecting bodies to be taken back to the city's overflowing morgues.

  Instead, though, they take the corpses to secret hiding places and then demand payments of up to £2,500 a time to release them to relatives for burial. Because Muslim custom dictates that a body must be buried as soon as possible after death, many families simply pay up, rather than involve the police.

• LOL to David Remnick's year-old but highly readable profile of Bill Clinton:

  Nearly all Clinton’s younger aides refer to their boss as “the President,” but they also “do” him.

  Furthermore:

  He picked up the thread of his monologue, describing in fantastic detail why Ray Nagin edged Mitch Landrieu in the New Orleans mayoral race (“I understand it, because I know how black folks think”) ...

  “I don’t care how drunk he was sometimes,” he said. “Yeltsin really hated Communism.” ...

  In Durban, he’d picked up an eight-foot-tall wooden giraffe for Hillary (“She loves giraffes!”) ...

• Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame gets high on his own supply:

  One of us, for instance (the economist, who lives in Chicago), grew up comfortably in a Midwestern city and has fond memories of visiting his grandparents’ small farm. This author recently bought an indoor hydroponic plant grower.

• Get it? Y'all bloggers slow, man!

  

• I wasn't aware of this example of path dependency, via Kevin Drum: "Why is the Pentagon a pentagon? Short answer: it was originally intended to be built on a pentagonally shaped piece of land, so a pentagon was what fit. It got moved later, but the shape stayed."

• Maybe a good attitude:

  I once had the opportunity to have coffee with Andros Epanimondas, who had been the assistant to one of my greatest heroes, Stanley Kubrick. Reminiscing, he mentioned that, over dinner, he once saw Kubrick hurriedly alternating bites of his main course and bites of a chocolate cake. He asked why. Kubrick, busy preparing for his greatest project to date, the unrealized Napolean, simply responded, "Andros, it's only food!"

• Via the Economist's Free Exchange blog, I came across a lovely Deutsche Bank Research whitepaper entitled "The Happy Variety of Capitalism: Characterised by an Array of Commonalities" (PDF). The first page tells us that

  The happy variety of capitalism is one of the four varieties identified by a systematic analysis of 22 rich countries.

  • The happy variety of capitalism...
  • The less happy variety of capitalism...
  • The unhappy variety of capitalism...
  • The Far Eastern variety...

  For serious.

Alternate Universe of My Dreams

At Berkeley this past December [1999], Unger bumped into David Bonior -- the influential Democratic representative from Michigan -- in the hallway of his hotel. Earlier in the day, Unger had delivered a fiery speech denouncing progressives for lacking the courage to experiment with bold new ideas. Now, however, he struck a more conciliatory tone. Handing two copies of each of his most recent books to the congressman, he told Bonior he hoped he would enjoy reading them.

"And could you," he added, "pass along these extra copies to Mr. Gore for me?"

—Eyal Press, "The Passion of Roberto Unger," Lingua Franca 9.3 (March 1999).

Make Either Fearsome or Lovable Your Implements of War

From a somewhat old Washington Post article about combat robots and the men who love them:

Every time [the robot] found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted ... Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself forward. [Mark] Tilden [the robot's designer, a physicist at Los Alamos] was ecstatic. The machine was working splendidly.

The human in command of the exercise, however -- an Army colonel -- blew a fuse.

The colonel ordered the test stopped.

Why? asked Tilden. What's wrong?

The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg.

This test, he charged, was inhumane. ...

It's common for a soldier to cut out a magazine picture of a woman, tape it to the antenna and name the bot something like "Cheryl," says Paul Varian, a former Army chief warrant officer who has served three tours in Iraq with the Robotic Systems Joint Project Office. ...

"I've been a proponent for a long time of painting a mouth and eyes on the Global Hawk," the Learjet-size surveillance bot, says retired Col. Tom Ehrhard ... "Humans are social animals. Make that other thing part of your family, your social structure. Try to animate and make either fearsome or lovable your implements of war."

Information Battlespace II: Executive Ability and the Management of Barbarism

From a Believer article by the incomparable Paul Collins:

Perhaps emboldened by their success [creating fake Harry Potter sequels]...Chinese publishers have gone on to promote entirely fictitious Western authors. One best-selling classic of business advice, Paul Thomas’s Executive Ability, is a five-volume work in Chinese by a Duke University business professor who does not, in fact, exist. Yet a very real Chinese business scholar, Yu Shiwei, has also found himself confronted with books he never wrote. Los Angeles Times reporter Don Lee noted in 2005 that after a lecture in Shanghai, Shiwei was accosted by an eager autograph seeker bearing ten copies of “his” book Ying Zai Zhi Xing (“Execution Wins”). Shiwei, not wanting to disappoint his fan, graciously signed them without a word.

The L.A. Times article that Collins draws on (reprinted in a Hong Kong paper) offers deeper insight:

Although bogus books are not confined to business topics, they are particularly prevalent in that field, largely because most management volumes are translated and are in high demand. ... "There are [bogus] recommendations from Bill Gates, The New York Times or even Einstein, which is really ridiculous,'' said Jiang Ruxiang, general manager of Beijing Zion Consulting ...

"The most harmful influence of these books is that a large number of China's best entrepreneurs are learning wrong and misleading management principles,'' he said. ...

"We lack the experience to distinguish these new fake books,'' said China Chang An Publishing House vice president Chen Xiaojun.

"[Executive Ability is] a nice book,'' said Wang [Zhe], who finished Volume 2 of the series in two weeks. He was hard-pressed to explain details of the 256-page book but said the overall point was that successful managers pay attention to details.

A strange phenomenon, no? How could so many people in an economy so successful be so gullible? Quite suspicious, especially when you recall the following tips from everyone's favorite jihadi guidebook, The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage through Which the Umma Will Pass (PDF, 2004):

We must make use of books on the subject of administration, especially the management studies and theories which have been recently published, since they are consonant with the nature of modern societies. There is more than one site on the internet in which one can obtain management books [including] ... the site Mufakkirat al-Islam (The Notebook of Islam) ... Moreover, it is possible to obtain more management books and resources from other sites on the Internet or from libraries and publishing houses, keeping in mind that we must undertake practical application when study of them is complete so that we may see the administrative styles (positively) influence the work [i.e. jihad].

In short, the Chinese government is secretly collaborating with U.S. covert operations to undermine Islamic terrorists by giving them an inaccurate understanding of modern management techniques. Why else do you think 9/11 hasn't been repeated? Let's just pray that they never master GTD.

A Somewhat Stale Remaindered Reference

Dr. Laura's son is apparently both a soldier and a pervert -- and not the friendly kind either. His "MySpace page, publicly available until [last] Friday when it disappeared from the Internet, included cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestation; photographs of soldiers with guns in their mouths...and a blog entry headlined by a series of obscenities and racial epithets." I'm sure he's a repulsive little chickadee, but what really struck me about the linked article (from the Salt Lake Tribune) was this astonishing bit:

Army spokesman Robert Tallman ... said "it may be possible that our enemies are actually behind this.

"Our enemies are adaptive, technologically sophisticated, and truly understand the importance of the information battlespace," Tallman continued. "Sadly, they will use that space to promulgate and disseminate untrue propaganda."

I checked (i.e. googled): "Army spokesman Robert Tallman" is not just a figment of the Salt Lake Tribune's imagination. So a no-foolin' public representative of the U.S. Army honestly hinted that the likes of Al-Qaeda would spend their time mocking up fake MySpace pages for the purpose of discrediting the relatives of minor American media personalities. Just so we're clear on that.

Incidentally, "the information battlespace" appears to be something of a term of art in military circles. For instance, a company called Zel Tech has a DARPA contract to create an "IPIB [Intelligence Preparation of the Information Battlespace] process," which seems to consist of a checklist, a database, possibly some flowcharts, and a set of metaphors ("This project addresses ... whether it is feasible to identify cyberspace analogs for kinetic concepts such as terrain, weather, and adversary doctrine"). It's jarring to see how abstract and downright philosophical some of this wartalk gets. A 2006 article in the Air & Space Power Journal ("the professional journal of the United States Air Force"), subtitled "Affecting the Strategic Battlespace with Effects-Based Public Affairs," promises to consider "the application of nonkinetic effects or means to the information battlespace" but pauses first for some ontological clarification: "In order to understand why [Air Force Public Affairs] must operationalize and become effects driven, one needs to understand the nature of effects." This leads almost directly (seriously!!) to a discussion of blogs.

Remember when Russia (maybe) inflicted cyber-warfare on Estonia? "'If you are implying [the attacks] came from Russia or the Russian government, it's a serious allegation that has to be substantiated. Cyber-space is everywhere,' Russia's ambassador in Brussels, Vladimir Chizhov, said in reply to a question from the Guardian."

Everywhere.

A Weird Claim about Schumpeter

Made by Robert Solow, no less:

The man was all problems, and one very important idea.

(It's the last sentence of "Heavy Thinker" (review of Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction), The New Republic 21 May 2007. I do these citations purely for my own future benefit, by the way. I know no one cares.)

A Possibly Old-Hat Second Life Anecdote

This is where Lazarus Divine comes into the picture. A few months ago, Divine began buying up small slivers of land near other Second Life residents and erecting on them giant, garish billboards emblazoned with the text: "SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. End the Illegal War in Iraq. Restore US Credibility. IMPEACH BUSH." The towering blue signs ruined the views of nearby residents and consequently threatened the value of their property. ... A few residents vented their frustrations by erecting "Impeach Lazarus Divine" billboards. Others joined forces and sent Divine endless instant messages complaining about his actions, but to no avail.

Apparently it was kinda politics, kinda extortion. Also, a : O quote from the "Declaration of the Rights of Avatars" that would probably take months to "unpack":

The principle of all sovereignty in a virtual space resides in the inalterable fact that somewhere there resides an individual who controls the hardware on which the virtual space is running, and the software with which it is created, and the database which makes up its existence.

Obvious point: is this actually the same weird metaphysical basis on which our regular constitutional rights rest -- that, allegedly, but probably/certainly incorrectly, there's some magical "individual" inside the hardware of our bodies and the software of our culture and the database of our, um, databases (memories?)? Freedom blogs.

Both quotes come from Steven (Berlin?) Johnson, "Brave New World: Online Fantasy Worlds Put Our Democratic Ideals to the Test," Discover 2 April 2006.

The Extent of My Ambitions

...little more than a confection of heightened rhetoric and archive pleasures.

—Paul Myerscough, "The Flow" (review of Adam Curtis, The Trap), London Review of Books 5 April 2007.

Amusing Easter Egg

[Creating sound from a spectrogram] allows electronic music artists to "hide" images in their music. Examples include:

• Aphex Twin hid an image of himself in a spectrogram (using MetaSynth). The image can be found on Track 2 of the Windowlicker EP as a nine-second sweeping section right at the end. (It is recognizable in an MP3, but the compression changes the spectrogram and it is not as clear as from the CD.) Aphex Twin also hid the image of a spiral shape in his first track from the "Windowlicker" EP.

Etc. Nine Inch Nails also uses this technique to give out clues to its alernate reality game (?!). See WP for more.

If I were BLDGBLOG I'd go off on a whole riff about this. Alas.

Go Blog It

Similarly, Bell and Gemmell would like software that organized the contents of the archive into movies—something, at least, to compress and shape it, to summarize its parts. “Auto-storytelling,” Gemmell calls it. “My dream is I go on vacation and take my pictures and come home and tell the computer, ‘Go blog it,’ so that my mother can see it. I don’t have to do anything; the story is there in the pattern of the images.”

—Alec Wilkinson, "Remember This?" The New Yorker 28 May 2007.

On Second Thought

Who am I kidding? I give up. I do love the arbitrary juxtaposition of unrelated but independently kinda funny things:

(Starbucks supports Al-Qaeda.)

(Via Ellis.)

Vague Yet Bafflingly Precise Consumption Preferences

1. At Tealuxe, a loud man stepped up to the register. Refusing to submit to the quiescent conformism of "working through the system," he spent not the barest instant looking at the lengthy menu, with its rigid notions of "respectable" beverage selection; no, this fellow would forge his own instrument of oral irrigation, answering solely to what he wanted, not to what Tealuxe wanted him to want. "You have anything hot, with a kind of raspberry flavor, kind of tart? Like a hot bubble tea?" "All of our bubble teas are cold." "Well, can't you just put the bubbles in?" "...I guess. We just don't have any specific recipes for that. I--" "So can I get a hot bubble tea, berry flavor, kind of tart, maybe a little bitter?" Undaunted, this guy. The spirit of 1773 lives on.
2. At the Morse Music & Media Library, two young men prowled the DVD collection. Said one to the other: "I want something intense: violence, death, destruction..." "Violence and death?" "Yeah, but witty violence and death. Maybe something Italian?"

Preserved for Posterity

The copy from the front of the Killa Season DVD:

This is Harlem.

This is Flea's world.

At the end of the day, business is business, money is money.

And from the back:

This Harlem inspired story details Flea's rising empire to take over the streets and an unstoppable drive to hustle all the money in various places around the world. Flea was a basketball player, happy with his subtle hustle, until a Dominican connect introduced him to a new way to spread the work and make all the "cake." Revenge will take place when honor is at stake. No one wants to see you on top.

Cameron Giles, you saw him in Paid In Full, makes his directorial debut with this powerful and detailed story of growing up in Harlem and learning to be #1.

With powerful performances by Cam'ron (Paid In Full), Juelz Santana, and Hell Rell, the film also features cameos by Funk Master Flex and Michael Williams from HBO's The Wire.

A few points:

• "an unstoppable drive to hustle all the money in various places around the world"

  • "The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish [Dominican] connexions everywhere" (Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto)
  • "Yo, I could promise this / You dealing with a communist" (Cam'ron, "Leave You Alone," Killa Season)
• "happy with his subtle hustle"
• the quotation marks around "cake"
• "Revenge will take place"
• the repetition, in the space of a couple of sentences, of the Paid in Full citation
• the use of "detailed" as a laudatory term

Sincerely,
The Hood Internet

Marx on Wikipedia

Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success; their dramatic effects outdo each other; men and things seem set in sparkling brilliants; ecstasy is the everyday spirit: but they are short lived; soon they have attained their zenith, and a long depression lays hold of society before it learns soberly to assimilate the results of its storm and stress period. Proletarian revolutions, on the other hand, like those of the nineteenth century, criticise themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltriness of their first attempts...

—"The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), 597.

"The Eighteenth Brumaire" drops jaws.

Economic Progress Party?

I wouldn't call Will Wilkinson, a political-philosophy wonk (or something like that) at the Cato Institute, one of my intellectual heroes --- his well-justified appreciation for the achievements of "liberal capitalism" is too often marred, I think, by an unjustified identification of the priniciples underlying such a "regime" with the particular institutional forms it has taken in the U.S. --- but he's often an insightful critic (see my post directly below!!); the good thing about all these libertarian bloggers is their outsider status and their disdain for much of mainstream political discourse. I was particularly shaken by a tasty morsel that Wilkinson just threw up on his site, one of those "obvious in retrospect yet totally surprising when laid down in words" storms-and-stresses that I love to run across in my textual wanderings:

[re: the Rawlsian conception of distributive justice and its primary domain of application, the "basic structure" of society] This is, of course, massively confused. The deep objection to this way of thinking is that different basic structures don’t so much determine how stuff is distributed, but determine whether or not there is stuff at all, and how much. ... Because wealth is created and not just moved around, and more wealth is created under certain institutional schemes than others, the question isn’t so much one of distribution as production or creation. The question of whether people live under institutions in which they can realize their capacities and reliably acquire the necessary means to successfully enact their life-plans is mainly a question of what might be called productive justice.

I'm reminded of nothing so much as Marx, in "Critique of the Gotha Program," mercilessly assailing the naive idea of "a fair distribution of the proceeds of labour" as the vision for communist society: before you can get around to handing out checks, he says, you have to deduct from the total social product "cover for replacement of the means of production used up" (including, I assume, depreciation); an "additional portion" set aside "for expansion of production" (note: production is to expand, not stay constant); "reserve for insurance funds to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural calamities, etc." (Black Swans!); the costs of administration; the costs of public goods like education and healthcare; and the costs of upkeep for members of society who can't do productive labor. "These deductions ... are an economic necessity and their magnitude is to be determined according to available means and forces, and partly by computation of probabilities, but they are in no way calculable by equity." Marx sees such limits as things to be eventually overcome in later stages of communism, but you can't get there without paying attention to the contemporary "means and forces." Production, production, production.

I think we can detach Wilkinson's notion of the priority of productive over distributive "justice" (btw probably not the best term to use here) from his icky belief that all we need to do to fix up the world is to "install liberal capitalism" (wuzzat, exactly?) in every country, as if the Founders aced it for all time in 1787 and now we need only set their elegant clockpunk contraption in motion to ring in the end of history.

Inspiration one: America Beyond Capitalism by Gar Alperovitz. Breaking up wealth > redistributing income. Cooperatives, worker-owned firms, innovative collaborations between government and business. (I may riff more on this book later (preview: it's good/great but it pushes the "consumerism is bad! let's live simple and stop buying pretty things!" button (it's made of postconsumer recycled drywall and it's lacquered with organic pesticides) way too hard for my taste/comfort level/conception of political usefulness).)

Inspiration two: holycrapshit CHINA TO BUY A STAKE IN BLACKSTONE, a huge private-equity firm that is apparently doing an IPO pretty soon. Really, let that news sink in for a bit: nominally communist (and maybe, despite what the haters say, becoming more communist all the time) China is plowing billions of dollars into an American company that does nothing but take over and reignite other companies; T-bills aren't floating the bureaucrats' boats anymore. A bigger effort, "the State Foreign Exchange Investment Company," is apparently on the horizon; the Times opines that if the co. ends up looking anything like Singapore's state-run development operation, it "would effectively create the world’s largest hedge fund." !

The boys at Long or Short Capital (the blog that pays dividends) and the boys they link to harp on the possible dangers and shortcomings of the deal, for both sides --- China might kinda collapse any day now, given the brittleness of its program to inflict a hardened centralized will upon the whole of an increasingly restless (probably) civil society, and Blackstone could explode too (Black Swan Black Swan Black Swan), leaving China, which is committed to holding onto its shares and to not buying into competing firms for the medium-term future, in the super-shitty lurch --- but goddammit I was excited when I heard this gospel. Remember how China and McKinsey are also building a crazy utopian environmentalist city of the future? These people ain't thinking small, ladies and gentlemen; it must be improbably exhilirating, days like these, to be a Beijing functionary.

When will America wake up? The alarm's going off --- it's a clock radio, and NPR is playing Pharrell's remix of the Internationale --- but we keep hitting snooze.

Genius/Critic

I'm sure everyone's sick of my Unger obsession by now, but: I was stunned, in the course of rereading his neat little piece "A Program for Late Twentieth-Century Psychiatry," to find him pretty much following the Currier House party line in the formulation of a key concept:

To gain freedom of insight and action in a more remote context, often at the price of ineptitude in an immediate one, is a definition of genius.

Emphasis mine. To gain expertise in the immediate context at the price of vision for the future would be the corresponding definition of "critic." Of all the nonsense bandied about in "my" intellectual circle, the genius/critic quasi-distinction stands as one of the most promising and fruitful bits, I (perhaps surprisingly) think. "Factoid," on the other hand, remains controversial.

In café-culture news, the last few times I've gone to the local Starbucks, I've heard men with indeterminate European accents arguing heatedly — to the point of raising their voices, even — about particle physics. Simon's, Peet's: get your cake up. Your concentration of hand-waving humanists isn't going to cut it anymore.

I Can't Say That I Didn't Feel a Bit of a Sting Reading This

By the summer of 1929 the market not only dominated the news. It also dominated the culture. The recherché minority which at other times had acknowledged its interest in Saint Thomas Aquinas, Proust, psychoanalysis and psychosomatic medicine then spoke of United Corporation, United Founders and Steel. Only the most aggressive of the eccentrics maintained their detachment from the market and their interest in autosuggestion or communism.

—John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash: 1929, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 79.

But surely we can have all of this at once, can't we — more markets, more Proust, more communism? Otherwise, what's the point?

Crises Happen When I'm Not Paying Attention

xxAlekseyxx: i have some weird thing on my tongue.
xxAlekseyxx is away at 1:51:35 PM.

To be continued.

Oh, Religion

For example, when Terry Eagleton, a British critic who has been a professor of English at Oxford, lambasted Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” in the London Review of Books, he wrote that “card-carrying rationalists” like Dawkins “invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.” That is unfair, because millions of the faithful around the world believe things that would make a first-year theology student wince. A large survey in 2001 found that more than half of American Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians believed that Jesus sinned—thus rejecting a central dogma of their own churches.

…Critics of the Bible should find consolation in the fact that many people do not have a clue what is in it. Surveys by the Barna Research Group, a Christian organization, have found that most Christians don’t know who preached the Sermon on the Mount.

—Anthony Gottlieb, "Atheists with Attitude," The New Yorker 21 May 2007.

I'm a Hypocrite

Despite everything, I have to say that I think this image, posted recently on BoingBoing, is pretty funny.

At least there are no robots, pirates, or Vikings. Yet.

I Thought This Day Would Never Come

From an email I just received:

Subject: can i interview you about blogs?

Sure, but you might want to get a sandwich and something to drink. This may take a while.

I Feel There Is Still Potential in the "Funny Animal" Genre, Though

There has been a fair amount of talk of "café culture" in my world line lately, due to the influence of certain elements. Mostly "café culture" seems to mean breaking minor laws while sitting in front of Au Bon Pain. Today I was doing the latter half when a strange conjuncture occurred:

1. I started eating a "caprese" sandwich, the most shamefully class-inscribed of all widely available sandwiches (mozzarella, tomato, pesto, baguette).
2. A truck drove past, its trailer emblazoned with the word "BOURGEOIS."
3. A loud-mouthed would-be troubadour said, by way of introduction, "This is a song about my identity."

The troubadour troubled me, which raises etymological questions I don't dare to confront. I encountered him at a different location earlier on, engaging in a weirdly violent performance/terrorism: as people walked by, he sang about them. "You, with that pastry / Is it tasty?" It was something of an "act" and a "joke," but you could tell how uncomfortable people were with the (unacknowledged) shattering of their anonymity. A few steps away, a hired hand dispensed free samples of Eclipse gum, but people weren't taking them because they thought there was a catch, such as homelessness. The troubadour greased the wheels with his dulcet tones: "Hey, why don't you take that gum? / It's actually free!"

Obviously there are lots of things here about space, "the city," quack quack. I kind of liked the guy. But by the time he wound up in front of Au Bon Pain, his gimmick had become weirdly toothless and dispiriting. He sang that Barbie girl song in a funny voice. Also songs by Britney Spears. The small crowd was eating it up, so he transitioned to original works. The song about his identity was actually a riff on being — get this — Jewish, but taking Jesus as a role model. Main joke: the idea of Jesus eating gefilte fish (Jesus was Jewish!). Next song (people are digging this): something about Massachusetts politicians drinking a lot, doing drugs, and "lov[ing] coitus." Main joke: name of Massachusetts politician + lifestyle infraction. Final song, loudly demanded (and therefore apparently previously heard) by a homeless man: begins with the phrase "Starbucks supports Al Qaeda." Main joke: Starbucks supports Al Qaeda.

Now look — and here is where I guess I cross the line separating Gawker-style "here's a thing" from other-blogs–style "here's a thing" — this is just terrible. Everyone was laughing and laughing, thrilled at how controversial this guy was being, at how un-Peoria they were for accepting his jester-like truth-to-power shenanigans in the heart of the town square. But what was his point, exactly? Jesus was a Jew: incredible how this still retains force as a "startling" "revelation." Politicans as "immoral" in boring way: a staple of conservative thought. Are we to be titillated by this? Starbucks + Al Qaeda: a little funny, I'll admit. But how characteristic of the whole currently dominant mode of production of culturally knowing pseudo-humor! Just juxtapose some things that are floating around in the culture. Jesus robots! Robot Jesus zombie terrorist monkeys! I don't even want to go on; it's too sad, and I'm wasting perfectly marketable YouTube screenplay ideas. In the comic store I patronize — the shelves of which are strewn with the works of Robert Kirkman, an avatar of this style of "creativity" who's starting up a wolf-man book to complement, among other things, his (hilariously irreverent!!) Battle Pope book — a white board behind the register lists the week's new releases. A few times in the recent past, books entitled Zombie and Zombies came out during the same week, and I think that a third book, Zombies vs. Robots, also came out one of those weeks. The mischievous store clerks added fictitious entries for Zombies vs. Robots vs. Monkeys and Zombies vs. Robots vs. Monkeys vs. Pirates underneath, but it took me at least a few cycles to figure out what was real and what wasn't.

Surely this isn't all the future has to offer, right?

Blog 1: a comics review: "First, I think we can all agree that 'Zombies vs. Robots' is the best title of anything in the history of the world.…One might wonder how anyone can get a good story out of this concept. After all, what possible threat can zombies pose to robots? And at first, the answer would seem to be, 'Not much.'" (But there's a twist.)

Blog 2: http://robotzombiejesus.blogspot.com/.

Where Can I Get Funding for This?

When I got on the elevator in my building a few minutes ago, I noticed an empty beer bottle on the floor. I thought up an art project, based loosely on something I accidentally did once: upon leaving the elevator, I would position the beer bottle in such a way that it would straddle the threshold, breaking the photoelectric whatever-whatever and preventing the door from closing. It would probably take hours for the problem to be fixed. By then I would be long gone.

The title of this project would be Fuck Everyone.

Ziggy Stardust, CFA

With modern technology available to everyone, we should all be David Bowies in our ability to hedge our risks.

—Robert Shiller, The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 145.

Could Have Been a Thing

Failed initial experiments may have prejudiced movie-going audiences against movies with subtitles. The silent movie The Chamber Mystery, made in 1920 by Abraham S. Schomer, used words superimposed on the picture. They were placed in comic-strip style balloons coming from the mouths of actors, not along the bottom of the screen. The movie was not a success, and the text in balloons was apparently not used again.

—Robert Shiller, The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 103.

And That's Why I Can't Stand Certain Kinds of Academic Discourse

The vulgar and the hypersubtle possibilities exist in the interpretation of any great social thinker. Typically, the defenders of each theorist adopt the hypersubtle account of their master and the vulgar account of his rivals.

—Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Social Theory lectures (1976), "Classical Social Theory I," 128.

A bit obvi when stated in such an upfront fashion, but can anyone deny this?

In a similar vein:

Everyone believes that their favorite philosophers are misunderstood. The problem will be especially acute insofar as one's favorite philosopher is oneself, but most of us extend the claim beyond this special case.

—Peter Godfrey-Smith, "Dewey on Naturalis, Realism and Science," Philosophy of Science 69 (2002), S1.

Quotations Are All I Can Handle at This Point

In my day, we only had the one universe. Now it's like satellite telly. There's billions of 'em. And they're all shite.

—Captain Midlands in Wisdom no. 4 (Marvel, May 2007).

What Unger Would Call Institutional Indeterminacy

Hebrews 10:1-4 (NIV):

The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming—not the realities themselves. For this reason it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship. If it could, would they not have stopped being offered? For the worshipers would have been cleansed once for all, and would no longer have felt guilty for their sins. But those sacrifices are an annual reminder of sins, because it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

Bulls and goats, elephants and donkeys. Someone tell this to the Constitution fetishists.

Isaiah 1:22-23

Your silver has turned to dross;
Your wine is cut with water.
Your rulers are rogues
And cronies of thieves,
Every one avid for presents
And greedy for gifts;
They do not judge the case of the orphan,
And the widow's cause never reaches them.