George Liston Seay interviews Elemer Hankiss, author of "The Toothpaste of Immortality: Self-Construction in the Consumer Age"

... a very high place is reserved for the self-made man or woman. In a very real sense, we are all that person, given the myriad daily choices we make, that together compose the person we present to the world. And in the vast offerings of consumer culture, we find the objects, clothes, cosmetics, cars, and thousands of other products that define our sense of individuality as we choose among them. This amounts to a creative and complex link between daily acts that may seem trivial, and that deepest of all existential queries about finding and expressing our own sense of the meaning of life ...

( More inside )

GEORGE LISTON SEAY:
Hello, I’m George Liston Seay. Welcome to Dialogue, a program that explores the world of ideas and issues in international affairs, history, and culture.
Even the best informed discussions of violence in the world can never give us the full, visceral impact of human brutality. The acrid smell of gunpowder does not fill our nostrils, nor are we spattered by the blood of victims. Our ears do not hear the wails of the dying, and our eyes do not see the field of battle. For this we need the testimony of others, and no testimony can be more wrenching than that of a child soldier -- one of the world’s army of children whose innocence is lost to war’s savagery. My guest is Ishmael Beah, author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. Ishmael, welcome to Dialogue

( Continue )

Dialogue: Interview with James Fleming


GEORGE LISTON SEAY
Hello. I’m George Liston Seay, and welcome to Dialogue, a program that explores the world of ideas and issues in international affairs, history, and culture. The Spring edition of the Wilson Quarterly features an article on climate change, a subject that languished in the shadows of public indifference for decades, but which has now found the spotlight of intense public concern. This article takes on fundamental questions underlying the phenomena that rarely receive their deserved attention. Questions like: “What does history tell us about human attempts at climate management? What is the proper balance between technological initiative and altered human behavior in addressing climate change?” and, “What are the ethical reasons for doing anything at all?” The article is provocatively entitled, “The Climate Engineers: Playing God to Save the Planet,” and its author is James Fleming, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Jim, welcome to Dialogue.
( Continue )

"It is cynical but ture to say that in the academic world the theorys that are most likely to attract a devoted following are those that best allow a clever but not very original young man to demonstrate his cleverness." ~Paul Krugman remarking on modern economics.

Current Mood: calm

I can't get enough of this song!

I've been reading this months SciAm cover story, on dark energy and it's impact on the universe's formation. For my own reasons this sort of learning will always facinate me. I realized what it is though that keeps me coming back.

Why we exist, are alive, are conscious, invested with self awareness ect.

These questions are too large to expect to grasp in one lifetime. The world is 13.7 billion years old. Thats 13.7x10^12 years, a typical person from my generation can expect 70 years of life before going senile or punching out. Meaning shit has been going on for a long long long time, and at any rate 70 years (or the entire span of human history) just isn't enough to get a handle on all of it, even if I devoted myself to nothing but that. The world is just too large in time space and scale to get a hold on all of it. Presently what is known and understood is a tiney part of the whole.

In learning just a small part of that small part that is known I have found that religion just isn't big enough to contain the answers to "Why we are here." I mean how can the answer to "Why" be answered when it's built on a fossilized foundation of "How we came to be here"? The answers to How are so outdated that the question ceases to be relivant, Garbage In Garbage Out.

It's like, once you throw away the whole "Men are the children of Adam and Eve, who were created by God in his immage. He sent his son to teach us right from wrong, and this has serous consequences for anyone - say for example, gay people, unwed mothers, liberated women, agnostics and more than two thirds of the world population - who disbelieves." dogma (along with the continum of other weak arguments that went to the scrap heap long ago) the question of why starts to play second fiddle to the question of how.

I mean if there is a higher inteligance tuning the knobs to make this, um everything, happen then the best way of paying hommage to that creator is to study his work, to learn of the precious nich we hold in it and then act acordngly on that knowledge. The other guys got their cart before the mule, "See this is how the world works, it's written down right here, so you should act accordingly."

Side question: Did I stop learning because I stoped going to class -or- did I stop going to class because I stoped learning?

~ MF Doom ~

Not a lot of bling
When he do the thing, bada boom, bada bing
From the womb to the tomb
Get that ricotta, bada bing, bada boom
Doom, your reputation precedes you
Wail 'til you crack and see what "weed" do, you dweeb you
No pun intended, takes one to know one, will know - it's unscented
Yo son, demented when them sent it from the other time
Before everybody and they mother rhyme
What a crime - beats is the same way
Make 'em wanna hit the streets with the heat for a lame's pay
Game day, flag on the play, improper helmet
Drag on the suede from the gem drop of well spit
He didn't listen, titty kissin the city glistened
Depending on what from what position you're sittin
In the pissy wind, is this thing whistlin?
Who let the spinnin whisperin djinn in?
The villain again? without a doubt
That's his name, don't play it out
Or spray it, when you say it out your mouth
Then gave him a cold shoulder for a hour
And told him take a gold shower, for fakin funk, soul power
... stocky, short and cocky
Looked like apollo creed after he fought with rocky
Rhymed in a broken english slang, not cockney
Thirteen, his first queen wore hot knock knees
Had to tell her pops, yo stop cockblockin b
Hold somethin for your daily yay habit
Then go, bada-bing-bing-bing like ricochet rabbit
How 'bout the sicko say stab it?
There's liquor in the cabinet and a slicker for the crafted
And heineken, I told him much obliged friend
What I gotta spend, if I only touch her thighs then?
... why his eyes widened
He didn't know your man had a nice surprise hidin
Took pride in ridin in a sly wiseguy grin
... real recognize real
On the microphone, the wheels are mechanized steel
Please, at least respect your ideals
How you got her walkin along the stroll in high heels?
He said her mamma was gettin old
God bless her poor soul, now no more drama is your role
Straight to the head
He know a lot of haters can't wait 'til he dead
Lead to go, like a ho, to a strange whack housewife
Only thing he know will change his back do', how trife
Rules is rules, don't go there
Stay on sale like a old coat made of mohair
Keep a snotty chicken on e, the lone ranger
Why everybody always pickin on danger?
... and doom, maybe it's him
Called up my lady, told her baby it's slim
Make me up a margarita I need to take a swim
Tell them kids remember school - if they let 'em out, cool
But get the hell from out the pool

(*Beep!!*}

[Master shake]
Hey {shithead}, it's me again!
And you know what? I just heard, it's all done now!
And somehow, I guess you must have lost my number
You know what?! you suck!
You suck! your music sucks!
And I hate your sucky stupid metal face!
I hope you burn, you're going down
This is the last big mistake, you'll ever make
You suck!!! I hate your guts!
...
But, if there is another project in the future please keep me in mind
Thank you

{*Phone hangs up*}

I heard in the news today two guys got arrested in Boston for puting Light Brights around town. The things had Ignignot fliping the bird made up on them and were part of an add campain for teh new ATHF movie. These guys hung them from bridges and left them in intersections and public places. Some mouth breathing ass-hats in city hall freaked out, cuase this aparently looked like a terrorist bomb threat. Now these guys face two to five years of prison for the advertising they were hired to do. They did far better than anyone could have expected, but the fucktards at Fox News were all up in arms about it, aparently not a single person there or in Boston City Hall or in the Homeland Security Dpt. has ever heard of Light Brights or ATHF.... sad, but not unexpected.


Got paid today, made a lot more than I thought I would, enough to buy some drinks tonight at Gator City, perhaps go see Shitty Beatles at teh SideBar. Ither way it will be good. Probably hook up with D later on, and hers. Spent the morning backloging some old paper journal entrys into digital form. Fucked around on U Tube and found some really good workout videos I can do from my bedroom. Solves the problem of dooing pilates in the cold or on wet concrete. My feet are feeling better.

Spoke with Juils last night, feel like I cleared some shit up that had been holding me back. I've yet to understand how to love somone without being in love with them... unless it's just difference in degree. If that's the case then I'm an 8 and she's a 3. But wounds heal better when you clean them.

DLed some new music, Jeff Buckly, Madlib, MF Doom. All good stuff, also cleared out my old crap in iTunes and charged up my iPod. Biked to ABC bought my sister some wine for her girls night. I might get some green from Dean later on. Still undecided if that's good or not. I've been out of it for 3 days or so now, and this has been the most productive I've been in weeks. But it's fun. Haven't played WoW in over a day. 2 levels from 70 and I'm burnt out atm. Rather do this. On the whole it's been a great day. Gotta work tomorrow morning at 7am. Fuck that.

"One of the principal objects of theoretical research in any departement of knowledge is to find the point of view from which the subject appears in it's greatest simplicity."
~ J. Willard Gibbs.

A few notable words from the grandson of statistical mechanics, a great man if not a famous one. Gibbs is a kind of hero to me, he excelled at finding that obscure vantage that offered the simplest explanation to aparently contradictory information. There's a grandure to that view. I sometimes feel like my life is one massive paralel search for that vantage point. I should have kept my nose to the ground a followed up my time in Physical Chemistry whith Transport Phenomenon, bainged out a ChemE BS and moved on to the next big thing. But somewhere between those two courses I got it in my mind to stop the car and take a look around. Now three years later I'm still off the beaten path but no less certian about where that is.

Bob Dylan, remarking on his work:
"I concider myself a poet first and a musican sencond."

"I'm not spreading disilusionment by singing the truth... I guess listening to me is like reading a newspaper. I want to be entertaining as well as truthfull."

"It was important for me to come to the bottom of this legend thing, which has no reality at all. What's important isn't the legent but the art, the work."

Dylan made his music his own way, for himself not the audiance. The legend/immage was irrilevant; good or bad large or small he seperated himself from it. The pursuit of his work was it's own reason entirely.

Wise words for a man who said he knows little.

Newton must have spent his entire life as a blazing light. In 1704 a full 300 years ago he wrote: "The attraction of gravity, magnetism, and electricity reach to very sensable distances, and so have been observed by vulgar eyes, and there may be others which reach to even smaller distances as hirthro escape observation; and perhaps electrical attraction may reach to such small distances."

This is generations out of it's time. He showed up to work on mathmatics and physics 100 years early. A (once) living walking talking statistical improbability.