HN user
You've missed my point entirely. The OP is playing a game by defining arts (clown mask on) to be all of the entertainment industry (and citing that size in the headline) while supporting an argument for (clown mask off now) the NEA, which is an organization for the Fine Arts, not Katy Perry videos and iPhone apps.
The US has 338M people and they are claiming $763B PER YEAR for art. That's $2257 PER YEAR for every man, woman, and newborn infant in America. Total BS. Even if you include music and movies and TV, this is still way too high.
It's also dishonest, since this is a politically motivated attempt to counter cuts in NEA funding, yet very little of TV, movies, or music is sponsored by the NEA, which just goes to show how unimportant it is except to pseudo-elites who think that a urinal in a museum is art as long as the rabble don't approve of it.
Of particular concern to some was the use of Palantir as a tool that could aid investigators both in connecting suspected gang members to others in the community, and in identifying people deemed at high risk of either committing gun violence or being the victim of it.
??? Isn't that precisely what the tool is meant to do?
Australians and Brazilians: your bits are upside down. Try flipping them over and then running the tests again.
Thank you so much for reminding me of his writing. I fell in love with a Greek woman on Crete many years ago. It was one of the most painful times of my life when I realized that I could not stay there with her, or she with me. Cavafy's poem Ithaca has haunted me whenever I'm reminded of it:
http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=74&cat=1
I am a muted Ulysses.
[Update] Looks like I'm not the only one who loves this poem. See the follow-on comment for some background.
be the singing-masters of my soul
Those have to be seven of the most powerful words ever written in any language.
Reading this, I couldn't help thinking of an observation P.J. O'Rourke made after visiting the DDR ("East Germany"): "It takes a special kind of economic system to turn a nation full of Germans into a third-world country".
Alito concurring...That's very interesting language coming from conservative Chief Justice Roberts.
Your implication seems to be that conservatives are the ones pushing weak privacy laws. I'll grant that many conservatives have been weak on privacy protection, which is one of the reasons that I'm a libertarian. But the primary parties arguing here for nearly unlimited cell phone search were "The Obama administration and the state of California, both of which sought to justify cell phone searches...".
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/25/supreme-cour...
Not to mention that it was Bill Clinton who was behind the appalling push to expand no-knock raids by police for drug busts.
Even for pot smokers who didn't inhale.
Rest in peace.
I, on the other hand, hope that the three men that Marquez's close friend Castro had executed for trying to get to the US on a boat will rest in peace. Not to mention all the dissidents who died in his prisons.
Marquez lived in Cuba and for decades witnessed the daily suffering and poverty of the Cuban people. The endless monitoring of Castro's secret police. The constant rationing of basic necessities (though not for Castro or Marquez, who lived lives of luxury).
He was a master of writing about the lives of the people of Latin America. But he walked the streets of Havana, saw what anyone could see, and never wrote about any of that. Perhaps he was too busy sharing a fine repast with Fidel and Raul to get around to it.
> ideas like this are incredibly common in not-so-rural places like in the US.
I've never heard of this happening in the US at all, never mind being "incredibly common". Evidence?
Heidegger ... was member of the Nazi party throughout the war, in good standing at the beginning and bad standing at the end, but he never rebelled or retracted publicly -- complicated person.
He was not just another member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, he was Rector of Heidelberg University while Hitler was gambolling about Europe. Is "complicated person" what we're calling them these days? I can think of other words...
There are two ideas of deconstruction I find useful. The first is basically Nietzsche,...
If it's from Nietzsche, then it isn't from deconstruction at all, so why attribute it to them? If instead you are saying that these are all ideas of deconstruction, then you're being arbitrary, I think. Walter Kaufmann, N's greatest interpreter and translator, attacked academics who did what I think you're doing here. They would perform exegeses of N's texts and then, oh happy day, find that N. supported their ideas in a preliminary way, then cite him as an authority and attach him to their ideology.
So when the Libertarians have an "objective" system that shows that markets are best in an objective way... they are all just protecting their jobs.
Umm, what jobs? The fraction of libertarians who get remunerated for their political beliefs is damn small. Since libertarian views are outside the mainstream, in some environments there is actually a real danger of being punished for refusing to conform to the norms of whatever sub-group the libertarian finds himself in. It's much easier in life to run with the herd. You don't end up being lunch as often.
The deeper problem with your comment is that you seem to be implying that N. was a relativist. He wasn't. See John T. Wilcox, Truth and Value in Nietzsche: A Study of His Metaethics and Epistemology, for a solid refutation of this (common) claim.
Every metaphysics hides an implicit morality of the universe, and every morality hides an implicit and very down-to-earth will to power, and this will to power is a good thing and the drive of Life itself manifesting in human ideas. N's big example is Judeo-Christianity, and how by inventing a selfless morality a bunch of folks took over Western Civilization in very concrete ways.
I could "deconstruct" this all night long, but I'll keep this short.
1) N's ideas on the will to power were never fully worked out and settled, so it's difficult to say with certainty what he believed in many cases regarding W2P. That said, he seemed to believe that...
2) W2P isn't good or a bad thing, it just is, like gravity. Our moralities are reflections of some inner drives, all of which are manifestations of W2P. Those moralities that derive from an inner sense of fullness and overflowing N. judges to be good. Those moralities that derive from an inner sense of deficiency, self-loathing, and especially revenge, N. judges to be bad.
3) The early Jews and Christians were heavily persecuted by (variously) the Pharaohs and the Romans. The "slave moralities" they invented were quite different from the "master moralities" of the aristocratic Greeks. Slave moralities are motivated, at their core, by a drive for revenge against the people who brutalize them. Since they are slaves, they don't have power in this life to take their revenge, so they invent another life (the afterlife, the Thousand Year Reich, the Age of New Socialist Man, the Dar al Islam) in which they will enjoy pure happiness and 76 virgins and the "evil ones" (Pharaohs, Romans, Jews, Capitalist Exploiters, Infidels, the One Percent) will suffer (the Fires of Hell, Zyklon B, beheadings, property nationalization, starvation by Maoists (my wife had fun with this one), execution by the Khmer Rouge, etc.)
It's fascinating to watch all of this play out in America today, with Obama explicitly calling last October for his supporters (the core of which are the descendants of slaves who were brutalized by their owners) to "vote for revenge", the coming glorious age of Hope and Change, the coming destruction of the evil One Percenters (as soon as Obama and his fellow One Percenters finish their golf games on Martha's Vineyard), etc. [I suppose we should cheer up. I mean it's not like he's running a massive surveillance state and murdering American citizens and foreign innocents via drone strikes without judicial review while his propaganda media manufactures consent for his policies.]
And now I too should get on with my life...
>> Unfortunately, in the day of Fox News, being an informed populace is even becoming difficult.
Equality doesn't just mean that everybody has the same wealth, regardless of how hard they work. This is superficial. It means everyone has to think the same way. That's the only way we'll ever get true equality, and we won't get that until everyone's getting the same information. Conformity, equality, obedience: these must be our core values. Fox News must be stopped.
I'll have to stop by and say hello.
I believe the correct expression is "grab coffee".
From 2009-2012, these tax receipts were around 15% of GDP.
Total US government receipts in 2013 are projected to be $5.56 trillion. US GDP for the same period is projected at $16.3 trillion.
State and local governments consume about 17% of GDP (averaging across all states). http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/state_tax_rank
Current US (federal) debt is $16.1 trillion, the burden of which is largely hidden by the fact that interest rates are currently extremely low.
Add to the above numbers an inflation tax of about 1.5 - 2.5%.
Your analysis starts by excluding any taxes you find inconvenient (such as, apparently, social security, inflation, tariffs, ad-valorem taxes, and especially state and local taxes -- which you somehow don't regard as governments) to get the numbers you want. If a business did accounting the way you just did, they'd rightfully land in jail.
But if you're just going to point to the national budget, echo popular political talk-show points about "$16 TRILLION IN DEBT OUR GRANDKIDS WILL HAVE TO PAY"...
You fail to mention who's going to pay it then? It must wonderful to be an Entitled One and write checks that someone else has to cash.
...and "WE'RE ON THE ROAD TO GREECE" then I'd argue you're completely missing the forest for the trees.
Unfortunately, you didn't argue it, you merely asserted it without any evidence and worse, started by providing "evidence" that was misleading at best.
As for Greece, I actually lived there 15 years ago. Even then the government was obviously bloated beyond all recognition, with government "jobs" that required little or no work being handed out as political favors. I left in part because I knew that the country would deteriorate eventually, with a rapidly aging population and three -- count 'em -- viable communist parties and one socialist party (PASOK) that was at that time the largest party in the country. Current newspaper reports and email accounts from a friend there sound pretty ominous.
Years ago a prominent foreign politician -- I'm sorry I can't remember who -- was asked how his country went bankrupt. He replied "Two ways. Slowly at first, then quickly."
Three glowing mentions of Obama in the first four paragraphs, plus one more further down, in an article about 3D printers. Oh, praise his name!
Ummm, what irony? 1) The article doesn't say that Thomas used the word. 2) The word is hardly a "ten-dollar" word, since many foreign imports are standard usage ("gung-ho" is Cantonese). 3) Finally, I would expect that he would indeed use the word in his writings, since there really isn't a good substitute ("transistion" is rather too vague).
>> It feels as if western state-assisted assassinations of civilians are becoming a more frequently documented reality
And when were they documented the first time? It's much more plausible to believe that you are paid by the Chinese government to spread that rumor than to believe what you've written.
>> Sounds like a classic case of corporate murder.
No, it sounds like a case of Chinese government murder, something they have plenty of experience with. They must have known that there was a good chance that he would talk to the US government. The more interesting aspect is that the IME, a agency of the Singaporean government, would appear to be in on at least the suppression of the story.
So, Facebook invites Obama to their HQ to give a "townhall", then many of their execs contribute heavily to his campaign, and then Solyndra, er, Facebook gets a massive tax break. This is one of the many reasons why I, too, have made Obama a secular substitute for Jesus and anti-racism an easy-to-satisfy substitute for a more rigorous personal morality.
In other news, Facebook co-founder Chris Zell has purchased The New Republic magazine and turned it into magazine so pro-Obama that even its former owner, Martin Peretz (himself an Obama supporter) has attacked it.
http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2013/02/14/the-new-new-republic...
I hardly think you will find MSNBC by poking... NYT reporters or Christian Science Monitor reporters (not to mention al-Jazeera, BBC, RT, etc.)
I assume this is a joke, particularly the NYT. And I'm not seeing ABC, CBS, NBC (owned by GE, which has gotten massive "green energy" subsidies from Obama), PBS, the former Current TV, not to mention almost every newspaper in the US, anywhere in your list. Kinda lopsided, huh?
As for the foreign media organs, the BBC, al-Jazeera, and RT are all famously anti-American. Obama still manages to get much better press that any Republican. They hate America and they like Obama. Odd.
And they DO have to... if not, then the press coverage will increase until reporters demand an answer on their own.
No, the media coverage will the same as it has always been since Obama announced his candidacy: fawning adoration, mixed with just enough mild skepticism to create the impression amongst themselves and others that they really do perform some sort of journalistic function and that what we see in the media really is "news" and not just propaganda.
Poke a Mainstream Media "reporter" deep enough and you'll always touch MSNBC.
Picking Rand at her youthful (23 y.o.) worst seems hardly fair. The young Rand was very much under the influence of (what she took to be) Nietzsche's thought. (Much of Rand at the beginning and end of her life was Rand not at her best, the interview being a good example.)
Defining a lifetime by a single extreme is a game two can play, so let's play it. Ayn Rand was also capable of great caring and benevolence, as when she loaned money to two struggling friends (who never paid her back). See! See! That's who she really was, all else must be ignored! And since Clarence Thomas and Paul Ryan were fans of hers they too are great humanitarians! It's your ad hominem and guilt by association in reverse. Dang, this is fun!
More seriously, do you really think that someone going thru the intimate details of your life couldn't find one thing to damn you with?
>> Ayn Rand was an eloquent proponent of sociopathy.
No, she wasn't. She was an advocate (hardly a perfect one) of human freedom and prosperity. And speaking of sociopathy , that makes her an eternal enemy of every advocate of one form of socialism or another: Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workers Party, Slobodan Milosovic's Serbian Socialist Party, Stalin's Bolshevik Socialism, Saddam Hussein's Arabic Ba'ath Socialist Party, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge flavored socialism, Mao Tse Tung's socialism, or New York Times-endorsed Robert Mugabe's socialism ("I am still the Hitler of the time. This Hitler has only one objective, justice for his own people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people, and their right to their resources. If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold.") Etc., etc., bloody etc.
Mao said "Serve The People". Socialists, like the leaders mentioned above, are the people who truly care. Those who oppose them need to get a good dosing of Zyclon B, or at least a Struggle Session or three.
to see Obama's face on Time (or was it Newweek?)
That's what I love about living in America rather than North Korea: we don't have a news media working in lockstep to proclaim the greatness of the Dear Leader.
North Korea is not communist it is Juche.
No, it's communist. It's just called Juche. Note that nothing about how things are actually done in NK changed when they changed their constitution. Note also that constitutions are essentially meaningless in a dictatorship, since they provide few, if any, real constraints on the dictator. Which, after all, is why we call them dictators.
Looks like the fall of most of the communist states has gotten the regime a bit nervous. Can't have any of the little people thinking they might like to end their Socialist Paradise.
This is the same hyperpartisan Senator who was at the forefront of the effort to deny habeas rights to Guantanamo inmates.
The Entitled Party had complete control of the House and a 60 senator supermajority in the Senate for the first year of Obama's presidency, not to mention near complete control of the "news" media, Hollywood, television, the arts, the unions, etc, etc. If they wanted to introduce habeas rights for prisoners of war for the first time in US (or most any other country's) history, Obama et al could have done it anytime they wanted. State-run news media would have dutifully reported the wonderfulness of it all. Television programs and Hollywood movies would have exclaimed over the Nobel Peace Prize winner's greatness in their plot dialogue. They didn't do any of it.
Remember, it's Cornyn that's being "hyperpartisan", not you.
California's government is nonfunctional and almost bankrupt right now because California is a One-Party State, and that party likes to buy itself votes with other people's money and then get people like you to blame everything wrong on someone else.
Give the Entitled Party credit: they've destroyed the state's finacial situation, but hey, they've got a total lock on the state. So its all been a big success on the one thing that counts.
Assume nobody else has any idea what they're doing either. A lot of people refuse to try something because they feel they don't know enough about it or they assume other people must have already tried everything they could have thought of. Well, few people really have any idea how to do things right and even fewer are to try new things, so usually if you give your best shot at something you'll do pretty well.
What a fantastic insight, not to mention a real motivational boost.
As for Mao's great medical advances, I've actually been in a number of medical facilities in China. My wife survived and later became a physician at the second best hospital in Beijing (and presumably one of the best in the country). This was the hospital where the mid-level communist party members go for treatment (no proletarians need apply). All I can say is: Holy crap! I've also been to a medical clinic in the village where my wife's family is from. My advice to travelers: don't get sick in China. Get sick in Taiwan or Hong Kong.
Stalin (who would know) once said that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. When my wife tells me about her childhood (she only does this when I ask about it) it's the little details that chill me, not the "statistics" of her life. Here's a few:
She and her friends used to want a taste of sweetness so much (the Great Helmsman apparently considered candy a bourgeois excess) that they used to pull the bodies of honeybees apart and suck on them to get at the nectar. (This from a woman who today loves animals more than anyone I know.)
When my wife was in grade school she got so hungry one day that she snuck off into a field near her school and dug up a single sweet potato and ate it raw. She was caught and, for this horrendous crime, her principle put her on limited rations (and she was already hungry all the time) for an indefinite period. She became weaker and weaker as the months went by. Finally, after six months of this constant hunger, one of her teachers became alarmed at her state and went to the principle and asked to have her rations restored to her previous (limited) status. The principle's response? "Oh, I had forgotten she was still on limited rations. I only meant for that to last a month. Yes, restore her food quota." This was the little girl who is now my wife.
Yes, he means the guy who starved 39 million people to death during his reign of terror. Yes, he means the guy who made my wife spend three years of her childhood in constant hunger. Yes, the guy who sent my father in law to a labor camp for ten years for making a joke about him. At least, that's what his best friend told them when they were torturing him. Yes, * that * Mao.
Still, I'd like to thank him for inventing all those antibiotics and modern surgical techniques.
By the way, who's the source of your "65" number? Oh wait, I think I know.
>> Rather than jumping on the low-carb bandwagon before his ideas are properly tested, the precautionary principle suggests that it might be more reasonable to follow a moderate diet like the Mediterranean diet (or to follow Michael Pollan‘s stunningly simple advice to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”), to limit “empty calories” from simple carbohydrates like sugar, to eat a variety of vegetables and fruits, to choose low calorie density foods that are more filling, to limit meat intake, to limit salt, and to keep looking for behavioral and environmental ways to change our calories-in/calories-out balance.
Ummm, why does the precautionary principle state that we should avoid Diet X (Mediterranean Inuit, Vegetarian,...), rather than Diet Y?
Doesn't the precautionary principle really say that nothing should ever change, since we can always gather more data to further remove risk? (Except, of course, the things the speaker really wants to change, in which case the principle won't be invoked.)