Visa my arsa

Obama makes a first, civilized step toward nailing the credit card companies - admirable sense and restraint - I'd have turned Cheney loose on them. The thing, though, is the asymmetry between credit corporations and individuals is merely a special case of a more general asymmetry between the large institutional corporation and the alleged human being in USia.

We have all been fucked for so long we do not know we are being fucked. Now that the corporations have generally, royally, providentially fucked themselves, perhaps we can, by a sort of vicarious osmosis of recirculation, dimly recall how fuckity fucked we are, have been, etc.

more nature, less art

Wagner preferred to describe Parsifal not as an opera, but as "ein Bühnenweihfestspiel" - "A Festival Play for the Consecration of the Stage." #

A word from Nashe

"They boldly will usurp Moses chair, without any study or preparation. They would have their mouths reverenced as the mouths of the Sybils, who spoke nothing but was registered; yet nothing comes from their mouths but gross, full-stomached tautology. They sweat, they blunder, they bounce and plunge in the pulpit, but all is voice and no substance; they deaf men's ears, but not edify. Scripture peradventure they come off thick and threefold with, but it is so ugly daubed, plastered and patched on, so peevishly specked and applied, as if a botcher with a number of satin and velvet shreds should clout and mend leather doublets and cloth breeches."


Thomas Nashe, Christ Teares over Jerusalem

Downshift that Newton Reference Enthusiasm!

JSTOR–Now available at home!

Now you can read JSTOR articles without having to come in to the library–perfect for those late-night research sessions!  We now have remote access to JSTOR.

JSTOR is a collection of over 600 full-text journals across 40 disciplines in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

JSTOR* Home Access | In Library Access

Please note:  We are allowed two simultaneous remote users only.

vide infra

Jesu, meine Freude

When executed properly, this infusion of meaning creates a covetous relationship between your brand and the prospect's self-identity. To choose otherwise would be a form of emotional suicide. #

A century after Freud and Jung first compared size of their respective coglioni, their systems, interpretive languages, and feral mechanisms of survival are making it bigtime in the entrancingly redundant world of bullshit about branding. More just now the Prussic Herr Jung. That self you thought was tapping into archetypes? That's just bran gnou. More at Mystic Bourgeoisie.

High C/.s

Peter Sunde says Media r Funny

I don’t dislike that many of the journalists. I mostly dislike the editors that can’t even say that they’ve done wrong when it’s so clear that it happened. #

Sunde of The Pirate Bay makes a key distinction one rarely sees being made. Some editors I've known are a combination of bean counter and mid-management suck-all, looking out for the best interests of the capitalized entity that promises to pay them now, and after they retire.

Dream diagnosis

"As late as 1910, Professor Wilhelm Weygandt, who had reviewed The Interpretation of Dreams in 1901, not very generously, could exclaim to the Hamburg Congress of Neurologists and Psychiatrists that Freud's theories were a matter not for discussion at a scientific gathering, but for the police." Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.




Further:

"The Americans, [Freud] told Sandor Rado, "transfer the democtratic principle from politics into science. Everybody must become president once, no one must remain president, none may excel before the others, and thus all of them neither learn nor achieve anything."

of USians:

"This race, he once told his physician Max Schur, "is destined to extinction. They can no longer open their mouths to speak; soon they won't be able to do so to eat."

Macaulay on IntelProp

Copyright is monopoly, and produces all the effects which the general voice of mankind attributes to monopoly. [...] Monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.

Dead Tree Advocates Report from World circa 1994

Schmidt (Google) talks up micropayments:

Today there are very effective subscription based models, but there are not very good micropayment systems, micropayment meaning one cent, three cent kinds of systems. They clearly need to be developed by the industry.

Bravo. But scaling, at some point, we'll need to talk about $.001 to $.003.

And, ho, gnuuspapers (he's at the NAA) want Google to tweak to factor in their credibility. LULZ.

His crit of papers:

How do you avoid being just mediated with a set of stories that are aggregated with your brand on them, which is what's happened to some newspapers?

The elephantine answer in the room: Do some frigging actual, relevant, local asskicking news. E. fucking G.

Loved this exchange:

Question: Do you think intellectual property rights will continue to erode given the digital future as you see it?

I disagree with your premise that they will continue to erode. What I do believe is that all these partially-thought-through legal systems are being challenged by the ubiquity of the Internet.

related.

spookfish mirrors

. . .the unusual eyes of the spookfish, Dolichopteryx longipes:

These eyes are tubular, which are similar in structure to the eyes of many other fish that swim in the ocean’s twilight zone where the background light field is very dim.

In the few other species of deep-sea fish that possess split eyes, the upper eye has a lens, like in the spookfish, for focusing light. However, at these depths, there is so little upwelling light that a lens would attenuate light too much in its efforts to focus the light for the lower eye. The spookfish however, manages to focus light in the lower eye without using a lens. Light enters the lower portion of the eye and hits a mirror composed of stacks of crystals. The stacks sit roughly parallel to one another, but their angle changes over the surface of the mirror, giving it an overall concave shape. more