Warning!

This blog contains effusive rhetoric and profligate diatribes. Read at your own risk.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Music

Considering that I have a profound dislike for nearly all pop, rap, hip-hop, rhythm & blues, country, folk, bluegrass, gospel, swing, and big band (not to mention relegating jazz and classical to the status of elevator muzak), my musical tastes are surprisingly eclectic. If I were to map my musical favorites by similarity a la Pandora (something I am constantly doing with slightly easier-to-analyze subjects in a somewhat haphazard fashion, using Second Life as my 3D modeling tool for the purpose), the central "cloud" would be almost entirely hard rock and heavy metal, but on the periphery, you'd find such dissimilar choices as the following:

* In Extremo
* Kid Rock
* Frank Zappa
* Leslie Fish
* Megumi Hayashibara
* Natacha Atlas

And that only scratches the surface. It's worth taking a moment just to be in awe of how vast and diverse the musical field has become just within my lifetime, especially when you consider that as little as 200 years ago, it was highly unusual for most people to have any music at all in their life, unless it was their own folk singing or a local church choir. Little wonder that music and religion were closely tied together for so long; if you had never known music at all, it would have a pretty profound effect on you when you heard it for the first time. And all these years later, it's still used widely as a propaganda tool - how many movies have you gone to see in large part because of awesome music in the trailer?

I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it's definitely impressive.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Piecemeal Perfection

A good way to create a really impressive work of art is for one artist to paint in broad strokes and create a general outline of what he wants, then pass the work off to a bunch of other artists who each detail one section according to plan. Because each artist wants to prove his workmanship and has only this little area of a canvas on which to do it, he is motivated to do his very best work, to add a lot of individual touches to the work which wouldn't have been there if the original artist was grudgingly completing a project that he was only excited to start. As long as all the artists' efforts are properly coordinated, they can all achieve a common goal of excellence by working separately. This is why group efforts fail - they do not maximize the individuality of the groups' members.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Economic Pinch

Life in America has been getting steadily worse for years, and the only way it's ever going to get any better is if we pour money into improving it. Allow me to humbly suggest that we get this money by squeezing the greedy, arrogant fatcats that ruined the nation in the first place. Let's stop treating people who give themselves a $50M raise as if they deserve human rights; they should be subject to mandatory donations of a percentage of their ill-gotten gains, which will amount to "one less ivory backscratcher" on their budget but will make a noticeable difference down where actual people are living and barely scraping by. There are ethical arguments against doing this; I say they do not matter. The time is now for the purveyors of greed to pay us our pound of flesh, and be thankful we do not alter the deal further.

The Root of All Evil? (with disclaimer for other entries)

Money is power, and power tends to corrupt. People have killed for money; anything that can drive human beings to murder each other does not deserve to be powerful.

How can we deprive money of its power? Simply put, by doing something that we should be doing anyway - eliminate scarcity. Money is powerful because it can be exchanged for scarce resources; if no scarce resources (including less-tangible resources such as labor) existed, money would be worth nothing, and those who have killed for it would receive no reward for their unjustifiable act.

That, then, is what humanity must achieve. We must possess infinite wealth, so that wealth loses all meaning, all power to compel unconscionable acts. For if we will take a life to possess that which is meaningless, then life itself is meaningless, as the act of exchange proves. We couldn't trade money for food if food wasn't worth more than money, and we couldn't trade life for money if life wasn't worth less. Therefore, if life is to mean something, money must not.

Join me now in an effort to discover ways of exterminating the limitation of worldly resources.

(Disclaimer: This and a few other ranty-toned posts from last year or earlier are evidence that I have been less mentally stable at some points in my history than is desireable; I've made much progress gettting ahold of myself since then, and I'm going to be more careful about writing things like this in future. So for now please take these old messages with a grain of salt.)

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Mars (aka Ares) Attacks

Nobody starts a war just because they want to kill someone; that kind of psychosis can happen in individuals, but not an entire nation, since hundreds or thousands or millions of people like that can't stop killing each other long enough to form a civilization. Practically every war in history owes to one of two causes: Nation A had some resources, usually land, which Nation B wanted, or Nation A had an ideology that it thought was so awesome that everyone who was anyone would agree it was the only way to believe, and thus felt anyone who didn't agree to it was a dangerous maniac to be killed in the name of the believers' long-term safety and comfort.

The first problem could be solved easily enough by providing limitless resources so every nation had everything it could possibly need, but the latter is trickier; convincing people not to be paranoid about the chance that your neighbors will turn on you 5000 years from now because you didn't force them to like you today will take a stupendous act of defiance against the human capacity for illogic.

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Evaluating: The Great Secret

There is a hidden truth inherent in the process of valuation; as we human beings decide what we like or dislike, and how much so, and for what specific reasons, we are doing something dramatically important on a cosmic scale. What, exactly, I am not yet sure, but I feel very strongly that this is the purpose of our existence, that six billion years of stars exploding and forming into balls of rock is not as important as the reasons why people decide they like one thing more or less than another. We must carefully study our judgmental tendencies, figuring out why it is that we choose to like a particular song by an artist we normally hate, why we condemn a sport out of distaste for its fans rather than for the game itself, or what makes a person gradually grow to love a television show they once hated out of love for a partner who enjoys the show. Somewhere in the process of figuring out why we like certain things or dislike others, we will discover the underlying truths of the human condition, the true reason why not only our species, but anything at all, exists.