Author Archives: bluedepth

Acquiring Language

Posted on by
Reply

I have been reading this article and an idea struck me while I was reading along. It’s really just a hypothesis honestly, but wouldn’t it explain so much that acquiring a mother-tongue involves the cortex and the amygdala as a cooperative pair. It helps explain features covered in the linked article and helps explain to me why secondary language acquisition later in life, after adulthood, is not as easy as acquiring whatever language it is that is your mother tongue.

This idea was spawned actually by an episode of Arrow and in the episode the lead character defeats a polygraph test. Perhaps if you consider a question in your secondary language then it’s a job just for the cortex and because it misses the amygdala completely, there is no emotional qualities to your thought process and maybe there won’t be any galvanic skin response, pupil dilation, or pulse changes. Thinking about a false answer in a secondary language may be the key to defeating something like a polygraph testing session. This is something that would be very compelling as a study. You’d need test subjects that acquired a secondary language in adulthood, say French where their native language was English and present them with a polygraph that they were encouraged to try to defeat, and then deliver questions with emotional weight in their home and foreign languages and see if this makes sense.

I think it would be very interesting at least… It opens questions like is adulthood the seal on the amygdala from acquiring any more language/emotion content. Hmmm…

Commentary

Posted on by
2

Sometimes really good stuff comes when your patience is tried… this comment that I just wrote I think deserves to be elevated to a blog post all on its own.

Remember, if you don’t like what I write, you do not have to read it. Not reading this blog will not break my heart or hurt my feelings. You may want to think twice before trolling me.

***

My point wasn’t necessarily about the political argument surrounding welfare as much as it was about how we all need each other, socially, to do those things that must be done to make life better for us all. States that want to secede do not understand the larger context of their actions. Secession involves necessarily a new series of trade agreements between bordering states. If Texas, for example requires fresh drinking water from the Great Lakes Compact region, they will have to trade something they have and the Compact will have to determine what we are willing to sell our fresh water for, as an example. Plus for the states that abandon the Union, they’ll have to take on all those services that the Feds have taken care of, so, hard winters, hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes will require even more exchange of goods and services to compensate for assistance. No man is an island, and no state is an island either. If Texas were to leave the Union, as they are fond of posturing that they will do, then their interdependencies with other states will be much more complicated. They may have a lot of oil, or in some other states as you say, natural gas or coal resources, but without access to shipping it would be a challenge for these states to get the drilling equipment as well, so they can make good on their resources.

I don’t engage with people who go out of their way to whine about socialized care programs because their arguments are always incredibly myopic and almost always come from a sense of unbearable greed, obnoxious heartlessness, and a general lack of human empathy to people who aren’t as fortunate as others. I get it a lot from my conservative family members, especially when they say blanket phrases like “If they’d just get a job, they wouldn’t need welfare!” Well, yes, that’s obvious – but where are the jobs? Sometimes you can’t find employment despite every effort; For conservatives these poor people are just parasites and nary a single thought is spent on whether or not lives are lost just because of economic misfortune. There is no pride in taking welfare and people are ashamed of doing so, but have no other choice. Conservatives never really go out of their way to find people who use these services so they are told by their media outlets and by each other what these people are like, they use various logical fallacies to magnify one instance of someone taking advantage of the system and then use that to denigrate the entire framework. There may be people who take advantage of the system, but for someone with a functioning sense of empathy, it’s far better for ten people to misuse the system than for one person to starve to death through no fault of their own.

We will never see eye to eye on this. It is my conclusion that there are two different camps, and they are drawn on the political continuum between liberalism and conservatism. There is no middle ground, it is effectively a DMZ loaded with dead bodies and land mines. I do not seek to change your mind. I do not offer arguments to you to alter how you see the world. I simply try to live my life according to my ethics and morals and how I think the world should work, just like you. Because I offer no argument, there really is no room for a reply from this statement that I write. Consider it a billboard for this blog, you can rail at a billboard until you grow hoarse, but it will do no good. You will not change my mind.

Some would argue that this is unfair, that I am not giving my blog readers a place to express themselves and by effectively shutting down an argument and asserting that mine is the last word is the height of arrogance. You would be the definition of right. Nowhere on this blog do I state that I will behave in any particular way, so, as my partner is fond of saying, learn to cope.

Citizens from 15 states have filed petitions to secede from the United States – Dallas Top News | Examiner.com

Posted on by
2

Citizens from 15 states have filed petitions to secede from the United States – Dallas Top News | Examiner.com.

The list includes Louisiana, Texas, Montana, North Dakota, Indiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, North Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, Colorado, Oregon, and New York. Of that list, I would be dismayed only for the last three, the others? I couldn’t push them out the door fast enough.

What’s most curious is that most of these states consume a lot of federal money. If they left the union, life would become very difficult for them. Just imagine the new tollways that would open up on their now-not-federally-supported-segments of the Eisenhower Interstate System. You thought the NYS Thruway was an expensive axle-mangler, just wait until Albany has to figure out how to fix it all on their own.

I think we can all say with a fair amount of humor, that Texas can leave whenever it damn well likes. Stop posturing and threatening, just do it already. I can’t wait to see how OPEC deals with The Great Christian Domain of Texas. That’ll be hilarious.

Hurricanes that slam into Galveston will now be regarded as Reality TV as “Those poor fools in Texas” try to cope without the rest of us. A lot of these red states think they can exist outside of all socialized connections with the other states and the Union, and I think they should be allowed to leave to feel what being truly alone feels like.

How fast they would rush back. And my, what sort of concessions they’d have to part with just to get back in. Just ask South Carolina about secession. It’s been more than a hundred years and they still haven’t recovered from the last time. But you never know, it might be different this time. (no, it won’t, it’ll be worse)

How Lovely

Posted on by
1

I just got an email from my blog about a comment that was posted about my earlier post regarding controlling ammunition. There is no hidden agenda on my blog, I am a liberal and I proudly defend my opinions and thoughts and when it comes to weapons, what I write comes from the heart.

So, on with the comment from a user by the name of Joe Joe, email address bgyiu@gmail.com from IP address 166.152.62.75:

Move to chicago or new york ass munch. They have almost completely dis-armed their citizens, and now they are at the mercy of thugs who don’t follow the law anyway, dick mouth!! It’s candy ass turds like you who are the first to be raped and killed. Just because you don’t mind being defenseless, don’t expect the rest of us to be so anxious. Cowardly turds like you are precisely why this country has become a joke. Even if the criminals didn’t have guns, then we are at the mercy of an out of control, authoritative government. NO THANKS!!! Just move somewhere where they have disarmed everyone and allow YOUR family to be raped, pillaged, and plundered!!!! Keep your warped agenda to yourself, butt munch.

So that comment of course is certainly provocative. I find the actual word selection to be most interesting to me. Let’s set some assumptive defaults regarding the poster of the comment – first, I think it’s safe to say that anyone who reacts this way is likely a conservative and if so, we have to have pity for them because they are political lepers. Nobody wants to engage with them because all they have is vitriol, anger, and reactivity. This particular fellow also has a uniquely bent vocabulary.

Let’s move beyond the fear of control from the government and get at the core pillars of the comments contents. The first one is fear. This comment reeks of fear. Fear of criminals, fear of the government, and fear of what I said in my blog. I don’t feel anxious or attacked by the commenter, I feel sad for him – as I would anyone who lives in that much fear eventually would de-evolve into nothing more than a gross sort of pavlovian kicks and jerks. Now on to what really is entertaining about this comment, and these words are at the core of it: “ass munch”, “dick mouth”, “candy ass”, and of course, “rape”. Now my higher education is in psychology and english and I can’t help but feel excited at these very colorful phrases. The writer reveals more to me in his word selection than the actual content of what he is trying to convey. As I have said time and time again when it comes to conservatives who are so angry and upset with homosexuals, it has more to do with them fighting their reflections than it does anything else. This fellows comment is a perfect example of this. A rational argument could have been made without all these colorful epithets however this fellow spent time typing these in. I think this commenter has a deep psychosexual issue that he has not dealt with yet. He is typing “ass munch” and he is thinking about analingus. He writes “dick mouth” so obviously fellatio is foremost on his mind, “candy ass” has a rather well-known connotation to cowardice however when this phrase is in the same statement with the others, it’s not cowardice but rather a begging for anal sex. In the end we get to “rape”, and that imagery comes up quite a lot. I am unsure as to whether the commenter is fearful of being raped, anxious about having rape ideations or what, but he spends a rather long time thinking about it. I’d have to say that the phrasing is homosexually receptive, as it’s something that bottoms are fond of in general. So the commenter is probably a closet homosexual with ideations of being overwhelmed by a more masculine partner and likely fantasizes about having his will dominated by another man. The popular image of this is the ultra-butch muscle mary who at the drop of a hat drops their shorts for a righteous pounding. I would say that in the extremis, this fellow, if he wasn’t ruled by fear, would probably enjoy anal sex and from the sheer massive content of homosexual phrasing in such a short comment,  how could anyone see it any other way?

So, I feel more pity for him than anything else. Joe Joe, I hope you stop trying to troll blogs like these because your deeper psychology is leaking out in your vocabulary and I suspect that you really would prefer people to not know of how much homosexual ideation goes on between your ears.

As for the message you tried to convey? It is lost on me. I know what you wanted to say and stripping off your homosexual panic and the fear, I do get you, however I still do not agree with you. I still believe that controlling ammunition is the best way to control guns. Obviously it isn’t a topic that a liberal or a conservative is willing to budge on so perhaps leaving the comment was a faux-pas on your behalf. In any case, you did entertain me and for that, I am thankful.

You should  do something about all that homosexual panic though, it’s not good for you. Really.

Confusing Worthless Passbook

Posted on by
Reply

Apple has stepped in it quite badly when it comes to their Passbook app. It comes down to which metaphor they’d like to use and please, stick to whichever it is. I write specifically after updating my Starbucks app on my iPhone and the app asked if I wanted to add a card to my Passbook. So far my understanding of Passbook was that there was a stump-app which led you to the App Store to “buy” apps for different companies, so Target, Walgreens, that sort of thing and that those “Apps” were to be eventually organized in a Passbook folder.

So I start the Starbucks app, and it prompts me to add a Passbook card, so I figure there will be another app icon called “Starbucks” that I can put in the folder with all the other unused “Passbook” apps that I don’t use. And there is nothing. Huh. So I looked at the app for a while and couldn’t find where it put my Passbook “App” icon. I figured it must have been broken. That the download was buggy or broken. I completely ignored the Passbook app itself, because it was just a stump, why the hell would I use it again? It led to the App Store and that was how you entered the App Store if you wanted to waste time screwing around with Passbook bullshit. So I tapped on the app expecting to see the lame text and the link to the App Store, and there was my Starbucks Passbook card. As an added bit of huh, the link to the App Store is gone. So, okay. No more Passbook apps then for me, which I guess is fine.

It’s this really loopy “It’s an app” versus “it’s a card” metaphor that I’m griping at. It could have been more elegant, as for usefulness, eh. I don’t think of my phone when it comes to buying things. Phones don’t do that sort of thing, except now they do.

When it comes to Starbucks, we have a host of other problems that are going to pop up. I can’t use my Starbucks card at Barnes & Noble because it’s not a true Starbucks store, it’s B&N’s Cafe that serves Starbucks products. How many people will try to use their Starbucks card or this Passbook app? They’ll get irritated and be disinclined to use Passbook again. I know that feeling because I tried to use my Starbucks app at a Starbucks shop in McCormick Place in Chicago and was told they only accept cash or credit cards. That was the last time I used my Starbucks app except for just this morning to engage with this whole Passbook bullshit. So, even if you walk into a store that sells Starbucks, is a Starbucks, they may or may not use what you have. So having your phone out and ready to go and make things speedy utterly fails and you walk away without what you wanted, angry at the embarrassment. Then what are you supposed to do about some of those Starbucks that have drive-thru service? Do you honestly think people will hand their iPhones to a clerk for scanning? How stupid do you have to be to hand your expensive iPhone to anyone else? What if a compromising text pops up while they are scanning your iPhone? What then? I know why Apple would like Passbook to be useful and I’m all for new ways of addressing old problems, but there has to be a better way to do it. I suppose this really would only work well if you walked up to a Starbucks store, and there was some icon stating that the Passbook card would be accepted for purchases on the premises, then maybe then. But at that point how irritated would you be that you had to go hunting and searching for it? Then would you really even be interested in buying anything or just skipping it altogether?

So, the worthless Target and Walgreens apps, the weird App/Card thing with Starbucks, and how you can’t even be sure that any of it would work leads me to think that this is all just so much DOA technology. You aren’t going to use it because it’s too much bother. I can’t wait until some airline thinks they can stuff a boarding pass into this thing. Do you seriously think that a thieving TSA drone will give you back your iPhone? They’ll hand you back your Photo ID and pocket your phone. But that touches on the criminals that work for the TSA, but it’s still a REALLY BAD IDEA. Perhaps there will be something eventually that makes Passbook worth anyones time and trouble. I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Dust a Meeting

Posted on by
Reply

Meetings are insatiable productivity black holes that complicate lives and ruin workplace flow. I recently tried a collaborative online system called Basecamp in order to asynchronously develop a software strategy at work. What I wanted and what I observed diverged so thoroughly that there was absolutely no point in continuing with Basecamp as it was just in the way. The entire endeavor made me a little sad, not a huge fan of failure.

Meetings themselves are time vampires. I loathe them with every fiber of my being. They are massively interruptive and obnoxiously presumptive. You set aside a date and time and a place where people have to attend to discuss some topic. A meeting is a monster even when it’s in the cradle, being thought up by someone who desires to meet. Out of their heads pop a snarling tentacled beast with sharp fangs that serves no purpose but to interrupt flow and get in everyone’s way. Even the birth of a meeting is an arduous agony, with each participant (or combatant) the multiplexed temporal complexity grows. Two people can find a time to meet. Three people and it’s an order of magnitude harder. I was attempting to arrange a five-person collaboration and I wanted to avoid a five-person meeting with every ounce of willpower I could muster. My intentions were to establish a five-person collaboration which leveraged technology (Basecamp) to achieve speed and productivity because all five collaborators could function asynchronously. You could contribute what you felt you had to when it was right for you. It respected flow and was not supposed to be interruptive or presumptuous. Alas, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and this particular road lead to the very specific hell of a worthless unwanted but agonizingly unavoidable and loathsome meeting.

So now my efforts to avoid a meeting inexorably landed me right into setting a meeting up. Of course it was obvious that right after the first few responses I could tell the tell-tale sloppy-wet-sucking-sounds of a baby meeting unfurling it’s tentacles in my midst. The first agony of course is finding a time when everyone is free for a meeting. So right off the bat, two weeks went down the toilet as we had to wait for everyone to be ready. Then assembling it was a pain. It used to be easier with Groupwise, as a meeting organizer could see the public calendars of all the participants and select the time that would be best and then send it to all the participants which really reduced the interruption of flow quite a lot. Alas, we led Groupwise out behind the barn and we did-what-must-be-done. After we were done burying the corpse of Groupwise we were back to the way it was before – so A emails B, C, D, and E. Then they all reply, and then A shakes the magic eight ball and everyone agrees that in three weeks, we’ll all have time. It’s a lot of back and forth and this and that and it creates a nasty haze of meaningless email exchanges. So, the meeting is ripe for tomorrow at 3pm. Great.

So now I wait. I have a list of all the software we currently use and instead of spending the past two weeks discussing, asynchronously, the merits and flaws and coming up with a solution in at most a weeks time, this nascent baby meeting will likely take another month before there will be any resolution. Tomorrow is just going to be the First Meeting, where we trot out the new baby time vampire and give it a good feeding.

It’s a terrible way to do work. It trashes flow, it lowers morale, and it sucks time down a toilet drain. At least people aren’t fond of the parliamentary species of time vampire meetings, where you spend the first few iterations of the meeting discussing protocol on how subsequent meetings are to be held. That form of meeting is older, and much worse. I really must count my lucky stars that we usually only have the easier-to-cope-with modern meetings where the first three get-togethers aren’t set aflame with discussions on what words mean, how we are going to proceed, or what the definition of is, is.

There is wreckage however, even with a modern meeting. The person who had a problem and started all of this still doesn’t have what they need to get work done – we’ve been waiting for that special moment to arrive when we all can pet the baby time vampire and let it ruin our working lives. I can’t really get worked up very much, as least not as loudly as I used to a long time ago when I felt I could change things. It was pretty much obvious from the start that when the discussion immediately derailed with that most hated of questions “So, when shall we meet?”, heh, that was it. I knew that asynchronous collaboration was not going to work.

What’s really quite sad is that the technology has developed quite well and very elegantly. You see the edits and the collaboration realtime, there is “What’s new” and “Catch up” features, it’s free for 45 days, all of it – right there. Ready, willing, able, and if used, the promise of reaching a solution sooner-rather-than-later can be realized. Instead of that path however, we are going to have a meeting.

Not that anyones life is on the line for the work that has to be done, just the soul-crushing dread of having to endure another time vampire meeting. Having to go somewhere at a specific time, putting everything else on hold while we all waste our time and energy. The wry humor in the idea that we could have been already in the yea/nay phase and quite possibly be sending orders out to finalize the entire project, it could have been that way.

What have I learned? That I won’t ever do this again. Part of the agony of watching a grand design fail is watching it fail in flames. Modern business culture just isn’t ready for the kind of asynchronous ease and productivity that these tools can provide. I’ve written before, tongue-in-cheek that hateful meetings are like intellectual memetic herpes. It’s a theme that we play over and over again, not because actually having meetings leads anywhere but that instead we’ve always had meetings and our peers seem happy and life goes on, so why seek out anything else? It’s an idea, a meme, that is replayed again and again. The fact that meetings are time vampires that suck all the happiness and color out of life isn’t actually a part of the deal. Nobody seems to notice. Every once in a while one of us wakes up and shakes their head and asks “Why the hell are we having these stupid meetings?” and then tries something novel. Then that detestable question, “So, when are we meeting?”

That question should be engraved on a gun. Instead of asking it, just load one bullet, spin the revolver chamber, clack it home and pull the trigger. So, in the end this is all so much bellyaching over nothing. Asynchronous collaboration isn’t ready yet, or more specifically we aren’t ready for it, yet.

Not every industry has this problem however. You see companies like Automattic, which is the parent company that manages the WordPress technology – they make use of the P2 theme which is a central driver (so they say) in how they manage their projects and such. I’m sure Automattic has meetings, but I suspect that they use asynchronous collaboration a lot more elegantly than is done in higher education or the non-profit sector. When I first started exploring Basecamp, for example, I was blown away. I could collaborate with my assistant and material would build because when we were both working on the project and working together as a team brought a kind of science-fiction cool to the dull things we were collaborating on. There is something quite breathtaking about watching an entire project morph and change and grow as you sit there and watch it. Like timelapse only in real-time. Another little bit that I really found super-compelling was how these technologies enabled asynchronous collaboration and respected workplace flow. There was no interruption, if you were in the middle of a task you could polish it off quickly and confidently because time wasn’t important. The collaboration could occur at any time. It also occurred to me that asynchronous collaboration might also benefit from the differeing themes of cognition during different parts of the day. That you are more clever for some things right after dinner than you are before tea, or if you wake up at 11:30pm with a sudden Eureka moment, you could hop on to Basecamp and share your stroke of genius.

Alas, this is all just prattle against the memetic herpes epidemic that is the meeting.

It warms my heart to imagine a world without telephones and no rooms in which to meet. It would preclude meetings completely and banish them to extinction and force asynchronous collaboration. *sigh* It’s only a dream I suppose.

Mississippi Conservative Calls For Putting Gay People To Death On Facebook Page | Addicting Info

Posted on by
Reply

Mississippi Conservative Calls For Putting Gay People To Death On Facebook Page | Addicting Info.

Once again a politician who is picking and choosing from Leviticus. I’d love to know what his God thinks of the fact that he is clean-shaven and most likely has mixed textiles that he wears, as both of those are abominations in the eyes of his lord.

I mean, if you are going to pick and choose, why stop with just wanting to kill people like me? I’m flattered that I’m the target of your irrationally bloodthirsty version of Christianity, or, since you seem to be really jonesing on the Torah, perhaps Mr. Gipson would like a circumcision and a admittedly belated Bar’mitzvah? I’m looking very hard at you Mr. Gipson and I don’t see a Yarmulke. That’s offensive if you are a good Jew, but I think you aren’t a good Jew. I know you aren’t a good Christian because you’ve gone deaf to your messiah and his message, so which is it sir?

If you aren’t a Christian, and you have done really poorly at capering to be a Jew, perhaps you’d like a go at the Koran and try to be a Muslim? I’m sure that would be much more up your alley. I think you would be happiest as a Shi’ite, they are a little more driven than the Sunni’s are. I would advise you to tread carefully, the Christians and the Jews don’t really care if you pick-and-choose the rules but I’m pretty sure the Muslims actually do care.

So thank you sir, for your sweet words of bloodfeud. I look forward to the time when I get to defend myself against your bigoted, confused, irrational carryings-on. Go go gadget self-defense! Come on up to Michigan, I’ll make you dinner before you try to kill me. Knackers!

P.S. One of us is a better Christian than the other one. Sweetheart.

Timon Throws Mud At Athens

Posted on by
Reply

I wrote this on Facebook, but I think I should publicize it to a wider audience. This is my best argument for the election of 2012:

This is an excerpt from an email I wrote to my father after he told me about how awful socialists are. Enjoy.

***

I honestly can’t say that I’m terribly upset by Quantitative Easing or that I harbor any fear of inflation. I find fear to be a worthless emotion. Fear and worry do nothing for anyone. It’s a lot like a rocking chair. Yes you shuffle about a lot but you don’t get anywhere. Plus fear is a kind of fog that sits on your mind and suppresses true joy and real happiness. I’m tired of the media telling me that I should be afraid or fear that or this or whatever. I get loads of it when I fly for work and it’s, to put it nicely, utter malarkey. The end isn’t coming, the politicians aren’t going to ruin the world. The globe will continue to spin day after day and people will continue to make a gamely try at it, doing what they always do. The color of the background may change, but life will go on.

As for Willard Romney, as I refuse to use his cutesy pet name, he’s got a lot of problems. He, and others in the Republican party seem to have fallen off the rightmost edge of existence. Even beyond you and your friends. That’s quite something! The GOP killed a paid-for-and-ready-to-go jobs bill for **VETERANS**. Dad, I know you look in the mirror to shave. I know you were in the Marine Corps and I also know that once you are a marine, you are one for life. So, that on some deep private level in your mind should bother you. That your party nailed a perfectly good bill just because they are racist and can’t stand to see a bunch of old white men subservient to a younger black man. I know you aren’t a racist, and I forgive you for being so incredibly conservative, but you have to admit that deep down, your inner Marine has got to smart at least a little to know that a jobs bill that was supposed to benefit vets got shot down for absolutely no good reason. Well, it bothers me. More than that though, is the entire GOP party being so intransigent. They started congress with the single aim of denying progress to our President beyond rational thought. They have killed and voted down every single effort, efforts that are meant to benefit the middle class. Middle class people like you, Theresa, and uh, THE REST OF US. Including me. I can’t say that I have a problem with taxing the rich, not really. I learned a little bit of history a few weeks ago that I will share with you. Trickle-Down Economics, that economic policy that if you cut the taxes on the very rich that everyone benefits because the rich will donate, they’ll start new businesses, and hire people and all of that. It sounds wonderful, but the rich really haven’t done anything they were supposed to do for the rest of us. They, especially Willard Romney, moved their money to Switzerland or the Cayman Islands. So, back to Trickle-Down, it used to be known by another more colorful name. It used to be called Horse and Sparrow Economics. The mental image was that you force fed a horse (the rich) with oats until it started to run oats in it’s droppings, and the droppings were for the Sparrows (the rest of us). I find that to be more accurate a representation of the economic policy of the GOP. Feed the rich until they start dropping food out of their ass for the rest of us to eat. It’s a delightfully filthy image, but that’s how a lot of us in the middle class feel. That the rich get richer and the rest of us could die for all they care – yet we’re doing ALL OF THE WORK. Then I learned that the rich do not create jobs. It is the Middle Class that creates jobs. The Middle Class makes enough money to buy en-masse, which encourages those who want to make money to cater to us and then they hire people to suit that need. The rich will not just create jobs because somehow they feel put-upon to do so! It’s the Middle Class that does the hard work and it’s the Middle Class that creates the need. So, really, when you get down to it, the rich are parasites. It’s diametrically opposite to how conservatives think – that the poor are the parasites. It hasn’t worked out in 200 years, perhaps you have it wrong.

Another thing that I’ve learned is the hot emotional core of old white man anger. There is a problem in your ranks, with the Republican party and it’s been happening for many many years. The GOP has switched in it’s leadership. It used to be run by Yankee power, by the Andrew Carnegies and Rockefellers . Now it’s run by Southern power. It’s got nothing to do with getting rich and leaving a lasting positive legacy behind. That’s a Yankee extract from the Puritan style of thinking. That if you make a lot of money you owe it to leave something behind that benefits everyone else. Compare that with how the GOP is currently structured – especially the Tea Party people, whom you are directly responsible for as a party member. It’s a Southern way. It’s all about fear, loathing, racism and hierarchy. There is a pecking order and that rules over everything else. Where does this come from? Not from the Puritans, but rather from English aristocracy running slavery plantations in Barbados. They brought their structure into the deep south and for at least 150 years the Yankees had power and the Southerners resented it. Now the tables have turned. All the things you remember and treasure about your dear conservatism have been perverted by Southern wretches who refuse to acknowledge your aspirations about what conservatism can do. You want Trickle-Down, or Horse-and-Sparrow to work, and I know it’s precious and dear to you. But it’s not being driven by the men you thought it was. It’s driven by men who are only concerned with the structure of hierarchy and maintaining the status quo. In many ways, the rank and file of the GOP are field slaves to your new Southern masters. The Southern Republican wants it only his way and no other. No room for anything else. And no room for someone as backwards as Andrew Carnegie or a Rockefeller to leave anything but a smoking husk behind.

So the rest of us, pretty much having to land behind the horse and eat whatever seeds might be dropping out of the rear of that animal see nothing but rigid structure and absolutely no progress. There aren’t jobs being made, the recovery is stultified and the men and women who are supposed to make things easier for us all are so racist that they’ve become nearly crystallized in their intransigence. Things aren’t getting better and then we hear about how the rich have $21 Trillion dollars stored overseas and how none of the rich are helping anyone else. There isn’t anymore bird seed for us Sparrows! The rich are sending their droppings off to Switzerland! So, we’re between a rock and a hard place. Nobody wants to help us, the conservatives don’t give a flying rip and the Republicans think we’re just a batch of worthless moochers, the 47% that Willard Romney spoke of. The 47% like YOUR MOTHER for all the time that I knew her when she was still alive, one of those 47%! So, the Middle Class, with nothing from the conservatives at all have to turn to anything else. So the liberals and democrats say that some socialization may help. You chafe at the word socialism yet you feed off of it. It’s a strange relationship, you know. The silent generation and the baby boomers are both entitled and you are reaping the benefits while castigating anyone else who might even show an interest in what you are taking advantage of. Socialism. Like your auto insurance and your homeowners insurance, which is socialized. Your Fire Departments and the public schools that educated… people you love… again, socialism. Medicare that pays for your trips to see the doctor. Socialism. Social Security, which has SOCIAL in it’s !@#$ name! Regular checks… on the backs of the rest of us. And we smile gamely and nod and wish you happiness, and what do we get in return? Sour grapes and angry yammerings about marxism and socialism. My tin ear aches.

So yes, socialism Dad. Wonderful glorious socialism. The poor and middle class are tired of eating horse shit. We are weary of the rich and their excesses and their rudeness and their stupid capering behaviors! They aren’t respectable. The rich are tapeworms that eat everything and leave nothing for anyone else. They contribute nothing but nasty snide comments and thanks to a disgustingly eroded public education system, they use fear to control the great unwashed masses.

And so, we come back to fear. Fear is what’s at the heart of the problem. The majority of Americans are too stupid and too fearful to engage in any rational thought. If they knew what the rich and the conservatives did to the rest of us, while they waddled off fat and happy there would be hell to pay. Thankfully we are an easily cowed lot. Obedient and silent and hard-working.

So, in a way, screw the rich. And frankly my dear, I don’t want to be rich. I want to be happy. Perhaps capitalism isn’t such a grand to-do after all. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe socialism isn’t oh-so-terrible! Maybe if the Sparrows are given fresh bird seed they might be able to fly again. I think that’s worth looking into.

So as a member of the Middle Class, I have no choice but to be deaf to the Republican party. The members of your party did their level best to hurt the rest of us through glorious inaction. We see the GOP’s intransigence and we’ll throw our chips in when it comes time to vote. The question will be simple for us: Select someone who has hurt us all or someone who offers at least a workable claim to want to move forward. Willard Romney or Barack Obama. At least for me, there is no real choice. The GOP are anti-American racist hypocritical ignorant bigots.

An empty chair would be better. Or maybe, a chair with Barack Obama actually sitting in it, leading. DOING SOMETHING. DOING ANYTHING.

Barnes & Noble's Nook HD+ Is Clever

Posted on by
Reply

Barnes & Noble just sent an email out announcing their two new tablets: The Nook HD and Nook HD+.

Previously to this release I was discussing with my partner, who works for Barnes & Noble ways that B&N could compete with Amazon and Apple in the tablet space. There was a concern that B&N had lost traction and that the company was going to spiral out of control and crash, eventually. These tablets have just eliminated a good portion of that worry.

For full disclosure, I came across a rather pleasant and unexpected windfall in regards to money and I’ve been kvetching about the poor performance of my 1st edition iPad and in a way, Apple has sent a clear message that they regard the device as dead because they are no longer writing software updates for it. I went ahead and purchased an iPad 3 and I’ve been enjoying it quite a lot.

This news from B&N is very interesting to me as this new device has several key areas that put up more bang-for-less-money. The first surprise is the processing speed of the Nook HD+ in comparison with the iPad 3. 1.5GHz dual-core versus 1GHz dual-core. Ever since 2003 when the world pretty much stopped worrying and loved the bomb that is processor speed ratings this distinction isn’t as compelling as it appears on paper. The two units have different core technologies, the iPad has an A5X processor and the Nook HD+ has an OMAP 4470 processor. We have seen from manufacturers like HTC and Samsung that even when you pour huge muscular processors into devices to compete, that if the experience of the user isn’t done correctly then all the computing horsepower in the world means very little. It’s not about the muscles, it’s about the refinement of the motor cortex. It isn’t how strong you are, it’s your dexterity – at least in the phone and tablet space. I do hand it to B&N when it comes to pumping numbers and keeping costs suppressed – that’s a win in their column.

The second surprise, and I’ve been half expecting someone to notice this glaring deficit in tablet OS design comes down to what I believe to be Barnes & Noble’s knife-held-confidently-behind-its-back killer feature. Barnes & Noble is going to bring profile control to the tablet space. This casts a huge pall over both Amazon and Apple devices and redefines a tablet to be a multiuser device. It is exceptionally clever for Barnes & Noble to do this because it draws a clear bead of connection from everyone’s computer experience (where you have an account and profile) off to your device. When it comes to Apple, they rejected this model and regard a device to be a one-person-only deal, which has been a weakness in the iOS OS design. Apple may be too far along to make such a fundamental change to iOS so we may see the creation of a new track of tablet technology. Is a tablet multiuser or single-user? By being multi-user, and if B&N does it elegantly, it can cast B&N in a family friendly light, more than an Amazon or Apple product because one relatively inexpensive device can serve an entire family. Instead of the onerous cost of a Kindle or iPad for each person, because each device is single-user, one Nook HD+ can be used by different members of a family without having to worry about security, privacy, preference or profile leakages between people. It’s a failure of the Apple iOS OS and here is why: When I come across another persons iOS device, I am utterly lost – I don’t know their preferences, their security settings, where they have placed icons, and I find myself having to relegate to the search screen to even find where they put the ubiquitous “Settings” icon. If B&N does profiles elegantly, this will be a non-issue. Rendered moot because each person has their own settings that they are used to, making the confusion evaporate.

I think that B&N will pursue a marketing strategy that elevates the personal touch and the family friendliness of their Nook HD and Nook HD+ devices. That will be key, with profiles, the ability to use LendMe to share books, and their admittedly well-done “Parent recording storybooks for their children” technology they will position themselves to be “The Booksellers who care about you and your family” and they will occupy a third niche in this space. The first niche is the deep-discount one, that’s occupied by Amazon. The second niche is the elegance-at-all-costs one, which is occupied by Apple – and then last but certainly not least, the third niche which is the Friends-Family-Kids one, which is going to be Barnes & Noble Booksellers.

This niche may be the best hope for Barnes & Noble to retain their 21st century relevance.  They should maintain their “Brick and Mortar” presence and cater their stores to being a place where you feel welcome, with friendly staff and a coffeehouse/library atmosphere. The elevator sales-pitch is that B&N is more personable and immediate than Amazon could ever hope of being – you don’t know Jack at Amazon, but you know Jack at B&N. B&N’s approach to kids and family with their very deep roots set throughout America means they have already beat Apple to the market in terms of the personal touch. Yes, Apple has the Genius Bar and yes they are friendly geeks, but you don’t go to a Genius Bar to find out about Apps and Woodworking! You can only do that at a Barnes & Noble!

The real competition isn’t between B&N and Apple anyhow, since Apple touches B&N only in this one market-space. The real competition here is between Amazon and B&N. It’ll be an interesting evolution to say the least – which do people prefer more? The cold, impersonal, sterile deep-discount algorithms of Amazon or the instant-gratification, warm, personal, and direct approach of Barnes & Noble Booksellers? It may simply come down to how people refer to these two competitors. You USE Amazon and you VISIT Barnes & Noble Booksellers. That right there is something that Jeff Bezos can never buy himself into, but B&N already exists to cater to. Which do you value, the impersonal or the personal?

Barnes & Noble Booksellers may have just secured their direct relevancy in the market for the next decade with these two new devices. The proof is in the pudding of course, these devices, once in the stores, will be the final arbiter on the survivability of B&N in the tablet market space.

 

Exclusive: Paul Ryan Quietly Requested Obamacare Cash | The Nation

Posted on by
1

Exclusive: Paul Ryan Quietly Requested Obamacare Cash | The Nation.

This requires, as President Clinton said so eloquently last night, real brass. This man has no concept of honor or truth, he can’t figure out what is a lie or what isn’t and simply says things that are most convenient or expedient for his current situation. After reading the article from Rolling Stone magazine about Paul Ryan and then reading this, and witnessing the Goebbels-level lying – it’s just overwhelming. It isn’t that Paul Ryan’s pants are on fire, no, that’s not a powerful enough image – Paul Ryan’s pants have induced a kind of dishonesty-based shining fusion. We aren’t talking mere combustion here, the petty touch of chemistry – this is an elevated form of lying. This is lying that can manipulate the Strong Force of the universe and it has made his pants into a kind of tiny sun of dishonesty.

It used to be “Liar liar, pants on fire!” Now it’s “Oh Hi Paul, would you mind helping me put on sunblock for the blazing UV shining off those … uh… pants you’ve got on. I’m also going to need welders goggles just to look at you. Thanks.”

And I might as well just get this over with:

Paul Ryan’s Hero – Joseph Goebbels