Hello and welcome once again to the ol' blog. I've recently been playing a bunch of music, as you probably well know. It's not that I like music so much. It's just that I can't seem to stand everything else for too long. In any even, a few friends encouraged to me to record some of it, so I created a myspace music page. There are already a couple of songs up, and there is more to come. Enjoy
Raise your hand if you're sick of being abused and manipulated. I know I am. No, not with fists or any other physical means. I'm not referring to being herded along with brute force; rather, in the more subtle fashion. I mean, when people convince you that their actions and attitudes towards you are correct or justified, while in reality they're not. When people respect you so little that you have become just another object in their lives, as if you were a piece of furnature or a painting on the wall rather than a person. When people have overstepped their bounds so much and are now so accustomed to doing so that they get angry when you attempt to assert yourself. I mean people who get a hard-on when they know they can get you fired-up without putting forth the slightest bit of effort. I'm talking about functioning, psychological 2 year olds who have learned to say 'mine' in 1000 different ways and get away with it.
Italy is full of people who will treat you like this if you let them. I have encountered endless numbers of them. The social dynamics of Italian people are complex. It is like warfare, strategic, highly-tuned and calibrated. If you do not know the rules of the game, many Italians will pick up on that immediately and make a floor-mat of you. Honesty is not considered a virtue in Italy. In fact, it is a vice. If you cheat someone or cut a corner in any respect, it is considered clever. It does not matter the cost. Let me repeat that. It does not matter the cost. That's why the country is going to shit. No one wants to work, the streets are filthy, half of the economy is black-market, petty criminals govern the people, and the people knowingly and somehow willingly vote for them. The list goes on and on, and there is no hope in sight.
This is the life of an American living in Rome. I hope I'm not the only one who makes these observations. If I am. Then either I am crazy or everyone else is so used to it that it has become their 'normal.'
I'm tired of it.
"That blog is supposed to be about Rome?!" A friend reminded me the other day of an important fact: I set out to write about my adventures in Rome. I've been a bad blogger and neglected to do so. I haven't even posted in two months. Sigh...what's a boy to do? Stay tuned for some new posts...about real stuff.
Ya, we'll take an order of chicken fried rice, some sweet and sour chicken, and... oh ya, 10 million of yer women folk.
Mock anchorman Steven Colbert made his mark on history by fecisciously inventing a word during his inaugural broadcast of the Colbert Report. This word has been added into Webster's Dictionary and was awarded the Word of the Year Award in 2005 by the American Dialect Society. Behold.
Scientists claim to have observed a particle moving faster than the speed of light. This would, of course, have great repurcussions upon the way in which we understand the universe, evidencing a hole in the special theory of relativity. I don't really understand it so much, but here is the basic claim.
I recently came upon a 3-minute comedy news show, which is updated every weekday. The host is Steve Tatham, a writer for Disney Studios with a fair amount of wit. Enjoy The Ointment.
P.s. Do not apply to sensitive areas.
The Director of the GOA warns us of fatal flaws in US society and claims that she is bound to fall just as the great Roman Empire once did. Is he right in his predictions?
The following is an actual question given on a University of Washington Chemistry mid-term.
The answer by one student was so "profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, now why we have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.
Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?
Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.
One student, however, wrote the following:
First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will never leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.
As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different Religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not typically belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell.
With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.
This gives two possibilities:
1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.
2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.
If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa, (Cheerleader Captain and Class Valedictorian) during my Freshman year that, "it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you", and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night and again this morning, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.
The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct...leaving only Heaven, and thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why Teresa kept
shouting "Oh my God!"
THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A"
In honor of the first day of August and my glass of wine, I felt it appropriate to share with you my ever so profound observations of the cultural differences between Germany and the US. Ouila.
5. Discipline. There's no one who does straight down the line like the Germans. Americans, on the other hand, tend to stick to the more important aspects of life...like Paris Hilton.
4. Car maintanence. So many spotless, minimal exhaust VW's and Beemers you'll get dizzy trying to count them all as they pass by.
3. Bikes. In larger German cities, nearly everyone owns a bike. It doesn't matter if it's a fem-bike either, men can ride it. Take my bike for example, it's pink and black, and that takes nothing at all away from my masculinity... Hey, shut up!!! I found it in the basement ok. It was free man...it was free.
2. Fashion. Deutschland is the only place that I know of where it's still cool or at least acceptable to wear spandex running shorts, fanny packs, roller blade to work, and sport a bright yellow mohock in a high school classroom. That's what we call true freedom my friends. Who could ask for anything more?
1. Alcoholism. Your average bar fly in the States is like Oma's slow Tuesday evening in Deutschland.
"Freedom honors and unleashes human creativity -- and creativity determines the strength and wealth of nations." -George W. Bush, Nov. 2003.
Freedom. What a meaningful word! It opens up a wealth of significance for so many in the span of just two syllables. Free-dom. No word is used more often, I imagine, in the US political realm, and yet does our President know what he says when he makes such comments? Do we understand what he wants to tell us? Are we on the same page? It's not clear to me that we are. Does freedom lead us to allow for anything? Should we encourage human expression in any capacity? Let's say we take Bush out of the picture and explore the notion of creative freedom.
I've mentioned before my stance on human sensibilities. Everyone has a sore spot or two, just as everyone has prejudices which are liable to offend. This is a reality that we all must confess to be true at the risk of missing the boat to social progress. Where does that leave us with creative freedom? It is much easier for us to advocate freedom when it is we who do the offending than if the tables were to turn. Nevertheless, we cannot pick and choose when it comes to this basic freedom. As it turns out, one man's trash is another man's treasure. We should not, however, stoop to censorship if a man's treasure is trashed. Censorship does not achieve anything beyond the cultivation of fear and alienation. It is riddled with a lack of trust in society. If what Bush said on that fateful day has any weight, we ought to celebrate the human spirit. If you agree, are you prepared to face the results? One such consequence appears as follows: My Sweet Lord.
Ought the only governance of human expression be self-governance? Freedom. What a meaningful word indeed.
As most of you know I'm in Munich, Germany for the summer. I'd like to able to explain to you perfectly the wonders that I've been through in my time here so far. Begrudgingly, I admit the limitations at hand. My stay is only three weeks old, and already I've learned and experience so much. It has been the best of times. It has been the worst of times, but for the most part it's been fantastic. I fulfilled a dream of mine just the other day. My flat mate invited me out with some of her friends. I didn't think much of it at first. This wasn't out of the ordinary. She had invited me to hang with various friends before. So, I got dressed and shortly thereafter we were out the door. I didn't realize it until I had trudged through the lines at the beer garden nearby what was actually taking place. Surrounded completely by Germans, I was drinking, chatting, and singing away in a Baverian beer garden. With my massive Steinkrug mug (out of which you drink by placing your hand through the handle and sort of forklifting it up towards your mouth) in hand and a bratwurst on my plate, I soon found myself in a Baverian wonderland. If you've never had this experience, I recommend it highly. The lovely atmosphere was enough to take away from the frustrations of not speaking fluent German. In case you havn't studied the language, here are some words by Mark Twain that will tune you in a bit to the world of grrrr that is German. In short, come one come all to Germany, the land of thinkers and poets (oh ya, and beer).
I want so badly to like Neo-Marxists. I do. They just won't let me. Take Jürgen Habermas for a brief word: hier to the Frankfurt school, world-renound voice on politics and international relations, likely the most significant living philosopher. His accomplishments both in the academic world and with successful globalization efforts are remarkable. There seems no reason that I should have a problem with him. Yet last year he published a little piece called Religion in the Public Sphere, which ruffled quite a many feather. For the most part, however, it was received well in academia, well enough to earn him the Holberg International Memorial Prize, whose first winner was Julia Kristeva.
As a blanket statement, the fundamental notion of Habermas is appealing. In watered-down terms, Habermas' idea is that in order to come upon the truth of anything, we have to talk about it. We are not, however, meant to simply talk arbitrarily, but rather to strive to fight fair when we discuss such matters. He thus puts an ethical intonation on public discourse. The point which is emphasised here is that truth does not merely concern truth, but also the relationships between those who are striving for it. Many can agree: the paradigm is practical and engaging. His interests and the problems to which he seeks solutions are also quite similar to mine.
His most unquieting claim, in any case, is that religion has no place in such discourse. The idea at work here is that though people may have religious motivations for making their decisions or for voting in a certain way, these faith-based reasons are incoherent in the public sphere and obscure what should be clearly expressable in other terms. This is secularization at its best. It seems a bit unfair, though, to assume that religious people and their ideas are meaningless in the political realm, or in any forum, and beyond that, that they should not be heard by the public ear. Perhaps faith should not be the driving force behind politics, but this does not and must not necessitate the exclusion of religion. That position would hold what it calls communicative reason on a pedistal. It seems contradictory to say that this paradigm (exhaulted ever so religiously I might add) denies a usefull role to religion.
All cultures in all eras have had religion. The attempt to go beyond himself is a fundamental part of man. If this were not so, then politics would not even exist naturally. It would have to be forced upon us. Man has a spiritual nature, so why can we not discuss, for example, a person's dignity in light of different religious traditions? Reason is not the only facet of human life that produces meaning. I would then ask you Mr. Habermas, what reason do you have for completely eradicating religion from your ideal discourse? It doesn't seem justified even by your own ideals. And let's face it, though vehemently against religion on paper, Karl Marx was himself a great prophet, and his vision for the future was highly in tune with the Hebrew understanding of justice following the Babylonian Exile. What gives?
While it may not be apparent, I do make a conscious effort to be sensative to international news and various political issues which effect both the US and the world at large. I do try. Now, will the BBC or CNN be calling me up as a news analyst any time soon? Not likely. Just the other day, in an attempt to check up on the global buzz, I picked up the latest copy of The Economist, a moderately priced, world-savey news source out of London. There, on the cover, appeared a red-white-blue print semi-automatic handgun. The headline above read "America's Tragedy." Gripping, eh? Nough' said. I had to get it. So, I flipped immediately to the cover story and read. The writer's comments were, to my surprise, more discriptive than evaluative. He was quite fair to the public struggle between basic freedoms and gun control in American politics (as well as that at the cloak-and-daggar level). The opening page was, of course, a retelling of the brutal murders at Virginia Polytechnical Institute. With this, he then raised some important questions in a segue to the facts on civilian murders with fire-arms in the last 30 years, etc. At the end of the article, he nudged readers to re-evaluate their view of both sides of the aisle on the issue: Democrats and their short-lived vendetta against guns and hyper-sensative NRA members who react as if they were being completely disarmed each time someone even mentions the word gun. He then went on to make a not so subtle mockery of the Democrat's more recent exaltation of pro-gun candidates. Hardly atypical of a European writer.
What struck me most, though, was the persuasive force of the article without making an extreme, self-aggrandizing claim about gun control. I must say. Using the events in Blacksburg, VA as a springboard into his article was a rather engaging move. The oldest trick in the book: emotive appeal to raise crucial questions. In this case, however, he did not over-state what took place, nor did he have to. All he had to do was describe. Good. I hope we need no convincing. We must re-think gun politics. Documentaries such as 'Bowling for Columbine' and the like have previously created waves of activism, but politics based upon sensation tend to foster polarization rather than dialogue and tend also not to stick. The line between hyper-activism and fanaticism is blurry. I mean, who doesn't have a friend that was once a walking Michael Moore transcript? Mr. Moore and I agree that it's great to see people passionate about issues that effect both the greater populus and the margianalized. I just hope that the sensible doesn't get drowned in the sensational.
"Welcome, to the desert of the real," says Morpheus to newly-awoken friend Thomas Anderson in the film The Matrix. Anderson's skin is a blinding white hue, and all across his spine, head, and chest nodes arise out of his body, naked and exposed, to the surface. The nodes lead into his cranal cavity and central nervous system; they are signs of a world that once existed for Anderson, they are the result of a complex system of wiring and mechanical configuration which guided, perhaps even controlled, his brain waves and bodily functions since the moment of his birth. He has been used his entire life. The only value that Anderson took was proportionate to what he was able to produce for an energy-based, machine-lead infrastructure. "Why do my eyes hurt?" Anderson says as he attempts to focus his vision, distorted and blurred from decades of stasis. "Because you have never used them," is Morpheus' reply. "Because you have never used them."
You see, Mr. Anderson never before thought to question his life as a computer-hacking, 30 year-old teenager. Prior to this day, he was a testament to mediocre subsistance, and that presented no problems to the exent of his concern. Unknown to him, there was a rich stratum of meaning awaiting his moment of first wonder, a wealth pulsing with life that pre-dates his incarnation and will outlive him, although he will pass by it and be edept to enter into it. Anderson's story will be incorperated with that of this other world. His inclusion depends solely upon energy garnered from his own will's desire. The proper place for such a will can only be his soul, and that desire's bemouned destination, the other world. His new-found heart's desire leads him across the threshold of the now, into a reflective 'other' state, and back into the now with incredible perspective and insight. Mr. Anderson's mind is no longer under the guise of a mechanical, cyber-intelligence. He has discovered, by a friendly helping-hand, his own thoughts and autonomy. He is now able to take up his responsability as human person, Anderson embodies his own limited, interior state. He realizes that he is not, as the cyber-intelligence thinks befitting, a being for the proliferation of resources, but a being in and of himself. Freed from someone else's sick remedy for individual development, he can now live. "Welcome to the real world."
Not to scare you away. Those who have made it this far are brave. Stay with me here. I have been reflecting quite a bit the last couple of weeks, and much like Thomas Anderson, the position of man in this world, even in philosophical discourse intrigues me. Shall we share in a few thoughts? Good. Let's start with the simple notion that man is valuable. No one could refute this and be called a sane person. Everyone is here in agreement, all philosophies, all cultures, all religions. From Nietzsche to Ghandi, and back again. We all have an accord on this point. But, I ask, from where does this value come and in what does it consist? Because, this is the curcial point on which the axis of our contemporary world rotates. Is it, as so many people are like to say, an intrinsic value? That is, does man's worth exhibit itself in the sole fact that he is human person? That he loves, thinks, breathes, watches the sunset and sits in awe of it's beauty. Or, is it on the other hand, an inherent worth that comes about because of man's role in a greater scheme? I've been delving into philosophy for the last 5 years or so, and I've come to a place in my reflection, albeit perhaps humble and/or shallow, that many of the greater philosophies at work on planet earth today and in the past century threaten this notion of the intrinsic value of man:
Hegel's phenomenology of spirit envisions philosophy as a dialectical history that is, through different expressions of the human spirit, in a constant state of arriving at an answer. Man is thus an agent for bringing about the truth. Marx proposes that man takes on a dulled, deadened state when he is drawn by the necessity to survive. Work and fabrication are underlined in this philsophy. That is, man is judged by his part in the production of a worker's paradise, not in the mere fact that he is human. The various philosophies too in the background of modern science, e.g. logical positivism, image the value of man in some way as a result of his role as the discoverer of miniscule and unapparent realities, as the witness to a mathematically ordered world that shows no interest or meaning vis-á-vis person-based ethics. These philosophies are ultimately driven to master nature in an attempt to overcome it and reach toward perfection. But again, man is not worthy becuase he simply is. He is valuable in the event that he acts as aid in a cause. He has value according to what he does, what he produces, (inherent) not according to what he is (intrinsic). In Kant, too, the only intrinsic good is a good will willing. And, even though Kant is the last to speak of manipulation of person's towards an ideal end, humanity is again an agent of ethics, not a necessarily good being.
Case in point: The notion of inherent human value is widespread and commonplace today. This is a grave danger. Not only on a personal level with reguard to individual thought, etc. But, on a more ample scale. History shows that people easily become disposable and defaced if they are a cog in the wheel of a machine. It is worth it. The sacrifice is sufficient means to the ideal end. Am I saying that ideals are bad? Well, let's take into account that as Francis Schaeffer says "Ideas have legs" and to accompany his thought, ideals are a greater extent or degree of ideas, which can manipulate and gather people behind its lead. So, 'Ideals have bodyguards' should do. In addition, much of post-enlightenment culture today is urged by the notion that man is not enough as he is. He thus involves himself in the creation of a paridise. Nice things, surrounded by abundant beauty. A big house, gorgeous wife, luxury. What does one to to acquire this life? He must work and work and when he's finished work some more, providing that he hasn't old money. Man is much more than we make him out to be. We have become so wrapped-up in our own ends, that we never stop to find ourself on a passage through this life. We do not appreciate man for who he is, and thus we do not value him as person because we do not know man. Just take note of day-to-day life in modern, technological socities. We drive our cars constantly, we sit in front of computer screens, televisions, we sit on airplanes, we play video games, watch films, and heat our tv dinners up in the microwaves so we can keep going and don't waste time at the dinner table. All of this we take on at the expense of a glance in the eyes of the other. In this process, we have lost our sight and are at times unable to even see ourselves in the mirror. Coincidence? I think not.
Here we have it. Rejoice! Be glad! Today we celebrate the 50th post on this blog. What an appropriate find too. Here's a video fer ye.
We hear all about violent protests, hatred, attacks on other peoples, predjudice, suicide bombings, and xenophobia from pop media. There is no end to the amount of coverage that divisive people and events attract on a global scale. How often, however, do we even think to glance at the positive that may be taking place in our back yard, and even less seldom I imagine, how often to we think to support such occurances? I mean, who knew that interfaith meetings like this one between Muslims and Christians took place on easter?
