Have Frown Will Travel

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Veep Impact

Quote of the Day

The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.
- HG Wells


This is such a fantastic quote. It kind of reminds me of the quantum measurement problem. There is no way to get any information out of a system without interacting with it, and thus disturbing it. You can't measure something without changing it. There is no objective observation. This quote goes a step further by adding the more philosophical notion of subjectivity of perception. What is truth? Is there objective truth? We tend to think so. We tend to think that if someone has an idea in their head, like say, the moon is made of cheese or that Creationism tells the true history of the earth, that this 'perception is reality' at least for that person, in the sense that truth is just a model of the way things are constructed by the mind. Yet we have a deep intuition that there still is an objective truth "out there," regardless of how people perceive or misperceive it. Your perception may be your reality, but its not the reality. You would be 100% objectively wrong to believe that the moon is made of cheese. This is how we tend to feel about reality. This notion of reality existing objectively: that peceptions may differ but there is only one right answer, is the foundation that our criminal justice system is built on, and it is so almost right, that it is ok to run a society that way.

But this H.G. Wells quote reminds us that the conception of absolute objective truth is utterly inaccessible, at least to physical beings, so there is really no point in talking about it. Anyone who claims to have the correct answer, is just offering his interpretation.

Its like what Wolfgang Pauli said about the uncertainty principle. Einstein argued that just because it is increasingly impossible to measure a particle's speed as the precision of its location is more precisely determined, that doesn't mean that it doesn't still have a definite speed and definite position at all times. Reality is more that the readings on detectors, its more than the sum of all observations at a given moment, Einstein argued. When no one is looking at the moon, the moon is still there. Quantum mechanics, the most precisely accurate physical theory humans have created, tells us that this is the wrong way to think of things. The probability is very high that the moon is there, but there is a small nonzero probability that it is not there when nothing is interacting with it.

Pauli said,
"One should no more rack ones brain about the problem of whether something one cannot know anything about exists all the same, than about the ancient question of how many angels can dance on the point of a needle." If it is impossible to measure both the position and velocity of a particle, then there is no sense is talking about whether it has both a position and a velocity.

There is no sense in talking about objective truth because the only truth we can ever conceive of or interact with is a filtered truth, filtered through the perspective of whoever claims to have it.

The Racist Clemson Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day "African American Parody Parties" Outrage Part II: Racism vs Culturalism

Apparently "Paula Zahn Now," is CNN's Mountain Out of a Racial Mole Hill Watch. Its not really so much a news show, as it is a, lets scrape the bottom of the barrel to trump up some stories about how America is still a totally racist country, show. I'm not going to say that America ISN'T still a totally racist nation, because I'm sure large parts of fly-over-country actually are. But that's not really America. Its the Outback. Its the Amazon. If you starve to death in the Outback or get bitten by a tree viper in the Amazon, you could hardly have a show on CNN pretending to be outraged about it. I suppose I should concede that there are forms of racism and bigotry in every city in America, but I generally I think the playing field is pretty level.

****EDIT*** Here's a perfect example
Paula Zahn Now Promo

Anyway, without going into too much detail, I'll just say that every time I come across this Paula Zahn show, she's doing race stuff. The 1st audio bite that came out of my speakers today when I flipped through was a woman with so much make up on I couldn't tell if she was a pundit or a Barnum & Bailey act, saying, "this makes me ashamed to be white." They're admitting it on CNN now. What a shocking revelation people, white people feel really bad about bad stuff other bad white people did to otherwise good non-white people. This is news? Well I suppose it should be news that something so absurdly not-quite racist would make a white woman ashamed to be white. White guilt. Interrupt the regularly scheduled programs!

The thing about this show from the other random bits of it that I've seen, is that its so far not been stuff that's really that racist. It's kind of like, "oh my God, some kids racially stereotyped a depiction of some people somewhere."

"Oh my God, some senator from R-Tennessee is fighting to stop the removal of a confederate flag at the courthouse."

"Oh my God, some town in bumfuck has a mayor that arrested a black woman even though she didn't do anything." What an earth shattering proposal that small towns in Alabama actually have Southernerns running the goverment.


I'm not saying that of course the world wouldn't be a better place if it were truly color blind, because it probably would. I don't know however if things would be that interesting. XXX Horny Asian Sluts 5 wouldn't exist, for one. But I'm trying to come to a point. The distinction I wanted to draw today is that there is a difference between being racist and being culturalist. You really can't say that the majority of the parodies these Clemson kids enact are actually racially inherent. They are cultural motifs. Sure, there we're stuffed booties, but again, black culture, "has an affinity for large round buttocks and I cannot profer a falsehood, and few other brethern may deny such a fact, that when a gentlewoman strolls past with a diminutive waist and rotund object within close proximity to one's countenance, one gets sprung."

Thank you Sir-Mix-Prolific. The rest of these "offenses" or parodies perpetrated by white kids, have nothing to do with African genetics, and everything to do with African American Culture. You can call it "racism" or you can call it, "uh... pretty much the way things really are," to say that at least 51% of African American people that live in America, dress more like this:








Than like this:



Fuck, at least 51% of white kids dress more like that than like this.
So please don't call a parody of some retard with diamonds for teeth, a hub cab around his neck, multicolored denim shorts that start at the knees and end at the shoes, and a T-shirt that looks like a hoodless burka, RACISM. Its culturalism. Im not saying culturalism is okay or not okay, I'm just saying get your terminology straight because racism is a very loaded word. Parody and comedy in general is the best way to diffuse situations. Has Paula ever see the Chappelle Show for Christ sake? Or, sorry kiddies, In Living Color? I heard a story on NPR about a troupe of Israeli and Palestinian comedians who joke about the Arab/Israeli conflict and the successes and difficulties they encounter. They are doing it to bring peace, not to be fucking racist. One of their jokes:

So I was flying El Al and got up to go to the bathroom, and somebody was in it, but the door didn't say 'occupied,' it said 'disputed restroom territory.' A bad joke, but the point is that making light of stereotypes, which everyone knows are 98% true, can be healthy. I won't go so far as to say that what some of these kids did at these parties, dressing up in blackface being the most egregious, is healthy or condonable, but Paula Zahn, who really gives a fuck? Only people thatseemingly WANT there to be racial tension, like Jesse Jackson and apparently Paula Zahn. Anyone confortable with their sexuality or faith or racial disposition or whatever the category of parody may be, looks at these incident, smirks and goes, "What a bunch of morons. What's on the Comdy Central?"

Monies vs Money

When is it appropriate to use the term monies, and when is money better? Money is a term like water or salt or toothpaste that is never used in a singular conjugation but rather used in the plural in the sense that it is likened to be a sort of "stuff." You say, "the water flows down, not the water flow down." You would say, "the salt tastes good," but not, "the salt taste good." You say, "the toothpaste oozes out," not, "the toothpaste ooze out." This derives from the fact that you never can be considered to have just, "one water, one salt, or one toothpaste." You always have, "some water, some salt, some toothpaste."

You never have one money, you always have some money. So "monies" is a completely useless and redundant word by any application I can think of. There's never a situation where monies could be used and money couldn't be substituted.

The dictionary actually defines monies as: "a plural form of money," the problem being that money already is fucking plural.

The Media

As soon as I saw the 1st frame on CNN yesterday afternoon about the death of Anna Nicole Smith, I said to myself, "well, I know what's going to dominate the 24 hour news cycle for the next 3 days,***EDIT: try next 30 days.*** drowning out the din of anything else actually important in the world going on."


Nothing extremely wise there.

Today I was listening to Left, Right, and Center, and Arianna ranted about the media's responsibility and how this utterly meaningless and fogettable non-event steals the wind from important national issues like the Libby trial and Doug Feith being skewered for essentially being proven to have fabricated intelligence about Iraqi ties with al qaeda.

Sure sure, she's totally right and its the same story we hear from any halfway intelligent pundit commenting about the media in times of Britney haircuts or Tyra gaining 20 pounds or whatever.

But the thing is CNN and MSNBC and all these 24 hour news networks just play by the numbers. Don't hate the new networks Arianna, hate the stupid fucking retarded shallow cunts that are the American people. CNN knows that they will get better ratings and thus more ad dollars for tomorrow if rather than showing yet another corruption scandal of national importance or thousands of people being slaughtered because of government lies and blunders, they talk endlessly about Anna Nicole and her son and her lawyer and her refridgerator and all that bullshit, WAY WAY WAY more people will watch. The American people want to hear about tabloid bullshit, they don't want to hear yet another story on top of the towering pile of stories about how the government has lied to them and taken their money and spent it on making the country less secure, and how our lifestyles are causing global ecological collapse, or any of those other most-important-thing-in-the-whole-fucking-world kind of stories.

Just Kidding

How is it that people get away with saying things like, "not to be negative, but..." or "no offense but..." or "I don't want to come off as insensitive but..." as if prefacing you're negativity with such a statement excuses you of the offense you are about to commit?

"Don't take this the wrong way but, you're totally pathetic and no one will ever love you."

The other one, that's slightly less venomous but not by much is the, "just kidding," when you obviously wouldn't have said whatever preceded it if you actually were kidding. For example,

"dude these chairs are pieces of shit, I tried standing on it to change this light bulb and the thing just disintegrated underneath me, I almost killed myself."

"yeah well, maybe if you weren't such a fat ass. Ha ha, just kidding. They do suck."

YOUR NOT FUCKING KIDDING! You can't say something really insulting and simply tack on a just kidding as if that some how makes it no longer offensive.

So next time you catch yourself about to say, "not to..." or "I don't wanna..."

just... don't then. Because you are. And you know it.