Unruly Time

The so called "chapters" of our lives are merely fictions intended to impose some semblance of order on an inherently haphazard existence. The only demarcation that is real is the End.

Varieties of Responses to Reality

I am amazed at the vast variety of responses to Islamic terrorism from the average person. What most non-Muslims do not realize is there is a variety of responses within the Muslim community as well.

1. The terrorists are Muslim but they do not represent me.
2. The terrorists are not Muslims. No true Muslim would do this.
3. The terrorists are agents of [Jews, Western governments, evil doers] executing false flag events to achieve some goal against Muslims.
4. The terrorist attacks never happened. They are propaganda narratives pushed in the media.

I wonder if these ideas would have traction in the non Muslim world?

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One good argument against Muslim denouncements of terrorist acts:


Here is what Muslims and Muslim organizations are expected to say: "As a Muslim, I condemn this attack and terrorism in any form."

The implication is also that any crime committed by a Muslim is the responsibility of all Muslims simply by virtue of their shared religion.

This sort of thinking — blaming an entire group for the actions of a few individuals, assuming the worst about a person just because of their identity — is the very definition of bigotry.

Muslims, like myself, hate such violence & terrorism just as much as non-muslims.

We shouldn’t be expected to prove our innocence just because of our religion.

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I really get tired of the lack of nuanced thinking of the masses. Not everything is a straight binary.

Charlie Hebdo Is Heroic and Racist / We should embrace and condemn it.

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In The Flesh

My previous blog contained an entry that recounted all the live bands I have seen so I want to move that entry here so as not to forget what I had already remembered.

Some unknown band.

In a recent conversation I tried to recount all the concerts I’ve been to and became proud when I realized I couldn’t. So for posterity I will be doing my best to list them all out as they pop back into my head. Keep checking this space for updates. In no particular order:

Björk (Twice but one was DJ set)

AR Rahman
Bad Bunny
DJ Shadow
Crystal Castles (A top ten show for sure.)
Tool
Sade (Love Deluxe and Soldier of Love tours)
The Cure
Blink 182
Massive Attack

Yeah Yeah Yeahs

New Order

Zachery Allan Starkey

Makeshift Tapedeck

Psychedelic Furs

Stone Temple Pilots (minus Scott Weiland )': )

Peter Frampton

Night Drive

The Midnight
OMD

Sofi Tukker

The Fixx
Fischerspooner
Pink Floyd (without Roger Waters)
Roger Waters (The Wall and Us+Them tours)
DJ Spooky

Haiku Hands
Peter Murphy
Goldie
Depeche Mode
Incubus
Ministry
Skinny Puppy
DJ Rap

BABYMETAL (Way better live than expected.)

Skyharbor
Paul Oakenfold
Phuz

Decoded Feedback
Tiesto
The Go Gos (I hugged sweaty Jane Weidlan!)
The Horrors (Easily in top 10 performances)
Trisha Yearwood
She Wants Revenge
MIA
Spoon
Silversun Pickups
Wovenhand (3 times now)
My Morning Jacket
Polyphonic Spree
The Mighty Mighty Bosstones
Thievery Corporation
Ted Nugent

Clan of Xymox
Dieselboy
Creed
The Methods
No Doubt
Natalie Merchant
Chris Isaac
KISS (original lineup!)
Gloria Gaynor
Erasure
Muse
Experimental Dental School
John Legend
Green Day
Perry Farrell (DJ)
Book of Love
David Bowie
Peter Murphy
Kristeen Young
Less Than Jake
Goldfinger
Peaches
KC and the Sunshine Band
Meat Beat Manifesto
Morrissey
Asobi Seksu
New Found Glory
Nitzer Ebb
Josh Wink
Ellypseas
Crystal Method
John Mayer
Blue October
Jack Johnson
Tavares
John Waite
Numbers
Lynyrd Skynyrd

J Balvin
Girl In A Coma
The Duke Spirit
Jane's Addiction
Lionel Ritchie
Cee Lo Green

Boris
Holiday Mountain
Poe
Tamed Fury
Ace Frehley ( Definitely top 10)
Blonde Redhead (sadly disappointing)
Chelsea Wolfe (twice)

Big Black Delta

Gary Numan
A Flock of Seagulls (lead singer's own band)

RZA

A Perfect Circle (No Judith?!?!)

Mount Kimbie

Phantagram

Justice

Little Big Town

Leon Bridges

Run The Jewels

Lorde

Front 242

Com Truise

(I am including DJs but purposely leaving out cover bands, tribute bands, and other festival type performers who don’t release formal albums and such. I am also not mentioning the opera, symphony, or other live musical events I have attended.)

Notable for their absence are the following shows that I wanted to see but for some reason couldn’t:

Bjork (During her Debut tour in the tiniest of venues! (Numbers night club) I will always kick myself for missing that one.)
U2 (The original Joshua Tree tour!! Huge regret for *giving* away my tickets a day before the show. Stupid! To add insult to injury I missed the 30th anniversary Joshua Tree tour also.)
Bassnectar (My favorite dubstep DJ but I had some clash of schedules so paid tickets went unused.)

This list is by no means comprehensive. I have been to several shows that due to too much intoxication of one form or another I simply cannot recall. If and when I do I will post here. But in case I go way overboard this time, tonight we are seeing Jane’s Addiction!! [P.S. It was a great show.]

New section: Bands I could have seen but missed.

LTJ Bukem, Recently remembered tickets I had but the show was cancelled.

Wish List:

Dead Can Dance

Talking points - Racial economic inequality

On the notion that blacks at the same income level face greater difficulties in their neighborhoods and a greater risk of downward mobility than whites at the same income level:

"Here's the problem with judging these things by economic outcomes. A racist can make the argument that Jews control the economy to an unfair degree and keep themselves in the upper 1% by practicing nepotism. After all, statistics prove that a ridiculously disproportionate number of Jews are wealthy and that they are significantly wealthier, on average, than Gentiles.

The supporting evidence would be true but the reasoning would be false. "

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/06/morgan_freeman_don_lemon_and_race_the_actor_doesn_t_understand_the_link.html

My Favorite Virtue of the Masses

While reading articles online I must peruse the commentary for angles that writers may miss. Often, what I learn in the comments rounds out the article itself with important details or counterpoints that even out a biased tone.  Crowdsourcing can be a powerful thing. The collective mind is often much more knowledgeable and aware than the lonely duo of writer and editor (add fact-checker for the better funded content producers). Many times a thesis can be thoroughly refuted in the comments. That's when my respect for the anonymous audience member spikes. I love that no matter how strongly the author is undermined or corrected, the article remains, static, seemingly unaware that it no longer has a reason to exist. That makes me laugh.

Other times however, the commenters themselves are hilariously witty. I want to collect here the better ones that made me stop in my tracks and laugh out loud reading them.

Abolish the Week!
Article on world standardized time measures.
Comment:

My father used to advocate one 24-hour standard time around the world. This would mean when the sun would indicate noon at 1200 in Britain, and 1700 in New York. Sunrise might be at 0700 in one area and 1500 further west. That way, he said, international businesses would only have to advertise their opening and closing times without specifying the time zone, and people in other areas doing business with them (or fathers in Ohio trying to call their sons in Texas) wouldn't have to stop and think, "Ok, it's 9:00 here. Are they one or two hours behind us and what time is it there?"

Reply:

Your father is dumb. 

Microsoft Has a Clever Plan to Promote Its New Tablet
Article about Microsoft promotion that make comparison with Apple tablets.
Comment:

Wife made the swap. She couldn't be happier. She absolutely loves her Surface Pro.

Reply:

I made the wife swap, and she couldn't be happier. I think the dude she ended up with is a dentist or something.

Spaceman Ace Frehley offers his bland version of Kiss’ story in No Regrets
Article reviewing Ace Frehley autobiography
Comment:

Does Eric Carr have an autobiography?

Reply:

Y'know how we told you Eric Carr moved away to a farm upstate where he can chase rabbits all day? Well… uh…. Jesus, this isn't easy…

Unraveling a fantasy: A beginner’s guide to Japanese idol pop
Article about J-Pop
Comment:

Remember Avril Lavigne's "racist" video? This is why it isn't: she was performing an honest (if crappy) homage to this stuff., filmed in Japan by Japanese people.

Reply:

You lost me at "Remember Avril Lavigne"

James Franco on Cormac McCarthy, nasty reviews, and tackling necrophilia
Interview about new movie from controversial actor-director
Comment:

This interview is the all-time nadir of the AV Club. Especially that fawing " gasp,
writing poetry as an actor." You know damn well his poetry is crap and, if submitted under any other name, would never have achieved publication. No one's putting him down for being a poet, or a visual artist, or a director or an actor or whatever. But for being a pretentious douche and getting into multiple programs he has no way of fulfilling the criteria for within the same time span, and which he was only admitted into, again, on the strength of his celebrity.

Reply:

Show us on the body pillow where he touched you.

'The Theory of Everything' Star Eddie Redmayne Reveals How He Transformed to Play Stephen Hawking
Article on actor's physical challenges taking on main role in biopic of ALS stricken scientist Stephen Hawkins
Comment:

Does the movie end before he leaves his wife and (figuratively speaking) runs off with his nurse? That really happened. Bold move, Stephen Hawking.

Reply:

Runs Off? ? ? ? ?

It’s all about the Kitty: Hello Kitty Con 2014
Article about Sanrio convention in LA
Comment:

Ok I have SOME Hello Kitty stuff but mostly I just love the idea of someone creating something that means so much to so many people!

Reply:

And do you love the idea of drug dealers, too?

How to Get Your Clothes Wrinkle-Free Without Ironing
Household product review
Comment:

If you go straight from the dryer to a hangar your clothes will be wrinkle free.

Reply:

Yeah, but what if you don't live in an airport?

Charlie Hebdo Is Heroic and Racist
A  mixed assessment of the satirical paper
Comment:

Charlie Hedbo is a little like Hustler magazine. Sometimes you have to hold your nose while defending free speech.

Reply:

Oh, man.  That's what you are supposed to hold when you find a Hustler?  oops.

Stay With Me cover / Won't Back Down (Mashup)
Video of merged performance of two similar popular songs
Intro:

Here's my "Stay With Me" cover by Sam Smith, mashed up with "I Won't Back Down" by Tom Petty. First time I heard the Sam Smith chorus, I couldn't help but hear a slowed-down version of won't back down. 

Comment:

Very nice! Your voice is way more pleasant to listen to than Sam Smith's too.
Your camera guy should try working without the unicyle, though.

Dr. Dre’s assault on Dee Barnes was cut from Straight Outta Compton’s script
Article on criticism of NWA movie script omissions
Comment:

True Fact: Dee Barnes was the first person to personally experience Beats by Dre.

R.I.P. Yogi Berra, baseball legend and wordplay master
Short obituary on his colorful life
Comment

Back when I was in Little League, the coaches gave me the nickname "Yogi" because of the ferocity I played with and how often I got big hits in the clutch. Also probably because I said some pretty ridiculously silly things.

Reply

When I was in Little League my teammates nicknamed me "Ratface." I'm sure there was a delightful reason for calling me that.

The FBI Found Emails Hillary Deleted. That’s Great News For Her—if She’s Been Telling the Truth
Article on FBI investigation on Hillary Clinton's private email server
Comment

Chelsea, be sure to finish your homework.

PS: murder Vince Foster

Talking Points - Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering has advantages and disadvantages:

"In 1982, the Voting Rights Act,  with its emphasis on Southern states, was amended to encourage the creation of awkwardly named “majority-minority” districts in order to give black voters the strength of a bloc. I believed that drawing such districts was a progressive political tactic, a benign form of affirmative action that would usher more black members into a Congress that had admitted only a handful.

The tactic worked. In 1980, there were only 18 blacks in the U.S. House of Representatives. Now, there are 44, many of them elected from districts drawn to meet the mandates of the Voting Rights Act.

Unfortunately — like so many measures designed to provide redress for historic wrongs — those racially gerrymandered districts also come with a significant downside: They discourage moderation. Politicians seeking office in majority-black or –brown districts found that they could indulge in crude racial gamesmanship and left-wing histrionics.
...
If black voters think they have made substantial gains simply by having more black representatives in Congress, they’re wrong. They’d have more influence if they were spread through several legislative districts, forcing more candidates to court them."
Atlanta Journal Constitution

"Sometimes the people drawing political maps want to break up an area where the opponent has a sure win, other times they may want to draw a district that snakes this way and that in order to gather like-minded voters into a safe-for-our-party haven. But there’s a dangerous downside for a political party that gerrymanders too well.

When a party has redrawn congressional districts so it will surely win, the real contest becomes the primary vote. Then the only question is who the sure-to-win party will run in the upcoming congressional election. But the only people who turn out to vote in the party’s primary are the most zealous members of the party — a relative minority. And that minority of zealots tends to be further to the left or further to the right of the national party.
...
Fortunately, politicians can’t redraw state boundaries.  Senators have to seek votes across an entire state, not a rigged congressional district. There are some no-compromise senators, but on the whole the Senate is more temperate and more moderate than the House — which is what the founders planned. Now a bipartisan group of eight senators has come up with an outline for immigration reform. After the presidential election, the Republican party realized that it would go on losing national elections unless it took a position on immigration that was within at least a few hundred miles of the Democratic party.
...
But if the Senate does pass the bipartisan bill, the odds are against it winning a majority of Republicans in the House. When Republicans swept into the House two years ago, a good number of them came from districts where extremely conservative groups had succeeded in winning primaries and the subsequent Congressional election. Those Representatives aren’t representative of their party, only of their little congressional district. Thus far, that has made it impossible for the Republican Speaker of the House to induce, cajole, jawbone or whip enough Republican representatives into any bipartisan deal, no matter how attractive it looked to him and the rest of the world."
Critical Pages

Talking Points - Income Inequality

Is income inequality bad? First two questions:

1. What does income inequality mean?
2. Why is income inequality bad?

"In January, scholars from Harvard and University of California, Berkeley bolstered the Treasury economists' conclusions. Parsing data from the 1950s and 1970s, the researchers, who are involved with The Equality of Opportunity Project, reported that "measures of social mobility have remained stable over the second half of the twentieth century in the United States." The researchers also found that income inequality has indeed increased in the United States, which means that "the rungs on the income ladder have grown further apart." Nevertheless, "children's chances of climbing from lower to higher rungs have not changed."

What factors retard upward income mobility? Among other things, being located in the southeastern United States, greater residential segregation by race and ethnicity, poor public schools, residing in areas with lower social capital, and living in neighborhoods with higher percentages of single-parent families." - Reason