(or) Mammas Don't Let Your Kids Grow Up To Be Grown-Ups

I must say that I dislike the idea of kids/adults as some opposing dichotomy. The notion that "children" live idyllic simple lives apart from "grown-ups" and we need to keep them away from the scary "adult world" is just nonsense. Every single "adult" was once a "child" and there's no clear-cut means of deciding where the divide takes place. We as "adults" are seemingly willing to parcel our liberties and rights away to protect "the children," but of course those kids become the inheritors of muted freedoms and pass such flimsy ideals onto their own kids.

Now after 9/11 and Columbine, we are more willing than ever to make sure our next generation grows up with as few freedoms as possible, lest they misuse it. We take away their abilities to be wantonly creative, first by expelling them from school and ultimately by chemically-induced brain control.

Oh sad days these are, my friends and cohabitants of this land! The only solution I can offer is not to deign such tomfoolery with credence and call foul whenever possible. Mock the mindset that permits such madness and fling poo at the proponents of institutionalization. Amen.

Music For Your Ears To Taste: "How The World Fell Under Darkness" by The Protomen

~S-B

(or) I Wouldn't Touch Results With A Ten-Foot Poll

While I know exceptionally little of the art of statistics analysis, I have worked for four different telephone research firms, including Gallup itself, and there are a few other variables that are more or less invisible.

First, no matter how much research firms attempt to get their sample indicative of the population, polls will always be skewed toward people who answer polls. Duh, you say, but that is an important factor. There are any number of groups who will never answer a survey and we'll never know what they have in common because they wouldn't answer a poll about it.

Second: interviewer technique. As a fairly successful telephone interviewer myself, my own approach was to sell the survey as patriotic duty and with that I was luckiest with older conservatives. Most of the younger, hipper crowd I would pitch the survey to would usually refuse or hang up, seemingly thinking their time is too important and that they are clever to have beaten me. So, that's why you liberals really should answer these polls. If you don't, you make the country look more conservative.

Third, the demographic of interviewers. Even if we don't talk about it, much of the time we can tell the race people are by their voice alone. I have completed surveys with people of all races, but most frequently they were with my fellow pale folk. People respond more readily to someone they think is like them. And for those of you who don't know, Gallup is headquartered in my native Nebraska, a state not well known for its racial diversity.

I don't really have a conclusion to this as I'm not a statistician, but perhaps those who are can use this information to better analyze the data available. Or maybe it's all just a mug's game.

 

Music For Your Ears To Taste: "Language City" by Wolf Parade

~S-B

(or) Why Rich Uncle Pennybags Always Passes Go

The wealthy in this country seem to have been so buffered by their finances that they simply don't realize that choice is frequently a luxury. Mitt Romney has really helped expose this element of our society, and for that alone I will thank him. But the super-rich are known to make defensive exclamitories like "Well, I mow my own lawn" seemingly without being cognizant of how "elitist" that statement is on its own. In this country, if you are LUCKY, you own a lawn. And if you do, chances are that, other than mowing it yourself, you can't possibly afford any alternate method of acquiring a freshly trimmed yard, excluding some enterprising youngster in your vicinity.

The monied appear to think they are actually a higher caliber of person, rather than just another shlub working for pay, and they ignore or decry anything which ruptures this illusion. They even come to feel that their tastes, proclivities, and preferences are superior because of their existential financial situation. This is also why there is such hullabaloo about "class warfare" when the spectre of higher taxes are raised. Clearly they support a stratified society, but we are not supposed to have a caste structure. Perhaps they will see reason. And perhaps we will be at a point soon that, despite all their means, they'll have no choice in the matter.




Music For Your Ears To Taste: "King Rat" by Modest Mouse

~S-B

(Or) Loan Sharks Accounting for Whales

If there is one thing I can say for humanity, it's that we aren't dead yet.  Sometimes I wonder if all the stars in the sky are the radiant beacons left by other civilizations long past -- radioactive warning posts of cosmic proportions.  Hanging in the sky, exploding gently as a reminder of the cost inherent in crash-testing atoms.  Yet there is no way I would presume to cease our exploration, or heed these neon hell-signs.  I would rather we go out in the blaze of our own madness -- leaving in our wake a legacy of destruction, set to warm some new Terra and shed light on the mistakes of those who come next.  If we are to fail, I hope it to be definitive.  I hope we take entire star systems with us in our passing.

~RD


Music for your ears to taste: "Suicide by Star" by God is an Astronaut

(or) Won't Somebody Please Think Of The Grown-Ups?!?

In our education system, we are told that people "discovered" things like "DNA" or "gravity," as if those designations were innate to the concepts rather than a given name. This conveys the sense that there was always this elusive substance lurking in the bush awaiting capture by a passer-by with dumb luck, rather than a tenuous germ of an idea nursed to maturity by a dedicated and consciously-nurturing caretaker.




Song For Your Ears To Taste:"It Beats 4 U" by My Morning Jacket

~S-B

(or) NYAAAAAAAHHHHH!

The human capacity for imagination allows us to reach heights and depths unattainable by any other creature on Earth. However, as we are innately fearful, this also expands our inclination to violence tremendously. Not only are we able to concoct clever tortures that our perceived enemies may perhaps inflict on us, but we also invent terrors that are completely impossible and still seek to viciously protect ourselves from them. Deer don't invent gunpowder to protect them from the potential vole threat, yet that is essentially what we spend countless hours of time and billions of dollars on.



Song For Your Ears To Taste: "Jocko Homo (Live)" by DEVO

~S-B

(or) Dreams Of A Scientific Ape

We want to discover what the universe looks like with no clothes on. We dream of vivisecting time/space with a knife barely there and closing the gaps without leaving a scar. We wish to make sleight-of-hand so subtle we can fool nature into thinking the queen was on the left. I'm not saying we can't do it. But it'll take one hell of a mathemagician.




Song For Your Ears To Taste:"The Birdcatcher's Return" by Boom Bip and Doseone

~S-B