Vietnam Era Zippo Lighters - Pretty Damn Cool.

Via Accidental Mysteries: 06.24.12: Vietnam Zippo Lighters: Observatory: Design Observer

"There is no such thing as a perfect ethical law."

The Wisdom of Louis CK.

"...But I was puzzled. If businessmen didn't want the government interfering in the market, I asked, why did they send thousands of lobbyists to Washington to make the government interfere in the market?"

Fred On Everything:

"...But I was puzzled. If businessmen didn't want the government interfering in the market, I asked, why did they send thousands of lobbyists to Washington to make the government interfere in the market? He changed the subject. I guess he was distracted.

Of course, as Milton Friedman said, “There's no such thing as a free market.” (That may not be exactly what he said. It's what he would have said had he understood economics better.) I think Milton was right. I mean, as soon as capitalists start making money, they buy the government, and engage in carnal intercourse with it, and pretty soon the chiefs of corporations are in government, and great motingator alpha-crats of government get on corporate boards, and form the roaring mother of interlocking directorates, and so you get Enron and the sub-primes and nobody's got a house. The freer the market, the quicker it happens. A lack of laws favors the smart, the avaricious, and the remorseless...

It's confusing. Conservatives say that it's wrong to take money from those who produce and give it to those who don't. Then they take money from those who produce and give it, great bags of it, to the military, which never earned a nickel and produces nothing but corpses and amputees. It looks to me like a choice between welfare queens, colonels or indigent mothers. I prefer the kind that wants free cheeseburgers, but that's just me I guess...

Next, why do the cognitively challenged say that Obama is a socialist? The man is an arch-conservative. (I'm not sure what arches have to do with it, but never mind.) He bailed out Wall Street, the beating heart of predatory capitalism, and then carefully didn’t prosecute those who masterminded the sub-prime scan. Socialists hate Wall Street. Obama breast-feeds it. And he sends the military to bomb every country he has heard of, which is very conservative..."

Great column by Cory Doctorow on music, cultural appropriation, sharing on the internet, changing technologies, and more.

Much more at the link.  Locus Online Perspectives » Cory Doctorow: Music: The Internet’s Original Sin:

"In a recent Search Engine podcast, host Jesse Brown wondered about music’s ongoing centrality to the debate over file-sharing and freedom. After all, the music industry has all but abandoned lawsuits against fans, and services from Last.fm to the Amazon MP3 store present a robust set of legit ways of hearing and acquiring music. The labels have even abandoned DRM. So why is the music industry the enduring bogeyman of Internet policy fights? Brown called downloading music ‘‘the Internet’s original sin,’’ and posited that we’ll go on talking for music for a long time yet...

The part of a song that is ‘‘musical’’ is totally up for grabs, and changes from society to society and age to age. The European tradition has tended to elevate melody, so we think of ‘‘writing a song’’ as ‘‘writing the melody.’’ Afro-Caribbean traditions stress rhythms, especially complex polyrhythms. To grossly oversimplify, a traditional European song with a different beat (but the same melody) can still be the same song. A traditional Afro-Caribbean song with a different melody (but the same rhythm) can still be the same song. The law of music – written by Europeans and people of European descent – recognizes strong claims to authorship for the melodist, but not the drummer. Conveniently (for businesses run in large part by Europeans and people of European descent), this has meant that the part of the music that Europeans value can’t be legally sampled or re-used without permission, but the part of the music characteristic of Afro-Caribbean performers can be treated as mere infrastructure by ‘‘white’’ acts. To be more blunt: the Beatles can take black American music’s rock-n-roll rhythms without permission, but DJ Danger Mouse can’t take the Beatles’ melodies from the White Album to make the illegal hiphop classic The Grey Album.

The reality is that all music takes from all other music, anyway. They called Brahms’s first symphony ‘‘Beethoven’s Tenth’’ for reasons that are immediately apparent to anyone familiar with both composers...

Meanwhile, the recording industry has always had a well-deserved reputation for corruption and maltreatment of artists...

I think even the record industry recognizes that appealing to the innate justice of its survival and profit is a nonstarter. That’s the only explanation I can think of for their campaigns in the past decade that have focused on the risk to young peoples’ moral character as a result of file-sharing. This is a pretty poor argument, of course: when the record industry spends half a century telling would-be censors that it is not in the business of safeguarding the morals of young listeners, it’s pretty rich for the same industry to turn around and announce that it is only suing and threatening kids to save them from a life of sin and degradation...

Back at the beginning of the file-sharing wars, during the delirious 18 months during which Napster went from zero to 52 million users, much of the focus was on the novelty of getting music for free – but there was also a lot of buzz about getting some of that music at all. Prior to Napster, more than 80 percent of recorded music wasn’t for sale (except as uncatalogued, obscure used LPs). The record industry had always enjoyed both the savings from not having to warehouse and manage all those physical products, and the increased profits that arose from limiting choice. Napster, the original long tail marketplace, showed that audiences hungered for abundance of choice.

Twelve years later, abundance is the signal characteristic of all media. The media choices available to us are staggering in their variety and depth..."

"Is there such a thing as a just war?"

Training.

7/2 - deadlifts 1x 135/185/225/275/315, failed @365 - 1x315, 3x5 @225, chins x2

7/1 - free/off

6/30 - 3x2m rounds shadowing boxing alt w/3x2m rounds bag work- 2m round defense/flinch drill - 1x ring dips, chins

"Here Comes The Boom" Trailer.

I'm in.

Think for yourself and question authority. And stuff.

Training.

6/29 - 90m grappling drills/clinch work/jiu-jitsu

6/28 - chins 15/10/5/10/10 - Treadmill/1mile 7:54 - PruFit [5 rounds] hang clean pulls, push press, box jumps - chins x2

6/27 - chins 3x10/8-2, COCT 2x8/2x5/2x timed old, bw rows x2, ring dips 3x5 - boxing 3x3m rounds shadowboxing alt w/3x3m rounds bag work w/5 chins per round break, bw rows x3, hyperx x2

6/26 - chins x20 - cleans 5x5, push presses 5/4/3/2/1, plate/pinch grip farmer's walk - 60m grappling/jiu-jitsu

"Warren Ellis » Money Isn’t Real: Money is Fictional."

"...my position is based on the denial that money does store wealth. I think it’s a semantic hallucination, the verbal equivalent of an optical illusion..." - Robert Anton Wilson

More at the link -  Warren Ellis » Money Isn’t Real: remarks for the Greg Palast event, 26 June 2012:

"...Economics is an artform. It’s the art of the invisible. Money is fictional.

The folding cash in your pocket isn’t real. Look at it. It’s a promissory note. “I promise to pay the bearer.” It’s a little story, a fiction that claims your cash can be redeemed for the equivalent in goods or gold. But it won’t be, because there isn’t enough gold to go around. So you’re told that your cash is “legal tender,” which means that everyone agrees to pretend it’s like money. If everyone in this room went to The Bank Of England tomorrow and said “I would like you to redeem all my cash for gold, right here, in my hand” I guarantee you that you all would see some perfect expressions of stark fucking terror.

It’s not real. Cash has never been real. It’s a stand-in, a fiction, a symbol that denotes money. Money that you never see. There was a time when money was sea shells, cowries. That’s how we counted money once. Then written notes, then printed notes. Then telegraphy, when money was dots and dashes, and then telephone calls. Teletypes and tickers. Into the age of the computer, money as datastreams that got faster and wider, leading to latency realty where financial houses sought to place their computers in physical positions that would allow them to shave nanoseconds off their exchanges of invisible money in some weird digital feng shui, until algorithmic trading began and not only did we not see the money any more, but we can barely even see what’s moving the money, and now we have people talking about strange floating computer islands to beat latency issues and even, just a few weeks ago, people planning to build a neutrino cannon on the other side of the world that actually beams financial events through the centre of the planet itself at lightspeed..."

Food Log.

2.5 weeks worth since I had no internet/power for about a week in there...

6/10 - coffee w/Splenda & milk, whiskey & Coke Zero, chips, mac nuts, Amarula
6/11 - coffee w/Splenda & milk, V8, cheese, water, mayo, sardines, albacore
6/12 - coffee, Splenda, milk, water, protein shake, eggs, SPAM, salsa, cheese
6/13 - coffee, Splenda, milk, V8, jamon serrano, chorizo, chicken dogs, cheese, mayo, pork chops, water
6/14 - 3n1 coffee, water, protein shake, eggs, olives, tuna salad
6/15 - coffee, Splenda, milk, pizza, beer, chips
6/16 - Diet Coke, Coke Zero, water, whiskey, sake, beer, fried chicken, cold cuts
6/17 - coffee, Splenda, milk, iced tea, cheese, water, chocolate, peanut butter
6/18 - coffee, Splenda, milk, jamon curado, chorizo, jamon serrano, beef hot dogs, mayo, water
6/19 - coffee, Splenda, milk, protein shake, pork hot dogs, mayo, cheese, Ranch dressing, peanut butter, Diet Coke
6/20 - coffee, Splenda, milk, chicken hot dogs, cheese, mayo, steak, water, cream cheese
6/21 - coffee, Splenda, milk, chicken salad, mozzarella, water, bacon, tuna fish
6/22 - coffee, Splenda, milk, water, whiskey, Diet Coke
6/23-26 - multiple farewell & birthday gatherings, much junk food and liquor, basically an abortion of poor dietary choices & no food tracking... have pulled out of that particular nosedive today.  Onwards.

Training.

6/25 - chins x21/15, PruFit - deadlifts 12/10/8/6/4/2/max, scott presses 4x10 + partner resistance, chins 2x max

6/24 - rest/free/off

6/23 - 3x2m rounds shadowboxing alternate w/3x2 m rounds bag work, 2x weighted chins + chins


6/22 - 1m treadmill run 7:55, 30m stretching, 75m grappling/jitss

"Now get me a tumbler of scotch and some hookers."

Via the honest atheist: The Honest Atheist pictures June 24, 2012

Training.

6/21 - chins x20 - 1 mile treadmill run - PruFit [supersets] 4x6-10 inc bench/bbell row, db fly/lat pulldown, dips/chins

6/20 - kickboxing [alternating] 5x2m rounds shadowboxing & 5x2m bag work, 5 chins each round break - 2x20 power kicking/heavy bag 

6/19 - 3x8-12 db press & neg lateral, scott press, bnt laterals, dips, db row, wg pullup negatives, pullovers, curls - 20m treadmill interval run

6/18 - chins x20, handstand work, shoulder work [8x8] laterals, seated laterals, side swing, scott press, iso press

6/17 - chins x20, stretching 120m, gripper work COCT 2x10/2x5, 3 sets wrist curls/rv wrist curls

6/16 - kickboxing 5x2m rounds shadowboxing, 5x2m rounds bag work, 5 chinups each round break

6/15 - boxing [alternating] shadowboxing 5x2m rounds & bag work 5x2m rounds, 4 chinups each round break

6/14 - 3x10 glute bridge/hyperx, 4x10 hip thruster/bird dog - PruFit [5 rounds] hang cleans x5, pullups x5, dips x15, push press x5, t bar row x5