1. 19 August 2008

    Farewell, My Subaru

    49 days ago

    Journalist chronicles his transplantation into rural New Mexico with the goal of going green, almost cold–turkey. Solar electricity, water from a well, a veggie oil diesel truck conversion, goats chickens and a big garden. He even manages to find happiness and family. A good story.

    I’ve always wanted to try something like this. Particularly the computer nerd aspect of it: I’ll never pull a Thoreau so much as wait out for super–wifi that’ll let me bring an internet connection and solar powered computer paraphernalia into the sticks with me. The author has a website. Gotta figure out how to make that work. Overall a quick inspiring fun read.

  2. 26 July 2008

    Edible Estates

    73 days ago

    Attack on the front lawn. A not–all–that–interesting book, but on an interesting trend. My family’s house is on a double lot, roughly 80 feet wide. With front and back yards there’s very likely enough area that we could grow half of the food we eat in the summer. Being in minnesota would limit our choices a bit, but we could get over it and it’s not like there isn’t a grocer 5 minutes away by bike. But we have a reasonable green lawn instead. We have a rotary clipper—human-powered—and so don’t spew carbon into the air mowing it (1 hour of mowing your lawn is the equivalent of a 150km car trip), nor do we fertilize it with chemicals. But when you step back and think about it, the industry behing lawn care is indeed an insidious one.

    We do have a decent garden, though most of it’s for show. I started an herb garden in the side yard years ago, which I quickly neglected, but it’s still going. No vegetables though. I just don’t really know what I’m doing when it comes to gardening, and I don’t want to mess up my mom’s domain. When I get a place of my own I plan on starting a garden, but then maybe that’s just my deferral instinct talking. Who knows.

  3. 14 August 2006

    785 days ago

    Celebrity obsession grows as civilization crumbles

    I love it when someone else comes along and writes my thoughts down for me. Dare I say that celebrity obsession causes the crumbling of civilization. 120 million americans read at or below 5th grade level?! Good enough for people magazine.

    Jeer if you want, but I am ashamed to inhabit the same city as these women and their ilk1—the simple-minded rabble who breathlessly await photos of Tom and Katie’s baby as if the child were the Messiah. That goes double for those who squander their precious time and resources playing celebrity games while Western civilization crumbles from within. Syl Jones

    1 Star Trackers

    via Kjell Olsen785 days ago

  4. 22 July 2006

    The Metaphysical Club

    Louis Menard

    808 days ago

    A sort of charting of the flow of american philosophical though from the end of the civil war up and to the second world war, inspecting numerous characters in history. The 4 principle are Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles Pierce, and John Dewey. The notion of pragmatism, that we assume beliefs for the purpose of dealing with what we perceive as the world, and those beliefs hold according to how well they allow us to cope. The system operates outside of absolutes – we strive to believe in what helps us to deal with the world however we may perceive it.

    My thoughts and notes, mostly notes.

    The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks. Such nations have no need of wars to save them. William James, 148

    [Insert your own quips here, I’ve had it with goddamn politics] But read the speech linked with his name, it really is nice.

    Charles Pierce was considered an intellectual elitist:

    “Do you follow me?” he is supposed to have asked one of his advanced classes during a lecture. No one did. “I’m not surprised,” he said. “I know of only three persons who could.” 153

    All events, even those which, by their insignificance, seem not to follow the great laws of nature, follow them as necessarily as the revolutions of the sun. In our ignorance of the ties that bind these events to the entire system of the universe, we have taken them to depend on final causes or on chance, depending on whether they occur and are repeated with regularity or without apparent order. But these imaginary causes have gradually receded with the widening scope of our knowledge, and they will disappear entirely before a sound philosophy, which sees in them nothing but the expression of our ignorance of the true causes. Pierre-Simon Laplace, 184

    Laplace’s Demon:

    An intelligence which, for a given instant, could know all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it, if, moreover, it was sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis, if it could embrace in the same formula the lightest atom – nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes. Pierre-Simon Laplace, 196

    Determinism, or predestination. You only have to wonder how long it will take for technology to figure out all this elastic metaphysical stuff, cut through all this angsty human deliberation on the world and construct just how things really work. Because we are building some pretty impressive intelligences these days.

    He, my brother, and other long-headed youths have combined to form a metaphysical club, where they wrangle grimly and stick to the question. Henry James, 203

    I think I have a new motto.

    Atheism is speculatively as unfounded as theism, and practically can only spring from bad motives. Chauncey Wright, 212

    I think I developed myself into somewhat of a pragmatist early on, I don’t know if it was the influence of anything in particular, but I hold the view that at some point the human mind got too big for its britches, its capacity exceeded what was necessary to find food and procreate. So we took on this whole thinking/reasoning thing, and have vacillated ourselves all over the place ever since. See religion and science over all the years, 100 years don’t go by without nearly every aspect of the world changing (for the better? surely having changed things in such a way, we would have thought so.).

    If the foundations of human development are cast as a sort of flopping about, not knowing anything better to do with this new capacity of communication and thought, where does that put us now? (And above anything else, I think at this point in life I’d don the cap of cynicist.)

    Belief is only a way to deal with the world. (218) Comes through concretely focusing on John Dewey, having been insinuated by all previous exploration. One of my favorite american figures. The only person within the book I’d really heard of before, I’d studied a bit on his theories of education and really liked them. I’d only heard of him in an educational context, and had no idea he was more than a teacher.

    The purpose of all scientific investigation is therefore to push our collective opinions about the world closer and closer to agreement with each other, and thus closer and closer to the limit represented by reality itself. 228

    It’s all just a game of influence, whoever can convince everybody of everything wins. The hardest thing about pragmatics to me is that it’s a means justify the ends kind of thing, it removes all final objectives. You don’t have goals, because those goals are actually equivalent to whatever means you use to accomplish those goals, and as a fickle human being you conceive of means and end separately, when really they are all tied up in each other. One of the lines of thought in the book I could only half follow, but it’s fun to think about.

    When he was on the Supreme Court, [Oliver Wendell] Holmes used to invite his fellow justices, in conference, to name any legal principle they liked, and he would use it to decide the case under consideration either way. ...When there are no bones, anybody can carve a goose. 340

    I love this. Friggin justices, they’re just messing with us.

    I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water… The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, underdogs always, till history comes, after they’re long dead, and puts them on the top. William James, 372

    I haven’t quite digested this quote fully yet, but it struck me. Very 37signals, right under my nose in terms of having minimalist sentiments. Sort of an organic, way to develop, reminding me also of Christopher Alexander’s thinking on architecture (_invisible molecular moral forces_, patterns in a language).

  5. 24 May 2006

    867 days ago

    Fucking Nutbags

    I would like to quickly encourage any and all terrorists who may be out there to aim their bombs toward the desk of Bill O’Reilly. Fucking maniac. He says that american young’uns are being indoctrinated with tolerance, diversity, and secular values, and that it’s a bad thing. Who’s to blame? Our bomb throwing entertainers (John Stewart and the Dixie Chicks) and the pop media that fawns to them. Watch the video, I’m not even sensationalizing the shit he says. He actually used the term bomb throwing entertainers.

    via Kjell Olsen867 days ago

  6. 23 May 2006

    868 days ago

    Exxon-Backed Pundit Compares Gore To Nazi Propagandist

    That’s the problem. If I thought Al Gore’s movie was as you like to say, fair and balanced, I’d say, everyone should go see it. But why go see propaganda? You don’t go see Joseph Goebbels’ films to see the truth about Nazi Germany. You don’t go see Al Gore’s films to see the truth about global warming.

    We need a law passed condemning the phrase fair and balanced as outright farcical mania. Seriously america, go fuck yourself and maybe you’ll come back with a bit of sense.

    via Kjell Olsen868 days ago

  7. 01 May 2006

    890 days ago

    Loyalty Day, 2006

    WTF? I thought there we already had a May 1st holiday...

    via Kjell Olsen890 days ago

  8. 02 April 2006

    919 days ago

    How the GOP Became God's Own Party

    No leading world power in modern memory has become a captive of the sort of biblical inerrancy that dismisses modern knowledge and science. The last parallel was in the early 17th century, when the papacy, with the agreement of inquisitional Spain, disciplined the astronomer Galileo for saying that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of our solar system.

    via Kjell Olsen919 days ago

  9. 919 days ago

    'American sports are played with the hands. Using your feet is for commies'

    If you were soccer, the sport of kings, would you want the adulation of a people who elected Bush and Cheney, not once but twice? You would not.

    via Kjell Olsen919 days ago

  10. 26 March 2006

    926 days ago

    Loose Change

    After watching this, it’s hard to believe we haven’t been lied to on an terrible and enormous scale. Makes me want to curl up and die. But I’m actually off to play frisbee.

    Kjell Olsen926 days ago

  11. 15 March 2006

    937 days ago

    In a single house there is no check, but the inadequate one, of the virtue & good sense of those who compose it.

    James Wilson

  12. 11 February 2006

    970 days ago

    Man Dies After Insurance Co. Refuses To Cover Treatment

    .

    Kjell Olsen970 days ago

  13. 07 February 2006

    973 days ago

    Let's talk about debt.

    Fiscal year 07: defense spending +7% (It’s already eating 55% of your tax dollars). National debt: +45% since monsieur bush weaseled his way into washington. My faith in our gov’t? minus way to fucking much.

    via Kjell Olsen973 days ago

  14. 28 January 2006

    984 days ago

    America just rounding error
    compare to China
    We barnyard buffalo
    you runt pig
    with no formal access
    to prosperity tit
    Ha Ha Ha
    Maybe america
    go get job at wendy
    Oh Oh Oh

    In america
    everybody gossip
    because CEO government
    give all business to china
    Ha Ha Ha America
    Why you so dumb?

    China no use abacus
    use function graphing calculator
    plot time-money amortization curve
    America only know how to plot
    shortest drive to wendy

    Any luck killing fear?
    Maybe bomb anxiety first
    then work way up to fear

    Ha Ha Ha America

    China is already rubbing it in our face how bad they’re kicking our asses.

  15. 18 January 2006

    993 days ago

    FUH2 | Fuck You And Your H2

    People of the World Lift a Finger Against the Hummer. I can’t tell you how much I want to let the air out of the tires of every hummer I see.

    via Kjell Olsen993 days ago

  16. 16 January 2006

    995 days ago

    AlterNet: Chomsky: 'There Is No War On Terror'

    Chomsky on the current state of things, in an interview with Geov Parrish.

    Same with global warming. They [the bushies] are not stupid. They know that they’re increasing the threat of a serious catastrophe. But that’s a generation or two away. Who cares? There’s basically two principles that define the Bush administration policies: stuff the pockets of your rich friends with dollars, and increase your control over the world. Almost everything follows from that. If you happen to blow up the world, well, you know, it’s somebody else’s business. Stuff happens, as Rumsfeld said.

    What’s your biggest regret over 40 years of political activism? What would you have done differently?
    I would have done more. Because the problems are so serious and overwhelming that it’s disgraceful not to do more about it.

    via Kjell Olsen995 days ago

  17. 07 January 2006

    1004 days ago

    It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.

    Mark Twain

  18. 29 December 2005

    A Walk in the Woods

    1013 days ago

    Spectacular book from Bill Bryson. He matches odd quips of knowledge, very much in the fashion of A Short History of Nearly Everything with his trials and tribulations walking sections of the Appalachian trail.

    Bryson’s books really illustrate how little man actually knows. How stupid and shortsighted we really are. But as much as us humans are failing the world we ought to be serving, there’s still beauty and simplicity out there.

    Bryson has a sharp english wit, and uses plenty of it. As sobering as parts of the book can be, most of it is funny in an understated, haw haw sort of way.

    On page 46 Bryson digs into the National Forest Service. More like the National lumber trust. They specialize in building roads: 378,000 so far, 580,000 new miles slated to by cut by the middle of the century 47. 2/3 of 150 million acres is held for out future pulp based product need, the rest up for clear cutting and extraction by private enterprise via the government build roads.

    Oh, and that government tends to sell the trees at a loss. If $4 was spent surveying, appraising and road-building, the trees would go for about $2 (??48??).

    It’s embarrassing I’m willing to put up with the american government.

    I really like the flow of time when you’re out on trail. I’ve done a pitiful amount of distance hiking, only a few trips, but loved every minute of it. The physical exertion is so far above that of daily life. The only comforts offered by the wilderness are pure natural beauty and simplicity. Time really does recede – the sun gets you out of bed in the morning, and by sunset you’re tired enough that it’s not a problem to nod off at 8pm in your tent.

    There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far ot long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. 72

    Somehow that singularity has been pushed far far off to the side of the whole human ethos. How many people do you know have been honest to god off in the woods lately? City parks and ski resorts really don’t count.

    Here, the mountains and woods were just backdrop – familiar, known, nearby, but no more consequential or noticed then the clouds that scudded across their ridgelines. Here the real business was up close and on top of you: gas stations, Wal-Marts, Kmarts, Dunkin Donuts, Blockbuster Videos, a ceaseless unfolding pageant of commercial hideousness. 115

    The whole american attitude towards wilderness is retarded. For every person who enabled conservation and responsible management, hundreds practiced thoughtless mutilation.

    As the forest service senselessly enables logging, private industry all over is kicking the wilderness’ ass. Robert F. Kennedy gave a speech on government treatment of the environment that made the rounds a few weeks ago, and it’s a quite a sobering account of what sort of esteem gov’t (the american one at least) holds the natural world in.

    Everywhere, there was a kind of recklessness borne of a sense that the American woods was effectively inexhaustible. Two-hundred-year-old pecan trees were commonly chopped down just to make it easier to harvest the nuts on their topmost branches. 120

    Bryson also brings up something I’d never thought about – that winter as we know it is just the ceding of the last ice age.

    Here is the thing most of us fail to appreciate: we are still in an ice age, only now we experience it for just part of the year. Snow and ice and cold are not really typical features of earth. Taking the long view, Antarctica is actually a jungle. (It’s just having a chilly spell.) At the very peak of the last ice age 20,000 years ago, 30% of the earth was covered in ice. Today 10% still is. 196

    Bryson isn’t trying to debunk global warming, but pointing how how little we actually know about global climate throughout the history of earth. We can tell that there have been quite a few ice/thaw cycles, but haven’t the slightest idea what caused them.

    What if the quick bit of global warming caused by our great age of industry just tips the globe into a great period of glaciation? How long until the america we all love is covered entirely by ice?

    Ever since reading The Diamond Age, I’ve been finding places that we could do with more subtlety, the ability to handle ambiguity. Things are remarkably polarized. We live in the highest industrial comfort, yet drag ourselves backpacking through the wilds when we chance to have a vacation.

    A more mainstream example: we drive ourselves to the gym in order to counter the sloth introduced into society by automobiles. These illogical habits are all over society, but why?

    In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature is an either/or proposition – either you ruthlessly subjugate it [...] or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, as a thing apart. Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit… 200

    Indeed.

  19. 18 November 2005

    1054 days ago

    America is Broken

    What do you feel is more of a threat: terrorists or a government that tramples over and completely disregards the founding principles of our nation and enforces ineffective policies with mindless, out of control, oppressive bullies? Leonard Lin

    via Kjell Olsen1054 days ago

  20. 16 November 2005

    1056 days ago

    Deafening silence over GAO e-voting report, new evidence of abuse. | MetaFilter

    When the term ‘liberal’ (subscribing to an ideology, or current of political thought, which strives to maximize individual liberty through rights under law) is commonly used as an insult, liberty in essence is fucked.
    Jefferson would say widespread corruption of the voting system amounts to grounds for revolution. Tree of liberty, tyrants, et cetera. When the voting system itself is circumvented, democracy no longer exists. mullingitover

    via Kjell Olsen1056 days ago

  21. 09 November 2005

    1063 days ago

    Betraying Jesus - Jim Wallis

    Modern conversion brings Jesus into our lives rather than bringing us into his. We are told Jesus is here to help us to do better that which we are already doing. Jesus doesn

    via Kjell Olsen1063 days ago

  22. 06 November 2005

    Politics of Ignorance

    1066 days ago

    The problem is that when you try to enlighten the masses, it

  23. 06 October 2005

    1097 days ago

    Text of Gore Speech at Media Conference

    I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse . I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America’s fabled “marketplace of ideas” now functions.

    Gore alludes our age to that of the founding fathers – then it was the printing press, now it’s the internet. Before media stagnated due to the strong hand of the ruling elite, now it’s strangled by corporations. What could our situation lead to, if theirs led to such great things?

    But some extremely important elements of American Democracy have been pushed to the sidelines . And the most prominent casualty has been the “marketplace of ideas” that was so beloved and so carefully protected by our Founders. It effectively no longer exists.

    I have sworn upon the alter of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. Thomas Jefferson

    Television brought on the “refeudalism of the public sphere” (??Jurgen Habermas??), reducing average citizens to the level of peasants and serfs, manipulated to serve interests not of their own. One way street.

    I don’t like the direction in which America is headed. Hate it, even. To the point that I’m becoming ashamed of being American.

    It seriously embarrasses me that my peers watch four and a half hours of TV a day. People don’t think! People hate reading! And I can’t ignore the educated demographic – but without encouraging the entire population to be privy to it more and more people just don’t care.

    Our democracy has been hallowed out. The opinions of the voters are, in effect, purchased, just as demand for new products is artificially created. Decades ago Walter Lippman wrote, “the manufacture of consent…was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy…but it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique…under the impact of propaganda, it is no longer plausible to believe in the original dogma of democracy.”

    via Kjell Olsen1097 days ago

  24. 18 September 2005

    1115 days ago

    A Letter to All Who Voted for George W. Bush from Michael Moore

    My Republican friends, does it bother you that we are the laughing stock of the world?

    Our vulnerability is not just about dealing with terrorists or natural disasters. We are vulnerable and unsafe because we allow one in eight Americans to live in horrible poverty. We accept an education system where one in six children never graduate and most of those who do can’t string a coherent sentence together. The middle class can’t pay the mortgage or the hospital bills and 45 million have no health coverage whatsoever.

    via Kjell Olsen1115 days ago

  25. Also somewhat recently

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