We humans are really flubbing this new decade. It’s moving a little beyond just being insulting and enervating. Now it’s starting to hurt. Above you can see the prognosis for the next 5 days in terms of pollution where I live, juxtaposed with a close-up of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes the COVID-19 disease. The…
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“We’re in contact with aliens… It was the Germans who first got in touch… The aliens would mind meld and give them the technology… They’re bad aliens… Are you surprised the Nazis were influence by demons?… SS castles where they go, where the aliens want blood, so they’d kill like 20 kids and everything… it…
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A radical new approach to chess. Deciding winners by jury instead of by checkmate? I’d probably stick with the old version. The new variety, outlined in the blog-post I’m sharing below, seems be a bit nebulous for this old dog. Somehow this reminded me of the art world, but don’t mind me. I shall shuffle…
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What makes my runaway rants rants is that I write them in one go, initially without editing. I will go back and fix my more egregious typos, misspellings, and so on, but not change the flow. The ideas come one after the other, without an outline. It’s a way to keep it simple, but also…
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Anything that opposes art is probably immoral, even or especially when it wraps itself in the cloak of morality. The least we can ask of moral crusaders is that they are fighting for the highest good, and not merely advocating for their own special interests and personal benefit in and through alienating and disenfranchising others.…
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I’d sooner get my news from The Onion or The Weekly World News than from Alex Jones, but his sudden disappearance is cause for alarm. The underlying and inescapable message is that anyone can be scrubbed from social media without accountability. Your on-line existence can be ERASED, and we must simply have blind faith that…
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There are 2 inconclusive conclusions I’ve recently come to appreciate. One is that nobody’s perfect. Two is that nobody lives in reality. These aren’t grand new observations, but just the kind of thing one grows to understand more over time. It helps me deal with other people and with my relationship to them. We’re all…
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I like to stick to talking mostly about matters of art, but politics has so infiltrated the art world that you can’t be an artist without being clobbered over the head with certain ideas; and your work and career are evaluated, bolstered, or derailed in accordance with them. One of the biggest, most contentious and…
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How serious of a crime is a foul tweet, and what should the punishment be? The Crime Roseanne tweeted something stupid and offensive. Agreed. She said someone who is part black looks like a cross between the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes. It’s not just sophomoric, it’s elementary school recess time bullying —…
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Almost every day I am disgusted by politics and ideology. Recently I wrote about how you can never have all the answers, or most of them, because your relation to those answers is perpetually in flux. No hard fact has any import except in relation to a subjective, vulnerable consciousness. We can all agree on…
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Matt Damon suggested that the punishment should fit the crime, and for this thought-crime the public deemed the fitting punishment to be the end of his career. This is the sad story in which an actor is forced to apologize for reminding us that we shouldn’t exact extreme punishment for minor transgressions. The irony being…
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[RANT ALERT!] It would be more accurate to say, “get art the F out of politics”, because politics has engulfed art and not the other way around, but then it sounds more like art is meddling in politics, which it is, but that’s a lesser problem for me. I want to free art from the…
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The Claims Against Chuck: Chuck Close is now believed to be a terrible person who has committed sexual harassment, in which case people further believe that his art should not be viewed. Allegedly, he uttered words like “pussy” and made lewd comments to females who he paid to pose for nude photos. He told one…
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You can have free speech without violence or oppression, but censorship requires force, which means at least oppression, and violence if necessary to enforce it. [Note: Here I am talking about ideas or arguments as free speech, not slander, malicious gossip, or plans to commit a crime, and not actual crimes such as snuff films,…
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I’ve been trying to not talk about politics. Both the ideologues on the right and the left drive me nuts, in which case there’s barely any wiggle room for sanity between those bookends. But Donald just took the cake, and I’d rather America were overrun with screeching SJW ideologues than Donald irradiate a population of…
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Secretary of State John Kerry has been talking tough, standing firm, strutting and posturing, swollen with pride in American military power. And he makes me sick. On September 9th he accused Assad, “He sends airplanes to napalm children,” as if America hadn’t killed an estimated 200,000 Vietnamese, including children, with napalm. Later in his press…
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Frankly folks, I’m starting to foam at the mouth. This war seems like it’s going to be a huge disaster that could easily spread to Israel, Jordan, and Iran. And people aren’t talking about it. People are blithely sharing pictures of cutie kitties and shit on Facebook. They are quoting Buddhist ideas of accepting what…
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I’ve heard all this rhetoric before. Suddenly there’s the perfect opportunity to go to war with Syria, and Iran, with decade old rhetoric. Last time we wanted to go to war there was the question of WMDs. It was all about the WMDs. Saddam Hussein had them, and he might use them on US. We…
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War is business. Business is good. War is good. If we actually got to vote, war would end immediately. Our choice is grayed out. Note: for what it’s worth, I made the graphic. Uh, if it’s on my blog, and it has text, assume I made it myself. I customize the living crap out of…
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I am J Sri Bhagovwid, but you can call me JSB, or “Funny Baba” or whatever. I have been invited as a guest poster on this blog. I conceived this idea to share. We may have to play the game, strap ourselves into our seats and get in line on the superhighway to sit in…
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Examining the rhetoric of the interrogators. Yesterday a post by American Lieutenant and “terrorist catcher” Chris Simmons, arguing that the “Prisoner’s Dillemma” technique for interrogation proved the “frailty of loyalty” in people, was freshly pressed. After reading his piece, some counterarguments came to mind. [Note that the following is not a criticism of the author – who…
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