Considerations...

Death: Did you hear about republicans hate poor people?
Dream: Yeah... What of it?
Death: No. That is it. Crazy right?
Dream: ...

Bunch of thoughts about things...

1) So the kids I look after are still in the process of gaining a very rudimentary education. The other day it was time to talk about verbs. The teacher had written a passage and the kids had to go through and identify the verbs and what they meant. They easily identified the action verbs but then it came time to discuss different kinds of verbs. It came to the verb of verbs for philosophers: to be. Watching this conversation between the teacher and kids demonstrated the ridiculous nature of discussions about what it means "to be." The kids seemed totally non-confused when the teacher talked about how this verb was different from say kicking or running. The kids get it. Why don't eye?
2) Going to Fayetteville next month. Have some people to talk to and some things to think about. I shall report back when I get back.
3) Letters. Writing letters is hard when you have a job. This is more of an explanation than a comment.
4) So, the economics post never got finished but mind you it will. I have to admit I am a little glad to see the congress pushing back against this Bush plan. The fact that the "market" went nuts (down almost 400 points) when congress looked like it was not going to rubber-stamp Paulson's plan just shows that the market does not work for everyone's best interests. The idea that trying to help people stay in their houses is bad economics (in the eyes of the market) just goes to show how absurd the situation has become.
5) Have started going back to the gym. I hurt but it is the good hurt that I have missed so much.
6) Fall started yesterday. I am stoked.

Sometimes...

When go to a place to brings back memories from your youth the world comes into focus a little sharper. You have to look at the narrative of your life over the past x number of years. Where was I? What have I done in the mean time? What am I now? You have to rember that there was a time when a much younger you wanted the current you to be something.
Have a failed my much younger self?
I don't know. I know that much about me has changed that I thought years ago would never change. I assumed then that much of me had solidified into a static being. I just had to shore up and set the edges.
But one has to remember that things change and certain choices will always close doors. This seems to just be the nature of things. But there are moments driving familiar roads on misty cool mornings listening to songs you know by heart where you wonder if this is the way that things have to be.

The End of Republican Economics...

I have found myself more and more curious about the actual components of the financial crisis (crises depending on who you ask). It is complicated and you begin to wonder how much of this money is real and how much if it is well, not. The federal reserve bank has offered almost $200 billion in relief. The federal government now owns 70% of the mortgages in the country and has taken control of the world's largest insurance company A.I.G. I will leave behind the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac discussion and talk about A.I.G. for a moment. What is A.I.G. you ask? A.I.G. is an insurance company but not just ANY insurance company. They insure all kinds of things but the aspect of their business which makes them so important to the functioning of the world markets (and thus not something we can let go away) is that they insure investments against failure. Many of those sub-prime mortgages that were given to people who could not pay them and then bundled and sold off as tradeable securities which were then bought up by investment firms to trade were investments that AIG had insured against failure. Now as the sub-prime mortgages failed, houses were foreclosed on, and the worth of the securities they represented all failed AIG got into trouble. Now, AIG has also insured good investments so the failing of AIG would have a negative impact on more legitimate, healthy, and necessary aspects of the market. This would only make a terrible situation something similar to the 6th level of hell. The cost of this bail out in the form of a loan which the government gave in exchange for control of the company? $85 billion. And you know what they say: a billion here, a billion there and that starts to add up to real money. The question is, "Why was their no regulation to prevent this kind of bull shit!?" I will tell you why. Republicans. Now, that might seem like the kind of thing that comes off as partisan but it is true. For the most part Republicans are responsible for lessening, blocking, or completely doing away with regulations of industries. (I would like to take this moment to point out that Clinton was a major force of the telecommunications deregulation of the 90's and you can thank him and congressional Republicans for the Clear Channel monopoly of today). So let us talk about the Republican ideas concerning economic theory.
As best I can tell there are three main aspects Republican economic theory: no or little government regulation, no government bailouts, low taxes, and the nefarious "trickle down" theory of wealth distribution. We will take the first two together as they mostly deal with idea of how much business the government has messing around with business. (The second two also seem bound closely together.)
Conservative thinkers (as I see it) seem to think that the political and the economic do and should exist as two seperate spheres (to go back to the Greeks, political is the government of the Polis, or city and economics is derived from the Greek word Oikos for home, governing the home). Or you can look at all of this as a recasting of the public/private debate but I will skip all fo this for the time being. Basically the idea here is that government has no business either regulating or helping the business or the market (as the market is some kind of self-regulating entity). Cleary this has not worked. A lack of regulation has led to this kind of collapse ans thusly forced the hand of some pretty vehement free-market thinkers (remembering that Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson came from Goldman-Sachs). So Paulson (because Bush upheld the first sacred law of conservative economics) has had to violate the second sacred law. It is clear that the lack of regulation that was supposed to help business that has led to the collapse of business is not good for business. I am sure there is a syllogism in their somewhere. It will also have an impact on how much tax we will have to pay. Considering that the deficit and debt are really high and that we will have to continue to pay for this bailout and a two fronted war I see little room for other budget cuts now that people will want to do to pay for all of this mess. So go figure that out.
It is dinner time so I will return to this a little later...

Thoughts on things...

Philosophical questions: I was thinking not so much about philosophy today as the questions that philosophy attempts to tackle. I was reading some Searle today and he was attempting to address the question, "Do computers think?" This is of course a silly question. Totally silly. Not so much as to whether one could or would answer a question about machines but because of what the implications would be for thinkers. Of course machines do not think in the way that we do! To imply as much is total nonsense. But the problem is what if we think like machines? What if our mental events are equivalent to the sparks of electrons along silicon pathways? That would be depressing right? I say bollocks. I say bollocks to all that. Why is this problem? What does this steal from us? What light of mysterty goes out of this peculiar experience we call be human? Unless you have nothing it should not. But I am rambling. My point being this: a great many questions that philosophers ask are actually nothing but the echo of self-doubt. And this moot points, wastes of time, obuscations of the issue, and at the lowest level screams in to the darkness that is not actually the unkown but hubris...

Fall is in the air...

There is something about the smell of fall. I am not sure what it is. The air becomes crisp and yet some how thicker, but not in a bad way. Not in a humid summer way. This thickness lets it hold smells. The smell of oak, hickory nuts that cracked when they hit the drive way, smoke from somewhere, and for some reason the smells coming from your neighbors kitchens all seem to linger. It makes me think of camping, walks in the twilight, thinking hard but with hope, Harry Potter, Halloween, family, and most of all the feeling that things are simply going to get that kinda cozy sensation. I think that this is a thing peculiar to not-so-densely populated areas. It may just be that you need lots of oak trees (as this is the back ground). I don't know, it seems something distinctly southern... I guess I can't explain it anymore than that.
I have been thinking about "The South." I suppose it was the Republican Convention, the change in the weather, and that Sarah Pallin woman's constant pandering to an idea of a kind of person. I don't know. It is an area of the country that has had a rough time. It is an area that seems unable, or unwilling, to to escape from its past. We are area that relishes in our short-comings and disasters. We refuse to let go of our "Dixie Heritage." We love to make fun of those places that make fun of us and have a median income twice what is ours. And in our own way, Reconstruction never ended. We are constantly re-building. We are never building anew. We feast upon nostalgia, myth, and a skewed sense of our history. Our love of living in flood-plains, low-lying costal areas, and in the middle of tornado alley bely not only over love of pain but our ironic font of grit and character. Faulkner could never have written in Ohio. The blues would not have come to be in San Fernando valley. And by golly Jazz would never have come about in anyplace but New Orleans. It is a place I love and a place that drags me down. It is my sun and my kryptonite. I love it here but let us hope that it does not kill me.


That being said, the food is pretty good.

This time I really am just gonna say a whole lotta shit that I might to do the other day but didnt because my dinner came and I got distracted and...

I have even gone back to my notebook (and my new thesis/philsophy notebook which is not surprisingly much smaller than my normal journal and what not)....
A)In comic book news (yes, I am going to do this). I have decided to lift my moratorium on Superman comics. I have had a gut instinct that I would not be a big fan of the farm boy from Krypton. I think this is because I have always been a Batman kid and admired the Dark Knight's reliance on detection, brains, and billions of dollars to get the job done as opposed to Superman who just had the misfortune of being blown off of his own planet to another one where the sun was a different color. Ironically it is like a man with self-made millions vs the old money. Or something like that. Anywho, I have decided to dip my toe into A Superman for All Seasons:
It looks good. We shall see how I feel about the Man Of Steel when I am done with this. I still like how Frank Miller always lets Batman beat the shit of Superman though... In other comicbook news I now own issues 3-12 of the original Watchmen run from the 80's. I actually got a great deal on them. But enough of this dorkdom...
B)My living situation. Well I am sitting in my new kitchen and I have just poured myself a stiff supper over ice with a splash of soda water and as I sup I am sitting at my new breakfast bar. This is a curious sensation because this will probably be the nicest house I will ever live in. It is suburban, clean, freshly painted with french drains (whatever the hell those are). I live here with a good old college friend who is a male. This means to my neighbors that we are gay together and must romp around in bannana hamocks and listen to Ricky Martin. To be two grown men living together in this neighrborhood (as far as my town is concerned) is a clear admission of liking dudes. This is a poster the neighbors have made announcing our presence:
My hope is to bring a bit of flair to the neighborhood. I am sure that we will be one of a very few houses on the street with an Obama yard sign. We will also probably be the only house with two recycling bins to take care of the massive quantity of beer cans and bottles we burn through in a week. But hey, at least we recycle. I also intend to make a clear statement to my neighbors how I feel about living in manicured neighborhoods by being that guy who drinks fourties on his front steps and waves at people. Those of you who know me also know that I am just this kind of dude. This gesture will not so much be a gesture as something I like to do. I am not trying to buck any trends here and thumb my nose at the retirees next door. I am just gonna be myself. Aesthetic-Nietzschean-Self-Creation and all of that silliness. But at the end of the day living in nicer places is probably one of the more pleasurable aspects of growing older. Hell, even E. finally moved on up to the west side and C moved in with R out in the up and coming hip part of BK. We all get a shot at the grand life I suppose.
C) This being said brings me to my next point. The city... I do miss it.
D)Philosophy/Work/Mental Illness/Deafness... So I cannot remember whether or not I have discussed my current employment situation here yet so I will now and then go off on a few points that I have thought about because of it... Most of this stems from thoughts from my notebook over the past few weeks..
D.1) If you have never played kickball with deaf people you should. Or any sport for that matter. To remove being able to hear commands or warnings or advice from a team sport demonstrates not only how important but also how useless verbal communication can be at times.
D.2) American Sign Language is just that a language. It is not english translated into symbols it is the signified expressed through hand motions as a signifier. It skips the necessity of attaching itself to a word that attaches itself to a meaning. This is fascinating because this means you o not have a translator you have an interpreter. You do not translate one word into another you interpret a movement that refers to an idea of a thing and then find the word in english that refers to that idea. I know this is a pretty rudimentary explanation but it points to a few things. It is a language whose "speakers" do not actually have a written set of rules dictating proper usage. Any rules in a book would themselves have been made into a written language which is simply is not. It is also interesting to learn a language that is unwritten at this stage in one's life. Most second or first language are learned in infacy when one is not cognitive of the act of language aquisition or later in life through memorization and work books. Immersion is seldomly used by anyone. But my current situation has dropped me in it like a private first class being dropped in the shit in North Vietnam in '68: I have no clue what the hell I am doing. But I am learning. I am learning the language games. I am learning and be corrected. There is not necessarily an antecedent logic to this lanuage but only being able to navigate a world correctly with it. This is probably true for far more than sign language.
D.3.)"The ontology/ethics of having a sign interpreter." Sounds like the title of a paper one would give at an undergraduate philosophy conference but it is a thought provoking issue for me. I was issued John on my first day. He is my interpreter. He is an appendage for me, a finger, my ear and voice, my eyes to see a world that is all about seeing. He is almost a faculty of my being. What I say he "says." What the kids "say" he says. He is everpresent but the thing is that both myself and the deaf person are supposed to act like he is not there. This an ethical thing. I do not look at him and I speak to the deaf person even though he has no clue what it is that I am doing. This signifies that there are just TWO people having a conversation. But it goes further. The interpreter is ethically bound to attempt to say exactly what I say verbatim. A child might ask me the time and he will "voice" this question to me but he is not to answer it even if he has a watch on and could save time by simply by answering the question. I would probably ask John the time, he would tell me, I would look at the child and say "It is 2:15." It may seem like work but it is there to ensure the candid nature of conversation and communication. The normal rules do not apply here. At the end of the day it is an odd thing when one thinks about it. There are two people having a conversation, yet there are three people taking up an ethical situation. I neeed to think about this more.
E) Mental Illness. I have now dealt with the truly disturbed in a therapuetic situation. To think like a schizophrenic is nothing to strive for. It is something that cannot be duplicated for the sake of philosophical day trips. It is the indisrciminate destruction of the subject by the subject themselves. Deleuze and Guattarri were clearly deranged... Or stupid... Or both...
F)My thesis and philosophy: I have decided that I am still going to write a thesis. I doubt at this point I will ever submit it for review at the NSSR but hey it always feels good to be doing it for yourself right. I have not only decided but committed myself to writing around 50 pages on philosophy and democracy and talk about experience in their as well. Mostly how the two former necessarily flow and rely on the latter for ground and grounding but that in a minute. I will use Dewey, Popper, The Closing of the American Mind, Rorty, and god knows what else in this mission but I want to copy and paste something from E's blog that got my mind finally working today (I find that the thoughts of my friends do more for my thinking than any book I have ever read). I will need this as cornerstone for whatever else comes. More Whitman than Dewey but pointing the way regardless:

An experience is that which ruptures homeostasis, thus creating ripples in the flow of our being. Indeed, homeostasis is part of experience, but it cannot overtake it entirely (this is death). Likewise, experience cannot only be characterized by a chaotic babble of focusless noise, for to have an experience involves moments of rest and reflection, time to take those unexpected disturbances and suture them to one's past, present, and ultimately, future. To grow, to bloom into a future that fructifies means to have deep roots that reach deep below - into the past, into the dark soil of one's soul.

I think that is enough for one night or at least for the moment. I have a bottle of white on ice. We shall see what comes from that as the evening wanes.

I think I should move to...

a)Edinburgh

or maybe

b)Nice

Something European with better climes...

Ok, what the hell is there NOT to talk about!

So I have been derelict in my blogging duties of late but between starting work, getting a new place, and just now figuring out that only by sitting on my back deck do I get wireless I have few chances to get around to it.
Ok, presidential politics... What the fuck! Sarah Palin? Really? Really? She ruins what little credibility that John McCain had left. I liked John McCain back in 2000. He truly was a maverick. His positions on POWs, torture, immigration, taxes, the environment, special interest influence, campaign finance reform, and telling war stories were as right headed as they were courageous (I mean look at that pit viper of a party he comes from! They eat their young, their old, their weak, and just about anything else they can). Of course these positions are no longer his as he has veered to the right. But this is the thing, to win elections both candidates must inevitably swing to the right. Obama's position on faith bases iniatives is an excellent example but here is the thing: Republicans can only sell lies and democrats can't sell the truth. It is a sad state of affairs to be sure.
Obviously there is more to talk about my dinner has just arrived so more to follow...