Mike Starr RIP

Obit/LATimes

""""Mike Starr, the former Alice in Chains bass player who went public with his drug problems on the reality TV show "Celebrity Rehab," was found dead in a Salt Lake City house Tuesday, nine years after the rock band's singer died of an overdose. Starr was 44.

"There is nothing to indicate that this was foul play by another individual," said a spokesman for the Salt Lake City Police Department. An autopsy was planned.

Starr was fired from Alice in Chains shortly after the release of its breakthrough 1992 album "Dirt," which was packed with drug-related songs. In 1994, he was sentenced to 90 days in a Texas jail for stealing a piece of luggage at Houston Intercontinental Airport.

His former bandmates, with replacement bassist Mike Inez on board, enjoyed even greater success during the Seattle "grunge" movement. But singer Layne Staley's drug battles put the brakes on the band in 1996. Staley was found dead at age 34 in Seattle in 2002.""""

 We pay our debt sometime

wrong place...

right time, o close

Sobre dos ruedas

                              
Las-Bicicletas/LA Opinión

""Más que nunca los conductores de Los Ángeles tendrán que acostumbrarse a compartir el camino con los ciclistas, quienes ahora tendrán un sistema de 1,680 millas alrededor de la ciudad que los conectará con centros de trabajo, educativos y de entretenimiento, y con la red de transporte colectivo.


El gobierno angelino, que siempre había dado prioridad a los coches, aprobó esta semana un plan maestro que construirá cuatro veces más ciclovías que antes. El viraje ocurre cuando el precio del combustible es actualmente de más de 4 dólares por galón.


La ciudad tiene 378 millas de vías exclusivas para ciclistas en distintos segmentos que, sin embargo, no están conectados. El compromiso es construir 40 millas anuales (el promedio actual es de 8 a 12 millas) para cubrir esos huecos y enfocarse en vecindarios marginados. """

Y es esta mucha mejora para la salud tambien.

sabado gigante

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves 

Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder --

D A 

(from The Wasteland/ TS Eliot)

Phamily man

Carolyn Cassady/Guardian

""Idolised for his fast driving, hyperactive energy and voracious reading habits, Neal was the perfect Beat character, and his autobiographical writings were published posthumously as The First Third. "To sit still and write was agony for him," recalls Carolyn. "He said he'd think of a word and he'd think of 10 others." Instead, Neal dashed off free-flowing letters that influenced Kerouac's style.

The two married in 1948 and spent the next 20 years observing the Beats. Sort of. "I'm one of the last survivors and, of course, I wasn't a part of it really," says Carolyn. Certainly, there are no images of her in Angelheaded Hipsters, which takes its title from the opening lines of Howl: ". . . angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night."

Watsonomics

Searle/WSJ

""""".... as in the original Chinese room, the symbols are meaningless to Watson, which understands nothing. The reason it lacks understanding is that, like me in the Chinese room, it has no way to get from symbols to meanings (or from syntax to semantics, in linguistic jargon). The bottom line can be put in the form of a four-word sentence: Symbols are not meanings.

Of course, Watson is much faster than me. But speed doesn't add understanding. This is a simple refutation of the idea that computer simulations of human cognition are the real thing.

If the computer cannot understand solely by manipulating symbols, then how does the brain do it? What is the difference between the brain and the digital computer? The answer is that the brain is a causal mechanism that causes consciousness, understanding and all the rest of it. It is an organ like any other, and like any other it operates on causal principles.

The problem with the digital computer is not that it is too much of a machine to have human understanding. On the contrary, it is not enough of a machine. Consciousness, the machine process that goes on in the brain, is fundamentally different from what a computer does, which is computation. Computation is an abstract formal process, like addition......""""

Moral-o-metrics

Horgan on Sam Harris's neuroscientific moralism/SciAm:

""Harris asserts in Moral Landscape that ignorance and humility are inversely proportional to each other; whereas religious know-nothings are often arrogant, scientists tend to be humble, because they know enough to know their limitations. "Arrogance is about as common at a scientific conference as nudity," Harris states. Yet he is anything but humble in his opus. He castigates not only religious believers but even nonbelieving scientists and philosophers who don't share his hostility toward religion.


Harris further shows his arrogance when he claims that neuroscience, his own field, is best positioned to help us achieve a universal morality. "The more we understand ourselves at the level of the brain, the more we will see that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human values." Neuroscience can't even tell me how I can know the big, black, hairy thing on my couch is my dog Merlin. And we're going to trust neuroscience to tell us how we should resolve debates over the morality of abortion, euthanasia and armed intervention in other nations' affairs?


I suspect Harris wants to rely on brain scans to measure "well-being" because he doesn't trust people to simply say what makes them happy. If a Muslim girl says that she likes wearing a veil, as many do, she doesn't know what's good for her, Harris might say. Maybe she doesn't, but magnetic resonance imaging won't help us resolve these sorts of issues.""

sabado Gigante

Milquetoast

JoeKlein/Time:

""Public employees unions are an interesting hybrid. Industrial unions are organized against the might and greed of ownership. Public employees unions are organized against the might and greed...of the public? Despite their questionable provenance, public unions can serve an important social justice role, guaranteeing that a great many underpaid workers--school bus drivers, janitors (outside of New York City), home health care workers--won't be too severely underpaid. That role will be kept intact in Wisconsin. In any given negotiation, I'm rooting for the union to win the highest base rates of pay possible...and for management to win the least restrictive work rules and guidelines governing how much truly creative public employees can be paid.""

Mr Bakunin's class

On Education:

"""""Now we see why the bourgeois socialists demand only a little education for the people, a soupcon more than they currently receive; whereas we socialist democrats demand, on the people's behalf, complete and integral education, an education as full as the power of intellect today permits, So that, henceforth, there may not be any class over the workers by virtue of superior education and therefore able to dominate and exploit them. The bourgeois socialists want to see the retention of the class system each class, they contend, fulfilling a specific social function; one specialising, say, in learning, and the other in manual labour. We, on the other hand, seek the final and the utter abolition of classes; we seek a unification of society and equality of social and economic provision for every individual on this earth. The bourgeois socialists, whilst retaining the historic bases of the society of today, would like to see them become less stark, less harsh and more prettified. Whereas we should like to see their destruction. From which it follows that there can be no truce or compromise, let alone any coalition between the bourgeois socialists and us socialist democrats."""""

No-day

"The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness."

Lunes con CAMUS, Albert

sabado Gigante

"Do not give anyone what they ask for, but what you understand they actually need; then put up with the ungratefulness later".(Unamuno)

“Cheap Publicity Stunts” for $1,000, Alex

Cosh/Macleans:

""""Every article about Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy!-playing device, should really lead off with the sentence “It’s the year 2011, for God’s sake.” In the wondrous science-fiction future we occupy, even human brains have instant broadband access to a staggeringly comprehensive library of general knowledge. But the horrible natural-language skills of a computer, even one with an essentially unlimited store of facts, still compromise its function to the point of near-parity in a trivia competition against unassisted humans. Surely this isn’t a triumph for artificial intelligence, or for IBM, so much as it is a self-administered black eye?

Jeopardy!, after all, doesn’t demand that much in the way of language interpretation. Watson has to, at most, interpret text questions of no more than 25 or 30 words—questions which, by design, have only a single answer. It handles puns and figures of speech impressively, for a computer. But it doesn’t do so in anything like the way humans do. IBM’s ads would have you believe the opposite, but it bears emphasizing that Watson is not “getting” the jokes and wordplay of the Jeopardy! writers. It’s using Bayesian math on the fly to pick out key nouns and phrases and pass them to a lookup table. If it sees “1564″ and “Pisa”, it’s going to say “Galileo”....."""""

green Carnivores

Monbiot/Guardian

""""If pigs are fed on residues and waste, and cattle on straw, stovers and grass from fallows and rangelands – food for which humans don't compete – meat becomes a very efficient means of food production. Even though it is tilted by the profligate use of grain in rich countries, the global average conversion ratio of useful plant food to useful meat is not the 5:1 or 10:1 cited by almost everyone, but less than 2:1. If we stopped feeding edible grain to animals, we could still produce around half the current global meat supply with no loss to human nutrition: in fact it's a significant net gain.

It's the second half – the stuffing of animals with grain to boost meat and milk consumption, mostly in the rich world – which reduces the total food supply. Cut this portion out and you would create an increase in available food which could support 1.3 billion people. Fairlie argues we could afford to use a small amount of grain for feeding livestock, allowing animals to mop up grain surpluses in good years and slaughtering them in lean ones. This would allow us to consume a bit more than half the world's current volume of animal products, which means a good deal less than in the average western diet."""

A point lost on religious dogmatists--the pork industry, however unsavory does not produce nearly the environmental damage that cattle does. For that matter, shrimp beds don't either(or poultry, mutton, etc).

for a few shekels mo'

Wiseguys in Idaho

""To his Idaho neighbors, Jay Shaw was an outgoing, glad-handing greenhorn cattle rancher who liked to go hunting — at least until this week, when they learned he was actually accused Boston Mafia hit man Enrico M. Ponzo, on the lam for nearly 20 years.

“It was a shock to my system,” said one neighbor, who spoke anonymously out of fear of retaliation from the friend who turned out to be a mobster. “He always told me he was from Jersey.”

Yesterday in federal court in Idaho, Ponzo, 42, pleaded not guilty to 1997 charges of racketeering, plotting to murder and attempting to murder. A federal official said he’ll eventually be extradited back to Massachusetts.

Pals said the man they nicknamed “The New Yorker” for his accent landed in Marsing, population 842, nine years ago, with girlfriend Cara Lyn Pace. She bought 12 acres of land, and they built a home, then had a son and a daughter.""

Fuggetaboutit, sodbusters

St. Valentine's Day...........

Massacre, that izz...

""On the morning of Thursday, February 14, 1929, St. Valentine’s Day, five members of the North Side Gang, plus non-members Reinhardt H. Schwimmer and John May, were lined up against the rear inside wall of the garage at 2122 North Clark Street in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago’s North Side, possibly by members of Al Capone’s gang, possibly by gangsters hired from outside the city so they would not be recognized by their victims, or a combination of both.

Two of the shooters were dressed as crestview police officers, and the others were dressed in long trenchcoats, according to witnesses who saw the “police” leading the other men at gunpoint out of the garage. When one of the dying men, Frank Gusenberg, was asked who shot him, he replied, “Nobody shot me” despite having 14 bullet wounds. Capone himself had arranged to be on vacation in Florida. The St. Valentine’s Days Massacre resulted from a plan devised by a member or members of the Capone gang to eliminate the Polish-Irish Bugs Moran.""

Karpis claimed that Capone told him while they were both in Alcatraz (and Caponay decaying from syphillis) that Goetz had planned the massacre. Bugs Moran outlived Capone by ten years and died, nearly penniless, in the infirmary at Leavenworth.

sabado Gigante

Life is doubt, and faith without doubt is nothing but death.
Miguel de Unamuno

L-Wrong Hubbard , cont.

Scientology-expose-

""""L. Ron Hubbard may have faked his war record--
Scientologists revere the church's founder as a near-God, but Wright discovers that L. Ron Hubbard may have been all too fallible. Hubbard wrote Dianetics, the church's founding text, after claiming to have healed himself of his World War II injuries. But Hubbard's actual military records — all 900 pages of them — contradict the story. "Nowhere in the file is there mention of Hubbard's being wounded in battle," reports Wright. The Church says that it hired veteran intelligence agent Fletcher Prouty back in the '80s to unearth documents proving Hubbard's claims. Prouty's evidence, according to an archivist interviewed by Wright, is a "forgery."""""

Scientology-slaves

More:

CoS 1.

CoS 2

L-Ron's definitely a front-runner on the Quack-o-meter but in reality was not the crypto-nazi his one-time pal RA Heinlein was (e.g. peruse some of Heinlein's commentary with WF Buckley and the "Nixon was soft" crowd, not to say his support for Reagan's "Star wars" hype).  Following  LRH's mysterious death the CoS arguably became far more secretive and sinister . 

EA Poe....in Beantown

"Poe, Poe, Poe -- and po' Baltimore. A forthcoming big-screen thriller starring John Cusack as Edgar Allan Poe, called "The Raven," is set in Baltimore but has been filmed in Budapest and Belgrade. Now ABC is shooting a pilot called "Poe" featuring the poet, critic and fiction-writer -- and father of the detective story -- as a mid-19th-century P.I. cracking cases in Boston, where he was born.

Poe had such a contentious relationship with the scribes of his native city that it took until 2009 for Boston to designate "Poe Square" near the writer's birthplace. Even Beantown's mayor, Thomas Menino, had to acknowledge at the dedication that Poe said of Boston, "Their hotels are bad. Their pumpkin pies are delicious. Their poetry is not so good."

A few years ago, Mark Redfield filmed the independent "Death of Poe" right here in Charm City. Will we ever see a new Poe film set in Baltimore and shot here? It's beginning to seem, "Nevermore." .....

Viva EAP

Mormowned, continued

Can-a-mormon-now-be-President? WaPo

"""""The general public seems to be getting more tolerant of Mormons. Eighteen months ago, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life said said Romney's ratings rose after the 2008 election where Romney was viewed unfavorably by 44 percent of the general populace and favorably by 30 percent. By June 2009, those figures had dropped to 28 percent unfavorably vs 40 percent favorably.

If Romney thinks he's got more traction now, he has Fox News host Glenn Beck to thank. In one swoop, Beck managed to sweep away every last vestige of evangelical resistance to Romney when he included a long list of evangelicals, conservative Catholics and conservative Jews in his "Restoring Honor" rally last summer. People like Jerry Falwell Jr. said at the time that Beck's Mormonism is "irrelevant" to evangelicals like him.

Many evangelical insiders wondered why it took a Mormon convert to assemble 240 Christian leaders as a "Black Robe Regiment" for national revival. Beck's prominence pointed to a dearth of evangelical leadership willing to embark on similar bold and audacious moves. Beck was at least willing to step out and lead, for which evangelicals were grateful. """"