January 2012 archive

Blacks in New Orleans cry foul over French Quarter curfew

The City Council says stricter rules are meant to protect kids, but critics accuse members of wanting to keep low-income blacks out of sight of tourists.

By Richard Fausset, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Atlanta– From a distance, it seemed like common sense: an ordinance meant to keep children away from an open-air night-life zone with more than 350 places to buy booze, an abundance of strip joints and a 300-year-old reputation for iniquity.

But last week, as the New Orleans City Council approved a strict curfew for youths 16 and younger in the French Quarter, it sparked an incendiary debate that laid bare some of the tensions over race and police priorities that the Louisiana city – which suffers from the nation’s highest per capita murder rate – is struggling to resolve as it navigates its post-Hurricane Katrina future.

 

Eh, ragazzo, I didn’t want to go this way, but we are at war.  Stupid fucking Hobbit.  Stupid fucking man.  

BooMan is pushing the long-ago debunked IAEA report and wishes that the international community squeezes Iran like a balloon to enact regime change.  

And he thinks I’m the moron.  Needless to say, I think such manifest nonsense is crazier than a shithouse rat dining on Dick Cheney’s rotting corpse.  Are you listening, driftglass?  We haven’t even finished our latest war crimes that broke us to pieces.  Suffice it to say, if we attack Iran, I rely upon the noble Persians to shove the Fifth Fleet up our collective ass, for the sake of justice.

Ideological insanity.

I want to touch on the problem of ideological insanity.  It strikes me as a Necker cube problem, wherein people lose their ability to “flip” between ambiguous interpretations of reality.

Allow a brief digression.

Jeff Hawkins, who invented the palm pilot, has an interesting theory of cortical function, as good as any, better even.  Based on the virtual uniformity of structure of the large dinner napkin we call neocortex, as originally noted by Mountcastle, he suggests that the invariable function of the six-layered neocortex is to correlate data, the higher the layer, the higher the level of correlation; such that low-level properties (lines, angles, colors) are correlated in the lowest parts of the hierarchy, whereas high-level concepts (war, peace) are correlated in the highest levels of the large dinner napkin.  To quote Hebb, neurons that fire together wire together, and the cerebral cortex is nothing but a massive hierarchical multivariate analysis.

Yes? So good, so far.

The brain’s three parts (I hold with the “four-parts” people, spare parts excluded) can be sub-divided as far as you want to go, but at Swanson’s considerable eyeblink, it goes “cortex, cerebral nuclei, brainstem,” which suffices for our discussion.  

Within the brainstem are two major parts: the incoming and outgoing processes: sensory inflow (thalamus) and motor outflow (hypothalamus), what you see, what you do; low-level stuff, but stuff that should not be dismissed.

The high-level “CEO” (how I hate that acronym) in the cortex relies on incoming data.  He is only as good as his data.  But what happens over time, learning, development, is that the high-level correlations, i.e., belief-systems, come to dominate sensory input; that is, expectations come to rule, even above incoming facts. The large dinner napkin begins to instruct and bias sensory input.  Quite literally, cortical output dominates sensory input, over time.  To put it simply, religion dominates facts, the ‘cerebral cortex coerces sensory input, in the same way Dick Cheney coerced prisoners at black sites (albeit via the triple-descending outflow of cortex).

Now that is fucked up, but that is the way that it is because it is that way.

Due to some technical difficulties and the idiosyncrasies of the Internet, mishima could not bring us his Random Japan. He hopes to be able to return next week, so do we. In the meantime our blog partner davidseth has returned refreshed from his brief Internet hiatus with the wit & wisdom of This Week In The Dream Antilles. Welcome back, davidseth

Regular Features-

• On This Day In History January 7 by TheMomCat
• Punting the Pundits by TheMomCat

These Features-

• Economists really ARE greedy assholes by ek hornbeck

These Weekly Features-

• Popular Culture (Music) 20120106: A Brief History of The Who by Translator
• This Week In The Dream Antilles by: davidseth
• Health and Fitness News by TheMomCat

This is an Open Thread

The U.S. Constitution.

WØRD.

This week’s episodes originally aired January 28, 2005.

How Many Stephen Colberts Are There?

By CHARLES McGRATH, The New York Times Magazine

Published: January 4, 2012

The new Colbert has crossed the line that separates a TV stunt from reality and a parody from what is being parodied. In June, after petitioning the Federal Election Commission, he started his own super PAC – a real one, with real money. He has run TV ads, endorsed (sort of) the presidential candidacy of Buddy Roemer, the former governor of Louisiana, and almost succeeded in hijacking and renaming the Republican primary in South Carolina. “Basically, the F.E.C. gave me the license to create a killer robot,” Colbert said to me in October, and there are times now when the robot seems to be running the television show instead of the other way around.

…

A voice-over at the end announced that the commercial had been paid for by an organization called Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, which is the name of Colbert’s super PAC, an entity that, like any other super PAC, is entitled to raise and spend unlimited amounts of soft money in support of candidates as long as it doesn’t “coordinate” with them, whatever that means. Of such super-PAC efforts, Colbert said, “This is 100 percent legal and at least 10 percent ethical.”

Just as baffling as the Iowa corn ads – at least to the uninitiated – were some commercials Colbert produced taking the side of the owners during the recent N.B.A. lockout. These were also sponsored by Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, but they were “made possible,” according to the voice-over, by Colbert Super PAC SHH Institute. Super PAC SHH (as in “hush”) is Colbert’s 501(c)(4). He has one of those too – an organization that can accept unlimited amounts of money from corporations without disclosing their names and can then give that money to a regular PAC, which would otherwise be required to report corporate donations. “What’s the difference between that and money laundering?” Colbert said to me delightedly.

In the case of Colbert’s N.B.A. ads, the secret sugar daddy might, or might not, have been Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who has appeared on the show and whom the ads call a “hero.” We’ll never know, and that of course is the point. Referring to the Supreme Court ruling that money is speech, and therefore corporations can contribute large sums to political campaigns, Colbert said, “Citizens United said that transparency would be the disinfectant, but (c)(4)’s are warm, wet, moist incubators. There is no disinfectant.”

…

“Aren’t lawyers allowed to have fun?” Potter asked me a few weeks ago, adding that he knew what he was signing up for by appearing on the show. He also said he thought that Colbert was serving a useful function. “I’m very careful not to ascribe motive to him – he can speak for himself,” he said. “I don’t know what he’s thinking. He can find the laws ironic or funny or absurd. But he’s illustrating how the system works by using it. By starting a super PAC, creating a (c)4, filing with the F.E.C., he can bring the audience inside the system. He can show them how it works and then leave them to conclude whether this is how it ought to work.”

Sponsored by Americans for a Better New York Times Magazine Tomorrow, Today.