united colours of vruz

Kermit in Tiananmen Square

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 12:50:00 -0300

For Jim

In May of 1989, the month I graduated from 8^th grade, 17 year old Michael Chang defeated Ivan Lendl in the fourth round of the French Open, a tournament he would go on to win. It was the single most amazing athletic performance I’ve ever seen. Chang, doubled over with dehydration and cramps, serving underhand and screaming with pain after every swing, somehow found a way to defeat the world’s number 1 player. Lendl, a 6’5” force with the power and emotional range of a machine, could simply not find a way to solve the drop shots and loopy serves of the diminutive Chang.

That same month, student protesters in Beijing swarmed Tiananmen Square to show their support of democracy and equality, and to protest government oppression and corruption. For awhile they were allowed to protest peacefully, but eventually the government sent in the military and ended the protest with tanks, guns and ammunition. From that rebellion, the world is left with the unforgettable image of a single man standing in the street, blocking the way of four huge tanks. He simply would not let them by.

As I was getting ready for high school, I was watching a world where an individual could break the laws of physics or sacrifice all sense of personal safety to accomplish what he or she felt was important. While I’ve never believed that anybody could be perfect enough for me to call them my hero, or any leader infallible enough for me to simply follow them, the courageous, singular acts of these men gave me a buzz. The adult world, seemingly full of nothing but rules, prohibitions, power-mongers and oppressors of imagination and expression, could be turned on its head by a single person. The rules could change. Systems could be defeated.

That sounded like a job for me.

The problem was I wasn’t that great of a tennis player, and my quiet Indianapolis suburb, while certainly oppressive, lacked both Communist dictators and tanks. Clearly, I needed to find my own way to change the world.

I became extremely pretentious. The forces of frivolity, lightheartedness, and general fun were my enemies. Literature, cinema and serious-minded alternative music were the only forms of entertainment that I allowed into my world, which was now dedicated to the pursuit of only the most serious of culture.

I stood in front of the rolling tank of high school life, and I didn’t blink. My blistering serve aced the world of friends and parties.

But there was a problem. I really wasn’t a serious person. I loved to read and watch movies, but too many of the books that I admired also bored me silly. Try talking about Lord Jim and the political ramifications of the phrase “One of Us” on a first date at the Olive Garden. All the soup, salads and breadsticks can’t make that pain go away.

Somewhere in my quest to stand-up to the marching hordes of conformity and ignorance, I defeated myself, burying my personality under a mountain of words and thoughts, none of which were connected to any real feeling. Slowly, it dawned on me that even though I was amazingly conversant in literature and cinema that I just wasn’t myself, and I hadn’t been since I graduated from eighth grade.

The real breakthrough moment, what I soon learned is an epiphany, came during summer vacation in college, on the same couch where six or seven years before I watched the world change at Roland Garros and Tiananmen Square.

PBS was showing a tribute to Jim Henson, who had died when I was 15, almost a year after I graduated 8^th grade. I barely noticed his death, even though he invented a world that allowed me to tell time at the age of 2 ½, to read the newspaper at 3 and to be able to understand love, happiness, sadness and death as all a part of the process of growing up and being alive, before I hit kindergarten.

On the PBS tribute, the Muppets were very concerned because Kermit was nowhere to be found, and they weren’t sure if he was ever going to come back. Despite all of the years I spent trying to shed my childhood; I simply could not accept a world in which Kermit the Frog was dead. I knew how Michael Chang felt against Lendl, the Chinese protester against the tank. Kermit the Frog cannot be dead. I literally felt the oxygen leave my body.

Then, he appeared. The Muppets cheered, and I let out a shout. The world made sense again. The creaky, ponderous adult person I had become had been defeated by the power of Kermit the Frog.

Jim Henson, from all accounts a mild-mannered, laid-back guy, spent his life standing in front of the Ivan Lendl’s and the fascist tanks that want to squash the spirit of children, the oppressive legions who believe that silence and compliance equal goodness and that happiness is sign of a trouble. For Henson, being an educated, intelligent and successful person meant more than following the rules and getting good grades. It means being truly, fully alive. He taught me, and millions of others, that life is not meant to be studied and perfected. It’s meant to be lived.

When all of this is over and you’ve graduated from your last graduation, no one will remember you as a report card, a batting average, a standardized test score, a GPA, a thesis, a salary, a resume, a bank account, a credit report, a stock portfolio, a piece of real-estate, a country-club membership or anything else that can be obtained. You are none of these things. You are not even the sum of these things. You are the holder, the controller and possessor of a life. The world will send tanks and blistering forehands to stop you from living it they way you need to live it. Stand up to them, beat them with drop shots, and always remember that it may not be easy being green, but if green is what you are, be the most amazing green you can be.

Executive Order 10730, September 24, 1957 –via...

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 12:18:30 -0300

Executive Order 10730, September 24, 1957

–via todaysdocument

President Dwight Eisenhower issued this executive order to enforce his Presidential Proclamation 3204, from the previous day. Intended to restore peace and order during the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School, Eisenhower’s order placed the Arkansas National Guard under Federal control and sent 1,000 U.S. Army paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division to assist them.

"As a defense against the Witch-doctory of Hegel, who claimed universal omniscience, the scientist..."

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 12:17:08 -0300

“As a defense against the Witch-doctory of Hegel, who claimed universal omniscience, the scientist was offered the combined neo-mystic Witch-doctory and Attila-ism of the Logical Positivists. They assured him that such concepts as metaphysics or existence or reality or thing or matter or mind are meaningless—let the mystics care whether they exist or not, a scientist does not have to know it; the task of theoretical science is the manipulation of symbols, and scientists are the special elite whose symbols have the magic power of making reality conform to their will (“matter is that which fits mathematical equations”). Knowledge, they said, consists, not of facts, but of words, words unrelated to objects, words of an arbitrary social convention, as an irreducible primary; thus knowledge is merely a matter of manipulating language. The job of scientists, they said, is not the study of reality, but the creation of arbitrary constructs by means of arbitrary sounds, and any construct is as valid as another, since the criterion of validity is only “convenience” and the definition of science is “that which the scientists do.” But this omnipotent power, surpassing the dreams of ancient numerologists or of medieval alchemists, was granted to the scientist by philosophical Attila-ism on two conditions: a. that he never claim certainty for his knowledge, since certainty is unknown to man, and that he claim, instead, “percentages of probability,” not troubling himself with such questions as how one calculates percentages of the unknowable; b. that he claim as absolute knowledge the proposition that all values lie outside the sphere of science, that reason is impotent to deal with morality, that moral values are a matter of subjective choice, dictated by one’s feelings, not one’s mind.”

- Ayn Rand (via the-capitalist:logicallypositive:letterstomycountry)

this is a complete butchering of logical positivism, a misunderstanding of Godels Incompleteness Theorem and a straw man but okay. Logical Positivism eventually was proven invalid by Quine, but not for the reasons Rand lists.

vruz: this is the sort of thing Sarah Palin would write if she decided to portray herself as a philosopher. I shudder at the thought a new generation of idiots in 50 or 100 years from now will pick Palin’s books and do the same other idiots did for Ayn Rand.

Scientists Glimpse Images In Your Mind TPM IdeaLab Reading...

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 11:54:10 -0300

Scientists Glimpse Images In Your Mind

TPM IdeaLab

Reading another person’s mind is impossible. But it is now possible to see what’s going on in there visually, thanks to scientists at the University of California-Berkeley, who on Thursday announced they had managed to decode the brain signals of three individuals into watchable movies. YouTube movies, to be exact.

The team of neuroscience researchers led by UC professor Jack Gallant accomplished the incredible feat using an MRI machine to record the brain signals of three subjects - three members of their research team, in fact - while the subjects watched movie trailers.

Then, the team took the recorded brain signals and ran them through a database of 18-million-seconds of random YouTube clips, but specifically didn’t include clips of the trailers that the subjects had been watching in the first place.

Berkley’s computer program was able to pick out new clips visually similar to the subjects’ brain imagery and mash them together into composites, creating eerie, hallucinatory new movies that replicate with startling accuracy the exact scenes that subjects saw in the trailers, frame-for-frame.

– read more –

vruz: oh look, there’s offensive communistic-vietcong-muslim-northkorean-indigenousamerican-mexican-martian images in your mind! pre-emptively sent to jail!

Saturday morning. Our hero starts his day with his...

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 11:40:03 -0300

Saturday morning. Our hero starts his day with his characteristic, proven dynamism.

lectorconstante sez:Sábado naciente. Nuestro héroe inicia la jornada con su característico y probado dinamismo.

(lo pinta Antonio López)

Small Dictators, Big Bots

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 11:24:41 -0300

Small Dictators, Big Bots:

Slate

vruz: dear former sheep friend, here’s some utter extremism from a plain vanilla microsoft-operated website. maybe now a mainstream operation tells it like it is your authoritarian senses will be more inclined to trust what they say.

We are ruled, in effect, by small dictators and big bots. And this unelected, inefficient, and sometimes-petty tyranny is throttling the growth of a vibrant, healthy Internet and fuels many problems ranging from inane “real name” policies on sites like Google+—where people can be asked for official proof of identity if their account is flagged as a nickname—to major disruptions in connectivity. This is terrible because the Internet is not just any widget—it’s increasingly the heart of our networked commons. Dominance of a bad business model on the Internet doesn’t just result in bad products; it results in unhealthy social dynamics.

Take the Yahoo hiccup: What likely happened was that the offending URL, https://occupywallst.org, was added to a spam filter master file. (Maybe this was a politically motivated act. More likely, was just random error. In either case, it demonstrates the problem.) Most platforms rely on centralized huge databases of spam originators that are heavily automated and run by very small numbers of actual people. A long time can pass before an error is caught and a human is tasked to intervene and recalibrate the system.

John Coltrane (September 23, 1926 – July 17, 1967) h/t...

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 03:16:00 -0300

John Coltrane

(September 23, 1926 – July 17, 1967)

h/t reinventionoftheprintingpress

John Coltrane - My Favorite Things h/t...

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 03:15:00 -0300

John Coltrane - My Favorite Things

h/t reinventionoftheprintingpress

4CP vruz: fucking tumblr hipsters stole it from 4CP without...

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 03:04:00 -0300

4CP

vruz: fucking tumblr hipsters stole it from 4CP without crediting him. I hate such bad blogging form. it takes an awful lot of work to scan and curate comics. maybe 4CP doesn’t mind it, but I do. just spoilt kids, and bad manners. disgusting.

Bible FanFiction –via vela:Carefully approaching a...

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 02:39:58 -0300

Bible FanFiction

–via vela:Carefully approaching a potential internet wormhole…

vruz: the bible has always been kind of crowdsourced anyway, right?

the theo-military-industrial complex.

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 02:25:50 -0300

the theo-military-industrial complex.

Holy S**t! It's fascist picture story time!!

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 02:22:25 -0300

Holy S**t! It's fascist picture story time!!:

2005-09-02

vruz: a refresher. theo-military-industrial recruitment, Lexington KY Baptist Church.

Scientists discover virus that kills all types of breast cancer ‘within seven days’

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 02:11:41 -0300

Scientists discover virus that kills all types of breast cancer ‘within seven days’:

The Raw Story

Scientists at the Penn State College of Medicine said this week they have discovered a virus that is capable of killing all types of breast cancer “within seven days” of first introduction in a laboratory setting.

The virus, known as adeno-associated virus type 2 (AAV2), is naturally occurring and carried by up to 80 percent of humans, but it does not cause any disease.

Researchers learned of its cancer-killing properties in 2005, after Penn State scientists observed it killing cervical cancer cells. They also found that women who carried the AAV2 virus and human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes cervical cancer, had a lower propensity to develop cervical cancer.

When combined in a lab recently, AAV2 eradicated all the breast cancer cells “within seven days,” according to researchers. Better still, it proved capable of wiping out cancer cells at multiple stages, negating the need for differing treatments used today.

“If we can determine which viral genes are being used, we may be able to introduce those genes into a [therapy],” explained Penn State research associate Samina Alam. “If we can determine which pathways the virus is triggering, we can then screen new drugs that target those pathways. Or we may simply be able to use the virus itself.”

feeding the working class the right instincts to become an easy...

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 02:10:00 -0300

feeding the working class the right instincts to become an easy recruit fighting the billionaires’ wars abroad. it’s the theo-military-industrial complex.

–via ih8religion

"I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself..."

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 23:00:23 -0300

“

I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry.

Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it’s just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.

”

- Ray Bradbury, Green Shadows, White Whale (via liquidnight)

LIFE: "how can you not love zooey deschanel?"

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 22:59:12 -0300

vruz: uhmm… how about, like this?

You make my heart sing

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 22:20:00 -0300

You make my heart sing

Wild Thing –via retro2go:jimi ‘68

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 22:17:57 -0300

Wild Thing

–via retro2go:jimi ‘68

Berlin, Germany –via ryking:euralmanac: Members of the...

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 22:04:00 -0300

Berlin, Germany

–via ryking:euralmanac:

~~Members of the Catholic clergy wait for the arrival of Pope Benedict XVI before a Holy Eucharist at the Olympic stadium~~ (via guardian.co.uk)

“Members of a homophobic group who ironically have vowed to never have sex with women wait for the arrival of a man who wears silly hats and dresses who will feed them the flesh and the blood of a magical man who allegedly lived over 2,000 years ago and who was also his own son.”

vruz: and don’t forget he’s also a bird, who impregnated the mother of the son. yes, the son is both the son and the bird who impregnated his own mother. it’s like marty mcfly having a *successful* date with his own mother, but marty mcfly is also a dove. zoophiliac and incestuous connotations aside, the paradox alone is already crazy, right?

"Perry said he’s in favor of making English the official language of the U.S. Perhaps he should..."

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 21:03:01 -0300

“Perry said he’s in favor of making English the official language of the U.S. Perhaps he should concentrate on mastering it before the next debate.”

- If you’re Perry, and you just lost Michelle Malkin, you might have to pack your knives and go home (via aatombomb)

vruz: and the Malkin award goes to… Michelle Malkin. it may be the first time that somebody’s abuse of the english language prevents her from supporting wondrous acts of political prestidigitation.