Generative “AI”: The Guitar Hero of Creativity
2 hours ago
Monday, September 14, 2009
Americans Have Been Taken Hostage
Dylan Ratigan
Huffington Post
The American people have been taken hostage to a broken system.
It is a system that remains in place to this day.
A system where bank lobbyists have beenspending in record numbers to make sure it stays that way.
A system that corrupts the most basic principles of competition and fair play, principles upon which this country was built.
It is a system that so far has forced the taxpayer to provide the banks with the use of $14 trillion from the Federal Reserve, much of the $7 trillion outstanding at the US Treasury and $2.3 trillion at the FDIC.
A system partially built by the very people who currently advise our President, run our Treasury Department and are charged with its reform.
And most stunningly -- it is a system that no one in our government has yet made any effort to fundamentally change.
Like health care, this is a referendum on our government's ability to function on behalf of the American people. Ask yourself how long you are willing to be held hostage? How long will you let our elected officials be the agents of those whose business it is to exploit our government and the American people at any cost?
As hostages -- was there any sum of money we wouldn't have given AIG?
Why did we pay Goldman Sachs and all the other banks 100 cents on the dollar for their contracts with AIG, using taxpayer money, while we forced GM and others to take massive payment cuts?
Why hasn't any of the bonus money paid to the CEOs that built this financial nuclear bomb been clawed back?
And more than anything else -- why does the US Congress refuse to outlaw the most anti-competitive structure known to our economy, one summed up as TOO BIG TOO FAIL?
It has become startlingly clear that we as a country, and I as a journalist, had made a grave error in affording those who built and ran those banks and insurance companies the honorable treatment of being called capitalists. When in fact the exact opposite was true, these people were more like vampires using the threat of Too Big Too Fail to hold us hostage and collect ongoing ransom from the US Government and the American taxpayer.
This was no unlucky accident. The massive spike in unemployment, the utter destruction of retirement wealth, the collapse in the value of our homes, the worst recession since the Great Depression all resulted directly from these actions.
Even with all that -- the only changes that have been made, have been made to prop up and hide the massive flaws on behalf of those who perpetuated them. Still utterly nothing has been done to disclose the flaws in this system, improve it or rebuild it.
Last fall was an awakening for me, as it was for many in our country.
And yet, our Congress has yet to open its eyes, much less do anything about it. In fact conditions have never been better for the banks or worse for the rest of us.
Why is this? Who does our Government work for? How much longer will we as Americans tolerate it? And what, if anything, can we do about it?
As we approach the anniversary of the bailouts for our banks and insurers -- and watch the multi-trillion taxpayer-funded programs at the Federal Reserve continue to support banks and subsidize their multibillion bonus pools, we must ask if our politicians represent the interests of America? Or those who would rob America of its money and its future?
As a country, we must demand that our politicians stop serving those whose business models are based on systemic theft and start serving those who seek to create value for others -- the workers, innovators and investors who have made this country great.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Crasher Squirrel & Joe Wilson
Monday, August 31, 2009
Friday, August 28, 2009
The Republican party is not to the right, it's philosophy is really a leftist idea. This concept came to me in the middle of the night, a dream state and unconsciousness all bubbling to the surface, anyway the Republican's are on the left. Why? Because they are Free-market anarchism (sometimes called simply market anarchism,[1] and occasionally libertarian anarchism[2]) refers to an individualist anarchist philosophy in which monopoly of force held by government would be replaced by a competitive market of private institutions offering security, justice, and other defense services[3] – "the private allocation of force, without central control".[4] A market would exist where providers of security and law compete for voluntarily paying customers that wish to receive the services rather than individuals being taxed without their consent and assigned a monopoly provider of force.[5] The belief, among free-market anarchists, is that this competition thus will tend to produce cheaper and higher-quality legal and police services including "a high-quality good of impartial, efficient umpiring of conflicting rights claims".[6]This is really the the true definition of 21 Century Republicanism, they are anarchists
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Futurism became fascism
The original Italian Futurism movement became fascism, maybe it is all about the seductiveness of looking forward , cleaning out the closet and throwing it all away.... starting fresh without the control and restraint of the past. But that is impossible, by the very act of rejection you must have something to rejected against which directs where you are going.
postfuturist manifesto #2
i am for an art (response to
Claes Oldenburg's original poem)
i am for an art of aesthetics
i am for an art of creative self-expression
i am for an art that bends over backwards to make itself understood
i am for an art that dips its brush into the paintbucket of dreams
& paints on the canvas of reality
i am for an art of design & craft & intention
and
i am for an art of divinely inspired improvisation
i am for an art of truth
& beauty
& truth & beauty & truth
& i am for an art of shared experience & transcended pain
i am for an art of carefulness & of fortunate happenstance
i am for an art of honesty
& i am for an art
that cares nothing for the title of its creator
artist, writer, dreamer, designer, poet, craftsperson, student or singer
famous or infamous or anonymous
i am for an art that gets itself made
i am not for the art that smears itself on the wall
& i am not for the art that speaks only of itself
& i am not for the art that seeks only to shock, offend, attack & destroy
i am for an art that feeds me
or i am not for art
PS - Even if I hate your art I'll defend to the death your right to do it
��copyright 1996 the spelunkers of the collective unconscious
Post Futurism
I have discovered that I am a Post Futurist and have been all along.
The Post-Futurist Manifesto
Franco Berardi, February 2009
1. We want to sing of the danger of love, the daily creation of a sweet energy that is never dispersed.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be irony, tenderness and rebellion.
3. Ideology and advertising have exalted the permanent mobilisation of the productive and nervous energies of humankind towards profit and war. We want to exalt tenderness, sleep and ecstasy, the frugality of needs and the pleasure of the senses.
4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of autonomy. Each to her own rhythm; nobody must be constrained to march on a uniform pace. Cars have lost their allure of rarity and above all they can no longer perform the task they were conceived for: speed has slowed down. Cars are immobile like stupid slumbering tortoises in the city traffic. Only slowness is fast.
5. We want to sing of the men and the women who caress one another to know one another and the world better.
6. The poet must expend herself with warmth and prodigality to increase the power of collective intelligence and reduce the time of wage labour.
7. Beauty exists only in autonomy. No work that fails to express the intelligence of the possible can be a masterpiece. Poetry is a bridge cast over the abyss of nothingness to allow the sharing of different imaginations and to free singularities.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries... We must look behind to remember the abyss of violence and horror that military aggressiveness and nationalist ignorance is capable of conjuring up at any moment in time. We have lived in the stagnant time of religion for too long. Omnipresent and eternal speed is already behind us, in the Internet, so we can forget its syncopated rhymes and find our singular rhythm.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
The Unbearable Lightness of Racism
From Harry's Place
This is HP reader Eyal’s view on Aftonbladet’s antisemitic article
"Seeing this story, and others like it that appear from time to time, reminds me of an old joke I heard years ago:
In Nazi Germany, a group of thugs jump an elderly Jew and pin him to the ground.
“Who’s to blame for the war?!” they yell.
“The Jews and the bicycle riders”, the Jew answers immediately.
“Why the bicycle riders?” they ask, puzzled.
“Why the Jews?”
The “joke”, of-course, being that the racists can’t fathom why a group of unrelated individuals would be held accountable for something that they obviously have nothing to do with, but are all too happy to accept the collective responsibility of Jews.
Nowadays, this behaviour is symptomatic of many ‘progressive’ groups in the left. The incredible lightness in which ‘enlightened’ people can blame Jews and “Zionists” for everything that they think is wrong with… well, anything…
Reading HP, I am sometimes absolutely dumb-stuck by how groups on the far left and on the far right find common ground by opposing ‘Zionism’. As if Zionism had some sinister globally-encompassing agenda that sent its tentacles deep into the affairs of all nations. As if opposing Zionism was the only thing that defined them. As if eliminating Zionism would solve all the problems of the world…
Fascists obviously hate Zionists because they hate Jews in general. But what amazes me is how people from the center and leftwards use “Zionism” as some sort of magical bean, some ambiguous dark entity, at which they can funnel all their hatred and bias, without being considered “racist”.
This trend of “opposing Zionism” is all too common among leftist groups. It is how supposedly progressive people associate themselves with authoritarian, right-wing or Islamist homophobes, women oppressors, and bigots. And this is how they can make themselves believe any fairy tale they hear, as long as it blames the “Zionists”.
As DavidT put it earlier this week, this is the anatomy of a lynching.
Imagine why that is.
Maybe next time something like this comes up, perhaps they will blame bicycle riders instead."
The rest at Harry's Place, which is an interesting blog from the UK
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Nurses and Healthcare Reform
Someone needs to start talking to nurses about health care reform.
Without real health care reform the nursing shortage will become a nursing
crisis, you need 30% more nurses in the next 10 years and we're are not going to be there," we have left
the building, don't call us we'll call you"
The average age for for RN's is 46.8, only 8% of all RN's are under 30. Over the last 20 years as the the health care industry has become more profit driven there has been a stampede of nurses leaving the profession, for profit health care is driving them out of the profession.
Patient to staff ratios have eroded, nursing jobs have been out sourced to agencies with no benefits, and positions once filled by nurses are now filled by minimally trained personal. the health industry have lobbied and pushed for state laws to allow unlicensed personal to administer medication, which includes narcotics and insulin and fill the positions once held by nurses.
I believe that the health care industry is making a concerted effort to replace nurses.
The industries' unrealistic employment polices, staffing ratios that are dangerous and legislation whose only purpose is to dilute the nursing practice laws are creating a situation where nurses find it impossible to practice their profession, a profession we all loved.
" In at least one state, surgical technologists and radiologic technologists seek to create a monopoly for their area of practice at the expense of registered nurses. Jim Willmann, general counsel for the Texas Nurses Association, explains that in the last Texas legislative session, a proposed law was introduced that would permit the licensing of surgical technicians to serve as first assistants in surgery, prohibit registered nurses from performing that function, and remove the supervisory authority of the circulating nurse. That bill failed."
Bruser, Susan; Whittaker, Sue MSN, RN
(if you do a search over the last 10 years various organizations have been trying again and again to introduce this type of state legislation. )
In Broward county Florida, the school nurse positions have will be filled this fall by agency health techs, paid minimum wage, with a few days training, no benefits, no health insurance, these techs will pass schedule II drugs, give insulin and make health care decision for children. Each tech will cover one school with an average of 1000 children and they will be supervised by an RN who will cover 5 schools, a total of 5000 children. The RN will cover 5000 children.... !
Nurses are the largest segment of the health care workforce, we are the big expense, we are the ones who advocate for our patients , our main concern is not the bottom line, and we have been vocal about the need for real health care reform for many years, we are fly in the billion dollar honey pot of the health care industry. And we are running away from the nursing profession because we are being chased away by an industry whose only concern is the bottom line.
Weiner Challenges the Republicans to Put-Up or Shut-Up on Healthcar
I love this guy, he is the rep from Brooklyn and was Jon Stewart 's roommate in college
Monday, August 17, 2009
I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean I love the country but I can't stand the scene. And I'm neither left or right I'm just staying home tonight, getting lost in that hopeless little screen. But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags that Time cannot decay, I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet: Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
Leonard Cohen
Nursing and health care reform
I have been writing comments on various sites concerning the stampede of nurses leaving the profession over the last 20 years. In a opinion piece written by Scott Gottlieb at the WSJ the same anti health care reform arguments are rehashed again and again and they ignore any comments to the contrary. The fact is without reform there will very few nurses to run a healthcare system.
One of my comments addressing Gottlieb's article.
The average age of a practicing nurse in America is 47. No one wants to be nurse anymore, why is that?
I have been a nurse for thirty years, in that time period the health industry has become the multi billion dollars business it is today. In these years as profits have grown, one of the ways to keep costs down has been to targeted nurses, patient to staff ratios have eroded, nurses has been out sourced to agencies with NO benefits and nursing positions once held by nurses are now filled with cheap "techs" , a high school diploma and a week of training is all you need.
Talk about "evil" socialized medicine all you want, but the is fact with out meaningful reform the next time you or a relative are in the hospital and you put a call light on and no one shows up, or if they do they are a tech who doesn't understand why you can't breath and they have to go find someone who does, remember that medicine is a business and the bottom line is the most important thing.
The medical industry has made a concerted effort to drive nurses out of industry to keep costs down and it has worked. Every major nursing organization supports meaningful healthcare reform with a public option and some a single payer. We are the people who see how healthcare really works in this country, you should pay attention.
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