Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Monday, March 2, 2015
SCIENTISTS ARE WRONG ALL THE TIME, AND THAT’S FANTASTIC
When a researcher gets proved wrong, that means the scientific method is working. Scientists make progress by re-doing each other’s experiments—replicating them to see if they can get the same result. More often than not, they can’t. “Failure to reproduce is a good thing,” says Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch. “It happens a lot more than we know about.” That could be because the research was outright fraudulent, like Wakefield’s. But there are plenty of other ways to get a bum result—as the Public Libary of Science’s new collection of negative results, launched this week, will highlight in excruciating detail.
Unfortunately, it's often the wrong science that gets published in the media and the public is never notified as to the error. This is why there is an anti-vaccine movement and crackpots tell us to eat a lot of diabetes-causing grains and stay away from life-saving eggs.
Unfortunately, it's often the wrong science that gets published in the media and the public is never notified as to the error. This is why there is an anti-vaccine movement and crackpots tell us to eat a lot of diabetes-causing grains and stay away from life-saving eggs.
Why I’m Coming Out as a Christian
No, I’m nervous to come out as a Christian because I worry I’m not good enough of one. I’m not scared that non-believers will make me feel an outcast. I’m scared that Christians will.
To be sure, if that's your great fear, you may not be quite there yet. If you are viewing your faith as a way of reconciling that of Obama's or to satisfy the puzzle-witted expectations of secular pundits, you need to study scripture a bit more.
After all, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it...Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels."
It's about action, you see, not thought.
To be sure, if that's your great fear, you may not be quite there yet. If you are viewing your faith as a way of reconciling that of Obama's or to satisfy the puzzle-witted expectations of secular pundits, you need to study scripture a bit more.
After all, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it...Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels."
It's about action, you see, not thought.
So the Government Took over the Internet the Other Day...
...not with a bang, but a whimper. No one voted on it, it was not discussed in Congress, no one but the inner circle at the FCC was permitted to know what is in the plan's 300+ pages, and yet it rather significantly changed the Internet into a government regulated utility. [There is a rumor that websites will eventually require licensing and, of course, taxes, which is the real reason for the change of status. This is probably just a rumor, though. After all, when has a government ever done such a thing?]
As an acquaintance notes:
As an acquaintance notes:
New competitive models and technologies will now have to be vetted by government bureaucrats who will soon be captured by the industry itself. It literally always happens this way. How much innovation did you ever see in the landline phone business? My telephone at my birth in 1962 was identical to the one in my dorm room in 1984. Power companies? Water companies? Cell voice service? What innovation have you ever seen? What new competitors have you seen pop up to challenge the old guys? Only in cellular data has there been any innovation, and that is to date the one place in phone communications the FCC has not regulated with this model.
Sunday, March 1, 2015
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Friday, February 27, 2015
The Media, as Usual, are "Uncomfortable" with Religion
Death row women find God; ABC News promptly loses him
I've noticed that educated people, when they are insecure about their education and their intellect, tend to avoid or ignore religion. Religious subjects are generally associated with those whom they classify as beneath them.
I've noticed that educated people, when they are insecure about their education and their intellect, tend to avoid or ignore religion. Religious subjects are generally associated with those whom they classify as beneath them.
Well, This is Disturbing
A report on increasing anti-Semitism on American college campuses compiled by scholars at Trinity College in Hartford.
In short, 54 percent of self-identified Jewish students in 55 college across the country experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism during the 2013-2014 school year.
Of course, the Episcopal Church has some issues in this respect, too.
In short, 54 percent of self-identified Jewish students in 55 college across the country experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism during the 2013-2014 school year.
Of course, the Episcopal Church has some issues in this respect, too.
D.A. Levy and the Cleveland Beats
“If you want a revolution
grow a new mind
and do it quietly if you can”
grow a new mind
and do it quietly if you can”
__________________________________________________________________
One never thinks that poetry can lead to martyrdom.
I taught poetry in schools and colleges for nineteen years, here and there. Sometimes as a full-time faculty member, sometimes as an adjunct, sometimes as a visiting lecturer. I've come to realize that there are two things about poetry I've always appreciated. The first, and the most obvious, is that it elevates all elements of a language to art. Not only through simple rhyming verse, but through tone, the pattern of the syllables, and the manner in which the very pronunciation of the words can create a kind of music without instrumentation. Poetry delicately enlivens the mind and creates a synaptic theme for appreciating reality anew. [Wow, that last sentence is pure academic gibberish, isn't it? Or is it poetry?!]
The second reason is more complicated and visceral as it appeals to another portion of my character, I suppose; that which appreciates art that is less...tactile. For example, in my days as an indifferent and failed New Wave musician, it was "the scene" rather than the music that drew me. The energy, the raw, undiluted emotion of primal music, the massive expectations and the sheer, wild puissance of the crowd and the band and the immediacy of shared experience.
The people drawn to music, both musicians and fans, tended towards the fringes of society, either due to their youth or liminal habits or peculiar view of the world. To be involved in the next, and decidedly non-corporate, development of popular music was intoxicating, especially when it had not even been noticed by the professional sentinels of the media.
Similarly, poetry, too, highlights "the scene". While I can recognize the stirring themes of Tennyson, absurd world-view of Eliot, the vividity of Shakespeare, or the lyrical wonder of Wordsworth, I can also appreciate what has been offered by poets of, in my opinion, lesser efforts. While they may have come and gone, or only heard on amateur nights at the corner bar/coffeehouse or at a "slam poetry" experience at a college, they were willing to extend their artistic sense into a verbal medium.
This means there isn't that much of a difference between a musician and a poet. There are those who prefer to offer the classics, or at least the classical themes, and those who are more experimental. Some become recognized artists whose work is collected and presented to subsequent generations, others offer a more transitional effort that also plays a role in the greater corpus of art. Both poets and musicians experiment, shove at limits that are artificially imposed, weave new themes and styles into expression, and attract followers who are eager to share in the poet/musician's art. The life of David Bowie and the life of Lord Byron are not as separated as one might think. Both, whether consciously or not, make their lives into an art form.
One of those poets of lesser effort but important influence was D.A. Levy, who established a forum and style for a school of verse that became known as The Cleveland Beats [which was also the name of the one of the bands in which I played]. I'm not a big fan of Levy's poetry, but I appreciate what he did and how he pushed the raw experience of localized poetry into a new, much less cautious and deliberate, dimension. A testimony to his power was that, when I was a first-year English teacher in a Cleveland high school, I was advised not to teach Levy's works in my classroom. Being banned from formal educational curricula is generally, in my experience, an indication that the subject may actually be valuable.
Levy was born David Allen but, with a young man's enthusiasm and as an homage to e.e. cummings, eventually shortened his name and rendered it in lower case so that, by the mid-60's, he was listed on posters and poetry collections as d.a. levy. His family were members of the sizable Jewish population that emigrated from Europe during the 1930's and found jobs in the enormous and powerful manufacturing sector of Cleveland. He was born in 1942, lived throughout the Cleveland area, and unlike other Cleveland poets such as Hart Crane or Langston Hughes, never left. His overriding desire was to write the great Cleveland poem, much as had been done for Chicago by Carl Sandburg.
He was slight, quiet, and unimposing with an unremarkable voice; often seen in the centers of counter-culture life with those originally labeled "beatniks" and later "hippies". His first poem to be read by a respectable audience, "Cleveland Undergrounds", sought to capture the dualism of his city. It is an immature work, and derivative of many of the beat poets of the period, but shows an energy that many found compelling.
Other poems would be printed from 1962 to 1968. These would not result in any form of mainstream recognition, but Levy would gradually become a legend in the Cleveland sub-culture that found its epicenter in the University Circle/Coventry Road area of the city and in a popular performance space located at the Episcopal cathedral. [It's interesting that when I think back to my youth, much of the counter-cultural arts scene was introduced through the basement of Trinity Cathedral. In those days, the Episcopal Church really was on the cutting edge of society, rather than simply believing itself to be.]
He would suffer a different type of recognition, unfortunately. Disturbed by the movement that was consuming youth culture and creating friction with the political class, Levy and the other "hippies" would come under the aggressive scrutiny of the police, especially as their drug use and promiscuity became known. Since Levy wrote candidly of the counter-culture experience, used sparing profanity in his art, and was recognized as a spokesman for the artists of his generation, he was targeted by local authorities and twice arrested for obscenity. As the charges were somewhat vague and clearly designed to harass, nothing much came of them, legally. However, they did contribute to what many of Levy's friends recognized as a growing mental disturbance. In 1968, shortly after completing what is considered his most elaborate work, “Suburban Monastery Death Poem,” Levy took his own life. As he was only 26-years-old, one cannot help but wonder if he would have continued to grow as an artist.
The second reason is more complicated and visceral as it appeals to another portion of my character, I suppose; that which appreciates art that is less...tactile. For example, in my days as an indifferent and failed New Wave musician, it was "the scene" rather than the music that drew me. The energy, the raw, undiluted emotion of primal music, the massive expectations and the sheer, wild puissance of the crowd and the band and the immediacy of shared experience.
The people drawn to music, both musicians and fans, tended towards the fringes of society, either due to their youth or liminal habits or peculiar view of the world. To be involved in the next, and decidedly non-corporate, development of popular music was intoxicating, especially when it had not even been noticed by the professional sentinels of the media.
Similarly, poetry, too, highlights "the scene". While I can recognize the stirring themes of Tennyson, absurd world-view of Eliot, the vividity of Shakespeare, or the lyrical wonder of Wordsworth, I can also appreciate what has been offered by poets of, in my opinion, lesser efforts. While they may have come and gone, or only heard on amateur nights at the corner bar/coffeehouse or at a "slam poetry" experience at a college, they were willing to extend their artistic sense into a verbal medium.
This means there isn't that much of a difference between a musician and a poet. There are those who prefer to offer the classics, or at least the classical themes, and those who are more experimental. Some become recognized artists whose work is collected and presented to subsequent generations, others offer a more transitional effort that also plays a role in the greater corpus of art. Both poets and musicians experiment, shove at limits that are artificially imposed, weave new themes and styles into expression, and attract followers who are eager to share in the poet/musician's art. The life of David Bowie and the life of Lord Byron are not as separated as one might think. Both, whether consciously or not, make their lives into an art form.
One of those poets of lesser effort but important influence was D.A. Levy, who established a forum and style for a school of verse that became known as The Cleveland Beats [which was also the name of the one of the bands in which I played]. I'm not a big fan of Levy's poetry, but I appreciate what he did and how he pushed the raw experience of localized poetry into a new, much less cautious and deliberate, dimension. A testimony to his power was that, when I was a first-year English teacher in a Cleveland high school, I was advised not to teach Levy's works in my classroom. Being banned from formal educational curricula is generally, in my experience, an indication that the subject may actually be valuable.
Levy was born David Allen but, with a young man's enthusiasm and as an homage to e.e. cummings, eventually shortened his name and rendered it in lower case so that, by the mid-60's, he was listed on posters and poetry collections as d.a. levy. His family were members of the sizable Jewish population that emigrated from Europe during the 1930's and found jobs in the enormous and powerful manufacturing sector of Cleveland. He was born in 1942, lived throughout the Cleveland area, and unlike other Cleveland poets such as Hart Crane or Langston Hughes, never left. His overriding desire was to write the great Cleveland poem, much as had been done for Chicago by Carl Sandburg.
He was slight, quiet, and unimposing with an unremarkable voice; often seen in the centers of counter-culture life with those originally labeled "beatniks" and later "hippies". His first poem to be read by a respectable audience, "Cleveland Undergrounds", sought to capture the dualism of his city. It is an immature work, and derivative of many of the beat poets of the period, but shows an energy that many found compelling.
Other poems would be printed from 1962 to 1968. These would not result in any form of mainstream recognition, but Levy would gradually become a legend in the Cleveland sub-culture that found its epicenter in the University Circle/Coventry Road area of the city and in a popular performance space located at the Episcopal cathedral. [It's interesting that when I think back to my youth, much of the counter-cultural arts scene was introduced through the basement of Trinity Cathedral. In those days, the Episcopal Church really was on the cutting edge of society, rather than simply believing itself to be.]
He would suffer a different type of recognition, unfortunately. Disturbed by the movement that was consuming youth culture and creating friction with the political class, Levy and the other "hippies" would come under the aggressive scrutiny of the police, especially as their drug use and promiscuity became known. Since Levy wrote candidly of the counter-culture experience, used sparing profanity in his art, and was recognized as a spokesman for the artists of his generation, he was targeted by local authorities and twice arrested for obscenity. As the charges were somewhat vague and clearly designed to harass, nothing much came of them, legally. However, they did contribute to what many of Levy's friends recognized as a growing mental disturbance. In 1968, shortly after completing what is considered his most elaborate work, “Suburban Monastery Death Poem,” Levy took his own life. As he was only 26-years-old, one cannot help but wonder if he would have continued to grow as an artist.
Beyond his poetry, however, Levy made another, and lasting, gift to the Cleveland literary scene. Using an old mimeograph machine, purchased from some school or church, Levy and some of this friends created the primary underground publication of its era, The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle. Beginning in the summer of 1967, its crude, blue print pages presented a collection of local poets who could not find a publisher willing to print the lyrics of hippies. These poets, The Cleveland Beats, found local notoriety and earned an appreciation that continues to this day. Without Levy, they would have never been known.
It wasn't simply a forum for poetry, either. As noted in a magazine profile of Levy from a few years ago:
It wasn't simply a forum for poetry, either. As noted in a magazine profile of Levy from a few years ago:
Paging through issues of the Junkmail Oracle, which levy first published in June 1967, is like paging through levy’s radical, rambling mind. Articles on Buddhism by Allen Ginsberg and Zen author Alan Watts, levy’s own poems and some by Charles Bukowski ran along with his wild collages, which mixed images of Buddha and Hindu gods with cutouts from newspapers, movie ads and skin magazines...When police shut down the bars and cafes at Euclid and East 115th, and fires struck the buildings, levy accused the cops and the University Circle development corporation of destroying the area to create a wall between blacks and whites. (Two parking lots and a McDonald’s sit at the corner today.) Levy also wrote about books, movies and music, even interviewing the Velvet Underground, the legendary art-rockers....
In retrospect, Levy was exactly right about the motivation behind the University Circle development, as it did create a barrier between the cultures that lasts until this day. The development also, very gradually, destroyed the counter-cultural community through re-zoning, absurd rents, and the harassment from law enforcement. From the late 1960's through the late 1970's, the clubs where we would play our eccentric music, the coffee houses where we could hear poetry recited, the theater company that produced experimental plays, the small bookstores, even the delicatessen that provided cheap, wholesome food on ample platters, would all evaporate.
However, there is an historic marker acknowledging the existence of the sub-culture and its artists, as if from some exotic, extinct tribe that surrendered to inevitable progress. So there's that, I suppose.
There is also, like a brooding ghost, an image of Levy that can be spotted to this day on university bulletin boards, dormitory doors, some remaining independent bookstores, and the music clubs that have gradually moved further east and west. His visage serves as a reminder that, behind the perpetual attempts of the city to be something other than it is, it remains the Jerusalem of the under-appreciated. And that's okay.
A video of Levy reading one of his poems may be found at the Cleveland Memory Project, which is still the most complete depository of his works. As he was sloppy about seeking copyright protection and tended to release his poems far and wide, all of them are in the public domain. In fact, most may be found for free on the Internet.However, there is an historic marker acknowledging the existence of the sub-culture and its artists, as if from some exotic, extinct tribe that surrendered to inevitable progress. So there's that, I suppose.
There is also, like a brooding ghost, an image of Levy that can be spotted to this day on university bulletin boards, dormitory doors, some remaining independent bookstores, and the music clubs that have gradually moved further east and west. His visage serves as a reminder that, behind the perpetual attempts of the city to be something other than it is, it remains the Jerusalem of the under-appreciated. And that's okay.
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Well, I Got Tagged in Twelve of Them
Below is a list of 72 types of Americans that are considered to be “extremists” and “potential terrorists” in official U.S. government documents...As you can see, this list covers most of the country…
I concede we live in an era when the government's hyper-vigilance towards potential terrorist actions requires such generalities, but it's interesting how one may passively come to be regarded as a potential extremist.
I Try to Stay Away from Secular Ideological Argument, But...
...when "pundits" decide to use religious devotion as a truncheon against their ideological opposites, I find I usually have something to say. However, in this instance, a law professor of my general acquaintance does so for me:
Milbank (who is probably not a Christian) is missing something about Christianity that is quite glaring to me (whose possible Christianity is an enigma). To many Christians, claiming to be a Christian doesn't make you a Christian.
Milbank (who is probably not a Christian) is missing something about Christianity that is quite glaring to me (whose possible Christianity is an enigma). To many Christians, claiming to be a Christian doesn't make you a Christian.
Lenten Wave #9
"Surfing, alone among sports, generates laughter at its very suggestion, and this is because it turns not a skill into an art, but an inexplicable and useless urge into a vital way of life." - Matt Warshaw
[In other words, it's like the practice of religion.]
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
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