The Borders of Things

Value Votes

An interesting report on the Census Bureau's 2007 Statistical Abstract of the United States.

The following statistic made me even more convinced that we need to be generating liberal education in the high schools, before college:

More than half of American households owned stocks and mutual funds in 2005. The 91 million individuals in those households had a median age of 51 and a median household income of $65,000.

That might help explain a shift in what college freshmen described as their primary personal objectives. In 1970, 79 percent said their goal was developing a meaningful philosophy of life. By 2005, 75 percent said their primary objective was to be financially very well off.

We take off for the East Coast tonight.

Chattabound, with Notes on Videogaming the Apocalypse

As some of you have already heard, we are going to be in Chattanooga next week. Please come to Lang and Charity's on Tuesday night and hang out.

In other news . . .

I have recently learned of a video game based on the ever-popular Left Behind book series. The game is called Left Behind: Eternal Forces. Ominous, no? Check out the official website here. According to this article, the premise of the game is essentially a rip-off of 19th-century colonial practice: Convert the heathen. If that doesn't work, shoot them. But what does this game have over good old fashioned Christ's-love-at-gun-point? A lot. I quote from the website:

· Lead the Tribulation Force from the book series , including Rayford, Chloe, Buck and Bruce against Nicolae Carpathia – the AntiChrist.

· Play multiplayer games as Tribulation Force or the AntiChrist's Global Community Peacekeepers with up to eight players via LAN or over the internet!


Doesn't that sound far cooler than camping in the Belgian congo or some other god-forsaken pagan land? Plus you can eat Doritos while you build "spirit points."

Nothing is better than the power of prayer coupled with modern military weaponry. Particularly if you are using it to wax the Antichrist's Global Community Peacekeepers.

I'm asking for it for Christmas.

My Wife's Luck

Last night, Capria won a $250.00 gift certificate to Best Buy at her company's holiday party. Pretty sweet, considering she did it while we were eating their food and drinking their beer. I should buy her more lotto tickets.

Now we just have to figure out what to do with it. I'm proposing 25 copies of Billy Idol's christmas album.

Back to work.

Show Me the Money

This is a great article on the need for intelligent economic thinking. . . and the need for discourses of justice that utilize the benefits of such thinking. Too many people I know act as if a good economic argument equals a good moral argument, or at least does away with it. As this article shows, neither on their own is sufficient. Money passage:

But when equity and efficiency trade-offs do arise, economists like Sanderson are systematically biased in favor of efficiency because that’s what they are experts on. Efficiency they can measure and analyze. Fairness? That’s the turf of philosophers and politicians. This tendency is most pronounced in discussions of economic growth, and how the benefits of that growth should be distributed. Sanderson paraphrases his Nobel Laureate colleague Bob Lucas, who says that “once you start to think about the benefits of high growth, it’s hard to think about anything else.” In other words, first worry about how best to grow the pie, then how to slice it up. Let efficiency trump equity, create wealth, and then you can use the extra wealth you’ve created to alleviate inequality.

This makes a certain amount of sense. But when this rhetoric comes to dominate our politics, the problem of inequality is never addressed. Now is always the time for growing, later is always the time to address concerns about equity. The result is predictable: In countries that have adopted the neoclassical policy prescriptions (including the United States), there has been an ever-widening gap between rich and poor.

John Cage is Coming for the Souls of Your Offspring

Ron Silliman linked to the website for M.A.N.: Mothers Against Noise, an organization dedicated to stopping the spread of Noise Music, those naughty, naughty children of Cage and Co. M.A.N. even has its own merchandise, sporting this nifty logo:

Here's an excerpt from their site:

This current state of popular music provides plenty of motivation for these radicals, and the Internet appears to be facilitating then, even if the large masses of potential followers are currently deaf to their activities. These Noise Groups that are opposed to and mostly ignored by the media have used this new resource very cunningly, the internet is the only way they have been able to spread their message effectively. It is spreading and its goals are to create a virtual distorted mindset for the veiwer. Most Noise Groups are autonomous groups spread out over the globe. The open structure of the Internet supports this clandestine modus operandi as a way for these militants to recruit new members and look for common goals or inspiration. Why the Noise Music agenda has never full taken over in the past is because of fragmentation and extreme descentralisation, currently it has become an fully functioning global network set on infiltrating and influencing the world.

As always, the pharmakon of the internet is there to save the day, and M.A.N. is about to fight fire with fire. No more virtual distorted mindsets (mindsets which are virtual and thus distorted? virtual and also distorted? virtually (as in not literally) distorted?).

I am so endlessly fascinated by stuff like this. It makes me want to compose a poem in sprung rhythm set to the sounds of my heater turning on, dedicated to the proud women of M.A.N.