something new?

February 23, 2010 on 7:39 am | In music, extropy | No Comments

I’ve been working on a new musical project in my spare time (what there is of it!) and hope to have some finished material to post soon. I’m exploring some new sound spaces and excited about the direction so far. Loosely calling the new work “Ouroboros 3.14159265″. Field recording meets shoegaze doom dreampop. Or something.

the center does not hold

February 11, 2010 on 8:20 am | In economics, fucking americans, peak oil, politics, world | No Comments

So, is anyone else getting a sick feeling in their stomach watching events unfold these days?

I just finished reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s excellent and provocative “The Black Swan”, so I’m not making any specific predictions on where things are heading, but it seems to me that we’re driving towards some seriously mean looking dark clouds.

A very successful friend and mentor once told me, “The truth is, no one knows what they are doing. The problem is that too many people think they do.” He wasn’t excluding himself or the most powerful people in the world from this statement (and he’s known a lot of important people).  I consider this to be a very sharp and profound insight. Viewing the world through this lens has given me a new perspective that often makes me laugh, but usually makes me worry.

Since my daughter was born a few months ago I have not kept up with the news as much, but today seems to be particularly irritating. I see a lot of dots but no one is connecting them.

First off… Obama seems to have gone completely off the rails with a recent statement to Bloomberg about his buddies at JP morgan and Goldman Sachs… essentially that he doesn’t begrudge them their multimillion dollar salaries, given they are both “good businessmen”. Really? Because it seems to me they really fucked up and pretty much took our economy down. I can’t believe that Obama has been so thoroughly corrupted by advice from those assholes Geithner and Summers that he can’t see what a major public relations mistake this statement is. It does not bode well for “change”, or even for keeping us afloat. Seems like we’ve hit an iceberg and most of us are stuck in steerage.

In the meantime, other crises are popping up all over the place.

The tenacious and ever-lucid Elizabeth Warren has just issued a warning that a crash in commercial real estate is coming. I know you’ve all seen the empty buildings… it’s been subliminal but evident for awhile.

And don’t even get me started on the environment. A couple of idiot scientists do something stupid and it gets taken totally off the agenda? You can almost feel the politicians sighing over that one. Seriously though… while the specific outcome of global warming is essentially a Black Swan, we can’t deny that it’s not looking good for human civilization.

So while we all languish in economic hell, dumping our tax money into failing banks, our local cities running out of money, the government pumping the largest share of our budget into the military EVER in the history of our country, while sticking it to us on health care, jobs, and the environment… the guys who helped bring us to our knees are getting a free pass and millions of dollars.

Nice. God bless America.

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