Wealth divide and plutocracy

Today there is a higher Gini-Coefficient (which measures the wealth disparity in a nation) than [during] the Great Depression. The US now ranks 42nd from the worst in the world in terms of the gulf between rich and poor, slightly worse than Iran, Nigeria, and Cambodia.

Source: http://newsjunkiepost.com/2011/02/06/the-disastrous-legacy-of-ronald-reagan-in-charts/

Poem 34

I tried reading this at an open mic poetry shindig and ended up sucking like a reverse air tunnel. Still, here's an after-the-fact audio recording in hopes that I'll eventually get better at reading my own poems.

Morning and late evening
he's busied for hours,
straining, peeling, mincing, mixing,
and breading with flour.
His items are stale,
shelves stacked with old bread and brown kale,
prepared daily and put out for sale
for monied men to devour.

In the evenings he stands
stirring, sauteeing, garnishing,
and tossing food in pans.
His flavors are astonishing:
clever combinations of old ingredients,
always traditional and obedient,
flavorful and grandiloquent,
the work of skilled hands.

At night he reads Chaucer and Marcus Aurelius
and mixes them with bits of Plato
and sprigs of Leviticus.
His process is the same, but a bit slow,
as he rolls out his arguments
on the finest of parchment,
smelling faintly of fondant
and drinking wine as he goes.

His customers never complain
about the food they're eating,
even those who leave with stomach pains
and leftovers they save for reheating.
Then one day, at a quarter to seven,
Gordon Ramsay walks in,
brow furled and cursing to high heaven,
shouting, "Bland!" and screaming.

2/2/11 update:

That last stanza has to go. It doesn't fit. I'll revise soon.

Breakfast theory

Random jotted thoughts, aphorisms

Our words, our expressions, our analogies, are clothed in humanness--in our concrete everyday-ness, our veracities, our situations. And, it would seem, too, that our outgoing thoughts are clothed in our words.

Philosophy as an ultimatum is a denial of the right for future generations to want to say something profound about the world, to color it with their own experiences and judgments.


What do we get out of such a doctrine? An advancing culture that must continually reject all that comes before it. A generation that says something, and another that says, "You're wrong... but perhaps..." and yet another generation that rejoins "no."


It's my view that one should be skeptical of religious beliefs that establish human-to-human hierarchies. Divine-to-human seems perfectly fine; it's the others that are dangerous. Religion originates in the individual—"subjectivity is truth"; "the crowd is untruth"—in subjectivity's relationship to another.

Deterministic rules, etc. -- The question of what these rules are is scientific. The question of why there are rules is religious.

"Is the space pope reptilian?"

"Culture is an observance. Or at least it presupposes an observance." —LW

The essay at hand is almost subterranean. (Deep.)

Kierkegaard is one of the few thinkers I would describe as overwhelmingly intelligent.


If I don't find a motivation beyond the grade in the course of a class, I'm not going to go very far.

Listening to the new Mars Volta albums is like waiting for a bus. A few beautiful moments in a sea of overindulgence.

"Be one of those upon whom nothing is lost." —W. James

Think about the following: the mark of good writing is in the artistry, wisdom, or significance to be gleaned.

Cheese is one of humankind's greatest achievements.

World population growth through history

Sadly, this is the best graph I could find on Google. It does its job though. (Click to view it in full-size.)


It's crazy to me that just over 200 years ago someone could say, "Wow, there are over a billion people! Isn't that ridiculous?—so, so many of us, more than there's ever been." And at the end of this century there may be as many as eight or twelve times that number.