City of Opportunity Declares Bankruptcy
Apparently, this is old news, but I don’t often follow local stories, so I just heard about it on the BBC world service…
I simply want to congratulate the City of Vallejo. In declaring chapter 9 bankruptcy, it has officially made the road sign that greets Highway 37 motorists as they enter (and mostly pass through) this forlorn municipality one of the world’s most ironic. It reads:
“Welcome to Vallejo: City of Opportunity”
I’ll get a picture next time I’m passing through, unless they’ve taken it down, which they probably should.
thank you bob scheer
Words of wisdom on Hil’s last stand from Robert Scheer, editor-in-chief of truthdig.org (transcribed from KCRW’s Left, Right & Center):
“What really is at stake here is not whether she stays in. If she stayed in and had an honorable discussion about the issues and their policy differences — fine — we can applaud that and democracy needs that. But what’s happening here is that she’s…playing up the race and gender issues in a way that is not helpful. And to be campaigning that you are in fact the one who can swing unenlightened white voters…at a time when she should say, by the way, that if anyone votes for me because they can’t bring themselves to vote for a black man or a half-black man, that’s racism and I don’t want your support. She’s actually using code language to say that “I can bring over racists.” And one of the alarming things is that here you have Democrats, a significant percentage…saying they won’t vote for a black person. Well, why don’t we meet that head on? Just the same way…when we finally have a woman candidate that can carry the day, we’re going to have to meet sexism head on. But you don’t surrender to that, you don’t pander to that, and you don’t brag that you’re the candidate of uneducated, racist white voters.”
Dan Bejar of Destroyer likes to drink (booze).
Swigging bottles of Stella Artois, swaggering in such a serious way, approaching the microphone stand as if it were the steering wheel of his ill-fated car, Dan Bejar had these things to say from the stage of the Independent last night:
“Did you guys eat dinner? Fuck Dinner.”
~~
“This is about a song…in Los Angeles…that I wrote…about two days ago…when I was there.”
~~
“This is the part of the show where we play another song…”
I realize the quotes don’t convey the besotted slur with which they were uttered. But this isn’t to say the show was a mess. Bejar completely maintained musical fidelity despite his loopy banter and threats from his sober bandmates — all the more reason to love Destroyer. Which everyone should.
________
Fittingly, I found this picture of Dan Bejar (’s legs) on someone’s flickr:
![Destroyer / Dan Bejar and Jameson [Bowery Ballroom / 04.23.08]](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2290/2438518002_bc18c31fc6.jpg)
Karl Popper (Kpop!) tells it like it is
From logical fallacies of induction to evolutionary epistemology, Kpop’s like ‘Yo! the sun might not rise tomorrow’ and ‘Yo! Hume’s psychology is primitive’ and ‘Yo! sometimes we perish by our unconfirmed hypotheses’. Break it down Karl…
“Hume himself confused the problem of induction with the problem of the necessary connection between cause and effect; and Kant saw in the problem of the a priori validity of the causal law one of the most fundamental problems of metaphysics. But Hume must be credited with the formulation of the pure logical problem of induction and its solutions…He writes, for example, that we have no reason to believe ‘that those instances, of which we have no experience, [are likely to] resemble those, of which we have had experience’.
…All that is assumed is that we have empirical evidence of the truth of certain instances, and it is asserted that this does not entitle us to conclude to or extrapolate to analogous experiences at other instances (whether in the past or in the future).
This, then, in all its purity, is what I have christened ‘Hume’s [logical] problem of induction’.
Hume’s answer is as clear as can be: there is no argument or reason which permits an inference from one case to another, however similar the conditions may be; and I completely agree with him in this respect.
I believe, however, that Hume is wrong when he thinks that in practice we make such inferences, on the basis of repetition or habit. I assert that his psychology is primitive. What we do in practice is to jump to a conclusion; that is to say, to quite inconclusive hypotheses to which we often cling, and with which we may perish, unless we are able to correct them, which is possible especially if, on the human level, they are formulated exosomatically in written form, and submitted to criticism.
The assertion that we have an irrational inclination to be impressed by habit and repetition is something quite different from the assertion that we have a drive to try out bold hypotheses which we may have to correct if we are not to perish. The first describes a typically Lamarckian procedure of instruction; the second a Darwinian procedure of selection. The first one is, as Hume observed, irrational, while the second seems to have nothing irrational in it.”
from Objective Knowledge, Ch. 2, §30: Muddles Connected with the Problem of Induction
the overwhelming fullness of being
lately, as temperatures in san francisco have been so perfect as to cause one to forget temperature exists at all, i’ve been suffering from an inability to totally comprehend the beauty around me. i work on the twelfth floor in a high-rise that stands on the peak of parnassus heights; the floor-to-ceiling windows of our howard hughes-funded research facility look out over golden gate park, ocean beach, and mt. tamalpais. standing behind that tempered glass i can’t even absorb the splendor, but rather stand unfulfilled, analyzing and not experiencing the profundity of what i’m seeing. i want to merge myself with the view; and i wonder if a life not spent learning to do this is a bit wasted.
sometimes i want to capture it with a photograph, but the photograph presents exactly the problem: with it i can capture the image, not necessarily the experience. a photo of a person can capture the experience of the subject, but how do you capture the experience of the photographer, as the strokes of the brush capture that of the painter? here i tried to use angles and exposure to represent the experience of being overwhelmed and unable to capture the fullness of the scene:
random literary quote without interpretation I
“She wanted them to go together to some hopelessly disreputable bar, and to console one another, in the most maudlin fashion, over a lengthy succession of powerful drinks of whiskey; to compare their illnesses, to marry their invalid souls for these few hours of painful communion, and to babble with rapture that they were at last, for a little while, no longer alone. Only thus, as sick people, could they marry. In any other terms, it would be a mésalliance, doomed to divorce from the start, for rubes and intellectuals must stick to their own class.
“If only it could take place — this honeymoon of the cripples, this nuptial consummation of the abandoned — while drinking the delicious amber whiskey in a joint with a jukebox, a stout barkeep, and a handful of tottering derelicts. If it could take place, would it be possible to prevent him from marring it all by talking of secondary matters? That is, of art and neurosis, art and politics, art and science, art and religion? Could he lay off the fashions of the day and leave his learning in his private entrepôt? Could he, that is, see the apple fall and not run madly to break the news to Newton and ask him what on earth it was all about? Could he, for her sake, for the sake of this pathetic rube all but weeping for her own pathos in the Metropolitan Museum, forget the whole dispute and, believing his eyes for a change, admit that the earth was flat?”
– Jean Stafford, Children are Bored on Sunday
