Wednesday, November 19, 2014

"The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly..."

"...It is simply indifferent." - J. H. Holmes


Forever ReBlog.


My hate grows stronger.

The Drunken Interview: Seven Questions for Daniele Bolelli | FIGHTLAND: "When his master presented him with a certificate of enlightenment—which was both a great honor and the necessary document to begin climbing the Zen hierarchy—Ikkyu promptly decided to wave goodbye to a monastic career and burned it. The so-called professionals of Zen were in Ikkyu’s eyes a bunch of posers—too busy acting ‘spiritual’ to be able to really taste spirituality in its rawest forms. Some people believed Zen enlightenment could only be found among clouds of incense in silent meditation. Ikkyu, on the other hand, found sake-drinking and wild sex more to his liking. As he put in his poems, “The autumn breeze of a single night of love is better than a hundred thousand years of sterile sitting meditation.” Or, even more bluntly, “Don’t hesitate: get laid—that’s wisdom. Sitting around chanting sutras: that’s crap.” Ikkyu denied the separation between sacred and profane, and firmly believed that Zen was a matter of awareness that could be practiced in any environment. He ended up attracting plenty of friends who followed him in his adventures, and had a particularly powerful impact on several Japanese art forms (from tea ceremony to calligraphy, etc.) The stories about him are both enlightening and hilarious."


To be truly evil you need bureaucracy.  Why Is California Fighting the Release of Non-Violent Inmates? Cheap Labor. - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "The Los Angeles Times reported the order, along with this rather interesting explainer of why the state was resisting letting prisoners out early: Most of those prisoners now work as groundskeepers, janitors and in prison kitchens, with wages that range from 8 cents to 37 cents per hour. Lawyers for Attorney General Kamala Harris had argued in court that if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would lose an important labor pool. Prisoners' lawyers countered that the corrections department could hire public employees to do the work. So, yeah, that's a pretty horrifying argument for keeping people in overcrowded prisons. "


Rejected for Being Asian: Students Sue Harvard, UNC Over Race-Based Admissions - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "Harvard has managed to keep its Asian student population constant over the years, while universities that don't consider race as an admission factor have seen more and more Asians gain admittance. According to Inside Higher Ed: What Harvard calls a holistic approach to admissions (in which applicants are reviewed individually, with a range of criteria considered) is actually a disguise for racial balancing in a system where Asian Americans are held to higher standards for admission, according to the lawsuit. As evidence, the lawsuit says that the racial demographics of Harvard’s admitted class, first-year enrollment and total student body have remained stable over the last several years. ... "In light of Harvard’s discriminatory admissions policies, [Asian Americans] are competing only against each other, and all other racial and ethnic groups are insulated from competing against high-achieving Asian Americans,” the lawsuit reads...

Who can defend abject racial discrimination against Asians? Harvard's administrators and some of its faculty can. One professor even had the gall to suggest that discriminating against Asians is good for Asians. According to Fox News: “Asian-American students benefit greatly from attending the racially and socio-economically diverse campuses that affirmative action helps create,” Julie Park, assistant professor of education at the University of Maryland and author of the book “When Diversity Drops,” told FoxNews.com."

  Parts Unknown Jamaica: Just the One-Liners - Eater: "James Bond doesn't get this. James Bond's a hustler. He gets this for a couple days before he moves on to the next location. The guy who lives here is the Bond villain." 
"Ian Fleming was much closer to Blofeld or Hugo Drax. Those guys had lots of leisure time, sitting around in hammocks trying to figure out how to take over the fucking world. Lot of downtime in world domination. Bond was a working-class fucker.""



WTF.  Citing Deference to ‘Broad’ Government Power, Judge Says Atlantic City May Bulldoze Home to Benefit Casino - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "According to the New Jersey Constitution, state officials may only condemn private property for redevelopment purposes when that property is "blighted." Yet in a ruling issued on Monday, Judge Julio L. Mendez of the New Jersey Superior Court allowed Atlantic City to seize one man's non-blighted family home. Why? Because the state enjoys "broad" powers, the judge said, and the courts have no business standing in the way."


Can't stop the signal.  5 Reasons why I am pro file-sharing and copyright reform — LEXI ALEXANDER: "It has been proven over and over again that file-sharers spend more money on music, movies & games than non file-sharers. Current studies have it at 30% more. What do we achieve by consistently sending out the message that we despise the behavior of our best customers?

...Let's look at Popcorn Time for a second. The other day I spent an evening with a group of young filmmakers and come to find out, every single one of them uses Popcorn Time even though they all pay for legal cable and streaming services. We all broke out in an animated discussion about how easy and convenient Popcorn Time is versus the variety of legal streaming devices on the current market.  Now if you're the CEO of an on-demand media provider, wouldn't you be curious to know who the guys are that created a better video streaming tool than the engineers on your payroll? And wouldn't it make more sense to offer them a job for millions of dollars,  rather than pay a bunch of lawyers those same millions to put them out of commission? But you know how the story of Napster ended. The genius kid was shut down (not only his website but as the documentary aptly portrayed...his soul as well) and a couple of years later Apple has 5.2 billion in iTunes sales. There's something sinister at play here. I had this discussion with an Executive the other day (who coincidentally also enjoys Popcorn Time secretly) and I asked him: "Why can't this industry embrace these guys?" And he said: "Because fear always pushes back.""

#RightInTheFeels 

This is why people don't like cops.  Brickbat: Honor the Vets - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "A Victoria, Canada, police officer pulled Debbie Ferguson out of a funeral procession to give her a $230 ticket for having an obscured license plate. Ferguson was part of the funeral procession for Steven Allen, a Canadian Army soldier killed during training. The procession took place on Remembrance Day." 


A Week of Praise: Womanly Love: "I can take care of myself just fine, but I still want a girl to do nice things for me because unconditional self-sacrifice is one of the foundational principles of a relationship. If you truly love someone, you should be prepared to do things for them that you wouldn’t do for anyone else, even at great personal expense to yourself. That’s the very essence of love; wanting to please your [them] just because. "




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