stream of consciousness

we got that ill shit so chronic, hooks more than weed in the phonics, buzz like the gin in your tonic, buss rhymes at speeds supersonic /so mad they deemed it demonic, hip hop possession no question, cuz by the end of the session got white folk speaking ebonics /forgive a nigga that's honest but life ain't half that was promised, so we just in for the profit, that green that cream, economics /and there ain't no way to stop it cuz we've got too much momentum, flows in the song of the ghetto kids, that old ones hated to mention /we tell the tales of the hardest shit, mind blowing heart wrenching, and there is no way to varnish it because the truth brings the tension /

groupthink

Groupthink members see themselves as part of an in-group working against an outgroup opposed to their goals. You can tell if a group suffers from groupthink if it:

1. Overestimates its invulnerability or high moral stance,
2. Collectively rationalizes the decisions it makes,
3. Demonizes or stereotypes outgroups and their leaders,
4. Has a culture of uniformity where individuals censor themselves and others so that the facade of group unanimity is maintained, and
5. Contains members who take it upon themselves to protect the group leader by keeping information, theirs or other group members', from the leader.

...taken from this article by the author of Ender's Game, whose novels i love but whose opinion pieces i'm not always impressed by

aliens with mad skills

contrary to what the title would have you believe this isn't about extraterrestrial rappers. it's about recognizing what business leaders and the markets already have...

America needs me.

i promise i won't outsource.

hmmm

so i was reading the news and saw that the head of BP had to resign after lying about a gay affair with a canadian. now i guess with left wing liberal fanatics running the media these days people's sex lives and sexuality just might be considered their own business but a man in his position should have known not to fuck a canadian.

a friend of mine was saying how turned off he was when after having sex with a girl he met online, he cracked a joke and she uttered the im-word "lol" in response. he would have wondered what the world was coming to had that situation been true. unfortunately he was actually just masturbating over the facebook profile of a girl he'd never met and had allowed the fantasy to carry on too long.

i am trying to write a screenplay for a movie that is half ennui half action. the protagonist would be a disillusioned young male artist called Jacques Phallus.

out of the mouth of babes

so i'm play-fighting with my 4 year old cousin chrissie (she's quite the tom-boy) and i tell her that every one has a weakness and you just have to figure out what it is. so she naturally asks me, "what is your weakness, marc?" before i can even think about what to say, her 7 year old sister serah -who happens to be passing by and overhears the question- immediately blurts out of all things.....

"girls!"

good god. they all know.

stephen marley is a boss

hey baby don’t you worry
even though the road is rocky
i’ll be coming home to you again
cuz if you thought that I was lost
i had to bare my cross
now I’m free from all these chains

a lone gunman

there is an emotional (and political) undercurrent that saps the rigor out of any intellectual discussion of gun control in the USA. what's worse is that analysis is often inconclusive not just because of the overwhelmingly complex nature of issue but also as a result of the abuse of data (cherry-picking for t-stats), and the flaws and bias inherent in the models used to analyze the data. [relevant plug: some interesting legal empirical research at Stanford Law School. disclaimer: yes my name is somewhere on there but my personal opinions, if any, probably would have drowned in the sea of statistical methods.]

here i mull around a couple thoughts about gun control as it might be related to one particular type of gun violence.

there is a shooting massacre that evokes emotional outrage on a national scale. naturally there are calls for sweeping reform. in spirit this is justified but in reality it is lacking in tenability. mind you, the opposition's calls to resistance of reform goes a step further from "lacking in tenability"and in fact sometimes loiters somewhere in a region of "ridiculousness."

how do we prevent a lone gunman from carrying out a massacre? with varying profiles for such perpetrators it will be difficult to identify and constrain all of them. there are already millions of guns floating around that can be stolen or bought in back alleys if someone is determined enough to source them. the average joe might be discouraged from jumping through hoops to acquire a weapon, but the average deranged school shooter won't be as deterred. if the illegal gun angle was closed off at the same time (through a massive crackdown and harsher possession penalties) perhaps there would be more merit in the idea of strengthening current legal restrictions regarding the general availability of guns.

further to availability of guns is that of ammunition. let's face it, the more bullets there are in a clip the more people a deranged gunman can kill in a short amount of time. when i did pistol training the coach restricted us to five bullets in the clip at any given time to reduce the likelihood or extent of any gun mishaps on the range. that logic seems fair and can be extrapolated in my opinion. to sensationalize a bit here: you wouldn't make more C4 accessible to a community in which lurks a potential suicide bomber so why would you have rambo belts and banana clips available with deranged suicide shooters feening for a glorious exit? because guns are protected in the constitution but not bombs? please.

and what about the actual crazy people. how do we stop them? are current procedures for acquiring guns thorough enough to preclude those with mental dysfunction from arming up? i don't know. even if the law was thorough enough the enforcement and monitoring capabilities are probably shoddy. it seems to me that the vetting time and background checks are quite often insubstantial. perhaps the sale and flow of guns needs to be (virtually? electronically? physically?) centralized and controlled at a government level, if it's not already. we have the technology to do that... political will is another question.