9.27.2011

On the Making of Shook Ones Pt. II

“I made that beat inside my mother’s house in Queensbridge. That house gave me a lot of inspiration because something could happen outside and I could go upstairs and make a beat. Like, I would have this feeling like, ‘Let me go upstairs and make a beat of how I'm feeling right now.’" -- Havoc

From: http://www.complex.com/music/2011/04/the-making-of-mobb-deep-the-infamous/shook-ones-ii#

9.26.2011

Wikiquote quote of the day:

Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten
thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity
of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a
better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.
 --F. Scott Fitzgerald
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald>

9.23.2011

I feel like maybe we're coming into a fertile period for fashion.  I haven't felt interested in anything in fashion since perhaps 2007.  Before, that, the last period of interest was around 2002.


9.22.2011

Futurism

The U.S. faces high unemployment and I feel as if Bernanke's "Twist" is in fact a negative inflection point in the fortunes of the U.S. economy and the global economy as a whole (cf. here).  Ideally, investment money would flow to growing industrial sectors, exports would increase, and employment would pick up, but with the U.S. economy largely service-oriented now, this proposition is pretty lame.  Much industry has already been exported overseas.

Questions:

To what degree will the rich retract and protect the base, effectively walling or gating themselves off from underclass America a la South Africa?

What can be done about unemployment and underemployment?  Do communities of self-sufficiency make sense as a homegrown solution?  Is Mondragon an example or should the communities not focus on factory-like production and economies of scale to succeed (and thereby buck the "rules" of surviving in the global marketplace (e.g. favoring techne (the craftman, mechanic) over episteme (the capitalist rules of the game))?

9.06.2011

How to Rein in Medicaid Costs

 "Fascinating concept, it’s not necessarily a pejorative term ! So, we have implemented a Panopticon without walls."