My sunny afternoon turned bitterly cold when I saw the NY Times homepage of my web browser – “At Least 12 Slain in Binghamton, N.Y.”

Maybe this gunman had his reasons, maybe he didn’t. Clearly, though, he didn’t consider life’s worth – he also took his own life. Claiming hostages in an immigration center, a place full of people craving to take part in the American dream, and showing them how ugly America can get is a perplexing irony whose motives I can’t grasp. What will it do? Had the man lived, his world would’ve been stripped of any kind of pleasure anyway, and he’d be left with a head-spinning guilty conscience to bear with for the rest of his days.

We pay such a high price to live. We pay to create life.

Obama’s executive order overturning stem cell research regulations has enflamed many conservative, religious, and all miscellaneous folk whose ethical beliefs disagree with the technicalities of the life status of embryos. I understand these beliefs. Everyone has reasons to judge as they see fit. Life shouldn’t be wasted. And thousands of couples unable to create it go to great lengths to nurture it, which of course, is why they fertilize multiple eggs in IVF, hoping at least one will succeed. Chances are slim, but multiple embryos sometimes form. So what does the couple do? They keep one, and leave the rest for the fertility clinic to take care of. What does the clinic do? Freeze them. Almost indefinitely, unless a desperate scientist comes along and pulls multiple strings to use the embryos for clinical research (not cloning humans, as some may believe).

But still, it has the potential to become life. Mind you, an embryo is removed from its cell after 3-5 days in the crafting of a stem cell – a point at which there are ten cells or less, none of them yet specialized to form organs. In any case, the comparison of existence at conception to the existence at age 20-50 (the approximated age range of the Binghamton hostages) gets arbitrary. The question (and my bittersweet conundrum) is why our culture is so quick to fight for the right to own guns, love violent film, but be extremely sensitive to young life. Whoever is the real killer of people, someone dies anyhow.

We love babies, but once they’ve grown into adulthood, we detain and torture them. We certainly don’t seem to value life in adulthood, so why bother getting that far? If human life is to be praised, we should first set our priorities straight by valuing it at all stages.

They’re like, “Say your name, and your power animal, and what you like to do,” and when it gets around to me I say, “My name is Deniz. I am a powerful animal, and I enjoy making statements.”

Later, she decorates the woman with sliced strawberries and whipped cream and icings of many colors while she is being fucked on a table.

[please note that the woman's restriction of movement is entirely voluntary and consensual as she attests to (after the icing has been washed from her) while sitting on a couch with a towel covering the naughty bits of her body, her face red with either excitement or shame or slapping, which is another thing that she likes, I assure you]

I can never be sure if the reason why I think Ipecac Neat is far and away the best P.O.S. album is because it’s actually better than everything he put out after it, or if it’s because it was one of the first hip-hop albums I ever liked, because I listened to it over and over and over and over in high school memorizing every word. This is the problem with all criticism: your response to every record you hear is conditioned by your life’s experience of music, by what you’ve heard and when and how many times and how you felt about it, and also by what you haven’t heard. So throughout this review let’s keep in mind that I got into rap through Rhymesayers and enjoy it now primarily through anticon., and that when P.O.S. makes references to punk rock I get them but when he makes references to rappers I generally don’t.

Things that were bad about Audition that are also bad about Never Better:

-almost all instances of singing
-songs about how no one will ever be like him (now in third person!)

Exciting new bad thing about Never Better:

-people chanting “yeah” in the background

Things that are good about Never Better:

-frequently employs heavy drums and thick bass
-frequently employs fast momentum-pushing drumrolls
-stef can still rap pretty dang good

What the fuck awesome:

-guest vocals by jason shevchuk

Problems that I have with this record which point to larger issues regarding mediocrity and stasis or maybe regarding growing out of certain styles of music or conversely getting so into old records that you don’t have space for new ones:

-i feel doomtree-fatigued, like i’ve heard a dozen records with all these people rapping on them, and rapping about the same things. where is the new? where is that which will make me feel like i’m listening to something that i haven’t heard before? where, i ask you, is attridge’s inventiveness?

I mean the record is solid. P.O.S. can rap like a motherfucker, and he doesn’t give a fuck what you think of him, and if he can be a little sentimental at times and a little over-pop-referential at others, at least he disses Obamarama in one song and sings a Fugazi lyric in another. So maybe the reason why I don’t feel it like I felt Ipecac is a problem with me, and not with the album. Maybe real criticism is impossible and we’re all just hanging out rationalizing our subjective emotional responses. Whatever. I hung out with Stef a couple weeks ago, I beat him at Super Smash Brothers, he was nice and funny and he told me that he really, really likes making rap records. So if he likes it and a lot of you guys like it, then what do one douchebag’s headphone-wearing musings on mediocrity and stasis matter?

“You must never let them know that you care or they will kill you.”

Dawkins [with smart-sounding British accent]: “Hitchens.”
Harris [pointing at Hitchens' podium]: “Hitchens.”
Hitchens [passed out drunk on his podium]: gurgle, snore

“I wanna take a ride on your disco stick.”

Everyone wants to write a book. It’s a glorified prospect – you write a book, you must be bright. And in the digital age it couldn’t be simpler (to be bright). At this very moment, if I wanted, I could upload a text document containing any of my own writings, submit it to a self-publishing company such as iUniverse, LuLu Enterprises, CreateSpace or Xlibris and hold a hardcopy of it – sans editing – in a few days time.

The attraction to publish through one of these companies is clear: it’s cheap and quick (like couscous). Little to no upfront costs and one can have copies made for friends and relatives by Tuesday. The author has a great deal of control over the process with no need to worry about storage space for unsold copies; many of self-publishing companies will print-on-demand and mail to customers. How does an author justify the arduous process of going to a publishing house? Consultation, editing, connection with an existing string of bookstores for distribution, upfront payment, marketing? Whether these aspects are worthwhile depends on the author’s goals and vision for their work but turnover in titles is showing that publishing houses are suffering while self-publishing companies are thriving.

So it would seem that people would rather hold what they have written than read what someone else has. In turn, traditional publishers are also forced to be more selective with their booklists; focusing on titles that will sell despite the economy rather than those that are substantial (with some overlap, I hope). For this reason, it’s comforting to know that self-publishing exists as an alternative to those who can’t afford or be afforded to be published by traditional means. Any comfort can turn to an unsettling feeling when one realizes any great work will likely be lost in the depths of common poetry and memoirs that should never have been written, much less published.

Short story: Don’t sleep with someone just because they’re published.

I’ve been working on another piece and its been taking me a while to finish, so in the meantime I thought I’d just write about a certain something thats kept me entertained for the last few days…

While Republicans and Democrats duke it out in Washington, another headline worthy exchange has been taking place within the media itself. Last week The Daily Show ran a segment about the business news networks and their clueless economic correspondents’, CNBC’s in particular. The feud began when Economic Analyst Rick Santelli was criticized for his televised tantrum on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange where he denounced President Obama’s plan to assist home owners who were fucked over by their banks’ bad loans. Santelli was scheduled to appear on The Daily Show later that week but cancelled… or as Stewart brilliantly put it, “bailed out”.

Along with the Santelli outburst were various clips of CNBC market analysts giving bad advice to investors. The one that’s received the most attention is of supposed economic guru, Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s Mad Money. In early 2008 Cramer encouraged investors to buy Bear Stearn stock based on what’s known to be his dependable instinct. Weeks later Bear Stearns collapsed. Cramer, later in the year, went on to express his optimism about Bank of America stating “I like Wachovia but I think without a doubt, Bank of America is going to shoot up to $16 a share”. Today Bank of America stands at $4.93.

Here’s the actual clip. It’s pretty hilarious.

Anyway, after being confronted about the clips on The Today Show, Cramer confirmed he’d meet Stewart face to face on the program to discuss the debacle.

Excuse me but what the hell is wrong with Jim Cramer? Nevermind the fact that his credibility is already being questioned, why the hell would he even think about going on The Daily Show? Since you’re probably not as big a fan of Jon Stewart or The Daily Show , you probably don’t know about an eerily similar confrontation with former TV personality Tucker Carlson. In 2004 Stewart appeared on CNN’s television debate show Crossfire and stated that Carlson and his co-host, Paul Begala, were “partisan hacks” and charged them with “failing miserably” by not providing the public with an actual news show. Shortly after the appearance execs canceled Crossfire. Aside from the fact that this was probably one of the greatest moments in television history, Stewart made Carlson look like a total a dick and since then his career has reduced to fill-in guest appearances on Larry King Live. By going on The Daily Show Cramer is basically jeopardizing his television career even more.

He’s scheduled to appear on The Daily Show tonight. If you like what you see I suggest you check it out, its one of the smartest “news shows” we got.

Chapter 1: All faith or dogma of any kind is fundamentally dangerous and an impediment to societal progress.

Chapter 2: Beliefs are assertions about the way the world is and therefore must shape the actions of their believers in drastic and potentially negative ways, and so they must be subject to evidence and, if necessary, modification in the light of that evidence.

Chapter 3: The positive things done by religious people throughout history are small exceptions in a long history overflowing with unimaginable brutality and violence.

Chapter 4: Holy fuck, Muslims are going to kill everybody unless we benevolent Westerners impose liberal dictatorships on them until they can get their heathen asses out of the 14th century.

Chapter 5: In the U.S. the infestation of religion at a government level results in the faith-based criminalization of things that are pleasurable and hurt nobody, like drugs; seriously, you guys, let’s legalize us up some drugs already.

Chapter 6: We must create an ethical system that is scientific and objective, based around the idea that all human suffering is bad, which ethical system leads us to the inarguable conclusion that torture is okay, and the fact that this conclusion makes you queasy is just too bad because what is a little nausea in the face of the OBJECTIVE SCIENCE of ethics?

Chapter 7: Eastern mysticism is a form of science which makes empirical assertions about consciousness.

Note how the book progresses from reasonable and incisive to alternatingly mundane and screamingly insane.