Author: VD

Brainspider

One of the Dread Ilk, David the Good, has released his third album. Based on the video, he’s got a bit of a mid-90’s trance thing going on; “brainspider” would appear to be an appropriate theme. “Phat Beat Saturday” made me think of Spooky on quaaludes.

In 2002 when I released Space Age, it was a grand experiment. Could I go into the studio for a year… and come out with something that was different… creative… and might even sell a few copies?

Apparently, yes. It sold well enough to break even and got some nice reviews. But back then, I had time to promote, write e-mails, drop off copies at events and venues and all that slavish sales stuff. Unfortunately, I’m much more interested in making the music than I am in selling it – though Space Age continues to sell online. The track “Elvira” is some kind of a hit… despite being ten years old, it gets played regularly on internet radio stations.

Really… why do I do this? It’s not for sales, though I like those. It’s for the joy of creating something and laughing my head off while doing so. It’s for people to pop into their stereos at a party so their friends think they’re insane. And it’s to continue annoying people that don’t like puns and songs about animals, science, grocery stores and pathetic attempts to woo non-existent women.

My second full album, The Infinite, got crashed half-way through by a drop-off in finances and time. I finished it and went broke. And had a baby at the same time. And had to move. The momentum was shattered just as it hit the Internet. No e-mails to listeners… no promotion… no physical copies sitting in coffee shops and dusty record stores. And, on top of that, the record is a downer. It’s about nuclear bombs, the loss of a father, a limbless angel, the emptiness of existence, and the battle between good and evil.

Hey… I like it, but not a lot of other folk seem to.

The new record drops all that. Sure, it mentions anarchy, guns, man-eating women and being trapped on an island… but in a positive, upbeat way that makes one feel good about their prospects and filled with a new faith in arachnohumanity. And, in keeping with Our Modern Era, it’s digital only. No more CDs to print and lose money on.

I hereby present The Brainspider Affair, 20 phat tracks of digital good stuff that’s guaranteed to change your life. Especially if you slip it into the DJ booth at a wedding. One particularly phat track even has its own video on Youtube:

You can pick up the new album at the following locations: CD Baby, Amazon, and iTunes.

Thank you, my friends… enjoy.

BF3: the joys of recon

After acquiring a PS/3 mike, I am quite pleased with the results, although I’m not entirely sure I’m actually communicating with anyone. In Operation Firestorm, I hopped a lift in a tank, then ditched at the Gas Station and headed high into the hills. I set up the SOFLAM on a rock overlooking the battlefield, then ran up still higher to operate it remotely.

No one did anything right away, but it was clear that simply laser-targeting the enemy tanks and planes was making them skittish. I kept reporting various vehicles and encouraging someone in my squad to Engineer up and loadout a Javelin; finally someone did and promptly took out two helicopters and a tank that was advancing on the Gas Station. That was close enough to my position that I put away the remote, broke out the rifle, and took out the tank gunner who had exited the vehicle before it brewed up.

I took out four more enemies who were in a building near the Offices before someone managed to figure out where I was, climbed the hills, and took me out while I was busy spotting. That wouldn’t have happened if I had a squadmate guarding my back, but c’est la guerre video. Regardless, by this time few enemy planes or helicopters dared fly anymore and even the tanks were cautious about advancing very far past the Docks. A few jeeps were tearing around with impunity, but when one stopped to capture the Gas Station, I took out the gunner with a 262 meter headshot, thus allowing two guys who’d been pinned down by him to kill the driver as well.

This must have been the final straw, as I saw in the camera that two jeeps and a man on foot were heading for my position with obvious ill intent. I decided discretion was the better part of valor and headed further into the hills without trying to engage them. They finally located and blew up my SOFLAM camera, so I headed into the combat area and attacked a flag or two in more conventional style. I didn’t score as many personal points playing this way as I usually do when I’m attacking flags, but since it was a close and hard-fought battle that we won by 20 tickets, I’m pretty sure that my recon action made the difference between victory and defeat. And, as a side bonus, my k/d ratio increased to 3.0.

Mailvox: questions for a conference

RR asks if anyone has any suggestions for questions he might ask at an evolution speech:

I was wondering if you and the ilk could help me come up with some questions to ask a speaker at an upcoming speech entitled “Evolution, Education, and Intelligent Design“?

I thought the following would generate a certain amount of brain-twisting and possible red-face and sputtering:

1. Could you tell me the practical advantages in scientific experiments that knowledge of evolutionary theory brings that would not be available to someone holding to some theory of intelligent design or young-earth creationism?

2. What predictability advantage comes from a thorough adherence to evolution rather than intelligent design theory?

These are good questions. As anyone who follows science knows, biology tends to follow one of two tracks, either the “do something useful with genetics” track or “keep attempting to prove TENS track”. There is very little, if any, connection between the two, and in fact, one could make an excellent case for the fact that wasting resources in attempts to prove TENS through “consistent with” results has been a much greater hindrance to advancing genetic science than the sum total of anti-scientific political efforts of the last fifty years.

And since the subject directly concerns education, another pair of useful questions might be these:

3. Since most biological science does not utilize evolutionary theory and because only a very small percentage of students will go on to study biology in college, why should any high school students be forced to study either the theory of evolution by natural selection or the intelligent design hypothesis?

4. A significant and increasing percentage of high school students are unable to read or do math at an age-appropriate level. What is the benefit of teaching evolutionary theory or intelligent design to a student who cannot read or do the necessary math that is required to understand even the most basic scientific concepts.

Anyone else have ideas?

Shut them down

One State attorney general has fired a legal broadside:

Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman today filed a lawsuit against several of the nation’s largest banks charging that the creation and use of a private national mortgage electronic registry system known as MERS has resulted in a wide range of deceptive and fraudulent foreclosure filings in New York state and federal courts, harming homeowners and undermining the integrity of the judicial foreclosure process. The lawsuit asserts that employees and agents of Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo, acting as “MERS certifying officers,” have repeatedly submitted court documents containing false and misleading information that made it appear that the foreclosing party had the authority to bring a case when in fact it may not have. The lawsuit names JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., Bank of America, N.A., Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., as well as Virginia-based MERSCORP, Inc. and its subsidiary, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc.

The lawsuit further asserts that the MERS System has effectively eliminated homeowners’ and the public’s ability to track property transfers through the traditional public records system. Instead, this information is now stored only in a private database – which is plagued with inaccuracies and errors – over which MERS and its financial institution members exercise sole control. Additional defendants include BAC Home Loans Servicing, LP, Chase Home Finance LLC, EMC Mortgage Corporation, and Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, Inc.

“The banks created the MERS system as an end-run around the property recording system, to facilitate the rapid securitization and sale of mortgages. Once the mortgages went sour, these same banks brought foreclosure proceedings en masse based on deceptive and fraudulent court submissions, seeking to take homes away from people with little regard for basic legal requirements or the rule of law,” said Attorney General Schneiderman.

Not a bad start. Now it’s time for the other 49 States to stop playing the White House’s attempt to retroactively whitewash the giant system of fraud, drop the “settlement talks”, and pin these criminal bastards to the wall for their attempt to destroy the private property system. MERS was always completely illegal and it is absolutely ridiculous that it wasn’t shut down in the beginning.

However, so long as these cases remain civil, not criminal, it’s very unlikely that any true justice will be served.

Mailvox: the last man standing

CrisisEraDynamo requests a rebuttal:

How do you plan to answer Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey, and Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit), all of whom assert that aging will be conquered Real Soon Now?

Watching them die.

NB: I have nothing against any of them, you understand, but all three of them are older than me.

Is the goose tapped out?

James Cameron is only the latest member of the super-rich to exit America:

Cameron’s decision fits the trend of wealthy Americans pulling their money out of the country and reinvesting it to buy land in the southern hemisphere, escaping spiraling tax rates and protecting themselves against the potential for widespread social dislocation.

In 2010, John Malone, billionaire chairman of Liberty Media, announced that he had bought a retreat on the Quebec border as an insurance policy to “have a place to go if things blow up here,” adding that he was concerned about the survival of the dollar and whether or not “America (was) going to make it” through the economic crisis.

“My wife, who is very concerned about these things, moved all her personal cash to Australia and Canada,” Malone told the Wall Street Journal, “We own 18 miles on the border, so we can cross. Anytime we want to we can get away.”

The political class are also seeking financial refuge in foreign land buys. The Bush family purchased 100,000 acres in Paraguay back in 2006.

Growing concern that economic stagnation could lead to widespread civil unrest, allied to crippling tax hikes, is causing many members of the super-rich to abandon the United States in pursuit of more stable countries with friendlier financial conditions for those with wealth. According to the Census Bureau, “The top-earning 1% of US taxpayers are leaving the USA at the highest rate in history.” In addition, a Zogby International poll found that more than 3 million US citizens relocate abroad every year, as record numbers of rich US citizens renounce their citizenship to escape punishing levels of taxation.

Now, it’s entirely possible that these elite individuals are all moving abroad for the Tuscan sun and New Zealand sheep-shagging. But that seems unlikely. I don’t think it’s so much a taxation issue as it is a sense that the goose doesn’t have a lot of gold remaining in it.

And yet, it would certainly be interesting to know what it is these very wealthy, very connected individuals know that is driving them to take such drastic, life-altering measures.

64 is not “middle-age”

Unless you genuinely expect to live to 128:

So why is there more age anxiety than ever?

The prime culprits, Ms. Cohen asserts, are boomers themselves. As marketers in the cosmetics, advertising and entertainment industries, they have been eager collaborators in the lucrative enterprise of rehabbing the image of middle age. It looks ever “thinner, smoother, sexier, wealthier, happier and hipper.” In fact, middle-agers have never been more powerful, more active or more alluring. But in the dark of morning, when you don’t get up in time for fitness class, does a nagging voice whisper, “You’ll never be as thin as Jane Fonda”?

First, there is no question that middle-age is past one’s prime. 25 to 35 is the prime of one’s life in practically every way. Make the most of it, because it’s definitely downhill from there. That doesn’t mean you can’t do important things or enjoy yourself thoroughly, only that you’re not going to do it as readily or as easily as you do then.

The great thing about youth is its energy and sense of possibility. Those things simply don’t exist to the same extent once one is past one’s thirties. I am far more fit and energetic than most men my age, and to be honest, than most men ten years younger. But it is nothing compared to how I was when I was 25. If I tried to do what was my weekly workout routine for even a single week now, I’m pretty sure I’d end up in the doctor’s office, if not the hospital.

The idiot Boomers are a perfect example of how one shouldn’t approach aging. Rather than deny one’s age, make the most of it. Exploit your experience, make use of what you’ve learned, and occasionally, throw yourself into something to recapture that sense of times gone by.

Last night I was talking with a friend of mine about the new Creative Assembly game, Shogun II, and we were discussing how much we disliked what they’d previously done with Medieval II in speeding up the combat to the point that there is no time to think about tactics, just send all your troops forward in one big rush. We both still prefer the original Medieval to the more recent one.

“It’s ridiculous, it’s just too fast,” I told him.

“We’re getting old,” he said.

I held up the PS/3 mike he’d just given me, which I hope will allow me to encourage at least one sniper to set up a bloody SOFLAM when I’m packing a Javelin and reminded him that I’d racked up a 1.625 k/d ratio and two Flag Attacker ribbons in three BF3 missions without any teamwork by my squad earlier. “We’re not done yet.”

He laughed. “No, we’re not done yet.”

Mr. One-term

Or so Gallup appears to indicate:

Gallup released their annual state-by-state presidential approval numbers yesterday, and the results should have 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue very worried. If President Obama carries only those states where he had a net positive approval rating in 2011 (e.g. Michigan where he is up 48 percent to 44 percent), Obama would lose the 2012 election to the Republican nominee 323 electoral votes to 215.

I haven’t been hearing as many rumblings about Democrats attempting to encourage Obama to step aside; most of them now appear to involve Biden stepping down as vice-president. But I wouldn’t be convinced that he won’t until he actually accepts the nomination at the Democratic convention this summer. In addition to the eligibility and intra-party pressure issues, Obama simply doesn’t strike me as the sort of personality who is willing to lose when he has the option of claiming instead that he didn’t even try to win.

The death of sex

This can’t help Japan’s demographic decline:

A startling number of Japanese youths have turned their backs on sex and relationships, a new survey has found. The survey, conducted by the Japan Family Planning Association, found that 36% of males aged 16 to 19 said that they had “no interest” in or even “despised” sex. That’s almost a 19% increase since the survey was last conducted in 2008.

If that’s not bad enough, The Wall Street Journal reports that a whopping 59% of female respondents aged 16 to 19 said they were uninterested in or averse to sex, a near 12% increase since 2008.

Combine an economic downturn with the increasing excellence of porn and video games, then throw in female economic independence and this is the result. For all that they are decried as soshoku danshi, the position of the “herbivores” is a perfectly reasonable one.

People often point out that “a real woman” is better than the autoerotic options, but the fact is that a) the real women tend to come with considerably more negatives than they did 50 years ago and b) the gap between a real woman and autoerotica has narrowed considerably in that time, especially for men who are not in the upper half of the socio-sexual rankings.

Throw in the difference in time and money expenditure, and one can see it is a real testimony to how highly men value actual women when one considers how compelling the alternatives have become in the last two decades.

Mailvox: statistical illiteracy

dh appears to find it hard to distinguish between “X” and “virtually X”:

This will be difficult for VD to walk back in the future when he wants to try to hold his various intellectual foes to account for words they use. “Virtually Impossible” = “something that happens every day”. Got it.

First, as I have had to point out many times before, the purpose of an adjective or an adverb is to modify a word. Therefore, something that is “virtually impossible” is, by definition, not impossible. It is merely highly improbable. Does the state senator’s comment qualify?

As I pointed out in the comments, the Center for Disease Control reported that an average of 473 white men were annually infected with HIV through heterosexual contact over the course of a four-year statistical study. Now, dh had already admitted that the chances of being infected for anyone, male or female, having heterosexual relations with an infected individual, was 30 in 10,000, or one in 333. Is that sufficiently improbable to qualify as “virtually impossible”? No, I don’t think so. However, we’re not done yet.

However, this does not distinguish between men and women, which is necessary because it is easier to transmit the virus from male to female than from female to male. That is why an average of 841 white women annually contracted the virus through heterosexual contact in the same study. This means that men are estimated to contract the virus at a rate that is about 60 percent of the female rate, thereby lowering the one in 333 figure to around one in 500.

Still not “virtually impossible” in my book, but we’re getting closer. Now we have to take into account the fact that these one in 500 odds only apply to sex with an infected female. So, we have to return to the CDC, which tells us that there are 682,668 Americans presently living with HIV, 26,966 of whom are white females. This represents one in 3,649 of the 98,408,776 white females in America. Note that it is appropriate to include the entire female population here because children are also included in the AIDS statistics that we are citing due to mother-to-child transmission.

Since it isn’t possible to contract the virus from someone who doesn’t have it, this means that a white man who has sex with a white woman has approximately a 1 in 1,824,682 chance of contracting the virus. This compares rather favorably with the 1 in 58,618 chance of being legally executed, the 1 in 147,717 chance of dying in a dog attack, and the 1 in 615,488 chance of dying in a fireworks discharge.

In other words, for a normal white man like Stacey Campfield, it is, in statistical fact, highly improbable, or if you prefer, “virtually impossible”, to acquire the HIV virus, which of course is necessary in order to spread it.

And before anyone starts complaining that white-on-white heterosexual relations doesn’t encompass everyone, I will note that the entire context in which the statement was made concerned the significant difference in practical risk factors among different population demographics. Campfield’s point, and it was entirely correct, is that it is totally absurd to discuss HIV infection as if it presents a similar risk to everyone, regardless of their race, sex, or sexual behavior, which of course is the main reason the mainstream media’s dire predictions of a heterosexual AIDS epidemic, still less “a national disaster as great as a thermonuclear war”, were so wildly incorrect.

And in conclusion, I will point out that in a nation of 310 million people, a “virtually impossible”, one in 1.9 million event is indeed very likely to happen every single day. Or, as is the case here, about 1.3 times per day.