kadrey:

“We now know enough to know that we will never know everything. This is why we need art: it teaches us how to live with mystery. Only the artist can explore the ineffable without offering us an answer, for sometimes there is no answer. John Keats called this romantic impulse ‘negative capability.’ He said that certain poets, like Shakespeare, had ‘the ability to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ Keats realized that just because something can’t be solved, or reduced into the laws of physics, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art.”

—

—Jonah Lehrer

parislemon:

Actor/comedian Aziz Ansari shares my Games of Thrones pain. As he tells GQ:

The way people release media is so far behind the way people actually consume it. There’s so much frustration. I mean, I get frustrated. I want to watch Game of Thrones. I’d love to see it before it comes back. Is it on iTunes? Do I watch it on HBO On Demand? What’s going on? What do I do? I bought the DVD, but I can’t watch it on my iPad?

And:

This is $5, and you have a video file that you can watch anywhere. I think people like the simplicity. Many surveys have people who stream TV shows or steal content saying that if it was available at a fair price and in a convenient form, they wouldn’t steal. And I believe that. Let’s say you hear that show Homeland is great, and you don’t have Showtime. You want to buy it. You go to Amazon, it’s not there. You go to Netflix, it’s not there. OK, fuck it, you’re just going to steal it from a torrent. But if you saw that it was $10, you could get all the episodes and watch it on anything, wouldn’t you do that? If you knew that the quality was proper and everything?

A-fucking-men. 

And unlike me, Ansari is in a position to do something about it on his end. He has put his comedy special online Louis C.K.-style.

For $5, you buy it, you own it, you can watch it anywhere. Support sanity.

[thanks Eric]

“Tolkien drafted two letters for Rütten & Loening — A.) one that ignored the request entirely; and B.) a kiss-off that discreetly called them idiots for buying into the Third Reich’s historically bankrupt appropriation of the term “Aryan.” It’s unclear which version Unwin sent, but the interesting one was dated July 25, 1938:”

Wrote a bunch of proposals for using this tech a couple years ago (thanks to the Despicable Me app story). 

Which goes to show good ideas are dime a dozen, execution is everything. 

spiegelman:

Judging by some of the links to pop up on my Internet the past hour or so, this fake Mitt Romney thing is starting to be about Pinterest changing the name of my parody account, and not about the fact that the leading candidate for the Republican nomination for President asked…

In addition to pulling funds from Planned Parenthood for The Susan G. Komen Foundation also decided to stop funding embryonic stem cell research centers making it fully transparent the organization has evolved from non-political non-profit to a partisan advocacy organization.

That means the loss of $3.75 million to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, $4.5 million to the University of Kansas Medical Center, $1 million to the U.S. National Cancer Institute, $1 million to the Society for Women’s Health Research, and $600,000 to Yale University. That’s a loss of nearly $12 million dollars in research money to eradicate breast cancer this year alone.

lessig:

In Republic, Lost and in the New York Times, I have described a version of small dollar funded elections that I have called “The Grant and Franklin Project.” Here’s a brief statement of the plan.

Assumption: Every voter pays at least $50 to the Federal Treasury in the form of taxes of…

rafer:

spytap:

joshsternberg:

The Republican Governor’s Association met this week in Florida to give GOP state executives a chance to rejuvenate, strategize and team-build. But during a plenary session on Wednesday, one question kept coming up: How can Republicans do a better job of talking about Occupy Wall Street?

1. Don’t say ‘capitalism.’

2. Don’t say that the government ‘taxes the rich.’ Instead, tell them that the government ‘takes from the rich.’

3. Republicans should forget about winning the battle over the ‘middle class.’ Call them ‘hardworking taxpayers.

4. Don’t talk about ‘jobs.’ Talk about ‘careers.’

5. Don’t say ‘government spending.’ Call it ‘waste.’

6. Don’t ever say you’re willing to ‘compromise.’

7. The three most important words you can say to an Occupier: ‘I get it.’

8. Out: ‘Entrepreneur.’ In: ‘Job creator.’

9. Don’t ever ask anyone you want them to ‘sacrifice.’

10. Always blame Washington.

Please click over to Yahoo! to read this article. And throughout the course of the year, I suggest revisiting it to see how Republicans follow through. Great lesson in messaging.

Click through to see the embarrassing reasonings for each of the above. It’s well worth it if for no reason than to understand the sheer amount of contempt and derision that the GOP has for the 99%. Because as we all know, the problem here – the underlying problem that Occupy Wall Street is fighting against – is one of verbiage.

The entire article is simply a way to avoid dealing with issues, in order to pretend to care. In fact, the concept of “pretend to care” is actually encouraged under #7 where it says “then offer Republican solutions.” And when that fails, they recommend outright lying: “Tell them…it’s the policies over the past few years that have created this problem.”

Every single point here is a matter of providing lipservice to avoid actual discussion. The Republican solution to Occupy Wall Street is very simply: “Avoid discussing it at all costs, and when forced into it, pretend to care.” Every. Single. Point. Is. A. Bullshit. Dodge.

Apparently the new GOP slogan is “If you can’t beat ‘em, make sure that you change the conversation so you never have to acknowledge the issues.”

Rafer sez:
#4 is a damn insightful point, regardless of the nasty intent. We could all learn from that. Jobs were never the dream.

And @tedr, cheer up.

““Avoid discussing it at all costs, and when forced into it, pretend to care.” Every. Single. Point. Is. A. Bullshit. Dodge.”

rafer:

Rafer sez:Nice neutral headline, crony.

It is not piracy legislation. It’s the legislated entrenchment of media incumbents.