Sunday, October 8, 2017

yeah.

time for a deduction, kids: iran. what's going on?

well, it's easy to conclude from the coverage that the president is a fucking moron, and that he's about to do something stupid - something stupid which would happen to hand over yet another oil producing region to the country's primary competitor. and, i bet the democrats would have fun insinuating that putin and trump are in kahoots over it, too, right?

that's not reality.

i like to find little pieces of evidence that would be impossible if it weren't for the alternative narrative i want to present; it's a kind of proof by contradiction - although i'm abusing the language, here.

iran is threatening to blow up american military bases if they put down sanctions. that's not scary; that's comical. it's a threat that's emptier than jagmeet singh's suits. but, they would hardly risk that kind of language if they weren't told the truth about what's happening.

iran knows that what trump is doing on iran right now is for domestic consumption, so it is producing it's own nonsense for it's own domestic population, and the media is laughably reporting it all as real. there is no other way to make sense of iran's threats, and america's decision to not even respond with a sardonic remark.

i kind of expected this from trump. the only thing he was ever really serious about was china. everything else he said ranged from ignorant to absurd.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.
this is my fourth symphony.

it's a sort of a pun; it uses the medical condition of acidosis, which is when the ph level of a person's blood dips to a level that causes complications or death, to draw an analogy to the environmental destruction being carried out by industrial civilization. it also forwards my intuitive hypothesis that homo sapiens will ultimately end up as an evolutionary dead-end. more specifically, my view is that intelligence, as a trait, is ultimately an evolutionary disadvantage. well somebody else probably has that view too.

(...i learned later that it turns out to be the seminal evolutionary biologist, ernst mayr, in fact. he made evolutionary syntheses, not hot dogs....)

the material is presented here in fragmented format to properly outline the structure of the piece.

that sexy cover art is a couple of bitmaps of neurons played with in paint and superimposed onto each other in coagula. the sound of that sexy bitmap is heard in the song.

i think i'd rather let the piece stand by title alone, other than to point out that the reaction explored in the piece is really more general than any specific narrative justifies. it's a systems break down.

the music is half generated algorithmically and half played. the half random, largely atonal notes i had programmed into the generator created unusual jam circumstances that were fun to play with. as an example, the piano part is live, but it's being spurred on by the random synth bass underneath it. the computer was driving me, creatively; i think it produced interesting results, both out of me and in itself. as a rhythm section, the computer holds it's own here - as random as the notes are.

what centres the track, though, is a classical guitar part that i recorded very late one night. i was weirded out about things and wanted to get some shit out, so i recorded myself playing for close to a half hour. i think a lot of people don't realize just how powerful a guitar can be as an alternate outlet for aggression. psychologically, that's powerful shit.

i listened to the jam when i got my head clear and i was sort of fascinated by it's just raw emotion. it didn't make any musical sense, but it expressed an idea through it's dynamics. i ran it backwards through an effect designed to simulate a record player dying over exaggerated lengths of times and that became the idea to build around. the shape grew slowly, all the way into the analogy, from there.

this was constructed over a little more than a month: from 7/7-8/20, 2000. it seems to have been recombined into one track around 2007 but has otherwise not been modified since it was completed. first released as an ep in jan 2014. release finalized on oct 8, 2017. as always, please use headphones.

this ep appears as a single track on my fourth record:
jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/deny-everything
 

credits

released August 20, 2000

j - guitars of all types, bass, drum programming, synthesizers, piano, loops, noise generation, organ, ebow, flute, mandolin, treatments, effects, found sounds, sound design, generative synthesis, generative percussion, light-sound synthesis, digital wave editing, production, coughs, a broken equalizer, cover art 

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.
and, you might not realize this, but it's absolutely true: in the wider academic community, not just math and science but pretty much across the spectrum, business people are broadly looked down upon as mindless idiots that lack the brain power to pursue a fulfilling subject matter.

an mba is like a doctorate in religion: it's not seen as a real education, and they're not seen as 'educated people'.

this goes way back, too. if western culture is fundamentally built on top of plato (due to christians burning all the other books. thanks guys.), you could argue that the entire purpose of academia is to slag business people as shallow and singularly-minded.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.
why should i hide my disdain for business people?

i don't like them. i don't want anything to do with them.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.
actually, tit-for-tat demonstrably outperforms more sophisticated strategies, in just about every possible simulation, and that is maybe what the media missed, all along: somebody playing 0-dimensional chess with force and conviction is actually likely to handily defeat somebody playing 18-dimensional chess, as he steam rolls over all of the logic bending around and collapsing in on itself.

what the math actually says in these scenarios is that you want to keep it simple, stupid. but, you're not consulting the math. you're consulting some hare-brained theories written by a bunch of half-literate charlatans with worthless mbas.

i keep telling you to take a course in game theory. it doesn't require advanced math - some simple algebra, that's it. but, you don't listen.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/08/politics/trump-corker-attack/index.html

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.
what is this, rachel maddow's not-evil twin?


jagmeet singh must cut his beard.
so, as with everything else with this administration, they're setting up a crazy house of smoke and mirrors to obfuscate the issue - expect a lot of bravado and a lot of words, but not much action.

this is good.

as i've stated repeatedly: putting sanctions on iran at this point is equivalent to rolling out the red carpet for russian troops to enter tehran.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-08/trump-s-iran-gambit-is-said-to-keep-worst-deal-ever-intact

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.
nationalism. racism. religion. tribalism. patriarchy. traditionalism. conservatism. heterosexism.

they're all the same thing, and they all need to be abolished simultaneously in order to prevent one from regenerating the rest of them.

https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/545/docs/Wendy_Wood_Research_Articles/Social_Influence/hall.matz.wood.2010.final_why_dont_we_practice_what_we_preach.pdf

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.
oct 6-7th vlog, where i go to touche amore and then spend the last hot night of the year out dancing.