Political Attractors

Raul Epitaph Lokino who's from Lorca Murcia, Spain and Karl  Punk_RockBeastMaster both have good blog sites dedicated in many respects to the punk/underground scene.  Raul asked if I could photograph the offices of Fat Wreck Chords in San Francisco.  This is the record label of Fat Mike from NOFX fame. 

You should be able to download the photos by clicking them open first.  Next, right click your PC's mouse and select Save.  For Mac's, I forgot the key commands, but I'm sure you can do the same thing.

Last Friday, I went to see the Motörhead show at the Warfield Theater here in San Francisco.  By that Saturday, I felt lucky to still have my wallet and credit cards in my possession.  My date and I passed out from alcohol-induced blackouts around 4 AM.

The night started out normally.  I arrived at my date’s apartment wearing a leather bomber jacket, an ammo belt and Doc Martens.  She was immediately concerned that she was underdressed for the event and solicited my fashion advice.  We combed her closet and soon had her decked out head to toe in biker denim, leather boots, silver rings on every finger and an opal pendant.  She looked hot and ready to rock and so we left.

The place was pretty crowded when we arrived.  She laughed as she viewed the crowd outside the Warfield: Metalheads, Hell’s Angels, punkers, and general speed freak types.  “What type of show are you taking me to?” she opined.  I said, “Don’t worry, let’s hit the dive bar down the street and get liquored up and we’ll fit right in.”

We had to kill about an hour.  Corrosion Of Conformity was playing the opening set and I like them, but wanted to save my energy for the headliner.  We had some drinks at the bar on 6th Street, which is a cool place:  Great music, a neon three-headed cobra light fixture above the bar and a boar’s head on the wall.  We got a good drunk on and then left for the show.

I waited in line for more booze before Motörhead started.  I noticed the crowd was a who’s who of the local underground punk scene.  I think I saw Keith Morris of the Circle Jerks at one point.  Anyway, I finally made it to the bartender who wouldn’t serve me because I’d forgotten to get a drink stamp at the door.  At that moment, the curtain parted and Motörhead fired up so I didn’t care and made it back to our spot.

The show kicked ass from the get-go.  We had a good view from the riser just above the main floor.  We weren’t temped to push on to the main floor because the place was packed and we are not very tall, so I think getting closer would have somewhat diminished the experience. 

I was totally pleased with the set, I was still getting drunker and raging to the likes of Shoot You In The Back, Stay Clean and Love Me Like A Reptile.  Then there was Another Perfect Day, Metropolis, a phenomenal drum solo by Mikkey Dee and killer versions of Just ‘Cos You Got The Power and Killed By Death.  More highlights included Going To Brazil, and an introduction to R.A.M.O.N.E.S. where Lemmy dedicated this song to the late Johnny Ramone.  There were several tracks played from the new CD, Inferno, which I thought were totally ass-kicking, but in my completely inebriated state, I didn’t recognize the titles.

At this point, the set was nearly over and my head was pounding from the amount of Guinesses I’d ingested.  My lady friend arrived with yet more drinks after visiting her friend at the Warfield’s ticket office (Yes they got us floor seats to a sold out show, weren’t we lucky.)  Anyway, she was finally a convert and was singing the praises of the band after seeing the drum solo. 

The set finished and we screamed our heads off for an encore.  They went acoustic for a rousing rendition of Whorehouse Blues (off the new album), and featuring Lemmy on harmonica!  Next was the moment my date was waiting for (she’s an avid poker player): They broke into a smoldering rendition of Ace Of Spades and the room went crazy.  I had been screaming for my favorite song just before the encore started.  I wasn’t sure it would happen, but to my delight, the strobe lights kicked on and Motörhead blazed into Overkill.  I became psychotic at this point and grabbed my date by the back of her denim jacket and we lunged forward in tandem with the crushing downbeats of Overkill. 

Whew…That was it ...So I steered her through the lobby as the band wound the song down to an extended finale.  I wanted to reach the door before getting trampled by the onslaught of bikers, metalers and who knows what else that would be trying to get out of there.  I don’t know if we missed anything, but I was too damn hammered to care. 

We went bar hopping for the next few hours.  We were high…Cranked up on Motörhead’s unflappable energy.  The dance music in the bar seemed laughable after what we’d seen but we danced a bit and really grooved.  From what I do remember, we weren’t obnoxious but we gave off a very intense vibe.  We hung out with some folks who were buying us drinks and pretending that they were Raul and Patricia from Mexico.  My memories of the remainder of the evening are vague, even though I do remember the cab ride home. 

To photography experts out there: I apologize for my shoddy work, I didn’t have a long throw lens on my camera.  Even with the right gear, a person in my condition had no business taking pictures of anything (except maybe the asphalt.)

One type of cinematic thrill I really enjoy are horror films.  I just saw the second Ring  movie.  Even if it's not as good as the first one, I was thoroughly entertained.

Anyone who has read anything on this blog knows I'm not a fan of the paranormal.  I don't believe in ghosts, E.S.P., UFO's, bigfoots, Elvis sightings or anything else like that.  I've noticed bloggers who are intensely focused on this subject and who appear to believe in paranormal things at least to some degree:

http://spaces.msn.com/members/ghosthunting/Blog/cns!1pxeo9op9QbDpJ-EeQnS2N4w!108.entry

When I read blogs like this, I can't help but be reminded of the Ghostbusters  movies.  They were clever and truly hilarious because Harold Ramis and Dan Ackroyd were using real physics terms (like "positron field") along side the paranormal gobbledegook.  Maybe this inadvertently lent credibility to parapsychology and people thought,  "Wow, that's real science because they have all that technical gear  and they use it to catch the ghosts."

Science has about as much hostility toward the paranormal as bible people do towards Darwinism.  Science is not in the business of trying to prove a negative (ie. ghosts do not exist.)  So the approach has traditionally been one of skepticism:  "Whatever the phenomenon is, there must be a physical explanation for it."  That's about all science has to say on the subject, with some rare exceptions in the 20th century: 

There was a trend toward theorizing about electromagnetic field disturbances as an explanation for ghost sightings and the physical behaviors associated with them.  But obtaining grant money to conduct controlled field experiments in electrodynamics... inside dusty Victorian mansions...did not generate much enthusiasm from the National Science Foundation.

Paranormal researchers believe they have a substantial body of evidence supporting the existence of ghosts.  Indeed they have a great deal of interesting photography (including infrared and video) and a lot of spooky audio recordings.  But even a college freshman knows that this is not data in a true sense. 

Magnetometers reading fluctuations do not demonstrate anything particularly relevant either: Disturbances involving the electromagnetic force happen everywhere in the Universe.  Even if the evidence shows some unexplained electromagnetic phenomenon, it doesn't mean the spirits of dead people are causing it.  If you travel to Canada and see the Aurora Borealis, you can't conclude that you just witnessed spirits in the sky.  You simply didn't realize the physical processes that created these natural lightshows.

I'd like to go out on a limb and propose an idea.  It occurred to me just last night, so it doesn't even have a shred of validity beyond my imagination.  I also have to refer to two relatively new theories that I've been reading about which I barely understand.  Here are the two theories and links if you are interested in getting more info:              1.  M Theory and  2.  Quantum Foam Proposal.

In any case, I'll try to briefly encapsulate my idea.  In order for M Theory to work at all, it must predict more than the three space dimensions that make up our everyday reality.  Strange as it sounds, the theory requires several extra dimensions which we do not directly perceive.  The extra dimensions are extremely, extremely small.  We and everything else in the Universe constantly passes through them without even experiencing a trace of their existence.

But new M Theory predictions state that the dimensions may not really be that tiny after all.  Because of something called branes, we might find that at least one of the extra dimensions are much, much larger...Possibly they are as large as the width of a human hair.  You'd think that a dimension that size would surely be visible.  But everything (you and I included) passes through these dimensions without ever noticing their existence:  And it works this way because our three "normal" dimensions are very, very  large.

Now keep in mind the idea of the hair-width dimension and add to it the concept of quantum fluctuations.  Simply put, QF just means that space on very tiny scales is a swirling cauldron of instability.  But quantum fluctuations, when amplified, can create very large scale effects (It is thought that the Universe expanded in this manner.) 

This hair-width dimension would be a depository for gravity (which constantly "leaks" into it.)  Fluctuations in the gravitational field inside this hair-width dimension, when amplified, could produce seemingly sporadic movements of inanimate objects...

The bowl on the table appears to move by itself and then stops...

All that really happened is that the gravitational field radically changed from one energy level to another inside this extra dimension.  Quantum fluctuations of this magnitude, probabilistically speaking, would not happen constantly.  Therefore, like ghosts, they are not events that we would experience on an everyday basis.

Most physicists would treat me like a complete kook if they read this.  So my disclaimer is that it is only a thought experiment.  After all, M Theory and the Quantum Foam proposal may not even hold up to experiments that will be conducted in this decade.

The Commander In Chief and his entourage were here in San Francisco this week.  GWB was speaking to the Commonwealth Club, the minority group that gets together here (either SF Republicans or mansion owners.)  Of course the talks involved, but were not limited to, Social Security reform, kickin' butt around the globe and keeping queers in this town from getting married.  All important issues, and it was clear the audience was anticipating W's every word.

Afterwards, there was a reception with refreshments and live music.  The Young Republicans and ecumenical types were mixing about and they were also rockin' to the sounds of the newly re-formed Christian metal band, Stryper!  Lead singer Michael Sweet could still get the crowd moving (who says pattern male baldness slows you down?)  Nothing like seeing a room full of conservative white folks smiling beatifically while headbanging.

I decided to hang out backstage with the Secret Service.  Their C.O., Agent Amanda Marsh (She's a cropped redhead with a killer bod!), did an impromtu search on my person, I guess to check if I had any weapons.  (I didn't realize that assasins usually carry guns in their crotches.)  Anyway, Amanda figured that I was okay and she let me chill with the rest of the agents.  Man do these guys party!!  No alcohol but they gave me a bump of what must have been the purest crystal meth on the fµ©king planet...My heart felt like it was going to pop out of my chest cavity, I poured sweat, my brain froze and I think I saw a window open into a parallel dimension.  No wonder these guys stay on top things so well.

Things started to wind down after a while.  The Secret Service guys were pulling some financial district chicks for some afterhours sex at the Fairmont hotel.  I decided to head home myself.  On the way out, I noticed that Rummy was outside on the street, staggering around a bit.  I saw him approach a rather tall blond "lady" on the corner.  After a short conversation, they headed toward the hotel.  They passed me and I recognized her from a karaoke drag queen contest a while back.  Poor Rummy!  I didn't have the heart to tell him what he was in for.  Hopefully, he was too drunk to really notice the difference.

I've read this article in the local free paper, the Bay Guardian.  It deals with two interpretations of what happened before and after 9/11.  The interpretations are 1) The official Bush Administration version and 2) The version proposed by so called "conspiracy theorists" who recently held conferences and previewed a new documentary film.  The 9/11 Commission report is considered ancillary, surprising enough, since both of these rival interpretations draw on selective parts of it.  Here's a quote from the article:

"Many pundits have puzzled over why Cheney has fought so voraciously to keep secret the records of the National Energy Policy Development Group he convened shortly after taking office.

He successfully fought efforts by Congress, the General Accounting Office (which sued the White House for the first time ever, backing off only after getting its budget threatened), Judicial Watch, and the Sierra Club to get those records, taking it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which seemed strange for something as seemingly benign as energy policy – particularly given that the politically embarrassing revelation of Enron's involvement had already been reported by the press.

Yet Ruppert postulates it was those meetings – held between January and April of 2001 – that confirmed for Cheney that the United States would face economic collapse unless it was able to take effective control of Eurasia (including Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Iraq, Iran, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia), where 60 percent of the world's oil reserves lie."

The ideas and disclosures in the article are not new, unless you get most of your information from FOX news.  The way it's presented, however, is looking closer to a more complete hypothesis.  A lot of the undisclosed facts have trickled down to the public in a very non-linear fashion.  It's easy to forget them from month to month.  But if you reassemble the parts in the right sequence, you get an interpretation of 9/11 that seems as plausible as the official reports.

For the entire article, go to: http://www.sfbg.com/39/25/cover_conspiracy.html

A fundamental philosophical question that has evaded explanation may have at least a partial answer in the near future.  The question is : "Why is there something instead of nothing in the universe?"

The context that created this question stemmed from a fairly modern cosmological framework.  The work of modern physics led to the realization that things are constantly moving to a state of maximum entropy, or in other words, a highly disordered state.

This concept has measurable evidence in experiments conducted inside particle accelerators.  When particle beams are collided with one another, the particles break up into their component parts, and certain particles decay (or even evaporate) sometimes in mere fractions of a second.

During the Big Bang, an infinitely dense "nano-pinpoint" containing all the universe's matter unraveled within a tiny fraction of a second, and its contents expanded into many many billions of miles within another fraction of a second. 

If you look at what happens inside particle accelerators, the unraveling process should have continued unimpeded.  Probablistically speaking, the chances were greater that the particles unleashed would have continued expanding into space without meeting any resistance whatsoever.  The universe should normally consist of an ocean of homogeneous subatomic plasma which would further diffuse itself into space.

Why didn't this happen?  The answer physicists are hoping to find is the existence of a field in space which provided resistance to the overwhelming impulse to diffuse into maximum entropy.  A new particle accelerator at the CERN institute in Switzerland promises to find evidence of this field in an experiment scheduled for 2007. 

If something called Higgs particles are discovered, they will be identified as the braking mechanisms which prevented subatomic particles from diffusing entirely into space.  The Higgs field  is thought to have slowed down the entropy process long enough for subatomic particles to form atoms, which in turn, formed the core structures of all matter in the universe.

In dynamical systems, small perturbations occurring at smaller scales have affected the shape of things at larger scales.  This occurs through something called phase space and expresses itself in the form of strange attractors.  The famous “Butterfly Effect” which goes something like: “A butterfly flapping its wings in China can generate enough turbulence to affect the weather in America in the following weeks” is a famous example.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

“Fractal processes create seemingly organic forms, but I have a problem seeing where ‘encoding’ would happen in an iterative process whose behavior arises from a program with a finite set of rules repeatedly feeding results back into itself.”

Searcher73  http://spaces.msn.com/members/Searcher73/Blog/cns!1pKDP486ntpIBiEqUOXnI5dA!339.entry

Quote from Michael Barnsley:

“If the image is complicated, the rules will be complicated.  On the other hand, if the object has a hidden fractal order to it—and it’s a central observation of Benoit (Mandelbrot) that much of nature does have this hidden order—then it will be possible with a few rules to decode it.  The model, then, is more interesting than a model made with Euclidian geometry, because we know that when you look at the edge of a leaf you don’t see straight lines.  It was a staggering image, correct in every aspect.  No biologist would have any trouble identifying it.”

(Barnsley created these images on a small desktop computer.  James Gleick describes the process: “Each new point falls randomly, but gradually the image of a fern emerges.  All the necessary information is encoded in a few simple rules.)

See the experiment in this java applet: http://www.geocities.com/bmw328driver/JavaFern.htm

Published By Punk_RockBeastMaster (http://spaces.msn.com/members/re-borne/) - February 20 10:37 AM

My response:

I grew up in the 1980's and seriously hated going to high school.  In Los Angeles, the cool thing to do was get stoned, take speed and go see a Black Flag show.  At that time, Henry Rollins had long hair and hadn't gotten buff yet.  Just about any night of the week you ventured on to the Sunset Strip and caught a show you were guaranteed to have a tear your fµ©king head off hardcore punk experience.  I used to wear skull and cross earrings in both lobes and had them torn off from people stage diving on to my head.

At the forefront of early eighties hardcore were Suicidal Tendencies who were young Vatos from East L.A. and had a marginal hit with "Institutionalized."  Other great bands to catch were Bad Religion, The Circle Jerks and Black Flag.  A lot of these shows in L.A. ended up getting mentioned in the papers because of the near riot situations that started in the mosh pits and sometimes ended up spilling out into the streets.

From New York came a blisteringly fast and super loud four piece, The Bad Brains.  They were black Rastafarian dudes from Queens and would play hardcore and then cut into heavy dub and reggae before cranking it back up to full throttle hardcore...really trippy.

Across the Atlantic came five fast, brutal, aggressive and politicized British thrash acts.  They were intensely focused on bringing down Margaret Thatcher's conservative regime.  GBH, The Exploited, Discharge, Abrasive Wheels and the U.K. Subs appeared at the L.A. clubs.  They were foul mouthed, arrogant and brilliant.

This is the best period of time to focus on if you're looking for take no prisoners, bareknuckled, in your face hardcore punk rock.  Thrash metal was directly influenced by these bands in the mid '80's.  But the sound and attitude is extreme without being metal-ly (No extended guitar heroics or dungeons and dragons imagery.)  This is old school stuff, but it really kicks ass.  If your not satisfied with the current crop of nu-punk rewind the clock back to 1980 and get ready to be immolated.

Quote from: Laoch-of-Chicago http://spaces.msn.com/members/checkraise

Interesting Idea

"Emergence theory is based upon the idea that non-linearity in the evolution of complex systems is as a direct result of the curvature of the surrounding phase-space of the system."

Sam Foster

Have got to read Sam Foster.  Thanks Laoch.  I haven't studied too much about phase space.  I know that the UC Berkeley mathematician, Steven Smale was a pioneer in the development of the phase space model:

From Chaos  by James Gleick:

"Smale's Horseshoe:  This topological transformation provided a basis for understanding the chaotic properties of dynamical systems.  The basics are simple.  A space is stretched in one direction, squeezed in another, and then folded.  When the process is repeated, it produces a kind of structured mixing familiar to anyone who has rolled many-layered pastry dough.  A pair of points that end up close together may have begun far apart."

http://www-nonlinear.physik.uni-bremen.de/nlp/publications/ChaosHTML/r14richter/node4.html

 

Geek Heaven's entry:

http://spaces.msn.com/members/jpminva/Blog/cns!1ppO8Ld1GjHFRSyLBNTc2AOw!374.entry

This entry on Geek Heaven's blog has been boiling my blood for a few days now.  It has festered and now it's ready to burst.  So here goes:

Several corporations have apparently been firing bloggers for writing negative rants about their companies on personal blog sites.  I don't know how executive officers of corporations would have the actual time to check out their employee's blogs anyway.  It seems they might be purposefully seeking out these blog sites to see if anything negative is being written. (That's my conspiracy nut moment)

Now let's define the landscape:

The U.S. Constitution does not give any latitude to private or public corporations to either interpret or place restrictions on the First Amendment in any way, PERIOD.

That said, even agencies like the FCC (which are charged with enforcing restrictions on free speech) are given limited powers to do so and these decisions are frequently challenged in the courts and are often overturned.  The Supreme Court is charged with interpreting the Constitution and more often than not, the First Amendment rights (especially freedom of the press) is given legal priority over the censors and their complaints.

Now I'll explore what the "bad guys" are doing:

I'm Joe CEO of XYZ corporation and I've just fired one of my employees for bad mouthing the company on their personal blog site. 

I may very well have violated the First Amendment by firing this person.  By firing them, I have intimidated all bloggers who may not want to risk getting fired.  This might restrict free speech because bloggers as a group will want to censure their speech regarding economic, social or political topics.

But I'll go even further:

The fact that they hate their jobs or feel their company has done something unjust is also protected speech.  And it is also critical speech which does not constitute grounds for termination.

"Whistle blowers" who have publicly criticized their companies and have gotten fired have been reinstated with back pay.  The courts do not consider constructive criticism of a company to be grounds for termination.  Joe CEO has other options such as verbal and written warnings to disgruntled employees or even better to sit the employees down to discuss and hopefully redress the grievances.

I suspect that these corporations fired the bloggers under corporate espionage guidlines in order to cover themselves.  Public criticism does not fall under this catagory and neither does bad publicity.  If you make your company's trade secrets, or internal financial information public, then that is grounds for termination.  If any bloggers crossed that line then their firing was justified.  But I doubt very many of them, if any, would be foolish enough to do that.

A blogsite should be started to publicly track all the bloggers who were wrongfully terminated.  A legal firm could use this data to start the process of filing a class action lawsuit.