Digital Underground - Return of the Crazy One

Find the Burning Bush

Who Did The Thing In The News?

"The hackers only latched onto The Interview after the media spent a week prognosticating over the possibility of it being the driving force behind the hack. It wasn’t until December 8, at least a week after the Sony Pictures hack went public, that the attackers started using The Interview as leverage. If you had just hacked Sony, and the world media just gave you the perfect opportunity to shift the blame onto North Korea, wouldn’t you do the same thing?
 
There’s also the overall timeline of the hack to take into consideration. The hackers managed to exfiltrate around 100 terabytes of data from Sony’s network — an arduous task that, to avoid detection, probably took months. Given how long it would’ve taken to gain access to Sony Pictures, plus the time to exfiltrate the data, I think the wheels started turning long before North Korea heard about The Interview.
 
Even if we take the movie out of the equation, the hack just doesn’t feel like something that would be perpetrated by a nation state. The original warnings and demands feel like the attacker has a much more personal axe to grind — a disenfranchized ex employee, perhaps, or some kind of hacktivist group makes more sense, in my eyes." (source)

Max Headroom Hacking

Groping in the Dark With....Burckhardt's Reflections

"The rivalry between history and poetry has been finally settled by Schopenhauer. Poetry achieves more for the knowledge of human nature; even Aristotle said 'poetry is more philosophical and profound than history,' and that is true, because the faculty which gives birth to poetry is intrinsically of a higher order than that of the greatest historians. Further, the end to which it is created is much sublimer than that of history."


                                                 Jacob Burckhardt, Reflections on History

Burckhardt gave us, whether we wanted it or not, our first lasting interpretation of the Italian Renaissance as a single historical epoch. Lots of kids have taken issue with that interpretation, especially with respect to the question of modernity and the equality of class and gender. Very little of what we would recognize as modernity is rooted in the Renaissance. The state was a medieval invention; anything resembling secularism would come later or would not come at all. Mathematico-empiricism is Baroque. In the realm of intellectual culture we generally agree that the Italian Renaissance gifted to the future knowledge of Greek classics, improved philological and historiographical methodologies, and a handful of witty political subversives. That's about all.

So, knowing this, I wondered why precisely current opinion differs so drastically from that of the nineteenth-century Swiss historian. The above passage, taken from a lecture on world history, offers part of an answer, a part I had not considered. We need to look to Schopenhauer's understanding of the relationship between history and poetry.* The German philosopher claimed that speech "represents a perfectly distinct class of ideas, whose subjective correlative is reason." There is no imagination in speech. Speech is reason speaking to reason. Poetry, as written speech, like philosophy, "reveals the events of our inner life, in so far as they concern the will," which "alone is the thing-in-itself." It accesses what is unchanging in mankind, revealing "the same, identical, unchangeable essence, acting in the same way today as it did yesterday and always."

History is merely the "mere coordination of what is known" with respect to particular facts, a category that is innumerable and infinite. From these facts one cannot access the universal. Against the Hegelians, Schopenhauer calls their "pseudo-philosophy" pernicious and--at root--a "crude and shallow realism," and "a shallow optimism." Hegelianism seeks a "comfortable, substantial, and fat State with a well-regulated constitution, good justice and police, useful arts and industries." But none of it reveals the inner life. Only poetry and philosophy and speech are capable of this revelation.

Burckhardt's approach to history was not as simplistic as Schopenhauer's (the Swiss historian trained at the University of Berlin under Ranke), but one does detect a similarity or influence between the two authors. Burckhardt often treated the writings of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and other Italian authors as the documents of important, uncomplicated witnesses to a profound change in the human spirit.

*Because I am lazy and ignorant, I simply followed the footnotes in the text. They led me to The World as Will and Representation Vol. 1, Section 51 and Vol. 2, Section 38. You can find these passages through Google if you're interested. 

Watching

Jenny Hval - I Called

Nightmares

John Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1782)

Nicolai Abildgaard, The Nightmare (1800)

Marianne Faithfull - True Lies

Noah23 - Tearz in Heaven (ft. Swag Toof)

The Sting of a Flea or a Fly

"Detach yourself from concern for the body when you pray: do not let the sting of a flea or a fly, the bite of a louse or a mosquito, deprive you of the fruits of your prayer."

    Evagrius Ponticus

Sigourney Sundays