Tao’s 2 Cents

I haven’t really written much about my new apartment. Essentially I live one block down from I old apartment, except now I live on the 7th floor instead of the 3rd and have an awesome view out of the windows in the living room. I live in a neighborhood called Mt. Vernon which also known as the cultural district. It’s basically in the north east corner of downtown Baltimore.

There are a bunch of cool museums, churches, monuments, statues and generally cool old buildings around the area. The Maryland Institute College of Art(MICA) is right down the road so there’s a bunch of cool wild art sculptures and displays around also, but especially on the boulevard that runs in front of my place

Another fantastic thing…

I was watching a clip from Politically Incorrect the other night. Bill Maher was interviewing Robert Draper, the guy who wrote the biography about George Bush called “Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush”. The guy seemed to buy a lot of what Bush says and does but was critical of his stubborness. He said that Bush seemed to be waiting on things as if a miracle were going to occur.

Normally I would just chock that up to the idea that Bush thinks he’s literally God’s gift to the U.S. of A, but I suddenly had a minor epiphany. I started thinking about Bush’s life pre-presidency…

It seems that George Bush will appear to give in to overwhelming public opinion and withdraw troops from Iraq. Of course, he won’t withdraw any more than he put in for his so called “surge”. It’s quite a trick. Send more troops in so you can bring them home and appear generous? sympathetic? human? I don’t know any more.

It would have been near impossible for him to give in and bring troops home if we weren’t “winning” in Iraq. Thats why General Patraeus had to at least have some smidgen of good news…

My grandmother created and guards my family tree. It’s not very detailed, mainly names and dates, but it’s still intriguing. I suppose it’s human nature to want know when and where your ancestors lived. It’s integral in fact to answering the ego’s demand to know who it is. All of this in the hope of figuring out why you’re here and what your purpose is. Who, what, where, when and why. Life is really just one big question, but what if we don’t like the answers.

I’m reading a book that I’ll write a review about when I finish. It tracks the evolution of man over the last 5 million years when our ancestors split with the chimpanzees. I began thinking about what those ancestors would have been like, surely very foreign and my instinct would be to disavow them as my ancestors. That’s clearly the instinct that many people give in to when they refuse to believe in evolution…