My dogs lie about food. Some mornings roommate gets up and feeds the dogs while I’m still asleep. When I walk into the kitchen a bit later, I ask, “You guys been fed?” I am confronted by four we-haven’t-eaten-in-a-week-mom starving dog faces attached to frantically wiggling and barking dog
bodies, even though they only ate fifteen minutes earlier.

Oppie and Dylan lie for each other. If I come home to find that they’ve gotten into something, with shredded evidence on the floor, I’ll stand next to it and in my most officious voice say “Who did this?” Both of them slink out of the room. (Ok, I know there’s another explanation here, but it
sure looks like they’re covering for each other!)

Empathy is indeed the “glue” which bonds tribal societies, not only among humans, but all primates. Although “empathy” is not the right word — the bond is actually stronger than that. Empathy is the ability of an individual to see oneself in another individual. In tribal communities, there are no individuals, in the sense that members do not *see themselves* as individuals. They see themselves as instances, as embodiments, of the tribe. All other members are also embodiments, “just like them.” There is no individual identity; there is only a tribal identity, in which each member partakes. Each sees himself in all the others, just as parents see themselves in their offspring.

But that common identity does not, and cannot, extend to non-members of the tribe. Tribal societies are insular. The most common rule is, one is either a member (“the People”) or an enemy. Non-members are enemies because they do *not* embody the tribal ethos, the tribal identity. They are alien, other.

Civilization is the antithesis of tribal society. Tribal resonance cannot be established over large numbers of people, because they cannot all constantly, intimately interact. Kinship or tribal groups may form within it, but they are not stable, because they are constantly buffeted and disrupted by the surrounding society.

It’s like a broke kid with no credit history being offered a million dollar platinum visa card…only the kid doesn’t really have any say or gets to spend that money except for an upfront “high interest” cash advance. That onetime upfront cash advance is also drained away by oppertunistic “entertainment lawyers”,managers, ect…

The rest of the credit is spent on the kid’s behalf,in the kid’s name, but the kid is the one stuck with the bill.

If you had a million dollar visa line, how would you feel if a bunch of freeloaders and oppertunists spent it all and you had to spend the rest of your life paying for thier good time?

What makes things worse is the “predatory lender” often tries to pad expenses and present inaccurate and false invoices to the artist, so that the artist is left in the dark as to how much was truthfully
spent and how much he owes.

If the artists asks for an accurate invoice, they are branded as a troublemaker and retaliated against. This is one of the reasons why they are going to Congress and lawmakers for help and to reform the industry.

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Creative Media Players just put out a list of the 100 sexiest songs.

I disagree with some of those and 100% agree with others.  These songs really are a matter of taste.

People don’t know what they like:  they like what they know.  Contemporary American culture from television aimed at very small children to advertising aimed at children of all ages to MTV, which is nothing but a 24-hour commercial, to every talk and variety show on television, etc. etc. etc. is saturated with the routines of pop music.  You cannot acquire a taste for that with which you are unfamiliar.

This answer begs the following question:  why is pop music more susceptible to this form of commercialization than classical music?  The short answer is that classical music makes greater demands on the listener . . . just as it does on the composer and performer.  Parents no longer routinely require their children to take violin or piano lessons, the idea that rewards follow upon some degree of effort as the compensation for some degree of discipline and learning has been thrown overboard in the wake of the youth culture of the 1960’s.  We see the lasting legacy of “the 60’s” on Madison Avenue, which has co-opted this attitude to sell products to kids.

When I told my wife that, according to this research, musicians have an auditory cortex (which is the part of the brain concerned with hearing) which contains 130 per cent more “grey matter” than in non-musicians, she said: “Amazing.  And you STILL can’t hear us when we call you!  What it REALLY amounts to is that musicians use a greater percentage of their brains to listen to music.  Like we didn’t KNOW this….”

I still thought it was pretty interesting to get it confirmed.