Everywhere a sign.

I guess that I should write something.

Hmmm. What the hell is interesting out there that I haven't already killed a thousand times?
Boehner, Bachmann, Governor Walker, too easy targets and besides, I'm off of politics for a while.

I did think it was cool that the tea party formed an alliance with the democrats and defunded one of Speaker Boehner's pet projects, the F-35 jet engine that nobody from the Pentagon wanted. So what if we lose some Ohio jobs, right John? What was it that you said the other day, so be it? If only they could have shot down Shelby too. Maybe this thing will get interesting...

***

Minnesota Dem Betty McCollum is getting death threats for going after a very sacred cow - stripping Nascar teams of Pentagon sponsorship. She had to alert Capitol Police after receiving a fax with the message "Yo, Slut Betty," "Shut Your Phucking Pie Hole!" The fax then reads "without exception, Marxists are enemies of the Constitution" and "Death To All Marxists, Foreign And Domestic!" 

McCollum's proposal seeks to ban the military from spending taxpayer money on racing sponsorships. Currently, the Army sponsors a car in the NASCAR's Sprint Cup series to the tune of about $7 million per year. Total military expenditures on racing run past $30 million. Similar to the post office's huge and wasteful expenditures on Lance Armstrong's racing team.

Her Chief of Staff Bill Harper says that they are fielding lots of calls. "Lots of Mississippi people, North Carolina people. We had a Florida person."

Guess she will have to learn not to mess with Bubba.

***

I am starting to read up on the philosophy of structuralism. I was reading a book on semiotics and sort of tapped into structuralism.

Semiotics, the study of signs and symbols comes from the greek σημειωτικός, (sēmeiōtikos), "observant of signs." John Locke wrote about Semiotics in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690. But the real father of the philosophic pursuit was Charles Sanders Pierce who in the 19th Century defined the "quasi-necessary, or formal doctrine of signs", which abstracts "what must be the characters of all signs used by...an intelligence capable of learning by experience", and which is philosophical logic pursued in terms of signs and sign processes.

Pierce referred to three kinds of signs - iconic signs, or those that clearly represent the objects they represent (like the above road sign), indexical signs, which represent concepts that we associate with a particular sign (like a falling rock sign) and symbolic signs whose meanings are determined by convention e.g. a skull or hazardous sign.

Charles Morris followed Pierce and extended the discipline beyond human communication to animal learning and the use of signals.

The founding father of semiotics was the swiss linguist Ferdinand De Saussere (1857-1913) who identified two parts of a sign - the signifier, or actual sign itself and the signified, the conceptual meaning ascribed to it.

Semiotics breaks signs into three major categories, semantics, syntactics and pragmatics. Semantics is the way that signs relate to that which they refer. Syntactics deals with the way that words relate to each other and the formal components of sign structure. Pragmatics relates to signs' effects on people.

If you look at the photograph that I post above, you will see a picture of a sign that I took off Interstate 40. The very elementary fonts are designed to be understood on the most primitive level when whizzing by at 80 mph. Information transfer in its most basic form. Eat and Gas. Highly effective in its most primal and simplistic modality.

Structuralism is a concept championed by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. It analyzes the human condition semiotically, as a system of signs. Strauss believed that this underlying language affects man in a very direct way, no matter what culture we happen to spring from.

First, that a structure determines the position of each element of a whole. Second, that every system has a structure. Third, structural laws deal with co-existence rather than change. Fourth, structures are the "real things" that lie beneath the surface or the appearance of meaning. One of the tenets of structuralism is that it be understood that these structures are not concrete manifestations of reality, but cognitive models of reality.

Not to belabor this exercise in pointy headed intellectualism but one of the main precepts of structuralist and post structuralist theory is the concept of binary opposition. The pairs in the structural system are either similar or opposite.  Man/woman, good/evil, civilized/savage, white/black, all are broken down to the elementary binary dichotomy.  But the kicker is that one of the polarized partners is usually dominant,  hence we now live in a culture that tends to favor conservative, straight, white men.

I find structuralism pretty interesting, as well as its connections with structural linguistics and phonemics. As different as cultures seem, we are all remarkably similar when viewed through the structuralist prism. Silly hairless apes.