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Friday, December 14

For Whom It May Concern

It May Concern You
Thy qualling toad-spotted miscreant hath a beef-witted pignut.
Thy spleeny hasty-witted skainsmate hath a pox-marked hedge-pig.
Thou art a mammering pox-marked malt-worm.
Thou art a spongy motley-minded baggage.
Thou art a fawning dizzy-eyed whey-face.
Enter your name to be insulted:


Mode:
One of 325 million Shakespearean insults by Insult-O-Matic

Sunday, December 9

I Also Prefer Dogs To People

A dog obviously has a Buddha Nature, but what about a cockroach?

There's A Difference Between Lonliness

And Being Alone
I'm not anti-social as much as I'm contra-social. Even maintaining a strong sense of non-approachability with sunglasses and an unmarked dark gray baseball cap over Jeffrey Dahmer inspired facial hair, invariably some stupid brave soul feels compelled to interact with me and thus prove what a loathsome excuse for breathing they happen to be. I am rarely surprised by their stupidity, cupidity, arrogance or ignorance. Par for the fricken course. Certainly I have "anger issues," but I have them firmly in control, so let's (myself and I) go get a drink, eh? Groovy...

A “Friend” Writes

I hope I was right about you're reaction to the Johnny Sneer Twitter account, and also that after our conversation you either understood or at least regained a broader context with which to mediate your initial, visceral reaction. While completely unsurprising, it was nevertheless gloomier than warranted: and please note my use of the comparative. It would be unrealistic and irresponsible not to recognize the dark undertow coursing through the above link, but I'm afraid it is an honest, organic reflection of our era.

Having been nurtured in Augean stables of pandemic mendacity and industrial-strength hypocrisy, this demographic tends to exhibit everything from varying degrees of unconscious contempt to unqualified disrespect for their society and much of what it celebrates and rewards. Bertolt Brecht comes to mind. So if you can't brighten or channel our Mr. Sneer's stream, you might consider adding to it and influencing it in a way that respects his autonomy without relinquishing the prerogatives of your intellectual rigor or altruistic intent. N'est–ce pas?

Wednesday, November 21

Turds In The Punchbowl

Or: why I refrain from commenting ... more often than not.
Reviewing Losers

Hi
xojane is for my tastes the most interesting, well written and topical editorial tour de force I've come across in a long time. So good in fact that I've been seriously obsessing: hoovering 188 posts in the last four days. It's either the commanding headlines, my self diagnosed OCD, or just some horny-old-guy research into chatting up smart (ie: hot) young women with big wits. (W i t s.)

OK, all of the above.

The warmth and generosity, the sensitivity and intelligence of "The Boss Lady" comes through every post. You are very much loved and deservedly so.

Thanks, Jane & Cheers!

Vanessa-> Reviewing Losers

"Horny old guy research into chatting up smart (i.e. hot) young women with big wits.)" Ew. Really? You had to say that? Read what you like but realise that this isn't your 'research' site and we're not hot young women here for your education. Gross.

peachgrenade-> Vanessa

And it was such a nice message aside from that. EW is right.

Reviewing Losers ->  peachgrenade

(&-> Vanessa) You're right. My bad. It was a misguided (and clearly unsuccessful) attempt at "clever honesty." I not only appreciate, but also understand how the comment could be off-putting and inappropriate in this venue ... if I had been completely SERIOUS. The joke's not funny if you have to explain it, so here goes.

Tuesday, November 13

Apocalypse When?

Detroiters often react testily to this kind of attention (as I do), even when it is done skillfully and with good intentions, as much of it is. Some of the criticism of negative publicity is just boosterism, as when the City Council denounced the producers of the ABC crime drama Detroit 187 for peddling the idea that there are criminals in Detroit. Others, weary of condescending criticism from outsiders, will defend Detroit’s reputation, or at least their privileged right to defame it, something like defending a bad parent: I can say anything I want about the old man, but don’t you dare. Ruin photography, in particular, has been criticized for its “pornographic” sensationalism, and my bookseller friend won’t sell much of it for that reason. And others roll their eyes at all the positive attention heaped on the young, mostly white “creatives,” which glosses over the city’s deep structural problems and the diversity of ideas to help fix them. So much ruin photography and ruin film aestheticizes poverty without inquiring of its origins, dramatizes spaces but never seeks out the people that inhabit and transform them, and romanticizes isolated acts of resistance without acknowledging the massive political and social forces aligned against the real transformation, and not just stubborn survival, of the city. And to see oneself portrayed in this way, as a curiosity to be lamented or studied, is jarring for any Detroiter, who is of course also an American, with all the sense of self-confidence and native-born privilege that we’re taught to associate with the United States.
Detroitism by John Patrick Leary @ Guernica

h/t Erik Loomis @ Lawyers, Guns & Money

Monday, November 12

Signal To Noise At Home (Box Office)

The nature and structure of belief systems is important from the perspective of an informational theorist because beliefs are thought to provide the cognitive foundation of an attitude. In order to change an attitude, then, it is presumably necessary to modify the information on which that attitude rests. It is generally necessary, therefore, to change a person's beliefs, eliminate old beliefs or introduce new beliefs.
Attitudes And Persuasion - Richard Petty and John Cacioppo
Like the novels it adapts, Game of Thrones has a sprawling ensemble cast, which George R.R. Martin estimated to be the largest on television.[6] During the production of the third season, 257 cast names were recorded.[7] The following overview reduces the list of characters in Game of Thrones to those played by the actors credited as part of the main cast.

Sean Bean is Lord Eddard "Ned" Stark, head of the Stark family whose members are involved in most of the series's intertwined plot lines. He and his wife Catelyn (Michelle Fairley) have five children: the eldest, Robb (Richard Madden), the dainty Sansa (Sophie Turner), the tomboy Arya (Maisie Williams), the adventurous Bran (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) and the toddler Rickon (Art Parkinson). The family's outsiders are Ned's bastard son Jon Snow (Kit Harington), and Ned's hostage and ward Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen).

Ned's old friend King Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy) shares a loveless marriage with Queen Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey). In defiance of her father, the fabulously wealthy Lord Tywin Lannister (Charles Dance), Cersei has taken her twin, the "Kingslayer" Ser Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) as her secret lover. She loathes her younger brother, the clever dwarf Tyrion (Peter Dinklage), who is attended by his mistress Shae (Sibel Kekilli) and the sellsword Bronn (Jerome Flynn). Cersei's oldest child is Prince Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson), who is guarded by the scarfaced warrior Sandor "the Hound" Clegane (Rory McCann). The king's "Small Council" of advisors includes the crafty Lord Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish (Aidan Gillen) and the eunuch spymaster Varys (Conleth Hill).

Signal To Noise At The BBC

Perhaps this explains why American television is constantly ramming British affectations down our ...er um ... throats. [ie: Piers ... and Simon ... and Stuart ... unbelievable]
And so you open Pandora’s box to find the seedy ingredients of British populism. It’s not just names, or performers and acts, it’s an ethos. Why is British light entertainment so often based on the sexualisation of people too young to cope? And why is it that we have a press so keen to feed off it? Is it to cover the fact, via some kind of willed outrage, that the culture itself is largely paedophile in its commercial and entertainment excitements? Milly Dowler’s phone was hacked by journalists cynically feeding the ravenous appetites of three million people who love that stuff, and that’s just the ones who actually bought the News of the World. When Leveson’s findings are duly buried, will we realise that it was the nation’s populist appetites that were on trial all along?

Tuesday, November 6

Lincoln, Lincoln bo Bincoln Bonana fanna fo Fincoln

Fee fy mo Mincoln, Lincoln!
Let’s Get Small

The word politico originated in the seventeenth century as a term of moral derision, and furnished the title of Matthew Josephson’s 1938 study of the graft-riddled Congresses of the Gilded Age. For VandeHei and his cofounding editor John Harris, however, the moniker was a conceptual upgrade: they originally planned to launch their Capitol Hill tip sheet under the plain-vanilla name “Capitol Leader” but evidently settled on the epithet as a better summation of their journalistic ambition. In terms of strict diction, you can’t fault their decision. In debuting a minute-by-minute chronicle of the permanent campaign by, for, and about terminal Hill insiders, VandeHei and Harris went all in on the enabling fiction that the seamiest features of human nature—which would find full expression in Politico’s quest to discredit rivals, to distort simple political aims and ideas with drive-by caricatures, and to float personality-based digital memes across the gossip-driven agoras of social media—were themselves somehow news, and therefore newsworthy. In the bald effort to define (and, of course, to win) a whole new race to a whole new journalistic bottom, the faux-statesmanlike overtones that came with a name like “Capitol Leader” simply weren’t going to cut it.
Come On, Feel the Buzz by Alex Pareene @ The Baffler

h/t karoli @ Crooks and Liars

Saturday, November 3

If I was looking for a reason...

It might be something like this:
It is not fear. It is simple, compelling logic. We have two major political parties. Until that great gettin'-up morning, when purists on both sides of the ideological ditch manage to create workable third parties that look like something more substantial than organized unicorn hunts — which won't happen until we have proportional voting, and I wish you as much luck with that as Lani Guinier had — we always will have two major political parties. One of them is inexcusably timid and tied in inexcusably tight with the big corporate money. The other one is demented.

Friday, November 2

How Do You Know When You've Joined A Cult?

2. You’ve lost it

Yes, I realise that’s going to sound harsh. But there’s no point in sugaring the pill.

I’ll be specific: for most of our relationship, there were two things I could rely on from Apple. The first was that your products would work far better than PCs. Windows PCs would get viruses, they would be difficult to fix, they would break down and leave you tearing your hair out. The second thing is that although you weren’t necessarily the most innovative company out there, you would just do it right. You weren’t the first company to make a smartphone (Nokia Communicator, anyone?) but you were the first to do it well. The same goes for mp3 players, for tablet computers, for family photo software, for media management (for the first half of iTunes’s life). You were never about innovation, but you were damn good at execution and flair.

Not any more. This is going to sound awful, but I can’t think of any big product you’ve re-imagined well since the iPad, and that was almost three years ago. iCloud? Not as good as dropbox, and actually more confusing. FaceTime? Slick, but still pales in comparison with Skype. iMessages? Mostly annoying, particularly when it sends messages twice. Siri? See the previous point. Safari? Not as good as Chrome or Firefox. Safari’s Reader function? Not as good as Instapaper. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

Plus, my Mac simply doesn’t work that well any more. The contacts on my iPhone don’t seem to sync very well with my laptop. Aperture is extraordinarily slow and buggy, Pages and Numbers are a bit of a nonsense. It just feels like you don’t make the best software anymore. And it doesn’t fit together as seamlessly as in the past.

DEAR APPLE: I'm Leaving You by Ed Conway @ Business Insider

h/t The Audit @ Columbia Journalism Review

Sunday, October 28

Really? That's The Image You Want to Go With, Huh?

If there was any discussion, it might have gone something like this:
Are you sure this is the look you want for your training program? I realize that the on-line market for students is - well ... distinct from shall we say traditional avenues of appeal, but --

No, no. I don't mean to suggest that there's anything necessarily wrong with this young woman's appearance ... it's just ... the leopard print seems a bit suggestive ... on at least a few levels. Along with the hoop earrings and the general exotic and fairly erotic over-the-shoulder come-hither ...

Yes, of course I realize advertising is all about seduction but ... my problem?

Well, sir. I'm not sure if we're targeting young, middle-eastern women or sexually adventurous western males ... no. Of course there's no reason we can't market to a variety of potential demographics at the same time. I see your point, sir. Yes. Of course.

We'll have it on-line in our next ad-buy. Thank you, sir.

Thursday, October 25

The Under-handed Matter

We can’t possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us,” a senior administration official said. “It’s a necessary part of what we do. . . . We’re not going to wind up in 10 years in a world of everybody holding hands and saying, ‘We love America.’ ”

That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism. Targeting lists that were regarded as finite emergency measures after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are now fixtures of the national security apparatus. The rosters expand and contract with the pace of drone strikes but never go to zero.

Meanwhile, a significant milestone looms: The number of militants and civilians killed in the drone campaign over the past 10 years will soon exceed 3,000 by certain estimates, surpassing the number of people al-Qaeda killed in the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Obama administration has touted its successes against the terrorist network, including the death of Osama bin Laden, as signature achievements that argue for President Obama’s reelection. The administration has taken tentative steps toward greater transparency, formally acknowledging for the first time the United States’ use of armed drones.

Less visible is the extent to which Obama has institutionalized the highly classified practice of targeted killing, transforming ad-hoc elements into a counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining a seemingly permanent war. Spokesmen for the White House, the National Counterterrorism Center, the CIA and other agencies declined to comment on the matrix or other counterterrorism programs.

emphasis is mine
h/t sosadmin @ PRIVACYSOS via Falguni A. Sheth @ Translation Exercises

Facts of the Matter at Hand


h/t

Tuesday, October 23

“Piercing” Objectivity

What about the other others? What about the poor people who dove under their beds, or hid behind the goat cart, or just ran until their hearts burst when they heard the detonation? What about the people hiding behind rocks that, to them, are substantially less solid and real than the blind explosive death from the sky? What about the other others tomorrow, as they walk to work, cutting their eyes toward the clouds, jumping every time an old car backfires? How can a society — even an impoverished one — hold itself together full in the knowledge that life and death is at the whim of someone at a distant targeting station, even more remote from the actual war he's fighting than the gods on Olympus were removed from Troy, since they occasionally at least visited the battlefield?

Tuesday, October 16

Social (Media) Disease

Wow. Really, just ... wow.
The Violentacrez clan seems to have walked out of a Todd Solondz movie, and a significant part of Violentacrez's mythos on Reddit comes from the details he's shared about his family. In 2010, Violentacrez hosted a legendary "Ask Me Anything" thread"—the same Q & A feature Barack Obama took part in last month. He was asked what was the creepiest thing he'd done "IRL" and delighted readers with a tale ripped out of Penthouse letters. "That'd be a tough call," Violentacrez wrote, "Perhaps oral sex with my 19-year-old stepdaughter." It was completely consensual, he claimed in the post, and went on to brag about how awesome it had been in graphic detail.

This happened over ten years ago, Violentacrez claimed. When his then-wife, the girl's mother, found out, she "got mad, then got over it," Violentacrez wrote. He says they were married for ten more years.

His current wife is similarly accepting of Brutsch's unsavory side, according to Brutsch. She is not only aware of his online habits, she's also a prolific Redditor under the handle not_so_violentacrez. She is a founder of the Fibromyalgia subreddit. She has diabetes and plays the online game Kingdom of Camelot. Violentacrez said that at home, the two would lie in bed together with their laptops, both on Reddit, him posting his porn, she posting cute animal videos and pictures of dolphins.

h/t Jill @ Feministe

Wednesday, September 26

The Only Man Harsher Than Moi

...Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the ‘bankstatocracy’ that has led to what the mainstream financial media calls an ‘unintended’ wealth gap in the consumer sector – between those who recovered from the recession, and those still struggling. Any suggestions that this wealth gap might be intentional is ‘suspicious’ behavior, according to the US government.

Sunday, September 2

Political Speech Recognition

That makes the entire Inside Baseball discourse a giant time sink, a cancer, an exercise in “Look! Over there!” After all, when everybody’s talking about how Eastwood hosed the Romney campaign because he misused a prime time slot, nobody’s talking about Gitmo, Afghanistan, or 23 million unemployed, are they? (There are entire lists of what we’re not talking about.)

And wasn’t that the real story? That, for one brief moment, a speaker turned human asked some questions that both candidates, and both parties, find very unpleasant?

Two Cheers For Clint Eastwood - Lambert Strether - 09/02/2012

Wednesday, August 22

Ticket To Ride?

And if all this seems, now, ridiculous and theatrical apprehension on the part of a nineteen-year old boy, I can say only that it didn’t seem remotely ridiculous then. A black person in this democracy is certain to endure the unspeakable and the unimaginable in nineteen years. It is far from an exaggeration to state that many, and by the deliberate will and action of the Republic, are ruined by that time.

White Americans cannot, in the generality, hear this, any more than their European ancestors, and contemporaries, could, or can. If I say that my best friend, black, Eugene, who took his life at the age of twenty-four, had been, until that moment, a survivor, I will be told that he had "personal" problems. Indeed he did, and one of them was trying to find a job, or a place to live, in New York. If I point out that there is certainly a connection between his death (when I was twenty-two) and my departure for Paris (when I was twenty-four) I will be condemned as theatrical.

But I am really saying something very simple. The will of the people, or the State, is revealed by the State’s institutions. There was not, then, nor is there, now, a single American institution which is not a racist institution. And racist institutions-—the unions, for one example, the Church, for another, and the Army—or the military—for yet another, are meant to keep the nigger in his place. Yes: we have lived through avalanches of tokens and concessions but white power remains white. And what it appears to surrender with one hand it obsessively clutches in the other.

Tuesday, August 21

Just Another “Oral” Fixation

You should not consume "Laura Meets Jeffrey" in one go. It feels a little like eating an entire pizza in a single sitting, except instead of pizza, it's an ass.
Julieanne @ xojane

Monday, August 13

“Cleaning Up” America Por los Touristas

Priam Rosenberg
Cops only have Tasers for children, the unarmed, the physically or mentally handicapped, and the elderly ... but if you bring a knife to a gun fight ...

In Times Square ... well then it's obviously right and proper that you get sprayed with (twelve!) bullets instead. America: FUCK YEAH!

Kill-shots are so manly. N'est-ce pas?

Saturday, August 11

solicitous and naomi$@?*$

Friday, Aug 10, actually in NYC
naomi$@?*$ 02:44 Hi how you doin?,, I'm naomi and im so wet and horny and looking for some fun. Wanna see me naked on my webcam? I just got out of the shower and still have my towel on with no undies <3
solicitous 02:53 well of course i do!
naomi$@?*$ 02:54 cool ..

Friday, June 29

Sometimes Advertising Doesn't Suck

Names from the Memoirs of the House of the Dead

Alexander Petrovich i.e.: Dostoevsky
Chekunda "...the dirtiest wench in the world." 39
Korenev "The flesh had gained so much the upper hand over all his mental attributes that you might see from the first glance at his face that there was nothing left in him but but a fierce thirst for bodily pleasure, sensuality, carnal satifaction." 66
baygushi"...some paupers, called by us baygushi, those who had gambled or drunk away all their money or were simply paupers by nature." 69
Yankel"...Gogal's little Jew, Yankel, in Taras Bulba, who, when he undressed to betake himself with his Jewess to some closet for the night , looked dreadfully like a chicken." 78
Aristov "...such complete moral degradation, such absolute corruption, and such brazen vileness, as in Astinov." 90

Monday, June 25

I Have this Album ... Somewhere

In a Box ... Hiding Under My Desk or in a Closet ... Or Something
a1)B.E.F.Groove Thang
2)DevoGoing Under
3)D.A.FDer MussolinI!
4)Fingerprintz (2)The Beat Escape
5)Heaven 17Soul Warfare

b1)Simple MindsLove Song
2)MagazineThe Great Man's Secrets
3)JapanThe Art Of Parties
4)The Human LeagueDo Or Die Dub (Special Edit) n/a

Methods Of Dance | Virgin | Vinyl, LP, Compilation | UK | 1981 | Electronic | New Wave, Synth-pop

Environs Prometheus

“He Received Every New Idea as Perfectly Beautiful”



Sunday, June 24

So Sprach Der Amerikanische Prometheus

...Now, this is not an easy thing, and the point I want to make, the one point I want to hammer home, is what an enormous change in spirit is involved. There are things which we hold very dear, and I think rightly hold very dear; I would say that the word democracy perhaps stood for some of them as well as any other word. There are many parts of the world in which there is no democracy. There are other things which we hold dear, and which we rightly should. And when I speak of a new spirit in international affairs I mean that even to these deepest of things which we cherish, and for which Americans have been willing to die -- and certainly most of us would be willing to die -- even in these deepest things, we realize that there is something more profound than that; namely, the common bond with other men everywhere. It is only if you do that that this makes sense; because if you approach the problem and say, "We know what is right and we would like to use the atomic bomb to persuade you to agree with us," then you are in a very weak position and you will not succeed, because under those conditions you will not succeed in delegating responsibility for the survival of men. It is a purely unilateral statement; you will find yourselves attempting by force of arms to prevent a disaster.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
SPEECH TO THE ASSOCIATION OF LOS ALAMOS SCIENTISTS
Los Alamos, November 2, 1945

Friday, June 22

x = “popper open society plato hexagon octagon circle”

ƒ(x) = google(x)
  1. Plato's approximation of pi? « Division by Zero

    divisbyzero.com/2012/06/20/platos-approximation-of-pi/
    2 days ago – Here's what Popper has to say (this is in his notes to Chapter 6 of The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. 1, pp. ... of this curious fact is that it follows from the fact that the arithmetical mean of the areas of the circumscribed hexagon and the inscribed octagon is a good approximation of the area of the circle.
  2. The Open Society and Its Enemies: The spell of Plato - Google Books Result

    books.google.com/books?isbn=0691019681...Karl Raimund Popper, Sir Karl Raimund Popper - 1971 - Medical - 368 pages
    Karl Raimund Popper, Sir Karl Raimund Popper ... triangles r(VI+V3) The rectangle ABCD has an area exceeding that of the circle by less than 1 J ... of the areas of the circumscribed hexagon and the inscribed octagon is a good approximation ...
  3. Division by Zero

    divisbyzero.com/
    2 days ago – Here's what Popper has to say (this is in his notes to Chapter 6 of The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. 1, pp. ... of this curious fact is that it follows from the fact that the arithmetical mean of the areas of the circumscribed hexagon and the inscribed octagon is a good approximation of the area of the circle.
  4. Numbers - Google Books Result

  5. ¡ℜ» Plato's “House”

    losersreview.blogspot.com/2012/04/platos.html
    Apr 13, 2012 – “The rectangle ABCD has an area exceeding that of the circle by less than 1½ pro mille” ... mean of the areas of the circumscribed hexagon and the inscribed octagon is a ... Karl Popper - The Open Society and Its Enemies ...

Friday, June 15

Punctuating Wills' Bomb Power:

The Modern Presidency and the National Security State

9The War Lords of Washington by Bruce Catton
20Werner Heisenberg
29Henry H. Arnold
59Henry L. Stimson | Office of Strategic Services | William J. Donovan
60Magic (cryptography) and Purple (cipher machine)
70George F. Kennan
George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy by David Mayers
Report, Dialectical Materialism And Russian Objectives by Edward F. Willett
71George Kennan The Sources of Soviet Conduct (1946)
75Executive Order 9835 | George Marshall
76Dean Acheson
The Fifteen Weeks, February 21-June 5, 1947 by Joseph M. Jones

Sunday, June 10

Punctuating Wittgentstein's Poker


9Stephen Toulmin - TheUses of Argument
22Marjorie Perloff - Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary
60GeorgeEdward Moore - Principia Ethica
66"...Liberal cabinet minister Charles Masterman, who created Britain's World War I propaganda unit."
74Adolf Loos, architect
75Lev Bronstein, aka: Trotsky
78Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations
81"The Wittgenstein house was one of the preeminentmusical salons in the city [Vienna] of Mahler , Schoenberg , Webern . Berg ,and of course, Brahms ."
82"...Richard Strauss played duets with Ludwig's brother Paul, a concert pianistwho lost his right arm in the First World War and for whom,in 1931, Ravelwrote his Piano Concert in D for the Left Hand. (Paul rejected a work for the left hand he had commissioned from Prokofiev: 'I do not understand a note of it and I shall not play it.' Prokofiev retorted that, musically, Paul belonged in the last century.)"
83"The painter Gustav Klimt called [Wittgenstein's father Karl] 'the minister of fine art' ... "
Thomas Bernard - Wittgenstein's Nephew
86Paul Engelmann, architect, Stonborough House

Tuesday, June 5

“Chapter X The Two Realms”

5. The balance of Power
... There are the hedonists who would withdraw wholly into the realm of existence, to ear, drink, and be merry without the pains and the qualms that go with immortal yearnings. The view of civility has been challenged by the ascetics who would withdraw from the realm of existence, waiting for the end of the world and their own release from mortality. It has been challenged by the primitive Chiliasts, who live in the expectation that the millenium, according to the revelation of Saint john, is near at hand. And it has been challenged by the modern perfectionists who believe that by their own revolutionary acts men can make themselves the Creators of heaven on this earth, In all these views the error stems from the same fundamental disorder. All refuse to recognize that, on the one hand, the two realms cannot be fused, and that. On the other hand, they cannot be separated and isolated—that they must be related by striking, maintaining, redressing a balance between them.

This is a complex arid subtle truth, rather like a surd in mathematics which cannot be expressed in the finite terms of ordinary quantities.

“The Revolution”

... All political parties have some sort of ‘ vested interest ’ in their opponent’s unpopular moves. They live by them and are therefore liable to dwell upon, to emphasize, and even to look forward to them. They may even encourage the political mistakes of their opponents as long as they can do so without becoming involved in the responsibility for them. This, together with Engels’ theory, has led some Marxist parties to look forward to the political moves made by their opponents against democracy. Instead of fighting such moves tooth and nail, they were pleased to tell their followers : ‘ See what these people do. That is what they call democracy. That is what they call freedom and equality !

Saturday, June 2

Just Another Day in the House of the Dead

Depends on what you mean by “dead”
So exposing classified national security information is an act of criminal evil when done by a whistleblower to expose high-level error or abuse, or to a court trying to assess the legality of the President’s actions. But it is an act of great nobility when done to venerate the President as a strong and tough warrior. That’s the manipulative, propagandistic game-playing this administration exploits with its secrecy powers and whistleblower prosecutions.

Reporting from the House of the Dead

“Dog! You have desecrated the Spirit of the Lamp!

RT's Capital Account for May 30, 2012.

See also: Zero Hedge

Friday, June 1

“Piercing” In the House of the Dead

Depends on what you mean by “obstruction of justice”
Oh, let us count the ways, shall we? The Civil Rights Movement was an exercise of political pressure that used for its philosophical underpinnings certain religious themes and rhetoric. (And "the light of the Gospels"? Well, partly, but, in his strategy of nonviolent resistance, which was the actual work of the movement, King was a student of Gandhi, who liked Christ, but didn't trust Christians.) It was dedicated to gaining for African Americans the rights that they already were promised as American citizens, and guaranteed by the Constitution, rights that had been systematically curtailed and eliminated by the secular law. The movement sought to restore rights that already existed, to give back that which has been stolen.

Supplication in the House of the Dead

Depends on what you mean by “reach-around”
When I visited the office of a noted Wall Street gray eminence the day after Paulson accepted the job as treasury secretary, my host said to me, "There’s been a lot of talk about why he did it, and the best explanation I have heard is that he and a lot of the guys he is close to Worry about potential market disruptions that could be big problems if the right guy is not in there with his hand on the tiller. I think he feels like he can really add some value and that he may really be needed? (The mortgage crisis later suggested there may have been some merit to this thesis.)

It is remarkable that there has been a relatively low level of outcry about the steady flow of executives from 55 Broad Street to offices inside the Washington beltway. Vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International Bob Hormats, himself a former senior official, said, "It is fairly unusual. . . I think it is because it has been demonstrated that when Goldman Sachs people get into these jobs, they give no preference to Goldman Sachs. There is no shred of evidence that they use any of[133]their influence on behalf of Goldman Sachs. If there were, just once, given the remarkable activity of Goldman Sachs in the private sector, it would be over. There would be an incredible hue and cry."

Living in the House of the Dead

Depends on what you mean by “prison”
Generally speaking, the whole tribe, with the exception of a few unquenchably cheerful souls, who for that reason enjoyed universal contempt, was sullen, envious, terribly conceited, boastful, touchy, and preoccupied in the highest degree with forms. The capacity not to be surprised by anything was the greatest possible virtue. They were all vitally concerned about one thing: what sort of figure they cut. But not seldom the most arrogant bearing changed with the speed of lightning to the most pitiful. There were a few genuinely strong characters, but they were simple and did not pose. But, strangely enough, some of these really strong people were superlatively, almost morbidly, conceited.

Thursday, May 31

The Renewal of the Public Philosophy

For Example: The Freedom of Speech
Divorced from its original purpose and justification, as a process of criticism, freedom to think and speak are not self-evident necessities. It is only from the hope and the intention of discovering truth that freedom acquires such high public significance. The right of self-expression is, as such, a private amenity rather than a public necessity. The right to utter words, whether or not they have meaning, and regardless of their truth, could not be a vital interest of a great state but for the presumption that they are the chaff which goes with the utterance of true and significant words.

But when the chaff of silliness, baseness, and deception is so voluminous that it submerges the kernels of truth, freedom of speech may produce such frivolity, or such mischief, that it cannot be preserved against the demand for a restoration of order or of decency. If there is a dividing line between liberty and license, it is where freedom of speech is no longer respected as a procedure of the truth and becomes the unrestricted right to exploit the ignorance, and to incite the passions, of the people. T-hen freedom is such a hullabaloo of sophistry, propaganda, special pleading, lobbying, and salesmanship that it is difficult to remember why freedom of speech is worth the pain and trouble of defending it.

Wednesday, May 30

해일 비너스

Books Ain't Everything

I learned that Loreen had won the Eurovision thing late this past Saturday night because I needed the Wikipedia homepage URL wherein her arresting visage was found. That was my first mistake. Wikipedia's front door aggregator always sends me off on wildly inapposite diversions, impeding my ever expanding course of much delayed study. My second mistake was stumbling down YouTube's advertising rat-hole to reconnoiter toute cette agitation.

Clicking on Loreen's vaguely war-painted face here will lead you to a play list I assembled as a testament to the depressing waste of time spent vainly searching for something—anything!—that wasn't a complete bouillante pile de merde. Yeah, more than a hour skipping through mindlessly saccharine and unnecessarily sexualized third-rate cabaret acts incongruously plodding across some multi-euro(FAIL!) stage in ... Azerbaijan? ... really?  That Azerbaijan?

Trackshittaz. Austrian. I guess they don't suck that much. Alles klar, Herr Kommissar. Chah!

MrEclipse.com
h/t Steve Clemons
@ The Atlantic
I needed restitution, though retribution was foremost amid my now meandering, wantonly unguided mentation. Clearly 40°25′N 49°50′E wasn't working. Serendipity swept her brightly colored Chima to 37°35′N 127°0′E making good my foray into the nominally brain crushing vapidity of the billion dollar(FAIL!) narcissist network, thankfully eclipsing all the “sexy sexy sugar” in Central Asia. (Azerbaijan. Europe. Azerbaijan. WTF?)

Funny Story #1

This all amounts to what I can at present best describe as "Yet Another Object Lesson In Why I try Not To Pay Attention To (Almost) Anything Everybody Is Talking About," a subject ranging from Mad Men—likely a worthwhile diversion—to Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, or any gaming of vampires, werewolves and ghosts ... id est: occult. Life is all about choices. Are you happy with yours?