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Saturday, March 31

Enduring Profligate Idiocy

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.

If the country took its obligations to self-government at all seriously, the presence of Sarah Palin on a national ticket would have been an insult on a par with the elevation of Caligula’s horse. However, the more people pointed out Palin’s obvious shortcomings, the more the people who loved her loved her even more. She was taken seriously not merely because she had been selected to run, but also because of the fervor she had stirred among people in whose view her primary virtue as a candidate was the fact that she made the right people crazy. Their faith in Idiot America and its Three Great Premises was inviolate. Because the precincts of Idiot America were the only places where his party had a viable constituency, John McCain became the first presidential candidate in American history to run as a parody of himself.

You could see it all coming that rainy night in New Hampshire, when all the Republican candidates were alive and viable. They were faith-based and fully cognizant of the fact that they were not running for office so much as they were auditioning for a role, trying for a chance to do their duty on behalf of people who were invested as vicariously in their citizenship as baseball fans are in their teams, or as the viewers of American Idol are in their favorite singer. So that was how it happened that, at one point in the debate, the contenders were asked whether they believed in evolution.

And, in response, three of the Republican contenders for president of the United States, in what was supposed to be one of the crucial elections in the country’s history, said that, no, they didn’t believe in evolution. And the people in the hall cheered. It was a remarkable moment in that it seemed so unremarkable. There was no doubt that the three of them—Tancredo, Brownback, and Huckabee—were sincere. However, since admitting that you don’t believe in evolution is pretty much tantamount to admitting that you plan to eradicate the national debt by spinning straw into gold, it should immediately have disqualified the lot of them. In fact, it should have given people pause about the entire Republican party that a third of its presidential field was willing to admit that their view of the life sciences had stalled in the 1840s. Instead, it was a matter of hitting the right marks, and delivering right on cue the applause lines that the audience expected.

This Is An Image


A few lifetimes ago (high school in the mid 1970s) my Art History teacher sent me to some midtown galleries on 57th Street.

I came across a few of Jackson Pollock's sketches and was overwhelmed by his command of detail and fealty to natural form, only having been familiar with his renown house -sized and -painted canvases.

It occurred to me many years later that his “splatter” oeuvre was probably a big wet "Fuck You" to the post-war Abstract Expressionism crowd.

Whenever I catch a Frank Stella in a museum, I immediately bust out my best  Brando from Streetcar.

Happy Accident

scan926

Wednesday, March 28

"Federalist Anarcho-idiocy"

In Three Parts
The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.

Monday, March 26

GOTH P M

Truncated Exclamation Series

Past Scratching Photoshop

Killer Wattage

Giving You A Number...


III

". . . ALL idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity—it is to destroy it. Leave that to the moralists, my boy. History is made by men, but they do not make it in their heads. The ideas that are born in their consciousness play an insignificant part in the march of events. History is dominated and determined by the tool and the production—by the force of economic conditions.* Capitalism has made socialism, and the laws made by the capitalism for the protection of property are responsible for anarchism. No one can tell what form the social organisation may take in the future. Then why indulge in prophetic phantasies? At best they can only interpret the mind of the prophet, and can have I no objective value. Leave that pastime to the moralists, my boy.”

Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle, was speaking in an even voice, a voice that wheezed as if deadened and oppressed by the layer of fat on his chest. He had come out of a highly hygienic prison round like a tub, with an enormous stomach and distended cheeks of a pale, semi-transparent complexion, as though for fifteen years the servants of an outraged society had made a point of stuffing him with fattening foods in a damp and lightless cellar. And ever since he had never managed to get his weight down as much as an ounce.

Sunday, March 25

One Time Used To Be

CYMK HTML Palette

Takes a moment to load because it's a little under 78 Kb of pure style-pounding HTML code generated from Excel spreadsheets built for this express purpose.

As much as I enjoy Photoshop/E9, working with the color dialog is an unsatisfying hassle due to its narrow confines.

Advantages of this HTML palette over an image or what's available in PSE (and Windows) for choosing colors are the greatly expanded range at a glance, and the utility of double clicking on the desired six-digit hex codes for a quick cut and paste into the Photoshop dialog box.

Saturday, March 24

"The Ministry of Fear" in 15 minutes & 1500 words

aka “Life During Wartime” - England ca. 1943
Listening Rowe thought, as he often did, that you couldn’t take such an odd world seriously, and yet all the time, in fact, he took it with a mortal seriousness. The grand names stood permanently like statues in his mind: names like Justice and Retribution, though what they both boiled down to was simply Mr Rennit, hundreds and hundreds of Mr Rennits. But of course if you believed in God — and the Devil — the thing wasn’t quite so comic. Because the Devil —and God too — had always used comic people, futile people, little suburban natures and the maimed and warped to serve his purposes. When God used them you talked emptily of Nobility and when the devil used them of Wickedness, but the material was only dull shabby human mediocrity in either case.

Monday, March 19

Limits? We Don't Need No Stinking Limits

And yes. these are our limits
...[T]he reconciliation of the people and the army turned out to be a chimera. When the chips were down, "supporting the troops" elicited plenty of posturing but little by way of binding commitments. Far from producing a stampede of eager recruits keen to don a uniform, the events of 9/11 reaffirmed a widespread popular preference for hiring someone else’s kid to chase terrorists, spread democracy and ensure access to the world’s energy reserves. In the midst of a global war of ostensibly earthshaking importance, Americans demonstrated a greater affinity for their hometown sports heroes than for the soldiers defending the distant precincts of the American imperium. Tom Brady makes millions playing quarterback in the NFL and rakes in millions more from endorsements. Pat Tillman quit professional football to become an army ranger and was killed in Afghanistan. Yet, of the two, Brady more fully embodies the contemporary understanding of the term Patriot.

Sunday, March 11

“On Being An American”

Henry Louis ... 1922
google Books
The facts must be remembered with shame by every civilized American; lest they be forgotten by the generations of the future I am even now engaged with collaborators upon an exhaustive record of them, in twenty volumes folio. More important to the present purpose are two things that are apt to be overlooked, the first of which is the capital fact that the war was “sold” to the American people, as the phrase has it, not by appealing to their courage, but by appealing to their cowardice—in brief, by adopting the assumption that they were not warlike at all, and certainly not gallant and chivalrous, but merely craven and fearful. The first selling point of the proponents of American participation was the contention that the Germans, with gigantic wars still raging on both fronts, were preparing to invade the United States, burn down all the towns, murder all the men, and carry off all the women—that their victory would bring staggering and irresistible reprisals for the American violation of the duties of a neutral. The second selling point was that the entrance of the United States would end the war almost instantly—that the Germans would be so overwhelmingly outnumbered, in men and guns, that it would be impossible for them to make any effective defense—above all, that it would be impossible for them to inflict any serious damage upon their new foes.

Wednesday, March 7

The Social Justice “Clean Room”

& Self Imposed Exile

And that, I think, is the problem with pretty much every mainstream model: they are not intellectual constructions that promote thought; they are more akin to cages built out of the remnants of long dead assumptions that are used to entrap the minds of those they are handed to. It is only those of highly independent mind that can wrench themselves from such conceptions once taught them.

Throughout, Gessen paints a bleak picture of the “hijacked state media” and the gradual though systematic erosion of freedom of speech. The elimination of those courageous enough to speak or write about injustice reminds us that although the KGB may now operate under a new moniker, its practices remain the same.

Tuesday, March 6

Most Profitable “Industry” In America

It's not that I have anything against Humana, per se, but leveraging the profit motive off of health care seems antithetical to the implied mission. Do people become doctors, or hospital administrators, or insurance company executives because they want to help
Columbia Journalism
Review:
Rocket Internet,
Gas Taxes,
The Price of Health Care
those who find themselves in physical distress or because it's an obscenely lucrative and captive market?

CJR's The Audit starts with industrial strength German intellectual-property Internet thieves, rolls by the gasoline tax, and falls into health care spending. A chain of disparate items I would never have assembled, but enjoy entertaining now that they've pointed it out.

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Perhaps, but I'm an avowed agnostic, so ... what do I know?

Data is not information and wisdom is something yet further refined and derived. How much does this "American Way Of Life" actually cost, anyway?

Cui bono?

Sunday, March 4

Now For Something Completely Different

And Antidotal To The Previous Post


Passionate Intelligence from "The Other Side"

I knew there were women worth talking to. I just never run into them, and having given up on the hope of finding companionship in kindred spirits – to say nothing of amore – am overwhelmed by the existence of something completely different. The root causes for the almost comical battle between the sexes are delusional misapprehensions of the complementary reality of men and women. The fight is enjoined by those wishing to preserve the unrealistic arcana of male prerogative and those wishing to abrogate the fundamental nature of their gender. There's no escaping ovaries ... mine just happen to be external.