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: 1 insult2 insults3 insults4 insults5 insults6 insults7 insults8 insults9 insults10 insults Mode: CombinedClassicEvil Fortune CookiePiratePsychiatricRedneckShakespeareanSimpleYo momma One of 325 million Shakespearean insults by Insult-O-Matic

The Cure For “TL;DR”

STFU and pay attention.

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?

http://ocd.xojane.seduction.net Dude-Bro Cycle

I'm not sure if it's a hat tip, an assist, or an exprobation that Ms Filopovic gets here, but ...

---

Dude or dude-bro: ten ways to tell by Jill Filipovic [The Guardian]

Best Of The Worst Of Online Dating Pickup Artists In The Wild [buzzfeed]

A(n)nals of Online Dating

I Am Going to Dropkick the Next Dudebro Who Tells Me Coercive Sex is Consensual Sex [xoJane]

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

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).

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

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.

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.

«Λ»unctuating Hedges' The World As It Is

003	Sheldon Wolin - Democracy Incorporated Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted... Politics and Vision Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought Tocqueville between Two Worlds The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life
014	John Ralston Saul - Voltaire's Bastards
020	Naomi Klein - No Logo 10th Anniversary Edition
023	Daniel J. Boorstin - The Image A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
029	Stuart Ewen - Captains Of Consciousness Advertising And The Social Roots Of The Consumer... Pr! A Social History Of Spin
047	Houston A. Baker - Betrayal How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil ...
050	Angela Davis | Dick Gregory | Ishmael Reed | James Hal Cone | Yusef Komunyakaa
050	Thulani Davis

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

Unimpeachable Perspective

Any questions?

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

“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?

So Sprach Der Amerikanische Prometheus

h/t Messrs Bird & Sherwin

...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

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. Pleiade | About us | A postscript... Logos and other trivia

5. Numbers - Google Books Result

6. Root 2, Root 3, Plato, Archimedes, and Pi - Math Forum Discussions

7. ¡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 ...

“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.

“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."