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

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?

Thinksgiving

and Be thankful for what you've got
 

  LBJ and the Conspiracy to Kill Kennedy: A Coalescence of Interests
By Joseph P. Farrell

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)	Devo	Going Under
3)	D.A.F	Der MussolinI!
4)	Fingerprintz (2)	The Beat Escape
5)	Heaven 17	Soul Warfare
b1)	Simple Minds	Love Song
2)	Magazine	The Great Man's Secrets
3)	Japan	The Art Of Parties
4)	The Human League	Do 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”

American Prometheus, p. 12

Punctuating Wills' Bomb Power:

The Modern Presidency and the National Security State

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

Punctuating Garry Wills' ...

... Henry Adams and the Making of America

7	James T. Callender,
7	William J. Duane
8	Pierre Beaumarchais
27	Grimke on the Equality of the Sexes (PDF)
36	Thomas Babington Macaulay
40	Walter Bagehot
43	Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams
46	Historical Essays by Henry Adams
81	Carl Schurz
81	Samuel J. Tilden
99	Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey
103	Manuel de Godoy, Prince of the Peace
113	The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
116	The Rise of Silas Lapham
123	A History of the British People

“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 !

“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.

Burdensome White Dude

“Whitey On The Moon”

[Cecil] Rhodes schemed and behaved like a politician, not a merchant. He acted with the ruthlessness and calculated brutality of a mediaeval warlord. He was a brilliant manipulator and, some would argue, swindler, his actions made noteworthy by his audacity. The legends and myths surrounding him are legion. He bought newspaper companies, both secretly and openly, because of his conviction that “the press rules the minds of men.” He has been accused of pressuring doctors to suppress information concerning a smallpox epidemic among the African labour force of his diamond mines, believing that this information would disrupt production because labourers would steer clear of the region; and it would, of course, cost money to pay for inoculations—money he did not want to spend.

“Deep in the heart of your brain...”

“... there is a lever”

“... I watched the coast. Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you—smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, 'Come and find out.' This one was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an aspect of monotonous grimness. The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam. Here and there grayish-whitish specks showed up, clustered inside the white surf, with a flag flying above them perhaps. Settlements some centuries old, and still no bigger than pin-heads on the untouched expanse of their background. We pounded along, stopped, landed soldiers; went on, landed custom-house clerks to levy toll in what looked like a God-forsaken wilderness, with a tin shed and a flag-pole lost in it; landed more soldiers—to take care of the custom-house clerks, presumably. Some, I heard, got drowned in the surf; but whether they did or not, nobody seemed particularly to care.

You tell me that it's evolution

Well, you know

The conservative often has a sharp sense of the complexity of revolution: not desiring change, he prefers to emphasize its difficulties, whereas the reformer is enticed into a faith that the intensity of desire is a measure of its social effect. Yet just because no reform is in itself a revolution, we must not jump to the assurance that no revolution can be accomplished. True as it is that great changes are imperceptible, it is no less true that they are constantly taking place. Moreover, for the very reason that human life changes its quality so slowly, the panic over political proposals is childish.
p. 139 (or 275)

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So long as the poor are docile in their poverty, the rest of us are only too willing to satisfy our consciences by pitying them. But when the downtrodden gather into a threat as they did at Lawrence[, Massachusetts], when they show that they have no stake in civilization and consequently no respect for its institutions, when the object of pity becomes the avenger of its own miseries, then the middle-class public begins to look at the problem more intelligently.

Le Révoltant Raffinement

De Reformuler

The wisest rulers see this. They know that the responsibility for insurrections rests in the last analysis upon the unimaginative greed and endless stupidity of the dominant classes. There is something pathetic in the blindness of powerful people when they face a social crisis. Fighting viciously every readjustment which a nation demands, they make their own overthrow inevitable. It is they who turn opposing interests into a class war. Confronted with the deep insurgency of labor what do capitalists and their spokesmen do? They resist every demand, submit only after a struggle, and prepare a condition of war to the death. When far-sighted men appear in the ruling classes--men who recognize the need of a civilized answer to this increasing restlessness, the rich and the powerful treat them to a scorn and a hatred that are incredibly bitter. The hostility against men like Roosevelt, La Follette, Bryan, Lloyd-George is enough to make an observer believe that the rich of to-day are as stupid as the nobles of France before the Revolution.
p. 143

Walter Lippman, A Preface to Politics - 1914

The Eclipse of the Public Philosophy

1. On the Efficacy of Ideas

Yet, however crude and clumsy our knowledge of the process, there is no doubt that a character is acquired by experience and education. Within limits that we have not measured, human nature is malleable. Can we doubt it when we remember that when Shakespeare was alive there were no Americans, that when Virgil was alive there were no Englishmen, and that when Homer was alive there were no Romans? Quite certainly, men have acquired the ways of thinking, feeling and acting which we recognize as their ethnic, national, class and occupational characteristics. Comparatively speaking these characteristics are, moreover, recently acquired. Even within the brief span of historical time characters have been acquired and have been lost and have been replaced by other characters. This is what gives to man’s history, despite his common humanity, its infinite variety.

Exculpatory Hawk for Roosting Chickens

M - I - C . . . K - E - Y

lt is only a citizenry; an alert and informed citizenry, which can keep these abuses from coming about. And . . . some of this misuse of influence and power could come about unwittingly but just by the very nature of the thing .... almost every one of your magazines, no matter what they are advertising, has a picture of the Titan missile or the Atlas or solid fuel or other things, there is . . . almost an insidious penetration of our own minds that the only thing this country is engaged in is weaponry and missiles. And, I'll tell you we just can't afford to do that. The reason we have them is to protect the great values in which we believe, and they are far deeper even than our own lives and our own property.

President Eisenhower, in Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, Volume 2

If only ...

& h/t Michael S. Sherry's In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930's (p. 235)

Trail of My (Current) Bliss

Follow Your Bliss

When the New Republic was Actually New

The most incisive comment on politics to-day is indifference. When men and women begin to feel that elections and legislatures do not matter very much, that politics is a rather distant and unimportant exercise, the reformer might as well put to himself a few searching doubts. Indifference is a criticism that cuts beneath oppositions and wranglings by calling the political method itself into question. Leaders in public affairs recognize this. They know that no attack is so disastrous as silence, that no invective is so blasting as the wise and indulgent smile of the people who do not care. Eager to believe that all the world is as interested as they are, there comes a time when even the reformer is compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing. But such moments of illumination are rare. They appear in writers who realize how large is the public that doesn't read their books, in reformers who venture to compare the membership list of their league with the census of the United States. Whoever has been granted such a moment of insight knows how exquisitely painful it is. To conquer it men turn generally to their ancient comforter, self-deception: they complain about the stolid, inert masses and the apathy of the people. In a more confidential tone they will tell you that the ordinary citizen is a "hopelessly private person."
p.9

Walter Lippman's Introduction to A Preface to Politics - 1914

Act-ON / Act-OFF

“Mr. Miyagi Mr. Miyagi — Do the thing with the hands”

You have often heard it said that Modern History is a subject to which neither beginning nor end can be assigned. No beginning, because the dense web of the fortunes of man is woven without a void; because, in society as in nature, the structure is continuous, and we can trace things back uninterruptedly, until we dimly descry the Declaration of Independence in the forests of Germany. No end, because, on the same principle, history made and history making are scientifically inseparable and separately unmeaning.

“Night of the Sorrowful Consequence”

I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any gentleman of that society, be he who he will; and perhaps I have given as good proofs of my attachment to that cause, in the whole course of my public conduct. I think I envy liberty as little as they do, to any other nation. But I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. ... Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer, who has broke prison, upon the recovery of his natural rights? This would be to act over again the scene of the criminals condemned to the galleys, and their heroic deliverer, the metaphysic Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance.

⋮

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings.

Edmund Burke