«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

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.

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

Environs Prometheus

“He Received Every New Idea as Perfectly Beautiful”

American Prometheus, p. 12

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 ...

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

Punctuating Wittgentstein's Poker

References Pervading a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers

9	Stephen Toulmin - TheUses of Argument
22	Marjorie Perloff - Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary
60	GeorgeEdward Moore - Principia Ethica
66	"...Liberal cabinet minister Charles Masterman, who created Britain's World War I propaganda unit."
74	Adolf Loos, architect
75	Lev Bronstein, aka: Trotsky
78	Ludwig 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, Ravel ♫ wrote 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
86	Paul Engelmann, architect, Stonborough House

“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 !

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.

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.

Standing On The Top

“That funk is here to stay, oh (We understand it)”

The Power Of Politics

Clearly, the richest would not be drawn to politics if politics did not offer them additional power above and beyond that which they had already acquired through financial or other professional success. Winning (or seizing) political office, or having the ability to influence political decisions, or having a base of political support directly empowers individuals. The source of the power is multifold. It is the power of the institutions that one has leadership within. It is the power of allocating the resources and setting the agenda for those institutions. It is the power to influence the creation of new laws and regulations, which offer the ability actually to institutionalize key ideas. It is the power of the history and national identity associated with those institutions. It is the power that comes from having quantifiable support among the people of a country or region. Government service is seen as legitimizing, as service to the community, with high posts also seen as the capstone of a career (although they often provide additional access and networks that can offer further opportunities for profit post-government). This leads directly to many top business leaders taking massive pay cuts to work in government.

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)

⋮

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.

You say you got a real solution

Eh bien, vous savez ...

Yes, the incentives given to business and investment leaders to motivate them to work harder and trigger growth benefit all. But are the incentives really market incentives, predicated on unfettered economic interaction, or has the system been fine-tuned to disproportionately benefit those who lead organizations, make investment decisions, and run boardrooms? It is true that governments have been unable to do much of what they should to improve the welfare of their people, and in a vast number of cases markets have done much more. But is creating a false choice between governments and markets, as so many politicians have done, productive or practical when neither can do the job of creating a thriving or just society alone?

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

Numisma Regni

Troca Língua

Having seen the evil results we have come to detest a conscious choice of issues, to feel that it smacks of sinister plotting. The vile practice of yellow newspapers and chauvinistic politicians is almost the only experience of it we have. Religion, patriotism, race, and sex are the favorite red herrings of foul political method--they are the most successful because they explode so easily and flood the mind with those unconscious prejudices which make critical thinking difficult. Yet for all its abuse the deliberate choice of issues is one of the high selective arts of the statesman. In the debased form we know it there is little encouragement. But the devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants. It is always a pretty good working rule that whatever is a great power of evil may become a great power for good. Certainly nothing so effective in the art of politics can be left out of the equipment of the statesman.