The problem with America today, concisely stated.
Too few Harlequins, too many Ticktockmen.
Related: I first broached the topic on Althouse, which led to this. Althouse quotes from Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, which quote starts the Ellison story that inspired my statement. Here’s the Thoreau:
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purposes as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.
Comments left on Althouse about Democratic Party Presidential Nominee Ages
Comments made on the
“”Clinton will take a long, much-deserved vacation, then assume a low-key schedule of advocacy work and lucrative speaking engagements.””
post from January 9, 2013.
FUN! Featuring the World’s Best Pickpocket!
You can read the whole thing here, but first a sample to whet the appetite:
A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act Penn and Teller, was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has a reputation as a pickpocket of almost supernatural ability. Jillette, who ranks pickpockets, he says, “a few notches below hypnotists on the show-biz totem pole,” was holding court at a table of colleagues, and he asked Robbins for a demonstration, ready to be unimpressed. Robbins demurred, claiming that he felt uncomfortable working in front of other magicians. He pointed out that, since Jillette was wearing only shorts and a sports shirt, he wouldn’t have much to work with.
“Come on,” Jillette said. “Steal something from me.”
Again, Robbins begged off, but he offered to do a trick instead. He instructed Jillette to place a ring that he was wearing on a piece of paper and trace its outline with a pen. By now, a small crowd had gathered. Jillette removed his ring, put it down on the paper, unclipped a pen from his shirt, and leaned forward, preparing to draw. After a moment, he froze and looked up. His face was pale.
“Fuck. You,” he said, and slumped into a chair.
Robbins held up a thin, cylindrical object: the cartridge from Jillette’s pen.
A brief thought about Lance Armstrong
Part of Lance Armstrong’s cancer treatment was chemotherapy. Is it any wonder he became convinced of the truth of better living through chemicals?
Fractalized
Update 12/4/2012: Seriously, everyone is watching you. Do you really think the government isn’t?
And the sad thing is this falls under the category of REALITY.
Original Post:
NOTE: The following is a draft of a post I started writing back in September. I didn’t publish it then because (a) I wasn’t finished with it and (b) the mathematical portion is a mess. In that portion I haven’t really used the mathematics correctly or clearly – what is there was a place holder until I could get back to it to clean it up.
Since then I haven’t actually returned to the piece. I kept meaning to, but it seemed like work and required more effort that I was willing to commit to at any one time. That remains true today.
However I have in the meantime come to a couple of decisions. More about those, at least one of them, later. But those decisions mean I’m not really going to go back and correct this piece. Rather than throw the whole thing out I’ve decided to publish the danged thing anyway. With a few minor edits, the original is posted below.
One Wednesday night back in September my neighbor came over and started a conversation. This was unusual as mostly our interactions have been about whether or not his dogs are trespassing on my property or my cats are trespassing on his property.
Anyhow, it got interesting. He has recently been borne unto the spiritual safety of the Heavenly Father. That is, he’s Born Again. He’s also gotten into conspiracy theories. This is where it gets interesting.
Now some of his ideas are just wrong. I’m not going to go into it, but they’re just wrong. Other ideas appear, at first blush, to be crazy. And this is where it gets interesting.
For example, take the idea that an international conspiracy of bankers and financiers is controlling everything. Crazy! Except that he then goes on to mention the Bilderberg Group. To quote the BBC
On Thursday the Bilderberg group marks its 50th anniversary with the start of its yearly meeting.
For four days some of the West’s chief political movers, business leaders, bankers, industrialists and strategic thinkers will hunker down in a five-star hotel in northern Italy to talk about global issues.
What sets Bilderberg apart from other high-powered get-togethers, such as the annual World Economic Forum (WEF), is its mystique.
Not a word of what is said at Bilderberg meetings can be breathed outside. No reporters are invited in and while confidential minutes of meetings are taken, names are not noted.
Hmmm. About 150 of the most powerful people in the world get together for a few days each year to do what? In complete secrecy? What the Hell? Nothing is completely secret these days. When was the last time ANYTHING was kept completely secret by that many people? It’s hard to not feel a little … strange … when contemplating this group. I mean, how would you even get all those people to agree to meet in one time and place each year?
A lot of these same people also meet each year at the Jackson Hole (Wyoming) retreat for central bankers. There is some overlap between the two groups. This just sounds worse. And then consider things like the IMF, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the rest of the World Bank Group, the fact that this all got its start at Bretton Woods*, the fact that these folks have WON (in succession the group behind this has defeated the Fascists, the Nazis, the Japanese Imperialists, fractured international communism, rolled the Soviet Union and its empire, and even converted the Maoists) and the whole damned thing starts getting scary.
But wait! Hang on a second! This is all crazy talk! Right? Right?! Well, yes, it is all crazy talk. After all, think about it. The nations of the free world had to set up some kind of organizational structure to figure out how they would run things after the end of WWII. Quite obviously the old order was dead, and Hitler’s order seemed likely to fail. Then what? Well, let’s get our BESTEST and BRIGHTESTEST together to figure this out! They needed to have an eye towards rebuilding the devastated nations of Europe, they were looking how to handle exchange rates, how to work out repayment schemes for the vast sums that had been borrowed, what to do with the European colonies, how to confront their good friend and ally Joe Stalin, et cetera. It only made sense that they would get together and plan.
And it makes sense that the central bankers get together to work out various issues on a regular basis. This really isn’t all that crazy.
Except for that Bilderberg Group. What exactly are THEY doing? And why do they keep what they do so hush-hush? Most of the attendees come from nations that are what we call democracies. A fair number of political leaders from those nations attend. Why won’t they tell us what they’re up to? I’ll come back to this a little later.
Consider something else my neighbor brought up the other night. He mentioned that the government can track everyone by their cell-phones, that they can even turn them on and off so that they can listen in on you whenever they like.
Crazy! Balderdash! Except that they CAN track you by your phone. We all know this from watching any number of missing person cases. We know this because it was written into the law after 9/11 that all cell-phones had to have this feature. Steve Sailer used to highlight cases of dumb criminals that would steal cell-phones and carry them around right up until the point when the police nabbed them. So this part is well known.
Turning them on and off to listen in on you whenever they want? Would they do that? Could they do that? Well sure they could. That can’t really be all that difficult a hack given that the government has the geniuses at the NSA working for them. (I went to grad school with a guy that ended up working for the NSA. Believe it or not, I qualify for crap like the Triple Nine Society. That means I’ve got a BIG BRAIN, top tenth of the top percentile, IQ in the 150s. When I bother to use it, I’ve got a nice brain. This guy was noticeably more intelligent than I was. I wasn’t in his league. That’s the kind of brain the NSA likes to get hold of – and use.) Not to mention that some 15 year-old is working on doing that tonight in the hopes of turning on a schoolmate’s phone in the hope of catching a shot of her boobs. There’s no reason to believe that your phone couldn’t be turned on remotely.
But would they? We already know what they will do. They’ll admit to an ever-increasing number of warrant-less wiretaps. That doesn’t mean they’re turning your phone on when you’re not using it, of course. But can you really truly say they wouldn’t do that? Think about that the next time your phone has mysteriously lost its charge….
…
Now for a brief (I hope) digression about mathematics. And by brief I mean largely non-mathematical.
Fractals are marvelous mathematical objects. They’ve got all kinds of neat properties that make mathematicians feel all warm and fuzzy inside, like non-differentiability. And beyond that they can be used to create really incredible images. The objects exhibit self-similarity, can be computed iteratively and frequently are nowhere differentiable.
…
So now let’s imagine a line. On one side of the line is reality. On the other side is, for lack of a better term, crazy. And by crazy I mean that which isn’t real, the delusional, the made-up, the phantasms of deranged minds, and even just the nutty ideas of otherwise sane individuals. If the line is nice and straight, it’s easy to determine if an idea is on the real or crazy side of the line. Even if the line is curved, but otherwise smooth, one can probably discern where an idea resides.
But what we have is a fractal line. And it is bobbing and weaving all over the plane. Oh, some stuff is clearly far enough away from this line to know whether the idea is real or crazy. Examples: Reality is that Season 9 of the original Dallas sucked donkey balls; Crazy was the idea held by millions of teenage girls back in the day that George Michael might be interested in them.
But what about the stuff closer to the line? Is some cabal of international financiers and their government cronies secretly running the world? We have to dig down through many iterations, perhaps an infinite number of iterations, to figure out if the existence of the Bilderberg Group makes that Real or Crazy. At some iterations the idea is clearly Crazy. At some it is clearly Real. At others we can’t really tell where the line is.
Discerning what is Real and what is Crazy becomes more challenging every day. “Is the government spying on us with our cell phones?” “Well they CAN.” “But ARE they?” “I don’t know. Do you mean all of us?” “Sure, all of us.” “Uh, I don’t think they have the tech to spy on all of us at once yet.” “Are you sure? Isn’t that what the cloud is for?” “Uhhhhhhh….”
Somewhere, in the Byzantine complexity of the federal government, there may – MAY – be someone that can say “Yes, we are.” And that person could give a definite answer. But that person isn’t going to tell us. The government is so complex that no one, not one single person, can definitively say “No, we are not spying on everyone by using their cell-phones.” There is no such person because no one person knows everything that the government is doing. They may make such a statement, they may even believe it. But they don’t KNOW it.
* Which came to an end, of sorts, thanks to Richard Nixon.
A Dialog about Business and Government
Below is a dialog between Annie and me. It took place during the three days after the election. I am leaving it largely unedited, though some changes are being made for clarity. I am leaving out some of the more intemperate remarks on my part.
This mostly follows the title. A couple of digressions have been put in towards the end. This two digressions are, as best I can manage, the only things taken out of order, and even those occurred near the end, as here. I could scare up links for some of it, but if you care enough you can look it up yourself. I have only included one link as that was all I included in the exchange.
Anyhow, what follows is roughly 4500 words. I’ve said enough so don’t expect me to hang around in the comments, should any follow.
Political Stuff
For those eager to discuss politics I have a few posts with observations of the Orange County, Florida political landscape over at my place. I kept at the political yard sign counting in an effort to gauge the political intensity of the Presidential race down here. Since we’re in the swing part of a swing state it actually has some relevance! (Short version: I believe but am not certain that Romney will win Orange County and Florida. Some of the latest polling agrees with that assessment.)
Anyway, I try to avoid politics over here, but not over there. So if that’s what you want please feel free to join in. I’ll be posting about how I’m going to vote soon as well. I’ve been in the Attila the Hun American camp but I’m wavering.
And the REALLY good news is we’ve only got about nine more days of this crap. After the election we’ll get some fresh Hell to blight our political landscape.
This story can’t possibly be true.
I saw a story today that was so perfectly awful I can’t believe it is true. It seemed like every sentence made it worse! let’s start with the headline.
Okay, right off the bad this sounds too funny to be true.
BERLIN (Reuters) –
Even the by-line makes the thing sound more unbelievable! Berlin? A story about an undertaker suing a domanatrix for the infliction of pain MUST take place in Germany! The fact that it actually is just seems too incredible. (There will be far too much use of the word ‘too’ in this post.)
A German court has ordered a dominatrix to pay 200 euros ($260) to a local charity as a penance after a client accused her of hurting and robbing him.
She had to pay penance to a charity for thrashing some undertaker?
Cologne district court spokesman Dirk Esser said the plaintiff had accused the woman he hired for sex last month of holding a kitchen knife to his throat before demanding his debit card and PIN number.
The guys name is Dirk, he’s an undertaker, he hired a dominatrix and is upset that she held a knife to his throat and made him do things? You actually CAN make this stuff up! But I can’t believe it really happened. Surely the guys name was Rolf, or he was an accountant, or he didn’t know he was hiring a dominatrix, or something!
The plaintiff, a 49-year-old undertaker, also said the woman had detained him against his will for five hours.
Um, perhaps he didn’t understand what a dominatrix is for?
The court decided that it was impossible to know for sure what really happened because both parties had consumed too much cocaine during their encounter.
AND it was coke-fueled?! This is just too freakin’* incredible!
* I use ‘freakin” because what else would be appropriate?
It dropped the charges but ordered the prostitute to pay the “penance money” to a charity that supports crime victims.
They can do that?! How strange! “Well, we don’t know that you actually committed a crime, but what the Hell, go give some money to charity!” Couldn’t she have just said some extra “Hail Marys” instead?
The 35-year-old mother of four has been in pre-trial custody for the past five weeks, but declined to be compensated for time spent in jail, Esser said.
Of course she’s a mother. And of course she refused to be compensated for five weeks in jail. Right, this all makes perfect sense.
The dominatrix denied keeping the man against his will, adding that he had also asked if a transsexual colleague could join them.
Of COURSE a transsexual colleague would somehow be involved!
The only things this story missed are midgets and ponies. But other than that, it’s too freakin’ freaky to be true. Right? RIGHT?!
Ambiance 