Since my main subject of study is America, I'm going out to do some urban, suburban, and rural anthropology for a bit. Posting will be a sometime thing.
In the meantime, here's a selection of traveling music. Take it away, Bob.
Continued...Since my main subject of study is America, I'm going out to do some urban, suburban, and rural anthropology for a bit. Posting will be a sometime thing.
In the meantime, here's a selection of traveling music. Take it away, Bob.
Now the rainman gave me two cures,
Then he said, "Jump right in."
The one was Texas medicine,
The other was just railroad gin.
An' like a fool I mixed them
An' it strangled up my mind,
An' now people just get uglier
An' I have no sense of time.
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end,
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again.
I refer to a brittle weakness in our economy, courtesy of the same smartaleck caste of MBAs who brought us derivatives and hyper-leveraged finance. A frailty that could, potentially, turn some short-term crisis into full-scale disaster -- and all because of a good theory that窶冱 been taken way too far.
The World From Above: The Beauty Of Aerial Photography @ Smashing Magazine
The Burning of the Bull: An Emblem for the Year of Our Lord, 2008 -- A bull sarcophagus in which a member of the Ubud royal family was cremated burns during the funeral ceremony Tuesday July 15, 2008 in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia. - 2008 in photographs @ The Big Picture
Physician-assisted suicide is not at all about “death with dignity”, but rather about actively enlisting the culture in support of radical individual autonomy. Not only must we exert full control over the time and manner of our death — which we have always been able to do, by simply killing ourselves — but we demand that society support, honor, and praise this decision, without the faintest whiff of criticism or condemnation. It is not sufficient that we be able to kill ourselves. Rather, it is necessary that we actively kill those societal sensibilities and strictures which condemn such a choice as morally misguided and potentially destructive to our human dignity and our social fabric. - The Doctor Is In [This entire essay is a powerful argument against our secular society of perpetual indulgence which I commend to all.]
"It was Orville’s turn. At 10:34 on the windy morning of December 17, he piloted Flyer for a distance of 120 feet in 12 seconds." -- Humankind Takes Flight: The Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, 105 Years Ago Today
Fewless numbering, more better grammer please. [VIA: Art and Installations from Money | WebUrbanist]
"Living in capitalism without understanding the role of money is like a fish that doesn't know how to navigate water," they write. "In our modern economy, capital is the equivalent of water to fields. With it comes the possibility of growth, without it little can survive." [VIA: The indispensible Brutally Honest.]
Americans spent the 1990s in a fantasy world, where technological change supposedly would transform the human condition, taking as their intellectual guide science-fiction writers like William Gibson. There was nothing wrong with the market mechanism as such; what went haywire was the childish imaginings of the American public.
Underlying the crisis is the Western world's repudiation of life, through a hedonism that puts consumption or "self-realization" ahead of child-rearing. The developed world is shifting from a demographic profile in which the very young (children four years and under) outnumbered the elderly (65 and older), to a profile with 10 times as many retirees as children aged four or younger. Economics simply never has had to confront a situation in which the next generation simply failed turn up. - Spengler @ Asia Times Online
The more interesting question is why the Left dominates the social sciences and humanities. To answer that question might produce the reason there are so few conservatives in the academy. (Could it possbily be that the Leftists in charge of hiring decisions won’t hire them?)Do ya think?
Six thousand years ago, a mother and two children died at the same time and were buried here holding hands. Someone obviously cared a great deal, as the scientist found that flowers were placed above and below the bodies. It is not yet known how they died. - Green Sahara - The Big Picture - Boston.com
Warming is evidence of global warming. Cooling does not mean that global warming is not happening, just that it hasn't yet...but it might, still..and then the theory will be right again...except if its not, and then it will be because something has temporarily interfered with the theory working, like cooling, but that doesn't mean the cooling has replaced the warming -- its just hiding it, for now. We know this because the models tell us. Can't be anything else happening like the sun, the oceans or any of that stuff. Why? Well, because that's why.
Gun’s N’ Girls "SPF-30? Check. Towel? Check. Sunglasses? Check? M-16? Check. Everything a girl needs for a day in the sun at Camp Victory, Baghdad." [VIA: Stop The ACLU + Morgan ]
"Lawyers and financial advisers have reported a 50 per cent increase in the number of divorce inquiries since the financial markets collapsed in September.... Like a frog, the Toxic Wife needs to hop safely on to another lily pad, and a rich one, before leaving her husband. She won't stand on her own two feet. And finding a job is quite beneath her.... As the joke doing the rounds among City men goes: 'This credit crunch is worse than a divorce. I've lost half my net worth and I still have a wife.'" -- Recession: When the money goes, so does the toxic wife - Telegraph
The answer that comes from our politicians, who see their pet programs and their contributors as too big to be allowed to fail, is to increase our debts through formerly unimaginable greater deficit spending, piling multitudes of new debt upon the existing. That is a prescription for delay, at best, of a far worse reckoning.
Michael Yon has the rest and a full PDF of the agreement HERE
"You can fool all of the people some of the time; you can fool some of the people all of the time; and that should be enough for most purposes." - From Minims by Tom Weller. [Note: Long ago I was the editor for this wonderful book. Glad to see it has survived being out of print and is still being pointed to today by distinguished pages such as Drawn. ]
We are going about this the wrong way. We treat symptoms rather than disease. We goafter men when we should be going after addresses. Behind every Islamic killer there is a nation. We have long known their names -- Syria, Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan. These dismal places are the factories of terror and blood. Wherever you find hordes of dead Westerners and slaughtered Jews you will find the footprints of one of these regimes. The Return of Scipio
The likely targets would not at first be American. India was chosen for a reason. It was next door to Pakistan, it had poor security, and exiting to Pakistan was theoretically possible. Indeed if there were twenty not ten attackers, then ten have escaped. The Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Spain, France, Britain, are all convenient targets. All these nations lack any meaningful ways of killing the plotters, which to them is the only thing that matters in considering such attacks. -- Whiskey's Place: The Bombay World
Obama: "Understand where the vision for change comes from, first and foremost,It comes from me. That's my job, is to provide a vision in terms of where we are going, and to make sure, then, that my team is implementing."
Killer
In February 1982 the secular Syrian government of President Hafez al-Assad faced a mortal threat from Islamic extremists, who sought to topple the Assad regime. How did it respond? President Assad identified the rebellion as emanating from Syria's fourth-largest city — Hama — and he literally leveled it, pounding the fundamentalist neighborhoods with artillery for days. Once the guns fell silent, he plowed up the rubble and bulldozed it flat, into vast parking lots. Amnesty International estimated that 10,000 to 25,000 Syrians, mostly civilians, were killed in the merciless crackdown. Syria has not had a Muslim extremist problem since.Until then, Mumbai will both past and prologue to "how we live now." Continued...
Liberal culture... hasn't produced any high art because it doesn't want to, doesn't know how to, and doesn't believe in it. What started out as an individual revolt against exhausted traditions... became enshrined as a Permanent Revolution against the crusty old bothersome past, the same big hunk of history that summed up the innumerable failures of the West, at least as the grave penseurs defined them. If we are the enlightened ones, then it stands to reason that the culture of the Dark Ages must reflect the sexism, imperialism, fascism, classism, and other myriad isms that stained the globe. But they'll still go see a traveling exhibit of old Masters, and they'll still pile in the halls to hear Beethoven, because those are still the gold standards for Taste, and Taste has long been their favorite, and most self-flattering, virtue." - LILEKS, (James) @ screedblog "I know what I like, too"