June 11, 2009

Grand Rounds for Readers

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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.

-- MINIM 14

How Princes Should Keep Faith.

It is not essential, then, that a Prince should have all the good qualities which I have enumerated above, but it is most essential that he should seem to have them; I will even venture to affirm that if he has and invariably practises them all, they are hurtful, whereas the appearance of having them is useful. Thus, it is well to seem merciful, faithful, humane, religious, and upright, and also to be so; but the mind should remain so balanced that were it needful not to be so, you should be able and know how to change to the contrary.
And you are to understand that a Prince, and most of all a new Prince, cannot observe all those rules of conduct in respect whereof men are accounted good, being often forced, in order to preserve his Princedom, to act in opposition to good faith, charity, humanity, and religion. He must therefore keep his mind ready to shift as the winds and tides of Fortune turn, and, as I have already said, he ought not to quit good courses if he can help it, but should know how to follow evil courses if he must. -- Machiavelli, The Prince

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Then & Now

Maynard G. Krebs is alive and thrives in the economic implosion. Doctor Joy Bliss relates Heard in the clinic @ Maggie's Farm Via a colleague from a patient in his 40s this afternoon:
"With my unemployment now with 23 weeks, plus the State's 12 weeks, andthe federal 18-week extension, I figure I can begin looking for a job in November. Since my wife got laid off later, she can wait until December or January. We're both burned out and need a break from work. She's been getting job offers, but there's no way she would take one now. And keeping our income down will help my youngest get a scholarship."
Maynard G. Krebs was second banana to Dobie Gillis on a TV show of the early 60s. Cast as a beatnik, Krebs had a deep aversion to work on principle. Here we see the update of the selfish years. No work because, well, they can afford it. As long as they suck on the teat of the state. And that teat is getting bigger. But lots of things can make a teat bigger... such as a tumor on the body politic.

Love's perfect losing moments: Sippican Cottage: The Fireflies Take Their Vigorish

It was a perfect moment there. The sun was just an ornament hung on the Christmas tree of my life. The reeds murmur assent; the muck beats anything a doctor could conjure. She was a flawless diamond hung on a chain of luck around the neck of a muse. I saw it, and knew, that I must lose, right there, if I was to play.
I know how he feels. If you don't, go out and get some.

Cobb updates instructions:

Instead of 'Best used if squeezed from bottom', we might have the following fine print:
The main theme of of this empowering essay on dialectic discourse is not situationism as such, but neosituationism. Therefore, if postsemiotic patriarchialist theory holds, the application of liberating anterior pressures is the subtext of choosing between prematerialist feminism and the capitalist paradigm of renewed oral reality. “Society is impossible,” says Sartre. So It could be said that Bailey would favor a Rousseauian cum-Hobbisan pan-liberation of all pressures simultaenously resulting in the most empowering externalities.
-- Cobb: Seinfeldian Observations on Indefinite Articles

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You are your data and you live in a cold room in Tukwilla, Washington with, maybe, 6.5 trillion photographs. Data Center Overload by Tom Vanderbilt

After submitting to biometric hand scans in the lobby and passing through a sensor-laden multidoor man trap, Manos and I entered a bright, white room filled with librarylike rows of hulking, black racks of servers — the dedicated hardware that drives the Internet. The Tukwila data center happens to be one of the global homes of Microsoft’s Xbox Live: within those humming machines exists my imagined city of ether.

David Warren points out that the real high poetry of the moon landing

had been delivered less self-consciously, a little earlier, as the vehicle containing Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down. Paradoxically, that line gained all its poetry from being spoken, not in poetical language, but in mission jargon. It was: "Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed."
I've always thought as much myself. Not the arch and over thought "One small step..." statement, but the mission jargon ("Aldrin: 40 feet, down 2 1/2. Picking up some dust.") held the key for that long ago and now long lost moment. We'll go back, I suppose, some time. We'll go back once we shake off the compulsion to live smaller and more restrained lives. It's not for us, the life of limits. We're made for the stars, no matter how many small souls try to anchor us in the mud. We'll go back. And on.

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Day by Day Cartoon by Chris Muir
Roger @ Maggie's Farm nails it down:

Men like Letterman always end up groping the help. All the Beta males do this. Look at John Edwards, Bill Clinton, Bob Packwood, Newt Gingrich... this will grow monotonous. They're lame, and know it, and so they try to get themselves in a position of power over the men they used to resent, and the women they never had a shot at. But the men are all dorks of one sort or another, and the women they never had a shot at are still out of their range. They can lord it over whatever women are handy, but eventually find that they are in the thrall of someone as defective as they are.

Surprise! Racism works!

This racialism will continue. Why? Because Obama discovered long ago than racial identification brings as many dividends as does the content of one's character or achievement. It is a force multiplier and foolishly left untapped. I fear more, not less, of this, as the tab for Obama's charge-it economy comes due at about the same time dubious players abroad conclude that serial apologies amount to a green light for adventurism. When his popularity dives, I think critics will be seen as biased and prejudicial. -Victor Hanson on David Letterman, Rev. Wright, and Thoughts on a Creepy Culture

Posted by Vanderleun at June 11, 2009 5:48 PM
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"It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." -- Karl Popper N.B.: Comments are moderated and may not appear immediately. Comments that exceed the obscenity or stupidity limits will be either edited or expunged.

I agree with you on the deadpan transmissions. They leave a lot for the imagination by trying to remove all imagination from the transmission.

I am in the Coast Guard Auxiliary, and our transmissions are to comply with regular Coast Guard transmissions. Knowing the jargon, knowing what is contained with such brevity, is like being privy to secret knowledge. To being part of a fellowship.

A few weeks ago I youtubed a scene from 'The Final Countdown'. Splash the Zeros. To hear a command given with 'I say again' and then the command given - and know why - is to be in that fellowship.

It is wierd; I say again, it is wierd.

Posted by: Mikey NTH at June 12, 2009 12:36 PM