Lagniappes (XIX)

A sample to taste;  click for the real deal.

Trying to find Mr. Right… is a fool’s errand.   (A novelist phrased it more candidly:  Looking for Mr. Goodbar.)   As soon seek a diamond, in a field of wheat.  But the wheat itself, each ear -- the wheat is good.

“Thou’st made an ill trade, Tommy my lad.   A goose is a good, is a very good thing.  But no Christian has ever discovered a use for pearls.  

For some time now, in these essays and elsewhere,  whenever the occasion required a metonymy or metaphor to signify ‘The World’s Worst Human Being’, I have been writing -- in all innocence, and without malice aforethought -- "Donald Trump".

I must here explain for the ladies, who would otherwise scarcely understand, that failure of one’s lawnmower to start, is humiliating for a man.

The forces of Sarkozy -- ahem, of Ouattara -- have taken Abidjan, and Democracy can breath a sigh of relief.

“Never before have I achieved such a mortgage with a man,” breathed the buxxxom American icon, breathily.

Minimalism and Entomology

This blog was begun in defense of Platonism -- sword flashing, doubts to the rear.

The emergent theme of Minimalism  has been experimental … feeling our way forwards…

But just at this moment (this very night) the idea presents itself, of a relation between Minimalism   and this:

worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/bugs

(And thus, with theology.)

Kibbles & Bits (XVIII)

[The subject-line?  Inside joke.]

Karefully krafted kwotes 4 U.  (For context, click thru.)

The larger editorial point in all this, is not the travails of the individual lands, which indeed have my deepest sympathy, but the way in which much of our media  resembles Top 40 radio, pumping out pop tunes, which the public whistles, blissfully unawares.

Stabat mater dolorosa
iuxta Crucem lacrimosa,
dum pendebat Filius.

Then Christ revealed his wound so wide

  Oh the leaves drop down in autumn

And Thomas thrust his hand inside.

  and the cherry blooms in spring

I have just conceived a remarkable proof and elucidation of the whole shebang!  But alas  the 140-character limit of Twitter  does not permit its exposition …

I have on occasion twitted ultra-Darwinists and early-universe cosmologists  for being seduced by the flashbulbs and footlights  into amorphous public vaporings upon matters of which they know not.  But their shticks are mostly harmless.  More concerning are ongoing attempts by neuroscientists to degrade what is left of human morality, accountability, and free-will.

Time:  Judgment Day.  Place:  The Pearly Gates.

Bobby D & me

So me’n Bob are sittin’ aroun’, chowin’ down, and passing a big fat joint back & forth like we always done.  Heck -- me & Bobby? -- we go way-y back.

He took a long drag and held it in;  which gave me a chance to get a word in edgeways.

“Say, Zimm,” I said -- I like to call him “Zimm”, just a little thing we have between us, “you see where that New Yorker writer went and just plumb made up some of your quotes?  Or maybe some were real only he like tweaked a preposition?"

A little intake of breath, and then a long exhale.  Mumbles:  “Messed-up, man.”

For a while we were silent, just taking in the sunset, and the moan of a distant train.

“Least he had the decency to commit hara-kiri with his own quill pen, right there in the office of the editor.”
Bob nodded.  “Said it, man.”

A long pause  while we contemplated unspoken things.

“Y’know,” I confided.  “I been real, real protective of your reputation, ever since I wrote Blowin’ in the Wind and you had your hit with it.”

He nodded thoughtfully.  “You written me some righteous songs, man.”

“And you remember that time when you were too stoned to sing, and I filled in for you on your album doing Rainy Day Women?”

A hint of a grin.  “Good times, man.”

~

~ Celebrity Endorsement ~

“To distract my mind from current troubles,

I like to dig into a gritty mystery,

starring those tough-talking, two-fisted Private Eyes,

the lovable Murphy Brothers.”

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(My name is Woody Guthrie, and I approved this message.)

~

.

Monostich Monopoly

For months (as we have long complained),  Clueless Google sent stringsearchers for “monostich”  on a wild goose chase, sending them to sucky sites and to pages that have nothing to do with monostichs or anything else.   Yet today, for the first time, some of WDJ’s splendid offerings in this department  appear within the top returns, as Wonderful, All-Knowing, Godlike Google  finally wises up.   So -- to all you fans out there in Monostichostan -- today is your day !!

We now celebrate monostichistically (without the least intention of goosing the stats) the monostichality or monostichosity of the vast

m

o

n

o

s

t

i

c

h

-loving public  by coining a new word:

monostichomythia

which means:  rapid back-and-forth dialogue (technically “stichomythia”) consisting entirely of monostichs.    Many plays have a witty interlude that is exactly that.

[Webmaster:  Put the following into encrypted stego so that it will only show up to members of the Tychonoff Cabal, and not to the ordinary user.]

Here, then, comrades -- now that we are alone -- I can reveal our Secret Plans:

(1) Corner the market in monostichs

(2) Corner the market in couplets

(3) World domination

Adventures in Empathy Acquisition

I remember a Battersea little girl  who wheeled her large baby sister  stuffed into a doll’s perambulator.  When questioned on this course of conduct, she replied:  “I haven’t got a dolly, and Baby is pretending to be my dolly.”

-- G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles (1909)

Now that’s … meta.

~

Marya  strolled by with her little toy dog, who last time had been nameless, and gave me an update.

“I named him ‘Cutie’.”

“Ah!  Because he’s cute.”

“Yes.”

“Nomen omen,” I refrained from saying.

~

She held forth, in her tiny hand, two little flowers side by side:  a buttercup, and a clover-flower.  “Look what I made for mommy -- a bouquet!”

Two tiny flowers -- one almost a weed -- just barely make bouquet-hood:  but they do.  They compose, indeed,  Minimalist Bouquet, reduced to its essentials.  Not for her the gaudy floral excess of a Mafia funeral.

[For the complete dossier of Marya's special adventures, click here.]

Nibbles ‘n’ Tidbits (XVI)

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Something to munch on; click for a full meal.

Each morning in public school, from primary through junior high, we began the day with the Lord’s Prayer.   Jew and Gentile, churched and unchurched, we all -- we each -- recited it with folded hands.

Now here is a new bleb that has appeared upon the body politic -- perhaps it is not yet too late to lance it.  I refer to the phrase,   “Well, again, …”

The most highly prized are made from the horn of a unicorn:  but these have not been seen since the time of Solomon.

Predicting human events at any granularity finer than that of the Kondratieff cycle  finds little support in the laws of Marx.    To discern the trigger of events (as opposed to their full background), we almost need to stand Marx on his head:  A man will not revolt because he is poor, but he may well take to the streets from resentment of his better-off neighbors.  

He sensed a touch upon his clout,

and felt some virtue going out.

"Who touched me?" cried the Christ aloud,

and sternly stared  among the crowd.

"Riddle this me, a thing that's three, and yet is only one.""That is the blessed Trinity,Father, Ghost, and Son."

Mezze (XV)

[Language note:  That word is from Turkish, and refers to tasty Mideast treats;  the Arabic is مزة ]

More morsels -- click for the full take.

We really must keep away from politics on this site -- lest, touching pitch, we be defiled:  for no-one convinces anyone else, and the ensuing heat helps melt the ice-caps.   But the escalating weirdness of the world compels attention. 

Violins and trumpets!  Children in the streets.

Balloon men and circus gongs  and peasants selling sweets.

Tall man in a top hat, smiling  walking by.

Old dog on a hayrick, in the sun, he’s sly.

Realism about mathematics is just a part -- and not the chief part -- of Realism about Reason.   One can actually get along pretty well, from week to week, without having recourse to Algebraic Geometry.  But Reason is at the core of our being and our freedom:  and it is Reason that, in these dark days, finds itself under attack.

When someone speaks of mathematics, dismissively, as not being “about” anything, we suspect he never made it past simple arithmetic, and finds the integers pale and spectral  next to nice red apples.   And it is true, you cannot eat the number 2; but then, neither can you really take the square root of a couple of apples.

Here we see the long history ofYemeni political poetry  coming brilliantly to fruition  in a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk  of poetry,music, dance, and fist-pumping  all in one.

Alas!  frisky and adorable, the prairie dog --like his cousin the humble woodchuck -- is entirely unfamiliar with the Peanopostulates -- or in layman’s terms, with Our Friends the Integers.   Therefore they get eaten.  Gobble gobble gobble !!!  Gone!

Word of the Day: “Wazzock”

[Update 17 Jan 2016]   Now that The Mitt is off the ticket, and The Trump has taken his place, our friends across the Atlantic have unpacked  from the woolsack   the word wazzock,  saved for ceremonial occasions, and bestowed it upon that (un-)Presidential contender.

We give the historical background here:

~

A florilegium of Britishisms:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/opinion/sunday/dowd-mitts-olympic-meddle.html?_r=1&ref=maureendowd&pagewanted=print

Conservatives in London oozed scorn. Mayor Boris Johnson mocked “a guy called Mitt Romney". Fleet Street spanked “Nowhere Man” and “Mitt the Twit.”

Conservatives on Fox News were dumbfounded. “You have to shake your head,” Karl Rove said. Charles Krauthammer pronounced the faux pas “unbelievable, it’s beyond human understanding, it’s incomprehensible. I’m out of adjectives.”

We may wince when the blithering toff, or want-wit, as Shakespeare would say, arrives at the Brits’ home and throws his Cherry Coke Zero can in the prize rose bushes.

He came across like a wazzock, as The Daily Telegraph called him, using a British insult for a daft know-it-all.

As for the pronunciation, the stressed syllable, WAZZ-, rhymes with spazz (from spastic), and the suffix -ock is reminiscent of British ballocks (American: balls).   Indeed, quite likely the origin of the word wazzock is grounded in such associations, rather than in (say) a deformation of the word wiseacre, as has been elsewhere suggested.  (W-Allahu a`lamu.)


You can view an unretouched roentgenogram of an actual wazzock  here:
http://vocabulry.wordpress.com/?s=wazzock

For further fun wordstuff, click here:  Logophilia.

For some spicy wiseguy trashtalk, click here:  Murphy on dames.

For clues to the origins of Romney's wazzock tone-deaf cluelessness, try this:
Mitt Romney:  the Early Years

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*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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[Update, 1 Aug 2012]  Ms. Dowd has outdone herself, with a new word-of-the-day:  “Gowk”.  Excerpt:

The Gadding of a Gawky Gowk

Remember when Janice Soprano shot her fiance to death after he punched her in the mouth? Then she calls Tony to come over and help her. He mops up the blood and has his thugs chop up the body.

“All in all, though,” Tony tells his sister sincerely, as he drops her at the bus station, “it was a pretty good visit.”

By Sopranos standards, all in all, Mitt Romney had a pretty good visit overseas. But by political standards, it was more like Munch’s “The Scream.”

When Barack Obama went abroad in July 2008, searching for some foreign policy cred, European leaders smothered him with love and respect.

More than 200,000 Germans thronged to the Victory Column in Berlin, hailing him as “Redeemer” and “Savior.” In a joint press conference in Paris, a smitten Nicolas Sarkozy was so touchy-feely that even Obama looked a little embarrassed.

“You must want a cigarette after that,” I teased Obama on the plane to London later.

Poor Mitt Romney had no such magic carpet ride. He insulted the British and infuriated the Palestinians while pandering to the Israelis and American Jewish voters, including donors like the Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson who tagged along.

Egged on by some of the same neocon advisers who brought us the Iraq pre-emptive invasion, Romney offered “Go ahead, make my day” diplomacy, signaling he would support Israeli action to pre-emptively strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.

In an inadvertently hilarious grand finale in Warsaw, where Romney was pandering to American Catholics by dropping Pope John Paul II’s name every chance he got, his spokesman insulted the traveling press clamoring for a rare dollop of attention from the Republican contender.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/opinion/dowd-gadding-of-a-gawky-gowk.html?src=me&ref=general

*

Falls Sie im Doktor-Justiz-Sammelsurium

weiterblättern möchten,

Bitte hier klicken:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Deutschtum

*

[Update 11 Oct 2012]   Don't be a wazzock!  Gin up on the latest Limeyisms:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/fashion/americans-are-barmy-over-britishisms.html?src=me&ref=general
"MITT ROMNEY is not the “bumbling toff” he’s made out to be..."

[Update 24 June 2013]  Someone just found this post by searching on “wassock originated in arabic”.   Such an etymology  I must very much doubt.  There is an Arabic adjective meaning ‘dirty’ which is phonetically somewhat similar to the British noun, though not very.  FWIW, Buzzfeed offers this: “Enjoying its heyday during the ‘lad’s mag’ culture of the 1990s, ‘wazzock’ is a Northern accented contraction of ‘wiseacre’.”
However, if it's Arabic you're interested, check this out:

The Semantics of Form in Arabic

Tapas (XIV)

Choice chewy quotes of gooey goodness, browned to a turn in our firebrick ovens, and served fresh 2 U.  (Click for the full meal.)

I’m not being very nice about this.  Bounds of academic discourse and all that.  But the fact is, these clowns have adolescents under their intellectual care;  it would not be too much of a stretch to haul them up on charges of interfering with the morals of a minor.

Syllogisms based on such smuggled assumptions  are known as enthymemes.  They may still point to valid inferences, once the unstated auxiliary premises are made explicit;  but, for obvious reasons, invalid ones often show up in public rhetoric.

We learn that “Nominalists hold that there are no numbers”;  this involves them in certain epistemological difficulties.   But en revanche (ô doulce revanche), numbers hold that there are no nominalists.  This  involves them in no difficulties at all.

There comes a time in the life of every young person, when they doubt the existence of coffee-cups.  So here comes jolly old Doctor J, to prove it for you.

If God exists, as anything like the being that is envisioned in the Abrahamic tradition, then yes indeed His purposes are beyond human comprehension:  of course they are.   Heck, most of the time, a man’s wife’s purposes seem beyond human comprehensions

It was not until he had reached his cottage that Jack thought to bite the coin,which turned out, beneath its tinsel, to be compacted of mere straw.

Screenscript Minimalism

Jack Bauer,  having offered himself to a cold-blooded killer as hostage, is about to go in unarmed, and hands his pistol to Marilyn:

Jack: Do you know how to use this?

Marilyn:  No.

Jack:  Point -  and - Shoot.

Jack Bauer and Mike Doyle  exchange torture tips:

Mike:  I’ve  never found pharmaceutical torture all that effective.

Jack:  I have.

Ready-made pick-up lines (XIII)

Choice quotes from WDJ.  Try these out in your favorite bar!

The author then mentions that the proof actually constructs the Reals out of the Rationals.  This is, of course, the most solid sort of proof of all – not one of those Cantorian diagonalization thingies that has you winding up assenting to the Infinite Woodchuck, without ever quite knowing how you got into such a fix.

Nine out of nine Humble Woodchucks prefer grommet-topped curtains to like, you know, the other kind.

I am not saying that numbers are ideas.  Or if they are that, they are that  in addition, where they keep such scruffy company as the Idea of a Unicorn  and the Idea of a Ham Sandwich.  They are, rather, facts as hard as baseballs, packing quite as much wallop.

Many of you may be unaware that this site receives no subvention of any kind: neither public nor private, open nor clandestine.  The whole thing is powered by a single hamster in an exercise wheel.

We have seen, throughout history, and perhaps especially of late, the phenomenon of the monomaniac, the homo unius notionis, with his One Big Idea.  He rides it through all the talk shows, he remolds it and reworks it, and sends it out to do battle with the issues of the day, as they crop up; however distant they might be to his central conception.

Sirs, hello.  I am Prince of Nigeria, writing to you from my cold hard prison cell.

Update:  However, don’t try these in France.

“Looking at someone up and down”

Updated here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/10/looking-at-someone-up-and-down-updated.html

Hors d’oeuvres (XII)

More mini-morsels for the discriminating palate;  click for the full plate.

Full knowledge is doubtless impossible in the case of anything so wildly complex as an acorn or a rock;  but in the case of something simple, like Hilbert Space (infinite-dimensional, it is true, but tamed by a norm that is based upon an inner product), we can perhaps come close to exhausting most of what can be known of it.

In “Memento”, every each least action is serious stuff ….

We embrace the phenomenal world (beginning with the breast)  with the same uncomprehending acceptance with which we receive the Host.

Shopper:  Dunno.  Does it make me look fat?

The typical working mathematician is a Platonist on weekdays  and a formalist on Sundays.

God himself may draw vital strength and increase of very being  from our fidelity.

Starters (XI)

[Atlantic-spanning note, for our American friends:
That’s British for “appetizers”.]

Tasty tidbits -- click on one, for the real meal.

I capitalize the word Realism, not to exalt it, but to distinguish it from the everyday use of the word, which can shade over into almost an opposite meaning, as in Realpolitik (the capitalization there is an artefact of German).   I don’t capitalize "nominalists" because, well,they suck.

Doubt the existence of your own head, if you must; but go do it behind the barn.

None of these summations of views can exhaust all there is to know and say about that rock, precisely because it is so real -- discovered, not invented.  (You might almost say:  Begotten, not made…)

A “Memento” Joke: a tachyon walks into a bar...

Just as a rock is already in the Universe, whether or not someone is handling it,  an idea is already in the Mindscape, whether or not someone is thinking it.

The motions of our understanding, confronted with the magnificence of ye spaces of ye honorable Banach, and  ye incomparable Hilbert, are like unto those of an humble woodchuck -- nay, a  turtle – nay, as the turds of a turtle – when, laboring groaning upwards through the clammy slime ….

"Man Camps"

I happened to click on this op-ed by Gail Collins, simply because it was at the very top of the "most e-mailed" listing for articles in the NYTimes.  It contains no mention of celebrities;  not much politics (other than what is implied); and no car-chases.   And it warms my heart that, nevertheless, our fellow citizens chose  to e-mail this --  boing-boing, back-and-forth --  around the globe.  A snapshot of the state of labor:


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/opinion/collins-where-the-jobs-are.html?src=me&ref=general&pagewanted=print

So -- from Hoovervilles to Man-Camps, in ten easy lessons.
And this, note, in a town with only 1% unemployment -- which means that this is as good as it gets in America these days, for labor.

Dumbo Does Diplomacy

[A note to our younger readers:

 That subject-line is a playful allusion to the title of a notorious movie from before you were born, “Debbie Does Dallas”. ]

It’s almost comical.

In the shock of 9/11,  Le monde  (perhaps with a nod to JFK’s celebrated “Ich bin ein Berliner”) headlined: “Nous sommes tous américains.”   But Dubya wasted no time wasting that good will, stirring up the francophobes that pullulate in his milieu, until finally the House changed “French fries” to “Freedom fries” on the menu (again with a Germany-related echo:  during WWI, sauerkraut was re-dubbed “Victory cabbage”).

So now Dumbney goes to England, and pointlessly stirs up a hornet’s-nest:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/26/mitt-romney-gaffes-uk-visit?newsfeed=true

If Barack Obama were dreaming up the ideal start to Mitt Romney's first overseas visit as the presumptive Republican nominee, the president might wonder whether his rival could offend the US's historic transatlantic ally.

That would obviously be rejected as impossibly ambitious, so the president might then ask himself whether Romney would fail to remember the name of one of his hosts in London.

Surely a successful businessman would never make such a basic error. So the president would wonder whether Romney would breach convention by saying in public that he met the head of MI6, Britain's overseas intelligence agency.

To the undoubted joy of the White House, Romney stumbled on all those fronts in London on Thursday, the first day of his visit to three of the US's closest allies - Britain, Israel and Poland.

Downing Street, which had gone to great lengths to give Romney the red carpet treatment without breaching strict protocol rules, was astonished when he questioned whether London was capable of running a successful Olympics. In an interview with NBC after his arrival in London, Romney said it was "disconcerting" that the Olympics organizers had encountered difficulties over security. One Whitehall source described Romney's remarks as a "total shocker" that had rendered officials "speechless".

David Cameron wasted no time in delivering a carefully calibrated put down. During a visit to the Olympic Park, the prime minister said Britain was delivering the games in a bustling city. "Of course it's easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere," the prime minister said in a none too subtle reference to the 2002 Salt Lake City games …

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/breaking-news/romney-causes-stir-in-britain/story-e6freuz9-1226436272277

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/0726/breaking55.html

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5huXWdc728NOXrBok4HE765GbFyAA?docId=CNG.f34fa4905c43f482a76265bdbf2ffef3.11

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/post/mitt-romney-showing-gold-medal-tone-deafness-in-london/2012/07/26/gJQAYSItBX_blog.html?hpid=z1

If Romney, and the xenophobes who have been key to his primary campaign, somehow claw their way back into office, the House menu may come to feature “Freedom muffins” instead of the English kind …

Appendix:   Comments from readers and kibitzers

This admittedly minor gaffe has evoked reams of gleeful comment.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/achenblog/post/summer-olympics-romney-medals-in-the-gaffethon/2012/07/27/gJQAf5tdDX_blog.html?hpid=z8
Here’s what he was saying: “My Olympics were better than these guys’ Olympics, and my hair is better, or at least much stiffer, their their hair.”

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/romneys-remarks-cause-stir-in-london/?ref=global-home

From TN in Texas:

All is not lost, Mitt! You can still mollify our friends across the Pond! All it takes is something in the spirit of Gilbert and Sullivan, the Pirates of Penzance perhaps. Here goes:

"I am the very model of a modern major candidate.
My thoughts are incoherent, and I am without a plan, to-date.
I've managed the Olympics, and I quote my base hysterical
On everything from gun control to policies chimerical.

"I'm very well acquainted too with matters economical
I outsource jobs in such a way I think you'd find quite comical.
About my healthcare history I am teeming with a lot of views
With many shameless flips and flops, depending on the facts I choose."

Julie of Joysy:

Wow, this is surprising. I thought that, you know, being Anglo-Saxon and all, this part of the trip would be a piece of cake for Mitt. Now he's gotten Cameron and the mayor of London all riled up, and the mayor of Salt Lake City is firing back at Cameron for implying that Salt Lake City is "in the middle of nowhere". One day out of the country and Mitt's created an international incident. Just imagine what a President Romney could do at a summit meeting.

Joyce of DC:

Another one born with a silver foot in his mouth

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mitt-romney-meets-british-officials-in-london/2012/07/26/gJQAfqixAX_allComments.html#comments

[Update, late]   Tsk, tsk, tsk.
Someone just found this page via the searchstring
   mit s.o.b. romney
(for you see, WDJ knows every keystroke you make -- every thought in your head, in fact).
This, we deprecate.  Firmly do we condemn such ad-hominem remarks anent a public servant (well no actually, not currently or recently a public servant, more like a private predator -- but let that pass).
Anyhow, where were we (harrumph).
Ah yes -- Ringingly do we denounce any reference to Willard "the Mitt" Romney  as an "s.o.b."
For truly, he is not the son of one.
His father, Romney the elder, was a businessman who actually helped make things;  and later a politician known for moderation, who never flippantly proposed invading foreign countries simply to please a domestic chickenhawk constituency, and who freely made available his personal tax returns for a period of many years.
No, it is not the father who is the "b."
If anything... it is the son.

[Update, 29 July 2012]  The tournée continues:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/romney-would-support-israeli-attack-on-iran-to-stop-nuclear-weapon-capability-adviser-says/2012/07/29/gJQA34luHX_story.html?hpid=z2

Does this include our support for an unprovoked attack upon Iran using the nuclear weapons that Israel already has, in abundance?

(You were aware of that fact, weren’t you ?  Surely you didn’t fall for the propaganda about Iran “introducing” nuclear weapons into the Middle East.)

A disturbing consideration:  That is what his spokesman said in public.   The Mitt then proceeded to a closed-doors meeting with Israeli leaders, having revoked his earlier permission for press-coverage.
If egging on a combative nuclear power to launching an pre-emptive war is what he says in public, then what is so sensitive that he has to say it in private?

A reader comments:

Old, war mongering theocons like Bishop Willard are eager to send someone else's child to bleed and die while they themselves were dining on escargot in France when it was their turn to serve, and have kept their kids out of harm's way as well.

“Theocons.”  Nice.

~

 The sabre-rattling (or rather ICBM-rattling) alluded to above, we bar, but at least it is a legitimate position;  it is not logically self-refuting.   There are, indeed, folks out there in America, who would welcome a MidEast war involving the Holy Lands, since that would be the signal for Armageddon, after which they and their co-parishoners in the Hardshell Twiceborn Megabaptist Texas Tabernacle get Raptured up to heaven, snickering all the way and thumbing their noses at their heathen neighbors and at the Papists, who get Left Behind.  Fine; soit.

Less important geopolitically, but amusingly self-refuting, were some of the other gems he let fall from his vast store of them, e.g. re healthcare:

As for Romney’s invidious comparisons with Palestinians -- but no, I’ve got to get away from this corrupting stuff, and get back to math.  Let Tom Friedman tell it himself;  like he says, he’ll make it quick:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/opinion/friedman-why-not-in-vegas.html?src=me&ref=general

July 31, 2012

Why Not in Vegas?

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

I’ll make this quick. I have one question and one observation about Mitt Romney’s visit to Israel. The question is this: Since the whole trip was not about learning anything but about how to satisfy the political whims of the right-wing, super pro-Bibi Netanyahu, American Jewish casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, why didn’t they just do the whole thing in Las Vegas? I mean, it was all about money anyway — how much Romney would abase himself by saying whatever the Israeli right wanted to hear and how big a jackpot of donations Adelson would shower on the Romney campaign in return. Really, Vegas would have been so much more appropriate than Jerusalem. They could have constructed a plastic Wailing Wall and saved so much on gas.

The observation is this: Much of what is wrong with the U.S.-Israel relationship today can be found in that Romney trip. In recent years, the Republican Party has decided to make Israel a wedge issue. In order to garner more Jewish (and evangelical) votes and money, the G.O.P. decided to “out-pro-Israel” the Democrats by being even more unquestioning of Israel. This arms race has pulled the Democratic Party to the right on the Middle East and has basically forced the Obama team to shut down the peace process and drop any demands that Israel freeze settlements. This, in turn, has created a culture in Washington where State Department officials, not to mention politicians, are reluctant to even state publicly what is U.S. policy — that settlements are “an obstacle to peace” — for fear of being denounced as anti-Israel.

Add on top of that, the increasing role of money in U.S. politics and the importance of single donors who can write megachecks to “super PACs” — and the fact that the main Israel lobby, Aipac, has made itself the feared arbiter of which lawmakers are “pro” and which are “anti-Israel” and, therefore, who should get donations and who should not — and you have a situation in which there are almost no brakes, no red lights, around Israel coming from America anymore. No wonder settlers now boast on op-ed pages that the game is over, they’ve won, the West Bank will remain with Israel forever — and they don’t care what absorbing all of its Palestinians will mean for Israel’s future as a Jewish democracy.

It is into this environment that Romney wandered to add more pandering and to declare how he will be so much nicer to Israel than big, bad Obama. This is a canard. On what matters to Israel’s survival — advanced weaponry and intelligence — Defense Minister Ehud Barak told CNN on Monday, “I should tell you honestly that this administration under President Obama is doing in regard to our security more than anything that I can remember in the past.”

While Romney had time for a $50,000-a-plate breakfast with American Jewish donors in Jerusalem, with Adelson at his elbow, he did not have two hours to go to Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority, to meet with its president, Mahmoud Abbas, or to share publicly any ideas on how he would advance the peace process. He did have time, though, to point out to his Jewish hosts that Israelis are clearly more culturally entrepreneurial than Palestinians. Israel today is an amazing beehive of innovation — thanks, in part, to an influx of Russian brainpower, massive U.S. aid and smart policies. It’s something Jews should be proud of. But had Romney gone to Ramallah he would have seen a Palestinian beehive of entrepreneurship, too, albeit small, but not bad for a people living under occupation. Palestinian business talent also built the Persian Gulf states. In short, Romney didn’t know what he was talking about.

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Vorspeisen (X)

More munchies.  Click on the quote  for the full meal.

Facilis descensus Averno.
Herewith some recent waymarks on the declivity.

"Memento":  a meditation

A picture-of-a-unicorn (so goes the rote) is as much an unfissionable entity as a hotdog, which does not split neatly into a hot and a dog:  what at first glance seem components  are in reality synsemantic (“incomplete symbols”).

… these insolent ‘memories’, these soi-disant relations to our own vital past, spewn forth from out the cauldron of the unconscious, like some unknown Australian self-proclaimed cousin showing up on our doorstep, bearing a letter of reference and a leer…

We have seen that belief in the intellectual curiosity known as the “Urysohn Metrization Theorem”, oddly widespread, can be adequately accounted for in adaptationist terms.  However, an even simpler explanation lies ready to hand.

… the Blorks:  blind, deaf, immobile (and quite spherical), who nonetheless can sense objects around them with incredible precision, using a kind of echo-location, but only when those objects move.  (Vision in some animals is rather like this.)