"I have not the pleasure of knowing my reader but I would stake ten to one that for six months he has been making Utopias, and if so, that he is looking to Government for the realization of them."--Bastiat
Edgar Allen Poe's poetry has always been a problem for critics. Hart Crane places Poe squarely in “The Tunnel” section of The Bridge, where the descent into the “interborough fissures of the mind” of the subway symbolizes the loss of the Emersonian vision of Self-Reliance. On four lines from Poe's “For Annie”: “Sadly I know I am shorn of my strength, / And no muscle I move / As I lie at full length – / But no matter! – I feel I am better at length” Allen Bloom concludes, “These dreadful lines are by no means unrepresentative of Poe’s verse.” The French, Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé to Paul Valéry, loved him. “An enthusiasm for Poe”, Henry James declared, “is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.” Walt Whitman called the poems “electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat”. Yeats wrote to his artist friend William Horton, “I do not know why you or indeed anybody should want to illustrate Poe . . . . I admire a few lyrics of his extremely and a few pages of his prose, chiefly in his critical essays, which are sometimes profound. The rest of him seems to be vulgar and commonplace . . . .” What really worries Bloom is less Poe’s diction or rhythm than the notion that his entire oeuvre is a “hymn to negativity”: “Poe, seeking to avoid Emersonianism, ends with only one fact, and it is more a wish than a fact: ‘I will to be the Abyss.’ This metaphysical despair . . . cannot be refuted, because it is myth, and Poe backed the myth with his life as well as his work”. (From
An estimated 7.5 to 8.0-magnitude quake struck at about 1 p.m. in February in the Calabria province in Italy in 1783. Within a minute, over 100 villages were leveled throughout the region. In several cases, communities were literally wiped away with no survivors or standing structures remaining. Many then drowned when a second tremor at midnight prompted a tsunami. The tsunami also killed thousands of people in Reggio di Calabria and Messina, towns that sit opposite each other across the strait between Calabria and Sicily. Mountains moved, rivers diverted and lakes created. The misery continued across southern Italy and Sicily for the remainder of the winter. With food supplies disrupted, the survivors were at risk of starvation. In addition, another quake on March 28 killed another 2,000 people. In addition, another quake on March 28 killed another 2,000 people. Including aftershocks and the indirect effects of the earthquakes, a total of 80,000 people died in the earthquake of 1783.
In 1960, 12% of 25- to 34-year-olds were never married; today, 49% never have been.
The President on Islam and Christianity: "Unless we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ," Obama said. "In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. So it is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a simple tendency that can pervert and distort our faith." So the sins of the fathers--or a google-great grandfathers--are visited upon the google-great grandsons. Or their neighbors, maybe. Or something in this strange man's Procrustean world.
Scapegoat: noun: One blamed for another’s wrongdoing. verb tr.: To blame someone for another’s wrongdoing. Another word with a story. This term arose as a misreading of a biblical word as Hebrew ’ez ’ozel (goat that departs) for what was, in fact, the proper noun Azazel, apparently a name for a demon. The explanation given in Leviticus 16:8 is that one casts one’s sins on a goat and lets it escape into the wilderness. Earliest documented use: 1530.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a senator from New York, a smart guy with objectivity. He is responsible for two political phrases that appear on occasion that define, in a critical way, social phenomena. First, "defining deviancy down:" when deviant behaviors — e.g., violent crime or births to unmarried women — reach a certain level, society soothes itself by "defining deviancy down," de-stigmatizing them by declaring them normal. Second, "iatrogenic government:" In medicine, an iatrogenic ailment is inadvertently induced by a physician or medicine; in social policy, iatrogenic problems are caused by government.
Mercenary corporations have received $138 billion in contracts for Iraq alone, according to the Financial Times. And the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimated in 2011 that fraud, waste, and abuse accounted for about $60 billion of the money spent in Iraq alone, so maybe privatization does not always reduce waste .
Transfers of benefits to individuals through social welfare programs have increased from less than 1 federal dollar in 4 (24 percent) in 1963 to almost 3 out of 5 (59 percent) in 2013. More than twice as many households receive “anti-poverty” benefits than receive Social Security or Medicare. Between 1983 and 2012, the population increased by almost 83 million — and people accepting means-tested benefits increased by 67 million. This despite the portion of the estimated population below the poverty line is unchanged. (15.2 percent in 1983; 15 percent in 2012). In 2012, more than half the recipients were not classified as poor but accepted being treated as needy. This may imply the country is losing its dependence on--and confidence in--the potential of every individual and lapsing back into the old European belief of rigid class structures.
The introduction of morality into economics creates a complex universe of unrelated things. One of the interesting efforts was the Distributism movement of the early 20th Century, developed by Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton. According to Chesterton, "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists." This was essentially a Catholic response to the world of industry and capitalism. Pius XI admitted in Quadragesimo Anno #42 that there are limits to what moral theologians can say in the economic sphere because “economics and moral science each employs its own principles in its own sphere.” In #41 he referred to “matters of technique for which [the Church] is neither suitably equipped nor endowed by office.”
Golden oldie:
On February 5, 1958, the United States Air Force lost a 7,600-pound (3,400 kg) Mark 15 nuclear bomb in the waters off Tybee Island near Savannah, Georgia, United States. During a practice exercise, the B-47 bomber carrying the bomb collided in midair with an F-86 fighter plane. To protect the aircrew from a possible detonation in the event of a crash, the bomb was jettisoned. Following several unsuccessful searches, the bomb was presumed lost somewhere in Wassaw Sound off the shores of Tybee Island.
Who is.....Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy?
NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams admitted he was not aboard a helicopter hit and forced down by RPG fire during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a false claim that has been repeated by the network for years. “The story actually started with a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG,” Williams said on the broadcast. “Our traveling NBC News team was rescued, surrounded and kept alive by an armor mechanized platoon from the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry.” Williams and his camera crew were actually aboard a Chinook in a formation that was about an hour behind the three helicopters that came under fire, according to crew member interviews. That Chinook took no fire and landed later beside the damaged helicopter.
The story was debunked by several men on the helicopter that had actually been under fire.
What could Williams have been thinking? Do these people think they can say anything they want? Or is this some weird admixture of fact and fiction so prevalent among fiction writers? Is the theme, not the exact facts, of import? Do all these public figures think their lives are being chronicled by Neal Stevenson?
Turkey's price for entry against ISIS was an American commitment to help bring down Assad. Obama refused. So Turkey sits it out. Why doesn't Obama agree? Didn't he say that Assad must go? The reason is that Obama dares not upset Assad's patrons, the Iranian mullahs, with whom Obama dreams of concluding a grand rapprochement. (sort of Krauthammer)
From Fields of Blood by Karen Armstrong. We have three brains that coexist uneasily. First is an 'old brain' that we inherited from the reptiles that struggled out of the primal slime 500 million years ago. Intent on their own survival, with absolutely no altruistic impulses, these creatures were solely motivated by mechanisms urging them to feed, fight, flee (when necessary), and reproduce. Second, 120 million years ago, formed over the core brain derived from the reptiles, the limbic system emerged. It motivated all sorts of new behaviors, including the protection and nurture of young as well as the formation of alliances with other individuals that were invaluable in the struggle to survive. Third, about twenty thousand years ago, during the Paleolithic Age, human beings evolved a 'new brain,' the neocortex, home of the reasoning powers and self-awareness that enable us to stand back from the instinctive, primitive passions. Now this sounds, in a posterboard way, sort of reasonable. But it is entirely speculative. and improvable. And, of course, irrefutable.
“Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel, LL.D. F.R.S. &c. At the Cape of Good Hope [From Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science]” exclaimed the New York Sun. The Great Moon Hoax, as it has become known, was published in the New York Sun over several days in the summer of 1835. It claimed to describe what the astronomer John Herschel had seen through his telescope from the Cape of Good Hope. The articles included increasingly lavish descriptions of planets, the lunar landscape, “several new specimens of animals” and, ultimately, in the last paragraph of the 6th and final part, the bat-like “Vespertilio-homo”, which appeared “scarcely less lovely than the general representations of angels by the more imaginative schools of painters.” The story was intended as satire rather than hoax by Richard Adams Locke aimed at Thomas Dick, a Scottish minister, teacher and author, whose faith in the existence of other worlds appeared throughout his writings. The refined detail was so well done that most missed the joke.
AAAAAaaaaannnnnnnddddddd.........a picture (color enhanced) of M104, The Sombrero Galaxy:
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