The writers at the Babylon Bee..............

 

.....need to get out of their bubble every once in a while.

Althouse seizes the opportunity....................

 

..........to break out the "charming bad logic" tag.

Reading with a dictionary at hand.............

 

     Bear in mind that equivocity is true to being only as one way of attending to and speaking of being.  It is true to being as relative to being and as relative to the other senses of being.  Against ironic postmodern truth-refusal and metamodern oscillations between sincerity and indifference at the expense of truth, Chesterton guides his readers to notice how preconceptions can warp attention and prevent clear perception.  This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in his detective fiction, which draws attention to puzzlement and indefiniteness, as well as the unexplained intractabilities of reality.  Fitting the metaxological mode of attention at the heart of Chesterton's journalistic metaphysics, his interest is in restoring the adventurous side of life where the comfort of the overly familiar has caused us to lose our primal astonishment and foundational perplexity.  How can we feel at home if we have lost a sense of wonder?  That would not be home but a prison for the soul.  And how can we truly wonder if we have no place of refuge?  Without a safe haven, wonder turns into terror.

      Chesteronian defamiliarization may be misunderstood as an attempt to restore passivity to the perceiver, given that univocity tends to put people in an active relationship with reality, albeit still unconscious and devoid of reflective reasoning.  This is only part of the truth.  As suggested, Chesterton wants to resist the "worship of law," especially the worship of arbitrary human laws, by restoring difference.  But the deeper aim of this strategy is to restore the possibility of genuine consciousness and real choice; that means recovering participation in reality.

-Duncan Reyburn, The Roots of the World: The Remarkable Prescience of G. K. Chesterton

Newsweek deliveres the opinion that..............

 

........America is getting the President we deserve.

You can read the essay yourself if you wish.  I will tell you that the following sentence made me stop and say, "What?":

When approximately half of adults in the U.S. lack literary proficiency, is it any surprise we elect leaders who speak in soundbites rather than solutions?

In 2025 almost half (actually, if you follow the link the number used is 54%) of the adults in the United States "lack literary proficiency"?   Can that possibly be true?

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What.................................?

 Every enquiry into first principles, original causes, and fundamental laws, will at some state come up against an unanswerable question: what makes those first principles true or those fundamental laws valid?  What explains those original causes or initial conditions?  And the answer is that there is no answer—or no answer that can be expressed in terms of the science for which those laws, principles and causes are bedrock.

-Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic

Not even going to pretend (or try) to understand...

 

“What is realised in my history is not the past definitive of what it was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.”

“I am there where it is spoken that the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being.”

“I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.”

“I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.”

“The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.”

-Jacques Lacan, all quotes from here

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"What is going on here?"........................

 A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on.  Not just deciding what to do, but he more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.

-Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy

Fifty years ago.......................At Woodstock

Sha-Na-Na....................................................The Duke of Earl

(audience facial expressions are priceless)

On Expectations for 2019.............

..............................................................Count on this one:

2.  Something will happen that doesn’t make any sense at all.

-Ben Carlson, from this list

(Ed. Note:  never forget the old Al Anon saying, " an unrealistic expectation is a premeditated resentment")

Must be older...........................

An odd thing.......................

While taking the walking tour through the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, one is confronted by this:

Why can't a good story (and a great movie)....

..................................just be a good story (and a great movie)?   I suspect The Dangerous Economist wonders the same thing, but nonetheless, he posts a wonderful interpretation of the Wizard of OZ.   Do read it, if for no other reason than as a stretching exercise.  Here is a wee taste:

When Dorothy’s twister-tossed house comes to rest in Oz, it lands squarely on the wicked Witch of the East, killing her instantly. The startled girl emerges from the abode to find herself in a strange land of remarkable beauty, whose inhabitants, the diminutive Munchkins, rejoice at the death of the Witch. The Witch represents eastern financial-industrial interests and their gold-standard political allies, the main targets of Populist venom. Midwestern farmers often blamed their woes on the nefarious practices of Wall Street bankers and the captains of industry, whom they believed were engaged in a conspiracy to “enslave” the “little people,” just as the Witch of the East had enslaved the Munchkins.

Because the learning never stops...........

Not remembering my Zeno's Paradoxes, the Oracle Google was consulted.  Now I remember, but I still don't understand.  Read it yourself.

"To fully solve any of the paradoxes, however, one needs to show what is wrong with the argument, not just the conclusions."

Really?   I think Diogenes the Cynic had the correct answer.

Political hospice..........................?

..............................Where would we be without the "experts"?

Being a “working class white voter” does not make us inferior or intellectually stunted so much that we need to be (re)educated in liberally biased schools of doublespeak and thoughtlessness. All we want to do is work a good job that does present a modest challenge, that does feel rewarding, keeps the lights on and our bellies full and after all of that, we just want to come home, drink some beers, pet the dog and enjoy the sunset in our small suburban slice of heaven. For us, that is what life is all about. We don’t care about revolutions, microaggressions, or how many physical and economic descriptors we can apply to a sub group of a sub group of a sub group. People like Gest and Capehart are more important to themselves, like Narcissus was to his reflection; eventually, they will drown in their obsession. And when they do, they’re still gonna be at the counter of a Mom and Pop shop asking some “white working class voter” with grease on his or her face “What’s wrong with my Prius?”

-as excerpted from here


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Contradictions........................

Never give up, which is the lesson I learned from boxing.  As soon as you learn to never give up, you have to learn the power and wisdom of unconditional surrender,  and that one doesn't cancel out the other; they just exist as contradictions.  The wisdom of it comes as you get older. 

-Kris Kristofferson

Wondering who thought this was a good idea.....

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I'll admit it's pretty cool.................

.....................................but, just wondering how many beers were required to come up with the idea?

Approaching the level of impeachability.......

Haven't exactly figured this one out.......

........................................................................Any ideas?

We were in Tampa last month and strolled around Ybor City.  It didn't take long before I was captivated by their sidewalk "paver" project.  My Sweetie not so much.  Still, what a cool idea.

And we wonder.......................

.........................................why "college students today can't write":

By 2005, Richard Fulkerson could write of composition, “in point of fact, virtually no one in contemporary composition theory assumes any epistemology other than a vaguely interactionist constructivism. We have rejected quantification and any attempts to reach Truth about our business by scientific means.”

Well, that explains a lot.  Full essay from whence the quote was extracted is here.  My theory is that college students today can't write (assuming that is true) because public grade schools stopped teaching cursive writing about twenty years ago.  What was that about?