My grandfather.
Boxcars don’t have roofwalks anymore, and there’s a now pair of six-lane bridges on either side of this magnificent bridge over the Carquinez Straits.
A Happy Meal that won't decompose →
A Flickr set from Sally Davies, whoever that is. Six months in and still alarmingly intact.
“This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club.”
From Harold Lewis’ letter of resignation from the American Physical Society. Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics at UCSB.
“Exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago.”
That is, “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex…”
I’ve heard many people connect the global-warming hoo-hah to the moneyed interests of our day, but I’ve never read anyone connect it to the influence of the military-industrial complex.
Patrick J. Deneen, "American Self-Loathing", on Front Porch Republic. →
Deneen really nails it.
Anti-Washington fever will rise to dizzying heights in coming days. The chattering classes will conclude that Americans have a firm idea of their destiny, choosing one party over another in coming days. Few will understand that the source of our loathing will be the division within ourselves. The divided government we will embrace is the division in our souls: two versions of democracy. In the one version, democracy is rugged individualism. In the other, democracy is a gentler concern that no one should be left behind. Both are fantasies born of bad modern anthropology. Our country oscillates between two fantasies of democracy – a downward spiral that is self-perpetuating and mutually reinforcing. The election is no more than a radar blip in the erosion of self-government. The more deeply we hate ourselves, the louder our denunciation of Washington will resound. The din of self-loathing will soon be deafening.
I would summarize thusly: idolatry produces confusion leading to self-destruction.
Water in Excelsis →
My dear friend Joshua Appel’s blog. I’m trying to get him to move over to Tumblr, but for now, he’s right up there at that address.
“Poor mortal, I am stung with a constant sense of time. But I can cover time-spans from one day to a year to a generation to a century, with my intent and my understanding. And am I asked to believe that neither my creator nor the man who revealed him to us enters upon the measures of time which I alone can understand? I know they do. For I have lived through epoch-making events which have changed the lives of all men on this globe. And in the light of the Lord of the Eons, I have found my path through these ends of my world and the beginnings of the next eon. To tell me, “oh, the Christian era has been a helpful myth in the past, but now we don’t need it any longer,” is like telling me: “the raft on which you passed [over] the abyss must be condemned.” I have found that there is a way of living through the end and the beginning of an era in perfect freedom, neither as the slave of capitalism nor as the slave of communism, neither as merely a German nor merely as an American, neither as a soldier nor as a scholar. And I should now go and destroy the raft, my raft, simply because people who have never passed over an abyss say: “There is no abyss: therefore the Lord of continuity through all the abysses between eras can be put up at our rummage sale of old wear.””
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who lived through two world wars and the life-shattering events that interluded, from the introduction to The Fruit of Lips, against the modernist theologians who tried to reduce the gospels to a disordered biography of an interesting personality from the ancient world.
Beyond the challenging and profound ideas that pour off his pages, ER-H is an arresting and shocking writer. Here he refutes the modernists not by demolishing their scholarship (he does do that elsewhere) but by appealing to his own experience passing through the destruction of the world in the 20th Century “in perfect freedom”. Against this, the “people who have never passed over an abyss” have nothing to say.
Rosenstock-Huessy wrote theology the way it ought to be written: forceful, fearless, wild-eyed, passionate. This is how you write for the queen of the sciences.
“Find out if it’s circular.
If it is, it’s circular.”
“How, after all, is contentment compatible with work, proper ambition, planning and goals? Am I being discontented if I decide that I want to read yet another book?
In the creation week, God’s contentment is temporally and eschatologically qualified. ”Good” means “Good for today,” but then the next day He does another good thing. To be content is to come to evening able to say “Good; things are done enough.” Even for God, contentment is not Stoic stasis; much less for us.
Eschatologically qualified too: God says “Good; enough” in the light of the next day, and in the light of the Sabbath toward which the whole week moves. So too throughout history, God is not statically satisfied with where things are right now, but satisfied with where they have come to, how much progress has been made toward His final end of summing up all things in the Son by the Spirit. The eschatological dimension is especially central for human contentment, since we are always exhorted to be content in the light of greater riches to come. On every Day 1 and on every Day 4, we rest satisfied in what has been accomplished, confident in God that more and greater is yet to come.
”
Where beef comes from.
This is actually only one tomato. Note the stem right in the middle.
Towboats and barges near the U.S. 60 bridge over the Ohio River by Cairo, Illinois. Another fellow took a picture of downtown Cairo awhile back; it still looks that way.
The Mississippi River from Thebes, Illinois.
Green River, Utah
Richard Buckner’s lyrics and stage persona are often inscrutable and abstract. But that inscrutability and abstraction push what begin as ordinary folk songs into captivating, evocative works. He is, fundamentally, a fine songsmith. In person (I once spent three hours with him in a bar before a show), he’s really entertaining and interesting. Get him on a stage, though, and he disappears behind his own closed eyes and clenched teeth. Baffling. His studio records are superb, though. My favorites are The Hill and Meadow.
I’m a sucker for an ugly tomato.
Gonna lay my head right on some railroad track / When some train come along, I’m gonna snatch it back…
This song stops me still every time I hear it.
“Mr Lanier lays into the Web 2.0 culture, arguing that what passes for creativity today is really just endlessly rehashed content and that the “fake friendship” of social networks “is just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical advertisers”. For Mr Lanier there is no wisdom of crowds, only a cruel mob.”
Earlier this year, Jaron Lanier, a technologist, musician and polymath best known for pioneering work in the field of virtual reality, published “You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto”. He has become a stern critic of many of the internet’s sacred cows.
Thus far, The Economist.
Endlessly rehashed content. That’s precisely what this tumblething happens to be.
I make my living off so-called “Web 2.0”, and I know that it’s the worst kind of ephemeral bulls**t masquerading as the “new, game-changing way to do things and network and make friends and buy stuff—yeah, especially, buy stuff.”
It’ll be gone or unrecognizable in five years, and that’s by design. Well, the “buy stuff” part will still be around.
Since the beginning, Americans have raced toward the horizon: building, rebuilding, and discarding. All across America we have left abandoned, like carcasses after the feast, that which only yesterday was state-of-the-art invention.
David Plowden, again.