It welcomed the tests of time/
Like an eternal friend,/
Our country is blessed,/
Our country is such!
Miscellany
For the Fourth: Holy American Major League of Nations (Notes on Baseball, Booze, and the Re-De-Nationalization of Americanism)
Posted in Anismism, Music, Neo-Imperialism, Old Gone Over, Political Philosophy, Sports, US History, War, Yoga Tagged with: America, American Idea, Americanism, Anti-Federalism, baseball, Borat, Constitution, Democratic Republican, Federalism, Francis Scott Key, Francis Scott Smith Miller, Gordon Wood, Ideal Americanism, Jefferson, Kazakhstan, Madison, Metonymy, National Anthem, Nationalism, Pennsylvania, Scott Smith Miller, Star-Spangled Banner, War of 1812, Whiskey Rebellion, Woodrow Wilson, Yoga
Why two spaces after a period isn’t wrong (or, the lies typographers tell about history) – Heraclitean River
The author, Farhad Manjoo, is astounded to find so many educated and ignorant people who apparently believe that two spaces are okay. He even polls people over Thanksgiving dinner, just so he can tell them how wrong they are! The…
Don’t Read “Don’t Read the Comments” Comments
“Don’t Read Comments” (@AvoidComments) says: Yes, sometimes comment sections contain insight and reasoned discussion. But do you really want to take that chance? The tweet was originally submitted on September 9, and re-tweeted yesterday, September 20, by Cathy Young (@CathyYoung63,…
Dying Declarations (disbelief in disbelief 2)
The religious affiliation of no religious affiliation among the so-called Nones may amount to a kind of popularized phenomenology or ambulatory deconstruction, the realized impossibility of the declaratory faith, potentially an actuality of belief independent of whatever verbal reduction or sign, if also potentially a condition of incoherence, of chaos not system, moral infantilization rather than advancement.
Foucault on Iran, Some Fool on Egypt
I don’t matter to Egypt, or to U.S. policy on Egypt, or to thought in general on Islam and liberalism.
I am in general unknown to politicians, imams, priests, and philosophers.
There is no becoming-known-ness in prospect for me. It’s a daily struggle for me to convince myself that I might in some way come to matter even to me.
a New Year’s Resolution: less discipline
So, anyway maybe we or anyway I, whatever that is, will see about erring on the side of the with-saying, for a change, for a while, God or gods or fates or nothing willing or allowing.
Posted in Miscellany
The perfect speech…
The perfect speech contains nothing slipshod; in it there are no loose threads; it contains no word that has been picked at random; it is not marred by errors due to faulty memory or to any other kind of carelessness; strong passions and a powerful and fertile imagination are guided with ease by a reason which knows how to use the unexpected gift, which knows how to persuade and which knows how to forbid; it allows of no adornment which is not imposed by the gravity and the aloofness of the subject matter; the perfect writer rejects with disdain and with some impatience the demand of vulgar rhetoric that expressions must be varied since change is pleasant. — Leo Strauss