AdamSmith

X An unhappy people in a happy world— Read, rabbi, the phases of this difference. An unhappy people in an unhappy world— Here are too many mirrors for misery. A happy people in an unhappy world— It cannot be. There's nothing there to roll On the expressive tongue, the finding fang. A happy people in a happy world— Buffo! A ball, an opera, a bar. Turn back to where we were when we began: An unhappy people in a happy world. Now, solemnize the secretive syllables. Read to the congregation, for today And for tomorrow, this extremity, This contrivance of the spectre of the spheres, Contriving balance to contrive a whole, The vital, the never-failing genius, Fulfilling his meditations, great and small. In these unhappy he meditates a whole, The full of fortune and the full of fate, As if he lived all lives, that he might know, In hall harridan, not hushful paradise, To a haggling of wind and weather, by these lights Like a blaze of summer straw, in winter's nick.

I can even recall Bird Songs of the Mesozoic.

Of course his body ballooning out around his own genitals and engulfing them would be unrelated.

1. Pure Thomas Eakins. 2. Walt Whitman! 3. "...some favor oysters; others ... prefer snails." (Bath scene from Spartacus.) 4. Norman Rockwell switch-hits! 5. ... At a loss for words. ('Thouth Pathific?' Nah, cheap...)

"They" ...For no reason, your construction reminds me of a line uttered by a student announcer at a football game at my college shortly after the death of John Paul I. After the quarterback went down, yet again, the announcer said: "My God, they're dropping like Popes out there."

To loop back in this thread -- there it is. To hitoall: there ain't no such thing as purely objective journalism. Can't exist. First sentence of the first article of the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics says: Journalists should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information. http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp Note the word interpreting. That is a central, essential, inescapable component of the value of good (repeat: good) reporting. J-School 101 hammers over and over that even the straightest news reporters and editors, intrinsically and of necessity, exercise judgment in deciding what to cover, how to cover it, what facts to empasize, in what relation to other facts. Good hard-news reporting cannot escape the newspaper's responsibly deciding on and imparting an implicit point of view and set of judgments about what is really happening. Point is, to be good, it must be done with the highest self-awareness and self-criticality, and public honesty about this. There is the difference between Murrow, Cronkite et al., and today's Murdoch stable among many others. Separate point: Back to JKane's advocacy of reinstituting common-sense regulation to prevent media monopolies. I agree, but as I said, today's pols, when trying to reform banking, cannot even just say, OK, we will just go back part and parcel to Glass-Steagall; instead we get this tortuous thing we have now, which only quarter-fixes the mess, if that. What gives you hope they would be any more capable or willing to fix media ownership law any more intelligently? My fear is that if the current Congress gets anywhere near media law, they will make it an even worse bungle than it is now -- ending up ignoring the ownership problems, and instead veering down the rathole of content control. As they showed themselves sorely tempted to do -- under cover of purporting to do the opposite -- with Internet regulation.

IX And of each other thought—in the idiom Of the work, in the idiom of an innocent earth, Not of the enigma of the guilty dream. We were as Danes in Denmark all day long And knew each other well, hale-hearted landsmen, For whom the outlandish was another day Of the week, queerer than Sunday. We thought alike And that made brothers of us in a home In which we fed on being brothers, fed And fattened as on a decorous honeycomb. This drama that we live—We lay sticky with sleep. This sense of the activity of fate— The rendezvous, when she came alone, By her coming became a freedom of the two, An isolation which only the two could share. Shall we be found hanging in the trees next spring? Of what disaster in this the imminence: Bare limbs, bare trees and a wind as sharp as salt? The stars are putting on their glittering belts. They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash Like a great shadow's last embellishment. It may come tomorrow in the simplest word, Almost as part of innocence, almost, Almost as the tenderest and the truest part.

VIII There may be always a time of innocence. There is never a place. Or if there is no time, If it is not a thing of time, nor of place, Existing in the idea of it, alone, In the sense against calamity, it is not Less real. For the oldest and coldest philosopher, There is or may be a time of innocence As pure principle. Its nature is its end, That it should be, and yet not be, a thing That pinches the pity of the pitiful man, Like a book at evening beautiful but untrue, Like a book on rising beautiful and true. It is like a thing of ether that exists Almost as predicate. But it exists, It exists, it is visible, it is, it is. So, then, these lights are not a spell of light, A saying out of a cloud, but innocence. An innocence of the earth and no false sign Or symbol of malice. That we partake thereof, Lie down like children in this holiness, As if, awake, we lay in the quiet of sleep, As if the innocent mother sang in the dark Of the room and on an accordion, half-heard, Created the time and place in which we breathed . . .

Agree. This piece gets it about right: http://247wallst.com/2012/08/28/another-setback-for-gms-chevy-volt/ ...nobody wants one. It was DOA. GM should fess up, kill it, find ways to reduce the cost of the technologies (one problem among several is that the U.S. does not own competitive battery technology these days, having abandoned core R&D there ages ago, so must license it from Asia), then relaunch an entirely new model. One early gaffe was Bob Lutz telling the press, a good while before launch -- pulling a number out of his ass in reply to a question -- that it would be priced "about $28,000." Oops. But, as this article notes, GM just cannot bring itself to eat crow in public. So failures like this drag on, and on. P.S. Detailed, balanced product review at CNET: http://m.cnet.com/reviews/2012-chevrolet-volt/35332353?ds=1

The plot thickens... Gospel of Jesus's Wife is fake, claims expert Scholar says papyrus fragment believed to provide evidence that Jesus was married is a modern forgery Andrew Brown guardian.co.uk, Friday 21 September 2012 12.54 EDT Karen King from Harvard university holds the papyrus fragment that has four words written in Coptic, which are believed to prove Jesus was married. Photograph: Rose Lincoln/EPA A New Testament scholar claims to have found evidence suggesting that the Gospel of Jesus's Wife is a modern forgery. Professor Francis Watson, of Durham University, says the papyrus fragment, which caused a worldwide sensation when it appeared earlier this week because it appeared to refer to Jesus's wife, is a patchwork of texts from the genuine Coptic-language Gospel of Thomas, which have been copied and reassembled out of order to make a suggestive new whole. In a paper published online, Watson argues that all of the sentence fragments found on the papyrus fragment have been copied, sometimes with small alterations, from printed editions of the Gospel of Thomas. The discovery has already sparked fierce debate among academics, but Watson believes his new research may prove conclusive. "I think it is more or less indisputable that I have shown how the thing was composed," he said. "I would be very surprised if it were not a modern forgery, although it is possible that it was composed in this way in the fourth century." His paper claims the work was assembled by someone who was not a native speaker of Coptic, which is a polite way of saying that it is modern. He does not directly criticise Professor Karen King, of Harvard, who presented the fragment at a conference in Rome this week. He says she has done a very good job of presenting the evidence and images of the disputed fragment. He believes the papyrus itself may well date from the fourth century, but the words, he says, clearly show the influence of modern printed books. In particular, there is a line break in the middle of one word that appears to have been lifted directly from modern editions of the Gospel of Thomas, a genuine Gnostic or early Christian text. It is common for words to be broken in the middle in ancient scripts, like Coptic, which were written without hyphens, he says. But it is most uncommon for the same break to appear in the same work in two different manuscripts. There has been no response as yet from King, who is believed to be still travelling after the Rome conference. Martin believes this is a forgery comparable with a papyrus fragment that caused a scandal in the 1970s by being presented as a variant of the Gospel According to Mark, in which Jesus spent the night with naked youths. "It's the same sort of technique – patchwork technique. This is particularly striking in the Jesus's Wife text, because it has little bits that are legible and they don't connect very well," says Martin. There has long been speculation that Jesus might have married – most notably in recent years when it became a key part of the plot in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. http://www.guardian....us-wife-forgery

Guardian's heartening account of the Warren/Brown debate in MA senate race... http://www.guardian....h-warren-debate Can't find them right now but over the last 24 hours I think I saw more than one poll suggesting she may just barely hold a greater-than-margin-of-error lead at the moment. Hope!

We got onto the topic from my responding to hitoall's repeated theme that the media distort, play favorites, ride their hobbyhorses, etc., etc. My point being, well, yes, all that is endemic to the media being the media. Question is, in the current political climate, do you dare to advocate today's pols putting their hands back into media regulation, without throwing out the baby with the bath? Or, rather, drowning it? Viz. e.g. the British press laws, and how far they have IMO trampled speech rights in the name of strengthening libel protection.

VII Is there an imagination that sits enthroned As grim as it is benevolent, the just And the unjust, which in the midst of summer stops To imagine winter? When the leaves are dead, Does it take its place in the north and enfold itself, Goat-leaper, crystalled and luminous, sitting In highest night? And do these heavens adorn And proclaim it, the white creator of black, jetted By extinguishings, even of planets as may be, Even of earth, even of sight, in snow, Except as needed by way of majesty, In the sky, as crown and diamond cabala? It leaps through us, through all our heavens leaps, Extinguishing our planets, one by one, Leaving, of where we were and looked, of where We knew each other and of each other thought, A shivering residue, chilled and foregone, Except for that crown and mystical cabala. But it dare not leap by chance in its own dark. It must change from destiny to slight caprice. And thus its jetted tragedy, its stele And shape and mournful making move to find What must unmake it and, at last, what can, Say, a flippant communication under the moon.

Noonan furthers her analysis: Mitt as CEO of his campaign is the root of Mitt's failings as candidate. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444165804578008702719456198.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

You might do well to recall what Jefferson said: "Had I to choose between a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to choose the latter. As Sen. Sam Ervin observed during the Nixon administration's efforts to quash publication of the Pentagon Papers and otherwise muzzle the press, "That is an eloquent and wise statement. You either have a free press, or you don't. In order to secure the inestimable good a free press brings, it is necessary to put up with its inevitable evils."

hitoall, your sense of fair play and equitableness and respecting everyone's point of view is admirable. But how far does it extend? One can see plenty of reasons, from his viewpoint, why Nixon did the things he did during Watergate. Would you similarly have begged for understanding, sympathy and letting him get by with it?

ROFL If true, weirdly of a piece with his not claiming all his 2011 charitable contributions in order to artificially keep his tax rate above the 13% he had previously claimed. Like his "cheesy grits" pandering in the south, and "trees the right height" (wtf?) in Michigan. Could the guy say "authentic" without crumbling to dust like Christopher Lee struck by sunlight at the climax of Horror of Dracula? Seems to be turning out that the Dems could hardly have chosen a better opponent if they had hand-picked him themselves. ...wonder how long til Rush et al. start insinuating that is somehow just what happened?!

I refer the Right Honourable Gentleman to my remarks on fidelity vs. monogamy some hours ago.

We sometimes lob the "self-loathing" label at each other too freely. But this crack of Rupe's seems to confirm his feeling of exactly that thing. Which he had smelt like a long time to me, even with his having bravely come out before it was fashionable. La Hilton is not worth crowding up the Internet or our heads with.

This reminds me too of the research 4 years ago that showed the reddest states on average scored weakest in "family values" -- i.e, had the most children born out of wedlock, most single-parent families, highest welfare rates, etc. -- while the blue states were strongest. Can a party premised nowadays on fundamentally mindfucking its constituents long endure?

Have they even blocked access to Google Maps through the Web browser?!? How about MapQuest?

Agree. Did you see the other day that he was out looking for an outside loan to his campaign? Even HE no longer believes enough to loan it his own money.

Lord Rob in a trice. (Although doomed I suppose by lack of the southern belle posterieure he seeks.) But the others -- had to step from Warner Bros. down to Hanna-Barbera in search of cartoon equivalents. ...And still looking!

Bloom on Canto VI (he was this strange in class, and then some. Perquisite of genius. We sat in awe)...

VI It is a theatre floating through the clouds, Itself a cloud, although of misted rock And mountains running like water, wave on wave, Through waves of light. It is of cloud transformed To cloud transformed again, idly, the way A season changes color to no end, Except the lavishing of itself in change, As light changes yellow into gold and gold To its opal elements and fire's delight, Splashed wide-wise because it likes magnificence And the solemn pleasures of magnificent space. The cloud drifts idly through half-thought-of forms. The theatre is filled with flying birds, Wild wedges, as of a volcano's smoke, palm-eyed And vanishing, a web in a corridor Or massive portico. A capitol, It may be, is emerging or has just Collapsed. The denouement has to be postponed . . . This is nothing until in a single man contained, Nothing until this named thing nameless is And is destroyed. He opens the door of his house On flames. The scholar of one candle sees An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.