2017 archive
No Selfie-Awareness 0
No selfie-awareness whatsoever.
Aside:
There’s a sure way to keep your nude selfies from becoming public.
Sustaining the Stupid 0
The Rude One comments on the Republican tax deform bill and its strategy to deny access to higher education.
Warning: Rude.
The Limited Access Information Highway 0
Thom discusses the Trump’s FCC’s attempt to end net neutrality.
The Rule of Lawless 0
Jay Bookman laments the Trumpling of the rule of law.
Follow the link for his reasoning.
A Poem for Trumpled Times 0
by T. S. Eliot
(who is, with e. e. cummings and Samuel Coleridge, among my favorite poets.)
I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer-
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
One Thing Is Not Like the Other Thing 0
The Charlotte Observer’s editorial board notes the hypocrisy of North Carolina Republicans’ claim that undoing the effects of their racist redistricting is somehow itself racist.
The Lesson 0
When I was a corporate trainer, one of the courses we offered was EEO training, which included topics related to sex discrimination (of which sexual harassment is a subset). The course was not intended to change attitudes–that is generally a fruitless effort unless persons already want to change their attitudes. Furthermore, attitudes are neither quantifiable nor observable; behavior is.
Rather, the course was designed to teach supervisors how not to get themselves or the company in trouble, to put it bluntly. That is, it was directed at how persons behaved in the workplace, not at what they believed or at what they did or said off-duty or off the property.
I found that the persons who most often questioned whether they could continue doing this or that reprehensible behavior generally already knew that the behavior was reprehensible. (If, for example, I take my clothes off before others in my workplace, I can make no argument that doing so is businesslike behavior or an honest misunderstanding. Zilch, nada, none.)
Those questioners wanted to keep on doing whatever they were doing because they liked doing it.
Image via The Bob Cesca Show Blog.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Practice politeness at home.
Officials say a preliminary investigation indicates the man accidentally shot himself on Saturday at a home in West Chester Township, north of Cincinnati. Police were called to the home that night.