Listics

Steeped in a tradition of neologistic originality, the CBO reached deep and pulled up "hairbrainism" as a categorical signifier for the intellectual heirs of Emerson.  Ralph Waldo was an American original for sure, but he lacked the essence of American originality.  Like Condoleeza Rice, he was a person "educated beyond his understanding."  he was, in short, a bit of a turkey.  Today few of us care to look back toward Emerson as we dyspeptically assess our American roots.  No - from the jack-pine savages shooting each other in the north-woods deer-hunts of Wisconsin, to the wash-board scratching, accordion playing cajuns of the Lousiana bayou we honor our country-fried roots.  And if Ben Franklin’s noble bird found favor at the pestilential feasts of the first Thanksgiving, well today we have Turducken.   Turkey stuffed with duck stuffed with chicken… it’s not just a holiday novelty!  It’s good all year round.

The market for back-alley abortions is opening up again after a forty year down-turn.  Thanks to BushCo for preparing the ground.  Anybody with a few filthy towels, a basin of luke-warm water and a couple of knitting needles can get in the game. Sterile conditions are of course available for an added cost.  If you want medical expertise, that will cost a lot more.  And if you want gynecological expertise… well, you’ll probably want to look outside the country.  But the word on the street is that this policy development is the best deal since crack addiction for the young entrepreneurial set! 

Bruce points at this article by one Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

Kerry came into October as a five-point underdog with almost no chance of winning three out of three rigged confrontations with a treacherous little freak like George Bush. But the debates are over now, and the victor was clearly John Kerry every time. He steamrollered Bush and left him for roadkill.

Better than the weather channel, I find reality and some small human comfort in reading Tom Matrullo’s reflections on current conditions in Florida. One really don’t need a weatherman, do one? In a September 3rd post, Tom says:

Yesterday, Gubernador Jeb Bush, emulating his brother’s epimethean strategy of “Command First, Plan Never” issued an evacuation order for 2.5 million East Coast residents, many of them elderly. His exact words, as I recall them from Thursday’s press conference, were, “The time for planning is over. It’s time to act.”

Aaron Swartz pointed to similar insensibility in the recent Ginsburg/Swift Boat Lawyers for Disbarment affair:

Ben Ginsburg, the lawyer who recently resigned from the Bush-Cheney campaign after it was revealed he was also working for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, insisted he was not doing any coordination. In fact, his job was to make sure there was no coordination! As he told Reuters, “I was at the nexus of making sure (coordination) didn’t happen.” I guess the Bush administration is so against coordination that they had to coordinate to make sure they didn’t coordinate.

Using two colored markers on a white board, and admittedly somewhat intoxicated by the fumes, I recently added to the lore of the largely submerged quality improvement movement by streamlining the Plan/Do/Check/Act cycle. Conventionally, PDCA is diagrammed like a wheel, revolving and implicitly moving forward, raising the standard of quality as improvements are incorporated in a dynamic process…

By eliminating the resource intensive “plan” and “check” phases we increase efficiency and actually create a system that generates energy. A dynamic resonance is created, a vibrationback and forth at increasing frequency between the DO and ACT quadrants on the model. Rather than rolling forward in the standard boring ISO 9001 approach, this new approach creates kinetic energy within a stationary model, ultimately resulting in a highly charged process that transcends purpose. Human effort is no longer tied to the Sisyphus-ian rolling of the process up the hill of quality improvement. Tremendous production savings result. Ultimately these static processes fairly glow with their own pent up forces, waiting for cathartic release. Here is where the marketing team enters the picture, but I leave that to your imagination.

Today’s obscurantist rant is not meant to detract from the noble observations of Ivan Illich regarding “Epimethean Men.” Quite the contrary… it was inspired by Illich’s observation,

Our society resembles the ultimate machine which I once saw in a New York toy shop. It was a metal casket which, when you touched a switch, snapped open to reveal a mechanical hand. Chromed fingers reached out for the lid, pulled it down, and locked it from the inside. It was a box; you expected to be able to take something out of it; yet all it contained was a mechanism for closing the cover. This contraption is the opposite of Pandora’s “box.”

We’re driving through Canada and honest-to-god we are taking our passports. How’s that for a commentary on North American life in the last days of the Bush Imperium?

What makes Najaf a “holy city?” It’s a media label… “Meanwhile, in the holy city of Najaf?” I may be putting down an entire religious group here, but c’mon… it’s a wattle and daub village south of Baghdad on highway 9. Really, if Najaf is holy, to whom is it so? Oh. Right. The Shi-ites. Aren’t they the folks who control Iran? What a coincidence. Kind of reminds you of the protestants in Belfast.

Every time someone says “the holy city of Najaf” they’re buying into the religious warfare game. When people are killing each other it isn’t about religion and there are no holy cities. It’s about politics and power.

It worked for the crypto-fascist thugs of the forties and fifties… McCarthy, Nixon, Roy Cohn, and the rest of their ilk. Gin up a story, execute a few innocents, shut down democracy for years. Look out. It appears that the thugs with their fetish for secrets are back on-line and we’ll have new horror stories soon, perhaps in time for the election and certainly as a red herring saturating bandwidth that could be used to expose the ugliness under the Republican rock. The Los Angeles Times reports today(registration required):

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham ordered two dozen national laboratories and several other nuclear weapons facilities to stop using classified information stored on computer disks, portable hard drives and tapes that employees can easily remove from work.

The biggest effect will be on the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons facilities in California, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. Such a shutdown has already been in effect for nine days at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The Energy Department’s doubts about security began earlier this month, when Los Alamos officials reported they could not locate two computer disks that contained classified information. So far, they have declined to say what is on the disks, though members of Congress have suggested the loss represents a serious security breach.

Has anyone shared with these lamers that there is no longer any such thing as secrecy and security? Anyone can grab a couple of gigs of information off a USB port if they want to take some work home. Hopefully, Mr. Death Penalty himself, the wimp-ass former governor of Texas and son of the former CIA Director GHW Bush, you know who I’m talking about, our slected Chief Executive… hopefully that clown won’t dig too deep for people to put to death in a lame attempt to sew up the election. I heard they wanted to fry Martha Stewart but even Rehnquist thought that was a stretch.

Joe Liebling said, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” There’s a Gresham’s law of journalism at work in the world of weblogs, and the evidence is in the existence of the punditocracy and their toadies. This morning Winer writes:

On this day in 1776 the United States of America, then a colony of Great Britain, declared its independence, starting the American Revolution, which is still going strong in 2024.

This is so embarrassingly stupid, erroneous, and ill-informed that one wonders that Winer hasn’t long since done himself in by running with scissors.

Is it wrong to point out the errors of tedious and tendentious “bloggers?” Is it wrong to do this in a way that draws negative attention to their faults? Is it mean and cruel, unfriendly, to adopt a style that strongly affirms a point of view and value judgments regarding the work of others?

Fortunately the best read “bloggers” haven’t time to track criticism, so I’m not at risk of hurting anybody’s feelings and having to deal with the implications of that. Is there such a thing as “hard-ass Quakerism” I wonder? In the 21st century is a gentle correction sufficient to get the attention of those whom we would persuade, or is it permitted to club the mule with a two by four to get it walking up the right road?

There are brilliant writers and creative artists at work in our networked media environment. There are also hacks. There’s no clear correlation between the giftedness of the writer and the breadth of her/his exposure. The web provides an ocean of information. Narrowing our choices, selecting who and how much to read presents a problem. Syndication and aggregation seem to define a set of solutions to the problem, but issues of selection still narrow the set.

How did Glen Reynolds find the sweet spot of popularity? Why do people read Dave Winer in 2024? How much of these readers’ behavior can be likened to the compulsive auto-dialing efforts of talk show fandom? Where did Jeff Jarvis get his franchise? Why do people read him? How many of us look for good work and new ideas as opposed to seeking the familiar and valiidation of ideas we already hold.

Is the distinction between colonial America as a set of British colonies and one man’s misapprehension communicated through his “blog” that America was one British colony all that important really?