Archive for the ‘Common-Place Book’ Category
Let's Play Internet!
I won't claim this observation is at all profound, but it is curious, I thought.* Is this an example of a new game, named something like "Internet Quoting", akin to the well-known game known variously as "Telephone" or "Rumors" or "Whispers"? In the older game of telephone, one person in a line of, say, 20 […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Such Language!, The Art of Conversation
Making the Bomb — Excerpts
A big chunk of my month of June was spent reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1986) an historically precise and yet dramatic telling of the story of the people and events that came together to unlease the power of nuclear fission at the end of […]
In: All, Books, Common-Place Book
Crude Poetry
Sometimes, driftglass reads to me like some sort of stoked-up poetry, usually a good thing. Although this stanza comes from the middle of a longer epic about using deliberately crude language*, it seems to have more truth per word than mere prose. Being gay is not a sin or a crime or any-damned-thing other that […]
Statistical Fluctuations
Abraham Pais, a physicist who wrote what is generally regarded as the definitive scientific biography of Einstein, said of his subject that there are two things at which he was "better than anyone before or after him; he knew how to invent invariance principles and how to make use of statistical fluctuations." Invariance principles play […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science
It's Good to Be Transparent
[Of jellyfish:] Their bodies are 99 percent water; they have fewer non-aqueous ingredients than lemonade. But they've been around for 700 million years. Armored trilobites, thunder-footed dinosaurs, and saber-toothed tigers have come and gone; the watery jellyfish endure. They have outlasted animals with bulk and brains. Their strategy for survival has been spectacularly successful: Keep […]
When to Adjust Plans in Iraq
"Stay the course"? GWEN IFILL: What is the Achilles heel here? Is the Achilles heel that we didn't study up enough on what to expect from these [Iraqi] paramilitary or as the Pentagon likes to call them, "thugs"? [i.e., the term two years ago for "the insurgency" which, as Donald Rumsfeld has assured us, is […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Splenetics
Real Science is That Simple
Evolution rankles them because it contradicts the Bible which says God made man in his own image and describes specifically how God did it. But cosmology, the study of the Universe as a whole, is even worse for them, since it clearly contradicts the very first passages of that Bible. If you take the Bible […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science
God's Envoy
Since George W. is not only a horse's ass, but vain and platitudinous to boot, it can hardly escape us that he is also serving (with all due inner incandescence) as God's chosen envoy for America. [Norman Mailer, "God's Chosen Envoy for America", The Huffington Post, 21 June 2005.]
The War Machine
What was the purpose of this complex organization [the arrangement of conscription, military organization, civilian production, and transportation that was brought to bear to fight the first World War]? Officially it was supposed to save civilization, protect the rights of small democracies, demonstrate the superiority of Teutonic culture, beat the dirty Hun, beat the arrogant […]
Einstein the anti-German
"Antisemitism is strong here and political reaction is violent," Albert Einstein wrote Paul Ehrenfest from Berlin in December 1919. The letter coincides with Einstein's discovery by the popular press, the beginning of his years of internatinal celebrity. "A new figure in world history," the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung described him under a cover photograph on December […]
Theatre of the Absurd
Q Right. What is the evidence that the insurgency is in its last throes? McCLELLAN: I think I just explained to you the desperation of terrorists and their tactics. Q What's the evidence on the ground that it's being extinguished? McCLELLAN: Terry, we're making great progress to defeat the terrorist and regime elements. You're seeing […]
Joyful Military Weddings
Halifax — The Canadian military is marking its first gay wedding. Two men, who do not want to be identified, exchanged vows in a small ceremony at Canadian Forces Base Greenwood in western Nova Scotia. It was the first time the military has presided over a same-sex union after introducing guidelines in 2003 dealing with […]
Wealth-Gap Dangers
The income gap between the rich and the rest of the US population has become so wide, and is growing so fast, that it might eventually threaten the stability of democratic capitalism itself. Is that a liberal's talking point? Sure. But it's also a line from the recent public testimony of a champion of the […]
Wolfowitz on Iraq
Testimony by then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, one of the chief architects of Iraq policy, before a House subcommittee on Feb. 28, 2003, just weeks before the invasion, illustrated the optimistic view the administration had of postwar Iraq. He said containment of Hussein the previous 12 years had cost "slightly over $30 billion," […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Instant Hindsight
Marty Kaplan* was writing about the expected MSM yawn that will greet the second Downing Street Memo, when he wrote this: I'm reminded of the moment in Tom Stoppard's play Jumpers, when a character reacts to the news that the Radical Liberal party's spokesman for agriculture, Sam Clegthorpe, an agnostic, has been named Archbishop of […]
Supporting Imperial Fashion
Isaac and I rarely watch TV anymore; there just doesn't seem much point to it really. Now I think there's even less point, since apparently Driftglass watches all those tedious Sunday-morning talking-heads programs and then summarizes ("Sunday Morning Comin' Down…Redux") the results (far better than the TV Guide ever could) — at least he did […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Speaking of Science, Splenetics
Conservative Elitist Backlash
For more than thirty-five years, American politics has followed a populist pattern as predictable as a Punch and Judy show and as conducive to enlightened statesmanship as the cycles of a noisy washing machine. The antagonists of this familiar melodrama are instantly recognizable: the average American, humble, long-suffering, working hard, and paying his taxes; and […]
Transactional Congress
Just a taste from a breath-taking report by Elizabeth Drew, "Selling Washington", in the New York Review of Books (23 June 2005): An analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics shows that pharmaceutical manufacturers, who received a windfall from the new prescription drug program in the 2003 Medicare bill—including a provision prohibiting the federal government […]
Appealing to Conservatives
[…] Remember 9/11 France and Germany are sissies Remember 9/11 Remember Poland Remember 9/11 Forget Poland the pulling out bastards Remember 9/11 Gays hurt sanctity of marriage Remember 9/11 Stem cell research immoral Remember 9/11 We hate fags Remember 9/11 Gays caused 9/11 Remember 9/11 Abortion also caused 9/11 Remember 9/11 The Constitution says… Remember […]
One More Time
In the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy and his minions charged that there was a plot against America and that no one could support the Democratic Party "and at the same time be against communism." He decried "liberals" whose "pitiful squealing would hold sacrosanct those communists and queers" who had sold China into "atheistic slavery." And during […]