“They saw their injured country's woe;
The flaming town, the wasted field;
Then rushed to meet the insulting foe;
They took the spear, - but left the shield.”
―Philip Freneau
.
And by a prudent flight and cunning save A life which valour could not, from the grave. A better buckler I can soon regain, But who can get another life again?
Archilochus
Thursday, June 4, 2015
Hybrids
Know what you get when you cross Carly Simon with James Taylor? Ben Taylor
Alas! my Flash Player and I have come to a parting of the ways which may well become permanent. Ergo, no more videos for me.
Sorry I can't participate, but I refuse to be the helpless pawn of an increasingly capricious, manipulative, domineering, ruthlessly coercive industry that certainly does not have my best interests at heart. Think what you like. I HAVE HAD IT.
Depends on what kind of world you want to survive in. I am coming close to the end of my journey. I am generally disgusted with the changes that occurred throughout my life. I cannot and will not accept what passes for "normal" today. To adjust to it successfully would mean the destruction of my identity, and the repudiation of everything I've lived, worked and stood for.
When "The Powers" repeatedly "unplug" you, deny you access to "services" they've long provided unless you jump through an ever-moving, ever-lengthening series of flaming "hoops" they hold out tantalizingly for you to jump through simply because they can, It's time to call their bluff and say, "No thanks, what you offer isn't worth the price you would extract. Go to Hell!"
Marine Engineering. Power plants, steam/diesel. And no, no history degree, but I had the most interesting history professor at the Academy, Dr. Jacques Szaluta. I took a number of history electives with him. He was a Freudian psycho-historian. He would ask questions like, "Why did Hitler invade Poland?" and expect you to answer, "Because he hated his mother!" :)
The spiral tendency of vegetation infects education also. Our books approach very slowly the things we most wish to know. What a parade we make of our science, and how far off, and at arm's length, it is from its objects! Our botany is all names, not powers: poets and romancers talk of herbs of grace and healing; but what does the botanist know of the virtues of his weeds? The geologist lays bare the strata, and can tell them all on his fingers: but does he know what effect passes into the man who builds his house in them? what effect on the race that inhabits a granite shelf? what on the inhabitants of marl and of alluvium?
We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling, if he could teach us what the social birds say, when they sit in the autumn council, talking together in the trees. The want of sympathy makes his record a dull dictionary. His result is a dead bird. The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature; and the skin or skeleton you show me, is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced, is Dante or Washington. The naturalist is led from the road by the whole distance of his fancied advance. The boy had juster views when he gazed at the shells on the beach, or the flowers in the meadow, unable to call them by their names, than the man in the pride of his nomenclature. Astrology interested us, for it tied man to the system. Instead of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he felt the star. However rash and however falsified by pretenders and traders in it, the hint was true and divine, the soul's avowal of its large relations, and, that climate, century, remote natures, as well as near, are part of its biography. Chemistry takes to pieces, but it does not construct. Alchemy which sought to transmute one element into another, to prolong life, to arm with power,--that was in the right direction. All our science lacks a human side. The tenant is more than the house. Bugs and stamens and spores, on which we lavish so many years, are not finalities, and man, when his powers unfold in order, will take Nature along with him, and emit light into all her recesses. The human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer. - Emerson, "Conduct of Life" (Beauty)
17 comments:
Alas! my Flash Player and I have come to a parting of the ways which may well become permanent. Ergo, no more videos for me.
Sorry I can't participate, but I refuse to be the helpless pawn of an increasingly capricious, manipulative, domineering, ruthlessly coercive industry that certainly does not have my best interests at heart. Think what you like. I HAVE HAD IT.
C'est la vie! It's a "survival of the fittest" world, now. ;)
Depends on what kind of world you want to survive in. I am coming close to the end of my journey. I am generally disgusted with the changes that occurred throughout my life. I cannot and will not accept what passes for "normal" today. To adjust to it successfully would mean the destruction of my identity, and the repudiation of everything I've lived, worked and stood for.
When "The Powers" repeatedly "unplug" you, deny you access to "services" they've long provided unless you jump through an ever-moving, ever-lengthening series of flaming "hoops" they hold out tantalizingly for you to jump through simply because they can, It's time to call their bluff and say, "No thanks, what you offer isn't worth the price you would extract. Go to Hell!"
C'est la vie! It's a "survival of the fittest" world, now
An economic 'system' that breeds psychopathic tendencies...
Makes me almost wish that I'd gotten that History BS instead of an Engineering degree...
You have an Engineering degree? So do I!
Makes me almost wish that I'd gotten that History BS instead of an Engineering degree...>
You don't have a history BS? I do! ;)
Lol!
Marine Engineering. Power plants, steam/diesel. And no, no history degree, but I had the most interesting history professor at the Academy, Dr. Jacques Szaluta. I took a number of history electives with him. He was a Freudian psycho-historian. He would ask questions like, "Why did Hitler invade Poland?" and expect you to answer, "Because he hated his mother!" :)
_ JOLLY OLD SIGMUND FREUD _
I went to my psychiatrist
___ to be psychoanalyzed
To find out why I killed the cat
___ and blacked my husband's eyes
He laid me on a down cot
___ to see what he could find,
And this is what he dredged up
___ from my subconscious mind:
Hey, libido, bats in the belfry
Hey, libido, bats in the belfry
Jolly old Sigmund Freud!
When I was two my mommy hid
___ my dolly in a trunk,
And so it follows naturally
___ that I am always drunk.
When I was three
___ I saw my father kiss the maid one day,
And that is why O suffer now
___ from klep-to-may-nigh-aye, Hey!
Hey, libido, bats in the belfry
Hey, libido, bats in the belfry
Jolly old Sigmund Freud!
When I was three, I felt a strong
__ ambivalence toward my brothers,
And so it follow naturally I poisoned all my lovers
But I am happy to have learned
___ the lesson this has taught:
That everything I do that's wrong
___ is someone else's fault!
Hey, libido, bats in the belfry
Hey, libido, bats in the belfry
Jolly old Sigmund Freud!
~ Anna Russell, celebrated International Concert Comedienne
Yet all that "quackery" has made $trillions for Madison Ave firms. Seems hardly probable. Business majors must be REALLY stupid. ;)
My dad's got a history degree and in his twilight wishes he had a science degree. Just can't get enough of popsci books, that man!
There's something very compelling about the Scientific Method, too bad its mandate is disappointingly narrow. ;-)
:P
The spiral tendency of vegetation infects education also. Our books approach very slowly the things we most wish to know. What a parade we make of our science, and how far off, and at arm's length, it is from its objects! Our botany is all names, not powers: poets and romancers talk of herbs of grace and healing; but what does the botanist know of the virtues of his weeds? The geologist lays bare the strata, and can tell them all on his fingers: but does he know what effect passes into the man who builds his house in them? what effect on the race that inhabits a granite shelf? what on the inhabitants of marl and of alluvium?
We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling, if he could teach us what the social birds say, when they sit in the autumn council, talking together in the trees. The want of sympathy makes his record a dull dictionary. His result is a dead bird. The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature; and the skin or skeleton you show me, is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced, is Dante or Washington. The naturalist is led from the road by the whole distance of his fancied advance. The boy had juster views when he gazed at the shells on the beach, or the flowers in the meadow, unable to call them by their names, than the man in the pride of his nomenclature. Astrology interested us, for it tied man to the system. Instead of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he felt the star. However rash and however falsified by pretenders and traders in it, the hint was true and divine, the soul's avowal of its large relations, and, that climate, century, remote natures, as well as near, are part of its biography. Chemistry takes to pieces, but it does not construct. Alchemy which sought to transmute one element into another, to prolong life, to arm with power,--that was in the right direction. All our science lacks a human side. The tenant is more than the house. Bugs and stamens and spores, on which we lavish so many years, are not finalities, and man, when his powers unfold in order, will take Nature along with him, and emit light into all her recesses. The human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer. - Emerson, "Conduct of Life" (Beauty)
The medical gaze from Foucault's "Birth of the Clinic" is all too pervasive today! ;)
Even so, there is something deeply satisfying, poetic even, in our scientific incantations… :-)
See, there is a romantic in there! ;)
Absolutely!
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