I felt the need to post this. This may not be the place, but where?

[existentialist]

"Grey the sky"
???????

What can be said or written that is worth saying?

The attitude betrays frustration and depression, Words might flow for the sheer joy of expressing them, but "worth saying" implies a cost. Arguably there is cost when words have meanings, and there is a premium on getting them right--but it this truly so anymore? Babble displaces reasoned discourse. Fabrications displace research. Unwillingness to believe erases memory and certified facts. Who cares? Why struggle to get them right?

I care or I would not have written thus. But I perceive little indicating that my efforts, or the efforts of those more heavily and directly involved in public discourse who also care are much regarded or much rewarded.

"Both ends against the middle. The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy turned loose against the world."
William Butler Yeats

Am I in the middle? I guess that depends upon how one perceives things, but I do fear the center cannot hold.

"It were a miracle if sanity stayed afloat."
Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum

Sanity is sinking.
Assertions of how things are and must be, true, untrue, and undetermined are sinking it. That it is to the advantage of no one that this ship sink notwithstanding.

The assertion of "Never again!" creates the circumstances where it is almost certain to happen again. That which has been set apart as unquestionable rots for lack of questioning.

"The elephants are good but there's dumb."
James Simon Kunen,
The Strawberry Statement

"A dim perception of he knew not what."
Whitehead, quoted by Pirsig in
Lila, An Inquiry into Morals

"You're next."
Danton, when passing the house
of Robespierre en route to the
guillotine

[virgogal]

1. Hmmmm !

[GeorgeGist]

2. Evolution speaks with action.

Insanity is an act of negative selection.

What remains afterward is sane.

Was that worth saying?



edited for word act

[struggle4progress]

3. ... and the elephants are kindly but they're dumb ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGykXOamGqE

[existentialist]

4. makes me wonder whether

Simon and Garfunkle influenced Kunen or Kunen influenced Simon and Garfunkle

The book and the song were roughly contemporaneous and I don't know which was first.


I didn't understand why Kunen chose the term elephants which (1) are, literally far from dumb, and (2) sounds like Republicans who would not have been, by Kunen's thinking good. What Kunen in fact meant by his use of the term "elephants" was establishment liberals who, as Kunen saw it, had sympathy for student activists and their concerns, but just didn't "get it" on a number of issues.

[struggle4progress]

5. wikipedia suggests recording of bookends began in 1966, and the album was released

in april 1968. the columbia protests were also in the spring of 1968, and kunen's strawberry statement was about the 68 protests. so it's plausible kunen heard it in the background during that time and wrote it into his book. but maybe the slogan was already making the rounds before that. dunno

i loved the strawberry statement when i first read it

[Boojatta]

7. Ken Kunen says that

many basic questions turn out to be independent of the usual axioms of set theory.

[provis99]

6. Peace, Love, Dope!

[dmallind]

8. Plum giblets are a tough sell on Yom Kippur

When did Luke's dad become black?

"My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has to go."
Oscar Wilde's final words.

I've always wondered why Dennys pay for locks on their doors if they never close.


The folding peonies of twilight are worth more than nice gold cufflinks - unless they have little diamonds on them, of course.


If you’re being chased by a police dog, try not to go through a tunnel, then onto a little seesaw, then jump through a hoop of fire. They train for that.

My school had a big problem with drugs. Especially class A. But I kept away from drugs out of fear of my dad. He was a man of few words. He used to say to me, "son..".

"Don't be stupid - they couldn't hit an elephant from this dist..."
General Sedgwick's last words as he looked at the enemy lines from a parapet.

Son, in my line of work knowing about the zodiac can make the difference between boiling the bishop and becoming a baboon's busboy, if you know what I mean - and I'm sure you do.