Leisure Sickness

"Education ennobles the soul and this is useless in the army."

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 17:29:34 -0400

“Education ennobles the soul and this is useless in the army.”

- Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Svejk.

"Suskind: I understand the music, I understand the movies, I even see how comic books can tell us..."

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 17:31:22 -0400

“

Suskind: I understand the music, I understand the movies, I even see how comic books can tell us things. But there are professors in this place who read nothing but cereal boxes.

Gladney: It’s the only avante-garde we’ve got.

”

- Don DeLillo, “White Noise”

laughingsquid: Shot Glass Card, A Paper Greeting Card That...

Tue, 01 May 2012 16:43:32 -0400

laughingsquid:

Shot Glass Card, A Paper Greeting Card That Folds Into a Shot Glass

It’s everything I’ve ever wanted in a birthday card.

Photo

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:36:59 -0400

"Stupidity has a knack for getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up..."

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:36:12 -0400

“Stupidity has a knack for getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.”

- Albert Camus, The Plague

The things people talk about.

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:10:00 -0400

“The Good Book says the meek shall inherit the earth and I expect that’s probably the truth. I ain’t no freethinker, but I’ll tell you what. I’m a long way from bein’ convinced that it’s all that good a thing.”

-Cormac McCarthy,All The Pretty Horses

Well, look who’s back. Truth be told, this whole project was born out of frustration and boredom in Alabama, yet despite being dangerously close to financial insolvency in Texas, there just isn’t that much frustration and boredom left. Getting ready for college, buffing up on LaTeX, and trying to rehabilitate a 2,300 sq ft house doesn’t leave much room for thought. However, if there was nothing to turn over in my mind while herding chickens, there wouldn’t be much to publish.

One can’t help but notice something I like to call “Obamapocalypse”. Since his inauguration, as many of you might have noticed, there’s been a general aversion to the President, and it seems almost personal. I’ll bet anyone $10 that the word “socialist” hasn’t been thrown around with this much unfounded zeal since McCarthyism was in style. The latest grimace-inducing “political scandal”, that President Obama was fed dog meat as a child in Indonesia, is yet another in a long string of “so what?” moments that have plagued the Obama administration since the very beginning.

But let’s talk about an issue near and dear to my heart: Obamacare. If you were to read a few “conservative” rags, the consensus is that some 72% of Americans believe the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional and should be repealed. Now, for a little perspective: this is the poll to which they refer. Indeed, in the section “Americans Do Not Think Individual Mandate Passes Legal Muster”, you’ll see that 72% of Americans polled by Gallup ”think that this requirement [buy insurance or pay fine] is … unconstitutional”.

That doesn’t look good for the PPACA, does it? If 72% of Americans believe the act is unconstitutional, logic would follow that it is extremely unpopular; since it is extremely unpopular, and the United States of America follows the tenants of democracy, it must be repealed.

This logic is the butt end of my “Joe Six-Pack is an idiot” philosophy. The United States is a republic. In other words, individuals have the loudest voices but the least real political power, which is only underscored by the extent to which our opinion is influenced by pundits banging the drum. Ironically, many of these pundits are also the loudest opponents of judicial activism, while conveniently glossing over the fact that any Supreme Court ruling on the PPACA would be judicial activism, considering how little of the PPACA has actually been enacted. Even the Gallup poll notes that “few Americans report any effect of the law on their own healthcare situation”. Then again, if I get bricks through my window detailing the first Federal court ruling to question its constitutionality, perhaps my opinion on the matter would change. (Also, it would be a good excuse to finally use my renter’s insurance.)

I’ve found that the typical last straw in dead-in-the-water debates is for an opponent to ask, “Well, what do you think about it?” Personally, I’m against the individual mandate putting a fee to people who can’t afford health care. There are quite a few reasons for people not having health care coverage, but I’ve yet to find anyone who claims that they have inadequate health coverage because they accidentally funneled too much income into their investment portfolios to pay for health insurance. [That link was just a jaunty aside; however, it reinforces an interesting point that national economic expansion results from taxing everyone highly (pre-1960, mid- to late-90’s), whereas “Reaganomics” provides economic expansion solely on the backs of the middle class.] Even though Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution allows Congress “Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises … for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States”, how much longer can we ignore the rampant obesity that is contributing to the overall cost of health care in a much more frightening manner than a lack of insurance ever could? Though Denmark’s saturated fat tax is generally regarded as a nominal step, it is an example of governmental policy designed to further a more constructive form of tax revenue.

So, what am I trying to say? The fat get fatter, and everyone else pays. We’ve wasted enough time quibbling over the constitutionality of one part of a massive health care bill; how about we take some private time to admit to ourselves that a rash of uninsured people seeking medical help was the piece of sand that rubbed our national sedentary Big-Mac-slamming huge-soda-gulping oyster the wrong way? Hell, we play this one right, we might even be able to get a pearl out of it.

Photo

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 09:47:10 -0500

Nice.

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 18:51:26 -0500

Nice.

"She prayed then to whatever power may care / In comprehending justice for the grief / Of lovers..."

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:02:25 -0500

“She prayed then to whatever power may care / In comprehending justice for the grief / Of lovers bound unequally by love.”

- Virgil. Aeneid, Book IV

Photo

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 18:44:01 -0500

"In some ways twenty minutes of combat is more life than you could scrape together in a lifetime of..."

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:19:34 -0500

“In some ways twenty minutes of combat is more life than you could scrape together in a lifetime of doing something else.”

- Sebastian Junger, War

Meno and the questions of virtue.

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 11:01:27 -0500

“There is a regular famine of brains here, and your part of the world seems to hold a monopoly on that article.” -Socrates

One of your humble narrator’s favorite quirks of the Christian philosopher Desiderius Erasmus was his tendency to cry out to “Saint Socrates” in times of philosophical conundrum. Though, when you read Plato’s dramatizations of Socrates’s dialogues, can you blame him? Socrates has a way of speaking that manages to pierce through time, space, and intellect: reading the dialogues, it’s just as easy to imagine him having a conversation at the bar in a bowling alley, or taking a motorcycle trip across the Midwest as it is a Greek home.

Recently, I’ve had occasion to ponder the meaning of the dialogue “Meno”. Without getting into minutiae, it covers one of the grand topics of classic philosophy: virtue. So, what is virtue? How is it acquired? Can it be taught? If you’re expecting answers to any of these questions, you’ll be disappointed, but as any experienced traveler will tell you, trips are more about the journey than the destination.

While we’re still on the topic of virtue, let’s discuss briefly what is mentioned:

1. Virtue requires soundness of mind (temperance) and justice in management.

2. Virtue can be transmitted through mentorship under great men.

3. Socrates doubts that virtue is knowledge, as he can find no teachers of virtue, except those who teach it implicitly through example.

More importantly than the topic of virtue, however, are the questions of how it can be taught; questions that raise interesting speculation on proper methods of teaching and learning. Of course, the concept of the “Socratic seminar” should be nothing new to you, dear readers, thanks in no small part to the discussion in “Meno”. Let’s examine it closely, shall we?

Socrates believes that knowledge is not so much acquired as it is remembered, a dubious concept that gained quite a bit of traction for quite a span of history. In a scene that is quite famous in some circles, Socrates leads a slave through the process of solving a rudimentary geometry problem; when the young boy, professed to be ignorant in geometry studies, successfully divides a square into portions, Socrates uses it as evidence that the slave inherently knew how to solve the problem and it was a matter of asking the right questions. Though his logic is rather shaky, it’s easy to transition into his most useful contribution to discussion: the Socratic method. According to him, true opinions awakened by repeated questioning become fully-formed knowledge through consistent questioning. In a turn of phrase that is pure Plato, Socrates warns: “Look out if you find me teaching and explaining to him, instead of asking for his opinion.”

What sort of questions do we ask? Too easy: we must get to the basics, first and foremost. The first aim is to attempt to define the essence of a quality (in this example, virtue) before conjecturing upon its properties, keeping an eye toward a precise manner of speech and contextual view when defining these concepts and objects. In a methodology better suited for forensic accounting, the method depends on taking complex questions and breaking them down to the sub-atomic level before rebuilding them into their final form. With the proper definitions, taking care to keep the data properly compartmentalized and in context, a question such as, “Is virtue the impetus to guide rightly?” can yield more answers than any situation deems relevant.

“Why does this matter?” Pooh, dear readers; I hear your grumbling, and I understand your concerns. My reply is this: should you apply this much consideration to only one or two issues you encounter in any given day, you are a revolutionary. Turn on your television and ask: “How often am I asked to consider while viewing this?” In this frantic run-up to a presidential contender, perhaps we as a society can advance ourselves not by asking how candidates plan to apply Band-Aides to hot-button political topics, but whether they show the virtue to transcend the role of “oracle-chanters” to become leaders of human beings in a truly difficult time in American history.

“Opinion in good man is knowledge in the making.” -Milton, Areopagitica

"So the heavy hoplite was supplanted by the legionary; the knight, clad in armor, had to give place..."

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 03:05:47 -0500

“So the heavy hoplite was supplanted by the legionary; the knight, clad in armor, had to give place to the light free-moving infantryman; and in a general way, in the evolution of life … the greatest successes have been for those who accepted the heaviest risks.”

- Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution

"Only the dead have seen the end of war."

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 21:52:52 -0500

There is, for some reason, a minor debate over the attribution of this quote. Some say Plato, some say Santayana; ultimately, in a slightly cynical sense, it’s a matter of everyone being wrong, even though a few are factually correct. Most importantly, it seems to entirely miss the point.

The full disclosure is this: your humble narrator is a veteran of two deployments to Iraq, both of varying intensity. Without giving either experience an undeserved sense of heroism or romanticism, they’ve left a few indelible marks: hypervigilance, irrational fears of certain situations, difficulty driving… the list continues, but not for you, dear reader. When ones’ most basic desire is to sit in the corner of their home with a baseball bat with a clear line of sight of all ingress points to a room, concepts such as “reintegration into society” become intellectual abstracts.

It has been more than a little bittersweet to see the news reports of the End of the Iraq War. We as a people can move forward to Our Glorious Future, with a chicken in every pot and a Norman Rockwell painting tucked under one arm. Soon we can forget the unpleasantries of the 2000’s and welcome a new era in scientific discovery and social welfare, as the Higgs boson particle is dangerously close to being found, and Twitter single-handedly liberates the Middle East.

Why do I sound so cynical? Because another friend of mine is dead.

The details are still coming in, painfully slowly. He and I enlisted together, went to basic training together; shook hands and parted ways. Every once in a while, we’d drop each other a line to see how we were doing, not worried about catching up, because we’d most likely live forever. Today, I found out he’s dead, under circumstances that sound like the worst possible of post-deployment suicides. I remember him picking me up when I was down in the past, and now he’s gone.

The truly tragic aspect is that he’s not the first and he certainly won’t be the last. These aren’t welfare queens, they’re not people who end up being reposted on First World Problems; they’re men and women who’ve accepted the yoke of societal service, accepted the role of chattel, travelled countless miles and endured hardships that are nearly impossible to adequately describe, and they’re disappearing at alarming rates.

Your humble narrator becomes quite bitter around Veterans Day due to the constant calls to remember Our Honored Dead who’ve “made the ultimate sacrifice”. As a civilian it’s fine to say that phrase before returning to the daily tedium after a bit of self-congratulation. Countless veterans have died for civilians to maintain the right to trivialize their deaths. Yet I’ve come to realize, and I doubt I’m the only one, that “the ultimate sacrifice” isn’t about dying: it’s coming back from That Place. It’s going from Survival Mode to Society Mode in the course of a 15-hour plane ride. It’s being asked to be quiet about your problems until noble civilian volunteers want to hear them at their convenience.

We as a people have been quick to congratulate ourselves on our leadership in the world, both in the fields of social and economic progress. At this point in history, it needs no mention that perhaps we’ve been a bit hasty on celebrating the latter; yet, how have we managed to allow the former to decline to such an embarrassing extent? Houses in Tennessee are burning down with responders on scene because the tenants didn’t pay a $75 tax; entire states are known for their public schools being “dropout factories”, and most infuriatingly, we are letting veterans slip through the cracks because they’re “not our problem”. (Correction: we’re letting the veterans who don’t commit suicide, overdose on legal and illegal substances, die in violent crime, etc. slip through the cracks.) Ladies and gentlemen, when are we as a society going to mature to the point where we accept responsibility, not only for ourselves, but for our communities, and for the people protecting them?

You can return to your day, and in this day and age, we can only hope it’s pleasant, despite the nastiness of the news as of late. Too many people are just not having good days, or they simply can’t focus on the smell of the roses. Me… I’m going to have a cigarette, and remember my friends who’ve died.

"In general, the wise in all ages have always said the same things, and the fools, who at all times..."

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:11:13 -0500

“In general, the wise in all ages have always said the same things, and the fools, who at all times form the immense majority, have in their way too acted alike, and done the opposite; and so it will continue. For, as Voltaire says, we shall leave the world as foolish and wicked as we found it.”

- Arthur Schopenhauer, from the introduction to “The Wisdom of Life”

Love in the Time of Philosophy.

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:46:23 -0500

Cephalos: What about love now, Sophocles? Are you still able to serve a woman?
Sophocles: Hush, man. I've escaped from all that, thank goodness. I feel as if I've escaped a mad, cruel slave driver.

wadewilson4president: flying ace

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 00:05:15 -0500

wadewilson4president:

flying ace

"‘My country right or wrong’ is a thing like saying, ‘My mother drunk or..."

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 22:42:37 -0500

“‘My country right or wrong’ is a thing like saying, ‘My mother drunk or sober’.”

- G. K. Chesterton

Photo

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:47:39 -0500

Career opportunities.

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 20:34:47 -0500

Today, I saw an advertisement for an over-the-counter pain relief medicine featuring an actress claiming to be a yoga instructor. I thought, “What have I done so wrong in my life where I can’t find a job no matter how hard I look, but there are people whose profession consists of teaching people to simultaneously breathe and stretch?”