2016 — 3 October: Monday
The stately sequence of notes1 from the BBC is well-matched to my initial cuppa on this surprisingly cold morning. 19.9C in the living room has kicked the central heating into radiator action. I have layered-up accordingly.
This is...
... as neat an encapsulation of the dilemma as any I have seen. "Epistocracy" is a new word for me. Source and snippet:
... while democracies give every citizen an equal right to vote, epistocracies apportion political power, by law, according to knowledge or competence.
The idea here is not that knowledgeable people deserve to rule — of course they don't — but that the rest of us deserve not to be subjected to incompetently made political decisions. Political decisions are high stakes, and democracies entrust some of these high-stakes
decisions to the ignorant and incompetent.
Of course, the ignorant and incompetent are rather easier to befuddle by our splendid mass media. "Brexit" comes to mind for some reason. And Mr Trump may yet triumph.
Servility v Civility?
The perils of rationality:
"Just think what the neighbours would say!" was but one of the (many) moral refrains from my childhood.
My anti-maggot measures...
... appear to have been a success. Scrubbing out and disinfecting the black bin, and switching over to a regimen of bin-liner bags (and a light sprinkling, on a neighbour's advice, of Jeyes "Freshbin powder") has worked wonders. A minor domestic triumph, I grant you, but "Just think what the neighbours would say!"
:-)
Oh my goodness!
What can one say?
Having shot myself...
... in the foot, I've now applied a bandage. I'd got Skylark into the state I want, and decided I could now install the frightfully useful "Recoll" desktop search tool. Did so. Created the index. Searched for the phrase "Turtle-necked twit" (which I know damn' well is on my ¬blog somewhere). Failed to find it. Thinks. Oops. Of course, now that all my 'molehole' web files are held on my NAS — and Recoll, by default, only indexes all the junk in my /home location — it didn't find them. Nor do I want to include the NAS files in my index.
Easy peasy solution. Copy just the ¬blog files on to my /home location and re-index. It's only 34MB of data after all. Trivial trivia, in fact. Done... and here's "Turtle-necked twit"!
The only piece...
... of literary "deconstruction" I have ever had any time for is the amusing section2 in David Lodge's "Nice Work". And I fear I have even less time for much of the tripe that is "Post-Modernism", but let's not descend that rabbit-hole...
By subverting the New Critical way of reading, the Yale Group — who in their distinctive ways considered great poetry not a harmony realized via paradoxes, ironies, and ambiguities but a dissonance achieved by way of contradictions, inconsistencies, and uncertainties — tilled propitious soil in the American academy.
Having read...
... yet another excellent Aeon essay, perhaps it's no surprise that my present choice of music is:
Catching up...
... on yet another of the "Spectator" magazines that Iris kindly passes along to me has enabled me to snaffle "Tracks" before it vanishes into the BBC's archives. Though only after asking for help from Mrs Google as the BBC's own web site search is almost as bad as the one Jeff Bezos hosts on Amazon. It's as if they don't want you to find their stuff. Anyhowsoever, the final episode is tomorrow. And the get_iplayer downloads are higher-fi than the podcasts.
Having exchanged...
... some emails touching, among other things, on "why the Universe bothers to exist" (!) I was reminded that "We're here because Urea" from Harold Baum's "The Biochemists' Songbook". I sent this particular snippet from it...
Winter solstice celebrate! Hail the festive season!
Wise men cease to cerebrate! Take a rest from reason!
Super ego is defined, (Ellis & Karminski3)
As that part of human mind, soluble in whisky.
... to dear Mama in one of my weekly letters to her at the appropriate solstice in 2001. No response, of course. Little wonder Dad liked an occasional drop of Scotch.