Saturday, July 03, 2010
Hey, did everyone else know about this?
Apparently, Coffee Mate is flamable.
You get 500 pounds of "non-dairy coffee creamer," put it in a tank, hook up a compressed air tank to get it to go way high in the air, then toss in a flare.
But, as they say, probably not a good idea to try it at home.
At least, not while your parents are home.
Friday, July 02, 2010
Click your heels together and say to yourself: There is no ontology, there is no ontology...
~
I once had a regular reader here, who (quite aptly) describing him/herself as "Chimera" used to come up with gems like "Well, it's not subjectivism to me!", and would then become all cross when everyone else at the Picnic would fall on the floor laughing. Who knows why this creature continued to pester us, since he/she seemed incapable of grasping anything that was said, but he did provide an excellent living example of the axiom, "liberalism makes you stupid."
No matter how many times, nor how patiently (admittedly, not my strongest suit) I tried to explain the nature of the logical principle of non-contradiction, Chimera would continue to fail to grasp the idea that a proposal and its oppposite cannot both be true. Of course, without the training, I could not identify in detail the nature of the intellectual errors he made, but of course, it was essentially the modernist error in metaphysics. Our world cannot seem to grasp the idea of the thingness of things.
I was having a conversation (perhaps ironically, on Facebook) with an old friend, about something related to the homosexualist ideology, to which she wholeheartedly adheres, and I realised that there was no point in continuing the discussion. She objected, I think I recall, to the prohibition against homosexuals giving blood. The indisputable fact that homosexuals, as a group, have much higher rates of diseases transmissible by blood meant nothing to her. It was discriminatory, and therefore needed to be stopped. Easily verifiable medical facts made no difference to her.
I could have begun the tedious task of taking apart her arguments and explaining the rhetorical errors she was using, and the factual mistakes, but I saw that she simply did not have the intellectual tools to grasp her error, which meant that there was no communication possible. I simply dropped it.
I have often talked about the feeling of living in a strange parallel universe in which I can see others and be seen by them, but in which there is no communication possible.
~
I once had a regular reader here, who (quite aptly) describing him/herself as "Chimera" used to come up with gems like "Well, it's not subjectivism to me!", and would then become all cross when everyone else at the Picnic would fall on the floor laughing. Who knows why this creature continued to pester us, since he/she seemed incapable of grasping anything that was said, but he did provide an excellent living example of the axiom, "liberalism makes you stupid."
No matter how many times, nor how patiently (admittedly, not my strongest suit) I tried to explain the nature of the logical principle of non-contradiction, Chimera would continue to fail to grasp the idea that a proposal and its oppposite cannot both be true. Of course, without the training, I could not identify in detail the nature of the intellectual errors he made, but of course, it was essentially the modernist error in metaphysics. Our world cannot seem to grasp the idea of the thingness of things.
I was having a conversation (perhaps ironically, on Facebook) with an old friend, about something related to the homosexualist ideology, to which she wholeheartedly adheres, and I realised that there was no point in continuing the discussion. She objected, I think I recall, to the prohibition against homosexuals giving blood. The indisputable fact that homosexuals, as a group, have much higher rates of diseases transmissible by blood meant nothing to her. It was discriminatory, and therefore needed to be stopped. Easily verifiable medical facts made no difference to her.
I could have begun the tedious task of taking apart her arguments and explaining the rhetorical errors she was using, and the factual mistakes, but I saw that she simply did not have the intellectual tools to grasp her error, which meant that there was no communication possible. I simply dropped it.
I have often talked about the feeling of living in a strange parallel universe in which I can see others and be seen by them, but in which there is no communication possible.
What is being lost is the capacity to think in terms of cause and effect, of distinguishing between differing levels of argument, and particularly any appreciation for abstraction. Increasingly, students expect to be spoon-fed with concrete examples, operational instructions, mechanical repetitions, and pictorial representation. The loss of language is but a symptom of the loss of thought -- and losing thought means losing much more.
...
The problem ultimately lies in a misconstrued metaphysics, or rather in the absence of any notion of ontology at all. When Bill Clinton was asked whether he had sexual relations with a White House intern and famously replied that this depended on the meaning of "is," his statement was of course evasive and facetious. But it was also intelligent: For apart from the time-indexed meaning of the copula in the present tense, the "is" in "This is a ball" is different from that in "A ball is a spherical object." The first sentence identifies a particular (or token) as a member of a class (or type), whereas the second offers a definition through the synonymy of types. The "is" in "it's like" is neither of these, for it seeks to define a type -- for example, "a ball" or "market segmentation" -- by reference to a token...
Providing merely an aspect of what is to be explained is not only reductionist (by substituting a part for the whole); it is also a subjectivist move that avoids describing and thus reflecting on the essence of what is to be explained. It is indicative of our age of increasing relativism under the guise of "pluralism" and "tolerance" -- your feeling about the nature of something is just as good as my feeling, because there really isn't any "is"; there may not even be an "a." Then a ball might as well have edges, for who can tell me that I can only call something a ball if it is round?
There is a curious reluctance to think about the nature of things, maybe as a result of decades of teaching that there is no such nature apart from what one wants them to be. Rather, students increasingly see the world phenomenologically -- as a haphazard arrangement of "stuff" and of events informed by the sensory impressions of their own experience but devoid of any structure.
...
Where in earlier ages people worked in their gardens, played an instrument, went fishing, read books, entertained guests, or engaged in conversation with family or friends, they have become passive and speechless consumers of canned content. These screens help produce a people that is losing its language. But more importantly, these people no longer see structures in their world but rather a bewildering juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated events.
~
So I'm like, 'Dude!..."
Someone else has noticed, using the Laws of Rational Thought, that the loss of facility with language is related to the loss of the ability to think clearly.
The loss of the distinction (which I have suddenly started seeing everywhere, and in places where I really should never see it at all) between "there," "their" and "they're" is not just a language-snob problem. I don't know if any research could possibly be done to support my observation, but I have seen lately a terrible slump in the quality of writing, even by fairly intelligent people who claim to have attended decent schools.
Some time ago, I posted this that seems to have received some praise in various places.
(Aside: I received a very kind email a couple of weeks ago from a nice chap who asked me for a link. I have to say, and it should be noted by others, that I don't approve of link-fishing. If you have something that is of any quality it will be discovered and its merits will promote it for you. If you go around the web asking for links like a Romanian gypsy begging on the train, you are much more likely to get from me what they get. Which isn't money. But Edward seems like a nice chap, so here, just this once. I'm probably going soft.)
I see that Daniel Mitsui, whose website and work I wholeheartedly and enthusiastically endorse, has quoted me:
I remember in Narnia, the worst, most horrible fate that the Talking Beasts could imagine was to lose language. To revert to being an ordinary dumb animal, to no longer have the spark of Divine Knowledge that Aslan had given them at the creation of their world.
I know I have written about this before, but I keep coming back to that scene in Prince Caspian when the children and Trumpkin are attacked in the forest by a bear. For a moment, Susan is filled with the horrible thought, "What if he is a Talking Bear, gone wild, who has reverted to the ways of dumb bears." For a dangerous moment she hesitates to fire for fear that she would be killing one of her subjects. When the bear is dead, Lucy, ever thoughtful, says to Susan, "What if, back home, the same thing had happened to men. That however much they may look like ordinary men on the outside, they had really gone wild inside." Susan tells Lucy not to think such horrible thoughts.
I think these horrible thoughts all the time. I think maybe it is what my mother was referring to when she wrote to me once of "the pain you seem to feel all the time."
Probably. It could be that these horrible thoughts have caught up with me, and this could be why I seem never to be able to be happy.
Here I am, typing this on my laptop, sitting in the midst of a glorious, fragrant, singing July day in Italy, 300 yards from the beach, on the balcony of my lovely apartment, surrounded by wonderful friends, employed in good work, in good health and safe. All these gifts, and yet my hope and faith barely clinging on.
I don't know. Maybe I've always been able to see that the facade of the world hides a cultural rot and despair that is only now starting to become visible to others. I remember even as a child, in the hippie-dippy 70s, knowing that the world was not what it seemed. That people were not as well as they pretended to be. That things were falling apart. Or, maybe I should say, being deliberately torn apart. I've always been an instinctual conservative.
I'm going into Rome today, just to hang out a bit. Maybe look at some monuments or art or something. It's important to try to remember that the world keeps going. People keep living and doing things, even when the barbarians are at the gates. Civilisations go up, civilisations go down. True things remain.
Maybe we should have a pop quiz for regular O's P readers. I wish Blogger would set up a thing where, instead of a word verification, you had to complete a literacy verification quiz before commenting.
What are the differences, for example, between the following?
Lay and lie.
Fewer and less.
Who and whom.
Flew and flown.
There, their, and they're.
~
Loss of language among the younger population -- that is to say, the ability to formulate and enunciate properly constructed sentences that reflect clear thought -- is growing at a staggering rate in the United States. Even among students whose academic aptitude is well above the national average, my years as an undergraduate business professor show that four out of five will make grave spelling errors in written assignments or exams, and about half that regularly commit grammatical blunders. The ubiquitous confusion between "there" and "their" may still be considered a quaint and negligible fluke that nearly creates a new orthographic norm; the inability to express lucid arguments must not.
The loss of the distinction (which I have suddenly started seeing everywhere, and in places where I really should never see it at all) between "there," "their" and "they're" is not just a language-snob problem. I don't know if any research could possibly be done to support my observation, but I have seen lately a terrible slump in the quality of writing, even by fairly intelligent people who claim to have attended decent schools.
Some time ago, I posted this that seems to have received some praise in various places.
(Aside: I received a very kind email a couple of weeks ago from a nice chap who asked me for a link. I have to say, and it should be noted by others, that I don't approve of link-fishing. If you have something that is of any quality it will be discovered and its merits will promote it for you. If you go around the web asking for links like a Romanian gypsy begging on the train, you are much more likely to get from me what they get. Which isn't money. But Edward seems like a nice chap, so here, just this once. I'm probably going soft.)
I see that Daniel Mitsui, whose website and work I wholeheartedly and enthusiastically endorse, has quoted me:
Nietzsche said, I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar. If only Nietzsche had lived long enough to see the 1970's and the new education he would have rejoiced at the final triumph of the human will over God...
The Restoration is not only a matter of politics, or even education qua education. It is an essential re-construction of ruined thought. Imagine Western Civilization not as a set of... precious cultural artifacts like the Mass or the Divine Office or legally indissoluble natural marriage or even any philosophical school. Imagine that it is a larger thing than that; it is a framework for our thought, our creative efforts. Imagine that it is the structure that makes something like Chartres or Salisbury Cathedral possible. The container for the idea of Chartres, without which no Chartres could be conceived.
I remember in Narnia, the worst, most horrible fate that the Talking Beasts could imagine was to lose language. To revert to being an ordinary dumb animal, to no longer have the spark of Divine Knowledge that Aslan had given them at the creation of their world.
I know I have written about this before, but I keep coming back to that scene in Prince Caspian when the children and Trumpkin are attacked in the forest by a bear. For a moment, Susan is filled with the horrible thought, "What if he is a Talking Bear, gone wild, who has reverted to the ways of dumb bears." For a dangerous moment she hesitates to fire for fear that she would be killing one of her subjects. When the bear is dead, Lucy, ever thoughtful, says to Susan, "What if, back home, the same thing had happened to men. That however much they may look like ordinary men on the outside, they had really gone wild inside." Susan tells Lucy not to think such horrible thoughts.
I think these horrible thoughts all the time. I think maybe it is what my mother was referring to when she wrote to me once of "the pain you seem to feel all the time."
Probably. It could be that these horrible thoughts have caught up with me, and this could be why I seem never to be able to be happy.
Here I am, typing this on my laptop, sitting in the midst of a glorious, fragrant, singing July day in Italy, 300 yards from the beach, on the balcony of my lovely apartment, surrounded by wonderful friends, employed in good work, in good health and safe. All these gifts, and yet my hope and faith barely clinging on.
I don't know. Maybe I've always been able to see that the facade of the world hides a cultural rot and despair that is only now starting to become visible to others. I remember even as a child, in the hippie-dippy 70s, knowing that the world was not what it seemed. That people were not as well as they pretended to be. That things were falling apart. Or, maybe I should say, being deliberately torn apart. I've always been an instinctual conservative.
I'm going into Rome today, just to hang out a bit. Maybe look at some monuments or art or something. It's important to try to remember that the world keeps going. People keep living and doing things, even when the barbarians are at the gates. Civilisations go up, civilisations go down. True things remain.
Maybe we should have a pop quiz for regular O's P readers. I wish Blogger would set up a thing where, instead of a word verification, you had to complete a literacy verification quiz before commenting.
What are the differences, for example, between the following?
Lay and lie.
Fewer and less.
Who and whom.
Flew and flown.
There, their, and they're.
~
Next year,
gotta get a set of hockey sticks, nets and a tennis ball and play some road hockey.
It'll weird the Italians right out.
It'll weird the Italians right out.
I AM Canadian
Yep. A splendid time was had by all.
Ate hamburgers grilled outdoors, drank beer, watched the Queen live in Ottawa, and sang the national anthem three times, then God Save the Queen, while letting off small, handheld fireworks.
Hotdogs!
New grill, just bought today, working great.
Got to get a supplier for sweet green pickle relish. How can you eat hotdogs without green pickle relish?
The aftermath. Not too much mess; I have very polite friends.
Ate hamburgers grilled outdoors, drank beer, watched the Queen live in Ottawa, and sang the national anthem three times, then God Save the Queen, while letting off small, handheld fireworks.
Hotdogs!
New grill, just bought today, working great.
Got to get a supplier for sweet green pickle relish. How can you eat hotdogs without green pickle relish?
The aftermath. Not too much mess; I have very polite friends.
Thursday, July 01, 2010
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Stoddart on Modern "Art"
To all the kind people who have sent me books recently, I am deeply grateful. I've been reading Scruton's "On Beauty" on the train lately, and it is a difficult choice between reading his beautiful ideas and looking out the window at the gorgeous Italian countryside. (We are in hay-mowing season, and as I said yesterday in a text to a friend, the sight of a newly mown hay field fills me with a sense of rightness and mysterious joy that no amount of serotonin-imbalance can touch.)
This, via Cusack, comes from another adherent to The Real and the Good, Beautiful and True in Art, Alexander Stoddart, a Scot who has retained his national ability to tell it straight:
Modern art is “rubbish”, narcissistic, snobby, devoid of skill, ignorant of taste, gripped by “nostalgia for the future”. But it goes deeper than that. It’s a difference of opinion about what art should do. Art, he says, has always been about “trying to alleviate the pain of existence”. Modern art “collaborates with misery as opposed to trying to oppose it”.
“A painting by Titian is like a Leningrad, holding out against the forces of the world. Even if they’re having to eat rats in there, they still will never surrender to it. Whereas the art of Tracey Emin is a complete capitulation to the world. Cutting a shark in half and putting it in a tank of piss is just art giving up. I find it very odd when they describe art as challenging, because I always thought art was meant to calm you like a lullaby, not challenge you like some skinhead in an underpass.”
~
Sunday, June 27, 2010
OK, now, I'm not really sure who (apart from a ten year old boy) really needs to know what sort of force it would take to smoosh a compact car into a pancake,
but if you really needed to know, these are the guys who would find out for you.
Did you check out the slow mo?
The car was vapourized.
Holy Crap! indeed!
but if you really needed to know, these are the guys who would find out for you.
Did you check out the slow mo?
The car was vapourized.
Holy Crap! indeed!
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Oh! OH!
It ...
it's...
it's like a dream...
Oh, let me see that again...
"during which Roman Catholic bishops were detained"
mmmm...
Sometimes it's a good day.
Sometimes.
~
it's...
it's like a dream...
A Belgian archdiocese may take legal action over police raids on church property during which Roman Catholic bishops were detained and a cathedral crypt searched, a spokesman said Saturday.
Oh, let me see that again...
"during which Roman Catholic bishops were detained"
The authorities also seized computer files at the home of Belgium's top cardinal for the last 20 years, Leonard's predecessor Godfried Danneels.
mmmm...
Sometimes it's a good day.
Sometimes.
~
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