Monthly Archives: August 2011

links for 2011-08-06

Well now here’s a practical education

Read carefully through today’s Lincoln Steffens Show post at No Fear of the Future and just see (a) how many dots you had/hadn’t already connected, (b) how many things you vow to keep an eye upon as the Circus continues to unfold before our eyes. Some exemplary bits:

…the perfect Narcissists to star in the next generation reality show are the ones who created their own illusory documentary narrative long before Survivor and The Bachelor: the American politicians who love nothing more than to engage in on-camera histrionics designed to manipulate the emotions of the general public around a largely illusory conflict between two political parties who represent an illusion of meaningful ideological difference…

…The 20th century revelation that probably had the most lasting cultural impact was Freud’s—that people are governed by primitive animal natures and appetitive drives that are often more powerful than reason. Freud’s insights were cynically employed on the this side of the Atlantic through his nephew Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, who overthrew the 19th century convention of fact-based advertising in favor of subtextual appeals to the baser natures…

links for 2011-08-03

  • "It’s as if Washington’s leading political players, aided and abetted by the media’s love of the horserace, had eaten LSD-laced brownies, then gone on stage before an audience of millions to enact a psychotic spectacle of American decline…" But READ THE WHOLE THING
  • good old Shorpy, always something to ponder (and how would YOU like to take a train across that thread? …but don't miss the link to a 2009 article on its longevity!)
    (tags: engineering)

Kunstler again

Jim Kunstler sure knows how to turn a phrase and sharpen an aperçu, exemplified in this bit from today’s blog posting:

We’re out of cheap oil, cheap and good ores, ocean fish, good timber, and lots of other things. All the stuff we erected to live our lives in – the stupendous armature of highways, strip malls, suburban houses, skyscraper condos, sewer systems, electric grids – is beyond our power to repair now. We can only patch it, and that can only work for so long before things go dark. (Can you sharpen a saw blade?)

Hmmmm… not a carbide-tipped blade.