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(on the question of al Qaeda in Iraq)
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right ON!
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Bruce Sterling plunders Hippolyte Adolphe Taine on The Baths of Caracalla. Plus ça change…
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“Proportions of MDR-TB among new TB cases were 19.4% in Moldova, 16% in Donetsk in Ukraine, 15% in Tomsk Oblast in the Russian Federation, and 14.8% in Tashkent in Uzbekistan…”
Monthly Archives: February 2008
links for 2008-02-28
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chicken wire… who knew?
links for 2008-02-27
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(not at ALL sure that this sort of thing should be encouraged)
Gobsmacked by Mary Ann Evans
Now and again I enjoy glimpses of glorious futures of information access. Today’s case in point was inspired by the morning bathroom reading of the Introduction to George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life, in which Thomas Noble quotes the opening passage of an essay George Eliot published in Westminster Review in October 1855 (bolding especially choice bits):
GIVEN, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society ? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety? Let such a man become an evangelical preacher; he will then find it possible to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial knowledge with the prestige of erudition, a middling morale with a high reputation for sanctity.
My god but that woman could write. I got to wondering if I could lay my hands on the whole text of the article (“EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR CUMMING”), and a few quick searches brought me a Google Books scan from George Eliot’s Works, which was almost completely satisfactory… the penultimate page of the article was illegible, but Google offered a “Flag this page as unreadable” link, and politely thanked me for reporting the deficiency.
For those with a taste for literary skewering, I continue with some more (winkled out from the pdf thanks to copyable plain text view), but heartily urge download of the whole text. You’ll find this not irrelevant to our present circumstances:
Let him shun practical extremes and be ultra only in what is purely theoretic: let him be stringent on predestination, but latitudinarian on fasting; unflinching in insisting on the Eternity of punishment, but diffident of curtailing the substantial comforts of Time; ardent and imaginative on the pre-millennial advent of Christ, but cold and cautious towards every other infringement of the status quo. Let him fish for souls, not with the bait of inconvenient singularity, but with the drag-net of comfortable conformity. Let him be hard and literal in his interpretation only when he wants to hurl texts at the heads of unbelievers and adversaries; but when the letter of the Scriptures presses too closely on the genteel Christianity of the nineteenth century, let him use his spiritualizing alembic and disperse it into impalpable ether. Let him preach less of Christ than of Antichrist; let him be less definite in showing what sin is than in showing who is the Man of Sin, less expansive on the blessedness of faith than on the accursedness of infidelity. Above all, let him set up as an interpreter of prophecy, and rival Moore’s Almanack in the prediction of political events, tickling the interest of hearers who are but moderately spiritual by showing how the Holy Spirit has dictated problems and charades for their benefit, and how, if they are ingenious enough to solve these, they may have their Christian graces nourished by learning precisely to whom they may point as the “horn that had eyes,” “the lying prophet,” and the “unclean spirits.” In this way he will draw men to him by the strong chords of their passions, made reason-proof by being baptized with the name of piety. In this way he may gain a metropolitan pulpit; the avenues to his church will be as crowded as the passages to the opera; he has but to print his prophetic sermons and bind them in lilac and gold, and they will adorn the drawing-room table of all evangelical ladies, who will regard as a sort of pious “light reading” the demonstration that the prophecy of the locusts whose sting is in their tail is fulfilled in the fact of the Turkish commander’s having taken a horse’s tail for his standard, and that the French are the very frogs predicted in the Revelations.
links for 2008-02-26
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e.g.,
while ( rome.fire() ) {
doFiddle();
} -
Throck and the Kats: 1921 from Shorpy :: History in HD
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tracking the flow of currency
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What a wonderful presentation. “to turn page click the right side of the page (flip back click on the left side)”
Daniel catches a nice one
Ralph Towner:
So now I want to hunt down some kalimba videos…
Doc Searls looks out the window
As a lifelong fan of the window seat view and of American landscapes, I’m in, like, total awe of what Doc Searls has captured in 282 images on a flight from Boston to LA (watch it as a slideshow… just DO it). I’m beginning to GET what digital SLR is capable of (not quite ready to start carrying all that weight around, though).
Barnett Rubin on Pashtuns and Buzkashi
This one is really worth every minute it’ll take to read it: Across the Borderline: Pashtuns and Taliban in Two States. A good corrective to my earlier simplistic thinking on Central Asian irredentism, and just the sort of analysis one would like to see the presidential candidates conversant with…
Good start to a Monday
from Music for Maniacs:
links for 2008-02-24
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yes well I want to know how to do this…