Praps. The Stack is new each day. International reach is great. On FB I had Chinese guys engaging in Lit conversations using software to get around the Firewall. I have a few folk corresponding from India. Nigeria has two. Germany 1. California 3. 😂
As I understand the aviation industry lotsa folks dislike travel now --and still they travel. Well can't keep 'em on the farm once they've seen Paree even if it's just to Green Bay from Cape Cod. All these vaccinated masked incubating hosts infecting each other nearly makes me stay out of anything but a taxi and even that might just be throwing caution to the wind. Might have to just roam celestially out of body like when I was young exploring Mars or Ringworld or being with Julius Caesar or Hannibal crossing the Alps.
I played chess. Chess tournaments and subscribed to Chess Life. About 2nd year of college majoring in pinball and student union I used to enjoy chess in the student union. High school eliminated my minor interest in athletics. Tennis and Water Polo. Almost as I mentioned went into the Army at 19. All a part of this American Life. By my move to SF at 30 after college and I broke up with my two degrees in hand I gave up on the paper chase of dollars or degrees. Easy really even as late as 1987. Ah but by 1992 water began to boil and even after .com bust simmered. The damage was done. Bohemia by the Bay became a real estate scam and fun got costly. Still given it all better broke and here under Covid because I dislike travel.
Nobody can get out of all that crap unscathed. Tennis and water polo are definitely beyond my range. :) For tennis, I realized that even if you are a tiny bit better, you can beat the heck out of me and water polo requires a whole lot of strength that I was ever willing to invest. I did try cayaking at 15 and was respected by the old ones for my strengths, but I found the stuff excruciatingly boring.
Funny, around 2001, I nearly got a job in SF as a computer linguist, but they made me fly overnight and without sleep, they gave me a 16-hour interview. I told them to put it where the sun don't shine and we agreed on that! :)
Still remeber the .com bust and a few friends losing their lifetime savings (the never asked me, I would have told them...).
Not even wrong. Well, maybe given literacy in these United States I overestimate acumen, ability and intelligence in which case I might not be even wrong.
That's the story of my life. All my big mistakes came from overestimating people's intellects (they were afraid of me, while I showed up simply to help, but that sort of thing was beyond their scope to relate to) and I still want to keep the standards up, because I believe that only the smartest and most intelligent will eventuall be able to make a difference. And the time is coming up for that...
My mistakes are numerous and yes some due to my wit. I grew up with suburban red necks who did not read or write often. Bookstores hard to find except in a mall or near a mall. I would get used books from the flea market. The first used bookstore I was familiar with was 10 miles away. Later as I drove more I found one in downtown Sacramento and a drive to Berkeley got me into Moe's and a couple others close to UC. All in all though to each their own as Frost has it.
Kinda cute; I grew up in a poor and crime-ridden 'hood, where often, I was the only child in the library (the librarians were nice!).
At the same time, I became a 2nd-division soccer player with the ability to become one of the best (table tennis was also an option and in 1987, I was the best amateur chess player in a blitz championship in a city of 2k inhabitants), Never had any ambition, though.
I kept noticing that I was able to summerize complex ideas, many of them mine, in a few sentences and other people became rich and famous for a lot less.
I still don't think we can drag our money to the grave, but we are responsible for our talents. Humility, in my book, includes that I take responsibility for my assets, and don't play dumb for morons.
While I am still reading several hours a day, it's nearly all complementary to crap I already know; my job is to share, preferably in an inspiring and entertaining way.
I am on my way out (aren't we all?) and I don't want to leave without having been of some use for people who deserve it (not worried about the rest; they would never admit that they need help).
“Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations that've long since bought and paid for, the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pocket, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and the information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them.”
Man is an animal who lives in a Polis said the Stagirite. Some years later Judge Learned Hand observed "The law is not just it is just the law." We dwell in a state of exception introduced under the previous Pretender's eyes and the current Pretender.
Alex Michael Azar II, 2012 to 2017, Azar was president of the U.S. division of Eli Lilly and Company, a major drug company, and a member of the board of directors of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a large pharmaceutical trade association. Thus a swamp creature who is an American attorney, businessman, lobbyist, and former pharmaceutical executive served as the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services from 2018 to 2021. And today former California Attorney General Xavier Becerra serves as head of Health and Human Services
Giorgio Agamben provides a thorough historical and legal contextualization of the state of exception, defining its critical nature and development. Defined as the expansion of executive power in response to existential threats to the nation, the state of exception has become the norm of executive power throughout Western democracies. Analyzing the legal and political theory that has given rise to the state of exception, Agamben delivers a highly detailed description of this legal concept. From its origins in Roman law, Agamben traces the evolution of the state of exception through two political scholars, Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. Today, the state of exception has allowed the President of the United States to unilaterally expand executive power into legislative and judicial domains.
Agamben’s Take-Home Points:
The state of exception is the expansion of the executive power to the point where presidential decrees have the force of law, often invoked during “states of siege” or a “state of war.” Through this expansion of executive power, the separation of powers no longer constrains the executive branch. It is not the suspension of law but an extrajudicial state where Presidential power works with and above the current judicial system (Chapter 1).
The importance of continual security has come to produce a continual state of exception in contrast to traditional declarations of war in Western democracies (14).
Abraham Lincoln (20), Franklin D. Roosevelt (21-22), and George W. Bush (3, 22) all serve as case studies for this state of exception and its gradual temporal expansion.
The state of exception depends on a conception of necessity, usually the survival of the state. However, necessity is always subjective (30).
The state of exception has evolved from the Roman law of iustitium, the suspension of law during times of necessity (41).
Western judicial order can be describes as a duality between auctoritas and potestas. Auctorita is the anomic or “metajuridical” whereas potestas is the normative juridical process. That state of exception is what ties these systems together and allows Western politics to access the legal anomie without abandoning conventional legal processes (85-86).
Agamben argues that the perpetual utilization of the state of exception will ultimately undermine Western law and lead to a “global civil war” (87).
Sorry, I owed you this after being unable to respond to your previous long comment from two days ago (I was halfway through after several hours, but my message got lost; it was I who pressed the wrong button, but that doesn't change a thing.)
I love your comments, but they are too long for me to answer consistently, because I have started to have the exponential jump in my subscriptions. Just today, it was another 27 people and the day is not even halfway through.
Can you and I do one thing at a time, please? You have extremely creative ideas, accurate observations, and some open-ended questions that should interest most thinking people, at least because they are also affected.
Other than that, you and I should just limit most of our conversations to the phone, especially when it comes to the erudite junk that you and I might cherish, but most people would be left out.
New Journalism means no dumbing down and a bit of wit for cheese not Dragnet Just The Facts mam. :) Saying this, I can cheerfully do old timey Journalism too, hatchet jobs are a speciality.
Actually, I ended up with 80 new free subscriptions yesterday, which is strange, because they came from all over the world and I haven't had a single new one today. :)
Remarkable. I average one every couple of days and one going away to make up. :) About right I reckon since La Revolution Surrealiste was and is today an acquired taste.
Dear imagination, what I love most about you, is your unforgiving nature.
The only mark of freedom is whatever still exalts me. I believe it right to maintain forever, our oldest human fanaticism. Indeed that reflects my sole legitimate aspiration. Amidst all the shame we are heir to, it is well to recognize that the widest freedom of spirit remains to us. It is up to us not to abuse it in any serious manner. To make a slave of the imagination, even though what is vulgarly called happiness is at stake, is to fail profoundly to do justice to one’s deepest self. Only imagination realises the possible in me, and it is enough to lift for a moment the dreadful proscription; enough also for me to abandon myself to it, without fear of error (as if one could be any more in error). Where does error begin, and security end for the spirit? Is not the possibility of error, for the spirit, rather a circumstance conducive to its well-being?
Oh, it looks like half of the worlds "secret" services have "signed up." They came from Germany, Korea, Slavic countries, Vietnam, and who knows where else. :) I don't mind educating morons, except I don't have a lot of hope attached to a positive outcome. Still, they have to do more than nothing for their money! :D
None of us is going to be particularly "popular," and that is good. I'm still on the rise, but that's only temporary; about two new subscribers a day, unless I count the ones from yesterday, which I prefer not to. Who knows, some of them might be for real? :)
In my understanding, what you are talking about is a club for a select few. I am okay with that, but I do believe that I was making sense at the age of five, when I said to someone who told me I was too young to understand something that "if you, Sir, are so smart, you can tell me in a way even I can understand."
I don't believe people are stupid, but overestimating them has resulted in the biggest mistakes in my life. I do hold the conviction that even the most complex crap people pose about as "experts" can be expressed in a way that enable people to understand, discuss, and even contribute.
This is an inoccuous site, where people can share or even form communities.
Praps. The Stack is new each day. International reach is great. On FB I had Chinese guys engaging in Lit conversations using software to get around the Firewall. I have a few folk corresponding from India. Nigeria has two. Germany 1. California 3. 😂
As I understand the aviation industry lotsa folks dislike travel now --and still they travel. Well can't keep 'em on the farm once they've seen Paree even if it's just to Green Bay from Cape Cod. All these vaccinated masked incubating hosts infecting each other nearly makes me stay out of anything but a taxi and even that might just be throwing caution to the wind. Might have to just roam celestially out of body like when I was young exploring Mars or Ringworld or being with Julius Caesar or Hannibal crossing the Alps.
I played chess. Chess tournaments and subscribed to Chess Life. About 2nd year of college majoring in pinball and student union I used to enjoy chess in the student union. High school eliminated my minor interest in athletics. Tennis and Water Polo. Almost as I mentioned went into the Army at 19. All a part of this American Life. By my move to SF at 30 after college and I broke up with my two degrees in hand I gave up on the paper chase of dollars or degrees. Easy really even as late as 1987. Ah but by 1992 water began to boil and even after .com bust simmered. The damage was done. Bohemia by the Bay became a real estate scam and fun got costly. Still given it all better broke and here under Covid because I dislike travel.
Nobody can get out of all that crap unscathed. Tennis and water polo are definitely beyond my range. :) For tennis, I realized that even if you are a tiny bit better, you can beat the heck out of me and water polo requires a whole lot of strength that I was ever willing to invest. I did try cayaking at 15 and was respected by the old ones for my strengths, but I found the stuff excruciatingly boring.
Funny, around 2001, I nearly got a job in SF as a computer linguist, but they made me fly overnight and without sleep, they gave me a 16-hour interview. I told them to put it where the sun don't shine and we agreed on that! :)
Still remeber the .com bust and a few friends losing their lifetime savings (the never asked me, I would have told them...).
Everything is a scam by now.
Never cared for traveling, either.
Not even wrong. Well, maybe given literacy in these United States I overestimate acumen, ability and intelligence in which case I might not be even wrong.
That's the story of my life. All my big mistakes came from overestimating people's intellects (they were afraid of me, while I showed up simply to help, but that sort of thing was beyond their scope to relate to) and I still want to keep the standards up, because I believe that only the smartest and most intelligent will eventuall be able to make a difference. And the time is coming up for that...
My mistakes are numerous and yes some due to my wit. I grew up with suburban red necks who did not read or write often. Bookstores hard to find except in a mall or near a mall. I would get used books from the flea market. The first used bookstore I was familiar with was 10 miles away. Later as I drove more I found one in downtown Sacramento and a drive to Berkeley got me into Moe's and a couple others close to UC. All in all though to each their own as Frost has it.
Kinda cute; I grew up in a poor and crime-ridden 'hood, where often, I was the only child in the library (the librarians were nice!).
At the same time, I became a 2nd-division soccer player with the ability to become one of the best (table tennis was also an option and in 1987, I was the best amateur chess player in a blitz championship in a city of 2k inhabitants), Never had any ambition, though.
I kept noticing that I was able to summerize complex ideas, many of them mine, in a few sentences and other people became rich and famous for a lot less.
I still don't think we can drag our money to the grave, but we are responsible for our talents. Humility, in my book, includes that I take responsibility for my assets, and don't play dumb for morons.
While I am still reading several hours a day, it's nearly all complementary to crap I already know; my job is to share, preferably in an inspiring and entertaining way.
I am on my way out (aren't we all?) and I don't want to leave without having been of some use for people who deserve it (not worried about the rest; they would never admit that they need help).
“Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations that've long since bought and paid for, the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pocket, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and the information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them.”
― George Carlin
Godd stuff. By now, people might want to listen up...
Man is an animal who lives in a Polis said the Stagirite. Some years later Judge Learned Hand observed "The law is not just it is just the law." We dwell in a state of exception introduced under the previous Pretender's eyes and the current Pretender.
Alex Michael Azar II, 2012 to 2017, Azar was president of the U.S. division of Eli Lilly and Company, a major drug company, and a member of the board of directors of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a large pharmaceutical trade association. Thus a swamp creature who is an American attorney, businessman, lobbyist, and former pharmaceutical executive served as the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services from 2018 to 2021. And today former California Attorney General Xavier Becerra serves as head of Health and Human Services
Giorgio Agamben provides a thorough historical and legal contextualization of the state of exception, defining its critical nature and development. Defined as the expansion of executive power in response to existential threats to the nation, the state of exception has become the norm of executive power throughout Western democracies. Analyzing the legal and political theory that has given rise to the state of exception, Agamben delivers a highly detailed description of this legal concept. From its origins in Roman law, Agamben traces the evolution of the state of exception through two political scholars, Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. Today, the state of exception has allowed the President of the United States to unilaterally expand executive power into legislative and judicial domains.
Agamben’s Take-Home Points:
The state of exception is the expansion of the executive power to the point where presidential decrees have the force of law, often invoked during “states of siege” or a “state of war.” Through this expansion of executive power, the separation of powers no longer constrains the executive branch. It is not the suspension of law but an extrajudicial state where Presidential power works with and above the current judicial system (Chapter 1).
The importance of continual security has come to produce a continual state of exception in contrast to traditional declarations of war in Western democracies (14).
Abraham Lincoln (20), Franklin D. Roosevelt (21-22), and George W. Bush (3, 22) all serve as case studies for this state of exception and its gradual temporal expansion.
The state of exception depends on a conception of necessity, usually the survival of the state. However, necessity is always subjective (30).
The state of exception has evolved from the Roman law of iustitium, the suspension of law during times of necessity (41).
Western judicial order can be describes as a duality between auctoritas and potestas. Auctorita is the anomic or “metajuridical” whereas potestas is the normative juridical process. That state of exception is what ties these systems together and allows Western politics to access the legal anomie without abandoning conventional legal processes (85-86).
Agamben argues that the perpetual utilization of the state of exception will ultimately undermine Western law and lead to a “global civil war” (87).
Sorry, I owed you this after being unable to respond to your previous long comment from two days ago (I was halfway through after several hours, but my message got lost; it was I who pressed the wrong button, but that doesn't change a thing.)
I love your comments, but they are too long for me to answer consistently, because I have started to have the exponential jump in my subscriptions. Just today, it was another 27 people and the day is not even halfway through.
Can you and I do one thing at a time, please? You have extremely creative ideas, accurate observations, and some open-ended questions that should interest most thinking people, at least because they are also affected.
Other than that, you and I should just limit most of our conversations to the phone, especially when it comes to the erudite junk that you and I might cherish, but most people would be left out.
This is journalism, after all...
New Journalism means no dumbing down and a bit of wit for cheese not Dragnet Just The Facts mam. :) Saying this, I can cheerfully do old timey Journalism too, hatchet jobs are a speciality.
Actually, I ended up with 80 new free subscriptions yesterday, which is strange, because they came from all over the world and I haven't had a single new one today. :)
Remarkable. I average one every couple of days and one going away to make up. :) About right I reckon since La Revolution Surrealiste was and is today an acquired taste.
Dear imagination, what I love most about you, is your unforgiving nature.
The only mark of freedom is whatever still exalts me. I believe it right to maintain forever, our oldest human fanaticism. Indeed that reflects my sole legitimate aspiration. Amidst all the shame we are heir to, it is well to recognize that the widest freedom of spirit remains to us. It is up to us not to abuse it in any serious manner. To make a slave of the imagination, even though what is vulgarly called happiness is at stake, is to fail profoundly to do justice to one’s deepest self. Only imagination realises the possible in me, and it is enough to lift for a moment the dreadful proscription; enough also for me to abandon myself to it, without fear of error (as if one could be any more in error). Where does error begin, and security end for the spirit? Is not the possibility of error, for the spirit, rather a circumstance conducive to its well-being?
Oh, it looks like half of the worlds "secret" services have "signed up." They came from Germany, Korea, Slavic countries, Vietnam, and who knows where else. :) I don't mind educating morons, except I don't have a lot of hope attached to a positive outcome. Still, they have to do more than nothing for their money! :D
None of us is going to be particularly "popular," and that is good. I'm still on the rise, but that's only temporary; about two new subscribers a day, unless I count the ones from yesterday, which I prefer not to. Who knows, some of them might be for real? :)
In my understanding, what you are talking about is a club for a select few. I am okay with that, but I do believe that I was making sense at the age of five, when I said to someone who told me I was too young to understand something that "if you, Sir, are so smart, you can tell me in a way even I can understand."
I don't believe people are stupid, but overestimating them has resulted in the biggest mistakes in my life. I do hold the conviction that even the most complex crap people pose about as "experts" can be expressed in a way that enable people to understand, discuss, and even contribute.
This is an inoccuous site, where people can share or even form communities.
What else could I ask for?
Oh, not THAT old time! :D