WaPo: Palin=Hitler

Why not? No one reads this shit anyway.

Brooks redux

So the formula is to always write that Obama is smart, oh my is he smart!! Problem might be that he lacks backbone or character or tenacity or those other things that are not so important to our vacuous culture now as `smart'.

Hmmm. Reminds me of Tecs saying someone was smart, hell, he went to Harvard! Who was that? Romney?

Not to beat up on poor defenseless Tecs all the time, but maybe this is the real problem, particularly for guys like us that think smart is so goddam important, since you prove theorems with that, not courage.

Are courage and tenacity undervalued by our dumbass Paris Hilton society compared to `if you're so smart then why ain't you rich?'

A Novel Idea

Why did the novel of ideas fall out of favor? Perhaps our distrust of concepts is hard earned, due to recently completing a century in which ideas fared so poorly. It was a period in which the really heinous actions were always done in the name of some idea. Or perhaps the novel – like everything else in society these days – is more comfortable addressing ideologies rather than ideas. But maybe an even simpler explanation can be mustered. The dominant role of films and television in contemporary story-telling – a pre-eminence that has emphasized “showing” versus “telling” -- has created a widespread impatience among audiences with those subtle, metaphysical things that can’t be shown.

Ulrich takes on Engineering, and Questions the Apollo Belvedere

From the moment Ulrich set foot in engineering school, he was feverishly partisan. Who still needed the Apollo Belvedere when he had the new forms of a turbodynamo or the rhythmic movements of a steam engine’s pistons before his eyes! Who could still be captivated by the thousand years of chatter about the meaning of good and evil when it turns out that they are not constants at all but functional values, so that the goodness of works depends on historical circumstances, while human goodness depends on the psychotechnical skills with which people’s qualities are exploited? Looked at from a technical point of view, the world is simply ridiculous: impractical in all that concerns human relations, and extremely uneconomic and imprecise in its methods; anyone accustomed to solving his problems with a slide rule cannot take seriously a good half of the assertions people make. The slide rule is two systems of numbers and lines combined with incredible ingenuity; the slide rule is two white-enameled sticks of flat trapezoidal cross section that glide past each other, with whose help the most complex problems can be solved in an instant without needlessly losing a thought; the slide rule is a small symbol carried in one’s breast pocket and sensed as a hard white line over one’s heart. If you own a slide rule and someone comes along with big statements or great emotions, you say: “Just a moment, please – let’s first work out the margin for error and the most-probable values.” …This was without doubt a powerful view of what it meant to be an engineer.

~Robert Musil
The Man Without Qualities
Volume I, pages 33-34.