Data, words, code
Sy Hersh’s Nov 09 article on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is not all that revelatory. But, given the last post here, it’s hardly reassuring to read of the Pakistani president defending nuclear security in these terms:
“Our Army officers are not crazy, like the Taliban. They’re British-trained. Why would they slip up on nuclear security?”
More optimism from Hari, this time idolizing JJ & co:
It works. Look at Britain. Three years ago, eight new coal power stations were being planned, and the third runway at Heathrow was all but inevitable. A few thousand heroic young people took direct action against them. Now all the new coal power stations have been cancelled, and the third runway is dead in the water. Here in the fifth largest economy in the world, they have stopped coal and airport expansion. Politicians felt the heat. That was done by a few thousand people. Imagine what tens or hundreds of thousands could do.
I’m piously encouraged by Johann Hari’s list of objects of emulation from 2009
Self-criticism:
A lot went wrong and my own sorry generation are largely culpable. Smug, lazy and intellectually self-satisfied; historically uneducated and therefore fixated on superficial understandings and re-stagings of the past; unwilling to risk seriousness, or rather, mistaking creative conservatism and po-faced self-absorption for seriousness; lacking sex, glamour, rage, resentment, a death drive, or anything vaguely fucking resembling a reason to make a mark upon the world – you, my peers, are possibly the most boring lot of Westerners since those born ‘tween the World Wars grew themselves up on Patty Boone and Georgia Gibbs.
Couldn’t agree more.
“
until less than ten years ago, the locks on RAF nuclear bombs were opened with a bicycle lock key. ” [BBC
]
Admittedly, this looks like a case of auntie spinning their info as far as it’ll go. e.g. no bicycle lock itself, necessarily, just the same kind of key.
Paul Erdos, Tom Waits, and women in Philosophy:
But he wasn’t just moving from one university or research center to the next in a restless quest for mathematical talent. He was on the move so much because he was holy hell as a house guest. —He “forsook all creature comforts—including a home—to pursue his lifelong study of numbers,” the blurbs will tell you. Bullshit. He forsook the bother and worry of creature comforts. Other people cooked his food. Other people washed his clothing. Other people kept him from wandering into traffic. Other people woke him in time for his “preaching” appointments. Other people filled out his paperwork.
Linked, because it has slipped my mind for almost a year, and because it’s highly entertaining (if a little obvious). If sharks were men:
There would, of course, also be schools in the big boxes. In these schools the little fish would learn how to swim into the sharks’ jaws. They would need to know geography, for example, so that they could find the big sharks, who lie idly around somewhere. The principal subject would, of course, be the moral education of the little fish. They would be taught that it would be the best and most beautiful thing in the world if a little fish sacrificed itself cheerfully…
Wordsworth, however, is a poet I’ve never been able to make mean something. The main reason, probably, is that I have no time for the pastoral. I’d rather see allusive intensity in the cities I love than in a natural world with which I find no connection.
But the above-linked article by Adam Kirsch turns up other reasons. Apparently “
many of what we now see as the Victorian virtues—earnestness, mature optimism, easy authority—are first incarnated in his poetry
“. And, perceptively:
If his first readers turned against him because he was undignified, today we are more likely to turn away from him because he is too dignified. He knows what he knows so surely, so completely, that he cannot think against himself; no poet besides Milton is as devoid of humor.
….His emergence as the great, challenging poet of natural sympathy and his subsequent decline into dull institutional benevolence form one of the key instructive dramas of modern poetry.
And then, there’s the politics. Shelley embodied it with Queen Mab and the Masque of Anarchy. Byron died for it in Greece, and even Coleridge kept up some level of political involvement through his life. Wordsworth did absorb the afterglow of the French Revolution, but as a spectator rather than an actor. “
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
” is no attempt to change the world, just a thrilling to the work others were doing around him. And even here, argues Kirsch:
“The Prelude” was written as an act of convalescence from and penance for politics, which he finally comes to see as “a degradation” fortunately “transient”
[Kirsch, admittedly, then goes on to praise Wordsworth’s “
struggle to transcend the radicalism of his youth, to rescue its benevolent impulses while escaping its shallowness and intolerance
“.]