Slow Death
I’ve thought about for months, and it has to be the end for this. Blogging, that is (I won’t kill it, I won’t touch it, I won’t bother to maintain it.).
It’s not just that even my wife has recognized, that blogging is a chore for me – my face is so scrunched up and angry. Frankly, too, I want nothing of the media world – verily, the most boring cage match wimps ever devised.. I don’t want my opinion out there. I don’t want to be associated with a profession that’s become little more than shilling for corporations even more transparently than a lawyer in a high-powered consultancy. I’ve batted this around for months – publish an article, or inflict paper cuts on myself – I couldn’t tell the difference between the two. It’s gotten so bad I’m beginning to believe opinionated narcissists should just perfect their own sophistry in silence, live their lives according to their conclusions…at that point the world would explode. I already have to pay lip service to the moronic belief, that language has some intrinsic value, and I spent four years practicing the black arts where language verily is a weapon, that I just hate words.
Thank you to anyone who even recalls I started writing way back in the early, hopeful days of this decade. I could say all manner of nasty things about sundry events in this long road down enlightenment kicking, screaming, and resentful, but frankly I’m relieved never to have to fashion cant as opinion again. I choose not to forgive. People can find another way to sate their hunger for distraction and magic fixes.
So long, mother fuckers!
DPJ Disappoints the Hani on Liancourt Rocks
Nonsense on Stilts
A Bubble Is a Bubble, Even in Taiwan
If It's Called a Duck....
Save the Xmas Spirit for Next Week
A Washington Irving tale. A Christmas Carol. Saint Nick. Coca Cola. Rankin/Bass specials.Tthe Yule log. A samurai Santa, and Colonel Sanders in a red suit. Christmas cake in a Busan patisserie. What do all these references have in common?
Avatar Is a Good Film
Sometimes pundits forget that words are not images. Movies are not essays. A movie is a live experience in a social setting – watching a movie alone is so pathetic! I paid a little extra for 3-D glasses, and slipped into Avatar.
Political Realism
Political realism is a philosophical paradigm within international relations. Its lasting contribution to social science is two-fold. Firstly, anarchy is the distinctive feature of the international system. Secondly, power, not morality, matters.
Today’s Japan Photo
Originally uploaded by toshiki55
Nothing Here, Keep Moving
I’m playing Civ IV taking a break from blogging today. The graduation ceremony for the 10-week intensive ESL class for DSME employees ended at 12 pm, after far too many speeches. BTW, here’s mine:
The Guys’ Climate Hangup
Is global warming skepticism a male hangup? (via Skepchick)
As one ex-scientist and now climate action advocate put it to me rather caustically a while back: “I’ve been debating the science with them for years, but recently I realised we shouldn’t be talking about the science but about something unpleasant that happened in their childhood”.
We’ll Never Be Here Again…Or, Will We?
I’m of two minds on health care insurance reform. As a consumer, I’m pissed. I want single-payer, and no amount of red-baiting will change my mind. I’m willing to accept a Dutch or Swiss model. As a student of politics, I’m just having all sorts of fun watching the American political system work. The drama is coming down to the wire, and I have to get both lobes working together.
Skeptical Take on COP15
Real skeptic Bjorn Lomborg is glad the UN Climate Change Conference is failing.
RAY SUAREZ: Not so fast, says Bjorn Lomborg. The Danish teacher and writer on environmental issues is a climate change skeptic, but not in the way that’s usually meant. Maybe he should be called a climate change conference skeptic.
“Intrigue” Doesn’t Mean “Ignorance” in Korean
Overcoming Samuelson
I’m sure economist Paul Samuelson was personable, but his college textbooks that bridged math and money almost singlehandedly ruined economics for me. I’ve had this perennial goal of sitting down with the ol’ micro and macro textbooks, and make my piece with Samuelson economics. Samuelson’s death might provide the impetus to see this goal through…maybe.
He was very much an economic management guy, I mean, what we call the new economics, which was sort of on everybody’s lips in the ’60s, when Kennedy came in, Kennedy, to whom Samuelson was a principal adviser.
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