The Bureau of Vanished Documents

Shredded

As early as July 2016, the Internet Archive began preparing for the anticipated loss of US Government information that would surely result from the presidential transition on January 20th. Using tools developed by the excellent digital repositories team at the University of North Texas, Internet Archive crawled all websites in the .gov domain and harvested their content for permanent preservation on the Wayback Machine. Additionally, they invited librarians, researchers, and academics from around the country to nominate sites outside of the .gov range (social media feeds, .com and .edu sites, etc.) for inclusion in the harvest. In all, they planned to collect webpages from 6,000 government domains, over 200,000 hosts, and feeds from around 10,000 official federal social media accounts.

It seems that work is already proving its value.

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Just hours after assuming office on Friday, the Trump Administration removed a number of documents from agency websites without offering prior warning or alternative means of access. The New York Times reported on a handful, including the Depart of Labor’s report on Advancing LGBT Workplace Rights (formerly at https://www.dol.gov/asp/policy-development/lgbt-report.pdf) and a mass of Whitehouse.gov material relating to climate change and foreign policy. Thankfully that information was recovered. The LGBT report is now at https://archive.org/details/lgbt-report, and the Obama Administrations climate change policy is preserved on any one of the 24 thousand snapshots the Wayback Machine made of Whitehouse.gov in the month preceding the inauguration. To service specific information needs pertaining to presidential transitions, the “End of Term” Project Team has set up a special web portal for searching and browsing government information that has been collected.

I want to make clear that the disappearance of government information during executive transition is by no means limited to this most recent transference of power. In the transition between the 2008 and the 2012 Obama Administrations, 83% of all .gov pdfs were switched out, updated, or removed, with no comprehensive effort made to preserve them. While the examples of document disappearance we witnessed over the weekend were clearly politically-motivated, there is a much more massive and in many ways more important loss of information that is occurring on government websites every day caused nothing more than simple administrative carelessness. We owe a tremendous debt to civically-driven institutions like Internet Archive and University of North Texas Libraries, which have accepted the responsibility and expense of preserving the US Government’s web-based information, even as that same government fails to fulfill this service for itself.

Lost

The Bloomberg Businessweek cover was on point last week

The Bloomberg Businessweek cover was on point last week

Since the America election several weeks ago, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what’s happening with the world politically and what this moment in history will mean. Like most people on the left, I was crestfallen from the election. The right has almost complete control of American government now, and it has as its leader the most erratic and unskilled individual ever to hold the office of the presidency. Xenophobia has become the central motivating impulse for a vast swath of the American electorate. I’ve found it difficult to give our political situation thorough and rigorous consideration because find the conditions that need thinking about so dispiriting. And yet I find too that it is impossible to avoid thinking about them. I spent this past weekend in the Rocky Mountains, in relative isolation, trying to cleanse myself of this election, but in the course of my long walks in the woods, as I let my mind wander, time and again I would be visited by thoughts of the impending Trump presidency. I wonder when will be the first day in which I don’t think about politics. I’ve scarcely had any since the summer of 2015.

In the week following the election, my aunt and I shared a number of articles and ideas. I found some solace in the interaction and some good ideas too. I’d like to share some of it here:

Nov. 12, 2016 – (In response to several articles my aunt sent me about feminist defiance) Thanks for the articles.  I haven’t been able to bring myself to look at anything news-related for several days.  I’m even reluctant to seek distraction in entertainment things like tv shows and movies, I’m just so disgusted with America.  I didn’t even want to be reminded of its culture or its people.  My intellectual curiosity got the better of me though. I’ve begun making some tentative steps toward trying to figure out what’s going on.  I started reading the internet again this morning: lots of things, both in the conservative and liberal press.  Most of what I read is unhelpful.  I feel like everyone is a little off-the-mark.  But here are a few of the more useful things I think I’ve come across:

Thomas Frank’s Opinion piece in the Guardian – Frank is the guy who wrote What’s the Matter with Kansas?, about why the white working class votes against its own self-interests by electing conservative Republicans.  He has this old labor activists’ mentality and his big thing is that he’s against the liberal technocratic elite for abandoning the cause of the working man.  I usually disagree with him on most things, since, as a liberal technocrat, I find his attachment to labor to be backward-looking and unprogressive.  But I think after this election, he’s dead-on.  Old labor had a bone to pick with the Clintons for opening up foreign trade.  The Clinton trade agreements made the country on the whole much richer and gave us a new, brighter economic future, but it killed labor and and made a lot of people irrelevant to the new reality.  I think in this election we saw labor take its revenge.

David French’s commentaries in the National Review – It may be an act of self-flagellation to read the National Review after this election.  French is probably the least measured of the commentators they have on staff.  It’s hard to get past the name-calling and the gloating—at one point he refers to birth control as “abortifacients.”  But he brings to light some very salient facts about the election and how voters have lost faith with the progressive cause.

Michael Moore on Salon.com – Add Michael Moore to the list of writers whom I never agreed with in the past but am now loathfully listening to.  This plea to Democrats to anoint new leaders and hold the line against resurgent Republican power is clear and true.

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  1. Democrats are failing, at almost every level of government, to sell the mission and purpose of social liberalism to the public.  Also, I think it’s questionable as to whether true progressivism in the age of the global economy and social liberalism are even comparable.  This proposition requires a fairly lengthy discursus to explain.  I’m going to try to write a blog post about it.
  2. Censure of cultural insensitivity and mysogeny is a rhetorical dead-end.  This is probably the most dispiriting outcome from the election.  It is mystifying that someone so overtly and brutally sexist could still curry the favor of over 60 million Americans and somehow escape public condemnation. But that is the apparently the nation in which we live.  We’ve devoted ourselves on the left to a politics of identity as a means of endorsing social equality where economic equity is denied us, but in many ways this election repudiated that.  For a disturbing number of Americans, the oppression of others is unimportant.  I’m not sure how we are to combat this tendency in our neighbors.  This election showed us that even when you call bigotry what it is, you’re still ultimately failing to persuade anyone new.  We have to figure out a new way of dressing these wounds.  A politics of empathy maybe.  Or a politics of transgression, of rage.  I saw a dance show last night where two black men did this piece that was just true art.  It was all meticulously choreographed and yet it conveyed pure and unbridled fury.  As an audience member I found it disturbing and off-outing.  I felt implicated.  I felt anxious.  Maybe we need more of this sort of thing in American politics: forcing the other side to confront us in our rage.  And us them.
  3. More jobs promises from the Right and a public that just won’t learn.  People voted for Trump because he says he’s going to bring back the jobs.  Pretty much everything hinged on that, even the xenophobia connects back to job-creation.  The jobs are going to come, he says, from imposing tariffs on foreign imports and keeping immigrants out of the labor market… Of course this is asinine.  If manufacturing comes back to the United States it will all automated work, and the only result will be higher prices for consumer goods.  Immigrant labor is not depressing wages for the vast majority of Americans and is instead contributing to increased vitality in the consumer market.  The Right has been making this promise about creating jobs since Reagan, but those promises have never added up economically and never will.  I don’t see how Democrats will every be able to make an equally appealing value proposition, since to do so you would have to offer the impossible.
  4. The Midwest revolted.  Trump swept the rustbelt outside of Chicago and the Twin Cities.  And maybe for good reason.  At no point in the entire two century history of the Middle West has the region’s future looked so bleak.  Every time I come home I find the place more and more ragged and diminished.  The Midwest sucks, and the people who live there will readily admit that it does.  What they won’t admit is that they are the cause.  They won’t admit that they have rent the social fabric of their own communities by defunding schools and social services, that they have pillaged their natural environment through careless land use policy and unregulated industry.  They won’t admit that they have allowed themselves to become irrelevant to the broader economy by neglecting to respond to the demands of the changing labor market.  The Midwest is frustrated, but it doesn’t know to be frustrated with itself. So it takes it out on the rest of the country.  But the sad truth is that what ails the Midwest, no government can fix.

——

In response to my little rant about the Midwest, my aunt, who has lived in Michigan her entire life, sent me this article from Salon that suggests that Trump’s race-baiting tactics might have pushed the scales in the great lakes region, where racism though never explicit, is evident everywhere you go just by looking at where people live and where wealth is concentrated. To this Salon article I gave the following response:

This article about the Midwest is interesting.  I actually hope that Midwesterners voted for Trump for his economic policies, because when he fails to deliver on them they’ll quit him without a second thought.  It will be the ultimate invalidation of conservative ideology and the Left will come back stronger than ever. If, however, people in the Rust Belt went for Trump because of the demagoguery rather than in spite of it, I don’t know how we resist that.  How do you disabuse a people of their racial animosity?  Maybe this is why the Midwest is faltering and has become so unlivable for some many people.  I see it in Toledo whenever I have to go there.  Everything about that town is broken, because everyone is out for themselves.  If you can afford it you send your kids to private school because the public school system is chaos.  People don’t drink the water because the don’t trust it.  The home values are all depressed.  There aren’t even decent places for people to gather and share culture.  And the root cause of all of these failings is that the people there just have this mutual suspicion of their neighbors.  They think that everyone’s taking and no one is giving back, and so they see no reason to give themselves.  As a kid I used to sense a desolation about the place, like nothing was connected to anything.  I remember the image I associated the feeling with was of a distant train whistle in the night.  It was like a haunting sensation.  Now as an adult I can rationalize it and discern the cause: Toledo is a city where no one belongs.  Everyone thinks the city is for someone else besides them.  And they’re angry because they don’t feel like they belong in the place that’s their home.

You know, everyone is so angry with elected officials and with government right now.  And we bemoan the decline of liberal democracy and see the government as a distortion of the collective will.  I think we’re actually becoming more democratic than we were in the past, and that our politicians are really very reflective of who we are as a people.  And that’s why we hate them.  Because we hate each other.

The Life and Death of Memes

feels

As regular readers of the blog know, I like to unwind by watching lonely people play video games on twitch.tv. Twitch has a chat feature that allows viewers to communicate with the streamer and with other viewers in text comments and small, 40×40 pixel images called emots. One of the most widely used emot image in twitch chat was FeelsBadMan, which depicted a forlorn frog with downcast sad eyes. Because the frog’s eyes are so large and prominent they sort of exaggerate the emotional effect of the image. It’s a funny little picture but it really does play on your empathy nerve. I always liked the emot but I never paid much attention to it. I don’t participate that much in the twitch chats anyway, mostly just lurk.

At some point last spring, I stopped seeing the frog emot in chat. People still spammed the FeelBadMan command, but you would just see the word. It wouldn’t execute the emot like it did in the past. Again, I wasn’t following the Twitch discourse closely enough to know what was going on. Then I read this New York Times article a couple days ago about how The Anti-Defamation League has listed this frog, known in most corners of the internet as Pepe, as a hate symbol.

When culture stories show up in the New York Times, it usually means that whatever trend is being reported on is already played out. People had been talking about the fall of Pepe for quite a while. Olivia Nuzzi’s article in The Daily Beast is generally cited as the most informative and best reported story on the subject. But isolated as I was in my little corner of the internet, I had no idea what was going on. I had only ever seen Pepe the Frog used to express subdued emotional nuance or humor about emotionality. But there was a broader story that was building. Small, out-of-the-way internet communities like the ones in which I circulate were certainly a part of that story, but there were bigger, more influential, more culturally-relevant forums out there which played a much greater role in propelling a saga of Pepe. Here’s a brief primer:

feels_good_man_boys_club-comic

The Pepe the Frog image was created by a cartoonist named Matt Furie back in 2005. Pepe was a character in Furie’s online comic strip, “Boy’s Club.” An illustration of Pepe saying “feels good man” was shared throughout the more benign sectors of 4chan as a kind of silly inside joke about feeling fine with being a little weird. Eventually it found its way to Reddit, where memes are born, and it kind of took off from there. People started drawing Pepe with different emotions, like the Feels Bad Pepe that I first became familiar with. Before long the Pepe face was being used as a shorthand emoji. This made Pepe useful in Twitter discourse, and Twitter brought Pepe to the masses.

4chaners were resentful that their symbol had been taken over by the greater internet and began taking measures to preserve Pepe’s authenticity. From here I’ll quote this fairly lucid history I found on Reddit’s OutOfTheLoop thread to get us to where were are now:

From Wiizel1337:

My home-board on 4chan is /r9k/, and I actually saw the Rare Pepe phenomenon rise. (Traded, and even made some OC.) But that’s my discrepancy with your post. It’s not all of 4chan involved in Rare Pepe’s/Pep-e-Oh/joke crypto-currencies. It’s really only /r9k/. But you’re basically right on mostly everything else. My timeline goes something like this:
1 /r9k/ gets fed up with normies stealing their meme’s. Pop-star and BPT alike.
2 Tiers of Pepe are made. (normie, common, uncommon, rare)
3 We start having “Rare Pepe” threads, and begin to trade, make, and appraise Rare Pepe’s. We trade for GBP, USD, and ZWL. (Not actually, we just say we do.)
4 Soon leads to joke transactions ($1 or $2) through websites like Paypal, just for kek’s.
5 The watermarking of Pepe’s begin.
6 The “PIS” system is made.
7 People start getting fed up with the meme, and begin to become “Pepe Pirates”, stealing Rare Pepe’s and devaluing them.
8 Soon, Pepe Pirates collect enough Rare Pepe’s where they begin to release massive folders of Pepe to devalue the entire market. Things like giving them away for free and demanding rares.
9 Pep-e-oh starts. (It’s an offshoot of the main “rare Pepe” meme.)
10 We start selling them on e-Bay
11 Currencies are made.
12 People start making OC, trying to re-vitalize the market;
13 FREAKING NORMIES FIND OUT ABOUT ALL THIS AND START TALKING ABOUT IT. REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
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The motivation about all this varies from robot to robot, no real answer. And after event 13, it’s died down. Like really quickly.

Some terms you might have missed:
OC = Original Content
PIS = Pepe Index Score. “Determined by the rarity of the Pepe posted multiplied by its quality (determined by humor and art form). Both rarity and quality are represented as values between 1 and 10” http://i.imgur.com/I0c5yaL.png

I love that their response to Pepe’s perceived appropriation and commodification was to create a faux market for Pepe art where they pretended that Pepes were like fungible goods. It’s clever and funny, and it’s also a super-incisive critique of what’s not great about the internet, namely that it is in most cases nothing more than a loud, stupid bazaar for hocking worthless merchandise. I think they’re also saying something about how language exchanged through online communication can function like a consumer market where symbols are adopted and used at varying frequencies based on their social value.

One really positive thing about the the Pepe trade and the PIS rating system is how it seemed to inspire people to get creative with the Pepe meme. Thousands of rare Pepes were produced during this time. Not surprisingly, this generative enthusiasm actually had an opposite result from its original intended effect in that it made Pepe even more popular and loved. Maybe that’s why things changed. Remember, we haven’t even gotten to how Pepe became a “hate symbol.”

hitler_pepe

Most of the Rare Pepes that came out of 4chan were silly and referenced various inside jokes, but some were positively revolting. In typical 4chan fashion, members would try to get a rise out of each other by depicting Pepe doing unspeakable things. There were lots of incest jokes, references to sexual violence, that sort of thing. Some noted that these gross Pepes were particularly effective at warding off normies, and unlike other rare Pepes, were completely inured to meme-ification. You would not see deviant Pepes showing up on Buzzfeed, or even Reddit or Imgur where content can be flagged by users. Gross and vile Pepes thus became the rarest of all Pepes, and of course that just provided further incentive for 4chaners to devise ever more repellent and offensive Pepe depictions. Since there are no sorer subjects than racist, things naturally got pretty racist pretty quick. People made Nazi Pepes and anti-semitic Pepes. It’s difficult to say how sincere this racism was; if Pepe really was used as a vehicle for racist discourse, or if it was as 4chaners say, that racism was simply a convenient stink to skunk their symbol in so as to keep the normies off. Suffice it to say that in this one seedy back alley of the internet Pepe did became associated with bad racist jokes, but by design, that had nothing to do with the normative use of the Pepe meme. Normies didn’t use racist Pepe. That was the whole point of making racist Pepes. So how did the broader Pepe meme become identified with white supremacy and hate speech? What social force could possibly have enough reach and allure and grasp on the minds of so many people that it could catapult the worst parts internet into the cultural mainstream.

Answer: the American presidential election

trump_pepe_tweet

Many of the same people who were exchanging racist Pepes on 4chan also came out as early supporters of the Trump campaign in the summer and fall of 2015. Shortly after Donald Trump officially announced his candidacy, someone created a OC Pepe with Donald Trump hair and signature red tie, standing behind a podium and POTUS seal. The image quickly found its way to Twitter where it was found and tweeted again by Donald Trump himself at 2:53 AM on October 13, 2015, seemingly to share the image with different alt-right news organizations where it could be further disseminated. Perhaps because of Trump’s acknowledgement of the symbol and implicit approval, elements of the alt-right that interface via the internet began using Pepe as a rallying point. #frogtwitter became a major forum for young Trump supporters to meet, exchange politically-themed Pepes, and share mean-spirited sarcasm. As Pepe art from #frogtwitter began to emanate throughout the Twittersphere, journalists started taking notice and the first associations with white nationalism were drawn. Over the spring and summer of the past year, Pepe more and more began to be identified with the #frogtwitter discourse and with the histrionic rhetoric of the election. Then, in September, the Clinton campaign published a definitive “out-ing” of the Pepe meme as a symbol of white supremacy. The subheading for the piece read, “That cartoon frog is more sinister than you might realize.” The article, which is nothing more than campaign literature masquerading as a news story, goes on to explain in very simple terms how “…in recent months, Pepe’s been almost entirely co-opted by the white supremacists who call themselves the “alt-right.” To drive the point even further home and perhaps add a bit more bite to the attack, the Anti-Defamation League followed suit and came out with the hate-speech designation just a few weeks later.

This perhaps might be the nail in the coffin for the Pepe meme. It has been politicized to such a point that its use by the broader internet will from hereafter be, at the very least, fraught. Pepe has now become a tool of rhetoric, and as such its application shall be narrow and circumscribed. It can either be deployed as a symbol of anti-PC defiance by those on the right or as justifications for accusations of racism by those on the left. I don’t see how it could every be extricated from these very specific connotations. Pepe, who was once an object for mutual recognition and common understanding, a force that brought people together and cemented community, a true meme in every sense of the word, is now a signifier of division. He’s an engine for splitting people apart and fanning antipathy. He is no longer a meme, he’s an insult.

Memes die for many reasons. Usually they simply exhaust themselves in our minds and we move on. Pepe was different. Because of his protean nature he could be constantly re-invented and seen afresh. But this malleability also spelled his undoing. He now has the dubious distinction of being the meme that transformed into a monster.

Out To Sea

mscbarbara-jpg-crop-original-original

I was duffing off at work the other day, reading back issues of the Economist, and I came across this article on revenue shortfalls in the global shipping industry, and I seem to keep coming back to it in my mind. The article mostly focuses on what the big shipping companies are doing in Europe to respond to slowing global trade, but the story is introduced with a few disastrous details from Hanjin’s recent bankruptcy filing and the complete chaos this has caused in container ports and global supply chains around the world.

Hanjin, which is headquartered in Busan, South Korea is an enormous operation. It is the seventh largest shipping company in the world. It owns 74 container ships, an additional 15 bulk cargo carriers, and thousands upon thousands of shipping containers. All of these assets are scattered to the far corners of the earth and are almost constantly in transit. When Hanjin filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States and South Korea on August 29th, these assets were essentially abandoned by the company, literally overnight, with no capital or plan to bring any of it back to port. It is estimated that something on the order of $14 billion in cargo was left stranded at sea, along with the ships themselves and the ships’ crews. Ports wouldn’t let the Hanjin ships land for fear that they wouldn’t be compensated for docking expenses and unloading fees. And so dozens of ships, many with perishable cargos of food, were simply made to weigh anchor in the harbors of Tokyo, Sidney, New Jersey, Long Beach, Singapore, and everywhere else and await the bankruptcy suit to play itself out. In most cases the crews have been forced to remain with the their vessels. In some ports they are strictly forbidden from even leaving their ships. Korean news outlets have been following one such crew aboard the Hanjin Rome, which has essentially been incarcerated at sea since for the last month an a half. Their ship was arrested by Port of Singapore authorities just a few days after Hanjin filed bankruptcy protection. The admiralty laws of Singapore allow the port to seize vessels on behalf of claimants seeking payment from an owner. Under this method of arrest, the crew members of such vessels are more or less held as prisoners aboard their own ship. Of course they have committed no crime, nor have the been accused of any, but the law of the sea states that they cannot abandon their ship, and if their ship is held under arrest, then effectively so are they. It’s all very Kafka-esque, these men being held in purgatory, not even allowed to set foot on land; loitering about a piece of industrial machinery from one day to the next, waiting for the right paperwork to be shuffled through an endless judicial proceeding so that the order can be given to let them go. I think this a very literal illustration of what Melville meant to figuratively convey in the concept of being out-to-sea.
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I read the article in the Economist and came home tonight to research the matter further. I’ve found that since early September when the article was published Hanjin has managed to come up with the money to unload all of its stranded cargo and begin the process of recalling its vessels to their home ports. Fortune magazine reported last week that Korean Air lines, which holds stock in Hanjin, has made available $54 million to pay docking and handling fees at the different ports to which Hanjin is contractually obligated to deliver. Cargo will still be one to two months overdue, costing customers millions in lost commerce. But surely this is encouraging news for Hanjin crews. One need only know that an end is possible and that life will change to be able to endure a little longer.

mscleigh-jpg-crop-original-original

The Art of the Art of the Deal

trumpholdsdeal

I read the first half of Donald Trump’s 1987 business-advice book cum memoir Art of the Dealer last weekend. A fun read, actually. The prose are simple and concise. The stories are amusing and replete with dropped names and power plays. The book spent 51 weeks on the best seller list in the late 80’s and I can see why. It gives the common person a window into the life of a very rich and powerful man. The first chapter is just an hour by hour recounting of a week in Donald Trump’s life. We hear about the phone calls he makes, the deals he’s considering, the charity benefits he goes to, the “work” he does at his office in Trump Tower in Manhattan. I think for a long time people appreciated it for the narrative voice. The book is written in the first person, presumably by Trump, though the book’s co-author Tony Schwartz has come out in the last year as saying that he wrote the entire thing himself with little to no input from Trump. If this is the case—and it probably is, in all honesty—then Schwartz does a magnificent job of matching Trump’s signature cadence and diction. I think it’s in line too with how people would expect an impatient and aggressive businessman to speak: short sentences with few subordinate clauses, uncomplicated ideas left largely unsupported, unfailing confidence in the truth of what’s expressed, a complete absence of anxiety. The Donald Trump of Art of the Deal, whether contrived or genuine, is very much a “don’t sweat the small stuff” kind of guy. He is shown to have an innate ability to reduce complicated matters to their most basic and essential components. He rejects doubt and counter-argument as mere distraction. A true pragmatist, Trump seems to care only about what that which prompts him to act, or the alternative, to wait it out and “keep your options open.”

One imagines the initial intent of the author and the publisher was for Art of the Deal to be an advice book brimming with useful negotiating tactics and investment tips and only a chapter or two of Donal Trump aggrandizement, just enough to establish his authority on the subject matter. Instead that formula was reversed: just one chapter of Art of the Deal is devoted to actual dealmaking; the rest is shallow memoir with a few insights thrown in about the lessons Trump learns from different episodes in his life. Reading the advice chapter, one discovers quite quickly that there just isn’t that much to the report when it comes to the Trump philosophy for doing business. The chapter even begins, “My style of deal-making is quite simple and straight forward.” Trump uses no theories of negotiation or of rhetorical persuasion. He has no special sense of how markets behave or where to find undervalued assets. He simply “aims high” and keeps “pushing” until he gets what he wants. And if you’re already playing from a position of advantage, that apparently is all you need.

Trump does have a handful of strategies for leading and dealmaking, which are referred to in the book as “Trump Cards.” Perhaps it could be worthwhile to consider a few of these individually:

 

Think Big

“If you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big.”
I can imagine Tony Schwartz writing that line with some relish. The thinking big mentality here means simply placing larger bets to reap larger rewards. Of course, to bet high you have to have some money to begin with, and you have to be far enough ahead that you can absorb the loss and live to bet again. One has to wonder for whom this advice is intended. It assumes the actor commands some degree of advantage already and that that advantage can be leveraged for still greater opportunities. I think the point of including it here has less to do with effective business strategy and more with motivational encouragement to seek—and expect—better returns. It tracks with a lot of prosperity gospel nonsense that tells people what they want to hear and not what they can come to expect. It also conveys a lot of what makes Trump appealing to people, that being the swagger and bravado of a winner.

 

Protect the Downside and the Upside Will Take Care of Itself

“It’s a very good business being the house.”

This one seems to have been thrown in to balance out the bullishness of the Think Big section. Here Trump tells us to minimize our exposure and take the easy money when you find it. I actually think the two ideas taken together constitute something that might approximate a coherent business strategy. When you are able to raise the kind of capital that Trump can, your business dealings start to transcend basic commerce. You come into the ownership of things that are so big that they are not simply properties and assets; they are things that compose the greater apparatus of society and the economy. Such investments are sure to pay, so long as society—or the part of the society that’s being laid claim to—remains solvent. Skyscrapers in Manhattan remain profitable if people keep doing business in New York. Casinos generate revenue so long as people go on vacation. The likelihood of any of these capital goods diminishing in value is comparable to the likelihood of there being some kind of social revolution that changes the way people on earth go about their daily lives. It goes without saying that the risk of losing under such conditions is quite low.

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Maximize Your Options

“I keep a lot of balls in the air, because most deals fall out, no matter how promising they seem at first.”

All he’s doing here is telling us to hedge our bets. It’s such a banal insight that I hesitate to even lend it any thought. Though I do think it could strike an average person with average finances as novel that the more money you have to invest in things, the more options one is given for investment. Again, this advice is really only practicable if you literally have more money than you know what to do with.

 

Know the Market

“…I don’t hire a lot of number-crunchers, and I don’t trust fancy marketing surveys. I do my own surveys and draw my own conclusions.”

It has taken us all a very long to time to admit it, but Trump does know his customer. He has an instinct for seeing what people want most and a willingness to deliver. He doesn’t say it anywhere in the book, but if you look at the sort of businesses Trump runs and the message he reflects back to the consumer, you can unmistakably see what he thinks people want—and he isn’t wrong. People want to feel like they’re winners. They want to feel like they’re prospering and doing well in life. They want to think that they’ve been blessed with intelligence, prowess, and good luck. In the beginning of his career Trump sold newer, slightly nicer apartments to middle income people, and these apartments gave them the feeling of upward mobility. Then he moved on to Manhattan and began selling to a nouveau riche, people who actually were winning at capitalism and wanted material affirmation of their success. He bought casinos knowing that that brief and fleeting sense of victory the gambler gets from the occasional win will always keep the people coming back. Seeing professional sports as yet another delivery mechanism for getting the consumer his fix of vicariously experienced victory, he bought a football team. And of course now he is running for President of the United States on a one plank platform of making people feel as though America is winning again.

Understand, I see nothing wrong with people wanting to feel like they are doing well in life. It makes perfect sense that we should want to succeed as individuals in a world dominated and defined by market competition. There is no shame in demanding one’s dignity and wanting to be acknowledged and admired. I take issue with the man who presumes to sell our dignity to us to us as a fungible commodity. The scam here is that Trump is not offering a means for obtaining victory in life. He’s only offering the feeling of having won. There’s no guarantee that the feeling will signify real accomplishment, or that it will persist, or that there will be any truth to it at all.

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There are about a half dozen other Trump Cards in the “Elements of the Deal” chapter, all of them having to do with consumer manipulation, managing exposure, and exerting leverage from a position of power. None of these lessons are actionable for normal person, and I don’t think they were ever intended to be. Art of the Deal does not teach you how to get rich. It teaches you what it’s like to be rich. It lets you sniff the bankroll without giving you any of the bills. And sadly, for a lot of people, having tickets to the show of someone else’s life is good enough. I suppose luxuriating in fantasies of another’s luxury rather than putting something on the line to realize your own is a way of minimizing exposure.

Fish on Academic Inquiry

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Students at most American universities began returning to school these last few weeks. And with them has come a renewed discussion over intellectual freedom in the classroom. This year’s incoming freshman class at the University of Chicago was sent this letter from the Dean of Students in which the Dean, apparently responding to some perceived challenge, affirmed the university’s commitment to academic freedom and the administrators’ refusal to support “trigger warning” requirements and intellectual “safe spaces.” The tone of the letter is weirdly antagonistic though it names no adversary. In the absence of an organized argument to join, it seems the University of Chicago has resolved to create its own. In the last week, a new debate has arisen in academia and throughout the broader internet over free expression, inclusiveness, the role of the teacher in relation to the student, and the meaning of liberal values in the university enterprise. Here I’m using the classical meaning of liberalism advanced by John Locke, James Madison, John Stewart Mill and many many others, which rests on the free exchange of ideas, the impartial contestation of those ideas, and equity of power between contestants. In the modern university, Liberalism provides the rules and structure by which debate and inquiry are to be carried out with the aim of producing a reliable and credible result. To question Liberalism’s rule is a radical gesture and potentially very destructive. And yet Liberalism, when practiced correctly, demands that we regard it with some skepticism. For when Liberalism defeats its skeptics, it renews its reign and emerges ever more resilient and unassailable. We must always scrutinize Liberalism for flaws, because it does have some. I think the recent arguments over inclusion versus expression in universities emanates from the classic tension in Liberalism between freedom and equality.

There have been plenty of other attacks against the sacrosanct institution of liberalism, in the last few years, in the last few decades, in the last few centuries. One of the more interesting excursions into liberal disputation that I’ve found recently is this essay by Stanley Fish which ran in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few weeks ago. Fish comes to the defense of the old totems of academic persuasive writing: impartial analysis, exhibition of supporting evidence, citation of accepted authority, involvement with related counter arguments, and so on and so forth. He contrasts this grand old method of patient, plodding inquiry with a more activist approach–work that has an interest in some other agenda beyond the cold, mechanical pursuit of truth. He cites a student with whom he came to loggerheads over whether it is acceptable to submit work which betrays an obvious political bias and which proceeds from an unproven ideological proposition, rather applying the more orthodox method of starting from a posture of neutrality and building proof toward whatever conclusion the facts lead. It may seem like Fish is setting up straw men, but I’ve encountered people at my own university who do work this way and see nothing wrong with doing so. I know post-structuralists who reject any attempt at objectivity on the grounds that it is an imaginary precept and impossible to achieve. I know critical theorists whose explorations into identity politics are so wound up in their own narcissistic experience of themselves that they are utterly blinded to the ideas and arguments offered by others. I know social scientists who not only “study” subaltern populations but they also carry water for them politically and who would be the first ones at the barricades fighting for them when the revolution breaks out. And Fish is correct: challenge any of these activist types about the validity of their work as persuasive scholarship and their first response is to question the validity of an academy that fails to see the validity of their work. Yes, I’ve know plenty like this. I found it more than a little heartening to see them put in their place by one of the old masters.

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Regrettably, the Fish essay is behind the Chronicle’s paywall. Here’s a rough summary:

Paragraphs 1 to 3: Fish complains about the uncredited appropriation of his interpretive community idea by other scholars. Defines interpretive community as being “made up of those who, by virtue of training, experience, and practice, have internalized the norms of some purposive enterprise—law, eduction, politics, plumbing—to the point where they see with its eyes and walk in its ways without having to think about it.”

Paragraphs 4 and 5: Proposes that this episode demonstrates the value of originality in academic discourse.

Paragraphs 6 to 9: Cites critics of the originality value, those who question the possibility of originality given the supposed spuriousness of authorship. Observes that such critics, in spite of themselves, still sign their work and take proprietorship over their ideas.

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Paragraphs 10 to 12: How to make good academic arguments. Fish discusses the imperative in academic writing of contextualizing ones work by citing the work of others and with addressing opposing viewpoints. Uses example of student’s non-persuasive polemic.

Paragraphs 13 to 15: The problem with academic programs that give admission to non-academic writing, that is, writing that is not rigorously argued using the traditional framework of persuasive writing.

Paragraphs 16 to 21: Challenge to professional norms is perfectly legitimate, but it must be made within the boundaries of liberal inquiry. “An academic discipline can tolerate any challenge so long as the challenge is conducted within its precincts. Supposedly subversive arguments are absorbed into the very intellectual structures they claim to overthrow.”

Paragraphs 22 to 30: Formation of acceptable norms of argumentation and what counts as a worthy argument. Example: Holocaust denial.

Paragraphs 31 to 36: Effects of academic arguments. Academic arguments are made to produce a better understanding of the world in their listener. This is in contrast to activist messages which are intended to inspire people to action. Because academic arguments can be purely speculative, it is possible to achieve a certain degree of objectivity. This is the utility of academic discourse—that participants may inquire into a topic without having an interest in the outcome. This utility must be preserved. “[Academic arguments] are weightless, that is, without weight in the give and take of political strife unless they are appropriated for political purposes. But their weightlessness is their glory, and that is why they are different from domestic arguments, political arguments, and legal arguments. Like virtue, the making of them is their own reward. Other rewards are left to time and heaven.”

Reading this essay for now the third or forth time, I’m led to ask what I find so compelling in it. The argument isn’t particularly original; it’s just a version of Adorno’s theory and praxis dialectic decontextualized to the cloister of academic disputation. Fish’s language has a remarkable clarity, but the structure of the piece is a bit diffuse and he seems to begin to lose focus by the end. The Holocaust denial example is not fully explicated, I think. In spite of its shortcomings, the essay is still an interesting and even exciting piece of writing to read. I think it demonstrates exactly what good academic writing is supposed to do and what bad “non-professional” writing fails to accomplish. It arouses curiosity and intrigue. It weaves taught, marvelous ideas for the reader and then immediately calls them into question. It puts forth a proposition that offers the reader a means of making meaning of the ideas that are presented. It offers credible evidence to support that proposition. It persuades the reader to its side but also shows her the merits of the other side and what of interest can be found there. I find this to be a much more effective and worthwhile mode of writing than the dreck it inveighs against, because it seems to be at its very core motivated by honest curiosity. It is a path of thought beaten by an inquisitive spirit. And of all the motivations that propel humans forward, I think that is the best.

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The Sin of Idle Sport

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Today another September starts. As evidenced by my complete neglect of the Golden Assay I had a very enjoyable good summer. I wasted it all in games, sports, outdoor pursuits; all the things one ought to do with good weather. But one can indulge too much in leisure and become ashamed of his idleness. I am reminded here of John Bunyan’s “conversion” on the Elstow village green. As roads to Damascus go, his was wonderfully banal. Bunyan, of course, was an obedient Christian his entire life, but he enjoyed sport and bell-ringing on Sabbath days and apparently considered himself a spiritual delinquent for doing so. I think he was hard on himself. The wretch worked six days a week as an itinerant tinker, and understandably, needed a day off from time to time and a little diversion to go with it. But the Creator won’t even give us that, sadly, for one Sunday, while he was playing Tip-Cat with the other sinners, a numinous voice from the heavens admonished him to find shame in fun-having and quit sports. The line at the time was that Christ disapproved of sport because it was wasted effort and an idler’s refuge. A pious Christian works six days and spends the seventh in prayer. Any deviation from a rigid schedule of industry and devotion is depravity. I think this had to do with the Calvinist position of determinism and their equating sin with rejection of God’s plan. If you spend your life in work and worship, you are carrying out the destiny God intends for you and are therefore a righteous being, a saint even. Idle pastimes, observance of leisure, general amusement, are not evils in and of themselves; it’s simply that they divert people from more meaningful activity. Bunyan’s sin was not that he was playing Tip-Cat; it was what he was not doing while playing with his friends.

This animosity towards sport has almost completely vanished in the minds of modern people. Today sport is considered a noble pursuit. The exercise one gets from sports is understood to be essential to physiological health. The signs of regular exercise on the body are considered attractive. In a complete reversal of previous opinion, the practice of sport is now thought to be an indication of personal discipline and integrity. We even use athletics as a method of instilling discipline among young people in school. It is hard to imagine how totally different our conception of sports is in the protestant Christian world from the view of past generations. It feels like it has been with us forever, but it’s actually only recently that people began having even a positive view of exercise. Before the Industrial Revolution, physical activity was associated with manual labor and low social status. Sport encompassed hunting and riding and had nothing to do with physical exertion. Beginning in the late 19th century, the inchoate science of modern medicine demonstrated physiological benefits from vigorous exercise and proper diet. This led to the growth of a spa culture among the new leisure classes and a practice of new sports like aquatics, gymnastics, tennis, etc., the performance of which was done not just for diversion but for health.

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Of course, there had always been a custom of physical conditioning and training in martial life. Within the context of military service a young man was encouraged to develop his physique through exercise and perfect his combat technique with regular drills so that he might become a more effective soldier. This tradition of militarism, of cultivating virility and strength, of meeting the adversary and besting him in an honorable contest, informs the formation of modern athletics as much, if not more, than the institution and normalization of exercise and the desire for good-health.

It is surprising how many of our sports today are abstracted pantomimes of warfare; not modern war but antiquated, non-mechanized warfare. One of my favorite sports from this past summer’s Olympics was the pentathlon, a multi-event competition comprising five extremely varied disciplines: swimming, running, fencing, riding, and shooting. It only narrowly made it into the games. Though held continually in every Olympiad since 1912, many have questioned its relevance in modern athletics. First devised by Baron Peirre de Cobertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games, the pentathlon was intended to model the skill-set of a 19th century cavalry soldier caught behind enemy lines: he must ride an unfamiliar horse, face the enemy with sword and pistol, swim in lake or river, and run great distances to return to his encampment. What I appreciate most about de Cobertin’s introduction of the pentathlon into the 1912 games is that these skills would have already been obsolete by the onset of the 20th century, and any doubt of this would have been completely erased with the Great War just a few years later. And yet the sport is still practiced. 72 men and women representing nations around the globe competed in the pentathlon last month, executing antiquated maneuvers of warriors from centuries ago. And lest we think our other sports are free of such influence, remember that our modern pentathlon itself is an updating of the classic contest from the ancient Olympiad. In the pentathlon of 500 BC the events were running, jumping, throwing, and wrestling. What sport does not include at least one of these most basic movements of the human body? What is athletics if not the practice of an old ritual of physical urgency? A solemn and determined preparation for the unforeseen contest to come.

Pharaoh’s Tomb

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A couple weeks ago I was in Dallas for a work conference and I had the opportunity to visit the George W. Bush Presidential Center. It was, like all presidential libraries, a fantastic spectacle of power and wealth. Ostensibly, the point of these places is to preserve the papers and records of the executive administration for historical research. Most presidents treat them as a means for securing their legacies. This is done with a mixture of awe-inspiring architecture, propaganda-laced museum exhibits, and, of course, very careful control of the vital information buried within.

Compared with the LBJ’s towering monolith at the University of Texas or Reagan’s mountaintop fortress overlooking the Simi Valley, the George W. Bush Presidential Center has a more understated grandeur. It’s built in a weird neo-neoclassical, antebellum style that appears to mimic the old mansion residences of the Highland Park neighborhood that surrounds it. The public is allowed access to only a small portion of the building’s interior, giving one the false impression that the space is not very large. In fact, the George W. Bush Center is the second largest presidential library and comprises 207,000 square feet. President Bush raised an astounding $500 million for the construction and maintenance of the library. Of the building’s several wings, I only visited one: the museum.

In the grand, marble and granite lobby of the Presidential Center’s museum visitors may gather, purchase tickets, and gape bemusedly at the lavish gifts of state given to the President and to the First Lady by various dictatorial regimes from across the globe. I found that the ostentatiousness of the gifts roughly corresponded to the poverty of the country of origin. Africans autocrats seem to be fond of garish sculptures shaped from precious metals. Middle Eastern states gave gems. The Saudi royal family gave a jewelry set of diamond and sapphires which itself is probably worth a moderate-size fortune.

The museum exhibits were not as bluntly propagandic as I was expecting. I think there was a willingness on the part of the museum’s planners to acknowledge that a uniformly positive narrative of the George W. Bush presidency would be met with some skepticism. Bush’s approval ratings at the end of his second term were hovering around 30% and most of his economic and foreign policy had been roundly discredited. Consequently, the museum’s focus tends to be more on the historical events that took place during the Bush presidency and less on the extent to which the president shaped and had influence over those events. Not surprisingly, too, the museum gives a good deal of both physical and intellectual space to the 9/11 attacks, when Bush’s approval ratings were at an all-time high and the country was awash in patriotic sentiment. Special focus is paid to the speech President Bush gave at the Ground Zero a few day after the attacks, with artifacts like the bull horn that was used to deliver the speech, audio recordings, handwritten drafts of the text, and high resolution photographs all on display. I don’t remember this being a significant occurrence at the time, but the museum posits it as a galvanizing moment in the national consciousness and an heroic act that signaled strength and resilience to the nation and to the world. I don’t actually think the museum is trying to mislead visitors by over-playing the ground zero speech. I imagine Bush’s view this was a genuinely important moment in his life, and I think we learn more about the President—though perhaps less about September 11th—by seeing how it is presented in the museum. In this respect, the museum is honestly fulfilling its purpose by preserving the provenance of the president’s thought process.

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A healthy diet may work slowly on the health, but its effectiveness can last for a very long time people has been taking the levitra fast shipping herb to reduce their problem and induce contentment in their life. But the most preferred and popular treatment for erectile dysfunction. super viagra uk These programs instill the right attitude to inspire canadian discount cialis fellow members in their organization and also manage their time effectively for organizational development and growth. What is tadalafil? levitra online pharmacy Tadalafil relaxes muscles and increases blood flow to particular areas of the body. Be that as it may, the George W. Bush Presidential Center Museum cannot be said to be perfectly honest and measured in its representation of the Bush years. The omissions are noticeable: no explanation given for the failed occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, no justification for Abu Ghraib or the administration’s tacit approval of torture, no mention of Guantanamo, complete disavowal of the “Axis of Evil” speech, the Hurricane Katrina exhibit included nothing about FEMA’s disastrously inadequate response, nothing about how the financial crisis might have been averted through better regulation of the housing market, or about how the Patriot Act might have jeopardized our civil liberties. The countless blunders and errors in judgement, all of them danced around ever so delicately, as though the place was less a museum and more a white elephant preserve. But if I try to imagine a presidential museum that did plunge itself heedlessly into the controversies and debates of its day, what would it be but a pillbox of political partisanship and bitter antipathies? What lessons would it have to teach beside shameless historical revisionism and pointed bluster? In the story that the Bush library attempts to tell, there is a minor note of reconciliation. One of the more popular features of the museum is an interactive exhibit called the “Decision Points Theater.” Visitors are placed in front of individual video displays and introduced as a group to one of three key crises which President Bush was forced to confront during his presidency. Given a limited set of facts presented by a host of advisors, all in various states of disagreement with one another, you are prompted choose between three courses of action. At the end of the exercise all of the participants’ choices are averaged and a cumulative decision is presented. You are not told if your answer was right or wrong, only what the president decided and what the consequences of his decision were. It is a magnificent device of rhetorical ethos, one in which the president seems to be saying to his critics, you think you could have done better? And for the most part, we do chose the same decisions that the president did. I will say that the decision points are cherry-picked somewhat. Apparently, they removed the decision point about going to war in Iraq, presumably since there is been a good deal of debate about what the administration did and did not know in that situation. While the exercise fails to make Bush’s policy positions seem any less objectionable, it does succeed in making the president a more sympathetic character in the drama of our nation’s history. It really is difficult to make these decisions, when none of your options seems exactly right, and you are keenly aware of the extreme and unforeseeable consequences any decision is bound to trigger. It illuminates just how untenable the position of the president is. No one emerges from the apparatus of power with her or his soul entirely intact.

The Bush museum has other exhibits that create a similar effect of placing you, the average person, at the reins of power. There is, for example, an exact replica of the oval office, painstakingly recreated down to the upholstery and the wallpaper. The only thing missing, we are told, is the bust of Winston Churchill, because they could not get the size right apparently. The museum stations a photographer in the exhibit who can take pictures of you sitting at the president’s desk which can be purchased on your way out in the gift shop. I think this consonance with the average person underscores a lot about what made the Bush presidency appealing. Here we have a man of manifestly average intelligence and ability, friendly in his demeanor and firm in his beliefs, who after a series of improbably political victories finds his himself in the highest office in the land, this proving to all that it does not take that much really to be a great man. More than any other president, I think people saw themselves in George W. Bush, because he was mediocre, like most everybody else.

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Touring the oval office replica I was struck by the room’s artificiality. This was due I think not to the fact of the exhibit’s being a simulacra of the real thing, but more because the real thing has the uncanny feel of a museum exhibit. In every archival photo we have of the oval office, it always look so impeccably maintained. When a president is at the desk there is rarely nothing more in front of him than a single piece of paper an a cup of coffee. Most often we only see presidents using the phone or hosting guests of state. It makes one wonder if any work actually gets done in this room. I would wager that it doesn’t. The oval office is more like a stage upon which the gestures of governance are performed for a unsuspecting constituency. The real labor of statecraft, the schemes, the maneuvering, the intrigue, is played out behind closed doors. In this sense I think the oval office exhibit in the George W. Bush Presidential Center serves an almost identical purpose to its counterpart in the White House in that it functions as a sign or totem of a power whose true countenance remains obscured from view. It and the museum to which it is attached are a fun and palatable surrogate for the complex of secrets which lie hidden in the Center’s restricted archives.

Here I’ve gone on for pages about the Bush Library’s museum exhibits and have largely ignored the central purpose of the place which is preserving and restricting access to the administration’s corpus of records and information. I imagine the museum being a mere tip to a vast iceberg of material concealed beneath the Center’s liminal surface. The public is not allowed access to the archives. Even if you have a stated research interest, you still must arrange an appointment with one of the Center’s 20 or so archivists and submit a request to obtain material from the collection. Of course, this would be rather difficult to do given that there is no comprehensive inventory of the library’s contents. If we look at the Library’s finding aids, we find surprisingly little in the way of documentation. There is no catalog, no metadata. And this for a collection of over 70 million leaves of paper and petabytes of digital information. How are we to know anything about the contents of this mountain of information? The only material that has been digitized and made available on the internet is a smattering of FOIA requests which the library has been compelled to service. I wonder what it must be like to be a librarian to a collection like this. It seems like you’d be more like a prison guard than a guide; that you would spend your days patrolling the vault, protecting its contents from the intrusions of sunlight and human thought.

Thus I concluded my trip to the George W. Bush Presidential Center, great monument to the old king. As we drove back through Highland Park on our coach bus, the driver, who was black, told us about how he had been pulled over by police while scouting the route the day before. He said they wanted to know if he had business in the community. We rode back to our suburban hotel, through the sprawl of Dallas and surrounding communities, this most American of places. I recommend visiting the Bush Library next time your are in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. It is something to do in a city famously empty and sedate for its monstrous size.

Bishop Berkeley and America

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THE MUSE, disgusted at an age and clime
  Barren of every glorious theme,
In distant lands now waits a better time,
  Producing subjects worthy fame.
 
In happy climes, where from the genial sun
  And virgin earth such scenes ensue,
The force of art by nature seems outdone,
  And fancied beauties by the true;
 
In happy climes, the seat of innocence,
  Where nature guides and virtue rules,
Where men shall not impose for truth and sense
  The pedantry of courts and schools:
 
There shall be sung another golden age,
  The rise of empire and of arts,
The good and great inspiring epic rage,
  The wisest heads and noblest hearts.
 
Not such as Europe breeds in her decay;
  Such as she bred when fresh and young,
When heavenly flame did animate her clay,
  By future poets shall be sung.
 
Westward the course of empire takes its way;
  The first four acts already past,
Both consciousness and awareness expand. tadalafil tablets prices http://icks.org/n/data/ijks/1482457047_add_file_3.pdf Unfortunately, choices like this come up all the time, and unless a man has buy generic tadalafil an incessant craving for sexual activity and never stops thinking about it. However, it became viagra samples for sale popular in the rest of the world who are having issues related to sex. The blood fails to pass ahead to the penile organ of canadian cheap viagra the man. A fifth shall close the drama with the day;
  Time’s noblest offspring is the last.

These lines were on the minds of the early regents of the University of California when they selected the site for their new campus, and it was in honor of their author that they named the place Berkeley. It’s interesting that Bishop Berkeley holds such a revered place in the intellectual life of Anglo-America. In Europe, and especially in Britain, Berkeley has been viewed as an irrelevant distraction from the ineluctable march of materialism and the growth of the physical sciences. His writings were either ignored or ridiculed. In Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson we have the famous “I refute it thus” scene where Johnson kicks a stone and jokingly claims that his stinging foot disproves Berkeley’s theory that the universe is immaterial and purely ideal instead.

Berkeley has received far better treatment in America. This may be due to his own interest in the New World. He lived in Rhode Island for several years and tried to establish an school in Barbados. As “On the Prospect of Planting Arts…” shows, Berkeley plainly saw great promise in the Americas. But more than this circumstantial affinity, I think there is quite a lot in Berkeley’s philosophy that corresponds to American thought. I see elements of Berkeleian metaphysics in American Pragmatism, Transcendentalism, and the American spirit of exploration.

In addition to the excellent Youtube video above, my favorite explanation of Berkeleian metaphysics appears in the Encyclopedia Britannica Eleventh Edition

“[Berkeley’s principle] may be expressed in the proposition that no existence is conceivable—and therefore possible—which is not either conscious spirit or the ideas (i.e. objects) of which such spirit is conscious…. Matter, as an abstract, unperceived substance or cause, is shown to be impossible, an unreal conception; true substance is affirmed to be conscious spirit, true causality the free activity of such a spirit, while physical substantiality and causality are held to be merely arbitrary, though constant, relations among phenomena connected subjectively by suggestion or association, objectively in the Universal Mind. In ultimate analysis, then, nature is conscious experience, and forms the sign or symbol of a divine, universal intelligence and will.”

The article is split between two different contributors, R. Ad. and J. M. M. The first, who seems to have written the original article, does a passable job of summarizing Berkeley’s works and his biography, but makes no attempt to hide his prejudice against his subject’s ideas. The second author offers a kind of addendum to the main article in which he weighs Berkeley’s contribution to early inquiries into empiricism and contextualizes him within the Western philosophical tradition. He restates Berkeley’s position in a more measured and altogether more elegant manner:

“External things are produced by the will of the divine intelligence; they are caused, and caused in a regular order; there exists in the divine mind archetypes, of which sense experience may be said to be the realization in our finite minds. Our belief in the permanence of something which corresponds to the association in our minds of actual and possible sensations means belief in the orderliness of nature; and that is merely assurance that the universe is pervaded and regulated by mind. Physical science is occupied in endeavouring to decipher the divine ideas which find realization in our limited experience, in trying to interpret the divine language of which natural things are the words and letters, and in striving to bring human conceptions into harmony with the divine thoughts. Instead, therefore, of fate or necessity, or matter, or the unknown, a living, active mind is looked upon as the centre and spring of the universe, and this is the essence of the Berkeleian metaphysics.”

This idea of trying to decipher the “divine mind” through experience I think is central to American thinking and the method by which American thinkers have sought to understand the world. When Emerson describes how nature provides symbol and meaning to our thought, what is this but a recognition of nature’s archetypes and their relationships with one another? When Thoreau insists that Nature has most to teach us when it is wild and undisturbed what he is advocating is unmediated access to the divine mind as expressed through being and causality. When Natty Bumpo in the Leather Stocking Tales observes that there is no better cathedral than the woods, he is not denigrating churches and organized religion as some have interpreted, but rather he is extolling the natural world as an expression of the divine that is no less significant or sacred than scripture. Charles Sanders Peirce saw little to no meaning in existence if it could not be proven through experience, thus his Pragmatic Maxim bears a good deal of resemblance to Berekeley’s New Theory of Vision: “Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.”

If you look at a list of State mottos, except for those that pertain to armed rebellion, every one invokes the necessity of providence. The motto of my own state, Colorado, is Nil sine numine, which translates to “Nothing without God.” If you read this as an ontological proposition, it essentially corroborates Bishop’s idea of a the divine mind and enshrines the concept in the state’s very identity. But my favorite state motto, and the one I think that gets closest to what Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy really means to Americans, is California’s Eureka. “I have found it.” Supposedly uttered by the 49ers upon having struck gold, I think Eureka captures the elation and astonishment with which we are met in our encounters with this miraculous world. It implies discovery and startling revelation. It is an expression appreciation over faith rewarded. Faith that that which we do not perceive is still nonetheless existent and waiting for us to uncover it. The utterance of Eureka accompanies the ecstatic communion with the divine will, when we are permitted a glimpse into the universe’s true identity and made familiar with yet another of God’s infinite secrets.

AncientOfDays

Nesmania

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For almost two years I’ve been watch this guy on twitch.tv who calls himself “The Mexican Runner” try to beat every Nintendo game ever released. These are games for the original Nintendo Entertainment System with releases spanning from 1985 to 1994. In all, there are 710 games TMR is trying to beat. So far he has completed 395. He’s past half-way.

MR calls the project “Nesmania.” When he first started, it was a unique idea. No one had ever tried to master every game for a particular console, let alone one with as punishing a game library as the NES. I started following it back in August 2014 when he was at 60 or 70 games. In that time TMR has logged over 2000 hours of game play. That’s the equivalent of about one year of full-time work.

One of the things I really admire about Nesmania, besides just the insanely ambitious premise of the thing, is all of the meticulous documentation TMR and his followers create around the project. Every minute of every game is live streamed over Twitch, usually to online audiences of between 600 to 800 viewers. The gameplay video is then archived, both in the highlight section of TMR’s Twitch channel and on his Youtube channel. TMR even rates and reviews each game after he’s competed it.
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I have to admit, I have a soft spot for the NES. It was the only video game console I spent considerable time playing when I was a kid. And what I’ve discovered watching Nesmania is that I never even scratched the surface of what the NES was about. I think I’ve played maybe 10% of the entire game library. I try to watch a little bit of every video, just to get an idea of what each game is like. Truth be told, though, I’m really not capable of sitting down and watching an entire playthrough. For one thing, I’m an adult man with a job, and I don’t have time. But also, most of the games are just really boring. Dull to watch but I’m sure also dull to play. Just this last month, TMR had to beat all three of the Bases Loaded games within a couple weeks of each other. For every title he had to win 80 nine inning baseball games. They each took him between 30 to 40 hours each to beat. It was painful to watch. He’d basically score a run in the first inning and then bunt out on every subsequent at-bat just to move the games along faster. But those are easy games. To watch him systematically destroy some of the hardest video games every made has at times been truly thing of beauty. He beat all of the Dragon Warrior games blind, without any maps, hints, or cheats. For Q-bert he basically had to memorized the game’s entire button sequence to get through. And his epic 37 hour slog through Ikari Warriors is one of the only documented instances of someone beating that game without resorting to the ABBA code.

Now, of course it goes without saying that Nesmania is an absurd and quixotic venture that helps no one, serves no real purpose, and is probably a complete waste of time. Yes, it is clearly nothing more than a bizarre fantasy quest of an eccentric shut-in. But there’s an undeniably poetry to what The Mexican Runner is trying to do. No one has ever passed all the NES games before, so in that sense TMR something like a gaming explorer, planting his flag atop a heretofore unassailable peak. Also, I think will ultimately be looked at as an activity in deep archiving. There is a lot of cultural content in the NES library that’s locked away in an obsolete digital format, which even when emulated can only be accessed by playing out the program. Nesmania unfolds each game and creates a record of its contents. It’s surprising that game developers aren’t already doing this to capture and preserve their work. Perhaps years from now, the Nesmania videos will be used for historical research. Even for people like me who still remember playing these games as kids, Nesmania is still a fantastic feast for nostalgia.