msstacy13 | Recent Entries

"A far more slippery slope is the one which leads to an ever narrower outlook; a self-imposed insulation and isolation which brings on a hardening not only of one's convictions, but of one's heart as well." I think most of you know that I'm a Republican. I am, in a manner of speaking, among the first fruits of the Party's embrace of fundamentalism, and feel very like the young woman in Downfall who says, "My family told me not to get involved with Nazis. What will I do now, go back to them and say, 'Oh, you were right!' ?" The Republican Party's effort to turn the country around through political means has proven to be an unparalleled disaster, from which I am certain we shall never recover. I remain a Republican not because I still believe in elective theocracy, but because leaving now would be a pathetically contemptible effort to disavow my complicity. If I foolishly cheered at the Nuremberg Rally, I will at least be somewhat wiser when standing trial there.

Girl Scout Launches
Cookie Boycott Campaign
After Organization's Inclusion
Of Transgender Child

I'm still waiting for Candide to reach amazon, and I still have to approve the proof of The Song of the Lark, and order the proof of Pride and Prejudice...

I think they wanted someone to explain
how a natural phenomenon like pareidolia
could render such a stunning likeness of Che Guevara.

Okay, so that's not the most exicting news you've read lately.

They changed their comments process,
and if they don't change it back soon,
I may leave.

We can now publicly disclose that we have been experiencing a large-scale DDoS attack the last two days, which has been the reason for the site issues most users have been experiencing. The traffic load has been immense, at many times our normal load level, and the attack is still on-going. We are in constant contact with our providers to mitigate the attack as best as possible. We again apologize for the disruption to LiveJournal usage, and are working to get everything back to normal as soon as we can. Thank you!

Status Updated: 2:29 pm GMT (Wednesday, July 27)

Otherwise, not much to report...

No Republican who votes for any tax increase can be re-elected.
In the primary, someone running against them will say,
"MY OPPONENT VOTED TO RAISE YOUR TAXES! MY OPPONENT SUPPORTS SOCIALISM!"

When I try to login, or try to post a comment, LJ sends me to neverland.
It's apparently doing this to some other people, too, but not everyone.
Mad Russian?

I never use speed dial on a phone because it's important to me to remember peoples' phone numbers. Similarly, I don't use email addressbooks because it's important to me to remember peoples' email addresses. Right, well, the new-and-improved Yahoomail has a particularly annoying feature now. When you reply to someone, it puts a click-button with their contact name on the to field, rather than showing the actual email address.

ysabetwordsmith mentioned
Questioning the Inca Paradox,

and I had to point out that if the khipus were not a language, the Catholic Church would have Christianized them, rather than destroy them. You see, Martin Luther didn't just translate the Bible into German, he proposed that Germans learn to read in their own language, and you can see where that led. Even Luther was surprised by the degree and variance of independent thought he had fostered. Or course, both the Roman Catholic Church and the Spanish Crown had a common interest in preventing anything of the kind happening in the Spanish colonies.

By "second-order intelligence" I mean that whenever the evidence itself cannot be examined, or is inadequate for a thorough examination, one must evaluate the consequences and repercussions of what can only be assumed and inferred. When you have fewer than one thousand khipus to examine, you'll be hard pressed to discern the rudiments, let alone nuances, of a written language, and there are several instances of the Incas developing atypical innovations. The arch is generally a defining achievement of any civilization, but the Incas didn't have arches. Instead, they had something like an arch which worked in their environment, where arches built later failed. It's possible, and even highly likely, that the Incas made some arches, learned that they wouldn't work, and moved on to something better; something most civilizations have never needed. Likewise, they may have discovered that language written in the usual way was inadequate for their needs, and then developed something like a written language which worked in their environment, but was something most civilizations have never needed.

It would be all too easy to dismiss the khipu as the work of a less advanced civilization, one that didn't develop guns, iron, or wheels. But for more than a decade, Urton has assumed that the khipu are evidence of Incan sophistication in ways we have still not grasped.

Most languages put the subject before the object, and the verb either before, between, or after the two. So if you could, among the six hundred or so khipus in existence, find three types of knots, the first always before the second and the third always in the same position relative to the other two, you might have evidence of grammar, but such grammar might not exist in this particular form of writing, and even if it did, you'd have to recognize something you know nothing about, and beginning with your own perceptions limits your ability to make a meaningful observation. In Heart of Darkness, for example, when Marlow finds a book with hand-written marginal notes, he assumes the notes are in code, and only learns later that they were in Russian. That is, when Marlow encountered a small sample of a language that had evolved differently from his own in several aspects, he assumed that it was only a code of some sort.

In this case, the sample itself is just too small to establish whether the khipus are excerpts of a written language or not. So we have to look beyond the khipus themselves, and study reactions to them. Doing that, I conclude that they were a written language, because the Roman Catholic Church behaved as if they were.

This, of course, brings us to something I've talked about quite a lot. "So we don't show her breasts. We show them to him."

In the last few years, most of my fiction has been about an investigator or a journalist; people who must discern the truth of a fuller reality from necessarily limited observations of only a few facts. But really, that's the essence of good fiction. What convinces your reader, what suspends your reader's disbelief? The stark details with which you describe someone's breasts? Or the very genuine response of another character who sees those breasts?

Life is a great school. It thrashes you and bangs you about and teaches you.
Nikita Khrushchev

As you may recall, I wondered last month how it was Khrushchev survived and excelled. Of course, he must have had some luck, but he also was quite good at recognizing his mistakes promptly, and seldom repeating them.

Oooo- another good Khrushchev quote-
"Let me tell you something. Life is short. See all you can. Hear all you can and go all you can."

The Rover Boys in Belgrade Time Magazine, June 13, 1955

When you go into a store to buy something,
there's a price tag on it. That's how much you pay.
That's how much the next person pays. That how much
the person ahead of you pays. Because that's the price.

However, the price tag wasn't invented until the late 19th century.
Before that, when you bought groceries, for instance,
you negotiated the cost of your groceries with the grocer.
Your negotiating skills determined how well your family did,
and what your family did without.

What was the effect of this?
Consider recent research into the price of new cars.
Yes, they come with a nominal sticker price,
but that's usually negotiated down.
And, what a surprise, on average,
white men pay less for a new car than black women.
Identical cars, identical options, black women pay more.
Are white men more skillful negotiators?
Or are car dealers more willing to take advantage of black women?
Those are rhetorical questions, actually.

Yesterday,

bogwitch64 mentioned The Salem Witch trials,
and I want to add that our understanding of that event, or series of events,
is very much distorted, or clarified, if you will, by our understanding of
The Communist Witch Hunts and the intentional contrast with "Puritanical values" proponents of
"The New Morality" presented in espousing their cause and beliefs during the 1960s.

Okay, what I'm telling you is that, so far as I know,
the accused witches of 1692 Salem were consistently from among the well-to-do,
and their accusers were consistently not.
What I'm telling you is that the victims of an oppressive society
had found a way to turn that oppressive social structure
against their oppressors.

But you don't have to take my word for it;
it's always possible that I'm wrong,
that my Orwellian/Trotskyite way of thinking has screwed me up again.
So look into it. Carefully. And see what you find.

Loganbeary's Constitutional Argument for Same-Sex Marriages is a transparantly vacuous argument.

A state has the constitutional authority to decide
what contractual obligations may be legally undertaken
within that state.

If you contract to sell methamphetamine or purchase a slave,
the impairment of contract clause will not protect you.

However, neither the legislative nor executive branches
of a state government may alter the terms of an existing contract
which was entered into legally. Only state courts may do that,
and only if they find the contract or part of the contract
to be in violation of either the law, the constitution, or both.

Now here's why I've decided to mention this after all:
When Nebraska refuses to recognize a legal marriage
which took place in Iowa solely because the two persons married
are of the same sex, Nebraska is impairing the obligation of a contract;
precisely what this clause forbids.

Most of the people on my reading list here
use DW as a redundant backup for LJ.

So, anyway, for those who don't see me elsewhere,
I'm alive and arguably well, and you should buy my books if you haven't already.

I'm currently putting together a first-rate release of Edward Eggleston's
The Hoosier School-Master,
and still hoping to set up a means of keeping revenue from the sale of books
legally distinct from my personal income.

Congress is doing the Deficit Reel again,
which will end, after much argument,
with them voting themselves a pay raise.
But before it's done, they probably will cut a few things
that affect me. All the more reason you should buy my books,
so I can publish a novel and sell the movie rights.

But if you'd like to browse a little more, try these...

alycewilson's Virtual Holiday Bazaar

ysabetwordsmith's Winterfaire 2010

2010 Puddle for Best Opening Line: Round four (of six)

And, like I said before,
it would be unsporting of me to tell you how to vote,
but chances are, you'll recognize my entry.

Amicae, Roma, Veritas

Germanicus says that you are loyal to three things—
to your friends,
to Rome,
and to the truth.
I would be very proud if Germanicus thought the same of me.

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Amicae, Roma, Veritas

Victory belongs to the most persevering.

Recent Entries

At the risk of being immodest, I'm quoting myself.

(no subject)

Sometime this year...

Actually...

(no subject)

For the third time already, now that I've scrapped Twitter™ I'll try to be here every day.

LJ may have accomplished what the mad russian could not.

LiveJournal Status

It's raining. Again.

See, the problem is...

LJ malfunction

Yahoomail! New and annoying!

"if the khipus were not a language, the Catholic Church would have Christianized them..."

(no subject)

Have we talked about the price tag?

(no subject)

(no subject)

Sorry I'm not here more often...

I'd like to believe that one of my books would be the ideal gift for anyone.

Once again, vote early and often!

Amicae, Roma, Veritas

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