| The Last Full Mesaure of Devotion |
[May. 28th, 2012|01:31 pm] |
Today is not Veteran's Day. Platitudes about "thank the troops" do not do today justice. Today is a day to distinctly honor those who have given the last full measure of devotion.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate - we can not consecrate - we can not hallow - this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
President Abraham Lincoln
November 1863 |
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| My tweets |
[May. 28th, 2012|12:00 pm] |
- Mon, 02:17: My Top 5 #lastfm Artists: Barenaked Ladies (2), Guster (2), Jars Of Clay (2), Norah Jones (1) & Damien Rice (1) http://t.co/ZhN7ZrYt
- Mon, 11:57: Best part of road trip: singing harmony with Jason. Amie's testing harmony too! (Guster's "Mona Lisa" just S of Louisville, KY)
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| On not speaking out: an letter to an editor. |
[May. 28th, 2012|09:18 am] |
I am writing in reply to an opinion piece published in your paper recently which culminated with:
They have come for the trade-unionists; what is to stop them from coming for me?
The writer of this piece is ghoulishly appropriating the struggles of trade-unionists to glorify his own life. Of course nobody is going to come for him, he's in such a position of power and privilege that he can be safely writing pseudonymous pieces in popular papers such as yours. The plight of the trade-unionists is tragic, but it is their plight. His slippery-slope argument, that somehow someone else will be come for next, is absurd.
There seems to be some sort of implication that what has been done to the trade-unionists is not limited in its impact to the trade-unionists, but this is plainly false. Has anyone come for him yet? He can publicly laud himself for his victimhood when someone does, but to spin tails of some nebulous fear of a harm that has not been directed at him would seem part of some grandiose fantasy of martyrdom on his part, which he wishes to reap the benefits of without paying the costs. If he's so concerned about the trade-unionists, why doesn't he become one, and get in line for the purges that way, instead of suggesting that the purges will with time make their way to him?
He speaks from a position of comfort, and I have to assume disingenuously. What does he think? That some focused malevolence uses purges of one group in part to warn off or silence the others. How ridiculous! Next he will be suggesting that when people are targeted for violence and, yes, even political purges, it is not that they as individuals are being oppressed, punished or disappeared, but that the entire group itself suffers from those actions. We know that some trade-unionists have been come for, but there are clearly some out there who have not.
His categorical statements are plain falsehoods, and his attempt to spin some fiction in which he, too, is a target, just further down the list, is not only offensive to those who have been targeted, but to those who would be higher up this supposed list. Why is he so important that he speaks out about his eventual fate, rather than the presumably much more immediate one that some others will face? Because there are no others, there is no list. There is no grand plan, and these purges are a message to no one, but are purely functions of what has happened to individuals. If these people have been purged rightly, then why should we stand with them? If, and this is a big if, they are being targeted for political or ideological reasons, to consolidate power or for whatever other reason, then we should stand with them, and not attempt to make their fate about us. |
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| Numbers and words |
[May. 28th, 2012|03:46 pm] |
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This morning I tried to return a phone call. I managed to dial the wrong number three times at widely separated intervals, and (I later worked out) on all three occasions I transposed the same pair of adjacent digits. And despite carefully cross-checking between the number shown on the display of my phone, the number on the email (my employer's voicemail system works by sending you an email containing the caller ID and a sound file) and the number read out by the caller, I managed not to spot the error for most of the morning. I'm actually quite worried by that. I've always prided myself on my ability to remember long strings of digits, and found it repeatedly useful. I've known for a while that I was prone to occasionally transpose adjacent digits in a number I'd only just seen, but I usually notice on the second attempt. This is the first time I've spent hours completely blind to the difference between the right and wrong versions and I don't like the feeling. :-( My best guess for how it might have happened is that the transposition turned a trailing 245 into a trailing 425, and my brain might have found the latter more plausible because it's common to see round-ish numbers ending in 25, so perhaps it unilaterally 'corrected a typo'. But even that's not a very good explanation. In other news, I visited my niece at the weekend, and she's just learned to say my name. (She's one and a half.) I'm not usually all that susceptible to the cuteness of toddlers, but when they repeatedly look at me and say ‘Si-mo’ I have been forced to make an exception.
Also at Dreamwidth. (  comments | Leave a comment ) |
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| проклятые станки |
[May. 28th, 2012|03:13 pm] |
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Увидев во френдленте фразу "Фотографии маков произвели на меня огромное впечатление", далеко не сразу понял, о чем шла речь. |
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| The things you learn: skink |
[May. 28th, 2012|12:20 pm] |
In Klingon, there’s an animal toqvIr lung translated as “Tokvirian skink”.
I thought that was a made-up word, but apparently, there really are animals called “skinks”. Huh!
(And they’re lizards, which makes sense, given that lung “loong” is described as a lizard-like animal. I presume the name was influenced by the Chinese word 龍 lóng for a dragon.) |
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| и снова про за 35 и с ребенком |
[May. 28th, 2012|11:46 am] |
всё-таки не понимаю я мужчин, у которых нет инстинкта размножаться, но есть инстинкт тратить деньги и своё внимание на детей пассии от другого брака. причем, при всём при этом в основном у этих самых пассий ярко выражается мнение, что на воспитание ребенка имеют право только кровные родители, а новый хахель ежели что - идёт в сад со своими выкладками.
вот и нафига это надо молодым бездетным парням? неужели нельзя найти без детей или хотя бы готовую рожать совместного? правда, после 35 рожать ещё одного, имея уже сильно выросших детей - редкость. |
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