"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
Found this at Cat’s place. Thanks, Cat!
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I’ve been sticking with the “ancient” Journalized Theme from Mike Little ever since Diane initially set up a WordPress blog for me back in 2005 as an inducement for me to move off Blogger. It’s been through more than a few WP upgrades and has gotten cluttered with all kindsa stuff ove the years, but until my upgrade today, to WP 2.6, it managed to creak along.
No more, though. WP 2.6 welland truly bashed, thrashed and trashed trhe Journalized theme, so now I’m shopping around for something that either suits me or is a quick mod or three away from suiting me. Make my own? Not a profitable use of my time. So, expect twc to look a bit off-color, as it were, for a while as I twiddle with whatever happens to strike me as something I might be able to live with.
You know, once upon a time, long, long ago, when I was very young and very, very stupid (yes, even more stupid than I am now), I subscribed to the aphorism that there are no stupid questions.
Time, experience and some sometimes very painful lessons have proven the stupidity of that aphorism.
And so, I have come to realize that some questions, especially some posed archly by those who suppose they have answers to offer, are stupid questions.
“Why was Stonehenge built?”–offered by yet another dumbass supposing they have discovered “the” answer, is one such stupid question.
Look, the only way we can know why Stonehenge was built is to ask the people who built it, because no one left us any written statement of purpose for the place. We may infer certain hypotheses from whatever information is there, but absent a clear, unequivocal statement from the builders, any supposition about why it was built is simply that: supposition.
So, go back in time and ask the builders. Oh, while you are traveling back in time to ask, be sure to travel back in space to where the Earth was at the time, since it’s moving away from its present position in our galaxy (along with the sun, the moon and all the stars we can see in their respective places) at an enormous rate of speed. (One of the problems with “time travel” as posited in science fiction is suspending disbelief in order to read/watch the stuff when time travel is mentioned, cos even if the position in time problem is solved, the position in space problem is almost never dealt with in any way, shape, fashion of form.)
And “Why was Stonehenge built?” is only one of numerous stupid questions asked–and that’s just in the class of “Stupid questions that cannot be answered” class. Another obvious class of stupid questions is the political class, containing such questions as, “Why do politicians feel the need to assuage the feelings of and otherwise pander to criminals?” Why is that a stupid question you ask? ( Now THAT’S a stupid question! :-)) Because the answer’s so obvious, of course. Politicians *spit* pandering to criminals has two very, very obvious reasons:
1. Most politicians *spit* are simply a subclass of criminal and
2. Law-abiding citizens strike no fear into political poltroons, whereas other fellow-members of the criminal class are indeed often powers to fear, because another aphorism of my youth is true: there is no honor among thieves (though there may be a cameraderie of like minds, of a sort, e.g., a congresscriter’s disingenuous reference to an “opponent” as “My esteemed colleague… ” instead of the more honest, “My partner in crime… “).
So, BOLO for stupid questions and their even stupider answers. You can most easily filter for stupid questions by asking yourself who is posing it. For example, stupid questions are most often posed by
politicians *spit*
Mass Media Podpeople
Academia Nut Fruitcakes
And other pompous gasbags.
This has been a public service announcement from America’s Third World County.
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Heck, this could be one of those comments that becomes a twc staple.
Reading in another pice of light reading for the past hour or so, a book from the Eric Flint-created Assiti Shards Series. That and the Belisarius Saga series are two of the most interesting “time travel/alternate reality” sets of books written in the past twenty of so years, IMO.
(All of them require some serious suspension-of-disbelief for the simple vast amount of distance in space required for any kind of time travel–especially the Assiti Shards books, as the Belisarius books feature an apparently different type of time travel–but the stories are generally interesting, especially if one is a history addict *heh*)
At any rate, Time Spike (Eric Flint with Marilyn Kosmatka) features a conversation in chapter 17 between a number of scientists and two odd men out (one’s a cop) that contains THE quote for today:
“We’re Ph.D.’s, don’t forget. Probably a bigger concentration of fruitcakes in academia than anywhere else.”
Preach on, brother!
*heh*
Oh, and another, from later in the book, is worth thinking on as well:
The ‘guv’mint’ is just something way over there, powerful and immense and unyielding to any personal leverage you might have. Sure, once every two or four years you get to vote, but that’s just so you can pick which big shot sits on top of the pile. You still don’t have any leverage yourself.
Sadly, all too true.
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No politics, no rants, no foaming at the mouth with this post. Just a lil fun.
Well, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS “Hardy Heron” has been out for over a week now, and here at twc central, three Windows computers have had it installed… three different ways. The full install (partitioning off a chunck of one hard drive) went slick as goose grease. Nice looks, snappy performance.
Two “Wubi” (Windows-based Ubuntu Installer) installs. One was straight off the CD. (Note: for the one or two readers of twc that don’t know what an iso file is or how to create a CD with one, no sweat. Just visit the Ubuntu home page, download the iso and read up on the well-written tutorial available there.)
A Wubi installation from CD in Windows is just like installing any Windows app you’ve ever installed, only a bit slicker than some. *heh* On a Toshiba Satellite WinXP system, the hard part was putting the CD in the drive. *yawn* Slipped it in during a commercial break (was watching one of my Wonder Woman’s fav shows with her) and autostart brought up the Wubi installer. Told it what user name and password I wanted and let it trundle along. Next commercial break, looked over at the notebook and it was asking for a reboot. Let it. It did its thing and before next commercial break it was rebooting and giving me a choice of booting Windows XP or Ubuntu, using the Windows XP boot manager.
Slick.