The Busy Mr. Bate

It does not surprise me that The Man Who Never Sleeps is also an artist.

Compared to him, I am a towering castle of sloth.

Fiscal Update

 

First Paragraph

Shortly before Easter in the year 1188 CE, an English archbishop of Canterbury went to Wales on a recruitment drive. Thousands of miles away, war had broken out in the eastern Mediterranean and the archbishop, whose name was Baldwin of Forde, had been tasked with recruiting several thousand able-bodied fighting men to join an army that was being deployed there.

- From Crusaders: The Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands by Dan Jones

Slow Horses

 

Read the books by Mick Herron. 

Watch the series starring Gary Oldman.

Great stuff.

The Global Antimanagerial Revolution

Elite rule within liberal democracies has been noted for many decades, with few analyses more insightful on this score than James Burnham's 1941 study, The Managerial Revolution (which influenced, among others, George Orwell as he was writing 1984). Burnham described this revolution as a different kind of realization of a Marxist vision: the propertied (aristocratic) class was in the process of being replaced by a new class who perceived that power lay no longer in static property but in the manipulation of ideas and production processes. The new "managerial elite" would maintain the appearance of what Burnham called "Parliamentary control," but power would be pooled in public and semipublic agencies and bureaus. The new ruling elite would govern a state-managed economy in which a nation's (and, eventually, the world's) wealth would necessarily flow through these agencies, enriching the managerial class. The simultaneous cry against the corruption of Washington, D.C. - surrounded by so many of the nation's wealthiest counties - and the lack of any national dedication among ostensibly American corporations was a reflection of a revolution from below against the "managerial elites" Burnham described. What is conventionally called a populist revolution is better described as a global antimanagerial revolution.

- Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

Cultural Offering's 9 Books

Here is Kurt's excellent list. 

I'm still thinking about mine.

Poems, Novels, and Values

 I was thumbing through an old and treasured book that I probably snared at a rummage sale while in grade school: One Hundred and One Famous Poems.

It was published in Chicago by The Cable Company in 1926. In addition to some very nice poems, it includes the Declaration of Independence; the Gettysburg Address; President Lincoln's Letter to Mrs. Bixby; the Magna Charta; The Ten Commandments; and Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death" speech.

It also has "Rules for Choosing Books" which provide guidelines for parents. Among them are:

"Does this book lay stress on villainy, deception or treachery?"

"Are all the incidents wholesome, probable and true to life?"

"Does it show young people contemptuous toward their elders and successfully opposing them?"

"Do the young characters in the book show respect for teachers and others in authority?"

"Are these characters the kind of young people you wish your children to associate with?"

"Does the book speak of and describe pranks, practical jokes and pieces of thoughtless and cruel mischief as though they were funny and worthy of imitation?"

"Is the English good and is the story written in good style?"

Although I have a great deal of sympathy for the character-building nature of the guidelines, I can think of many good books that could fall below their standards.

How would Oliver Twist fare? Or Huckleberry Finn? Or Treasure Island?

Classic

 

Hmm

 

Elon and His Inquisitors

 Their entire system is built to neutralize the people who disrupt.

The result: where we should have 15 to 20 universal geniuses alive at the same time, we have one.

Just one.

And you want to put him in prison.

You summon him before judges, you raid his offices, you insult him morning, noon and night, you dream of breaking up his companies. The man who lands rockets vertically and wants to take humanity to Mars.

You're disgusting.

History won't remember your names. It remembers Galileo, not the inquisitors who tried to silence him.

- Brivael Le Pogam