overnight

The cats were darling again overnight, but we still have surface water outside this morning. If it doesn't rain again, maybe I can let them out tomorrow when I return from downtown.

kitty litter box

I finally took care of the kitty litter box. It was overdue, but it has been hard to work around this rainy weather. It is an outside job. I consider myself lucky that I took care of those weeds during the previous brief respite.

Douthat on "Coming Apart"

We have done a number of posts on commentators letting Charles Murray have it for his "Coming Apart" book, in which he argues that the great inequality in America is due to the slack morals of the lower classes. Well, this is the same 'thinker' that wrote a magnum opus on the natural intellectual inferiority of colored people, "The Bell Curve". Nevertheless, I want to do one more, in which the conservative Ross Douthat raises a fair point about liberal criticism.

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1984 (2,5) Who Cares?

Julia may not have much of a head for political doctrines and ideological battles and political movements, but Winston appreciates that she is more shrewd in other political realities, in a street-smart kind of way.

_ _ _

In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connexion to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep people frightened'. This was an idea that had literally never occurred to him. She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during the Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing. But she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her. She believed, for instance, having learnt it at school, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. (In his own schooldays, Winston remembered, in the late fifties, it was only the helicopter that the Party claimed to have invented; a dozen years later, when Julia was at school, it was already claiming the aeroplane; one generation more, and it would be claiming the steam engine.) And when he told her that aeroplanes had been in existence before he was born and long before the Revolution, the fact struck her as totally uninteresting. After all, what did it matter who had invented aeroplanes? It was rather more of a shock to him when he discovered from some chance remark that she did not remember that Oceania, four years ago, had been at war with Eastasia and at peace with Eurasia. It was true that she regarded the whole war as a sham: but apparently she had not even noticed that the name of the enemy had changed. 'I thought we'd always been at war with Eurasia,' she said vaguely. It frightened him a little. The invention of aeroplanes dated from long before her birth, but the switchover in the war had happened only four years ago, well after she was grown up. He argued with her about it for perhaps a quarter of an hour. In the end he succeeded in forcing her memory back until she did dimly recall that at one time Eastasia and not Eurasia had been the enemy. But the issue still struck her as unimportant. 'Who cares?' she said impatiently. 'It's always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.'

-- 1984

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Nine minutes till nine

Nine minutes till nine, and I am only now getting on the Internet. Shower night. At least I won't have to shower tomorrow morning, as I have done for, I think, the last three library trips. On the downside, the skies turned an ugly grey in the late afternoon after what had been a picturesque sunny day, and rain is in the forecast for the early morning hours. I guess I should have gone downtown today, but that is not an option now. I'm more concerned, frankly, about the cats being penned up so long, regardless of the fact that it is not like they are in some little cage, but have much of the house to themselves.

A LiLo Valentine

“You don’t need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.”

-- Nick Hornby, "How to be Good"

I know I love this pictorial of Lindsay Lohan, and I'm feeling pretty extreme about it.



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