Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

" The open secret of violating a taboo with language that—through its richness, wit or rage—acknowledges the taboo, is that it represents a kind of moralizing.. " This quote comes from a thought provoking article by Lee Seigel from "The Wall Street Journal" online. I'm assuming for current purposes that this observation has more than a grain of truth in it, though some might feel there's no such secret, open or otherwise, implicit in the conscious public violation of a taboo. But if it is so, could it therefore be that the current tsunami of willfully conspicuous sexually and culturally "transgressive" posturing in the online, broadcast and print media, that so many in that media say others complain about, is in fact an outbreak of a yearning for conservative morality?  Now that's an interpretation that frankly hadn't occurred to me 'til now. Could it be that Miley Cyrus's ostentatious twerking and provocative gyrating is not

I have been taken by two potentially contrasting bits of potted wisdom recently. John Bertrand , the skipper of Australia II who first won the America's Cup from the USA for Australia 30 years ago in 1983, coming from 1/3 down to win 4/3,  has been interviewed multiple times recently as the anniversary is marked. It has fortuitously coincided with the Oracle Team USA remarkable defense last week in San Francisco of the current America's Cup, 9/8 against Team New Zealand, after coming back from being 1/8 down. One of the observations Bertrand made was that in high pressure, high stakes situations, such as coming from behind to win a regatta when a single loss means failure, is to remove all thought and speculation on the consequences of defeat or victory in any race, and focus wholly on the task at hand, the process required to win . Seems like good advice to me and James Spithall who skippered Team USA and his crew must have taken it to heart. By way of superficial contra

Check out these astonishing Amazon products and a book called " How to Avoid Huge Ships " (also available at Amazon). T hey are reviewed here . Resistance is useless.

This article (Lid dip to Instapundit ) , " Who Ruined the Humanities ?", which is the Saturday Essay in the Wall Street Journal of 12 July 2013, struck a real chord with me. The sub-heading reads: Of course it's important to read the great poets and novelists. But not in a university classroom, where literature has been turned into a bland, soulless competition for grades and status. What is it about contemporary college curricula all around the Western world that makes it look past the most powerful and insightful understanding brought to us by the cannon of our civilization's great literature to the mere process? If Shakespeare is taught as a deconstructed, ante-feminist, pre-colonial, racist expression of the dominant white male monarchical social order, is there any wonder that nearly everyone so taught will miss the point and not perceive the majesty, subtlety and astonishing insight into the human condition? Yes, it is hard to teach the substance of

A bit of inconvenient truth is starting to leak out into the public domain from the UN's climate data vaults, despite the best efforts of the gatekeepers in the media to keep a lid on it. The world is getting cooler . Not more hip,  cooler .  It seems , most inconveniently, that the planet has not been getting any hotter for the last 15 or so years, even though global atmospheric carbon concentration continues to rise through 400 parts per million .  And all this whilst our opinion making elites have been incessantly telling us for decades that we must change our lives drastically to a non-carbon energy base or it it will all get catastrophically hotter. This cooling is not cool for today's urban hipsters who have so much invested in rising heat. What are we to do with our carbon taxes and trading schemes, our Priuses, our bicycles, our food miles, our righteous indignation, and our smug sense of superiority about our special insight into our planet's climatic doom? Wat

Nature does have a way of re-establishing karmic balance in the cosmos. Even in the face of the seemingly irrevocable  thoughtless destruction of pubic lice habitat by humans, mother nature bites back at such hubris. It seems that destroying lice habitat has had unforeseen adverse consequences for those who so wantomly contribute to the extinction of another species. In news just in : PUBIC HAIR GROOMING INJURIES ON THE RISE, RESEARCHERS FIND ... Restore Bush!

Glenn Reynolds has now published his promised (see previous post) article on due process in a time of over-regulation. He has called it Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime . You should read the whole thing. It's short. He encourages readers to offer their own suggestions for improvement. Do. It has already generated some traction. At the Atlantic Conor Friedersdorf has a put out a piece entitled 8 Ways to Stop Overzealous Prosecutors from Destroying Lives  and at The Volokh Conspiracy   Randy Barnett has a long blog post on it . I was entertained also by Glenn  drawing attention the other day at Instapundit to this passage in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged : “ Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?” said Dr. Ferris. “We want them broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against – then you’ll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We’re after power and we mean it. You fell

 "Rule of Law" now imperilled by too much law Glenn Reynolds has recently linked to an article by David French entitled " David Gregory and the Decline of the Rule of Law ".  In it French asks: "Can we even speak of the rule of law as a meaningful concept when we combine an explosive regulatory state with near-absolute prosecutorial discretion?” This link appears as part of seemingly growing series of cross linkages that Reynolds is apparently accumulating for an imminent scholarly piece he says he is putting together on the theme " Due Process When Everything is a Crime ". In the western world we are now not just drowning in a sea of over-regulation from our over-zealous legislatures and bureaucracies. It seems that as well our law making institutions are bizarrely indifferent to the fate that its citizens labour under in the vast byzantine morass of freedom depleting strictures and criminalised triviality we now live with. But society ma

More evidence has recently come to light of Mankind's pitiless destruction of other species in its relentless self-interested march to complete planetary domination and, hubristically it is hoped, to its own inevitable demise. The pubic louse is now an endangered species , apparently due to the viral new fashion preference in urban society for bikini waxes. There is now so little viable habitat for the poor pubic louse that it has been unable to breed in sufficient numbers to maintain its population. We surely now need a public campaign to preserve the pubic louse and its habitat. It could have a slogan like: "Keep Bush. Save the Louse". That might generate enough itch for the luvvies to have a good old fashioned scratch.