Anyone can play guitar

As I was travelling on Saturday (and Data Coverage and WiFi were spotty at best), I relegated myself to sitting back, reading, and enjoying the complete Radiohead catalog. (It was a very enjoyable Saturday.)



However, I kept coming back to this one song and the lyrics:

And if the world does turn
And if London burns I'll be standing on the beach with my guitar


I like how wonderfully apocalyptic that sounds. Don't you?

Pictures from the Amica Marathon

HJ77 ran well. It was a wonderful, if really long day.

Prepare for the Rapture (Coming This Weekend)

"“I do believe that we’re getting very near the very end,” he said, repeating that “we’ve learned that there’s a lot of things we didn’t have quite right, and that’s God’s good provision.” He asserted once again that Judgment Day had nevertheless begun spiritually, that God had kept them in the dark in order to “bring about the tremendous event that occurred on May 21 of this year, and which …”

And then Harold Camping did something heretofore unimaginable.

“… And which probably will be finished out on October 21, this coming very shortly, that looks like it will be, at this point, it looks like it will be the final end of everything.”

He used the word probably. He hedged."


Harold Camping’s Prediction of the Apocalypse -- New York Magazine

So, what are your plans for the weekend?

I find this disturbing

"To explain Germany's response to the crisis we must start from the fact that the country has undergone a dramatic transformation over the last 20 years. In the postwar era, leaders from Konrad Adenauer to Willy Brandt realized that, for Germany to be readmitted to the fellowship of civilized nations, it had to atone for the recent past. Germany thus paid reparations to Israel, concluded peace treaties with its eastern neighbors, and, above all, entered an unwavering alliance with former foes like Britain, France, and the United States.

But the contrite Germany of the postwar era has been long gone. Since Germany's reunification, the need to atone for Auschwitz has been replaced by the desire to draw a definitive finish line underneath irksome talk of the Third Reich.

The first decisive step in this direction was taken in 1998 by Martin Walser, a famous novelist, when he called Auschwitz a "moral baseball bat" wielded by sinister outsiders intent on harming Germany's interests. Germany's assembled political and cultural elite feted Walser's speech with standing ovations."


Germany's Not That Sorry Anymore - By Yascha Mounk | Foreign Policy

Maybe it is because I have spent the last two weeks consuming and digesting Evans' Third Reich Trilogy but this causes me discomfort. Eddie Izzard has a bit about parachuting German youth into conflict zones with the point of proselytizing for peace but this...makes me think that the peace may be enforced at the point of a gun, or at least the pen on a checkbook...

In defense of the study of philosophy...

"What makes philosophy different? It can seem self-absorbed; philosophers themselves joke about Arthur Koestler's definition: "the systematic abuse of a terminology specially invented for that purpose." But it also is a tool (like history and religious studies) for thinking about everything else, and every profession from law and medicine to motorcycle maintenance."


Is Philosophy the Most Practical Major? - Edward Tenner - Technology - The Atlantic