Anton Kapela wants to know who has systems knowledge from bottom to to top.
I’d like to know who has systems experience from old to new.
Any of you out there in the DeepNet remember writing programs with these?
I do. But I’m writing my current book on one of these:
More than one way to climb a tree.
WH spokespeople are saying President Trump has asked Hillary Clinton to serve as his liaison to China’s rapidly expanding and increasingly ambitious military. “The mission is to silence some of the provocative rhetoric we’ve been hearing in our intelligence reports,” said Sarah Sanders.
Hillary is an obvious choice. As a former Secretary of State she has gravitas but no official agency affiliation. Sanders added, “We think Ms. Clinton can calm things down a lot if she gains access to a wide enough audience.’
We think she can make them stand still for what she demands of them.
Like, there’s history there between them, you know?
Alice. She’s so late, so late today.
The Era of Appeasement is officially over. A fitting time to remember what and who got us into this mess. The link below does indeed lead all the way back to the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
Yeah. Here’s a really disgraceful story from the Yale Daily News. Poor little lambs indeed.
Trump has the first state dinner of his presidency, a beautiful event and a rousing success with plenty of eye candy for men and women both.
So what does Drudge lead the day’s links with? What we all needed to see? Or just doing his part in the MSM’s Melania lockout? You be the judge.
So there was Melania, dressed to kill in a hat to die for. I immediately flashed on the clear inspiration for this look: Claudia Cardinale in a classic called Once Upon a Time in the West, also dressed to kill in hat and sixgun. Melania’s probably packing too, meaning the bitter press will once again have to pack it in with the critiques nobody cares about.
We were going to be rich. My great grandfather made very expensive shoes. He left his considerable fortune to his grandchildren but left one of his own sons in charge. When the place went bankrupt in 1965, that son had tapped every account and pissed it all away. It had been an estimable enterprise, nationwide in its reach, still memorialized in Wikipedia:
Laird Schober Shoes began in 1870 in Philadelphia, United States as a small manufacturer of ladies’, misses’, and children’ shoes by three young men in their mid-twenties.[1] The company grew with sustained and measured increase until closing its doors in 1965.
Samuel S. Laird, the senior partner, his brother-in-law George P. Schober, and their friend George A. Mitchell, were joined by Samuel’s younger brother, John, in 1875.[2] This is also the year that William S. Duling joined the company as a young designer.[3] Duling worked tirelessly from the beginning and the company saw large increases as a result. The company expanded into all areas of the country and he helped to maintain the highest quality of output. The three men were equipped with all the necessary details of the business and its demands to guide its growth. Constantly adding new machines, including the McKay that could sew 100 pairs of soles onto women’s shoes in one hour in 1858, and the Reese Buttonholer [4] that made 100,000 button holes a week in 1891. Continuously taking on more responsibility and earning greater trust from the senior partners, Duling was made a partner himself in 1894. The company name was changed to Laird Schober & Co.[5]
The craftsmanship, design and comfort of the latest technology led to increased recognition and prominence of Laird Schober shoes. The company won many awards[6] at international expositions and when a group of French shoemakers, in 1921, were shown the handmade, microscopic stitches on the welts, they exclaimed “magnifique!”[7]. This was considered high praise because the French were deemed the best in the trade.
Laird Schober & Co. won the Franklin Institute Engineering Award in 1900[8], for Excellence in Manufacturing of shoes, collaborated with fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli in 1938, and were sold in fine department stores like of Wannamakers, and Strawbridges and Clothiers of Philadelphia.
January 16, 2009
A miracle? Maybe.
SMIRKS AHOY. It always makes me nervous when people start tossing around the term “miracle.” Not because I don’t believe they ever happen, but because I can feel the insipid grin of the disbelievers, waiting for any opportunity to restate for the umpty-umpth time the threadbare objection, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Every purported miracle is, to them, a reminder of all the miracles that somehow didn’t occur somewhere else at some other time.
I hate that grin and all the arrogant banality which congratulates itself on knowing the physics of a universe honest physicists know they don’t, and maybe can’t, fully comprehend. So I’m going to risk the scorn and ridicule of the sophists by proposing an analogy that may help others consider a new way of thinking about the “bad things happen to good people” objection.
In the grand scheme of things, miracles are pretty rare. That is, the kinds of events which even people who believe in them might call miracles are rare. When you think about it, rarity is built into the definition. If every bad thing that threatened to occur were somehow prevented or reversed after the fact (like sudden total remissions from terminal cancer), the outcomes wouldn’t be considered miracles. They’d just be the way things work. Miracles are an exception. OR they are subject to particular conditions which are hard to bring about, especially since we don’t have much of an idea about what those conditions might be. For example, winning the Powerball lottery is an incredible long shot that nevertheless does occur; however, it does have an unavoidable pre-condition. You must first purchase a Powerball ticket.
On to my analogy. From time immemorial divinity has been closely associated with lightning. Zeus, Jove, Jupiter, and even the Bible’s Yahweh have been associated with lightning bolts, and there’s no mystery about why. It’s an ipso facto perfect symbol of a power from above visibly impacting the earth (and its inhabitants) below. Lightning strikes are pretty common events. Fatal lightning strikes on individual people are less so. That power from above is more or less always there. Its direct connection with human beings is limited by certain pre-conditions. People who know better than to wander around out in the open during a thunderstorm are not likely to be struck. And, generally speaking, lightning is more likely to strike big tall things like trees and church steeples rather than little things like people. But why does lightning strike tall things? Repeatedly. Which it does. Does it know that the tall things are there? And if it doesn’t, why wouldn’t it just strike randomly all over the place until it happened to connect with something it can light up? Why does it strike the tree more often than the outstandingly conductive bronze lawn ornament 24 inches off the ground?
Why? Because a lightning strike is a two-way process. The lightning bolt reaches down from the sky, and prospective targets on the ground reach up. They send out what are called streamers, which meet up with the lightning bolt and establish a connection. Here are two photos of streamers.
Connection made.
Connection sought.
The streamer is, in our analogy, a pre-condition. It’s the act of buying the Powerball ticket. And it helps to be a tall tree or a church steeple or a steel water tower at the center of town when a thunderstorm is in the air.
All of which is a fancy way of saying that miracles may, in fact, be precipitated by their recipients. Not through goodness or virtue alone but because they are also associated with preparedness, mass of some sort, and the kind of sharp focus we see in the streamer photographs.
That’s what’s so cool about the so-called Miracle of the Hudson. We can actually see a confluence of circumstances that apparently, luckily, resulted in — but just possibly catalyzed — an incredibly unlikely outcome. A variety of fortunate circumstances cannot explain away the improbability of the outcome, however much we want to play games with odds and statistics. The fact is, commercial airliners without engines “fly” with as much lift as a falling boulder, and they, well, effectively never land with wings straight and level on the water.
But in this case there were streamers. A pilot who was not only skilled but learned in the split-second differentials of commercial air disasters, who had made a long academic and practical study of air safety under emergency conditions, and who (to be frivolous for a moment) bears a striking resemblance to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
Captain Sully of Flight 1549 and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (Commander
Fairbanks’s uniform is real btw. He won the Silver Star in WWII.)
He was sending up a streamer. As were the ferry crews and FDNY personnel who responded so swiftly, as well as the passengers who quelled their impulse to panic and responded to the ancient call, “women and children first.” Preparation, determination, and cool heads with a fervent desire to do the right thing are all streamers, and there was mass behind the entire effort. The lightning bolt that could have remained in the clouds reached down to make a connection, and the incredibly (impossibly?) unlikely outcome occurred.
Just an analogy. Not even a theory. But if we follow the analogy, we can also glimpse the possibility that just as lightning bolts are chaotic things, so might be miracles. In my own mind, the collapse of the Twin Towers was a miracle for its relatively low loss of life. It could have been upwards of 20,000, as many surmised it was in the darkest hours of 9/11. But how many brilliantly bright streamers went up that day, from firefighters and policemen and gravely unselfish civilians, to connect with the lightning that brought so many thousands of people to safety? I know the grinners would cite that day as a miracle that didn’t happen. But you have to remember that they live in an irretrievably drab world of actuarial tables and lottery tickets that win nothing but heartache and ruin.
But when their turn in the storm comes, they too will pray for a miracle. And they might even receive it — if they’re prepared, focused, and united in unselfish resolve.
– posted at 5:27 pm by CountryPunk Permalink