Log24

Not  by Don DeLillo —

Those apt to be seduced by language, either secular or religious,
might note that the author of the Point Omega book above is also
the author of  Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power —

Hemingway fans might note as well a website whose background
image memorializes the Catholic fallen of the Spanish Civil War:

* Title suggested by my viewing last night "Revenge of the Fallen,"
   no. 2 in the Transformers  series.  That film reportedly opened
   on this date eight years ago.

"When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead" …

See Princeton,  Alice,  and Breitbart.

Odin's Day continues. 

The title is a reference to the recent film
"Olympus Has Fallen," directed by Antoine Fuqua
(which I watched last night).

Related material:

Ascent to Valhalla,   Times Blackout,
and the post-blackout Times Obituaries.

Update of 6:45-7:59 PM Aug. 14:

See also (in keeping with the ART WARS
theme of today's previous post) 
Juneteenth (Wednesday, June 19) 2013.
This last link may be regarded as posted in
memory of author Vince Flynn, who reportedly
died at about 2 AM on that date. Background:
Tuesday, June 18.

(Continued from Seize the Dia,  April 6)

Two chess games by Fischer, against two brothers—

1956: "In this game, Fischer (playing Black) demonstrates
noteworthy innovation and improvisation." — Wikipedia

1963: "Fischer [playing Black] had engineered a brilliantly
disguised trap for him and … he had fallen into it." — NY Times

See also this evening's Times  obituaries and The Unfolding.

Some context:  The Crosswicks Curse.

For Terry Gilliam

See also, from the the above uploading date, Taylor Made,
with its linked-to passage from a book by Charles Taylor.

For some more recent background, see

• "Fallen" in this journal,
•  the film by that name,
• Wednesday evening's execution in Virginia, and
• Wednesday afternoon's Treasure Hunt

"The first human to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong,
is 'doing great' after undergoing cardiac bypass surgery,
his wife reported…..

… Armstrong… went to the hospital on Monday
for a stress test. He flunked, and on Tuesday,
surgeons bypassed four blockages in his
coronary arteries. His wife reports that his spirits
are high, and the doctors expect no problems
with his recovery…." — Alan Boyle, NBCNews.com

Over the life of Man
We watch and wait,
The Four who manage
His fallen estate:

We who are four were
Once but one,
Before his act of
Rebellion;

We were himself when
His will was free,
His error became our
Chance to be.

Powers of air and fire,
Water and earth,
Into our hands is given
Man from his birth….

— Auden, not Goethe

See also Tuesday morning's post.

Tuesday was Charlize Theron's birthday.
See June 9, 2012.

A description in Pynchon's Against the Day  of William Rowan Hamilton's October 16th, 1843, discovery of quaterions—

"The moment, of course, is timeless. No beginning, no end, no duration, the light in eternal descent, not the result of conscious thought but fallen onto Hamilton, if not from some Divine source then at least when the watchdogs of Victorian pessimism were sleeping too soundly to sense, much less frighten off, the watchful scavengers of Epiphany."

New York Lottery yesterday, on Hermann Weyl's birthday— Midday 106, Evening 865.

Here 106 suggests 1/06, the date of Epiphany, and 865 turns out to be the title number of Weyl's Symmetry  at Princeton University Press—

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/865.html.

Symmetry and quaternions are, of course, closely related.

American Music Awards
Finale

Roll with it

Related material:

Yesterday's sermon

Moral Hazard —
The Devil and Wallace Stevens,
continued from May 1-2 entries:

Law Day,
Readings for Law Day,
Fallen from Heaven, and
The Script  

University of Southern California, Department of Economics — Industrial Organization ECN 680 – Autumn 2002 — Introduction to Contract and Organization Theory —

Professor Jean-Jacques Laffont
(September 4 – October 21):

“The purpose of this course is to introduce the student to modern contract and organization theory. Part 1 of the course focuses upon models with moral hazard and adverse selection.”

From the insurance page at 

http://ingrimayne.saintjoe.edu/:

“The size of the insurance industry indicates that people are eager to pay to avoid risk. They pay and get nothing if fortune smiles on them, whereas if misfortune strikes, they break even because the insurance should just pay back the value lost in the misfortune.

Sometimes, however, people do better than break even when misfortune strikes, and this possibility has greatly interested economists. If, for example, the misfortune costs a person $1000, but insurance will pay $2000, the insured person has no incentive to avoid the misfortune and may act to bring it on. This tendency of insurance to change behavior is called moral hazard.

Sometimes moral hazard is dramatic….

People who know that they face large risks are more likely to buy insurance than people who face small risks. Insurance companies try to minimize the problem that only the people with big risks will buy their product, which is the problem of adverse selection ….”

From today’s New York Times:

“Jean-Jacques Laffont, an economist known for developing mathematical models to estimate what something is worth in situations of deep uncertainty, died on May 1 in Toulouse, France. He was 57….

…Jerry R. Green of Harvard said he was ‘an architect of systems’ and ‘a very original figure.’

Eric Maskin, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., called Dr. Laffont ‘simply one of the major figures of our time.’

‘Many people would say he was the leading economist in Europe,’ he added, ‘and that wouldn’t be an unfair judgment.’

Although Dr. Laffont’s models were abstruse enough to satisfy the most theoretical economists, Dr. Green said they were adapted for practical purposes by companies, as well as by public television for scheduling programs.”

Real Enemies, Part I

“Even paranoids have real enemies.”
— Saying attributed to Delmore Schwartz

According to the Washington Post and Newsday today, the President’s persecutors now include

Paul O’Neill,
   formerly Bush’s Treasury Secretary

Richard A. Clarke,
   formerly Bush’s counterterrorism chief

Rand Beers,
   Bush’s counterterrorism chief after Clarke

Flynt Leverett,
   former member of the Bush national security staff

Richard Foster,
   Bush Medicare accountant

John DiIulio,
   former director of Bush’s faith-based initiatives

“Others who have fallen out of favor over Iraq include former economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey, retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki. All voiced concerns about either the expense or number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. All were treated dismissively by the White House. All are gone, but their estimates proved accurate….

Not every White House attempt at damage-control works. Last summer, White House officials tried to pin the blame on CIA Director George Tenet for not waving Bush off his State of the Union claim that Saddam was seeking uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons.

Political analysts rushed to proclaim Tenet a goner, but those obituaries proved premature.”

— Tom Raum in Newsday today

Self-Evident

Today many Americans celebrate a declaration of certain “self-evident” truths.  Others feel that these alleged “truths” are misleading.  Seeking a worthy opponent for the authors of the Declaration on this secular holy day, I settled on the following recently published book, a sort of Declaration of Dependence of government on God (an imaginary entity who speaks only through politicians, clergymen, and other liars):

Christian Faith
and Modern Democracy:
God and Politics in the Fallen World
By Robert P. Kraynak
Univ. of Notre Dame Press. 304p
$49.95 (cloth) $24.95 (paper)

From a review in the Dec. 24, 2001, issue of America, a Jesuit publication:

“The author, who identifies himself as a practicing Catholic, asserts that Christianity is weakened by its close alliance with the contemporary version of democracy and human rights…. 

The author states that ‘modern liberal democracy…subverts in practice the dignity of man.’  He defends his thesis relentlessly and persuasively…. 

Some readers of this well-organized volume will be disappointed that the author makes no mention of the four billion non-Christians among the world’s 6.1 billion inhabitants. The four billion Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists must be included in any attempt to make the modern state responsive to traditional and generally accepted norms of morality.”

— Robert F. Drinan, S.J.

Jefferson would probably appreciate Drinan’s remark on catholic (i.e., universal, or “generally accepted”) norms.

The “traditional and generally accepted norms of morality” Drinan mentions are discussed ably by Christian apologist C. S. Lewis in his book The Abolition of Man, which argues for the existence of a universal moral code that I am pleased to note he calls, rightly, the Tao.  As an Amazon.com reviewer notes, Lewis uses this term in the manner of Confucius rather than that of Lao Tsu.  I prefer the latter. 

For details, see the Tao Te Ching, (The Way and Its Power).  This is a far more holy scripture than the collections of lies called sacred by most other religions.  Both the leftist Jefferson and the rightist Kraynak wrongly assume that talk of a “Creator” means something.  It does not.  Classical Chinese thought is free from this absurd Western error.  Lewis at least had the grace to acknowledge the importance of non-Western thought, though he himself was unable to escape the lies of Christianity.