Lendl
10 July 2016All I can think of right now is Ivan Lendl’s sex face.
I’m sorry to bring this up.
I should go and cook hotdogs for the girls, perhaps that’ll take my mind off it?
All I can think of right now is Ivan Lendl’s sex face.
I’m sorry to bring this up.
I should go and cook hotdogs for the girls, perhaps that’ll take my mind off it?
Why is everyone who’s anyone (and a lot of those who aren’t) dealing in certainties, in absolutes, these days?
How has it got to a point at which an insubstantial, purely emotional case can trump any number of facts, and be accepted as reality?
It pains me to see the moral high ground taken by winners at the expense of losers, and unachievable objectives put forward as eminently possible by authority figures then lapped up by people desperate for change.
Perhaps the only certainty remaining is that death and taxes will catch us up eventually.
Perhaps.
Engineering is my trade, that’s something to which I’ve referred in the past. Engineers don’t deal in absolutes, in certainties. Engineers reduce the possibility that edge cases can ruin a successful outcome. Engineers take facts and… It’s very rare indeed that 100% certainty intrudes into our world.
Discovering that vast numbers of people cannot begin to take on board and process even simple facts, cannot search out alternative sources and make choices independent of those handed to them on a gold platter (platter retained by those dispensing the advice) - it’s now just a part of this journey towards political awareness I started in May this year.
Criticism?
Regrettably, yes.
Everyone has the right to offer an opinion, especially after a vote that’s gone against them.
Anyone want to point at a worrying development: that two candidates for very high office (leading a country!) have seemingly exaggerated their competencies to lead, based their campaigns on the understanding that pandering to raw emotions will triumph over cold hard facts, and say it’ll be alright?
Meanwhile, in the real world, it was the school Summer Fair today. Stalls selling stuff, stalls offering games of skill and chance, face painting, glitter tattoos, a (non-traditional but fun) dance part-way through the afternoon, a stall selling bags for the children to decorate, and food and drink and, well, lots of fun!
From a purely personal perspective, the very best thing about today was the greatest of male achievememts: me tossing two out of the three hoops over a thing, and thus winning prizes for my girls. Tossing. Testosterone restored!
Unusually for me, I took something odd away from the decision by the PTA and school to setup indoors to beat the wet weather. Was it the soft toy as big as daughter 2? No. It’s adaptability, something that defines how successful an enterprise can be; a willingness to make plans to get the very best from a situation. Our political classes have failed to do so; preferring a Monty Python approach to responsibility: “Run Away!!”
Next up, a PTA takeover of British government. Don’t discount it.
Censorship is something we’re likely to see more of as time passes, as the illusion of democracy intensifies. Paradoxically we’ll know about it due to the limited ‘sense’ inherent in our laws.
Ok, ‘sense’ might be overstating things a bit.
We live in an age of Super-Injunctions denying even the reporting of a legal action, DMCA takedown notices requiring immediate content removal without the luxury of rebuttal, and censorship by weight of numbers of uninformed and excessively antagonistic comments (don’t read the comments on web sites!)
An initiative coming from the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) - the organisation documenting and influencing the standards upon which the Internet relies to work smoothly - looks quite interesting.
Brand new status code HTTP 451 (in honour of Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ novel) should serve a notification indicating that the requested page is unavailable due to a block imposed as a result of a legal demand.
Unfortunately only time will tell how useful this will be. Actually no, scratch that dismissive response; it will be at least an indicator of the ‘freeness’ of ‘our’ ‘society’.
Now, tinfoil hats arent required here, just common sense.
Grab a friendly politician and…
Ah, a flaw.
Formulating government policy or a political manifesto is very much like making up a typical Facebook scam. Create a convincing document, pass it about a bit, and word-of-mouth accelerates its uptake.
The problem is simple: there’s nothing substantial about the thing. Attractive photos? Check! Lots of testimony from interested parties? Check! But try to get in touch with anyone concerned - to attempt to delve deeper, and there’s nothing there.
The political stuff has at least the illusion one can contact someone, whereas the Facebook stuff has zero contact details, at most 3 posts to establish provenance.
Where policy and FB scams differ: any company giving stuff away has the competition as a loss-leader. They have adverts for their products liberally interspersed with the competition details. They take a conservative approach to the giveaways; independently add their physical address, telephone number, email address, Facebook and Twitter usernames, and web site details. They’d have to be absolute loonies to miss out on the chance of a sale.
National and international advertising campaigns reliant on word-of-mouth do well, with minimal outlay.
A question: which has the biggest impact on identity?
Is it giving away one’s Facebook details to a faceless entity which won’t be around for longer has it takes the site administrators to catch on?
Or is it the voluntary subscription to an ideology which one has and almost-zero hope of influencing, and which alters dependent on the whim of that most capricious breed, the politician?
Which of them brings the most real disappointment?
It’s obvious.
Yet how can people’s hopes and dreams, and the constant let-downs be stopped? Conventional wisdom says that voters don’t care to vote because votes are wasted.
Well,THAT one’s been well-understood truly debunked, HASN’T it!
So wherever we go from here?
Fact-checking.
Its easy, requires only seconds (or minutes) and a very limited knowledge of how to formulate an Internet search.
Don’t believe the hype.
(Nothing to see here.)