Decimate. (Obliterate? Annihilate?)

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Perdido Bay Alabama: ('Perdido' is Portuguese for 'lost'.) THX1138: The meanings of words drift - sometimes in complicated, even subtle ways. 'Decimate', literally, is killing one in ten, a Roman tactic for dealing with sedition. Ten percent probably worked pretty well for them - without destroying the efficacy of their armies. Rule-of-thumb for specifically management activities within a project also used to be 10% - or 'tithe', Old English for 'tenth' - for 'government' you could say, both corporal & spiritual. But it went cancerous & mad along the way - free-of-tax day is now sometime in July or August, say, 60-70%; and the entire edifice is crumbling under the weight of it. Considering that government has become indistinguishable from industry & usury it's more like 90%. It's reflected culturally here and there - follow up on fandens fødselsdag / The Devil's Birthday if you like and ... think about it. Cadê O Cidadão? / Where is Elmo?: Let's go Citizen! Celebrate! The spectacle of growth has started already. Pssst ... Where is the citizen?         Viva! Whoopee! Uh!Uh!Uh! Yahoo! They're right there eh? Underneath that insupportable tax burden.   Everyone has to become adult. At some point it's necessary to abandon that infantile thing ... ... called happiness.   Cartoons cannot be taken at face value either. ... Just imagine what life in Toronto might have been with the other high-school dropout, George Smitherman at the helm: new and expanded eHealth (currently ~1,000 mouths at the trough) ... whatever ... I didn't vote for Rob Ford but some days I wish I had. Well then, a friendship relation between a man and a woman is obviously possible ... A woman doesn't have to be seen just as a sexual object! On the other hand we could be trivializing human relationships! Friends: Will trade a feminist sociologist for the crudest macho chauvinist. Any takers?   Angst Asiatisk i vælde er angsten. Den er modnet med umodne aar. Og jeg føler det dagligt i hjertet, som om fastlande dagligt forgaar. Men min angst må forløses i længsel og i syner af rædsel og nød. Jeg har længtes mod skibskatastrofer og mod hærværk og pludselig død. Jeg har længtes mod brændende byer og mod menneskeracer på flugt, mod et opbrud, som ramte alverden, og et jordskælv, som kaldtes Guds tugt. Fra romanen 'Hærværk', Tom Kristensen, 1930.        Angst Overwhelming eastern angst, come to fruition in immature years. In my heart it’s a daily sensation, as if whole continents disappear. My anxiety becomes a longing - visions of dread and distress. I yearn for mid-ocean shipwrecks destruction and sudden death. I long to see great cities on fire, humanity fleeing in a headlong surge, world wide break-up and collapse, an earthquake they call 'God’s scourge'. From the novel 'Hærværk' / Havoc, by Tom Kristensen, 1930.   I do not speak Danish, not at all. The translation is a melding of what I could find (with great liberties taken). I am imagining this nugget embodied in petit point samplers everywhere on bourgeois mantelpieces like the ubiquitous kitsch statuettes & prints of Don Quixote already there. [Kitsch (OED): Art characterized by worthless pretentiousness.] Not that the poem itself is kitsch; no more Cervantes' story - both of which are ... golden. Echoes of Yeats' 'Second Coming'. Altogether a very resourceful & self-possessed young woman: Tempting to post more of this delightful person in all her glory ... maybe later.

 

Dr. King said you only need 5% to turn it around. I could quibble over how long such a turn-around would take (too long sez I). ... But still. ... (This is what I might call properly positive thinking.)

 
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