From the YouTube blurb:
It is powered by a 1920's vintage hit and miss engine, and doesn't do anything except make noise and lots of lost motions.Yep. That sums it up exactly.
Header Image (book)
Thursday, February 12, 2015
How Government Works
Title of the display at Cotton Ginning Days in Dallas, North Carolina (October 11, 2014): Scale Model of the US Government:
From the YouTube blurb:
From the YouTube blurb:
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But how mightily we pay for the pleasure of obsequiousness to this machine.
ReplyDelete"Full of sound and fury -- signifying nothing."
ReplyDeleteYes AOW, that's it EXACTLY. That contraption perfectly symbolizes the condition to which Industrialization, Automation, increasingly domineering Technology, and the ever-increasing Trivialization and Vulgarization of Thought and Feeling wrought by the Mass Communication and Entertainment Media have reduced us.
DeleteI wonder if anyone could try to explain WHY we've done his to ourselves?
Could the LUDDITES have been RIGHT?
Why?
DeleteIt's fairly simple, FT. We're victims of comfort.
Very close, Ducky. I would put it a little differently, however.
DeleteI believe the problem has arisen because of our infernal drive to find ways to make our tasks easier and more "efficient."
Well, as my great Aunt Etta, a very wise woman, used to say, "Get your happiness out of your work, or you'll never know what happiness is."
Because of our frantic, mindless pursuit of "pleasure," -- and the efforts of those fiendishly eager to exploit it -- we have lost our way.
The French have a saying that describes it succinctly:
"Toujours plaisir, n'est pas plaisir."
So yes we ARE victims of comfort, if you want to call it that, but I prefer to think of it as victims of our innate laziness and generally poor set of values.
We want more political threads were we can insult the Both obamas as they deserve ,
ReplyDelete1. Couldn't this thread relate to the present regime?
Delete2. I'm still recovering from a fall, working a brutal third-quarter teaching schedule, and not up to posting much right now.
3. Is there really much to say about the Obamas? They are becoming more and more irrelevant -- still wielding power, of course. **sigh**
PS: Open thread coming again on February 21.
Aside from agreeing with AOW, I'd add that the rest of us might want posts with better sentence structure and grammar. Smells like a troll to me.
DeleteCI,
DeleteCould be a troll. There is an infestation of them in the blogosphere.
"The world is filled with endless woe
DeleteBy men who like to think they know"
This piece could relate to any regime but I think the government has actually become very efficient at what it really does.
DeleteHint: Follow the money
There's only one problem with this model. It doesn't run on money.
ReplyDeleteThersites,
DeleteGood one!
Only in America could we see such creativity. Good one AOW.
ReplyDelete"and doesn't do anything except make noise and lots of lost motions."
ReplyDelete" and doesn't do anything"
THANK GOD!
"It is powered by a 1920's vintage hit and miss engine, and doesn't do anything except make noise and lots of lost motions."
ReplyDeleteAnd waste a great deal of time, energy and taxpayers' money to keep it going," we might well add.
A perfect prototype for Modern Life.
FT,
DeleteA perfect prototype for Modern Life.
Going round and round -- accomplishing nothing. That's the blogosphere, too, much of the time.
MacDonald was a worthy Scot
ReplyDeleteAnd so was old MacTavish
Upon their aged, hoary heads
We should heap much praise lavish.
But not all "Macs" are worthy folk
Some are like a foul joke
Worth no more than wind from a beanery
Like the villain vile MacHinery!
§;-D
FT,
DeleteHa, ha!
Not sure why Moholy-Nagy is in a museum ...
ReplyDelete... and this splendid folk piece isn't.
Duck,
DeleteWhat is that thing in the link?
The steam and gas show that Mr. AOW and I attended for decades. Great fun! Lots of folk art!
Images from the Berryville Steam and Gas Show
And remember folks, when you lose your keys it's a real freaking pain if you hid the spare in a location that's iced in.
ReplyDeleteMore snow Sunday. This must end, no?
We need to alter our bodies surgically to include something like a KANGAROO POUCH, Ducky. ;-)
DeleteDuck,
DeleteMassachusetts is having a Snow-mageddon this year.
Good tip about the hiding place for spare keys.
So perfect! The U.S. government in macro, and our own little Soviet Monica in micro. Our wallets are the fuel, alas.
ReplyDeleteSorry, I would make the case that our government does a lot more harm than this machine could ever do.
ReplyDeleteKid,
DeleteYes, that case can certainly be made.
Baysider,
DeleteOut-and-out theft!
"More snow Sunday. This must end, no?"
ReplyDeleteHow's that "Global Warming" treating you lately?
Funny thing is, here in the DC area, it is oddly snow-less. We've had maybe two inches all winter, and what snow does fall melts when it hits the group. The weather is just being bipolar- 50, 20, 42, 20...
DeleteNot saying the GW thing isn't silly, but if the politicians don't bother to read the news (which wouldn't surprise me), they would think it was a warm winter.
-Wildstar
Wildstar,
DeleteAnd I'm grateful for this winter so far.
Of course, we haven't yet celebrated Palm Sunday, typically the last date for any significant snowfall here during the first six months of any given year.
We have had a cold winter, though.
BTW, there has recently been a lot of information that the GW numbers were deliberately tweaked to further the GW agenda. If you want a link,let me know.
AOW, I've been surprised by the relative lack of snow in NOVA as well....though we're under a snow forecast for tomorrow night. And I had to leave the house today.........good grief was it cold.
DeleteI head to Germany next weekend, and I feel like I'll be warmer there.
CI,
DeleteI think that we're going to get slammed with "the big one of the season" tonight. Wanna come over to help shovel out the AOW household?