[ by Charles Cameron — decapitation, in this case of the british iceberg, and the Hiwatari festival fire-walking of the Japanese mountain monks ]
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Hey!
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Athletes & Elites:
ONLY THE SUCKERS GO THROUGH THE ADMISSIONS OFFICE
Outright fraud, lying, faking test results is horrible and should be severely prosecuted — that appears to be at the heart of the scandal. No tolerance for that — period. Using contacts, donating money, hiring tutors, putting your kids in the best college feeder schools, taking advantage of legacy status, arranging résumé-building internships — those are the consequences of inequality compounding and amplifying over time, from one generation to another. Does it dilute the pure concept of meritocracy, the level playing field where everyone has an equal shot? Of course.
So why go via the bribery route?
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“LIKE DECAPITATING AN ICEBERG”: BRITAIN IS SCREWED
There is no perfect analogy for Brexit, the surreal, game-theoretical political divorce that was slated to conclude on March 29 at 11 P.M. London time.
Well if “there is no perfect analogy for Brexit”, perhaps “decapitating an iceberg” doesn’t really work either?
Then there’s The Magical Thinking Around Brexit:
The lexicon of Brexit, the United Kingdom’s buffoonishly mismanaged effort to leave the European Union, includes technical terms such as “backstop” and “customs union,” as well as a fanciful but revealing one: “unicorn.” It has come to be a scornful shorthand for all that the Brexiteers promised voters in the June, 2016, referendum and cannot, now or ever, deliver.
Magical Thinking ? Unicorn?
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Numbers count:
the whole of New Zealand, a remote island nation of about 4.9 million people that had only thirty-five murders in all of 2017, was in a state of deep shock
That’s from It’s Time to Confront the Threat of Right-Wing Terrorism
The Christchurch mosque shooter killed 50, more than the New Zealand murder total for 2017, and wounded 50.
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Significant interests of mine:
Poetry: The Final Prophecy of W. S. Merwin
Games: The Division 2 and the Severing of Politics from Video Games
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Just look at this:
Religious supporters walk across the embers of a large fire at the Mount Takao Hiwatari fire-walking festival. Mount Takao is close to Tokyo, and this well-known festival attracts a large crowd of worshippers and tourists. A large pyre is built on the grounds of Yuki-ji Temple, and after it has been burned, Yamabushi (mountain monks) and practitioners of the Shugendo sect of the Buddhist religion walk over the still-smoldering embers in a purifying ritual
The caption reads:
Religious supporters walk across the embers of a large fire at the Mount Takao Hiwatari fire-walking festival. Mount Takao is close to Tokyo, and this well-known festival attracts a large crowd of worshippers and tourists. A large pyre is built on the grounds of Yuki-ji Temple, and after it has been burned, Yamabushi (mountain monks) and practitioners of the Shugendo sect of the Buddhist religion walk over the still-smoldering embers in a purifying ritual
I was here myself in 1972, and the most impressive part of the ritual was the distribution to all comers of little slips of wood — the kind on which you write the name of the plants in a garden row or a pot — on which we were invited to write our sins of the past year, and which were then tossed by monks into the fire path —
— so that the monks can tread the embers of our sins beneath their feet —
— in robes comparable to the ceremonial robes of Catholic or Tibetan Buddhist monks:
