This is beyond hilarious. Hart Seely of Slate has taken excerpts from U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's press conferences, and reformatted them as poetry. The amazing this is, they're good. Courtesy of American Realpolitik, but my favourite isn't listed on his site:
"As we know,Very funny, and very poetic. It also refers to a basic tenet of successful spycraft, one that has serious relevance to the War on Terror.
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know."
-- Feb. 12, 2002 news briefing
I'm getting ripped off, just the other day I posted about the wisdom of admitting (at least to yourself) what you don't know. Whoever is doing the formatting though, he's a genius. A genius with a lot of time on his hands.
The remaining problem, and I paraphrase Mark Twain, is
"the stuff you know,
that just ain't so."
Robert Rumsfeld, Zen koan master.
This is the work of Hart Seely - it appeared in Slate a couple of days ago.
(http://slate.msn.com/id/2081042/)
Somehow the blogosphere is good at scrubbing correct attributions from stories. PLEASE give credit where it is due. Otherwise it just looks like copyright infringement.
Bloggers often use "second-hand attribution" in order to reward people who pointed the link out to them in the first place, and it's considered perfectly fair to do so.
American Realpolitik links directly to that URL in his post, and it's necessary to visit him if one wants to see the rest. Thanks for writing in with your concern.
But Joe, you could have given Seely attribution and kept the link the American Realpolitik by just replacing "A reporter" with "Hart Seely".
Just because it's a blogging tradition doesn't make it right.
The "knowing" poem reminds me an of an old "Ladder of Consciousness of Knowing"
(read from the bottom up, like climbing a ladder)
==================== 4--not knowing you know 3--knowing you know 2--knowing you don't know 1--not knowing you don't know ====================Used in some critical thinking classes to show the "rise" of unconscious ignorance through conscious ignorance through conscious knowing back "up" to automatic (unconscious) knowing (like driving a car for a simplistic example)
That's a good suggestion. Done.
Thanks - much appreciated
Joe K. and I have a discussion going about the nature of addiction. I have presented to him some evidence that contradicts the current theories. I also present an alternative theory that matches the evidence and explains things the current theory does not.
Joe is having a hard time with this. Not surprising it is a charged subject and quite a few people have trouble with the evidence. Even those in the field who are familiar with my sources.
It boils down to a very simple statement probably well known by all of you accepted and yet disregarded as so obvious that it can be ignored. The statement is this:
It is hard to see what you don't believe.
M. Simon is right on all counts - I am finding it difficult. The war crowded it entirely out of our rotation, but his take is worth viewing. Once it's all over in Iraq but the shouting, we'll get to his stuff and let y'all decide.
I actually thought this was one of the most brilliant and eloquent quotes I've ever read. Rumsfeld is a genius.