Monday, June 03, 2019

X Man's Burden


If you know your Rudyard Kipling, you may be thinking X = White, but we're not so clear what that means anymore, ever since the Noah hypothesis was deprecated in favor of the dinosaur one.

We may still imagine some sub-species of overlord, tasked with taking on the great burdens, but lets not pretend to go by melanin content in the epidermis.  Are they reptilian?

Taking everything literally is the fastest way to close doors on most possibilities.

Remember hallway monitors?  If you went to a large school, you might have had experience with the role.  The hallways of academia, like many hallways, have their monitors.

Do they look for inappropriate cartoons posted on doorways.

Professors often showcase humor at the entrances to their sanctums.

Some people profess about philosophy, having "doctor of philosophy" degrees.

However the PhD degree has come to signify proficiency in high degree, minus any stipulation that philosophy is involved.

One could say the PhD degree is fiat currency, in becoming divorced from the "gold standard" of what it originally stood for (proficiency in philosophy).  That's pure speculation on my part.

Today was a religious holiday of sorts in my pandas DataFrame of special datetimes.

A "datetime" is a type of Python object.

The religion in question:  Church of the Subgenius.

That's the church of Bob Dobbs, who only appears to look normal (what with that pipe and all).  Is he really an X Man?  The church of slack is not about glorifying toil.

Does "America" want to finally become a country?  With the border situation that open, with Canada, chances are slim, according to some criteria.  But all talk of fences aside, doesn't becoming a first world nation imply some degree of caring for one's citizens?

The Cowardly Capitalist crowd is hoping to get Uncle Sam to protect them, both from competition abroad, and from citizens agitating for social services.  The burden the C3s imagine assuming, should they be required to demonstrate social responsibility, just seems too unAmerican to them.