http://hugogrinebiter.com Essays by Hugo Grinebiter Tue, 07 Sep 2010 07:02:16 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en When executives commission analyses, translations, reports and so forth, they sometimes insist on having them done immediately. They need them ‘by yesterday’. A month later they call back and say, ‘I’m reading that document I got from you, and…..’ So they didn’t actually need the things by yesterday at all, ... http://hugogrinebiter.com/?p=1575 In the 1960s American companies discovered oil on the Norwegian continental shelf, and an oil boom began. One of the first Norwegian oil workers has recently described the spirit of those days on the platform. The Americans demanded continuous, visible work, whether or not any needed doing, so the Norwegians ... http://hugogrinebiter.com/?p=1570 In the beginning was the patriotic view of the Crusades. As recently as the works of Chesterton we find complete certainty that the Christians were right to march to Jerusalem, take it and rule it, either in self-defence, as a superior culture, or simply because Deus vult. There was some ... http://hugogrinebiter.com/?p=1565 When we are young, we have the faces our parents gave us, but when we are old, we have the faces we deserve. Habitual expression of feelings and attitudes are the engravers, and the most powerful is not laughter or even worry, but censoriousness. Who has not seen old people ... http://hugogrinebiter.com/?p=1561 It is a grave error to believe that habitual or devoted blamers blame only because there is something to be blamed. Such people blame because they gain their emotional satisfactions therefrom, and the more catholically they blame, the more catholic their emotional satisfactions. For example, the pleasure to be derived ... http://hugogrinebiter.com/?p=1556 One popular take on Mrs. Bennett is that she is struggling to survive, and see her daughters survive. This, however, seems to be a confusion with the predicament of some South Asian equivalent; it does violence to the text, which makes it clear that she had a comfortable income of ... http://hugogrinebiter.com/?p=1553 If, to a jaundiced eye, men may appear to be mere programs for fighting, fucking and boasting, to what simple program may women – in the name of equal treatment – be reduced? If you had to model female behaviour in a few lines of Basic, what would be the ... http://hugogrinebiter.com/?p=1550 The ultimate example of producing children for the market was the worship of Moloch. Philistines, and Carthaginians after them, sacrificed their first-born children to the god. This was done by placing the infants in the arms of the statue, which by mechanical means then lifted and tipped the babies into ... http://hugogrinebiter.com/?p=1548 When people have children to look after them in their old age, but expect the children to have children of their own before doing so, we have a stable system in which everyone sacrifices and everyone is sacrificed for. In some cultures, however, symmetry is broken; the parents demand that ... http://hugogrinebiter.com/?p=1546 Once upon a time there was a notion that a country might defend itself by force of arms against another country that was invading it, but should leave in peace those countries that were not invading it. We are now so much more sophisticated: for we may now pre-emptively defend ... http://hugogrinebiter.com/?p=1532