James Abbott The Jade Sphinx

"The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography." -- Oscar Wilde

Justice for Henry Nowak

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

That this is happening beggars imagination.

[Walter Kirn @walterkirn]

This kind of thing, these sort of charges, will freeze publishing. Publishers -- who tend to be risk averse given their slim margins -- will shun any material that could retrospectively be identified as "offensive" or "causing discomfort" etc.

That means, in practice, pretty much all of what we call literary writing, because it depends on ambiguity, intellectual complexity, and layered, ancient, unresovable conflicts in the mind and in society.

Only AI work will be trustworthy -- because it can be programmed to police itself according to all the current speech codes. It can even seamlessly update its own texts as those codes change.

The codes of speech and thought and expression very quickly will become as complicated as the tax codes and most human authors will simply give up trying to comply with them. Though publishers will give up first, I expect.

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

A sobering conclusion, yet ... also an inescapable one.

[Steven Edginton @StevenEdginton]

"If war was to break out tomorrow, it wouldn’t be worth fighting for this country."

"It was worth fighting for. But what was allowed to happen afterwards? That wasn’t worth fighting for."

I asked Don Poole, 102-year-old WW2 veteran, about modern Britain: https://t.co/uGwAZMz1QW

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

I was blessed to grow up in a big house. In many ways, it was a place of enchantment.

[Greg Cello @gregcello]

so much of what i’m doing is an attempt to recover an older understanding of what a home is supposed to do in the formation of a human being. the modern home asks almost nothing of a child.

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

Napoleon is really one of the most complex men in history, isn't he?

[Jash Dholani @oldbooksguy]

Women: "Do men even have feelings?"

Meanwhile men:

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

Charm to spare. Can anyone identify the illustrator?

[♠️ Gentleman ♠️ @Gentleman_1965]

Goodnight

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

@Gentleman_1965 Who is the illustrator?

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

I see this decline every day and everywhere around me. When I point it out, I'm told I'm being negative or dramatic. No, I'm just noticing. The West is crumbling around us and we turn a blind eye to it.

Follow @wrathofgnon -- a genuinely good guy with lots to say.

[Wrath Of Gnon @wrathofgnon]

The "decline of everything" is so profound and so thorough that the average person can not even express it in words. What we have now is nothing but a simulation. Everything from fashion to diction to public spaces to fonts to heraldry to speech to music.

We might as well say mammoths once roamed here and it would make more sense.

This is Tartarian Empire stuff.

Everything has been simplified and simplified until no meaning remains. This is what pornography is to the act of fruitful love. This is what the taped banana on the wall of the gallery is to Michelangelo.

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

@FredFredsonNY @Mish1713 @NYCMayor @NYPDUS Dude, you wrote "When she said she didn't have ID, it's now arrestable." That is simply not how life in the United States works.

Thanks for your attention in this matter.

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

Officers Asfak Mahmud, shield 10087, and Mohammed S. Ahmed, shield 22523, both of the NYPD’s 17th Precinct, along with their supervisor, must be held accountable.

@NYCMayor @NYPDUS

[Radically Right @RadicallyRight_]

It starts with your dog. Then it’s how you dress. The hemline. What you can wear on the street before someone decides it’s a problem. Then it’s the LGBT community. The bars. The music. And before you know it, you’re wondering whether you can still walk around New York at night like it’s your city.

This is just the beginning of what you voted in. I hope some of you are going to watch this video and finally ask yourselves, “What the fuck did we do?”

Around 3 a.m. in Murray Hill, two NYPD officers stopped a nurse while she was walking her leashed dog. The officers said she was in the street. She said she had the walk signal. One of them grabbed her arm, and you can hear her telling him he was hurting her. Bystanders started filming, called 911, and demanded a supervisor. Even with people asking them directly, the officers never clearly said what law she’d broken. She kept her dog.

I hope she goes after both of them hard. The two officers in the video are Asfak Mahmud, shield 10087, and Mohammed S. Ahmed, shield 22523, both of the NYPD’s 17th Precinct.

I’d file complaints with NYPD Internal Affairs and the Civilian Complaint Review Board and talk to a civil rights attorney about a possible lawsuit against the officers and the city. I want to hear exactly what justified putting hands on her.

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

Lovely illustration.

[Historium Unearthia @HistoriumU]

In Perrault's The Fairies, a kind girl receives the gift of producing flowers and jewels whenever she speaks. Her rude sister is cursed to spit snakes and toads. The same fairy tests them both, proving that supernatural encounters are rarely equal-opportunity experiences. #FairyTaleTuesday

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

@FredFredsonNY @Mish1713 @NYCMayor @NYPDUS No one in the United States is required to carry ID, unless you are driving. This is not Eastern Europe.

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

@FredFredsonNY @Mish1713 @NYCMayor @NYPDUS No citizen is obligated to comply with an illegal request, nor one that contravenes their Constitutional rights.

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

@FredFredsonNY @FelisPrime @NYCMayor @NYPDUS Actually, yes, I am.

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

@citizenjeff @FredFredsonNY @NYCMayor @NYPDUS It's not a bullshit claim if you look at the video.

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

@d4doome Same.

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

@Gentleman_1965 Artist?

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

"There's no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written, that is all."

--Oscar Wilde.

[d4doome @d4doome]

Few things worry me more than the idea that art and entertainment should serve some moral purpose. It’s an idea that is very popular among religious zealots (such as Christians and feminists).

It’s an idea that opens the door to more and more draconian censorship and social control.

That’s quite apart from the reality that what strikes one person as moral will be seen by others as immoral.

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

@FredFredsonNY @FelisPrime @NYCMayor @NYPDUS Blocking traffic on a sidewalk at 3:00 AM? Are you retarded? (Sorry ... you've already demonstrated that you are.)

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

@citizenjeff @FredFredsonNY @NYCMayor @NYPDUS Police must have an actual crime that they can articulate to detain you. There is no evidence that they have done that. Nor should they put their hands on her, nor threaten to take her dog.

Ignorance and arrogance? Or plan seeing and plain talking?

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

Give this a read.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

In 1805, a young man fell to his death on a mountain in England. When they finally found him, three months later, he wasn’t alone…

His name was Charles Gough, a young artist who set off that April to cross Helvellyn, one of the highest mountains in the Lake District, taking his little dog Foxie with him. Somewhere on the way, he fell and died, far from any path or house, and for weeks nobody knew what had happened to him. Then, on 27 July, a shepherd working near the lonely mountain lake of Red Tarn heard a dog barking. When he followed the sound, he found Gough’s body, and beside it, still keeping watch, was Foxie. She had stayed with her master through all those months, alone on the mountain, and she had even given birth to a puppy there, which sadly didn’t survive.

The story moved all of England: two of the greatest poets of the day, William Wordsworth and Walter Scott, each wrote a poem about it without knowing the other was doing the same, and Scott wrote these lines as if he were speaking to the dog herself:

"How long didst thou think that his silence was slumber? When the wind waved his garment, how oft didst thou start?"

More than twenty years later, inspired by Scott’s poem, the young Edwin Landseer painted the scene and called it Attachment. It depicts a dead man lying among the rocks, and a small dog pressing herself against his chest, as if she could still wake him…

Foxie didn’t understand death, but she understood love better than most people ever will. She didn’t know her master was gone, she only knew that he was hers, and that she would not leave him. And that is the miracle every dog offers us, whether we deserve it or not: a love that lasts forever and asks for nothing. Wordsworth said it best, and his words are still carved on a memorial stone on the mountain today:

"How nourished here through such long time
He knows, who gave that love sublime;
And gave that strength of feeling, great
Above all human estimate!"

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

@ross_baglin Perhaps. I hope he appeals. I think it smells to high heaven.

[James Abbott The Jade Sphinx @thejadesphinx]

So, I don't understand this. This isn't a political post, I only barely know who Russell Brand is. But how can a rape allegation, decades old with no evidence, deprive a man of his liberty?

[TMZ @TMZ]

🚨 BREAKING: Russell Brand sentenced to 10 years in prison. https://t.co/LYsspm2Vnl