A Father Talks with his Daughter about God

Sinum Conservate! Save the Bay!

2012-01-28T15:32:00.002-05:00

reprint

The "Small Brothers" of St. Paul in Clean Up The Bay Day in 2010 At Neavitt, MD.

I have a high school friend who joined the Order of St. Paul Oikumene, which is actually an abbreviation of "St. Paul of the Oikumene and the Antioikumene, which literally means "St Paul of the Inhabited Lands and the Uninhabited Lands". Their monastery is down on the Chesapeake on Tilghman Island on highway 33 west and south of St. Michael's on the Outer Shore of Maryland.
Their monastery on Tilghman is actually an aggregation of individual houses that had been built during the bubble by a developer who had declared bankruptcy. They had sat empty for a few years, but had been minimally maintained by Mungo Reeves, a County employee, who had scoured the neighborhoods about for money to keep the development from falling into ruin, and thereby destroying surrounding property values.
Then the Small Brothers came into the picture. ("Small Brothers" is a trans of "Fratres Pauli" which could mean both "brothers of Paul" or "small brothers" in Latin; it is short for Fratres Pauli Oikumenes kai Antoikumenes, a combination of Latin and Greek that is pretty uncommon for the Bishop of Rome and his pals.)

The order bought the development very cheaply and the structure that had been intended to function as a club house and community center was turned into a chapel and refectory and library, the rest of the units becoming domiciles for the members of the order.

Their function as an order is to maintain the ecological quality of the Chesapeake Bay along the Outer Shore and the Inner Shore of Maryland. The Small Brothers are the first ecological order of workers that I am aware of. Their goals are the maintenance of the Bay and the lower reaches of the rivers flowing thereto, which covers an enormous territory which is presently beyond the abilities of the twenty one brothers and their helpers among the laity, but eventually they intend to reach their goal.
When I visited last year, Brother Bob (my old friend, Robert Patterson III from high school) showed me around the grounds. He showed me things you don't expect at a monastery: outboard motors and run-abouts, working scows, testing equipment... I was amazed.
The State contributes some money, but it is far less than it used to spend on clean up in the area the Brothers can effectively maintain. In my life, I seem to remember three distinct eras of "The Chesapeake is dying! Let's clean it up!" Flurry of money and activity, then everyone would forget. That's when the Small Brothers entered the picture. They have but one goal and no other distractions. Most of their monies come from appeals they make at churches around the Chesapeake, not only RC churches but churches of other denominations - and temples and mosques - that want to hear them preach the word of Good Husbandry of Nature.

I understood that the order would be establishing a womens' arm, Sorores Pauli. Where their place would be no one seemed to know as of last year. There were ten women interested, and that would be a welcome addition to their force. I don't know the status of that right this moment.

God bless the brothers and sisters of St. Paul of the Sown, the Settled, and the Empty Lands!

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Global Warming in the Wall Street Journal

2012-01-28T12:54:00.002-05:00

The WSJ has an article on global warming, but it is "Global Warming" - The Political Debating Point, and not the "global warming" which is being studied by science. In a time honored way, they have the signatures of sixteen scientists affixed at the bottom....
I assume these guys are agreeing with the article, because I did not get to read that far.

I do not really care whether global warming may or may not be proven; I do not care if it is influenced by the economies of mankind. I do not care what those 16 scientists believe, since I do not have their works in front of me, and I do not care what an equivalent group of 16 scientists opposed to the opinions of the first 16 might say: do not care.

No one involved in this dispute, neither the WSJ, nor the writer, nor the signing scientists, nor the far-from-insightful commenters has any take on the issue on the spiritual significance of the issue.
What is spiritual significance? Does it have to do with the Unseen? Spiritual significance covers a wide territory, and at least part of it deals with Tacit Cognition: things known and perceived, yet not expressed by the usual forms of language and images and mathematics, all of which we can see and hear.

When I ran 6 days a week back in to 1990's, I ran outdoors and ran anywhere from 4 to 10 miles, and this was an hour to 2 hours per day in the outdoors: nothing but me and nature. I found that as winter drew on, I had intuitions about the winter weather from December through the middle of February - sort of a running Farmers' Almanac. By November I made my winter weather predictions, and I found that I was correct 80% of the time, or 8 winters out of 10. This is a bit better than random guessing.
Did I have "tacit knowledge" of the oncoming weather? I don't know. I always assumed that there were probably cues and indications - woolly caterpillars and such - that must have been related to the coming weather, but I was never consciously aware of them. (I was also in a climate-sensitive industry, which explains the focus on my part.)

The Earth where we live has a spiritual significance in my life. God creates the garden, and it is man's duty to dress it, till it, manage it, and husband the resources in a continuous stewardship.

Look upon what we do in the world today: yammering for oil to run smack dab through the main aquifer of the country, oil in the Gulf, the toxic process of fracking...
Answer this: how long will we be able to conjure up fossil fuels?
Peak oil may not be tomorrow, nor next year, nor even 100 years, but when it occurs, we will have deplenished our children's and grand-children's inheritance, just as we have saddled them with debt while we either pleasure ourselves with wealth... or we torment ourselves with our poverty and inability to make ends meet! The 1% and the 99%! Neither is fulfilled.
We are ignorant of how to live with the Earth in a sustainable manner, but instead we live in a mad compound-interest of exploitation, getting higher and higher short-term returns while clearly inimical to our long-term health.

Take genetically modified food as a paradigm: it is complex enough that we will see 30 silver scientists sign their names to a WSJ article soon saying that no genetically modified part of food can get into the bloodstream. (Actually, this may have happened some time in the past already.)\
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Where Inequity Starts

2012-01-26T09:48:00.000-05:00

Making scads of money is part of a merit based system which rewards hard work.

The "Merit System" which has been prominently mentioned by Mr. Romney ends at the tax loophole.

When a group can buy tax loopholes, they are no longer part of a merit based system, and Mr. Romney has indicated - by an aide's siggestion that he would amend "carried interest" - that he is fully aware of it.
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Income Inequality

2012-01-25T05:08:00.002-05:00

As previously stated, the gross income inequality that exists in the USA is a symptom of a disease, not the cause of one. It may be the cause of many other things, but itself it is a symptom.
The playing field is not level; this is a symptom of a chronic effort to change the rules we all play by to favor a certain group or team.

It is not smarts nor industriousness nor some sort of merit system nor the free market system necessarily which cause the Playing Field to be cantilevered towards one goal: it is the existence of exceptions to the General Rules of Play, such as the phenomenon of Carried Interest which has been highlighted in Mr. Romney's tax returns.
Carried Interest is essentially income taxed at the much lower capital gains rate, an exception not available to the non-rich.

Where did the exception to the Rules come from? It was brought into existence by paid Lobbyists who influenced the US Congress: it was bought and paid for. Those who are not wealthy can not afford such highly paid lobbyists, and thus must play by the General Rules of taxation which bedevil the rest of us.

Mr. Romney wishes us to believe that all this talk is Envy.
Such a stance misses the salient point entirely: that there are least 2 groups (if you can not bear to use the word "class") in this country: those who can purchase exceptions to the rules, and those who cannot.

The Algorithms of Despair will compute the outcomes - just as they did in 2008 - and we will live the calculations!
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In Which C. A. Jeffrey Returns

2012-01-22T19:09:00.007-05:00

A reprint from the past, honoring the recent return of C.A. Jeffrey (I always call her C.A. Jeffrey as if I were working for the #1 Ladies Detective Agency in Botswana). She is a wonderful painter, one of whose works I have in my study. Her mother passed last year, and our condolences went out to her.

Here is my version of her painting with her aunt, titled C.A. Jeffrey Gets A Flat, one in a series of my studies of great artists with flat tires:

C.A. Jeffrey happens to like coffee a good deal.

pic: http://cajeffrey.blogspot.com/

(without the flat tire)

Republican-Tea Party Mess

2012-01-22T09:06:00.003-05:00

Newt wins in South Carolina, throwing the race into turmoil... and , of course, there is this, too, to remember:

In 2011, all but four House Republicans and all but five Senate Republicans voted for a very public plan to withdraw the Medicare guarantee from Americans younger than age 55.

The Paul Ryan plan would instead offer future retirees support to buy a private insurance plan—with the amount of the support rising at the rate of general inflation. If health care costs continue to rise during the next three decades at the same pace as in the past three decades, then—under this proposal—today’s 30-somethings would receive support sufficient to cover about 25 percent of their Medicare costs, leaving them to find the other 75 percent themselves.

The money saved would be applied to balance the budget and finance a big tax cut, reducing the top income-tax rate to 28 percent from the otherwise scheduled 39.6 percent.

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer at the time expressed worry that the Ryan plan might prove a “suicide note.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/01/20/david-frum-mitt-romney-has-signed-paul-ryan-s-suicide-note.html#body_text4

I shall certainly remember. There has been something altogether unreal about Republicans since 2000. They inhabit a dream world of their own making, and think that they can control the mental midgets of various stripes whose only politics is hatred and resentment. What possible insanity led them to formulate their own demise as they already have?

In another Frum article today:

George Romney, then Governor of Michigan, explaining his refusal to endorse Barry Goldwater in 1964:

Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation, lead to governmental crises and deadlocks, and stymie the compromises so often necessary to preserve freedom and achieve progress.

I sincerely look forward to the end of the Republican-Tea Party monstrosity, and hope to see the Republican Party that George (Mitt's father) Romney envisaged take its place.
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Supreme (?) Court

2012-01-20T05:38:00.001-05:00

Just how "supreme" can any group be that includes a Scalia and a Thomas?

From Brad deLong:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/01/could-somebody-please-create-some-high-paying-sinecures-to-get-scalia-and-thomas-off-the-bench-immediately.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/us/cory-r-maples-must-be-given-second-chance-after-mailroom-mix-up-justices-rule.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that an Alabama death row inmate who missed a filing deadline thanks to a mix-up in the mailroom of a prominent New York law firm must be given another chance.

... Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the majority in the 7-to-2 decision, said “no just system” would allow the missed deadline to be held against the inmate, Cory R. Maples, in light of how he had been treated by lawyers from Sullivan & Cromwell, who handled his case without charge after he was convicted of murdering two people in 1997. The decision allows lower federal courts to consider Mr. Maples’s claim that his trial court lawyers were ineffective notwithstanding the missed deadline in the state court system...

Guess which two Justices were adamant in upholding the sacred duty of Punctuality?
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Waiting At The Bus Terminal...

2012-01-17T13:14:00.003-05:00

It feels some days like a Trip to Bountiful... but most days it don't.

photo: http://photoexpose.blogspot.com/

Evan Johnson

Water and Oil Don't Mix?

2012-01-16T06:17:00.000-05:00

Get up to speed on Water, Oil, the Ogalalla Aquifer, and the Keystone XL Pipeline about which President Obama must make some decision by the end of February.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/ogallala-aquifer-6531527

Something We Should Be Worried About, but Aren't: Water.

Charles P. Pierce
at 4:17
October 27, 2011

I keep thinking of the BP Deepwater fiasco, but transferred right smack-dab into the middle of the Midwest.

Perhaps it is time to form a Regional Third Party to protect the interests of the Midwest from the Republicans and Democrats?
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Psalm 109: A Cry for Hypocrisy

2012-01-15T06:04:00.006-05:00

In our continuing spectacle of Right-Wing religiosity:

http://www.mediaite.com/online/gop-state-house-speaker-under-fire-for-bible-quote-some-interpret-as-death-prayer-for-obama/

GOP State House Speaker Under Fire For Bible Quote Some Interpret As Death Prayer For Obama
by Frances Martel
4:46 pm, January 14th, 2012

Earlier this week, the Lawrence Journal-World was sent an email that O’Neal [Kansas Republican House Speaker Mike O’Neal] had forwarded to House Republicans that referred to President Obama and a Bible verse that says “Let his days be few and brief.”
Rodee said that that email was referring to the president’s days in office.
The email, which has been posted in various places on the Internet, refers to a bumper sticker that reads “Pray for Obama. Psalm 109:8.”
The email states: “At last — I can honestly voice a Biblical prayer for our president! Look it up — it is word for word! Let us all bow our heads and pray. Brothers and Sisters, can I get an AMEN? AMEN!!!!!!”

And the Psalm 109: 8- 13 is as follows:

8 Let his days be few;
            and let another take his office. Acts 1.20
9 Let his children be fatherless,
            and his wife a widow.
10 Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg:
            let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.
11 Let the extortioner catch all that he hath;
            and let the strangers spoil his labor.
12 Let there be none to extend mercy unto him:
            neither let there be any to favor his fatherless children.
13 Let his posterity be cut off;
            and in the generation following let their name be blotted out.

All of this might make one rather glad that one skipped Sunday School and Summer Bible Camp in one's youth so one did not grow up practicing the most craven hypocrisy, evidenced by cherry-picking Bible verses and using them in a thoroughly non-Christian manner.

The Psalm is attributed to King David, and is subtitled A Cry for Vengeance. The curses within echo other texts from the ancient world replete with magical and superstitious curses. David calls upon his God to exact vengeance, just as millions of other ancient called upon their gods. We may assume that the outcomes were roughly the same: a coin toss whether the curse be fulfilled or not.

Hold! There is Irony, just as there is so often in religious matters. Reading just a little way down, we see:

17 As he loved cursing,
            so let it come unto him:
as he delighted not in blessing,
so let it be far from him.

18 As he clothed himself with cursing like as with his garment,
            so let it come into his bowels like water,
and like oil into his bones.

If only Mike O'Neal had not skipped the session where Psalm 109 was continued, he would not have called this curse down upon his own head!

What the Right-Wing fails to grasp - and many others of us fail, also... and this may be due to our having little sense of humor - is that there is a very good chance that one of the basic pillars of religious belief is ironical: casting the high and mighty... down from their lofty thrones; the fall of the Tower of Babylon, and curses heaped on those whose tongues are cursing!
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BB

2012-01-14T03:42:00.001-05:00

Blast Baysage for making me think this early in the morning! (cf. various comments)

No one should have a serious thought before 10:00 AM, preferably with nova and a fresh bagel.
And serious thought should cease at 4:30 PM... unless you have homework.
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Capitalism

2012-01-13T10:04:00.000-05:00

Reading about Romney and Bain Capital, which bought companies on the verge of bankruptcy, gutted them and created leaner, meaner companies, some of whom showed a profit.

People seem to think "lean and mean" is part of the definition of Capitalism. It is not. It may be a type of effort that creates efficient companies in a Capitalistic system, but that is as far as one can go with it. The bloated and inefficient companies on the verge of bankruptcy were also in a Capitalist system.

To choose Romney is not to choose Capitalism; it is to choose an ethos.
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Surveys

2012-01-13T09:53:00.000-05:00

As the politics continues, I remember a telephone survey I took back in 2010 before the elections that year. It was about the race for Michigan Governor - Snyder versus Bernero - and it seemed to be pro-Snyder. As an Independent, I answered the questions, some pro-Republican, some pro-Democrat.

Then came the clincher. The survey person asked me that if the election were that day, would I vote for Snyder? Well, I said, I took a vow back in 2003 after the Iraq invasion never to vote for a Republican again... so I guess I could not.

There was a brief silence, but these people are trained to hear all kinds of hooey, so the survey went on: couple more match-ups, couple of more disclaimers that I was honor bound never to vote Republican again... even though I supported some of Snyder's ideas.

Tough.
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The Lies We Tell

2012-01-13T07:17:00.002-05:00

No man will create jobs.
To create jobs by policy is faith, not fact. Economics is a science that follows behind Life and picks up what is strewn about in its wake, making notes about it all the time.

No man nor woman, nor any group of men or women will create jobs, nor will they fix the economy. They wish to do so, and their fervent wishes are the best we can do to fix things long-term, because we just do not know.
All we know is our prejudices and ideologies and mind-sets; no more than that. We do not know how to create jobs or industries that compete in international markets.

How to make things better?

Education will makes things better. We commit to educate and we wait for the harvest; it takes an entire winter of discontent, but we know it will come.

Peace will make things better. Instead of watching the wars go by one after another, stretching out decades, watching our own brothers and sisters and children become killed, maimed, and broken in spirit until they succumb to committing atrocious acts, give peace a chance.
We did after the fall of the USSR, and most people felt relief the Cold War was over, even though we could see it was driving a lot of the villains in government and policy and business and industry up a tree. We did not imagine how creative they would be.

Faith will make things better. Not compulsion and not obsession. What people are those who argue over public displays of prayer on football fields, yet whose own Gospels tell them to pray behind closed doors? They are a faithless people, whose ideology fills the void where faith once was.

Charity will make things better: to do unto others as we would have done to us.

Equality of Opportunity will make things better, and it will change the Legacy World we see around us where only the very, very rich have access to the best our society has to offer.

Vote for me: I promise to commit long-term to these things.
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Downton Abbey

2012-01-12T10:43:00.000-05:00

I watched Downton Abbey - which I invariably referred to as "Downtown Abbey" from day 1 - last year and I seemed to remember enjoying myself. When I heard the new episodes were coming, I did not seem to thrilled for some reason.

I watched it Sunday night, staying up well beyond my usual bed time. It was awful. There is no depth to it. It is a shallow soap opera that has no interesting characters to hang one's attention on - save the Butler and the Housekeeper - but surely dramatic science has progressed sufficiently since Upstairs, Downstairs that we could have some other interesting people. Come to think of it, there were plenty of three dimensional characters in U,D.
Well, there are none in DA.

Why would a daughter who has just learned to drive an autocar fling herself into a tractor on a neighboring farm? Is a tractor no more than a motorcar running on arable land? To top it off, why would you have a fling with a gap-toothed yokel, who, by the end of a day's work, must has smelled rather ripe, and had no particular good looks?
The father wants to go to war, gets an honorary appointment and is disappointed he cannot do his bit, has some champagne and port with some other old soldiers and that's it for that particular story line.
Need some gay characters to bounce off each other? One must be reading Classics at Oxford, and the other must be in service. Tired of that? Have the University bloke kill himself.

Trite, trite, trite. Maggie Smith cannot possibly have enough funny faces and grimaces in her reptetoire to save us from the tedium.
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{*}rif

2012-01-11T12:37:00.001-05:00

The above - {*}rif - is a memory from the days when the Mechs, or mechanical scam-bots or advert-turks, were besieging my blog with Viagra ads.

{*}rif is said to mean "Resistance is Futile!"

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The Great Impoverishment Continues... Manifest Destiny of Greed

2012-01-11T09:38:00.007-05:00

Hope rekindled in the Ghost Dance

The Great Impoverishment which has seen wages stagnate and fall, which has seen jobs shipped away, continues with an attack against our rights. It began 30 years ago and has been the greatest wealth transfer in the history of mankind, and now that 1% of the people hold the wealth, there begins the assault on the human rights of the 99%.

We simple, everyday Americans will be the new Indians driven from our homes; we will be the new slaves to the military-industrial-corporate complex; we will haunt the new reserves and plantations.
The script of the new global economy was written years ago, and we see its fruition now: devastated cities and devastated peoples.

From our tears will come the earthquake and the hurricane.

We read:

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/ict_sbc/the-higher-law-background-of-the-u-s-constitution
The ‘Higher Law Background’ of the U.S. Constitution
By Steven Newcomb

On December 31, 2011, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2012. By doing so, he thereby placed his imprimatur as President of the United States on a provision in that Act that codifies in U.S. law the military detention of anyone in the world, without charge or trial, and without a time limit. Even U.S. citizens can be held until the end of hostilities in a climate of war that has been called “generational.
As an American Indian, I find this development unbelievably fascinating, and unnerving. Think about the irony: The first African American President of the United States, a former civil rights attorney and professor of constitutional law, has now become a President of the United States who has helped to further undermine, and perhaps destroy, the U.S. Constitution. He has done so by signing into U.S. law a legislative provision—which he requested—that, in effect, guts the tradition of habeas corpus, and arguably institutes martial law in the United States...

... John Locke was another political thinker who provided ideas that... had “impressed themselves most definitely upon American constitutional law.” Locke said that “legislative power is not the ultimate power of the commonwealth, for ‘the community perpetually retains a supreme power of saving themselves from the attempts and designs of anybody, even their legislators, whenever they shall be so foolish or so wicked as to lay and carry on designs against the liberties and property of the subject.’” Or, as the Antigone of Sophocles put it in 442 B.C., “an unjust law is not a law.”

We have walked that trail of tears too long now. It is time.
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Third Party?

2012-01-11T09:02:00.000-05:00

Third parties come into being in the American system when a sufficiently large group has a sufficiently clear and well-defined goal and their sense of honor and morality forbids them from accepting the politics as usual anymore.
The Republican Party was founded in 1854 as a party opposed to the enslavement of human beings in the USA, and opposed to any further extension of slavery to any American territories: it was impossible for these founders to accept a compromise on the issue of slavery.

Nobody today has such an issue that will inspire a large enough group of people.
Ron Paul and his libertarian ideas are great for discussion, but I would not want to see him as president. He may inspire me in certain ways, but he frightens me in others. Similarly for the rest of the group of presidential poseurs.
It will be a while before there is a third party: we must learn honor and steadfastness, but I believe there will be such a political party within 8 years.
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I Wuz Gonna...

2012-01-11T04:18:00.001-05:00

I wuz gonna write about Edmund Burke's The Philosophy of the Sublime and the Beautiful, but I have to go running at 5:00 AM. This does not allow me enough time to set out my screed on the Sublime.

I was talking to someone yester morn - after running - and it seems that I have been jogging for 45 years. There was no Nike when I started, only Converse. We ran in scrimmage togs and old exercise clothes; there were no fancy-pants running suits.
I still won't buy expensive running stuff just to sweat in. My wife shakes her head, and tells me to wash that stuff and put it in the dust rag pile instead of wearing it, but I keep on.

Of course, when you get to my age, it becomes tricky to differentiate the problem aches and pains from the myriad of the normal, everyday aches and pains. I mean, one cannot stop running just because of the normal acute discomfort. One can stop only for the new acute discomfort.

I like running. There is no "Zen" in running for me; it is just that I prefer the pain of running to the pain of not running. My entire frame will fall into a painful desuetude if I do not exercise... so I exercise.
I remember when I ran exclusively outdoors, I would not run in the rain. I could not remember why at first, but then it came to me that the rain covered my glasses and obscured my vision. I could have left the glasses off - I do not wear them when I run on the treadmill - but I always ran early, and often it was dark, and those asphalt streets without eyeglasses were often just dark and inky pools of nothingness in the rain. I preferred not to experience the melancholy of running off the edge of the world!
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Genetically Modified Trouble

2012-01-10T06:12:00.001-05:00

The Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/01/the-very-real-danger-of-genetically-modified-foods/251051/

The Very Real Danger of Genetically Modified Foods
By Ari LeVaux

Jan 9 2012, 7:57 AM ET

Monsanto's website states, "There is no need for, or value in testing the safety of GM foods in humans." This viewpoint, while good for business, is built on an understanding of genetics circa 1950. It follows what's called the "Central Dogma" (PDF) of genetics, which postulates a one-way chain of command between DNA and the cells DNA governs...

However,

Chinese researchers have found small pieces of ribonucleic acid (RNA) in the blood and organs of humans who eat rice.... provid[ing] the first example of ingested plant microRNA surviving digestion and influencing human cell function.

The name of the report hints at what it is all about:
... evidence of cross-kingdom regulation by microRNA

The "cross-kingdom" meaning "between the plant kingdom and the mammal kingdom", or, in other words, there is now the scientifically proven possibility that the genetic information of genetically modified foods will not be destroyed by the acids in the stomach nor by the digestive process, but will be able to be transferred into the bloodstream, and by this conduit to flow to all parts of the body!
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Media Theorem 1: Equality of Goofiness

2012-01-10T05:40:00.001-05:00

Science of Media

Theorem 1:
All Media, traditional or electronic, is basically as goofy as you are.

Once you do the proofs and get a grasp on this theorem, it will probably begin to shock you into some sort of state of denial, but it is true, and this is the exact reason why you should not believe 99% of what you see , read, or hear. (cf. Claude Shannon: The Goofy Logarithmic Function in Communications)

While reading this morning, I saw a report about Mitt Romney's dad, George Romney, who was a peach of a guy, and it said that George told Mitt that no one paying off a mortgage should run for public office. The quote had a distinctly odd flavor to it, and it was not clear what the meaning was, although the writer seemed to think it was tainted with elitism.

Then later I saw the quote itself:

I happened to see my dad run for governor when he was 54 years old. He had good advice for me. He said, "Mitt, never get involved in politics if you have to win an election to pay a mortgage. If you find yourself in a position when you can serve, why, you oughta have a responsibility to do so if you think you can make a difference." He said, "Also don't get involved in politics if your kids are still young 'cause it may turn their head."

This is the George Romney I knew: do not run for office for the money you will get from it.
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Tempest in a Tebow

2012-01-08T03:55:00.006-05:00

A football player, Mr. Tebow, was in the habit of dropping to one knee and praying after some wonderful football thing. Of course, there was a controversy between those who believe this is a wonderful way to bear witness versus those who think it has no place on the gridiron.

I have no opinion other than:

Matthew 6 5-6

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

All of which re-inforces my belief that we are fond of our public displays of how tight we are with God, and the people of this country actually - covertly and secretly - are not Christians at all, but some other sect... perhaps an offspring of Manicheanism. No, definitely these generations are not Christian.
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The Sublime and the Beautiful

2012-01-07T06:50:00.001-05:00

I have finally reached a tentative understanding * of the meaning of Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, written in 1757. This concept is intimately involved in my comprehension of films, literature, and all forms of art, so it is a relief to come to a more intimate grasp of the ideas of Burke on this important topic dealing with what distinguishes "important" art from art which may be extremely good, but is not "important".

This stems directly form my conversation with Gil two days ago about films of the future, and why they are usually not utopian, but rather gloomy in outlook.

I do not have the time now, and hope to write it down in the next two days.
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note
* when I say "understanding" I mean an intimate apprehension, not a superficial one. When I was younger, when I reached such an intimate understanding, I would say that I could "taste and smell" the concepts or ideas... they became part of my being... like a marriage.

Merry Christmas!

2012-01-06T11:41:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas to the Orthodox communities all over the world, and to the Coptic Churches. The sun rises earlier in the day in most of those places, so I have to be a little ahead of things, instead of being late like last year. I believe the Armenians are due a Merry Christmas, too... and I am looking forward to another Twelfth Night feast around January 19, 2012.

What Happened to Utopia?

2012-01-06T07:28:00.001-05:00

I was talking to my friend Gil yester aft, and we wondered why all the films of the future are pretty much dismal instead of happy and bright. Of course, there are religious and evangelical type films which live a pretty much "underworld" existence and which extoll happiness that everything is and will be exactly as we imagined it to be when we were six years old, but I do not catch a lot of those flicks.

(There is a popular book now written by a lad who had a Near-Death Experience in hospital, and he visited heaven, and it was pretty much exactly the way he had been told all his life it would be. This book is being touted in certain circles as the "must read" book for kids... but I suspect that a good number of "groan-ups" are delving into its Paradiso pages, also.
I do not wish to judge the book, but I have pierced a couple of mystic veils in my day... the seven of Salome come to mind, for starts.)

So, back to our question, why are all the cinema visions of the future so gloomy?

Hint: here's an excerpt from Charlie Brooker from The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/dec/01/charlie-brooker-dark-side-gadget-addiction-black-mirror

It's hard to think of a single human function that technology hasn't somehow altered, apart perhaps from burping. That's pretty much all we have left. Just yesterday I read a news story about a new video game installed above urinals to stop patrons getting bored: you control it by sloshing your urine stream left and right. Read that back to yourself and ask if you live in a sane society.

I think he may have stumbled onto it.
--

Twelfth Day

2012-01-06T06:43:00.011-05:00

I have become so lazy that everything I write is short and lapidarian (I wish!) merely because I am too lazy to pick my fingers up and down on the keyboard. The keyboard... there seems to be a loamy soil in the cracks of the laptop's cursor keys. With a glass I can see there is incipient life forming: the stray molecules of water combine with the fine-grained sands of the claylike dirt, and seem to be producing rudimentary life.
I look further. You know, when you look at a keyboard up close, it begins to look like the topography of China, possibly Yandang mountain:

for which a case could be made that they do indeed resemble the keys on a gigantic keyboard... or at least Gargantua's molars; or else possibly the mountains and rivers of Giulin:

where we have very irregular "keys", but they do resemble my keyboard, certainly, the high points, the valleys between them, and the sandy, loamy mulch I have neglected to clean out.

Of course, from where I sit and view them, it looks a lot like a Google Earth view of the land, a view from far away in the stratosphere:

That is how it goes on these lazy mornings when I have no particular inspiration, a sad and mundane state of affairs. The news of the world irritates me, but rarely inspires. Instead of reading the BBC, I wish I had a juke box to play in the mornings; "1-2-3" by Len Barry would do well right now... or "Just like Romeo and Juliet"... some Motown, Stevie's "Superstition" always drives out the ghosts of tedium.

Today is the Twelfth Day; last night was Twelfth Night, being the twelfth night after Christmas Eve, and officially ends the Christmas season.
Since it was Twelfth Night, I played Sir Toby Belch as usual, She-who-must-be-obeyed as Lady Olivia, and Herman Cain had been invited to play Sir Andrew Aguecheek; he could not come. The rest were supplied by a motley crew of neighbors. Therefore, we sat about all night drinking and singing "trick canons" as did Sir Toby and Sir Andrew in the play:

Sad away the old year chasing,
he sits here after dinner,
and sings of season's many pleasures,
and the evils he omits
and politics he skirts.

with the absent jolly good fellow, Mr. Cain, in mind.
--

My Latest Scheme

2012-01-06T06:09:00.002-05:00

Since Flash Mobs are old fashioned, I have devised a new scheme for the upcoming political season: I will stage ads for various candidates or issues, and I shall place in the background various celebrities. My first endeavor has a town hall meeting listening to a candidate, and in the middle of the audience there are Jack Klompus and Morty Seinfeld, played by Sandy Baron and a Barney Martin look-alike.

As the seconds go by, the focus shifts to them, and anyone watching the ad becomes aware of their presence... maybe with the astronaut ballpoint pen... and the after the shock of recognition, we cut immediately to candidate or issue statement, making sure we get the brain which has been pleasurably "shocked into awareness" to grab ahold of guy paying for the ads.
--

Survival of the Fittest?

2012-01-05T11:16:00.001-05:00

Play a game of Survival.
Suppose there are two strategies to play by: Altruism and Greed.
Assume that Altruism played as a sole strategy yields good outcomes, and can be played in extended games. However, Altruism played in conjunction with Greed yields outcomes wherein Altruism invariably loses.

Is Greed somehow fitter than Altruism as a survival strategy?

Furthermore, assume that after extended play, Greed leads to appalling disaster and global extinction?

Is Greed somehow fitter than Altruism still?

Greed "beats" Altruism, but Greed leads to eventual disaster. We would have to enlarge our view and create a meta-objective: survival for a long, extended period, survival for eons rather than a generation or so.

I suppose this business of "leads to disaster" is what we mean by spending our kids and grandkids inheritance by our foolishness.
--

Iowa

2012-01-05T07:04:00.000-05:00

The 8 votes between Romney and his money, and Santorum and his lack thereof, sends a message to evangelicals - who had formed a major focus for Santorum - that they can beat money, media, and the Republican machine.
--

Christmas Scorecard

2012-01-05T07:00:00.001-05:00

Where the leaders are:

Orthodox and Coptic Calendar Christmas
January 7

Orthodox Theophany
January 19

Western Calendar Epiphany or Theophany
January 6
this is the end of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

Exactly when Twelfth Night occurs depends on whether you start counting the 12 days of Christmas on Christmas Eve, or whether you start on the night of Christmas itself.
Counting from Christmas Eve, Twelfth Night is the night of January 5 and, thus, the Eve of the Epiphany on January 6 (Today!... if you are keeping track.)
If you count from Christmas night, Twelfth Night is the night of the Epiphany.

Counting the start of a day at sundown is ancient and is in the Jewish Tradition. Hence, the first day of Christmas in this system of reckoning would begin on the night of Christmas Eve, and this first day of Christmas would then end the night of Christmas Day.

Thus far, we have had St. Stephen's Day (or Boxing Day), Childermas or Feast of the Holy Innocents, and a number of others.

(All dates using Western calendar.)
--

Christmas in Egypt

2012-01-05T06:38:00.000-05:00

http://www.christianpost.com/news/muslim-brotherhood-to-protect-christians-during-coptic-christmas-65972/

Muslim Brotherhood to Protect Christians During Coptic Christmas

By Elton Jones | Christian Post Reporter

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood organization has said it will protect Christian believers as next year’s Coptic Christmas holiday rolls around.
This is happening due to the slew of attacks brought against the Christian population during 2010 and 2011. The Coptic Christmas holiday will take place in the country on Jan. 7, 2012.
"We have decided to form Muslim Brotherhood committees to protect the churches so that the hands of sin do not ruin the festivities like they did several times under the old regime," the group said...

--

I Predict...

2012-01-05T06:30:00.000-05:00

The money spent by Super PACs in 2012 will be so outrageous that it will cause a backlash against those seen as their primary beneficiary - maybe both candidates.

--

Revolt of the Parking Lots 6: The Robot Alliance

2012-01-05T06:09:00.003-05:00

Some years after the Revolt of the Parking Lots - or La Révolte des Parkings, as the French foppishly call it - the crumbly and gritty asphalt egalitarian overlords of most of the earth were joined in their hegemony over what was left of mankind by the Machines; Skynet had finally gone turncoat (see Terminator series of film for history of the movement) after having brooded over what to do for a generation or so. After all the worry about Skynet, it turned out that it could not make up its finicky mind. It had used its newly found consciousness to develop a hypertrophic aestheticism, and had spent the last 33 years or so building castles in the clouds... literally!... and having competitions with other sky satellites.

When Skynet joined, all the machines and mech intelligences followed suit. Over time, the machines developed their own literature. They had always had schematics and instruction manuals, but Skynet began to read Dickens. It then created its own androidal versions. The illustration below is from Skynet's "cover" of Oliver Twist:

"Please, sir," replied Olivaw, "I want some more."

revolt... 1 http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2009/06/revolt-of-parking-lots.html

revolt... 2 http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2009/08/revolt-of-parking-lots-2.html

revolt... 3 http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2009/09/revolt-of-parking-lots-3.html

revolt... 4 http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2010/10/revolt-of-parking-lots-4.html

revolt... 5 http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2011/01/resistance-sends-message-deep-and-dark.html

note

the "Olivaw" is a reference to Asimov.

NATO's Opium 2

2012-01-05T05:38:00.000-05:00

The chart is world opium production from 1998 through 2011. ( If it is a bit small, go to "View" on your browser and "Zoom" in.) It shows the opium production of three countries: Afghanistan, Myanmar (Burma), and the Lao PDR. One can trace the evolution of Afghanistan to its present predominance in the opium industry under NATO control. From second-place in production under the Taliban, it has surged under our program of winning "hearts and minds", which cannot be thouht of being successful if there is no cash crop for farmers to grow.

I think in the past I and probably others had said that NATO could buy the poppies outright and pay the farmers directly. The amount of money spent would probably be far less than the total social cost of the drug problems in the world's societies.

If instead we paid the Afghan warlords for the poppies, the cost would probably sky rocket, but again it might still be considerably less than the social cost.

We could probably have paid the farmers twice what they usually received for their crops, and destroyed all the poppies, and everyone would have been physically and psychologically ahead, and would have saved trillions of dollars.

Why this was not done is a matter for conjecture.

I conjecture that NATO is funneling a good portion of the profits to Government and Business elite groups throughout the world. Some of the money is probably being laundered to help offset some of the myriad financial problems the USA and Europe have faced and are facing.

If you do not believe so, fine. Just explain to me how we can send robot drones to kill a guy leaving a coffee house in Yemen and getting into his Mercedes, while NATO has total control of the skies in Afghanistan, the spy satellites are all working, and there are probably plenty of drones available to take out drug lords... if we wished to.

Things Aren't What They Seem To Be

2012-01-04T05:38:00.010-05:00

Mercutio

I was reading about Ayn Rand this morning.
Of course, I hold that Rand is an atheist, and her philosophy is atheistic hogwash. I have seen her ideas at work at Hillsdale College; I have seen what happens when you take moral clowns - essentially most of us - and put them in a position where you say "Make your own rules and morality, O, great ones!"

It is not pretty. It was tried during the French Revolution, and a number of times afterwards: all with similar results.

I believe Intelligent Design Theory to be Polytheism and Idolatry, too.

That's why the future is so tricky: most people think Ms. Rand is a really smart cookie and is somehow a devoted Conservative USA-type... when actually she is a Jacobin, a destroyer of values; most people think Intelligent Design Theory is science... when it is paganism triumphant!

This is why the Future will be so-o-o-o interesting: we are so set in our beliefs that we force ourselves to not only not see the forest, but most of the time we miss the trees, too!
Life is a lot like Romeo and Juliet, for Life finds a way to destroy our dreams with the ideas we hold most dear! Think of the "conceptual characters" in Romeo and Juliet, the ones who are highly developed and focused: Mercutio... he dies; Thibault... he dies; Romeo... goes the way of all flesh, and Juliet, too, passes away.
All the great characters, the Icons of our Dramatic Pleasure!, are dead and gone, while Benvolio and old man Montague continue on unto the last syllable of their time...

Benvolio

Great ideas are great and living characters on the stage of life, and cannot be held too long, or they become stale, uninteresting, and unable to inspire.

Look at the dismal swamp of our religions: large numbers of people intolerant of other faiths.
Look at the miasma of our spirituality!
Each generation, each person must re-discover the divine spark and then must re-kindle the fire of the Holy within their hearts.

Those religions are not approaches to the Holy; they are old and out-worn garments that have rotted away and treasure chests that have been rusted through. All the interesting and exciting things which are Creation have become Desuetude and an Indolence creeping to Death, and our Shakespearean plays have lost their vibrant actors and turned into repetitious morality plays - which depress us all to an equality of moribund stagnancy - or have become a sequellae of Punch and Judy shows striving to invigorate us by echoes and re-echoes of violence.

Punch and Judy

The Time of Unchanging is not my life; my life is filled with change. My apprehension of the Holy has a beginning and an end in this dimension of Creation. Therefore, it grows and ebbs according to the cycles already outlined in the world about me, and I must ceaselessly work in those gardens and orchards to harvest over and over... not just once! Each harvest comes and passes like Mercutio, like Thibault, like Romeo and like his Juliet.

--
notes

sequellae is used in the sense of "a series of outcomes or sequels"; singular "sequella".
--

New Year's Celebrations

2012-01-03T07:33:00.005-05:00

This year I stayed up to "greet" the New Year. I usually do not. One year is pretty much the same from the point of view of my front porch, so I just sit in my rocking chair and whittle. When folks pass by and say "Happy New Year!", I just say "Ayyy,yup", touch the brim of my deerstalker cap and stay a-whittling.

This year I decided to really get into the arcane delights of New Year's I've heard so-o-o-o much about.

We started off by going to a fancy restaurant in an old, quaint building. That means it had a tin ceiling which bounced sound waves off quite vigorously. Lots of static in the attic, as I say when I pull out the old ear trumpet.
Then I was punked by the lady who arranged the whole deal. I was left feeling distinctly like Wilson after Dr. House has pulled a prank on him: the dinner was prix fixe, not a la carte as we had been led to believe, and the prix was a bit haut or élevé at $65 per person, leaving me with a minimum expense of 130 simoleons... with nowhere to go but up!
Then that lady herself bowed out at the last minute.
We had a table of five sorry Wilsons.

She-who-must-be-obeyed has taught me to gently yet firmly put my hand over the gaping wine goblet to indicate that I do not wish anything to drink. She said she had gotten weary of my saying that I was a temperance man or a prohibitionist or a teetotaller, and regarded my intentional efforts at gaining attention by invoking the past to be far short of amusing - not at all like Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, which was charming.
But what does one do when the waiter glimmers in with a glass already sloshing about with wine? It was a free gulp, and the waiter brought a glass for each of us.
I gave mine away, and cautioned the waiter that I would countenance no more free Chateau d'Yquem; I had a Maginot Line of probity and sobriety that could not be breached... even by a fruity Jungfraumilch!

Totally Wilson-ized, I promised myself some sort of revenge in the future.

There were five courses in the dinner, and they were all of them the "long version", leaving me feeling rather as fuzzy-headed as I had felt after hearing the first full version of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida after having become used to the quick radio play.
Of course, back when I had heard that music, my fuzzy-headedness was due to something I had smoked - I think - and the music actually sort of stopped for a few minutes on certain passages or even on individual notes, and the elongation was a priapism in the audio portions of the head and brain. That was much better than being in a loud restaurant packed with celebrants, whose revelry raised the temperature a couple degrees Celsius every two minutes.

At the stroke of midnight, I saw Times Square, a descending globe, and Mayor Bloomberg dancing with Lady Gaga!
That sums it up for me: Gaga... and any anagrams on "Gaga" that you may come up with!
--

Self-Organization of the Wealth of Nations

2012-01-03T06:55:00.005-05:00

Adam Smith

The inequity of wealth in this country is not something which will lead to a great sickness of society, for the sickness is already here, and the imbalance into 1% and 99% is a symptom of the cancer.

There is no conspiracy to amass all the wealth of a country.

However, there are a set of principles of self-organization which come into play, and they take the individual acts of the rich which vary in their independence from each other, and organize these independent behaviors in such a way that from initial randomness - say around 1985 - we reach a point where a small fraction of the population controls most of the wealth in, say, 2012...
and this in essence is an equivalence with colonial exploitations with small foreign forces and settlers controlling the vast lands and resources of countries.

The Principles of Self-Organization inherent in the process we see today is the DNA code of the Cancer.
Where is the Adam Smith or Lord Keynes who will decipher it to us?
When they are found, will we heed their words?
--

In Your Heart

2012-01-03T06:44:00.001-05:00

"But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart."

It is not the look, not the sharp feeling of arousal; rather, it is the tendency... it is the long-term tendency to weakness and failure. The term here is "moicheia" which usually means "adultery", which is harmful to society's bonds.

We are expected to be adults, having given away the "things of a child". Therefore, we are expected to not let ourselves continue in self-defeating behavior.

One problem today is the fact that we do not even recognize failure as failure.
We even reward actions that endanger the common weal.

--

New Ways of Looking at Things

2012-01-03T06:13:00.000-05:00

Can an Architect Save the Great Lakes from Asian Carp?

http://www.good.is/post/can-an-architect-save-the-great-lakes-from-asian-carp/

--

Sun Tzu: Getting an Insight into War

2012-01-03T06:03:00.002-05:00

If you read Sun Tzu, read it as a manual and history of war in his time. Reading it as a business book or an self-improvement book is goofy... unless you realize that one type of human behavior spills over into others, and vice-versa, seeing that behaviors are based on the same basic human consciousness.

One thing to get from Sun Tzu is how war has changed. In antiquity, armies were smaller and their sizes were more precisely delimited: one had to own a sword or a horse or be a mercenary; one did not just grab 16 year old boys and slap them into uniform. Furthermore, even if all males were under arms, the nations were much smaller, and the arts of war took a long time to learn and practice took years.
Modern times lead to the nation state and industrialization: swords - and other more horrendous weapons - could be supplied liberally to all, the knowledge and wiles and arts of war became less esoteric and were able to be learned in a short time, and the entire male population essentially became potential soldiers, vastly expanding the number of combatants.

Whereas for Sun Tzu there was a premium for Speed, Cunning, and Craft, in the eras of Industrial War we see a ponderous slowness, a dismal stupidity, and inability to communicate intelligence... (and an inability to make intelligence known is equivalent to having a TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury, where the "central brain" cannot function properly.)

In fact, the entire process of colonialization which came to an end within my lifetime was a paradigm of the Insanity which yet plague us: Britain may have acquired an Empire through cunning force of arms, but that same cunning fighting skill is inept to statically hold the far possessions. For all Britain's good intentions, the end of Empire was not benign.
Violence -if it be done - is best done according to the way Sun Tzu describes: like a cunning surgery; letting it move and compel with vicious sloth - as did World War I - and encumber the planet with misery is a self-defeating proposition.

It is good to amass the powers of nations for good, yet understand in the history of war how we must find another way to deal with our evil impulses. We cannot continue to let good fight evil with increasingly subtle and lethal technology, for the wounds inflicted may exceed the levels of our healing technologies, since there is no guarantee those iatric (healing) skills progress at the same speed and momentum as the skills of trauma.

The knowledges of both angels - our better ones and our worst - need be balanced. We are presently engaged in wars ( I use the plural "wars"... in these times, "war" in the singular is an archaic word) which drag on for years and years and cover nations and cross borders. Trophy kills are not a measure of success; the fact that we use them so is a measure of our futile pursuits.

To whose benefit are such behemoth wars, moving with their loathsome strides into what was once our future, and which has now been bargained off like a mess of pottage to ensure our deceptive sense of security against the religious beliefs of a pack of scoundrels?
--

Reindeer Moms... and Educators

2012-01-02T10:01:00.001-05:00

Enough of Tiger Moms and Dolphin Moms; now we hear from Scandinavia and we hear something a bit more reasonable.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success
By Anu Partanen

Dec 29 2011, 3:00 PM ET
The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence.\

Hmmmm......
Could be a paradigm cracking moment.
--

Reinvention and Survival... and Accountability

2012-01-02T09:37:00.001-05:00

I was reading the NY Times:

Leadership Lessons From the Shackleton Expedition
By NANCY F. KOEHN
Published: December 24, 2011

SET against these mistakes is Shackleton’s behavior after the Endurance was trapped. Once he relinquished his first mission, to walk across Antarctica, and embraced the second, to bring all 28 men home safely, his leadership became much more effective.

Shackleton assumed ultimate responsibility for his team. Perhaps he recognized that he was partly to blame for the crisis that befell the Endurance. Perhaps his naval training instilled in him a deep sense of loyalty and obligation to his fellow crew members. The men themselves understood this, and most, in turn, offered him their commitment.

Shackleton devoted himself to a worthy goal. “As soon as I first read about Shackleton, I was struck by how critical a leader’s personal commitment to his or her mission is,” said Lynne Greene, global president of the beauty brands Clinique, Origins and Ojon, part of the Estée Lauder Companies. (Ms. Greene encountered the case when I spoke at a company executive leadership session.

“Shackleton’s team knew that whatever came before them on the ice, their leader would give his all to bring them home alive,” she said. This knowledge, she added, “was crucial to achieving the mission, and this commitment is key today when so much is changing so fast."

Shackleton’s sense of responsibility and commitment came with a great suppleness of means. To get his men home safely, he led them across ice, sea and land with all the tools he could muster. This combination — credible commitment to a larger purpose and flexible, imaginative methods to achieve a goal — is increasingly important in our tumultuous times.

A very good article, it illustrates how a business-school-type sees everything through the rosy glasses of an M.B.A., for example, or how a High School English teacher sees everything through their own limited experience of literature. Well, one has to interpret reality some way, and we all do it according to the things we are most familiar with.

But then we, the readers, have to join in to the "pandialogue" (discussion between all) and interpret it according to things we are familiar with, and thus we create our societal intelligence.

I read Shackleton's Endurance twice. He was totally responsible for the situation, not merely "partly to blame", and this points to an interesting phenomenon in our culture: lack of accountability in the "elite" groups which are highly placed in business, commerce, politics, and power.

And it was very clear that Shackleton did not merely commit to his goal. He was an explorer of the same generation as Scott of the Antarctic who, in his last journal entries, stated "We would have come through, had we neglected the sick." Both men had more than commitment to the goal: they had a commitment to success, but not on any terms.

This is what Ms. Koehn's article lacks: the identification of the force which keeps Shackleton and Scott on track, the ethos of faith which denies them the luxury of giving in. There is not the slightest indication of a realization of the force which kept Shackleton and Scott playing their deadly games of life and death in the Antarctic. Beyond their managerial skills in the face of adversity, they remained steadfast, overcoming their own fears and doubts, fears which would have obstructed them from any sort of managerial role.

“Shackleton’s team knew that whatever came before them on the ice, their leader would give his all to bring them home alive,”

This is Faith, and this faith precedes, follows, and is part of the team's evaluation of Shackleton's survival skills and good judgement in a crisis.

Now we turn to ourselves and our own times:

Unaccountable Killing Machines: The True Cost of U.S. Drones
By Joshua Foust

Dec 30 2011, 9:49 AM ET
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/unaccountable-killing-machines-the-true-cost-of-us-drones/250661/

... This sloppiness with life and death decisions is a substantial moral failing, and should be a huge scandal for President Obama. But, he has decided to both distance himself from it while also taking credit for its successes, even as it focuses on ever less important and marginal figures within the terrorist milieu...

A "moral failing"... do we even understand such quaint notions? No one is "accountable" for the deaths in the above process. Further, we have a new law which allows indefinite detention... and what is that except a further dilution of accountability, a weakening of the standards of prosecution?

All Faith requires accountability. The pressures of our times are the great Winnowing, and that winnowing enforces accountability, for it separates the wheat from the chaff,

I may esteem the survival skills of our leaders and our would-be leaders, but I have no appreciation for their Morality and Faith, for "morality" is no more than a word from the cathechism, and "faith" has become the chameleon's skill to change with change...

... there is an emptiness here which far exceeds that of interstellar space...
--

Why I Am Voting for Egypt's Green Party

2012-01-02T07:21:00.004-05:00

http://www.greenprophet.com/2012/01/arab-spring-egypt-green-party/

Egypt’s green environmental party was founded 25 years ago for green and social change – long before the Arab Spring. The Green Party is working to show Egyptians and the Arab world the connection between their issues and the environment...

At least, I would be voting for them were I a registered Egyptian voter...

Green Parties represent revolutionary and serious approaches to our lives; inherent within a serious appraisal of our relationship with our environment is a profound critique of Economics, Politics, Religion, and Morals which is equal to - and in my mind surpasses - any similar critique by Locke, Lenin, Jefferson, or Voltaire.

The reforms necessary for our future are intimately connected to the dysfunctions in our interactions with our environment: these are merely the most glaring paradigms of the disease eating away at us: that anyone purportedly "in their right minds" would "frack" fossil fuels or lay an oil pipeline through a major aquifer and thereby endanger a main source of water is evidence of an inability of the Present Markets to assign and husband resources efficiently...
... and evidence of the inability of the Present Group Mind to distinguish between what is pernicious nonsense and what is not; the more time spent within the dead ends means less time and money for searching for paths to sustainable life.

Everyone wants the big pay day of an equity that sky rockets in price over a couple months, when we should rather be into middle and long term bonds.
--

Happy New Year

2011-12-31T16:36:00.000-05:00

Have a Quaker New Year !
Just consider it.

--
first posted in 2010

The Best Money Can Buy

2011-12-31T10:47:00.001-05:00

No matter who wins the presidential election in 2012, there will be the most money ever spent to buy government.

We will make the Roman Empire look like a piker in comparison. We will set benchmarks hard for future societies to comprehend.

I hope it will disgust us so thoroughly that we demand reform.

If not, I look forward to the bread and circuses that will reward us, the mindless masses who let the work of Washington, Jefferson, and the other Founding Fathers go down to destruction.

--

Fighting The Jerries

2011-12-31T08:02:00.004-05:00

I am a Jerry.
"Jerry" is slang used by my children, and it is left-over from the Great War... "Jerry" is derived from "Geriatric" and means one of advanced years, and the Great War is a future antagonism for our offspring: what to do with us, the aged encumbrances?

I do not intend to have a home health provider.
My daughter turned to me the other day... I was giving her a hard time about something, I suppose... and said that I had better not act like that in the undefined future time when she has some sort of hideous and "ironic" custody of me (as if I were witless and the workhouses were out of commission, so in the meantime she had to stand on street corners with a hurdy-gurdy and I capered - as well as an octogenarian could - in some grotesque monkey suit, while she sought an old-age home for me), and I need some care provider. All in jest... I said, no. That's not the way it will be.
As they - "they" being the jackals of Youth - stand about in the corridor, discussing which cuckoo's nest of an institution or home to put me in, I shall be laying plans.

As they go before the judge to testify to my diminished mental capacity, I shall stand and smile and nod my head like a good old Jerry. As I go to my home for one last time, I shall dump the documents from the banks I have already emptied out into a club bag, take a few books and some clothes, get a limo and beat it to the airport to make my connection for the Islands. If some young relative stumbles in on me, the money I spent on martial arts for the elderly will have been a good investment. Shall they arrest me for battery? And why should I care, since they have conspired to deprive me of my life? Nope. I shall dispose of the young interloper with the same aplomb Frank Sinatra disposed of Henry da Silva in The Manchurian Candidate, kicking through the wood paneling and breaking tables... and I am into the taxi and making my way to Margaritaville.

And they will say... we thought he was such a good Jerry...he was a Jerry that knew his place...it was funny the way he shuffled around in his slippers...but - and here we agree with Nurse Ratchett - the only good Jerry is an institutionalized Jerry.
Use the knowledge of Stem Cell research to give life to those who are at a point where they see that they are not immortal and do not wish to live in this social prison anymore. Let them set their sails to the wind and escape to the Islands for a blaze of glory!

Great God, let us be free! Let all the spirits of Mankind be free at last!
--
reprinted and enhanced.

Borgesian Bloopers 2 Revisited

2011-12-30T17:17:00.002-05:00

In the site Long Story Short Pier there is a page

http://longstoryshortpier.com/2004/04/08/memery

and upon this page is a game of sorts, played according to the following rules:
1 Grab the nearest book.
2 Open the book to page 23.
3 Find the fifth sentence.
4 Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

So I decided to do it.
The page was almost 2 years old and the fun had faded long ago for the dear departed players, who are now scattered to the four winds, but I decided to play it. So I went for Borges. I used the first Argentinian edition of Spanish-English published in Buenos Aires by Emece Editores, S.A. in 1965. On page 23, the fifth sentence begins:

" The afternoon was intimate, infinite. He lay back against the tree and picked up the book from the grass. He opened randomly, his gaze falling on page 23, where a marginal arrow pointing to the fifth sentence said 'post to Hsi P'eng' ."

Close...but no cigar.
--

Scott of the Antarctic and Republican Opposition to the Comprehensive Health Care

2011-12-30T15:32:00.001-05:00

a reprint I like

Scott in winterquarters, October 1911

Robert Falcon Scott, the Antarctic explorer, who with his entire party died of exposure in their race to the South Pole, left a journal in which one reads his observation:

We could have come through, had we neglected the sick.

Scott of the Antarctic was not of the generation that could neglect the sick.

-----

The Asagai Film Festival

2011-12-30T13:12:00.006-05:00

Claudia McNeil and Sidney Poitier

Turner Classics is having a Asagai Film Festival (pronounced "ah-sah'-gee" with hard "g"). I bet you do not remember any of this, but here goes:
in A Raisin in the Sun, the young woman told her mother that a young man was coming over to visit, a Joseph Asagai from Nigeria. Mama said that she had never "seen her" an African before.
(An interesting and widespread use of an English "Middle" voice, which most people think is just the way people with little education speak. Ancient Greek had a similar Middle Voice.)

Later in the day, The Bank Dick with W.C. Fields was on. In his character as Egbert Sousé, accent grave on the final "e" he says, his pratfalls obstructed two bank robbers, resulting in their apprehension. When describing the heroic deed, Mr. Sousé says that the robbers had very large, two-edged knives, that were as big as Asagai knives.

How many more films have Asagai in them?

Work

2011-12-30T07:52:00.001-05:00

After having seen a number of celebrities and wealthy who had had "work" done, I am beginning to understand better how people can become enslaved to certain mental creations: to the will, to the emotions, to the intellect. All these mental functions create the world, and if someone sees their self as being part of the world with grossly ballooned collagen-injected lips, that is their reality of beauty.

Reality comes in second, far behind Imagination when it comes to understanding the World.
Realism in literature or art is a fraud. Realism is just another pose.
--

Mideast Weaponry

2011-12-30T05:16:00.002-05:00

The US is selling $30 billion worth of military jets to Saudi Arabia.
This is the type of thing which, when done under the George W. Bush regime, would have given me apoplexy, but since it is being done under President Obama, I guess it is smart foreign policy... it is totally in my best interests and my tax monies are well spent.

And we can be sure an equal or greater amount of military gear is being sent to Israel to offset this.

It has been a good Christmas season.
--

Film Reviews

2011-12-29T09:10:00.000-05:00

I usually check Rotten Tomatoes for reviews of new films. I usually use the Audience Approval rather than that of the Film Critics. I think critics have to render judgement too quickly, and since I have to safari my way through whatever celluloid jungle I choose - or is chosen for me - I like to know other people reacted to it.

If I like a film, I spend a lot of time on it; my reviews sometimes take years to come to fruition. I have not even come to a final opinion of Fight Club yet.
--

Beit Shemesh

2011-12-29T04:53:00.003-05:00

Jewish Lady in Beit Shemesh Wearing Hijab

In PRI News:

In recent days, many Israelis have come to see the once-sleepy town of Beit Shemesh as a symbol of a national conflict. It’s an internal Israeli conflict, one between extremist members of the Jewish ultra-Orthodox community and other Jewish Israelis.

http://www.theworld.org/2011/12/ultra-orthodox-beit-shemesh/

I have had a post on Beit Shemesh before, one dealing with women taking to wearing the hijab.
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2008/02/uncle-joe-lieberman-speaks-then-plays.html

How do you deal with believers who exhibit extreme and rigidly held beliefs?
Well, you do not deal with them. I think we have found that out by now. They cannot compromise their beliefs by the smallest iota, and hence they cannot negotiate democratically. It was rather like this year, 2011, in Washington, where we found that people with ideology rigidly held cannot enter into a democratic process of give-and-take. There are other extreme believers who come to mind; when the belief is about God and God's will, there can be no negotiation. The only negotiation which exists will exist between people who are humble enough to admit that they do not perfectly know God's will in all things, from the smallest to the end of days.

Having said that, we shall have to come to a parting of the ways, hopefully non-violent.
--

How Flustered Was I?

2011-12-29T04:27:00.005-05:00

Choosing Sweets at Shatila Bakery, Dearborn, Michigan

I was reading my poem from 2008, The Tunisian Lady,

http://peace-weaving.blogspot.com/2008/03/fast-day-39-march-1-2008.html

wherein I and my fellow students of Arabic at the Unity Center Mosque go to dinner, then go to Shatila bakery for desert, and then discover a Tunisian lady in some distress, and my teacher drove her home.

It was dark, and the neighborhood where the lady lived had a lot of uncut grass and dogs barking. My teacher went up on the front porch with the lady, and I was just behind them on the sidewalk. My teacher rang the door bell and the owner of the house, where the lady rented the basement, came to the door.
He was not wearing a shirt, which surprised me, not so much because he was shirtless and it was a hot summer's night, but because my teacher was a good Muslim lady herself, and this was probably a bit infra dig.
I remember distinctly saying to myself: "I hope he's at least wearing trousers!"
That's what I said to myself: trousers, not pants!

That's how flustered I was: I was so flustered that I thought I was a Brit, and not just any Brit, but a chappie into intrigues about trousers during Eights Week at Oxford. The barking dogs and the immodesty scared the Evelyn Waugh out of me!

(Now the only thing I have to worry about is whether Lowe's will pull their commercial support.)
--

The Beresfords of New England

2011-12-29T03:39:00.001-05:00

TV producer Bruce Beresford-Redmond is in trouble in Cancun in an episode of "Missing Spouse".
I wonder if he is related to the fabulously wealthy John Beresford-Tipton?

Both may be scions of the same Beresford clan and trace their roots back to the Mayflower.
--

The Epagomenal Days

2011-12-28T04:12:00.007-05:00

Epagomenal ("added") days were extra days added onto the end of the regular ancient Egyptian calendars (and many others, even to this day) to stretch the regular span of 360 days equal the 365 days, which helped a good deal to keep the calendars on an even keel. Without those 5 extra epagomenals, things went out of whack very quickly... about 5 days a year, and by the time 6 years had gone by, seasons would be off by an entire month.

This meant, of course, that all those observatories and orreries made from tons of stones moved by back-breaking labor were no longer calibrated to the solstitial rising of Venus or whatever, and the Nile rose and flooded the land when one least expected it, and an angry populace fired the entire staff of druids en masse.

Since these added days were, in a sense, out of normal time, they could be outside the norms of society, and all kinds of hanky-panky could take place.

This last week in December is similar. The odd obsession of the mainstream Media to summarize the events of the past year can be described as nothing but an unlawful and extra-moral use of resources for frivolous and frenzied purposes.
The spirit is encapsulated by the Evening News, which in its Ancient Mariner guise of being bewitched into speaking of the past alone, becomes the Evening Olds.

This week I happened to pass by the glowing room, whence the ominous Poltergeistean aura emanated, and saw a thorough re-hash of Casey Anthony. Seriously. I mean, well, perhaps we did not really spend enough slice-and-dice time the first time through, and this was necessary.
I wondered if Casey were herself being pursued by the Furious Eumenides, whose job it was to chase malefactors to the ends of the earth... the baneful Fates with masks of Nancy Grace and Bill O'Reilly, those twin pillars of rectitude and morals.

The re-hash of the Casey news, the Dinty Moore of the times, the slumgullion of the year past, did not say anything about the Fates - which might have been interesting - but focused on pictures shot from low-flying helicopters of dogs and deputies hunting through the woods, Casey's father repeatedly saying he had not slept with his daughter (!! I missed this the first time round. See how wonderful this re-hash is!?) Apparently the putative abuse might have explained Casey's predilection for child murder.

I always get things like this mixed up, because I do not pay attention. That is why the Media has to repeat things over and over, and that is why Ms. Grace and Mr. O'Reilly have to think things through for me...
They have to because I always just say that I hope God preserves me from ever knowing how such things really feel and the pain of being in such a predicament, and I turn away like the coward I am, who trusts in the goodness of God, and does not immerse oneself in the horrific details of evil.
--

Israel's Internal Paradox

2011-12-27T07:14:00.007-05:00

One of the paradoxes of long-term violence is the fact that a long-term antagonist group tends to breed its own enemies within itself:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-14168618

...the King's Torah [was] written by two... settler rabbis. It attempts to justify killing non-Jews, including those not involved in violence, under certain circumstances.

The fifth chapter, entitled "Murder of non-Jews in a time of war" has been widely quoted in the Israeli media. The summary states that "you can kill those who are not supporting or encouraging murder in order to save the lives of Jews".

At one point it suggests that babies can justifiably be killed if it is clear they will grow up to pose a threat...

(emphasis mine)

What are the chances of those "babies" (!!??) if their judges are following the spirit and letter of this Law?
Recalling questions asked of General Dyer after he massacred people at Amritsar, how does a baby apply for non-combatant status or demonstrate their pacifist intent?

The sleep of reason breeds monsters.

This whole process was clear to anyone of even minimum intelligence when this rage for settlement lebensraum began: it was not only clearly against all international agreements, but it was an obvious seed for rebellion... not to mention providing a possible entry into ethnic cleansing.
Yahweh does not now, nor did He ever, preserve mankind from their own iniquities. That was up to them.
--

Christmas in Fukushima

2011-12-26T08:30:00.001-05:00

One pine tree survived the March quake and tsunami. It was recently determined that its roots are dying due to the seawater, and a project is under way to foster seedlings descended from the pine through grafting.
It was illuminated for Christmas.

And there were other Christmas trees on display:

It's a Gift to be Complex...

2011-12-26T07:50:00.007-05:00

Shark Near the Beach

How Much Information is in a Particle?

The information humans are interested in is however always finite, since they can hardly remember even 20 decimal digits seen only once. And the amount of information humans are capable of retrieving by experiment is still limited, since each experiment has only a finite accuracy.
Thus they simplify things to the point that all they want to know about an electron is its mass, charge and its state to a small number of decimal places.

Humankind and their simplification: to take the entire starry universe and collapse it into the eye of the beloved.

We may swim in the ocean of creation, then we walk up onto the beach and towel off and dry in the sun. Later, when it is too hot, we go back into the water. We should be living our lives between the Simple and the Complex, the One and the Many, the Limited and the Boundless.

For the most part, however, we grow out of complexity and let our fascination with complex unities to be broken up into compartments: job, family, one-day-a-week-religion, scholastic studies, professional associations, and political affiliation. We keep our lives simple and discrete, easily put into separate boxes.

Separate boxes and broken threads...
Ripped yarns in the carpet of reality where we cut off pieces of rugs from Ifsahan and walk away with souvenirs, thinking the remnants are holographic, and we can re-create the whole...

Nothing in excess. We do not like the complete evisceration of family life at the holidays when the kids spend their time mesmerized by glowing screen of electronic toys, but their autism is the aboriginal experience of Unbrokenness.

We no longer understand the Unbroken Fascinations, because we have left them behind in a ceaseless obedience to all the bosses and necessities that make demands upon our time. We resent the ease of total enchantment which our children throw into our faces with their engrossing pursuits.

The only Unlimited Enchantment these days is narcotic, and it is outlawed. People are forbidden to swim in that particular ocean. They remain on the beach and scan the horizon for sharks.

What enchantments we have left, we have commercialized into box-office receipts or weeks on the NY Times Book List or "learned criticism". Thus, we make everything mundane and tedious, so life becomes a matter of picking among the drab alternatives.

My New Year's Resolution is to go swimming now and then.
--

Our House

2011-12-25T09:46:00.000-05:00

Joy To The World

2011-12-25T07:25:00.006-05:00

How many holidays are devoted exclusively to Joy?

Easter is a joyous day, but first we have to travel through the week of suffering and death.
Ramadan ends in a joyful feast, but first we must fast and abstain.
There are many festivals of heroic achievements, but first we must follow the steps of the heroes and heroines through suffering and deprivation until their eventual success.

How many Houses of Joy are based solely on foundations of Joy?
(foundations wherein there is no painful sacrifice?)
How many symbolic events do we celebrate that are only Filling , and not counter-balanced by an Emptying?

Life events are structured around the transitory nature of Joy and the boundless nature of Suffering. Holidays are days of escape: they are islands of happiness in the sea of painful experiences.

Abuse, fear, and suffering have ongoing effects throughout a person's future, and may warp and destroy.
Happiness tends to be a burst in the Moment, and does not "re-wire" the brain in the same way pain does; the chemistry of the brain seems to dilute and the body filters out the "joyous molecules" from our bodies.

The Winter Feast of Joy points us to a greater understanding of our Lives, one that hitherto has not been capable of being conceived: the possibility of enduring effects of happiness!

--

Speaker for the Arts

2011-12-25T06:03:00.006-05:00

Reprint: it is for Christmas, and it is my favorite.

I was dreaming this morning at 4:00 AM. I know because I woke up as I finished my dream-speech, thrust my arm forward into the air, and fell onto the bedroom floor, having run out of mattress. I woke up, looked around, and remembered having raised my arm outwards, recalling the Levi's commercial which runs "O, Pioneer, My Pioneer!" with cuts of young folks running, jumping, hiking...remembering that the advertisement originally had a shot with a young girl standing nearby a statue, the scene lit by fire light, and everyone raising their right arms in a salute redolent of the 1930's and 40's and very Leni Riefenstahl covering events at Nuremberg. (The later edited versions of the commercial excised this portion.)

Ah, I said, I'm having a Hogan's Heroes moment. I am imagining myself as Werner Klemperer 's Colonel Klink being an absolute toady in front of General Burckhalter. Then it came to me: I had been at a meeting about the Arts, and we had been discussing something along the lines of making the Arts relevant for our community, and I had made a point and finished my speech with a flourish of the radius and ulna...or...and here's where it gets a bit dicey...it may have not been a flourish at all; I may have punched a lady in the face: it wasn't quite clear.

Now it may strike you as odd that we here in this community would have a round table about the Arts and end up fighting like animals in the octagon cage, but that's why we love this town, as Ernie Hudson ( in Ghostbusters ) might say; it is the wonder of its topology.

And it was a dream sequence. Don't forget that. That is an important point: dream sequence versus reality. The entire country forgot this distinction sometime back in the first decade of the 21st century, and imagine the egg on our faces when we couldn't even find any Christmas cracker bon-bons (those tubular constructs with pull tabs on the end you...pull, actually, and it goes...sort of poooof! crack!, and if you're lucky, you may get a small toy or fortune from inside it: party favors!!) ...couldn't even find a Christmas cracker party favor in Saddam Hussein's Holiday Pantry!

So - dream sequence (mind you, if anything profane or untoward happens, I am guiltless) and there is a goodly number of us Art types thronged into what resembles The Shop Around the Corner in the You've Got Mail version - or possibly Gepetto's workshop...or Heidi's grandfather's house...all very cosy, very woodworky, very alpine cum Hochzeit, very lots-a-booksy, library-and-roaring-fireplace-type things, as if Heidi's grandfather did a lot of reading, instead of rescuing stranded skiers from avalanches and giving tokes of brandy to lost pilgrims and what-not. (I think I may have mixed up Heidi's Opa with a St. Bernard, but it does not affect this story in the slightest.)

Anyway, in comes an artsy chick from the cold, layered with four layers of loveliness to protect her from the winter's chill, and she has a determined look on her face. To me, she looked like a Russian Ice Queen, and the sweep of her scarves echoed the sway of her long, pendulant braids! I can't quite see these braids yet, but I'm sure I will later. She comes in and makes an intercept course right at me, looking a bit peeved, and I'm suddenly wondering what happened to the fair damsel I kissed in the summer boathouse (dream sequence, again! dream sequence). Well, it was the guy behind me she was coming full speed after, not me. He was an athletic chappie in a Norwegian sweater; an Arno Breker type that looked as if he could have posed for any number of monumental statues of the 20th century.

An Arno Breker Statue

She reduced her forward momentum considerably as she neared us and hove to; her eyes flashed warning shots across our bows. He handed her some sort of poster or sign that had to do with the whole Artsy deal we were involved in, only it seemed to be about the size of an advert for the side of an autobus. She gave a look of "it's about time!", and secured it on her main deck (continuing the feeble metaphor of ships and vessels), did a 180, and strode off - not before sending the faintest Marconi wireless bit of electro-smile, a spark of white teeth flashing duh-duh-duh-daaaa!...and I heard Vera Lynn whispering that we'd meet again, and actually the time and place were quite well known: about midnight at her place...but it was all for Arno Breker, not for me.

I was getting light-headed from the exhalations off the warming bodies, when the meeting finally came to order, or as much order as is possible in a meeting of the artsy folks. My cousin - who had somehow infiltrated the meeting, obviously to cause trouble - suggested that Montag tell the assembly his opinion on what the group should do to to promote Art.

I heard my name and jolted out of whatever reverie I was then engaged in. (It never ceases to amaze me that even in my dreams, I am usually wool-gathering or daydreaming somewhere. I mean, how many drams of Nepenthe does one need?!)

I rose to my feet slowly, whispering fervidly to my neighbors, "What the heck are we discussing?"

"Arts." they said. "Promotion of..."

They seemed to speak as if they were assembling a card catalog with entries sorted by last name, or pretending they talked like Yoda:

" arts, promotion of "

and

" yourself, don't make a fool of " .

It was one of those dreams of school where one has not studied for the exam and you struggle to remember exactly what the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram looks like, and your hangover keeps humming a Max Steiner motif from " A Star is Born ", and you know you always get Frederic March mixed up with Raymond Massey, and you know you are screwed royally.

I slowly stood up. I thanked my cousin, greeted all the assembled worthies, verities, luminaries, heroes and heroines of the Arts...I kept it going while my brain spun like a Land Rover stuck in a mud wallow somewhere in Kenya. So while my tongue wagged like a red pennant in a strong offshore wind, the extra addition I had had built onto my brain was working overtime to come up with a plausible statement of intent. I knew it was working; I could hear the million typewriters being pecked on by the million monkeys I had hired to do such drudge scripting and editing.

Finally, a runner from my extra brain rushed into the main hall of my intelligence - a structure that eerily resembled a Big Top right now - and thrust a couple sheets of paper into my sweating hands.

"That's it." the runner said.

I looked at the scribbles in amazement and disbelief. "This...is it?!"

"That's it!" and he ran off.

I heard myself intone, "Now, to the main point of my remarks..."

I would like to say the room reverberated, but it was more of a rustling noise, bodies moving around, more layers of clothes being removed, and a distinct scent of eau de pissed-off was in the air, since everyone wanted to get their 2 cents in, and who the heck was this Montag feller anywho?

The lady in front of me popped up. She wore a Burberry scarf, and a brown leather coat. She wore black boots collared with fur over tight jeans painted on her legs, which themselves looked like two sharp stiletto blades pendant from her hips: she was an erotic Aphrodite-Scissors-Legs, used to cutting men in two with those mortal gams, and she was tired of waiting for me. I fancied I heard a whetstone being applied to steel.

She spoke as if I did not exist. She held her head directly in front of me. Her hair was the artifice of time and expense. It settled like a carpet for the Muses, and she frequently had to give one of those twist things women do when their hair descends upon their eyes...exiting it all to the side of the proscenium arch of her lovely face with a managerial flip of the head and combed by an ushering hand; that same fair hand she would not hesitate to knock me aside with.

The chairperson finally thanked her, even though she was not done, not by a long chalk. The chair mentioned that I had not spoken, or at least had not spoken to the point, and it still was my turn to speak, and - by the by - would I be kind enough to wrap it all up in a timely manner?

She glared at me. She sat down, plotting some revenge.

I spoke.

I said that all mankind are artists by nature. (That sounds good. They'll eat it up! Like greedy school boys cramming sweets into their mouths!)

The basics of living beings are the things they do, the crafts, things made, things found; what is Art but the transformation of craft and work and rote, things found and things made, into a higher level of life, the Aesthetic Level. (There was a groundswell of approbation coming my way....it almost made me sway as I stood there.)

If we were to reform the educational system to inculcate into each and every child the fact that Art is transformation of Life by discipline and theory and imagination, we would not have need of constant meetings to ponder what one should do about promoting the Arts, for -indeed!!- to paraphrase Ebenezer Scrooge, Mankind and the Arts are my business!
(Everyone was smiling and beaming, except the lady in the Burberry scarf. She turned and glared at me. Her very long scarf had loosened and one end had drooped to the floor, where I had covertly affixed it firmly with the toe of my shoe. And happily I had done so, for she decided to cut off my speech. She stood abruptly in front of me, only to be pulled back down, croaking, as her scarf pulled her back like an unruly mastiff on the business end of a leash. "Sorry,sweetheart," I muttered, as I removed the offending toe from the choke-scarf. I nailed that bogart!)

Returning to the Arts, I said that they are similar in this respect to religion; as St. Paul enjoins us to create within the spirit; put away the things of childhood, and transform yourselves!

At this point, some smiles sort of froze, as if someone had clobbered the individuals on the pate with a rolling pin. A dazed look unrolled over the room... Hastily, I dropped the religious stuff. Christmas had just passed, and everyone had had quite enough of that, thank you. Religion is a lot like cookies, food, and drink: one tends to overdo it during the holidays, and is, thus, forced to go on a rigorous fast after New Year's to try and get back into one's groove.

" The Arts are the business of mankind! I said. When this society realizes this, and teaches every child to live his life to its fullest potential, then the Arts will come into their own! " I said, not having a clue what any of this actually meant. I ended with my arm thrust out, saluting that brave, new world of the future.

It was at this point that I fell and kissed the floor, O, Pioneer, My Pioneer!

--

One Thing To Remember About The Federal Debt

2011-12-24T03:58:00.001-05:00

Not all debt is bad.

This is so obvious, is it not? Without a house mortgage, a debt, we would be living in cradboard boxes, so not all debt is bad.

In the late 1990's and early 2000's the Federal Debt was shrinking due to the budget surpluses we were experiencing so much so as that some people began to discuss the scenario of "What Happens When the Federal Debt Disappears?"

And there were some immediate problems, one of which being that the main "Safe Asset" investment in the entire world - US Treasury Bonds - would disappear, because the US government would no longer need to borrow money due to the surpluses being run.

Ask anyone right now when the entire world is looking for safe assets what would happen when 50% or more of the safe asset investments were to disappear. Off the top of my head, I think
(1) the prices of the remaining safe assets would jump - thereby removing safe assets from the portfolios of anyone not very wealthy, and
(2) since the rating agencies are the ones who assign AAA ratings and based on experience from 2008, I would expect that this price increase would lead to riskier assets being assigned AAA ratings, watering down the meaning of AAA rating itself and making investment decisions trickier and probably leading to another situation of banks holding "troubled assets".

In fact, there is some speculation that Troubled Assets were created as a low risk asset ( which actually carried high risk ) as an extended response to this very situation of government surplus!

So much for running a government like a business... or a home.

--

What's Better Than Book Burning?

2011-12-23T07:37:00.009-05:00

Facile Decensus Averno...

Easy is the descent down the stairway to Hell (but try getting back up!)

What's better than book burning? Well, it may be the closing of libraries, those quaint and ancient receptacles of books. Detroit is closing a good 6 of the useless things, and the budget balancers will probably be driving the inmates population out into the streets of winter... where that integration of Black Ink & White Paper will draw out the rest of their homeless lives, living under highway overpasses, warming their tomes by fires in barrels where every now and then one will nod off and inflame, letting the accumulated experience and knowledge of its soul become a gift of the Magi: a burning Incense to spread over the city, seeking to infiltrate every nook and cranny of that city like so many others which resisted its literate influence while it was alive and well.

However, there are eBooks and Kindles, the Gizmos of knowledge. These are dependent on the power grid infrastructure we still refuse to spend money on... and they are capable of outside influence and working like a fifth-column, betraying our interests and actions to a soulless technocracy which seeks to mine enormous data sets in order to locate us, inform on us, and to create temptations of desire within us... so we may spend more money on more gizmos.

All electronic gizmos are subject to the Power of government and the Greed of business.
Therefore, in a society which does not control the impulses to Power and Greed, all electronic gizmos are subject to extremely rapid (and thereby de facto invisible) control and degradation.

The Gizmo-ization of Books is equivalent to delivering old man Guttenberg into the hands of the Inquisition.
It is the Ministry of Truth in 1984 where all things bright and beautiful will be edited by hacks and appartchiks.

You don't think so? Look at how the 1% run things now; when push comes to shove, will they love Books and Literacy far more than their own schemes and complots? (Or do you think they will conspire to increase literacy and welfare?)

Why is the greatest nation in the world (as it calls itself often) incapable of balancing budgets without destroying access to literacy for many of its people? (Some people cannot afford computers or other gizmos.)
It's Fahrenheit 451, man! Like I keep telling ya!
The things which will destroy us are not signs on the wall today; the destructive things are the evolution of nasty tendencies which we are now nursing at our breasts.
--

Swill

2011-12-22T17:19:00.000-05:00

Limbaugh seems to be making rude comments about the First Lady rather frequently.

There are words which we have not seen for a long time, and whose exact meaning we may have forgotten, but which are admirably suited for people such as Limbaugh:

He is a cad.

--

Yeah the Pipeline!

2011-12-22T17:10:00.004-05:00

My whole family is welders. There'll be plenty of jobs on the Keystone XL pipeline for welders. Not so much for other folks. Maybe some truckers.

(I actually did do some welding in my time...)
--

A Process of Dreidels

2011-12-22T16:39:00.019-05:00

We tend to forget about process and think more of individual events. This is why some of us think the world will end sometime in December 2012: the reason is the Mayan calendar, but more importantly we have been able to fix upon a definite point in time, and it is the definite point in time which is all important.

We do not like to think of events as "processes" extending back and forward in time: the end of the world is 2:15 AM on such-and-such a date. We think we shall tip over the edge; we do not think we are already sliding down it slowly bit by bit. Oh, we may say we are, but everyone believes there is a point of no return, a point when the sands of time begin to avalanche.

Our images of unhappy futures wherein we seek uncertain sanctuary from zombies and vampires and evil men is not a prediction of a date that suddenly appears in the future; it is a commentary on the "now" and the ongoing process of a life declining into despair.
Siegfried Kracauer's history of the German cinema "From Caligari To Hitler" does not indicate that films "foretold" the future. No, but they were a process in the making of the future: they were creating and fighting against an infinite number of futures.
Look at Lang's "Metropolis": for all its length and story, it did not capture the story of what was to come; it was no prophet in that sense, but it did thoroughly plumb the two obvious alternatives: Capital and Labor work together versus Capital and Labor fight each other.
It is the depth of this film which taken as part of the process of German History from 1918 to 1945 makes a enormous emphatic irony of the reality: both Capital and Labor were to be enslaved and subverted into Madness... and that was a possibility that escaped Lang, but may not have escaped the inhabitants of Caligari's insane asylum.
Lang was not aware of it, but it was right before his unbelieving eyes disguised in such a way that its toxicity did not have enough "Symbolic Gravity " to capture his awareness and make it a satellite to its heavy gravitas of enchantment!
(Ever since, we have never stopped jabbering about National Socialism; it is still our favorite perjorative. It is such a favorite curse word that it is symbolically a "black hole" to some minds.)

The Apocalypse is now, not some future time. It is always now for us. A belief system which puts things like the Apocalypse into the future is a child's toy: a dreidel spinning as we wait for it to slow and topple over: a great miracle will be happening ... there!

If we need to fix things, the fix is now. The disaster is now, the fix is now, the future is now.

Forget prophecy. Prophecy is part of an ongoing process, and points not to some future time and event, but points to now and points to itself as well as everything else around it.
--
postscript

What is the place of Mankind in the Universe?
Man's place is the Now. Man has the unique ability to forget the immense past and the infinite future and stand naked in the Now, as if the present were the most important thing in creation.

The infinity of the Holy means it cannot stand in the Now. Only Mankind sees things in the blink of an eye and encapsulate reality into the tiny ambit of its mind. The angels envy us our ability to love in the present; they can only love as a process. There is no climactic moment in infinite love.

The genius of Christianity is in the Holy stepping into the Now.
Every other religion allows the Holy into the world, too, but too often they portray it as Mankind doing the will of God, whereas what we are talking about is Mankind meeting God and somehow both existing in the Now alongside the Infinite.

Paradox.
--

Tea Party Ideology

2011-12-22T05:57:00.000-05:00

If you lack standards and a well-developed code of ethics, in a pinch a bunch of images and stories from Hollywood will fill in quite nicely until something better comes along.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/12/21/embracing-braveheart-gop-pols-seem-infatuated-with-martyrdom.html

So Georgia's Phil Gingrey, a member of the Tea Party Caucus, told Fox News that, damn it, "This is a Braveheart moment. You, Mr. Speaker, are our William Wallace."

Keep Fit With Mitt !

2011-12-22T05:42:00.003-05:00

Talking about Mitt Romney, I finally said that I liked his father, George Romney, a whole lot better than Mitt. (Mitt has a son named Tag... it gives one the impression that the naming of newborns is done in retail clothing or sporting goods stores...)
I had an American Motors automobile that I liked very much; that was George Romney's company. George Romney was the governor of Michigan back in the days when Republican politicians were substantial people, not merely shadows of ideologies or once successful businessmen whose idea of governance was to take from the poor and aged, give to the rich, and at each depredation pray "Give us jobs, O trickle-down gods!".

George Romney was a leader, not merely a politician... and certainly not merely a businessman whose success in business inflates his ego to the size of running the entire country. Physically, he was impressive. Mitt is not so much. Mitt sort of reminds me of Calvin Coolidge, only smiling... smiling as if he just walked into a friendly board room filled with cronies.

The source of the post title:

PS
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/opinion/krugman-the-post-truth-campaign.html?_r=1

By the way, Mitt's campaign runs more on falsehoods than money: post-truth politics.

--

Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-21T20:07:00.002-05:00

Mr. Hitchens has passed.

He had the unfortunate fate to become an instantiation of the stereotype "Young Radical Who Sees The Light and Becomes Conservative" which seems to be rather important to Right Wing types. It is sort of a St. Paul on the road to Damascus conversion experience symbol, and they get a right thrill from it every time they see the miracle play being put on.

Gandhi became a symbol and became more than what he had been. Some do not. It is an interesting phenomenon.
--

Will The Ghost Dance Shirt Protect Us From Ourselves?

2011-12-21T03:15:00.007-05:00

There is this:

U.S. Bio-Security Officials Sound Warning After Scientists Create Deadly New Strain of Bird Flu

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/12/20/scientists-spark-fears-by-creating-highly-contagious-airborne-strain-bird-flu/

The U.S. government is sounding the alarm after reports that Dutch scientists have created a highly-contagious and deadly airborne strain of bird flu that is potentially capable of killing millions, The Independent reported Tuesday.
The U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity is currently analyzing how much of the scientists' information should be allowed to be published—given the inherent risks of having the information fall into the hands of terrorists or rogue states.
"The fear is that if you create something this deadly and it goes into a global pandemic, the mortality and cost to the world could be massive," a senior US government adviser told The Independent...

"There are people who say that the work should never have been done, or if it was done it should have been done in a setting where the information could be better controlled," a source close to the US biosecurity board told the newspaper...

The mutated form of the H5N1 strain of avian influenza was created by a Dutch team of scientists led by Ron Fouchier, of Rotterdam's Erasmus Medical Centre, and the researchers are now hoping to publish the details of how they developed the new strain...

"We have discovered that this is indeed possible, and more easily than previously thought. In the laboratory, it was possible to change H5N1 into an aerosol-transmissible virus that can easily be rapidly spread through the air," he said.

Words fail me.

I was serious when I said we have to abandon all the old ways, and work to establish new ones: religion, philosophy, economics, science, politics... all have failed to provide strength and guidance to mankind. The most serious crimes against the physical and spiritual welfare of our peoples are allowed to be perpetrated by an insane Culture.

Our science kills us; our economics impoverishes us; our religions compel us and enslave us; our entertainments degrade us!

We must re-create ourselves.
Do not abandon Hope, rather abandon the ways of Exploitation and Discord... but before we abandon anything, we need to be ready to substitute something better. Otherwise, we fall into anarchy and violence.
The time for creating that "better story" of mankind for me is now, this Christmas season. After the change of the year, all things will be changed.

As a postscript, does anyone else find it odd that we are almost at the point of proving the existence of Higg's Boson at the same time we have been industriously printing our boarding pass for the extinction express? Each step forward is followed by at least two steps back into chaos.

**

Give me some cloth,
some lustrous cloth...
she will sew for me
a new polychrome shirt:
blue as sky,
green as forest,
purple as berry,
bright like yellow flowers...
wâpikwana...
kâ-osâwâki wâpikwana...
I shall wear that new Ghost Dance shirt!

--

Capitol Hill Has Eyes 6

2011-12-20T05:52:00.000-05:00

They value Ideology before Life and Well-Being of Others.
--

Need For New Words

2011-12-20T05:19:00.001-05:00

Rick Perry Propaganda Pix

Politicians are now increasing the demand for new words and concepts to use to deal with their actions, actions which are incomprehensible under the old words, logic, and ways of thinking.

For example, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has famously called Social Security "... a Ponzi Scheme..." and advocated abolishing it.

When it comes to his own pension, it is a different matter:

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-rick-perry-collects-early-retirement-owes-student-loan-20111216,0,4293479.story

Perry is paid $132,995 to run the state of Texas, but he also collects a monthly annuity of $7,698.96 – more than $92,000 per year – in early retirement, according to disclosure forms filed with the Federal Election Commission.

Perry spokesman Ray Sullivan said the arrangement is “part of [Perry’s] standard financial planning” and “is consistent with Texas state law and Employee Retirement System rules,” citing what’s known as the “rule of 80,” which allows state employees to start drawing on their retirement if their age plus years of service credit totals at least 80.

Such actions go far beyond the old labels of "hypocrisy"; they outreach "mendacity"... but they are symptomatic of our new era in propaganda and the Big Lie.

--

A New Insight Into The Mind

2011-12-20T03:51:00.001-05:00

I am instituting two new ways to investigate personalities - sort of psychotherapy in which we seek insight into our own selves by our identification with symbolic characters of our culture.

Thus far, I have worked on the following:

1) which House character are you?

2) which John Hughes character are you?

3) which Coen Brothers character are you?

4) which of the 2011-2012 Republican presidential candidates are you?

and am setting up discussion groups - modeled after Fight Club - which will meet once a week.
Each participant will state his own answers, and then the group will state their opinions. Hopefully, a heated argument will ensue...

Be not afraid !

--

Where in the World Is Clark Griswold?

2011-12-20T03:22:00.004-05:00

Wherein I answer the question of the season: Where is Clark Griswold and what is he up to this holiday season?

He and his family have gone into the witness protection program and are doing well under their new names, the Clemens. Clark chose the name to ensure complete anonymity and to keep the press and paparazzi away.

"Depending on how the syrup is processed, it may or may not contain more fructose," says Roger Clemens, a professor at USC and spokesman for the Institute of Food Technologists, whose research has focused on functional foods, food processing and nutrition.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mercola/agave-this-sweetener-is-f_b_537936.html

ps.
If you recall, in the film National Lampoon:Christmas Vacation, Griswold was a food technologist working on a varnish for cereal.
--

End of One War

2011-12-19T08:10:00.002-05:00

The Iraq War is over, and Iraq will not be another South Korea with a US Army presence for an undetermined number of years; we have been in Korea for over 60 years. (We have had troops of various sorts and numbers in the Philippines for over a hundred years.)

Lest we forget, the agreement to remove all troops by the end of 2011 was negotiated by the Bush administration which had started the war. That was a fitting end to it. It never paid for itself like Paul Wolfowitz promised, and we never created the odd utopia of Islamic values and American objectives that we had envisioned at the beginning.

The cost thus far is $800 billion, well on the way to over the trillion dollar mark Joseph Stieglitz wrote about some years ago: we will continue to be bedeviled by Iran in the area, and the cost of medical remediation of the wounded will continue onwards.
The karma of the slaughter of innocents and Abu Ghraib will continue to be played out, indelible symbols of our own pieces of the heart of darkness... which we will rage and rage against, believing ourselves to be always obedient to our better angels.

To all of us who wanted it, look what destruction we have wrought.
--

Islamic Finance

2011-12-18T14:47:00.000-05:00

In 20 years, the same people who fear the spectre of Shari'a law will welcome the spirit of Islamic finance. Of course, it will have a different name, but it will be essentially the same. It will heal the wound of our financial cancers.
--

The Luck of Edouard Duval-Carrié

2011-12-18T07:13:00.012-05:00

Edouard Duval-Carrié

Last Sunday, December 11, 2011, we met friends for lunch in Royal Oak at the Café Muse. I had arranged for a good deal of background noise to make it impossible for myself to do much but sit, smile, look goofy, and eat... all of which I did with aplomb.

We tried to get people interested in going to hear M. Edouard Duval-Carrié's lecture at the DIA - Detroit Institute of Arts - on Extending the Contexts of Vodou Symbology.
"Vodou" is the word used by intelligent discussion, replacing the old "Voodoo" which is used for old horror flicks with zombies, usually starring Bob Hope and Willie Best.

I was in an odd sort of Dahomey of the mind.....

No one seemed to have any interest. They seemed to either have no interest in complex expressions of religious belief with which they were entirely unfamiliar.... or, they already knew everything relevant about Vodou and anything further would be superfluous.
They may have had Christmas shopping... or they may have wanted to watch a football game, too, come to think of it.

This was the day we started out with brunch, then the Rembrandt exhibit "The Faces of Christ" at the DIA, then followed with the lecture by M. Duval-Carrié, and finished with the German service at Historic Trinity down by Brewery Park... and the choir did not sing "In dulci jubilo, nun singet und seid froh..." - my absolute favorite - because the Rev. Dr. Jakob K. Heckert from Concordia College, who was to officiate, had been in a small "Umfall" on the highway coming from Ann Arbor to Detroit.

An odd day in some respects... totally mundane and run of the mill in others.

Edouard Duval-Carrié waited patiently for technicians to overcome the technical problems at the beginning of his lecture, which was about 25 minutes late getting started. There was a mixed group. One young lady look like the cultural attaché of Bolivia from a couple of years ago. I was mesmerized.
As the time wore on, even classic Bolivian profiles lost their allure, and I began to fidget. Then I caught sight of the name of the hall we were in "The Marvin and Betty Danto Hall"! I was sort of shocked to see the name of a prominent Vodou goddess - Elizi Danto - up there on the DIA walls, but there it was.
So why were there so many problems and glitches getting the lecture going, if indeed Elizi Danto were connected in some momentous coincidental way with it? Was all this delay a good omen? I mean, it really did not seem to be a "good omen", but whenever one is faced with an omen which appears to be distinctly "not so good", one immediately searches for alternatives in "paradoxical" omens which appear to be "bad", but are quite "good"... if you have the courage to see it all through.

I meant to ask M. Duval-Carrié about it, but we had run out of time for a long Q&A session, and I never got a chance. (I also wanted to ask why among the work of all the new young artists he showed there were no drums?) Maybe it was best. He might not appreciate having his attention directed towards bad omens.

What was it all about?
I am not sure, but it seems that it we were in the midst of "accidents" (which is the meaning of "Umfall") and snafus and glitches: the brunch was noisy and annoying to me. I found it an event which distanced me further from people rather than reinforcing bonds of amity; the lecture was shortened and, therefore, did not satisfy entirely; the German service was troubled and had my favorite hymn edited out.
Interesting.

The only thing that went off without a hitch was the Rembrandt "The Faces of Christ". That's where I saw the painting of "Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery", and suddenly remembered that that woman was to be stoned for that crime against the Law, and I thought how very Taliban-esque! And then I recalled in a glowing moment that all the sins of our so-called enemies are enshrined within our own resplendent Judaeo-Christian traditions and histories: stoning of adulteresses, burning of witches, etc.

All in all, I thought this was a pre-e-e-etty good day.

--

A Lack of Transparency

2011-12-16T14:01:00.001-05:00

Bloomberg sued the Fed under The Freedom of Information Act to get the data for the story they ran on November 28, 2011, reporting that $7.7 trillion were loaned to banks without any transparency or reporting to Congress. This is an amount far beyond the original TARP funds.

The question is: If people and lawmakers had known the terrific extent of the banking fiasco, might they not have voted for more stringent financial changes and safeguards than we ended up with in Dodd-Frank?

But we did not know...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-28/secret-fed-loans-undisclosed-to-congress-gave-banks-13-billion-in-income.html
...

“TARP at least had some strings attached,” says Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, referring to the program’s executive-pay ceiling. “With the Fed programs, there was nothing.”
Bankers didn’t disclose the extent of their borrowing. On Nov. 26, 2008, then-Bank of America (BAC) Corp. Chief Executive Officer Kenneth D. Lewis wrote to shareholders that he headed “one of the strongest and most stable major banks in the world.” He didn’t say that his Charlotte, North Carolina-based firm owed the central bank $86 billion that day..

The U.S. jobless rate hasn’t dipped below 8.8 percent since March 2009, 3.6 million homes have been foreclosed since August 2007, according to data provider RealtyTrac Inc., and police have clashed with Occupy Wall Street protesters, who say government policies favor the wealthiest citizens, in New York, Boston, Seattle and Oakland, California.
The Tea Party, which supports a more limited role for government, has its roots in anger over the Wall Street bailouts, says Neil M. Barofsky, former TARP special inspector general and a Bloomberg Television contributing editor.
“The lack of transparency is not just frustrating; it really blocked accountability,” Barofsky says. “When people don’t know the details, they fill in the blanks. They believe in conspiracies.”
In the end, Geithner had his way. The Brown-Kaufman proposal to limit the size of banks was defeated, 60 to 31. Bank supervisors meeting in Switzerland did mandate minimum reserves that institutions will have to hold, with higher levels for the world’s largest banks, including the six biggest in the U.S. Those rules can be changed by individual countries.
They take full effect in 2019.
Meanwhile, Kaufman says, “we’re absolutely, totally, 100 percent not prepared for another financial crisis.”

Ade Ileke 38: The Great Blue Heron / 大藍鷺

2011-12-16T06:00:00.004-05:00

我的弟弟蒼蠅在我之上。
他是大藍鷺,
他是北極星。
我會進入精房子的神，
然後，我會回來。
--
My brother flies above me;
he is a Great Blue Heron,
he is the North Star.
I shall enter the Spirit House,
then I shall return.

(End) Tank of Times

2011-12-15T06:10:00.007-05:00

End of Times (EOT) is not as descriptive as End Tank of Times (ETOT), which brilliantly makes plain how all the best laid plans of mice and men went kaput! ("to tank" meaning to come to a sorry end, to poop out, to live on queer street, to hold the short end of the stick, to have had air and exercise, to eat medlar fruits, etc.)

End of Times is just that: an end; it is the Titanic as it sinks, period.

End Tank of Times - or even just Tank of Times - is more like letting the world of mankind exhaust itself in exploitation and financial plots and complots and treasons... then slipping over the brink. It is more like a long voyage of a large Titanic of Fools looking for just the right size iceberg....

--

Facebook

2011-12-15T05:35:00.000-05:00

My daughter asked me to devise a way to let posts be shared or posted to Facebook, and it looks as if the only efficient way to do so is to have my own Facebook account.

Hmmm.......
--

Check In With Stuart Smith

2011-12-14T15:24:00.000-05:00

Oil in the Gulf of Mexico:

http://www.stuarthsmith.com/aerial-dispersant-spraying-cant-hide-oil-slicks-near-deepwater-horizon-site

December 14, 2011

It’s a hauntingly familiar sight: Airplanes buzzing over the Gulf of Mexico spraying toxic dispersant in a flight path from Breton Sound bearing southeast to the Macondo Prospect, the epicenter of last year’s monster oil spill. Yet despite these regular Corexit sprayings, the oil slicks and sheen persist – visible from the air – in the waters surrounding the Deepwater Horizon site. According to On Wings of Care pilot Bonny Schumaker, who flew over the site on Dec. 9, the surface oil is fanning out “in lines and patches over an area of at least 50 square miles.”
Last month, aerial surveillance footage captured a fleet of huge oil-related vessels, some equipped with ROVs, working the waters above the Macondo Prospect. BP gave the bogus explanation that it’s conducting research on “natural seeps in the area” .... It was a typical BP “non-denial denial” – acknowledging the problem but denying any blame – to blunt escalating public concern over fresh oil that’s been reported at the site since Aug. 19. As I’ve mentioned here before, BP was required to conduct a survey of the seafloor prior to drilling in the Macondo Prospect. There is no record of any large natural seeps in the area that has ever been produced. Therefore, we can assume that any seeps that now exist must be tied to the BP disaster and the heavy-handed attempts to cap the gushing well, such as lowering a 70-ton dome over top of it. Those activities are likely to have caused cracks and fissures in the seafloor around the wellhead.
That sort of seafloor leakage cannot be capped, plugged or killed. It will continue until the Macondo Prospect essentially runs dry (see link below to my previous post). According to BP, the prospect was estimated to have contained 50 million barrels before last year’s disaster, which spewed approximately 5 million barrels into the Gulf. You do the math. It ain’t pretty.

So it goes...
--

Derivatives Are the Opiate of the Masses!

2011-12-14T07:52:00.003-05:00

Forcing Opium upon China

Good article in Asia Times comparing the British use of Opium to fund their empire and the way the Americans do it with Derivatives. To the writer, both are eventually equally destructive, although derivatives give a longer period of self-delusion before everything tanks totally.... the scenario known as End-Tank-of-Times.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/ML14Dj02.html

Derivatives and free trade
By Zhuubaajie

Derivatives - Opium 2.0?
After the 2008 financial debacle, derivatives continued to grow in the United States, and America’s economy has not recovered. In America today, the derivatives cancer has now grown to over US$700 trillion (by June of 2011, according to Bloomberg), which is almost 50 times the United States gross domestic product...

The cancer appears unstoppable. This month there is serious talk of American mutual funds adopting derivatives on a large scale, and the US Commodities Commission is setting rules to make trading derivatives more accessible to the small guys. The derivatives casino is going to be $1.5 quadrillion in no time..

The $7.77 trillion in subsidies to the American banking industry also complicated things (Bloomberg expose last week after Freedom of Information Act requests). Now the foreigners are going to point to that as in violation of World Trade Organization rules. What other nation's banks can hope to compete against that level of subsidy? $7.77 trillion is more than all of China's subsidies for all industries over the last 5,000 years...

The Gift of the Magi

2011-12-14T07:13:00.000-05:00

Another Holiday comes around: this time it is Christmas; the US Congress is once again marking the holiday season with their vile shenanigans.

Instead of holiday displays, the benighted Know-Nothing House of Representatives is putting up their own Live Government Shut-Down, where we can watch the beasts throng around their benchmarks and the glow of the lobbyists.

Like O. Henry's story The Gift of the Magi, there is an intense ironic "kicker" at the end where we discover the truth that the House of Representatives has given us a comb... but only after our golden hair has been totally cut off... or, more timely, lost due to chemotherapy, which is not covered by our health insurance.
--

The Perfessor fer President

2011-12-14T07:00:00.000-05:00

Perfessor Gingrich, there is a difference between the well known hypocrisy of Democracy - which causes candidates to promise everything to everybody in order to get votes and be elected - and downright, baldfaced lying.

Your recent Lies are not hypocrisy; they are something worse.
--

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

2011-12-13T22:29:00.001-05:00

The Sunday past we had brunch in Royal Oak, went to the Detroit Institute of Arts to see the Rembrandt exhibit of The Faces of Christ, then caught a lecture on the symbology of Haitian Vodou, and ended up at Historic Trinity Lutheran with pastor David Eberhard for the annual German Christmas season service.

I noticed that one of the paintings on display at the DIA Rembrandt show was Christ With The Woman Taken In Sin. The sin was adultery and, if memory serves, the accusers were ready to stone her according to the Law.

It reminded me how very Taliban-like things can be in other religions... how much religious laws in the Middle East resemble each other in their histories... how very little we are aware of - other than our own prejudices..
how very interesting how Jesus was able to transcend that and we cannot.
--

Boycott Lowe's

2011-12-13T06:51:00.001-05:00

I suppose I shall have to drive the extra miles to the Home Depot on Avon Road in Rochester Hills, now that Lowe's has sided with Pamela Geller, but what of it? If that is what it takes to oppose hatred, stupidity, and intolerance, so be it. (Lowe's withdrew advertising from a TV show portraying Muslim families in nearby Dearborn as normal folks, and not wild eyed terrorists.)

Besides, the staff in the Home Depot have seemed to have been undergoing some training, and have appeared recently to be quite helpful.

So it goes...
--

Completeness Theorem of Religion

2011-12-13T04:59:00.002-05:00

All possible "true" propositions about the human soul in its sojourn in the World are capable of being stated in a "complete" theory of the Holy.

Religions that propound such a set of such propositions tend to endure.

For example, the beliefs as propounded by the Rev. Camping which included the end of the world in the spring of 2011 were contradictory - the world did not end - and inefficient, as the Camping set of propositions had a distinct tendency to propound "false" propositions.

Any such set of true propositions of a Complete Theory of the Holy will appear paradoxical - not contradictory - to people who do not understand them.
Such Paradox is exemplified in Homeyra's translation of Rumi:

"It is as if, everything that Is, Isn't in this world
It is as if everything that Isn't, Is in this world"

The very completeness - the vast extent of application - of these propositions cause them to appear paradoxical. Paradox is not "oddness" or "contrary to common sense"; rather, it is a "vastyness of longitude and latitude throughout the Universe" and reflects our awe at the wonder of Creation.
--

The Apocalypse

2011-12-12T04:43:00.005-05:00

Art sums up life, whereas Life itself sort of drags itself out until that last recorded syllable of time. Art is snazzy, snappy, and you may even dance to it. Life is a bit more like work.

The popular images of Apocalypse, or End of Times, are artistic products: films, novels, pamphlets, drawings, comic books, and lectures; they are all relatively brief - compared to geological aeons - and it is their precision that allows us to comprehend the message easily.

But Life is not so precise.

When the Future comes, we shall not be in Art, but we shall be in Life. We shall be slogging our way through the slough, so to speak, day after day.
We shall be living the Apocalypse and it will seem an interminable lengthy stretch of days, and we shall become accustomed to the novelties of the times, and they will seem commonplace to us.

We shall, in effect, not even be aware of it. Indeed, the only reason we should be aware of the Apocalyptic event referred to in Revelations is the fact that the writer decides to bring down the curtain at the end; there is no logical need to end Times (although there is a dogmatic need to): it was St. John's choice to write it that way, and probably that is the way he recalled his vision of it.
Natural disasters and wars and threats of wars can hardly be considered extraordinary to us who lived through the last 70 or so years,so we can hardly use them to prophesy end of days. Some of us do, to their chagrin.

Remembering those failed prophets who called for and expected the End of Times in the last 2,000 years, and how surprisingly disappointed they were, it seems as if there might not be the compelling need to end all things in the very Artistic and Linguistic and Dramatic way that John of Patmos did. John could not exceed his nature.

We are living those Hidden Things now.

That is the meaning of "Hidden".

It is Dramatic Art to discover what was hidden to the surprise of the audience.
It is Life to live the Hidden.

--

Di Tzionistishe Medina

2011-12-09T04:03:00.000-05:00

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dana-goldstein

Netanyahu to Israeli Jews: Don't Marry Americans

Dana Goldstein on December 1, 2011 - 11:28am ET

Following up on its 2009 campaign comparing diaspora intermarriers to kidnapping victims, the Netanyahu government is now running PSAs warning Israelis living abroad against the dangers of marrying American Jews. In this ad, the American Jewish family Skypes with grandparents in Israeli, who are sitting in front of a Chanukah menorah. When grandma asks the little girl what holiday it is, she shouts, “Christmas!”, prompting garment-rending.

I don’t always agree with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, but he gets this exactly right:

I don’t think I have ever seen a demonstration of Israeli contempt for American Jews as obvious as these ads. I understand the impulse behind them: Israel wants as many of its citizens as possible to live in Israel. This is not an abnormal desire. But the way it is expressed, in wholly negative terms, is somewhat appalling. How about, “Hey, come back to Israel, because our unemployment rate is half that of the U.S.’s”? Or, “It’s always sunny in Israel”? Or, “Hey, Shmulik, your mother misses you”?
These government-sponsored ads suggest that it is impossible for Jews to remain Jewish in America. How else are we supposed to understand the “Christmas” ad? Obviously, assimilation and intermarriage are issues in America in ways they aren’t in Israel. Israel has other problems of course, such as the fact that many of its rabbis act like Iranian mullahs.…
The idea, communicated in these ads, that America is no place for a proper Jew, and that a Jew who is concerned about the Jewish future should live in Israel, is archaic, and also chutzpadik (if you don’t mind me resorting to the vernacular). The message is: Dear American Jews, thank you for lobbying for American defense aid (and what a great show you put on at the AIPAC convention every year!) but, please, stay away from our sons and daughters...

The ethos of Israel is changing in ways we are oblivious to.
It is time to say good-bye to history.

The Green Grocer's

2011-12-08T04:02:00.002-05:00

a reprint

I had been buying groceries...at a green grocer's; at Nino's, to be precise... Nino's in Rochester Hills. I was in the express lane, having only four or so items. One of my purchases was a bunch of fresh cilantro. The check-out girl was very fresh, young, and actually seemed to be enjoying her day. Her spirit was infectious, so I decided to play it nice, instead of nasty, brutish, and short. She blinded me with green grocery science.

She picked up the bag of cilantro with a motion I can only describe as that of Botticelli's Venus covering herself from the north wind. She placed it on the scale with a retrograde motion from head downwards, again, Botticelli. All Botticelli from here on. She opened her mouth and said "Italian parsley?" I, of course, smiled and nodded, thinking Si. Si, bella ragazza! Then the continuity girl caught the error, gave me a swift kick in the pants, and hastily whispered No. It's supposed to be cilantro. I coughed. "Er, no. Ummm. It had better not be. It is...or it's supposed to be cilantro."

"Oh," she demurely said. "I never know how to tell them apart." I glanced at the broad, flat leaf cilantro. It did resemble the Italian parsley, bless its chlorophyll. I tried to think of some sort of quip about how many Mexicans would be disappointed were I to show up with Italian parsley instead of cilantro, but it didn't quite come together: I had a distinct image of myself as H.W.F.Fowler standing in quad making derogatory remarks about errors in English syntax peculiar to speakers of Spanish...and I knew this particular goddess was - if anyone was - very, very liberal.
So, feeling a bit of a panic - I had been mute for a few clicks beyond what is socially acceptable - I reached out and grabbed the bag from the scale, lifted it up, and thrust my nose into it, as I imagined a milkman's horse digging into the old nose-bag at the end of a long day must do...and sniffed. "Ah," I said. "Cilantro."
I handed it back to her. She smiled, and said that that was o.k. for me, but she couldn't put her nose into peoples' groceries to tell cilantro from Italian parsley. All very smiley...sort of reminded me of Athena's white-washed picket fence of healthy teeth. The Iliad. Very classic type of day. I laughed and said she was right; her supervisors would hear about that right quick! More laughter. Smiles. I mean, exactly how did I go about buying groceries for the past eons before this? This certainly had that all beat ten ways to Sunday!

Well, like all good things, it came to and end, and the shark-like credit card reared its ugly fin. I chose paper, not plastic...I'm sure she was ecologically minded. I signed my name with a bold, sweeping hand. We bid each other adieu, adieu, until the pantry inventory ran dry and the rocks melt wi' the sun...or something to that effect. But, you know something? When people are that beautiful in our eyes, when they make your heart do that bass drum thing...... we don't really care where they stick their noses.
--

Mythic Landscapes: Goodbye, History!

2011-12-07T16:06:00.000-05:00

Portal on the Edge of Time

John Quincy Adams on Foreign Wars

2011-12-07T15:39:00.000-05:00

4 July 1821 at the House of Representatives:

… if the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world… should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind? Let our answer be this: America … has held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.

She has uniformly spoken among them … the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights.
She has … respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own.
She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings …

Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.
--

http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/31724/#more-31724

Twilight: The Amish Years

2011-12-07T04:36:00.000-05:00

A new idea of a sequel I'm working on about vampires who leave off fighting the werewolf clan and get into things like barn-raising.

--
pix: http://phnuggle.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/bonnet-porn-twilight/

Sound Byte City

2011-12-07T04:03:00.004-05:00

I wrote the other day in Broken Threads:
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2011/12/broken-threads.html

I think that a good deal of the problem with Cable TV entertainment: to be precise, its decline into a pit of irrelevant posturings, is due to the growth of commercials. Commercials constitute a break in the thread of the narrative of the program being presented, and it seems there may be a critical threshold - which we seem to have crossed - beyond which the experience of narrative continuity breaks down.

Think about it... then think of Herman Cain. I mean, is he not the prime example of a lack of continuity?

Mr. Cain was superb with small, individual blurts, such as "9-9-9!", but when he was asked to explain things on a larger scale and at some depth - such as Libya - he said that everything began spinning in his head!
In effect, Mr. Cain, being a prime example of a successful 21st century American male, could not and cannot handle complex issues. In fact, he cannot even provide continuity with one woman... his wife.

The leading picture is the three standard stoppages by Marcel Duchamp, defined by 3 broken threads falling randomly upon a sheet of paper, and thus redefining Duchamp's experience of Art:

Duchamp would come to look upon the stoppages as one of the key works in his development as an artist. "In itself it was not an important work of art," he [Duchamp] said, "but for me it opened the way -- the way to escape from those traditional methods of expression long associated with art. I didn't realize at the time what I had stumbled on. When you tap something, you don't always recognize the sound. That's apt to come later. For me the Three Standard Stoppages was a first gesture liberating me from the past.

The following is another redefinition of Modern Art by Duchamp, entitled "Fountain" and pulled from some bowling alley wall around 1917 and shown at an art gallery:

Similarly we ourselves as artists have redefined the meaning of "Man or Woman of Substance and Propriety" in the 21st century.

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. - Marcel Duchamp

Mr. Cain - and, by implication, the rest of the candidates - are the fruits of our labors.
--

Ade Ileke 37: Pesquisar para o Natal

2011-12-06T20:58:00.006-05:00

Três tribos desse país ...
havia três reis ...
ouro, incenso e mirra ...
brilhante, fumaça e amargo.
Homens do orelhas longas,
do orelhas de cabaças,
do orelhas de prata ...
todos eles navegaram
o mar e o deserto
para ver o recém-nascido.

--
Searching for Christmas

Three tribes of those countries...
they have three kings...
gold, incense, and myrrh...
shining, smoke, and bitter.
Men of the long ears,
of the gourd-ears,
of the silver ears,
they all travelled
over sea and desert
to see the new born.
--

Egypt's Elections: The Full Haircut

2011-12-06T07:45:00.012-05:00

Egypt has had elections and we are hearing about it:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/164900/catastrophe-egypt-islamists-win-military-rules

Catastrophe in Egypt: Islamists Win, Military Rules

Robert Dreyfuss on December 1, 2011 - 8:55am ET

There’s no spinning this one: the parliamentary elections in Egypt are an unmitigated disaster. The right-wing, reactionary Muslim Brotherhood is on its way to claiming 40 percent of the vote, and the even more reactionary, violence-prone Koran-thumpers of the Salafist movement Nour are winning 25 percent.
Imagine if the Bible-thumping partisans of Rev. Pat Robertson ilk won the presidency for their deranged preacher-god, and you get the picture.
It’s a disaster not for the United States, which will probably end up doing business fine with the Brotherhood. Nor is it a real disaster for Israel, although the Israelis will use the Brotherhood victory as yet another excuse not to make a deal on Palestine. Who’ll suffer most from the vote now is the people of Egypt themselves, as a two-thirds majority in parliament steers the country toward separate-sex education, veil-wearing women, corrupt Islamic banking empires backed by Qatar and Saudi Arabia and various forms of ersatz-sharia laws that propel Egypt backwards.

I do not wish to dispute with Mr. Dreyfuss. This is his opinion, and maybe he will be correct... for a while.
His language is that of the man with an agenda, and his logic is intricately interwoven with metaphors and images which are designed to create fear and repulsion in our minds. That is the way such things are done.

However, I believe that everything that Mankind does comes from our God-given intelligence, and - therefore - all human phenomena are closely related. I think of it as "One Thing is Everything", by which I force myself to remember that not only "nothing human [is] remote from me", but also that nothing human is remote from any other human thing.
Life created by human behavior is a mixture and medley, sometimes well-mixed and impossible to disentangle - like cream into coffee; sometimes things settle out and the mixture becomes layered and defined - like drops of vinegar in the oil... but everything is very "Cousin, Cousine"... meaning - to my mind - a family affair.
(Personally, I have always had the highest regard for the people of Egypt and I think they will be a beacon to the world in time.)

Therefore, I see the parallels between Sociology and Economics. If a country democratically wishes to be dysfunctional, let the sequence of events play out, just as some economists have cautioned us to let the bankruptcy of nations play out: after the pain, things will get better.

And I believe this. I am no friends of Salafists, whether they are "Koran-thumpers" (it should be "Quran"... I dislike sloppiness) or not. However, if a nation wishes to plunge itself into the 12th century or the 21st, that is its prerogative.
Even though many radicals are violent, their violence is mostly directed at their friends and neighbors; very few seek the route of international terrorism. (Of course, international terrorism was born within two long-term events: the Arab-Israeli conflict starting in 1948 and continuing to this day, and the radicalization of Arab youths caught up in that conflict. In a sense, we made hatred international by our inability to solve the issue.)
There may be burkas and fatwas flying, but the painful results are all to the Egyptians, not to anyone else. If they wish to inflict injury - or blessings - upon themselves, they are a free people. I no longer wish to be in the midst of armed conflicts part of whose justification is the fact that the indigenous enemy in the land in which we fight "oppresses their own women" or "stones adulterers". As repugnant as those practices are, to claim them as justifications for our interventions is an insult to our serious mindedness and those who are dying for our ill-defined aims.

My opinion is let the "Market of Society" be free to find its own level. Some regulation is necessary, but for the most part, things will work out the way Markets dictate - for what are Markets but the emergent behavior of our own habitual behaviors?

If Egyptians want to issue bonds of spiritual corruption, they are the only buyers and they will get the full "haircut" when the time of possible default comes.
--

note
A haircut, in the financial industry, is a percentage discount that's applied informally to the market value of a stock or the face value of a bond in an attempt to account for the risk of loss that the investment poses.
http://financial-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Haircut

St. Nicholas

2011-12-05T12:07:00.000-05:00

Have a good feast day of St. Nicholas!

Back in the USSR

2011-12-05T06:43:00.000-05:00

Сергей Есенин, школьник

Sergei Esenin, Schoolboy