The Magic Barrel

The Magic Barrel is a collection of short stories by Bernard Malamud.

This collection contains the story "The Angel Levine"; a story I referenced in a posting above our own Levine, member of the Greybeards.

At the time, Levine had said something so insightful and unusual, that the rest of the members were speechless. We were speechless for such a long time it was uncomfortable. Then, after a certain time had passed and we were no longer quite so uncomfortable in the unexpected silence, no one wished to breech the silence, which by now had taken on a numinous quality.

So I said, "We have heard from the Angel, Levine..."

What else could one say?

Levine has some Yiddish. That is nice.

I started to learn Yiddish a thousand years ago it seems. One of the first books I ever bought was by a Yiddish writer.

The first book I ever bought on my own just as a book, not a textbook, nor a book that played a part in a religious ritual, was John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.

The second book I ever purchased was Satan in Goray by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Mr. Singer wrote in Yiddish, I came to find out.

I have that book yet. It cost 65 cents at the time.I have taped the binding and handle it with care. It's not a first edition or anything like that. It is a 65 cent paperback (it was the fashion at the time to call them PocketBooks).

The pages are becoming mottled with age, but so am I. I shall have that book forever.

I remember it well. There is a posting somewhere around here about Justice Scalia and the Rabbi of Goray. That was a good posting, if I do say so myself.

So I began to study a little Yiddish when I was 15.

Meshigaas! There was no one I could talk to.

So I finally located a news stand that sold the Forwerts, a Yiddish paper. I would go there and buy my copy. It toke me at least a week to read it.

I forget the news guy's name. Orele comes to mind, but I think that is wrong.

In my memory, we sit around and talk about important matters like learned men trying to pierce the veil bewteen this world and the spiritual.

I don't think we did. I think I just put down my money, bought a cigar - no, that's wrong, too. Just put down my money and went.

My family is not Jewish.

The only person by blood that is observant is my wife's nephew. Maybe he's not, strictly speaking, "observant", but his home is kosher.

The best part of any culture is usually spiced with a spoonful of good religion.

Women At Bay

Sometimes it seems we are living in our own dystopian fantasies: we think those films and books are fiction, but they are not. They are memories of the past, informers of the present, and makers and predictors of the future. All those massacres eventually come to fruition. They did in Iraq, didn't they? It does not matter what the objective is. The devil drives us. He offers us the carrot of our vain self-righteousness as we strive harder and harder in his work. This is a generation cursed by God, in that all it desires will come to fruition! Now that is Irony! So now here we are. God asks us " Where have you come from?" We answer " From roaming the earth and patrolling it." Then God asks " Have you noticed the women of the world? " Let us take a look: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6196716.stm Pain of Afghan suicide women In Afghanistant, young women subjected to forced marriages and abusive husbands are more and more seeking release through self-immolation. http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=13675 ‘Taking To The Streets’ For Agunot Expressions of the frustration of those who for at least a decade have been advocating, largely in vain, for a rabbinic solution to the problem of agunot —women who cannot free themselves from an unwanted marriage. and most appalling for us, the taxpayers of the USA, we find that the War on Terror is actually being fought against Islamic Terrorists! The so-called Islamo-fascists are the guys we are supporting, and one item on their agenda is repression of women. Read it at http://arabwomanblues.blogspot.com/2007/02/ishtar-at-gallows.html Ishtar At The Gallows It is not for the faint of heart. However, we would not have started a war if we were faint of heart. We supported the war; we should be able to read about the outcome. All Christianity, all Judaeism, all Islam should weep.

Neocon Rap:MC Brownie And Floodmaster G.

You will say that this is another sophomoric attempt at humor. I agree. As I have said before, it is jejune and junior high; it is " jejun-ior high " humor. Somebody, some place, is not laughing. These are both good men. Maybe I should be glad I wasn't there. Perhaps, even in my insignificance, I somehow realize that it is more than just being a good guy; it is more than just being a good administrator. We lack a moral core about which we are absolutely certain, and which is not degraded by racism, contempt for others, greed, and lust for violent actions or stories and habits of thinking which are violent.

The Empire Of The Sun

More refugeees...Jeeeeez!

They could be from the war in Iraq. They could be Palestinian. They may even be from New Orleans...still. Guess where they are not from. That may be informative.

V Day 2007

I have produced my Valentine for today, V day, 2007. I have also seen a picture of Muqtada As Sadr with dirty, stained teeth. Then, I read an article about how Muslims should not celebrate V day. This was written by an aged Pakistani guy. I sympathize. Poor old crab. I totally agree with him about Sweetest Day, a holiday I go out of my way to ignore.

does the heart know its own color? does it know it beats? does the desert eagle know its young? or offer its neck as their ransom? does the lion know its mate? or feel the fire of her faith? does my smallness know its magnitude in the eyes of my beloved?

painting: Ismail Fattah

painting copied from:http://arabwomanblues.blogspot.com/2007/02/diss-information.html

Frylock Settles Out Of Court

Frylock has directed Turner Broadcasting to settle for 2 million dollars with the city of Boston. It is good to know that the security forces, some of whom required that our rights be reduced to aid their efforts, have been able to save us from the Fratricide of Frylock, the Shock of Master Shake, and the Malevolence of Meatwad.

Uncle Joe...Or Dimwitted Cousin Joe

Senator Joe Lieberman, whom I actually like as an individual, has said " We're on the brink of a decisive battle for Baghdad." He said this on February 19, 2007 and it was quoted in TIME magazine. (I was in a doctor's waiting room, and I was reading. I have not read TIME for a long, long time.) First, we observe that after 4 years in March, 2007, we do not even have control of the capital of Iraq. Second, we observe that once we have control of the capital, we have the rest of the country yet to deal with. Third, we ask Senator Lieberman to go on record NOW and tell us how much money, how many men, how much time will be required to achieve...wait a minute! I do not even know what to write here!!!!! FOURTH, what is the bleeding objective, Senator? And how do we determine WHEN we have gotten to it? FOR WE WILL NOT SIT BACK AND WAIT AS THESE NINNIES IN WASHINGTON D.C. CREATE YET ANOTHER QUAGMIRE! Then they sit back and smirk and say "It would be suicide to leave now." They would say "What's your plan?" Then they say "That's no plan." Then they continue, secure in their infamy. Put an end to it, Senator, or you will be consigned to the same circle of Hades as the man who gave you that Cosa Nostra kiss.

Words: Port-manteau Words and Duffelbag Words

Thanks to my daughter for the article on Lincoln and Herndon yesterday.
She left a message threatening legal action unless I issue an attribution of source. Since she is a lawyer, this was no empty threat. I tried to suborn her with the befuddled old father routine, but she sneered and said she would begin the suit in Maryland and left me a toll-free number for the Public Defender.

She also asked, "Why Bush?", apparently since Mr. Bush appears in the title, but nowhere in the piece.

Why Bush, indeed, I have asked since the year 2000.

I just wanted to juxtapose a REAL president versus a mid-level corporate executive who pantomimes as a president:
Lincoln: intelligent and expresses himself as such;
Bush: dull, drab, and mundane.

I am not referring to his verbal bloopers. Everyone does that. I mean that he is extremely mediocre in expressing himself. He is cursed by the prevalence of Duffelbag Words ( words derived from Sports metaphors of not a particularly brilliant type) which are among the less discrete charms of the Booboisie.
HOWEVER, the ultimate blame must be layed to the people of America ( people of the USA, that is. Canadians always complain when I imply America is the sum totality of the hemisphere). It is the people themselves who have allowed conceptions of finality, such as "culmination", "climax", and "denouement" to be collapsed into the all-around sports duffelbag expression: 
it ain't over 'til the fat lady sings, 
or, better yet,
it ain't over 'til it's over!

It is the people themselves who abbreviate "recrimination" or "regret" or "review" into the sports duffelbag expression:  
Monday morning quarterbacking.
Or consider that the Secretary of State see fit to express not that victory was achieved at long last, rather that there was but a minute left on the clock!



Inspiration thanks to: H.L.Mencken
" College football would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to humanity. "  
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/mencken.htm

Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Bush

Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, had written him arguing that the president as commander-in-chief possessed the right to initiate a war against Mexico without specific Congressional authorization.

Lincoln answered: "Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure.
Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, - 'I see no probability of the British invading us;' but he will say to you, 'Be silent: I see it, if you don't.'"

The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood,"

Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to William H. Herndon, Feb. 15, 1848.

--

Ovadia Yosef Comes A Cropper

Rabbi Yosef

new.bbc.co.uk

When my brother said adieu to the slammer, he asked me what was up in the world. So I said something like Nihil Novi Sub Sole and Semper Ubi Sub Ubi, saying that it was same old same old.

"Hmmm...", he pondered. "Everyone at each others' throats?"

"It goes without saying."

He mused. He said he no longer remembered what it was like before 2001, 9/11 type 2001.

"Was there history?" he asked.

"Oh, I pretty much think there was," I replied.

So we decided to look back into the days when all was peace and fairness.

We came across the above.

On April 10, 2001 - well before 9/11- we find the genial fellow at work:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1270038.stm

Rabbi calls for annihilation of Arabs

The spiritual leader of Israel's ultra-orthodox Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, has provoked outrage with a sermon calling for the annihilation of Arabs. "It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable," he was quoted as saying in a sermon delivered on Monday to mark the Jewish festival of Passover.

On July 21, 2001 in NewsMax:

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/7/27/122828.shtml

Arabs Should 'Go to Hell,' Top Israeli Rabbi Says "In the old city of Jerusalem they're swarming like ants. They should go to hell - and the Messiah will speed them on their way," said Rabbi Ovadia Yossef during his a weekly sermon broadcast over Israeli army radio, according to Agence France Presse.

As far as we can tell, he lives yet.

In Wikipedia, we see " In 2005, Rabbi Yosef repeatedly condemned the Gaza Disengagement. He argued that he was opposed to any unilateral action that occurred outside the framework of a peace agreement. Rabbi Yosef again cited the principle of pikuach nefesh, saying that empowering the Palestinians without a commitment to end terror would result in threatening Jewish lives, particularly in areas near Gaza in range of Qassam rocket attacks. "

Therefore, the Rabbi is not mad. He is eminently sane. And yet he equates peoples to ants, rendering them sub-human. I forget the Hebrew for things that crawl upon the face of the earth. There is a word...Avivah Zornberg discusses it in her wonderful The Beginning of Desire, her study of Genesis.

My brother said, "It was better back in jail. Not so much fighting."

( We hope the mention of such a wonderful person as Ms. Zornberg will do some little bit to dispel the miasma left by writing of the Rabbi Yosef.)

Hope And Sorrow

My brother is no longer in jail. My father and I had visited him during his incarceration. We found the people that work at the new jail near Port Desespoir to run the gamut from competent to surly, rude, and barely distinguishable from the worst inmates. My father found a woman who knew a woman with whom we used to work. All was smiles. After all, we were visitors. There is no particular reason we should be treated as criminals. When we asked questions, we received answers. There was no longer a supercilious disdain or a low, throaty growl.

So on to the visitation area. Did I mention that this jail opened new in 2006? In the visitation area, the guard lead us to an alcove where there was inch thick security glass, on the other side of which sat my brother, wanly smiling. "Thanks," we said to the guard. "Don' mention it." he said. "Talk loud." Ah...hmmm? Did we hear that right? "Talk loud."? Is that some sort of criminological adieu? Something like: we are parting...so sad...our time together ( about 2 minutes) was great, but we must part...since we will be far from each other, TALK LOUD, so that even if I were at the ends of the earth, I could hear your voice and return in the wink of an eye...and so on, and so on, and so on. O.K. If that was it, it was not very interesting. White guys, especially fat, white guys-especially fat, white guys who are prison guards- are always trying to be hip. They fail badly. I did not think that I would soon be saying goodbye to someone and smartly saying, "Talk loud!" (I might, just might, say "Talk loudly!")
So we turn to the object of our visit, giving the old alcove the once over, looking for (a) some sort of grill in the glass through which sound waves could carry, or (b) some sort of telephone connecting us to the other side of the glass, again through which sound waves could carry. There was nothing. I asked my brother, "How do you talk here?". He made one of those hand-as-an-ear-trumpet motions and I think he said "Eh?"  I spoke louder. "How do you talk here? There's no phone." He laughed. "The place's screwed up." 
We managed to fill in the next 30 minutes yelling at each other. My father, who has some lung issues, managed to get himself up to proper volume and bellow his question why my brother had not gotten a haircut yet. And so it went. There were other folks there, just visiting. So there was a constant chorus of Ehs?, Huhs?, Howzats?, Run that by me agains? up and down the halls. We assumed the staff was busily writing down all the secrets being passed back and forth. We thought that perhaps the county could not afford an surveillance eaves-dropping system to spy on any shenanigans that might go on, so they came up with this wheeze.

At the end of the half hour, all the visitors panted to the elevators and shared wondering looks. We would have laughed, but we were out of breath. So now he was out. And what will he do now? Well, this has been a trying transformation for all involved.
However, yesterday I decided to emphasize drinking. I suggested that if he wanted to drink - at which point he demurred, saying it wasn't as much fun as it used to be, and he was thinking of quitting...if you drink, I said, if...try and schedule it a bit better. A which point he gave me the old goggle eye. "What?" So I toke a piece of paper and wrote down two columns, one with 5 and 2 equalling 7, the other with 4 and 3 equalling 7. On the top row that had the 5 and the 4 in, I wrote "Binge Days". On the second row I wrote "Cold Sober Days". I pointed out that we could make a lot more progress in getting him a place and a job if I could count on certain days of sobriety. I suggested he plan it better. Don't just drink. Make the binge days count. Get it out of your system. Rent a movie. Rent two or three movies. Just remember to watch the one you really want to see first. Watching movies on a binge day means the second and third movies become a wee bit disjointed. And so on. He was captivated by the notion and we expanded our talk to other areas. It was rewarding. The hours spent before now- since his decarceration-had not been amusing and amiable. One step at a time...forever.

A Study Of History 1

In Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, we see reference to the Dominant Minority, the Internal Proletariat, and the External Proletariat of Civilizations. We shall speak of these again, but for the moment we shall only glance in a cursory manner.

The dominant minority could be conceived as being parallel to the top 5% or 2% of the population which is presently referred to as having been enriched by the present government. The internal proletariat is the rest of the population, condemned to servitude as greeters in stores that sell shoddy goods from foreign lands. The external proletariat had a parallel in illegal aliens ( just as an example - do not take me to task on this.) Notice that the dominant minority was taken by surprise by the hubbub about illegal aliens, and wished to promote a policy of amnesty. Remember how many of the dominant minority had illegals in their employ. How many recent federal appointments were sabotaged by the lack of a green card? The first fellow chosen to follow Tom Ridge as head of Homeland Security fell prey to this. This shows how far apart the dominant minority is from the rest of the population. Not only do they draw themselves further away economically - but the rest of us just shake our heads and say that the rich get richer- but their view of the world tends to become skewed further away from the view of the internal proletariat.

The fervor of the population over illegal immigration shocked the dominant minority. All this example does is demonstrate how dominant minorities rule over the population with which it does not necessarily share the same world view.

This division showed up in the film Apocalypto. The dominant minority of the Indian civilization imposed a religion of terror and reign of violence. Toynbee holds that, as the dominant minority becomes less and less creative - the more it settles matters by brutish and violent methods; the more it abdicates all values bating its greed-the rest of the populace, the internal proletariat, develops its own view of the world, informed by its experiences, its poverty, its abasement, and creates a Universal Church. The Universal Church acts as a chrysalis to pass the culture of civilization from the dying civilization on to its successor, a new civilization. His primary example of this was the Church's role in the decline of Rome and the rise of Europe. Dominant Minorty, internal proletariat, and external proletariat; these are terms to remember.

In The Night Lands

 The Watcher of the South
 

If you have not read William Hope Hodgson's The Night Lands, well, it's too bad, because it is out of print, and it is written in a pseudo-archaic style that endears it to no one. It is a 1912 work, so its sensibilities pre-date World War I, and its horrors are horrors of the time past, the Victorian age and before; the evils are antique, but none the less appalling in form.
There are good books coming all the time. If you graduate from college and have a friend or relative in the publishing business, you have at least one book. Every graduate has a book in them, whether they write it or not. Every graduate has a screenplay for Porkie's or Animal House, but for the most part they do not write it down, and it becomes reminiscences to be repeated before the children who will think their father was quite the wild party animal in his day.

Why do I read The Night Lands? To be very brief, for the book itself is rather prolix, The Night Lands is set in a time when the Sun has gone out, and humanity has dwindled to remnants in two outposts. The world where these last stands of man are located has been infested by monsters and Ab-human creatures who prey upon man when man ventures outside his two safe zones.
The most impressive of these monsters is The Watcher of the South, a entity of the shape and bulk of a mountain of crushing magnitude that appeared upon the southern horizon a million years past and has crept progressively closer, measurably, though hardly noticeable within a year or ten, but terrifying over the course of thousands of years during which the remains of humanity charted its progress. Yet it reached a point where appeared a glowing dome of light. This seemingly halted its progress.
The last men wondered that this force for Good still existed and gave them safety, and they were glad of it. So we see we are in a world where the paradigm of God the Almighty has been broken like a little Hello Kitty mirror, and its shards still reflect the Holy, yet not unified, not seamless, not unbroken.

The power of the Holy has not been destroyed, but the evil of the age to which man has progressed is such that it has rendered the power of the Holy intermittent and parochial. Think now, what would it be like to live in a world where the power of God became futile as a cold morning's battery; you pray and have to keep your fingers crossed and mutter "I think He can, I think He can!" ? It is the present, only with the men and women of Faith removed. That's all.
Our belief in the continuity of God's love is a paradigm based on reason. Faith is living, action, not opining, not inspecting propositions. When we have created enough havoc in the world, would it not appear to us that God has withdrawn His love? When the desert takes over, when the super-hurricanes hit, when the drought strangles, would it not seem as if the Holy had gone away? But, what has happened?
We created an idol from our Reason. Then we handed it over to the professional theologians to take care of, ignoring it in our daily lives, in our daily works and business. We executed our depredations upon the world and our fellow men with plans based on Reason, not Faith.
When everything falls apart, the paradigm created by Reason, created by the bastard sons of Voltaire, breaks down, and into the vacuum Reason - a horrible, inpotent and wretched Reason now- inserts a new paradigm: God is dead, God is gone, God's love is only intermittent. Reason has a multitude of faces, and it plays all sides; reason is attention to detail, and detail is infinite, and there is Reason's strength and its weakness.

Look where we are now: a Doomsday Vault. In Dr. Strangelove, its was a Doomsday Machine. The word Doomsday has been resurrected. It is not restricted to Terminator. Apocalypse if the work of God; Doomsday is the work of Mankind.  

The final design for a "doomsday" vault that will house seeds from all known varieties of food crops has been unveiled by the Norwegian government. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6335899.stm and Under Swiss law, local governments are required to provide shelter spaces for everyone, and in the early 1970s Lucerne was short by several thousand. The new Sonnenberg motorway tunnel, just being built, seemed a neat solution: kit it out as a nuclear shelter as well and it could hold 20,000 people. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/6347519.stm

The Svalbard International Seed Vault may be a Last Redoubt. The Swiss bunkers will be among the last outposts of mankind. Perhaps. I think we have to turn from the Christian Wiseguys on TV and radio and come back to a true Christianity.
I think we must turn from the obscure and violent Islamic Wiseguys and come back to true Islam.
I think we must cast out the Jews who embrace hatred, and come back to the God who led us all from slavery and from the wilderness. links: http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2006/10/christiano-wiseguys.html http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2006/08/get-pat.html http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2006/08/christian-jihad.html

Told Ya!

Memories of Peter Sellers and Dr. Strangelove crept through the room as the stage is being set for Cold War II. Back at Christmas time, I mentioned that this was coming. It was fairly obvious. As the pinhead pundits of the media and blogosphere danced about a missile defense system, they forget that it would lead to an arms race, especially if the US government is seen to be inimical to the interests of other nations. There are other reasons, too. However, we see Mr. Vladimir Putin speaking in Munich. He asserts that the US has overstepped proper bounds in political, economic, and military spheres. It was a formula that, he said, had led to disaster: "Local and regional wars did not get fewer, the number of people who died did not get less but increased. We see no kind of restraint - a hyper-inflated use of force." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6350847.stm and the riposte: But it was left to US Republican senator and presidential hopeful John McCain to lead the retort. Today's world, he said sternly, was not uni-polar, adding that it was an autocratic Russia that needed to change its behaviour. "Moscow must understand that it cannot enjoy a genuine partnership with the West so long as its actions at home and abroad conflict so fundamentally with the core values of Euro-Atlantic democracies," he said. It's pure Athens and Sparta, the Euro-Atlantic democracies being the Delian League. If we wish to see parallels, this is where they lay.

And whenever I begin to soften on Mr. Bush, I have to remember that he is responsible for more than merely Iraq. link: http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2006/12/merry-anti-christmas.html

picture: news.bbc.com.uk

Global Climate Change Idol: Mother Nature Auditions 1

news.bbc.co.uk

Global Climate Change, make it or break it? Or we could say " Hit or Miss?" Or we could gong it.

I have decided that, since our " " " leaders " " " ( count them...that's three quotey things with the index and middle fingers of both hands.) cannot decide on what to do about climate change, and Charlie McCarthy-type scientists are called in to sit upon their laps at Senate hearings to speak ventriloquaciously about change-yes!, change-no!, change-maybe!...

well, let's forget about the science and pretend Climate change is something like, oh, American Idol.

So what we will do is take some pix of climate change showing old Mother Nature up to her unusual monkeyshines, then we will have a panel of our peers render judgement on her efforts.

I would like to hear Simon's response to her first try-out above. It would be great.

We wanted to go see Kathy Griffin last night, but the show was sold out. I'd like to hear her opinion, too.

The game is Global Climate Change Idol.

You are the panel.

Rip Mother Nature a new...azimuth!

L'Ombre Et La Lumiere

Ah, la poesie!...and lots of it! as Lemmy Caution said to the Computer Mind of Alphaville when asked whether he had dined.

I do not know whether I have mentioned it, but I do not like buying gifts for the sake of buying gifts. I despise the bric-a-brac and bagatelle mortar of our lives of pseudo-hedonistic Consumerism, where everything is cheap, poorly made, and tawdry.

Therefore, I create my own tawdry gifts, thereby saving a bundle. For Christmas, I buy fancy paper, but I print my own cards on it. I add a poem, or some sort of literary devilment, and all is done. (Apologies to real people of intelligence for any plagiarisms.) So, from Xmas 2006:  

Susan’s tree, enwrapt in needles’ mysterie, 
star visions, shining in the skies; 
gifting-time, either honey or the bee, 
hope-weaver of our lives! 
druid sylvan, motionless in prayer, 
with what eyes, solstice now observing; 
on mountains tops, once and forever, 
ancient feasts partaking? 
Susan’s Christmas place, filled to overflow, 
good food, wine and sweets embroidered; 
weaver of delight, our gifts bestow! 
all our fears occluded!

Cahiers Du Cinema

I you read Les Cahiers du Cinema, I have une histoire, numero 532 exactement, in the Cine-Manga Interactif section. It is the November Cine-Manga and you mave have to rechercher (search) for it, as it may no longer be on the front page. Try it. It is fun.

The Technocracy Has No Clothes!

(c)2004-06 Rand Careaga/salamander.eps

Diebold Voting Machines

If There Is A Bible Code, Then...

of course there is a Quran code. Surprisingly, they seem to differ to the superficial glance, which is pretty much all this generation of mankind is capable of. HOWEVER, I have decided to apply the methods of Bible Code to a series of cellular automata generated by Stephen Wolfram. I shall be assigning letters to various sequences of squares ( one dimension), then sequences considered as two dimensional, and so on. I am not so sure I shall require the Bible Code after getting this far. In future postings, I shall refer to it as Wolfram Semiotics.

Mel Gibson's Apocalypto and Will Durant

Previously, from my big leather chair at the Cinematic Drones Club, I had sipped old scotch whiskey with water and said how I thought that Mr. Gibson's latest film was almost a masterpiece. I still believe it. I have some niggling problems with the time line - classic Maya (?) and Spaniards cannot be what was intended-but poetic license will cover all the chinks in the mortar. However, I have come across some contrary opinions that are decidedly strange. In filmcritic.com we see by Sean O'Connell http://www.filmcritic.com/misc/emporium.nsf/2a460f93626cd4678625624c007f2b46/2e132ed6c5ef09828825723c0075dd17?OpenDocument  

The director precedes Apocalypto with a cryptic quote by philosopher Will Durant: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." Since the quote has nothing, in context, to do with the film, I’ll assume it refers to Gibson himself.

The critic seems not to have the slightest sense that the film is a critique of violence.

I have read at least 6,000 pages of Mr. Durant's work, along with that of his delightful wife, Ariel. So I am not entirely cold coming into this. Mr. Durant's love of wisdom isn't the point. The point is his quote. People do not know what Mr. Durant was talking about. When he says a civilization destroys itself from within, what does he mean? What are the details and specifics in this destruction? ( I think people are much too familiar with quotes of brainy types being inserted into prominent positions in films and books. We have become so used to it that we tend to think that brainiac quotes are more like allegories with an aura of wisdom...but no particular meaning; certainly no meaning such that we should actually have to read some of the brainiac's works, and then study the works, and then try to understand. No. We have to draw the line somewhere.)

Mr. Durant lived through World War I. I would guess his age to be around 28 to 35 at the outbreak of the war. World War I was total carnage. It profoundly shocked the generations alive at the time. We have become inured to carnage. We dismiss WWI because we believe our own time deserves the Palme d'Or for killing. The illustrious Arnold Toynbee made it very clear in his extensive historical work that one favorite method by which civilizations destroy themselves is violence. Constant wars which deplenish the commonweal; strife within the society between the classes or groups therein; these are the true destroyers of civilization. Hence, the point of the quote is that civilizations will suicide from an overdose of violence.

We see another review in SFgate.com by Mick LaSalle http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/08/DDGSLMPQNF15.DTL&type=movies It's a bloodbath, of course, but to say that isn't enough. Scorsese movies can be a bloodbath, but would Scorsese ever show you a man eating the raw testicles of a wild boar within the first five minutes of screen time? And what about the running motif of beating hearts yanked from living bodies? No, for those excesses one can only turn to Mel.

First, Scorsese would not flinch from such a scene. Scorsese has demonstrated time and again a loving pre-occupation with over-the-top violence. Furthermore, there may have been intent in the juxtaposition of the quote and this early scene: this is a world of violent acts; we kill to eat; but some violence freely chosen will destroy the body rather than nourish it. That is a possible gloss. The reviewers I have chosen have no eyes for subtlety. Neither reviewer had any inkling that the movie was about VIOLENCE itself.
Neither reviewer sensed that there were two arenas: (1) the internal religious violence of a civilization, and (2) a standard chase sequence with its violence. We have become so used to the expression "gratuitous violence" we think all violence is gratuitous. Not so. Try making a war movie without any scenes of violence. What interested me mostly was whether Mr. Gibson had anything to say to us. Was there any allegory linking to our society and its predeliction for War and Violence? I think so. The reviewers above didn't even get a glimpse. And...every one of my friends did not understand it when they saw it. They did some remedial work on Durant afterwards maybe, but they did not get it. I shall always remember sitting in that darkened theater and feeling the growing realization that I was watching a work of genius.

The Buck Stops Here

I have been reading about George W. Bush (GWB), his papers, his library, and Harry S Truman (HST).The discussion about GWB and his library centers on the unusual amount of classified material, and the war in Iraq.Some articles have been written about GWB and HST, both unpopular in their time.

It is the job of the president to make decisions, whether these decisions be popular or unpopular. Both GWB and HST had to make hard decisions unpopular in their times. HST's turned out to be good and GWB believes his will be.

I almost became sympathethic to GWB. I was actually moved.However, GWB made his decisions in arrogance.I needed to remember why I thought the War in Iraq was an appallingly immoral act: the incredible and monstrous arrogance which accompanied it.

Shock and Awe Remember? It was Shock and Awe. Our killing of the guilty and the innocent was Shock and Awe.

The War was named as if it were a version of Grand Theft-Auto. It was going to be a replay of Gulf War I. It was Gulf War II. Only bigger and better.

Every Neoconservative worth his grain of salt was heard crowing about how quick the war would be, how painless the war would be, how cheap the war would be.

Yet any fool knew in his heart this was a crude deception.

Then Mission Accomplished. And GWB danced a Caligula-like jig upon the deck of an aircraft carrier. (Amazingly enough, an ex-marine member of the Greybeards Club saw this and immediately turned against the President back in 2003. He said it reminded him strikingly of a railroad car in Compiegne and a doctored newsreel. He did not mean a parallel between GWB and any other historic figure. He meant the attitudes were repugnant to him.The fighting men yell and get drunk with victory. This war was nothing for the people at home. They were not inconvenienced.Why this display? He said the display was to re-inforce and establish the equivalence between 9-11 and Iraq. We suffered nothing from the Iraq War at that time. Hence, the only reason for a victory dance was 9-11. At this point, he saw through the lie. Those guys at the Greybeards are way too smart for me.)

And then the 40 million dollar Inauguration. And they danced while the innocent were killed. No. I do not see any resemblance between HST and GWB. I had a professor once whose dad used to play poker with HST. He said HST had an odd game wherein deuces, treys, jacks and queens were wild...mainly as a way of spreading the wealth around. GWB only looked for the well-being of the rich. I see no resemblance between HST and GWB.

MIL Is For Millions

Fantastic returns to these armaments conglomerates have been reflected in the continuing jump in the value of their shares or stocks in the Wall Street: "Shares of U.S. defense companies, which have nearly trebled since the beginning of the occupation of Iraq, show no signs of slowing down. . . . All the defense companies-with very few exceptions-have been doing extremely well with mostly double-digit earnings growth. . . . The feeling that makers of ships, planes and weapons are just getting into their stride has driven shares of leading Pentagon contractors Lockheed Martin Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp., and General Dynamics Corp. to all-time highs. . . ."[3]

( http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_prof__is_070120_must_read_3a_why_isn_t.htm )

War is good for business. This much we have learned.

The military-industrial-complex [would] cause military spending to be driven not by national security needs but by a network of weapons makers, lobbyists and elected officials. - Dwight D. Eisenhower

There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. - General Smedley D. Butler

A racket. The Age of War as a Racket.

It's all beginning to come together; the Christiano-wiseguys, the cosa-nostrafication of Business.

If the President is ever impeached, it will be for violating the RICO Act.

Coffee, Danish, and Cartoons

It's very late to talk about Danish cartoons, but the topic did come up at the Greybeards Club the other morning. There were some desultory remarks about freedom of speech or freedom of sketch, not backing into buzz saws, and the like. I told them the story of the time I was in the UK and Salmon Rushdie invited me over for tea and scones. Now there's a story for ya!

The Terror Of Frylock

By now you must know that the Boston Security people arrested those responsible for:

and this was on an Ad Campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Frylock is the Fries guy. When asked to comment, he said " No Comment."

Borgesian Bloopers 2

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.
--

Appliances Of The Future

This one is the Military-Industrial-Lobbyist Complex brain prosthesis.

It is called "Resistance is Futile!"

Why I Hate Ayn Rand

I got up in the middle of the night, scuffed my way into the kitchen, and stumbled across an article about the Super Bowl. http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4895 The Joy of Football: The Super Bowl Offers a Too-Rare Celebration of Goal-Achievement To make it even better, the author is described: Thomas A. Bowden, author of The Enemies of Christopher Columbus, is a writer for the Ayn Rand Institute. The Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Thomas A. Bowden practices law in Baltimore, Maryland. My mouth watered as I read, checking the blades of my mental scalpels to whet them to unusual acuity. Unfortunately, the article is rather brilliant. Blast! Oh, God of my fathers, that my opponents should be brilliant, and my friends be such dullards! Note well the following paragraph ( if you are happy enough to read th'article): Sports offer as close to a universal value language as we have left. The sense of brotherhood that sports fans feel makes it possible for complete strangers to find themselves happily discussing the latest exploits (or ruefully noting the recent failures) of their favorite team. It is my sad observation that Religion by its very nature is intended to be that universal language of values. And it has abdicated its position to Sports. Extremely interesting from my point of view. We will hear more of this. I shall save Mr. Bowden's article and ponder it. Oh, and by the way, I do not hate Ms. Rand, God bless her soul. (It was all a subterfuge, using the name of a popular icon to get you, the readers, into my gingerbread Blog. Tomorrow I shall entitle ' Why I Hate Stuart Erwin.' )

The Washington Neo-Conservative Memorial Design 5

This design is the Condoleeza Rice inspired Barber Shop, known to Beltway wags as Secretary Powell's close shave.

...Now That Football's Done

It was some Romantic poem; something, something, in the Sun; something, something, what's to do now that football's done? I think it was written by Sir Walter Raleigh. By circumventing 99.9% of the build up to the actual game, I found it vaguely enjoyable.

I began to regret that I had seen absolutely nothing of the NFL this season. I found Prince to be a bore. The special effects of rain were pretty darn good, however. If I were a performer, I do not think I would encourage the support team to do rain effects. It would be like encouraging my Foley editor to experiment with flatulence noises. It would come back sooner or later and bit you somewhere unpleasant

The closest I came to pre-game hoopla was reading Joe Namath rate the Quarterbacks, then subjecting his interview to a Bible Code analysis.

Amazingly, the result was " INDIAN CITY BY TWELVE "!

Since 'Indianapolis' is literally Greek for "Indian + City", this looked like a hit.

I went to dinner at my brother's. He is a fine cook. We had a very good pot roast which had marinated for 4 hours in a beer and red wine marinade. Heady stuff. They live in a condo high-rise on the 25th floor. I have a fear of heights, so I shy away from the windows. It was a cold day-about -15 degrees wind chill-and the snow showers zipped through the sky like my fingers at a sushi buffet. We spoke of all things. My brother spoke of our society's nasty habit of defining a process by its failures.

For example, the mistakes and problems of doctors lead to malpractice to high insurance premiums, resulting in a shortage of Obstetricians: the practice of medicine is delimited by its failures, not its successes.

I think a similar process works through the entire national subconscious. It is our failure in Vietnam that haunts us, and thereby is present to mind more than the good things we've done.

World War II is the exception that proves the rule, for it is now so long ago, that the present generations cannot claim it as their own. It was a victory of a golden past

And we cannot define our objectives.

What was our objective in Iraq? Weapons of Mass Destruction.

They did not exist. What was our objective then?

Getting the really, really bad guy in prison.

O.K. Got him. What then?

Export freedom and democracy.

O.K. What then?

Try to keep from getting killed..

There were no objectives in any rational sense of the word; they were just steps in a series of blunders.

Look now at Health Care. What are our 5 main objectives in a Health Care Program?

We don't know.

Maybe, just maybe we will say all kids should have health care, and maybe, just maybe, we shall actually accomplish something by 2012. Maybe.Do you think the present bunch of leaders and would-be leaders can bring Health Care off?Do you think the leaders and would-be leaders can do anything about Social Security?

The future is in the young. I do not think anybody over 30 has escaped being degraded into a useless, resentful ideologue in search of something to believe in.

Now the bad news...

Oceania, 'Tis For Thee!

The opening words of the anthem of Oceania, the bloc in which Winston Smith finds his sorry self in the novel 1984.

In 1984, there is a state of ongoing war. The three slogans of the ruling Party are:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

We are in the time of troubles foreseen by Dwight David Eisenhower, who warned of in his Farewell Address of the Military-Industrial Complex. The objective of the Military-Industrial Complex is War.

Not surprising, War is good for the economy. It always has been. It still is. War is the ultimate in Consumption activity.

We are on the brink of the Era of Constant War.

In http://blog.mondediplo.net/2006-12-17-Carter-Israel-et-l-apartheid

we see:

Dans un entretien donné au Washington Times du 13 décembre, sous le nom « General Foresees(sic) "Generational War" against terrorism », le général Mark O. Schissler, directeur adjoint de la guerre contre le terrorisme au sein du bureau de planification de l’état-major américain, fait part de ses réflexions. « Nous sommes dans une guerre générationnelle. Vous pouvez essayer de combattre l’ennemi où il est et où il vous attaque, ou les empêcher en défendant votre patrie (...) Mais cela n’est pas suffisant pour les arrêter. Nous devons briser la chaîne et cela signifie l’idéologie. Nous devons montrer les erreurs de la pensée islamiste extrémiste. » Un de mes problèmes, ajoute-t-il, est de savoir comment « maintenir la volonté des Américains, maintenir cette volonté à travers le temps ». Cette guerre sera longue parce que « notre ennemi est engagé pour une lutte longue, ils sont complètement engagés sur un plan de 50 ou de 100 ans ».

This translates to General Mark Schissler saying the War is inter-generational. Our enemy in the War is set on a duration of 50 to 100 years!

( the original link was in the Washington Times, but they seem to have seen fit to remove it.)

I concur that we must fight against extremists. I deny this is a War. One of the determininants of the start of the War in Iraq was the need to have something that actually looks like a war, not just chasing a bunch of Wahhabis through the mountains.

We must fight against the Military-Industrial-Lobbyist cabal, the MIL. We must fight to define the scope of action, to define what is a war and what is not.

People will not support WAR expenditures for things that are obviously not war. The MIL created Iraq for this reason, out of many other reasons. For the people to support the government, the government must give them something that looks like war. Our generation knows the difference. All the generations gathered here today reading know the difference.

However, the generations of the future will have been degraded by the MIL and will not know what a real war was like. Their wars will be blunderings about the globe to enrich the MIL.

Super Duper Bowl

I had intended a light-hearted post today, something medium length and bubbly, just right for wrenching a smile from the lips of my readers who anticipate the Super Bowl this evening with chips and dips stars in their eyes, 3-alarum chili in their loins, and a variety of horrid gut-busting delicacies. I am going to my brother's for dinner. I shall eat well. I was asked if I wanted to watch the game. I declined with fervor. I used to watch the game. My interest in football ended when the local franchise did the Ground-Hog Day bit once too often; team sucks, need new coach,who will be new coach?, we have all confidence in newbie, honeymoon is over, team sucks. Baseball was destroyed in 1993 when owners and players joined in destruction. The intention of replacement players who were not good enough, thus assuring that when the regular players return, no one team will have too great an advantage, was an affront to Sparky Anderson. He would rather sit out the season than insult Baseball by a charade. The owner gave him one more season- for appearances-and he received his walking papers. In the Hall of Fame, Sparky wears a Cincinnati hat. This isn't Cincinnati. The last game I attended was inter-league, the Tigers were awful and I went to see Sammy Socia. It was a bright, hot July day. I went to buy 2 bottles of water. While I was in line waiting, Sammy Socia hit a home-run. That was too bad. Then he hit his second home run of the game. How long was I in that line? Long enough. The owner had such contempt that he fielded a terrible team and he ran a terrible park. I never watched professional sports since. This last year, the Tigers were in the World Series. I watched nothing. I knew the name of one player, Punch Rodriguez, and this was wrong, the correct sobriquet being "Pudge". I suppose it would have mattered had I been in a gaggle of fans waiting outside the locker room, clutching a brand new baseball in my sweaty hands, yelling for "Punch!" to sign it.

The Silence Of The Lambs

I have an eerie feeling that they will shoot me during a demonstration protesting the extension of hostilities to Iran. The price of gas will be a non-issue; if you have to ask how much it is, you can't afford it! We will walk to the protest...and it will be right down on the corner...right next to Jenny's Coffee Clutch. And there I shall experience true mortality. The white light I see will be Jenny's flashlight. "Is the old ___ still breathin' ?" Boulos will be there, head bent to my chest. "No." A tear in his eye. Thanks, Boulos, I hardly knew ye. "Bring him 'round back." she will say, wiping a sharp deer dressing knife on her bloody apron. "Can't even afford horsemeat now...damn gas prices."

We Probably Gave Powell the Wrong Speech

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,462782,00.html  
The former chief of the CIA's Europe division, Tyler Drumheller, discusses the United States foreign intelligence service's cooperation with Germany, the covert kidnapping of suspected terrorists and a Bush adminstration that ignored CIA advice and used whatever information it could find to justify an invasion of Iraq.

This article is a truly interesting read. I mean, we gace the Secretary of State the wrong speech? I guess that mistakes indeed were made.
At this point, one is supposed to smack one's forehead and fulminate about the Bush regime which indeed should be changed, but what's the point of that? We pretty much got what we asked for. And if we did not take the time to see the little man dancing behind the curtain in his flak jacket, operating all the controls of our Oz-like fugue state following the September attack.
I do not mean to diminish the importance of the Action Against Terror. The recent events in Birmingham, England demonstrates that a goodly number of evil mad men do indeed exist in our world and whom we had been hitherto able to ignore. Now we cannot.

However, the unsuccessful attempt to chivvy Osama bin Laden from his lair in Afghanistan and to capture him should have been a wake-up call to us. Slipped through our fingers? It never ceases to amaze me that when we beat the drums to war, we are wise and competent; when things go wrong, mistakes were made, we cannot know everything, the body-armor was in the mail to Iraq, and so on, and so on.

If Sam bin Laden had been apprehended and incarcerated, we might have thought the war was over.

That could not be allowed to happen.

Therefore, Sam must be allowed to slip away, and a REAL war must started.

Once again, I caution you that I am not necessarily implying that things were done intentionally. Bad stuff and stupid stuff may occur unintentionally. However, the bad results of evil done unintentionally is just as bad as that done with intent. The victim of murder and the victim of manslaughter 1 see no distinction; only the judicial system does.

At which point, we come to the object of the posting.

)(=)(=)(=)(=)(=)( : : : : ( an emoticon termed "the stipled-back centipede" that is used to indicate long, arduous detours from the point. particularly note the tracks left behind.)

My three nephews, who have names, but whom I call 6, 6, and their brother 6, have asked me why I was so positive that Saddam Hussein had no WMDs. I mean, right from the get-go I had been adamant about it. Did I possess some arcane knowledge? Or did the fact that my Arabic teacher had a sister who had a niece whose next-door neighbor had a daughter married to a second-cousin of a nephew of Tarik Aziz have anything to do with it? Scarey. I don't know. I mean, I do go to the same church as Tarik Aziz, meaning that he is a Christian - and don't think he wasn't soundly given the raspberries about that at the meetings at Saddam Central! - and I think he was the same denom as I. Now they are trying to prove he shot blokes and mollies, which, come to think of it, is something a Christian might do.

All I can say about the WMDs ( or ' WiMDoos' as I have taken to calling them...you can not take me to task for this macabre jocularity, for I have spent my entire life under the threat of Wimdoos, and if I want to crawl under my school desk to protect myself from the blast and pray that God spare us from wimdoos, it is my right!) is that I paid a great deal of attention during 2002 and 2003. I relied on the BBC, the Guardian, some Belgian paper dont j'oublie le nom, Al Ahram from Cairo, and The Christian Science Monitor and my local Daily Bugle.
I was fortunate here, for most of the US media were co-opted as well as being embedded. The truth was very hard to discern for news readers and viewers. I never watched FOX, except as an 'exception' that proves the rule type thingey: find something, read, see what FOX says, if FOX says things which fly in the face of all reason ( freequently the case, unfortunately), then I have 'proofed' the rule...or the proposition...or the matter under scrutiny.

At some point, probably after the UN inspectors had been there quite a long time and repeatedly said that they found nada, I found no evidence anywhere for WMDs. I repeat, everything given out by our government had absolutely no proof of anything, and Secretary Powell's speech to the UN - and I recall Adlai Stevenson during the Missile Crisis-would have gotten a 'C' at best for 'Show and Tell'.
Sometimes my certainty faltered, but I never wavered. So I was right. Big deal. My parents were convinced in the opposite direction, and they still believe the Wimdoos are there, hidden under some mountain in the north-east, probably next to Frederick Barbarossa, King Arthur, and some other fabled characters, waiting for the fullness of time to return.

My father, when pressed to it, says if they'd give some financing and some hi-tech metal detectors like those used on the beach to find coins and bottlecaps, he'd go and find the WMDs, that is, if he were 10 years younger. He is contemptuous of this generation. His generation fought and beat the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire in less time than the Iraqi war has lasted, then for dessert they fought the Cold War.

Maybe if we all just learned to live together with war. War gets a lot of bad press now. Back in '02 it was a fresh, young ingenue, just starring in its first big role. Now it's a tired, evil, jaded virago.
Learn to love War. According to the Vice President, we shall have this one at least for 3 or 4 administrations. They did not tell us that back in '02. That would have ruined the surprise.

Winter Of The Heart

 Jeremy Irons and Jpohn Gielgud in Brideshead Revisited

In the end of January, the snow blows in from the North, howling up the hill where we live, coming like the white sands of winter upon those same lusty winds that bear the brittle grains of summer’s dust. It comes so thickly that it obscures the firmament, filling over the grey tent stretching from east to west with a uniform of white.

The world has lost its horizon, undifferentiated foreground and back. There is no hand in front of your face, and small, well-considered steps become fearful plunges into the unknown. Angry swarms surround the left-over Christmas greens, mixed species, baccate red and undessicate, forming balustrades upon the balcony and atop the antique terra cotta pots in whose smiles are sequestered the long-lived pansies that had flourished through the wet holiday and well into the new year.

It is then we view Brideshead Revisited and The Jewel in the Crown. We turn to a better world whose fancy will not decrease. Each episode opens with its musical theme, the same pictures of the past march by, and we go into that labyrinth of color and sound, and we dance with the ancient mysteries of love and hate, war and peace, food and drink, and man’s humanity and inhumanity within a world spinning out of its orb; all being in the 20th century, all being at the end of empire.

 Perhaps we are sitting in on the beginnings of empire. Many of our countrymen believe our country is just beginning its imperial march. I tell my wife I think it is more like Athens, an Athens no longer spiritually creative, and NATO the Delian League. The greatness of the West in North America started just before 1500 and reached a high point around the writing of the Declaration of Independence, a span just short of 300 years.

This zenith lasted until the Second World War, which saw the great evil and the great good come together in a war like none before as happened in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Like Tolkien’s world, the world began to run down and unwind after the great war. The greatest moral achievement left was the ending of the Cold War: the refusal by the USA and the USSR to destroy each other and the world. Then the Peace Spring...which in retrospect appears to have been Peace Autumn.

At this point, no one cheered. We looked around like moles thrust into the sunlight, and we sought for greater wars in which to spend as much as we could, and pass the bill to future generations. Now, as we watch Brideshead, the world is looking again to engage in thermo-nuclear stand-off, and we all seem to stutter about the important issues like Anthony Blanche in a louche bar.

As we watch Jewel, General Dyer fires on the defenseless at Jallian Walla Bagh, Gandhi dies (to be re-born next year at this time), there is rioting in the cantonments, and Rose Cottage passes into a mythic past – yet we will dance again to swing records on Lily Chatterjee’s victrola. Each episode closes with its music. This time the music bears the undertone of the passing of enchantment; the death of the Muse. And it never fails to sadden us.
--

Father Ghraib And Mother Gitmo 2

Another example of the idiosyncratic, yet brilliant, poetry of Richard Cheney.

We can do more than one thing,

We have removed the scorpion's sting;

Yet Al Qaida lies scheming.

Old man Sam of bushy beard,

will by Bush his beard be sheared...

and of scum an ethnic cleaning.

That which is not dead may eternal lie,

And with strange aeons, even death may die;

In his lair, Cheney waits, dreaming.

This small bit of verse was discovered in a trash can in front of the Naval Observatory.

Neo-Conservative Books 1 The NecroNeocon

The NecroNeocon is a Lovecraftian tome consisting of the finest works of the greatest NeoCon minds. A definite plus to any library! With notes in the hand of Abdul Alhazred himself!

It is said to contain the names of 600,000 to 700,000 of the dead ( De Inferis Quaerite ! ), or of only 30,000 to 32,000, depending on whom you ask. Incredible? You betcha!

What The Heck Is Writing?

I cannot yet answer the question posed in the title. However, I am able to say that when I came to write my review of the film Notes On A Scandal
( http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2007/01/film-review-notes-on-scandal.html ),
I had a very different approach to it relying on my interpretation of the grammar of the Imagery and the grammar of my Emotions.

I was quite content to accept the cinematic observation of Dench's character that the Blanchett character was shallow. As soon as I touched upon this in writing, I realized this was a stupid, self-serving evaluation of Sheba's character. And I mean ' as soon as'! It was as if one form of consciousness- adequate for observation, recall, and the interpretation limited to Images and Emotions- gave way to another form of consciousness - one more attuned to understanding, making distinctions, seeing connections more subtle than those easily discernible by the Logic of Images.

The film began to bear an uncanny resemblance to The Queen, a film where the interest of the tabloid press and the public seems to be unnaturally focused on the sensational and the lurid, rather than on the good works of the individual who is unfortunate enough to fall under this particularly coarse lensed microscope.

In The Queen, Lady Diana is the focus of the emotions of the crowd and the press. One feels sure that it was not her labours in the field of outlawing land mines that led to the more intense outpourings of grief. It was something else; something evocative of someone's guilt, someone's shame, someone's failure, someone's ending of innocence, something of the long and final trek through the tunnels under the surface streets of Paris where wolves are behind and the unearthly light is at the far, other end. All due to writing. Very neat.

--

The Washington Neo-Conservative Memorial Design 4

This design is called the "Richard Cheney"

It is intended to evoke a plaintive wail that the media does not cover all the good that is going on on Iraq, outweighing the slaughter of innocents by far.

In Iraq, mistakes were made, but on the whole things are just dandy.

This a soupcon of the Military-Industrial-Lobbyist complex in the signs labelled 'money orders' and 'check cashing'.

The lottery sign is a reference to Borges' story 'The Babylonian Lottery'.

Faith And Reason

From The Times Online, The Times Literary Supplement, January 17,2007, article named
 " A Deadly Certitude"

Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century.
The most influential figure was the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who argued in The Incoherence of the Philosophers against the very idea of laws of nature, on the ground that any such laws would put God’s hands in chains.
According to al-Ghazzali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smoulder because of the heat, but because God wants it to darken and smoulder. After al-Ghazzali, there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries."

Notice that a Muslim philosopher uses Reason to modify Faith. The Religion itself is not inimical to Science, rather Reason is used to do the dirty work!

Then on Monday in http://www.firstthings.com/ , in an article named  "Reason and Pop Atheism"  we see:

"de Lubac might seem to be elevating the place of reason here to such a height that he ends up conceding reason’s right to judge the things of God—the very procedure he found so objectionable in Descartes and Kant. "

This is a demonstration of a recurring theme: Faith is not opposed to Science and Reason. If you believe a Faith to be inimical to Reason, look at what Reason did to Faith in mediaeval Islam. Al-Ghazzali used Reason to make judgements about the works of Allah. This was a fundamental error on his part:  the works may be necessarily good, but the complexity of the process cannot be divined by Al-Ghazzali, neither in his inquiry nor in his lack of inquiry.
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Emoticons For The Impaired 2

8 )

name: The Buddy Holly

alternates: The Drew Carey, The Robert Q. Lewis

used to connote: general myopic friendliness with large frames.

: < (

name: The Eric ( from Lon Chaney's The Phantom of the Opera )

used to connote: Don Juan Triumphant, subterranean opera, I'm feeling ugly today,...

-( : {

name: The Kaiser Wilhelm ( non-plussed, neither unhappy nor happy; sort of "Was ist's...?"

used to connote: ambition, hybris, sort of a "Die Welt ist mein Feld" type of bonhomie.

}{ }{ }{ }{

name: The Belly Dancers

alternates: The Hula Dancers, The Chicken Dancers, etc.

used to connote: depends on the type of dance; if chicken dance, used to imply extreme discomfort, usually accompanied by fountains o' chocolate and cheap bubbly.

I'll See The Bible Code When It Comes Out In Mishnah

Recently, quite recently, yesterday, in fact, I decided to look into the structure of statements dealing with future events.

Among such statements are those of prophesy and those foretelling the future.

This brings us to the Bible Code

To be a spoilsport, I shall say right now I consider this particular bit of idolatry of the modern age to be moronic.

The adepts of the Bible Code are creating an entire new Torah based on their slice and dice Torah. Of course, there is need of new Mishnah for the new Torah. And they are creating the new Mishnah, too!

I came across this bit of doggerel on http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php/236 .

It deals with Mel Gibson. Mr. Gibson was not in the Bible until he had the misfortune to mouth off while drunk. Once he did that, his fate was sealed. Amazingly he turns up hidden in the Bible, and in an unfortunate light.

I am shocked!

1. Skip=3,806 – Main skip 147 letters The ones that made me, the mob, was blackened by me (one hundred are his Gods). The one who fixed outside1Give (tell) it right! Please cut off 60! 2 Comes3 an honest, a whole hearted4 person to Gibson: "Guilty one! 5 Are the Nation6 and G-d a joke? Does a heap of ruins a place to permanently place water? No!" (That is) His line! It is their Anger! The story of creation7 the guilty one will negate (refuse to accept)! He placed permanently, and he insulted from a record8. Ah, you are in a heap of ruins. It is a beautiful hotel that is a heap of ruins (that is Kosher). Hashem: "Mel is rotten." It has to be said9 G-d is one10. My God! Hashem is the one that kills11. He killed; or, another interpretation12: "because Hashem is G-d."

Now you see why further elucidation is required. Quite the code. Apparently the idols speak in pidgin.

Remember when it comes to this process, there may not be vowels marked in the text. The choice of vowels appears sometimes to be up to the discretion of the adept.

Furthermore, remember that the letters themselves are a linear sequence of letters; there is no punctuation, there is no separation of letters into words: that must be done by the adept.

Therefore, if I see a sequence ( from the above): M L S R T T N.

This reads " Mel is rotten". I could just as well read it " MuLeS, RoTTeN" or " MoLeS aRe Too TiNy".

Even if the vowels are included, we are very close to " MeLeS Rotten" wherein we "correct" the "i" occurring after "L" and change it to "e". This gives us the statement that the river Meles, where Homer was born, is rotten - probably uttered by a schoolboy studying the Iliad.

I often wonder why my parents wouldn't let me have my own golden calf to pray to.

In Praise Of Jimmy Carter

I am honored to have been a countryman of Jimmy Carter.

I do not consider it an honor to have any such association with his critics.

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Emoticons For The Impaired

There was a great flurry recently about emoticons, those little bits of type confused with the ancient qwerty-arts into living symbols.

For example, we may see     
:)    (sideways) smiling face. This is not only 'smiling face', but may indicate the writer is in a good mood, the writer is smiling, the writer may be enjoying a good laugh over something (although we would expect :) = lol which would be smiling face, classic Maya glyphic speech indicator, and 'lol' meaning 'laugh out loud' .)

Now, if you are up to speed, you will have noticed that I ended my paragraph above with a 'knowing wink'; i.e.
; )  

By using italics, we can create " smarmy wink", or "wink, wink, nudge":
 .)

Having had discussions about President A. of Iran recently, and having actually had a visit from a Farsi speaking individual who translated the infamous "wiped off the map" quote in a proper manner for us of the Greybeard Roundtable, we noticed a lot of noise in the air and on the net about Mr. Hitler. It was primarily things like "He's just like Hitler!" "Yer freakin' crazy, he is not!" "You're a Hitler!" "Am not! You are!" and so on. We decided to provide the proper emoticon for the "Yer a Hitler. No, you are" kind of interchange. This would provide everyone the proper punctuation for ending an insightful discussion into Hitler parallels. We submit the following punctuational emoticon:  
 // : =(            This is the "Sad Hitler". You may use the "Happy Hitler" for stronger effect.

The Washington Neo-Conservative Memorial Design 3

This one is called "The Douglas Feith"

It is also termed "Iraq-Hawks", with a slight reference to "Nighthawks" diner scene.

The idea was "We buy [oil], you [Iraqees] fry." The builders got it wrong, and we have to read "You buy [our notion of democracy], we fry [your sorry a.] " photo: tEdGuY46

NeoCats and NeoDogs

I have been reading about the Neoconservatives. It seems most of them had been Neoliberal at one time. They only changed the trappings of compulsion.

Their belief in the State Behemoth imposing its will on the country and the world is the same, whether under the aegis of Liberalism or Conservatism. Neoconservatives and Neoliberals are power-brokers.
The difference between them and a Serbian General is that the Neos know when to stop the blood-letting...at least, they used to know. Sometimes it goes out of control.

 They are totally the same in the reality that YOU do not matter one whit. Only the allegorical YOU matters, whether you are John Q Public, or you are the forgotten man, or you are the feminist, or whatever the label they apply to you and duct-tape across your mouth... No, we do not matter to them.

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