Future Tense

The Future is being offered to us, and we have but to accept it.
It will be a long and arduous task. far beyond anything we have ever dreamed of attempting.

It will be a hero's quest, and there is no mistaking that it will be the most difficult journey we have ever set upon, and once started, there will be no turning back.

The Future is our Grail quest, and it is not a Dan Brown fiction: it will be frightful in its consequences. We stand as Arthur did among the entering barbarians and the exiting Roman legions, and we face the same choice whether to pick up the instruments of leadership or let them rust.

Shall we slip into obscure barbarism, or shall we recommit ourselves to the ideals that have almost vanished from our land, attenuated by hatred, fear,and our damnable ignorance? Shall we take up the fight against anger inchoate as yet but none the less egocentrically intent on its self-aggrandizement?

It will take the rest of our lifetimes... so pack a bag.

--

All or Nothing

I am reading about the future of oil exploration and deep drilling. New technologies and new understanding of the geologies involved. It is overwhelming and ricochet of new facts and new data make my head spin, and I am in awe just as back when I was new to science fiction.
It is as awe-inspiring as science fiction, and to my primitive mind, it is - like Arthur Clark says - seemingly magic and wizardry
It manages, however, to ignore the dark side of the old stories, such as the exhaustion of the earth after everything has been drilled, or the loss of the ability to sustain the high technology as society fights against greater impacts - such as adverse climate change.

There is always a downside. Only the money guys pretend it does not exist, but we know it does. Always evaluate the up side and the down side.

Libels

Someone asked me if I was serious about my post "Jud Suss" and what it implied. I said that I was, that formerly one would have to scour out Aryan Nation websites to read such things, and now the anti-Semitic trash is everywhere to be seen.
The fact that the lies are labelled as such is a disclaimer people may or may not heed. The fact that there are "Birthers" still blazing with the righteousness of their cause is a sufficient indication to me that "facts", "truth", and "disclaimers" are mere inconveniences for many people.

It has been my experience that if I publicly acclaim my neighbor by stating that

"So-and-so is a fine man who does not commit child sacrifice, nor does he enrich himself at the expense of the rest of us!"....

...some of it would stick.

--

Violent Karma

Petitions to Lords of Xibalba, "Place of Phantoms"

In the French Revolution, Robespierre called forth the Terror during which many were killed. Soon Robespierre himself was killed by the Terror which he invoked.

Violence destroys everyone, friend or foe.

We have waited too long. There was a general accumulation of guns and ammunition in 2007 to 2009, as well as an increase in violent imagery. There will be a bloodletting, but my feeling is that it will of short duration. Things are sort of up in the air right now. It's not clear whether the recent blood is sufficient to appease the dark gods that drive us blindly on.

--

Either...Or

 Carter and Brezhnev

Someone is either insane, or they are not insane, right? We could not truthfully say that someone is both sane and insane, right?
Wrong.

Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD, was a nuclear strategy that deterred nuclear war based on the fact that each side would destroy the other. The usual suspects we have for leaders would say it was a "rational" strategy and it worked.

I say it is an island of Insanity within the universe of Rational Strategies.

I say that it is too early to assert that it worked, for as a  by-product it has led to an all too easy acceptance of too many nuclear weapons in too many hands, while it also led to wars to prevent nuclear weaponry where there was none: pure insanity.

The Joint Achievement of the USSR and the USA to prevent nuclear destruction was one of the greatest Moral Victories in the history of Mankind, even though no one celebrates it. Still the Victory is not yet complete. When it is complete, we shall see whether MAD was mad or not.

Jud Suss

The Jew Suss, a film made in Germany around 1944.
Propaganda film...

I am wondering why Glenn Beck has a list of enemies in the elite, and eight of the nine listed for Friday's show are Jewish.
I am wondering whether the phrase "blood libel" was used purposely - regardless whether it made sense or not in the context of the Palin creature - as a way of acceptably bringing it back into the attention of the populace. Hitherto, not a lot of people would have been aware of the notion of the libel of child sacrifice.
Now it has made headlines, and everyone knows of the allegation of child sacrifice again.
And a child, Christina Green,  has indeed been killed.

Patterns within patterns.

--

Just What Education Needs

New Jersey Governor Christie wants to eliminate teacher tenure. Apparently he thinks that is the problem with education, that along with a poor evaluation of teachers in the first place.

Governor Christie, tenure was the quid you throw teachers for the pro quo of under-paying them for importance of their work.
Once tenure is gone, they will rightly demand more pay for the job of educating America's children.
At that time, New Jersey school districts will resist this demand, arguing that New Jersey is still too impoverished to do any such thing.

The problem is systemic in society, not merely within the educational part of society. By politicizing education we shall ensure the continuation of the Idiocracy in our country.

Rumblings of Accord

My lady wife has upset me; she knocked me a bit off kilter.
I am so much used to being ignored by everyone I know - ignored for my opinions, that is - that I am rather stunned when someone says something that sounds like agreement. Of course, the reason that I am ignored might not be the opinions themselves, but the messenger. Having delivered some pronouncement, it would not be unheard of for me to dodge into my Arnold Toynbee persona and start quoting Latin and Greek, French and Arabic, to cite Herodotus or 'Antara, thereby dashing any sympathy which may have germinated.
I tend to focus a bit maniacally on things I am interested in, and I am interested in my opinions. They are how I create the world, and I pay attention to mine and other peoples'.

Yesterday my wife spoke about Christina Taylor Green, the  nine-year old child who was killed in Arizona. Christina had been born on 9/11 and that birth upon that horrible day seemed to have been part of an effort to reverse the awful events of that day by giving the world a bright and vivacious child whose life may well have assuaged pain and promoted well-being.
Here lies the first irony, the first reversal: a turn from killing to new hope in the birth of Christina.

Then most untimely she is killed and her life is wasted, reminding us of the many lives that are similarly wasted each day.
This is the second irony: the abrupt reversal from hope to desperate yearning - a hope that has no visible means as yet of fulfillment. We have not changed from hope to despair, but we have lost the guts of our optimisim: we have lost the  bright and shining children of the future.

This unsettles my lady wife, because she sees a warning within it.

That unsettles me, because I get so used to what I say that I take it for granted: rise up in the morning, get a cup of coffee, then write something nasty about society as a whole.
When people start agreeing with me, I realize that time is getting short, because the outcomes that I have looked at are not pleasant, and I have frequently moaned about being born in a time of trials... but none of us can go back, so we have to tough it out.

The Irony of religion  bears looking into. The Almighty throws the mighty from their thrones and raises the lowly: reversal. Pride goes before a fall - this is not an idle observation of sociology, rather it is a description of life itself: pride contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Joy and Suffering are not necessarily opposites, they are not similar to Hegelian Thesis and Antithesis; they are the elements of the Irony of Life. And it is the very Shock of Irony, the incredible way that a sudden reversal gets our attention, that makes us pay attention in the first place! Without the shock of irony, we would live on dreamily like the lotus-eaters, living a drowsy dolce far niente existence.

And the preceding meditation upon irony is why I have been thinking so much on Quakers and their beliefs recently:

if in the normal course of things the irony of life ensures that each act contains the seeds of its opposite, then should I not be lowly so that I might be raised? Shall I not be not be meek so that I might inherit the kingdom? And should I not be a peace-maker so that I might be a child of God?

--

Securitas

Ah, security! I can breathe the air of sancta securitas!

Now, explain to me why it is that when I want to get on an airplane there is a lot of paperwork, I may have to take off my shoes, I may be X-rayed and subjected to intimate inpsections, and everyone thinks that's just dandy because we all want to be safe, yet - remebering that we all want to be safe - why can a deranged person buy a gun and not need a permit to carry a concealed weapon?

The Way

All these years I've heard of women named "Hooda" and it never dawned on me what the name meant until the other day at the bank when the lady said she had a sister named "Noor", just Noor. If she had been Muslim, she might have been named Nor al Hooda possibly... and it popped into my head "Oh! Light of the right path!".
Hooda means path or way, but it is also a religious term indicating the Right Way or path.

Thinking along these lines and a post I had the other day, I remembered when Jesus said "I am the way, the truth, and the life."
I feel the word "truth" is used in an inclusionary sense - incorporating all things - rather than an exclusionary sense that sets some things outside. Certainly St. Paul's take on it suggests so.

Exclusionary truth eliminates things; we end up with one winner, one truth teller. Inclusionary truth is like Harry Truman's poker games which widened everyone's chances of winning.

Palin Does Not Get It

And she never did. She never understood the concept of finishing the job as Governor she had been elected to.

Palin is the Alcidbiades of the present age, and her lack of seriousness and decency will bring disaster somewhere.

JIEC 1

The Journal of Industrial and Economic Cosmology (JIEC)

First article
David Byrne, excerpts from Knee Plays, 1985

In the future everyone will have the same haircut and the same clothes
In the future everyone will be very fat from the starchy diet
In the future everyone will be very thin from not having enough to eat
In the future it will be next to impossible to tell girls from boys, even in bed.

--

New Journal

The Journal of Industrial and Economic Cosmology

Now accepting papers.

--

Climate Change: The Crisis

Briefly stated, Growth and Sustainability do not mix well. They are like the proverbial oil and water, or - even more illustrative - like the Grain and the Grape, the intemperate mixing of which at parties surely leads to a hang-over in the ghastly bright dawn.

As we presently think of matters, Growth and Sustainability are at opposite ends of the spectrum. The irresponsible fiduciary behavior of governments has resulted in huge deficits which can be addressed by austerity programs, or vast growth, or both. Since austerity is politically unpopular, there will be a tendency to stress exponential growth and exploitation of resources for at least the period of recovery.

In essence,our fiduciary irresponsibility has led us to ignite what we hope will be a bonfire of growth and exploitation. This will combine with increasing populations, rain forest deforestation, and all the other ills in the litany of climate change to produce the worse possible set of circumstances. It will be a perfect storm of unrestrained growth and environmental barbarism.

This will be the exact time when Climate Change takes it up a notch.
And we shall be defenseless, for we shall have lost even the will to address the issue, for Growth will have been our god for too long.

--

New Ghost Dance 2

I have read a lot about the Ghost, or Spirit, Dance which was the teaching spread by Wovoka, or Jack Wilson.
My interest started a long, long, long time ago when I had first discovered that religion was not only what was on display in the "conservatories" of religion, nor had the horticulture of the age rendered all religious growth coppiced and pollarded, or pruned into static topiaries!

I had discovered Religions of the Oppressed by Lanternari, and had realized that religion, far from being well-defined and systematized, was on the loose in the world and was growing like some mad kudzu everywhere!

So when I came across Mooney's account of The Ghost Dance, I was enthralled. I never forgot the recounting of the story of the Prophet showing two men an old black hat: one saw an old black hat, the other saw the universe within the ambit of the sweaty brim! How different - I thought - may the Truth be to two different men!

Later, when Clarence Thomas was confronting Anita Hill, I saw the same thing. One day it came to me that both individuals were telling the Truth! I was amazed, truly amazed.
I was amazed at the set-up: we have two people who contradict each other. In our present scheme of things, one has to be telling the truth, and the other mistaken or lying. Typically, the one we feel political sympathy with is telling the truth.
The realization that both were telling the truth was stunning, not so much for the nature of truth that it revealed, but for the duplicitous nature of the set-up that we all mindlessly accept. We will never grasp truth as long as we start our inquiry beforehand by stating that the assumptions involved in the set-up are themselves already true.

(Mrs. Thomas recently placed a call asking Ms. Hill to confess to her misleading  testimony, and this was debated by our media representatives, which indicates that we mostly still believe in the set-up. The judicial system has a certain manner of conducting its business based on this type of winner-take-all logic which works for the judicial system, but this does not imply we extend the paradigm beyond the court room.)

I found that realizing both told the truth forced me to not take sides and to be silent, for what really could I add to the situation? Not a bloody thing! There was nothing to analyze if both sides are indeed telling the truth.
The fact that the two truths seem so disparate is our problem, not a problem of Truth itself.

I do not attack Truth. I do attack the way we deal with it. Truth does not lead to discord, it leads to amity. Truth does not lead to division, it leads to community. And Truth makes for a congress - a coming together - that is a concert of trust.

Truth will make us all Peace-makers. We are yet a long way from that.

--

Budget Stressed Cities Make Ends Meet...

David Politzer
http://davideology.com/?cat=4

--

Virtue

Virtue is the way we ensure that things will be OK when language and analysis fail us.

Climate

From The Daily Galaxy:

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/01/current-climate-change-not-part-of-natural-cycle-arctic-evidence-unlike-any-seen-during-previous-war.html#more

January 11, 2011
Current Climate Change Not Part of Natural Cycle: Arctic Evidence Unlike Any Seen During Previous Warming Episodes

The possibility that current climate change might simply be a natural variation like others that have occurred throughout geologic time is dimming, according to findings that reveal that sediments retrieved by University at Buffalo geologists from a remote Arctic lake are unlike any seen during previous warming episodes. The team was able to pinpoint dramatic changes that began occurring in unprecedented ways after the midpoint of the twentieth century.

"The sediments from the mid-20th century were not all that different from previous warming intervals," said Jason P. Briner, PhD, assistant professor of geology in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. "But after that things really changed. And the change is unprecedented." ...

"Unprecedented" is a word I do  not like.
Our morbid pre-occupation with politics... our OCD fixation and need to politicize everything because talk radio shows make money... is leading us to an unfortunate era when a bankrupt country can not help its citizens escape the wrath of nature.

Symbol & Sign 9: The Hero Myth

There is something in life that often leads us to the conclusion that life is an illusion. I do not know if it is our culture alone, or whether it is common to many cultures. I suspect it is common. When St. Paul speaks of putting away the things of a child, or when the Lord Buddha speaks of Maya, it is clear that there is a dynamic of change which can be seen as illusion and disillusion.
The shooter in Tucson seems to have arrived at the point where life is seen to be empty, a judgment based upon his present state of mind. Interviews with his friends mention his sense of nihilism.

The story of the Hero is the story where the protagonist goes beyond this point; the Hero does not accept their first encounter with chaos (lack of meaning) as a true end to their quest. The Hero senses that there is yet more: even as there was a long journey from birth to the present situation the Hero finds themself in, so also is there more road to be traveled on their quest.
One facet of the Heroic is the fact that heroes do not stop; they continue; there is no end to the quest. Even when the Hero has become King of the Realm, monsters still rise up from the depths of the forests to bedevil Beowulf.

The next step after one has arrived at the understanding that Life is an Illusion is the journey to the recognition that Illusion itself is illusive. Once Life has no meaning, the quest must follow on to the point where Life is filled with meaning... it is the next logical step for the Hero. It is not the next logical step for those of us who fail.

--

What is the Reward for Virtue?

The problem is not heated rhetoric; the problem is we ourselves.
The problem is not guns; the problem is our lack of virtue.

I am not interested in the theory of virtue in morality as a strictly philosophical inquiry (mainly because I never parted ways from it - not that I was ever that virtuous), but soon we shall all take an interest in what it means to be virtuous and how one goes about doing it.

On a very simple level, it brings to mind the British Empire and the playing fields of Eton, where teamwork and playing one's part were inculcated in the minds of British boys. It brings to mind a simple complex of behaviors: sports team and their dynamics.
Sports had always been considered important in the US also for similar reasons.
Then I think of all the years of stories about parents being out of control at children's sporting events and the speculation on what these spectacles taught the children. I remember all the years of money grubbing owners and steroid using players and the total present day disrespect for the burden of "role model" by not only sports people, but almost any celebrity in the eye of the media.

What behaviors have we been rewarding and teaching?

Virtue is its own reward.
--

Sorry

I'm very sorry about all this political stuff. Other people do a lot more of it, and - I may say - they do a better job of it. I should stick to other things, like reading Le Figaro and telling you about the guy who "was in the grip" of alcohol and shot up a laundromat.
It is just that  certain things are way too over the top and must be spoken about, and if condemnation is needed, those things must be condemned in no uncertain terms. That's why I started this blog: to make sure that my chidlren know what I thought, to make a stand... to let them know there is another view point other than that of the mass media. (At the time, I thought the War in Iraq vastly immoral... still do. I think the karma will spill upon us like the contents of Pandora's box one day soon.)

I think I shall keep the Z over on the right. I always thought that the film had more meaning to me than was apparent way back when I saw it. How much could a film about other people in other places be so deeply insightful into my life? Well, if you wait long enough, I guess everything becomes clear. Everything resounds through time, back and forth.

Yves Montand was the star. My wife and I always liked Yves Montand. If you were to ask us our favorite film, we probably would answer Cesar et Rosalie in which M. Montand starred along with Romy Schneider; absolute favorite and we would say it is the best love story we ever saw. I think it was out during the era of Love Story. There was quite a difference between the two films, beyond the fact that Cesar et Rosalie was a comic love story. I think the director was Claude Sautet. I just checked on Amazon and they have it for sale.
I should get a copy, for surprisingly enough, it is very rare to see it. Most films re-surface through the years on TCM or AMC or on tape or disc or the local artsy theater,  but not Cesar et Rosalie. If the chance presents itself, see it.

Speaking of directors, as mentioned, Costa Gavras directed Z. My sister-in-law used to be a nanny in Paris for people who were friends of Costa Gavras; I guess she was a reverse au pair. She took care of a young boy who had one lamb chop for lunch every day, and my sister-in-law went to the butcher's every day to buy one chop. She also went to the baker's and possibly the green grocer's.

I also like The Battle of Algiers very much.

We saw True Grit on Saturday and the John Wayne version was on cable on Sunday. They are pretty much alike, except for the fact that Matt Damon's role is played by Glenn Campbell in the earlier version, and Mr. Campbell is way off the mark in comparison. It was a good film, but I have to see a film at least twice before I can analyze it to death... and I'm not going to see True Grit twice, thank you ( I have to count John Wayne's as a separate film.). If I must choose between drunkards, I preferred Jeff Bridges' drunk in Crazy Heart to his drunk in True Grit.

It was well worth the cost of admission, reduced as it was from the Holiday Season inflated ticket prices.
I know only one thing, however: after True Grit, people will be speaking with fewer contractions like aren't and won't for a spell of time and will most likely assiduously seek other ways of improving their diction.

Is Palin To Blame?

I personally blamed Palin months ago when that map with cross hairs targetting various districts appeared. I did not wait until this happened to blame Palin. Any fool who can live to be my age knows what happens when you do things like she did; it is only a question of how long it will take to come to fruition.
When Palin used shooting language  - like "reload" - in political talk, I blamed her then. I thought that the supposed distinction between shooting a bear and shooting an opponent may be lost on the more dim-witted of her listeners. As it turns out, it was.

I learned a long time ago that when you invoke Violence, no one is safe anymore, not even yourself.

Violence is a nasty Vampire that is in our house and killing people, but everyone says that it was not they who invited the vampire in!

--

Is Political Rhetoric Too Heated?

No.
We are the problem.
We are just too stubbornly ignorant, nasty, and brutish.

See my post before this one on Virtue Theory; it is we, the people, who have allowed ourselves to become barbarous - from road rage to talk radio.
Within intimate community we are loving and caring, yet let the sense of intimacy disappear and let us seem like strangers in a mall, and we become prey to our violent fantasies that by now are behavioral dispositions.

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Virtue Theory

Reading about virtue theory in phil, and about E. Anscombe ( I think that's the name....).
Simply, virtue theory says to focus on which virtues to learn and teach rather than which rules to have and to obey.

Why is this so important?

It is extremely important because life is so dynamic and changeable that there is no set of rules which may encompass all the combinations and permutations of a breathing second!
Therefore, when the salami hits the fan, if you have already learned to be virtuous, you will respond immediately with Bravery or Fortitude or Perseverance and Charity.
If you go by the theory of rules, you will still be looking up which rule applies long after the fan-hitting salami is gone the way of all cold cuts.

It is important for us because we are leaving an Age of Theory and Rules and entering an age of Virtue or Lack-of-Virtue when we shall have to respond with haste.
That's why I keep harping on having "good stories" as the substance of our mythic makeup, to have a fund of virtuous tales and role models we may have quickly at hand to meet the things that will come. When time is short, we need to have our "Kobayashi Maru" winning strategy all ready to go.

When the force of events - violent events - leaves no time for reflection, we can only fall back on what we have learned as virtuous behavior.

Pot Again

The Tucson shooter is described as a pot-smoking loner. David Frum, in FrumForum, asks whether or nor it was the Reefer Madness that pulled the trigger.
Well, I know the feelings as they float by. All my life I have heard these debates, so I am very, very familiar with how this plays out in the intelligences of us all. Right after I have a post on drugs arguing for a sane policy, some loner high on weed goes crazy, and now we sit wondering if we were wise to have suggested... anything else but the present drug policy... BUT the present policy does not work! That is all there is to it. The present War on Drugs rewards the worst specimens of humanity with outrageous profits and corrupts everyone who comes near it.
I have just finished reading of the French hostages in Mali who were executed by the Aqmi (  Al Qa'ida au Maghreb Islamique : "Al Qiada in the Islamic West of Africa " ).  Aqmi derives wealth from the flow of drugs to Europe and the Middle East the article in Le Figaro suggests.
In this same edition, a man in Bayonne-Nord, a man who is described as obviously under the influence of alcohol  -  Un homme de 63 ans, manifestement sous l'emprise de l'alcool, a ouvert le feu sur cinq personnes dimanche dans une laverie à Bayonne, faisant un mort et deux blessés dont un grave  -  opened fire on a laundrette, killing one, wounding two, one of whom is in critical condition. One must choose one's poison, so it seems.



I repeat and re-emphasize my call for a sane drug policy.
The lunatics have always been the cat's paws of the oppressors, and they always will be. Just as Hitler used Van der Lubbe to burn the Reichstag, so do the enemies of freedom spread their vile propaganda nets widely, knowing full well that they will catch a few unbalanced ones to do their dirty work.

By the way, the Palin creature has removed the image of rifle scope cross hairs from her Facebook page, but only after millions went there and recorded it for posterity. I am sure she is seeking something of conscience and wisdom to say, but she has not yet found anything.

--

Monday

Ζει

pronounced  " zey "

" she lives "

The film  Z  by Costa Gavras may not be familiar with many of you, mainly because film is considered commodity entertainment : last night's news mentioned film by saying True Grit won the weekend box office sweepsstakes!

Z dealt with the rule of the generals in Greece, a period of cruel repression and lack of freedom. The generals came to power on the back of right-wing terrorism against the progressive elements of Greek society. Yves Montand played a Progressive politician who was mortally wounded  by a blow to the head. After his death, his supporters used the letter " Z " to be the emblem for their cause, the  " Z "  is pronounced "zey" which was the exact same sound as the form of the verb  "zei - he lives ".

--

Z

Z

after the film by Costa Gavras and the book by Vassilikos,  " Z "  stands for   Ζει,
( pronounced  "zay" )

meaning here " She lives! "    
-- 

Domestic Insurrection's Timeline

 US Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex) PowerPoint Display

http://www.csgv.org/issues-and-campaigns/guns-democracy-and-freedom/insurrection-timeline

Coalition to Stop Gun Violence has a chart:

On June 26, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court embraced the National Rifle Association's contention that the Second Amendment provides individuals with the right to take violent action against our government should it become "tyrannical." The following timeline catalogues incidents of insurrectionist violence (or the promotion of such violence) that have occurred since that decision was issued:

Interesting read.

Time Goes On...

As time goes on, I do a little research on gunshot wounds to the head. The word now is that doctors are "optimisitc", which sums it up: they are looking at the bright 5% side. They are not confident or cautious; they are hoping for the best.

Now there may be a Martyr who was demonized by the Right and shown in Palin literature as being a choice target.

There is no one to pull us back anymore, unless it be the President, the Leader of the Senate, and the Speaker of the House. If they do not raise up to the challenge, we shall go down the roads of martyrs, and join in the civil bloodletting of other unhappy nations.
The Speaker has told us of duty and the responsibility to continue on the normal business of the country. That is fine, and no one can argue. But we can point out that Albert Sidney Johnson and William Tecumseh Sherman did not want to make a military career of civil war; that was not business as usual as they envisaged it. But when the call came, they answered and did their best in situations much beyond what would have been their lot in more peaceful times.
All elected officials: if you will not lead, then turn aside lest you impede other men of goodwill, and thus provide an open road for those who hate.

The Good Samaritans

The Samaritans still exist; they are one of those minorities that make up the threatened diversity of the Middle East. Check it out at BBC:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12069728

That's Not Supposed to Happen

Proponents of free and easy guns long argued that when every good citizen is packing, they will bring an end to random shootings. I distinctly remember the argument after Virginia Tech:  armed students and professors would have shot the gun man down!

Life does not quite work out the way dopes think it will.

Price of Gas

Gas is up. I was talking to a first mate on an American Steamship vessel and driving him around at 4:00 in the morning to customs, and he saw the prices posted, and said they had been around $2.70 when he was last ashore.
Gas prices maxed last time in the good year of 2008.

Algerians are rioting over food prices which have doubled in the past two months. Food prices are up world wide. Last time they were this high? 2007 - 2008, our favorite years.

There is so much easy money for speculators that, once again, prices are being bid up.

At some point, we really do have to get serious, but we are not ready yet. Once we take the second bounce off rock bottom, we'll get serious.

Wake Up Call !?

Once again I hear the expression "Wake Up Call for the Country!"
I have heard it all my life.
How deeply asleep are we?

The Shooting of a Congresswoman

When I heard about the shooting, the question in my mind was "What are the gun laws in Arizona?"  The recent relaxing of gun laws has resulted in people carrying guns everywhere. I believe I mentioned that here in nearby Royal Oak, Michigan last summer the city council felt it necessary to allow guns to be openly carried during the annual Art Fair !
Gun owners said it was for their self-defense, no doubt having been to other numerous small city art fairs where hostages were taken by mime terrorists!


Even then, any sane person knew that this was a trend that was going to bite us. Sane people are hard to come by in public affairs, however.

Arizona Gun Laws

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/17/arizona-gun-law-concealed_n_541445.html

Arizona Gun Law: Concealed Weapons Allowed Without Permit Under New Law

PAUL DAVENPORT and JONATHAN J. COOPER
| 04/16/10 07:39 PM

PHOENIX — Favoring the constitutional right to bear arms over others' concerns about gun safety, Gov. Jan Brewer on Friday signed into law a bill making Arizona the third state allowing people to carry a concealed weapon without requiring a permit.
The measure takes effect 90 days after the current legislative session ends, which likely puts the effective date in July or August.
"I believe this legislation not only protects the Second Amendment rights of Arizona citizens, but restores those rights as well," Brewer, a Republican, said in a statement.
Alaska and Vermont now do not require permits to carry concealed weapons.

Rhetoric using Imagery of Guns and Gun Violence

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/

(CNN) – As of Saturday, Arizona Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' name appeared on a website titled "take back the 20" as part of a list originally issued by Sarah Palin of vulnerable House Democrats. A map on the site showed crosshairs over the contested Democratic districts.

Palin first posted the list in March 2010, naming 20 House members who voted for health care reform and represented districts that Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona won in the 2008 presidential election.

It does not take the chickens very long to come home to roost.
Since we are zooming along in our handbasket to hell, is there room for the rest of us?

--

eBooks

I was reading about Google's eBooks.
Then, Friday, we had a power outage. The temperature was in the upper 20's and the wind was mild, so there would not be a rapid loss of heat in the house, as there would have been if it had been a windy day, for we live upon a prominent hill, and the wind bangs the shutters when the fugitive breezes blow.
The G____s, the Indian family down at the end of the street, have a new baby, born the 23rd of December, so I walked by there. The wife's father was outside and we chatted about when the Edison company expected the power to be back on. The lady at the Edison hot line had asked me whether I was running on generator when I had called. I wished I had had a generator. Water lines freeze when it gets too cold and the wind whips up the hill.
We would have hot water; the water heater did not require electricity. Even if the pilot light went out, there was no electric ignition, rather a primitive yet simple and dependable process of lighting a long, thin stick and inserting it into the access door.
The heat was gas, too, but the furnace blower was electric.
As time went on, the extent of the outage was seen to cover a larger territory, and 1,000 to 5,000 homes and businesses were affected. The traffic lights were out,which was good news, for it indicated that this would be considered a serious matter, and take a high priority in the order of repairs, even though there was no reason to think that there would be wide spread problems: there had been no ice storm, the snow was negligible; in fact, the winter was taking on the pattern of the winters of recent memory - cold and snow in December and not too much to speak of here while out East and West and South blizzards went through with annoying punctuality.
Power was out from 11:25 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. The appliances, which had all flatlined at 11:25,  now hummed and those with time displays told us "PF" - power failure - and waited for our attentions to set them back on their courses of duodecimal tolling of the hours.

Of course, we had AT&T Uverse and that base was dead, so there was no telephone other than the cell phone, and there was no cell phone re-charge unless one had a car charger for the phone. I did not like the feel of that. I wished now that I had a generator - even though I would not easily be able to control the exhaust from it, and did not desire to die of carbon monoxide poisoning -  and I wished I had a car cell phone charger.
My computer had four hours of battery life, and I set it for maximum power savings. However, I found that my Verizon WiFi card did not find a connection. This was very surprising, and I had to assume that somehow Verizon had also been affected locally.

I had turned everything off that I knew had been on. I had drawn the drapes over all the windows to conserve heat. I was standing in the kitchen when I saw a glow from the bedroom, and I wondered at it. A humming to my left indicated the Frigidaire had been CPRed back to life and that glow was the small light on the bedroom dresser. I was relieved, for we had gone through an ice storm many, many years ago, and we had no fireplace anymore to sleep in front of. I no longer had to concern myself with turning off the water lines by midnight if the elecricity had not come on, nor would the G______s have to find lodging at one of the hotels nearby.

If I had had an eLibrary, it would have gone down. I wondered what was best: redundance in the electrical supply by having a large enough generator on stand-by all the time, or whether to have real books and newspapers which, in their robustness, would allow me to read. I had read some of the "real" Sunday NY Times as I was standing in the kitchen. Similarly, with my access to Microsoft Word denied me, I had turned to pencils and paper pads to write on.
I think a wise society would make provision for both systems, the electronic media and the print media, to continue to endure side by side. If not, everything will be outsourced and we will not have any paper necessaries when the plug gets pulled.
The question is and remains: how good is our infrastructure (particularly energy grids!) and how serious are we in maintaining it?

Even more questions come to mind, as we think of people who lightly describe our capitalistic system as "creative destruction", meaning new technologies breed new economic facts while the old ways fall out. Yet there is obviously more to it than that. If diesel locomotives had been prone to infrequent but disastrous outages, the Baldwin Steam Locomotive Company might yet have been in business today in some form.
The complexity of our lives is never easily summed up, for it is not static; it is dynamic, and it is fearsomely changing all the time. The challenge that faces us is a good and great challenge that calls for intelligence and wisdom.

--

Anne Rice

City of R'lyeh

I have never been able to read Anne Rice. I actually cannot read her writing: it has nothing to do with what she is writing about, but it is the very techniques of her writing that I can not handle. I have tried three times with no luck, and there is nothing I could do to improve my case, so I let the books close after going through no more than six pages. (I have the same problem with a few other writers.)
Strange.
I can, however, easily read about Anne Rice, which I having been doing this cold afternoon:

Rice rediscovered James Frazer's The Golden Bough through Joseph Campbell's application of Frazer and Jung to myth... She had Lestat similarly recover the vampire's origins in the pre-Christian vegetation gods and Goddess worship; her vampires essentially perform a Druidic-Egyptian fertility ritual.

Interesting article; tells me nothing at all. Sweeps the veils of arcana before my eyes, but discovers to me not a whit of the old vampire actually. Every veil the Salome-vampire strips off is replaced by two new ones!
I think I read all of Joseph Campbell on Myth, and he bemoaned our lack of myth. If I'm not mistaking, his idea of myth was the writing of James Joyce. He would never have considered vampire stories as modern myths.
Modern myths, note! Not ancient myths, not stories about pre-Christian vegetation gods and the Mother Goddess. They had their day, and they are gone. We may have glimpses of them now and then, but just as slender twigs: the branches, trunk, and the roots are long gone. The notion that modern horrors find their beginning in the ardent faith of antiquity is just more of the same old nonsense of people who have no imagination themselves.

We have our myths of vampires and zombies, and their genesis is in uncontrollable desire. Unfortunately, their motivation is death. If you do not believe me, go see a horror flick. Uncontrollable desires have really been in the news recently: wars, speculation, bubbles, fundamentalist terrors... all in the news. We have our own gods, thank you. We have no need of the old gods of R'lyeh to explain our myths.

link to later posts:
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2011/02/anne-rice-psychology-of-vampires.html

A Temporal Distortion

Just like the Enterprise under Captain Jean-Luc Picard, we are perilously close - 20,000 kilometers - to a temporal distortion. The distortion lay in the death of newspapers and the ensuing extinction of film critics. There are some independents on the Internet - thank heavens - but soon the only film critics will be working for large commercial interests: the measure of success will continue to be $ on the weekends and effectively all serious and artistic discussion will be put into Cryogenic suspension until some years in the future when every penny will have  been squeezed from a film, and a real evaluation will be possible, as it will no longer harm someone's bottom line.
Of course, such things happened before, but not with such complete thoroughness as is possible now  by control of electronic media.

A temporal distortion putting off serious discussion until the future...
Interesting.
Somewhat like the universe  before Wikileaks, where knowledge in depth was put off for years until papers were unsealed. Just like the universe now, where government policy has been and continues to be the flavor of the month:  2009 was "Stimulus Cinnamon Spice" year, 2010 was "Rocky Road  (for Obama)" year, and 2011 will be "Balance the Budget Berry"! Enjoy your temporal loops as we repeat even deja vu.

I have said that Democracy is a fine system by which large numbers of intelligent beings process information, and it very well may be the best such system. However, if the system lets itself be tied into repeating its mistakes over and over again, it has defeated its purpose.

The New Economy

The Decline
Ever since the 1990's, people have been talking about the new service economy where we would no longer produce things - that would be left for laborers in foreign lands - but would provide more and more valuable services to the world in return for their manufactures.

It came to pass: now manufactures are done overseas. Many of our people are in low-paying service jobs.

The Illusion
Ben & Jerry's - and all producers of foods - constantly maintain prices by providing smaller and smaller containers of their products. Ben & Jerry's ice cream is now in slightly smaller containers, so the buyer gets less for the same mount of money.
This prevailing marketing approach underscores the fact that costs are constantly increasing, while wages are not keeping pace: if wages kept pace, we could afford more expensive ice cream. Since we cannot afford it, the ice cream container has to be modified.
This creates the illusion that things have not deteriorated for us.

The Blame
Most of our leaders have bought into this charade: do not allow the people to become aware that their lives have deteriorated to such an extent.
There was no economic imperative that demanded the change we spoke of in the 1990's: it was a conscious choice by people in position to make decisions. Certainly, they did not have the necessary imagination to see that their choices had some ghastly outcomes, but that's what happens when people of limited intellect run things.

Things could have been done differently, but we allowed the market to dictate to us what our future would be.
Let me tell you one thing: the complexity of the Free Market has only one entity it is interested in, and that is the continuity of itself. Extremely complex creations are not dead and inert, they live. However, they have no sense of morality.
We could have chosen which route to take. Look at China; it maintains a measure of human independence of the Machine of Free Marketry even as a communistic state! So the dictatorship is more free than we! That is one fine paradox.
There are no guarantees of the good intentions of complexities such as Markets. They are as benign or malign as the peoples involved in them. Recalling the history of 2008, we have absolutely no reason to be optimistic... yet.

The Habit of Cost Over-Runs

How much bang do we get for our infrastructure buck?

Assume, for example, we go back one hundred years or more and look at how much structures cost:  the Temple of Music in Buffalo, NY cost $85,000 in 1901 US dollars, and this is equivalent to $1,500,000 in 2008 US dollars. (The Temple was built for the Pan-American Exspo, and it was where President McKinley was shot.)
Now this comparison obviously involves more than monetary adjustments, for we cannot build such a structure for $1,500,000 any more. So we must include cost over-runs. Such a building would cost us $3,000,000 - for whatever reasons costs do go over.

In other words, Society itself has changed, and we must not only look at the value of money at different times, but we must also take into account that some ages just generally inflate the costs of doing things... they get lazy and fat by doing it: easy money and easy times and lax discipline lead to generally inflated costs.
We have been lax for over 30 years, and I doubt that we can kick the habit cold turkey.

Merry Christmas!! (just a little delayed...)

Merry Christmas to Coptic and Orthodox Christians everywhere!
Merry Little Christmas, Epiphany, and Theophany!




Let us return to the Twelve Days festival, instead of the week between
Christmas and New Year!     Let us restore the Octave of eight day feasts to the calendar! Let us never forget the light of the season.




Let us remember in our prayers and in our actions those who are persecuted, the poor and hungry, and the sick.

--

The Uses of Poppies

Minoan Goddess wearing Diadem of Poppies

The Uses of Poppies; The Need for a Human and Sane Drug Policy


I was wondering about the ancient use of poppies, and particularly spending time gazing at the Poppy Goddess - or, more correctly, the Goddess crowned with poppies - from ancient Crete.

It strikes me that God created the universe as it is, with joy and suffering. Suffering always seems to be on the score-card... the game is not an eternal series of runs... love and joy will sooner or later strike out... and the other side comes up.

Continuing on, when there is suffering, the Creator provided ways of reducing the pain by providing analgesic substances for mankind to use. If, indeed, the World is a place of Joy and Suffering, and Joy is closer to God's intention than is suffering, then the proof of creation lay within our joys and within the amelioration of our sufferings, and these things are inherent in the very structure of the World and our being.

Furthermore, the things that reduce pain - the analgesics (Greek an - not  plus  algia - pain)  or narcotics very often possess the ability to induce trances and non-normal states of reality. This intimate connection between the States of Rapture and the States of Relief is not an accident! To me it seems a fingerprint of the creator on the world:  the world is not perfect from our viewpoint, because the complexity of our intelligence contains within it the seeds of our pains;  this connection between Rapture and Relief  is proof of ongoing intent to amend a complex Universe not quite perfect!

This must come as a shock to people who believe in timeless perfection. I trust it is not a surprise to them to learn that Cannabinoids - variants on the molecules of cannabis: marijuana - are produced by the human  body itself.

Where are we today?
We condemn all such substances, even those produced by our own bodies. For the ill and suffering to get marijuana, there is a maze of regulations and the DEA. We allow only those which are most alien to the simple ways of nature. Our approach to almost every problem is a sea of regulations, a large bureaucracy, a small army of armed enforcers, and demands for our complete and absolute compliance.
Yet cannabinoids are produced inside our bodies.
Do we hate ourselves?
Perhaps that is why we abuse these substances... our own self-hatred. The high sounding illusions of the War on Drugs is a bitter joke to the world. As Mexico witnesses its bloodbath of Suppliers, We - the Demanders, the Users - sit and watch the tragedy on our doorstep and calculate ways to forbid poor immigrants entry (drug lords always have a way in). Is our concern for a sane drug policy in this country carried on at the same fever pitch as our effort to deny the right to speak Spanish? or to deny the right to ethnic classes in school? By addressing our own problem realistically, we automatically solve Mexico's in this area!
Why are we so intent on pursuing the paths of oppression to allow full and real-time suffering to all who fall under our power? So far we have relied on faith that what we are doing is right; it is a faith of genocide.

--
A much better meditation on the topic is at
http://cariferraro.com/2009/06/11/poppy-goddess/#comment-482

It is reasonable, whereas I issue jeremiads against the modern age. Nobody likes that.

--

Steve Zissou and the Life Interior: 3

 

Steve is just under the wheel house, to the right - or starboard. 

He is wearing the standard blue uniform and red knit toque hat of  Société Zissou.

--

pix: http://www.flickr.com/photos/allthegoodurlshavegone/2268378923/in/photostream/

Holy Name Society

Various religions have various names assigned to the Holy: the perfect, the unchanging, the limitless, and so on.
I fancy that God is the Unboring. It is the essence of the Holy not to be boring.

The eternally fascinating and enchanting spirit of the Holy illuminates the Deep.

(The Holy Name Society is a confraternity of RC laity devoted to good works.)

--

Montag's Sense of Snow 2

In my first post yester about hiking in the snow ( I don't use yesterday anymore... too long ) I wished to write that, having had experience as parents of childrens' illness,  an image of separation of child from parents during our hike was not the first that we, the parents, had ever imagined.

However, I wrote that it was the first such, and I proof read it twice, and it was seen as correct. But this morning it was obvious. When I wrote it down the first time, there was much more emotion and the emotional part of my being prevented me from setting down such a logos! Such a word, such a thought!

We must always be so careful of what we script. Later that day... yester, it was... my sister-in-law called to let us know she had to begin chemo and radiation next week.
And did I write it down correctly? I wish I had not.

--

Essays

I hate essays. Everyone writes essays; they amass all their arguments and all their rationale all the way back to Plato and beyond. If there was ever a real need for Occam's Razor, truly this is it: to cut through the verbiage.
However, I am aware that perhaps this is a result of my incredible antiquity, having been a sort of Wandering Jew or Flying Dutchman, or even a Xerxes the Homeless Guy - condemned to eternal dumpster diving for having given Esther a hard time.
I certainly do not know everything, but it all seems familiar, very familiar.

There is little of value that can be learned within the limited scope of the essay, except the point the writer wishes to make. Einstein - if physics is your topic - cannot be restricted to the Planck scale of the essay. Same thing with Foucault ( With whom I had dinner 35 years ago... it was chicken. He made a joke about poulet which means "chicken" but also refers to sex trade workers. Nowadays I would frown mightily at such louche behavior.)

Leave the learned baggage with the TSA that pats down your spirit, and jump freely into the friendly skies of Opinion!

Parables

The purpose of parables is the same as the use of koan; that is, to jar one out of usual ways of thinking. I doubt very much that Jesus' intention was merely to better illustrate a point He wanted to make; He wanted to change how his auditors viewed reality. He wanted to punch them out of their complacency.

Both function as a meta-language to let us stand outside the everyday world. It is a hard place to get to.

--

Parliament of Mind

I sense light within a room; a photocell senses light in the same room. I am aware of doing this and the photocell is not aware. Some say, then, the difference is consciousness, a phenomenon which no one can fully explain.

Awareness is not an extra mental faculty. I am not actually aware of the light in the room unless I enter a dark room, stumble around for a bit, bark my shins against chairs, then finally find the light switch.
Entering a lit room from another illuminated place, I am not so aware at all.
I need a reason to reflect on my actions.
Ask me a question, I'll spin you an answer.
Ask the photocell a measurement, it will give you what it has, no more.

My awareness lies within the richness of my experience, for I am not solely restricted to measuring the candle power of the light available: I can also stumble, curse, swear, imagine myself kicking you for getting me in a darkened room and searching for a light switch.
Awareness is the layering of existence. Awareness is symbol built upon symbol upon symbol. Awareness is hierarchy that is flexible and transparent.

If I wished to make an aware photocell, I would have to be able to put up with a photocell that would politic with me! It would palaver and cajole and threaten. When I asked for the level of light, it would launch into an oration about the moral meaning of Light versus Dark.
Awareness is a Congress or Parliament of Mind.

Montag's Sense of Snow

Two years ago we were walking with our daughter on this Paint Creek trail in the snow. It was snowing enough to obstruct the view, and visibility was about a quarter mile. I had a "petite claudication" (... oh, well, a limp... I had a sore tendon or something. It sounds better in French.) and our daughter soon outpaced us and disappeared far ahead within the curtain of snow.
At times like that, I wonder if I shall ever see her again, or whether the excision by snow - the editing out of someone - is a permanent change. There was a history of illness, so to us, the parents struggling through the snow way behind the young one, such an unpleasant image was not the first one that ever occurred to us.

Soon she returned, a free snow bird winging her way back.

When she passed us again, she snorted in amiable disgust at our lack of vigorous speed.

It made us quite happy.

--
pix: attacksquirrel5   http://www.flickr.com/photos/30692081@N04/

Pakistan, Blasphemy Laws, and Governor Taseer

It is blasphemy to kill someone for their speech or their beliefs.

Taking refuge in your anger or your fervid faith will not save you from The Day.

He who usurps the role of God and tries to force events according to his own will has not surrendered himself to the will of God.
--

The Difference Between Now and History

 Excerpt from a history text:

The next recession confirmed occurred in the years between 1807 and 1814, and was called the Depression of 1807. This depression was primarily caused by the Embargo Act of 1807, signed into effect by then President Thomas Jefferson. This act destroyed a good part of the shipping related industries, and it was fought hard by the Federalists, who allowed smuggling to take effect in New England as a result of the Act.

Everything moves along very fast in History: you fall, skin your shin, and by the time you blink, why it's been kissed  by Mom and it's all  better.

Not so in the Now. We have to live through it in slow-motion... or regular time, actually, not the accelerated time of History. Like cinema's 24 frames per second, we now live 365 days per year, no matter what. Reading the history text, we have no idea of the suffering involved.
What is important is that the country as a whole came through it in what seemed to historians to be one piece. The dead bury their dead and life goes on. One whole fabric: the cloth has actually changed, but it is still one whole fabric and we can see that no matter who suffered, the greater good was somehow attained through fate.

It is a different viewpoint from those who suffer.

What we have on cable and radio and all news and opinion sources is a concerted effort to speak historically:  to speak in abstract, general terms about the downside of poverty and despair, but keep your eyes on the (theoretical) recovery. No one speaks for the living, those who live every day. How little we delve into the lives of those being foreclosed on: the vomiting at 3:00 A.M. from worry and despair!
The only speaking is abstract, done for long term Trust Funds, Corporations enduring over time, Politicians who hold old beliefs and old powers,  People who are unkind to new forms of thinking. These are the historical thinkers who skim over the pain and sum things up the way they wish, who, being for the moment safe from pain, project themselves into a timeless, vague and neat universe where they are always top dog and they do not wrong and everything will work out in the end... in that far away end where trust funds wax fat still....
Do we look at each individual every day, or do we look at conglomerates of interests over time? When things are going wrong, do we look at the poor and sick, or do we focus on MarketWatch 24/7 and guess at historical trends?

Only those who survive have the right to think historically.
Only the survivors write the history.
Think about it.

--

Symbol & Sign 8: Lights of Christmas

 

Light creates.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Darkness - whatever its nature - was over the surface of the deep or abyss. Did Darkness pre-exist the heavens and the earth? What of the Deep, whose surface is covered by the Darkness? What was the nature of the Deep? And how intimate is the relationship between Dark and Deep?
Regardless how we answer these questions, we are still at pre-history: there is yet no day nor night, there is no continuity nor discontinuity, there is no grow nor decay, no warming with the sun and no growing cold with the sunset.

Then God said Let there be Light. Light and Dark were separated, and there was an evening and a morning and there was the first day.
Light did not dispel Dark. They had to be separated by God. Light on it own does not dispel the dark; it requires active involvement of intelligence. This forms a symbiosis between intelligence and light that has creative power.
The patches of light and dark in film create powerful symbols. They are not just artifacts, for artifacts do not inspire the souls of those even yet unborn, whereas symbols have just that very power. A film may be unseen content in a vault somewhere and lay as an extinction of life, but let it be uncovered, let the projector light shine through it, and let it be viewed by an audience, and the symbol rises phoenix-like once again: an artifact becomes symbol and a potential psycho-pomp, a guide to realms of the mind and spirit not thought of before.

Light creates symbolic structures.
Christmas trees are not just artifacts, like lampposts; they create a light-filled area, a halo which we flock to and respond to emotionally, a halo of comfort, goodwill, and peace. The Light of Christmas has something mere light does not, it has a moral dimension which is always focused on the Good.
The lights of miniature Christmas villages on display create a reality which in our immediate physical perception is static and unmoving, but once the patches of color, light, and dark start moving through the body to the brain, once our inborn codes come into play – codes which conform the flow of information to and from the seat of intellect – these inert shows begin to seethe with life, and the geese hung in the Poulterer’s shop begin to squawk and hiss, the pewter horses attached to carriages trot and cottony steam rises from their hot bodies. In each house, there is a holy Christmas feast, from the rich to the poor: the goose is cooked, the pudding hurrahed, and wishes are made on wishbones.

If we were to leave the Christmas village up all year long, the inhabitants would not debase to racism, nor war, nor political squabbling, for they are symbolic creatures of the light! And it is our light and the external light which illuminates this peaceable kingdom.

You see now what we are capable of.

--

Soviet Art and an Over-Active Imagination

The poster says "To Defend... USSR" and was done in the time of The Great Fatherland War, which we call World War II on this side of the pond.
When I first saw this poster as a child ( I had a very Charles Dickens - Oliver Twist childhood: orphaned early on, I was adopted by a Soviet Jewish family. The novel Hard Times comes to mind.) I thought the aeroplanes - actually they are outlines of World War I bi-planes - were some sort of electronic communication gizmos that were working to co-ordinate an army of giant robot soldiers; the bayonets of the soldiers' rifles that were sticking up behind their helmets I interpreted as aerials which received the controlling radio transmissions from the white electro-gizmos. I was all very Yevgeny Zamiatin in those days, and used to read scienti-fiction by the glow of the nightlight.
Easy to see why the Nyemets  (German) army was stopped in its tracks at Moscow with these suckers patrolling the Kremlin walls! (I thought the inclined shadow area where "CCCP" or "USSR" is painted was the Kremlin... maybe it is. I thought the shadows between the feet of the robotic soldiers were heads of the leaders viewing the square on May Day.)

Insta-Google

I for one am sick of the Google instant fill in for search items. It is constantly guessing wrong and I end up looking at totally ridiculous things, and having to re-do it all. Today I wished to write "disable" and I got as far as "d", at which time Goggle decided I wanted to say "delete", inserted it, and allowed me to type on in this manner - me blythely pecking at the keys while the Google room with a million monkeys seated at computer monitors edited and otherwise overrode what I wanted to say.

Better than coffee in the morning to wake you up.
Oh, and the Blogger Help is pathetic.

What Constitutes an Attack on Christianity?

I had a post previously about such things:

http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2010/12/another-fox-attack-on-christianity.html

wherein the famous fatuous Tucker Carlson of FOX spoke of his religion, saying 

“I’m Christian. I’ve made mistakes. I believe fervently in second chances. Michael Vick killed dogs in a heartless and cruel way. I think, firstly, he should have been executed for that. The idea the president of the United States would be getting behind someone who murdered dogs is beyond the pale.”

Let us first be clear that we are speaking of such a pronouncement when we say "attack" . We are not talking about the status of Middle Eastern Christians which has become perilous indeed. In fact, since Shock and Awe the lives of Christians in that part of the world has taken on a distinct aura of Dr. Seuss and it seems a fitting title to their history might be:  On Beyond Perilous!
I believe the Pope did warn us, but we told him to mind his own scandals and let us see to our own perfidy: On Beyond Perilous... the churches they went to, the roads that they rambled, just to have their body parts scrambled!
Enough! Instant Karma is boiling on the back burner, and what will be, will be. We have bigger fish and Tucker Carlson to fry!

O.K. "I'm Christian. I've made mistakes. I believe in second chances."
I like the way Christianity has become the Second Chance Way in FOX ideology: everyone gets two strikes. However, this seems to set us up for "Three strikes... yer out!". I have to question a religious belief that seems modeled on baseball, or a conservative approach to penology and penal systems.
Actually, I always had the impression that forgiveness was forever. The teachings of Jesus always struck me as containing within them an infinite Get out of Jail...  card with the addition of  ...Free  if you paid your debt to society and to your family and to yourself! God's forgiveness was infinite and co-extensive with His being! Pretty radical for the modern day or antiquity.
Briefly, Jesus' teaching was the Death of Depression and the End of Suicide of the Forlorn, for no matter what the offence, there was forgiveness. We could only be killed when we could not forgive ourselves. This business of the second chance is a dangerous perversion, because there exists a symbolic context "three strikes and out" which seems to already control how the idea is used.

Now the notion of capital punishment for dog-fighting has been addressed, and the notion that Christianity in the 21st century could use a little brushing-up and refurbishment by emulating Saudi Arabia is a notion whose time has possibly come to be discussed.
For a long time I have considered Mr. Carlson a non-entity seeking meaning, and he unfortunately runs true to form, as he cannot help but give the impression that all his religious set-up of the first part of his quote is nothing but a petard upon which to hoist the President.
And as the old saying goes, he ends up hoist on his own petard.
( Hoist by one's own petard means to be blown up by one's own explosive device. Petard is a word from Middle French which seems unusually appropriate for Carlson and FOX. Jospeh Pujol, known  on the stage as Petomane, was an entertainer, just like Carlson and FOX. I am beginning to sound a lot like M. Rabelais all of a sudden...  if you want to know what these words mean, I believe Wiki will have them.)

Art: Tavik Frantisek Simon

Seventh Avenue, New York

Czechoslovakian

وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: Culture

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: When they write about Arab culture in the Western ...: "I mean, you really have to know no Arabic, and you really have not know nothing about Arab culture in translation, and you really have to ha..."

Click on the first sentence link and continue, then, on to acquaint yourself with the poetry of Adonis... wouldn't hurt to take an Arabic class or two, but that's one of your New Year's resolutions.
Beautiful poetry and very much political I should say, being right in the middle of the passions which inform our days and nights. There are things you may not like to read, so be forewarned, and if exposing your sensibilities to things that disagree with you is not your cup of tea, consider that there is a PG 40 on the poetry: parental guidance for everyone under 40 years of age.

The article refers to an interview in the NY Times, and we subscribe to the NY Times Sunday edition and we have found that their reviewers leave a lot to be desired. Some of the reviews are so sophomoric with vague reference to iconic names that really do not have much to do with the work of art under discussion that it is almost an embarrassment to read them.

I studied Arabic and Hebrew,  but I spent more time reading Isaac Singer in Yiddish, which I learned somewhat reading the Forverts! newspaper.I still read Zakaria Tamir in Arabic, and find him very much empathetic.

One thing you will discover learning language is that reality tends to take a few side-steps and turn-abouts as you get into a different way of doing that thing we call "intelligence". Words are intelligent communication and poetry raises language to the high level of cinema which is intelligent imagery in communication, or to the level of musical communication on a high level, and all of these will affect the very basis of your existence as an intelligent being.....  so be forewarned.

Seamstress

http://motherjones.com/photoessays/2008/03/aryan-outfitters-11

A Ms. Ruth ( not our Ruth !) blessing a newly tailored KKK outfit.Read the story at Mother Jones above.

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Granny Gets Tazed

Baysage has a post on what citizens of Oklahoma have said famously and infamously through the past year.

http://whatpowderfingersaid.blogspot.com/
Thursday  December 30, 2010
They Said It

one of which is:

"Don't Taze my granny!” — Lonnie Tinsley in a lawsuit recounting what he told an El Reno police officer before the officer used a Taser to subdue his 86-year-old grandmother, Lona Varner.


This is my favorite of all. It is perfect for a country-western song:  
"Granny got tazed until she flatlined... messin' with the law one Christmas night!"
and so on. (Best sung to "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer".)
I am starting to use the word "taze" myself in contexts like: he tazed a sizzling line-drive over third base, or to speak of mind-tazing perplexities.
I sort of use it to give the F*** word a rest, and everyone around me seems to be much relieved. When I let loose with a withering "Grammutha Tazer!", no one seems all that upset anymore.

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Arizona Madness

Follow up on the Arizona Education Bill which takes effect today, part of which reads:

Also outlawed are courses designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group and those that advocate ethnic solidarity rather than treat students as individuals.
source: Christian Science Monitor


Rabbi, get your yeshiva students off the streets!


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Steve Zissou and the Life Interior: 2

Steve:

Anti-Steve:

'nuff said.

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