Judo Logic

Someone once described to me his ardent desire that his new born son would, in the fullness of time, attend University and would be healthy and smart and would have the intellecetual acumen to be able to withstand the onslaught of the smirking, sneering, liberal Dons or Fellows or Professors who demean Christianity and would try to send all their students down the easy path to perdition. He said his son should be able to withstand their logic. His son would be tutored in the philosophical ways to fight and demolish error. I said that it would be a whole lot simpler if you taught him not to let his opponents choose the battleground. Or, if the battleground is the Secular University and we have no other choice for matriculation, then we should not allow the enemy to choose the weapons, nor the ground rules, nor anything else, for that matter. Having been a student myself, I know how it goes: the Professor has authority and learning and logic; in short, he has everything on his side, including our feeling of being subordinate to him, since he controls our grade. However, I recently learned one ought to do Philosophy just as one does Judo: let your opponents thrust cause him to overreach and we use his own efforts against him. For example, if one argues God's existence, one cannot accept the Scientific Method as a touchstone of Truth for the existence of something. God does not fit into a test tube, so one must find some other way to assert the Truth of God-propositions. Thus, one must attack the opponent's very basis of logic: assigning truth values to propositions. You do not neeed to defend your beliefs until the opponent has demonstrated that his criterion of Truth is acceptable to your debate. Now the ball has been tossed back into his court. Now he will propose various criteria. Shoot them down. Make him do the work. There is no good and transcendent way to assign Truth. Truth is belief, pure and simple. The opponent will wear himself out trying to come up with an iron clad definition of Truth. Stake out you own battlegrounds; don't let others define them for you. You will only fall into their traps if you do. This is why I refused to answer when people asked me whether Jesus was my savior. Whether I answer yes or no, I am immediately in the midst of combat on their terms, on their battleground, using their logic. They will use their things better than I. So I did not answer. Instead I wrote their sins in the sand on the beach with my finger. That's a joke. But...if you do not let others define things for you, if you do not let society define your being, then you must do it yourself. In this process you will come across an old pal, God Himself. You will say, "Haven't seen you in a month of Sundays." He will say, "I have been here all along. You just did not recognize Me. You had someone else's glasses on."

What The Pres Did And When He Did It

As a snippet from Mr. Mclellan's book causes us to question our collective insanity for putting up with outrageous nonsense, I feel compelled to point out one verity which I have learned over many years: When we have attained the point where one may observe that "The President did not know that what he was telling Mclellan was false." "The President merely repeated what he had been told." "Although the President gave his full authority to the denial, he obviously was uninformed." and so on, we have come to the point where we either fish or we continue to dither and cut bait. For when we have reached the point where the highest powers in the land are portrayed in a nebulous casuistry of lack of responsibility because they were uninformed, we are very close to the point where even the true believers will begin tittering in the audience. When the President's defenders must use the defense of ignorance to support their man, their man has been fatally wounded.

Reality As An Ideal Construction 3

I heard someone say they disagreed that we create Reality. I asked them, "What do you think is the purpose of consciousness?" The role of consciousness in life is exactly to create a Reality in which a life form may live well. Natural selection and genetic change help form life to the various situations it finds itself, but consciousness works faster; e.g., the use of tools to build a shelter is faster than waiting for a mutation to give you a carapace impervious to the elements. The role of consciousness is precisely to create a Reality for consciousness. What other purpose would it have?

Why Don't You Write More About God?

Given the Blog Title, some inquiring minds wonder why I sometimes appear to write about everything but God. Therefore, I shall make it clear now. My friends, or -more correctly-those people who happenstance find themselves in close quarters with me for more than 15 seconds and feel enforced to converse, will blurt out "God again!" when I mention the Holy, as I invariably do. For me, the touchstone of all conscious life is the manner in which we deal with the Holy. God for me is not some alien being, not remote, not intellectual, not saved for one day of the week, not something so abstruse that you need an advanced degree even to mention Him, not here, not there, not seen, not invisible. God is the most wide, most great, most important aspect of the Conscious Being we refer to as Man. I understand nothing in my short life if I do not understand my relationship to God. There!

American Empire 3: The End Of Freedom

When did the American Empire begin? Did it begin with the war against the Native peoples of the continent? Or did it begin with the Civil War and the period of despotism over the vanquished South? It may have begun with the invasion of the Phillipines and the Spanish-American War.
Certainly the Civil War showed what America was capable of in terms of firepower and sheer slaughter, as well as military innovation and invention.

In the 1/3 century, a generation, that followed the end of the Civil War, we awaited the next conflict. This was the Spanish-Ameridan War, started over what appears to have been a staged explosion of the battleship Maine. (Foreshadows of Tonkin Gulf and WMDs in Iraq...it never changes...the bloody minded have nothing new, but they don't have to, because their lies always work.) It reached its greatest power in World War II and continued through the era of reconstructing Europe and Japan.

When the Soviet Union fell apart and China decided it was better to export toys rather than revolution, there were no more wars. However, the men whose entire consciousness was based on war and emnity and competition and brutality could not conceive a world without war.
Therefore, they give us the denouement of Empire:
whereas the USA and Soviet Union achieved the enormous moral victory of not blowing up the world and actually beginning to decrease nuclear arms, now such arms increase again;
whereas the USA was a beacon of Democracy, it now uses Democracy as a punch line in a crank phone call at best;
whereas the USA used to have some fund of moral value which attracted others, it now has torture and Abu Ghraib;
whereas there used to be a belief that all citizens were participating in the growth of wealth and benefit in the country, it is becoming increasingly clear that more and more the USA is a country where a small number control a vast majority of the wealth. (This is demonstrated by the recent abuse wherein we provide the less wealthy with mortgages which will destroy them - potentially-and they will only be able to pay if the housing bubble were to continue indefinitely: sub primes. This ruse had the intention of DECEIVING the people who were not fully participating in the economic growth. It deceived them into thinking that they were. And it worked for a while.)
 

From the foregoing, we see that a period of Imperial Growth is often marked with great benefits and great good. Empire is not necessarily a perjorative term. However, when Empires go bad, they go bad quickly.

We have not yet reached the point where the imperial party has gained absolute control and all politics has become merely the machinations of the rich...but we are close. This business of the possibility of the Presidency being in to exclusive possession of exactly 2 families for a quarter of a century is ominous.

During this time we have seen how outsiders are marginalized by the political process. ( Perot, Nader, et al. Mr. Ron Paul is the most recent. He has been studiously ignored by the Large Media. However, his supporters have utilized the Internet for fund raising. Mark it well: if he has a measure of success, the Republicans and Democrats will seek to hobble the Internet after the 2008 elections.)

The next year will be very informative. I believe that things will happen in politics domestically which will absolutely astound us.

Reality As An Ideal Construction 2

We may provide a simple Mr. Wizard test with which we distinguish Objective Reality ( Johnson's cobble stone) from Reality as Construction: (1)Reality as basic and simple, free and independent, or axiomatic (objective reality) occurs in situations free from language, memory, imaging, and other forms of conscious behavior; a void silent of data. (the Johnson kick: the leg and foot accelerated to the stone.) (2)Reality as construction, dependent, or derived occurs in the fullness of consciousness; in situations where there is so much conscious activity that it almost stifles one. (the Johnson observation: the mind and mouth creating "Thus do I refute Berkeley!" and Johnson's feeling of satisfaction at having successfuly demonstrated his point.) At this point, assuming that I have not been so obscure as to have lost your attention to something vastly more interesting such as a ticking clock, one may notice that in the silence of the void of Reality as basic and fundamental (1) bears a great similarity to certain concepts of Zen or Ch'an Buddhism. If you notice this, I may take the liberty of pointing out that it also bears a similarity to certain concepts of Christianity, Islam, and Judaeism, as well as just about every form of Religious consciousness with which I am aware. It has been one of the purposes of all religious geniuses to pierce the veil of deception which separates us from God; that exiles us East of Eden; that perpetuates the myth that the World itself is cruel and not the mankind which inhabits that World.

Reality As An Ideal Construction

Reality is an ideal construct; beings possessed of what we call "consciousness" create Reality. This is not to say that all existing things are somehow dependent upon Mind or Consciousness. This asserts that a conscious being's awareness of itself existing in a Real life in a Real universe is an awareness not of something external called Reality but of a construct of that being's consciousness. Hence, when Samuel Johnson refutes Berkeley and kicks the paving cobble, his foot does not hit an ideal cobble, but rather a very "real" cobble, durable and painful in its inertia. When, however, Samuel Johnson appeals to some objective truth, such as prevails in the "real" world, he appeals to something constructed by consciousness: an ideal within an ideal; the consciousness of Reality is not simple and brutishly direct- as in kicking the stone- but rather is complex to a great degree and dependent upon Johnson's history, his memories, his beliefs: the entire range of his consciousness. When we experience an earthquake, we experience Reality in its independent and overwhelming existence. When we discuss religious beliefs, we experience Reality differing within the minds of every discussant; almost like (forgive the flippant simile) a funhouse filled with myriad mirrors reflecting light each in its own way.

Dogmas Versus Dogs

I had awakened and was rudely tumbled from my bed by what appeared to be a horde of Viking toughs. It greatly resembled some credit card commercial advertisement of the s& m sort wherein the hapless holder (of credit card) is buffetted by various unscrupulous forces only to be assuaged by this particular financial institution which is caring, thoughtful, has no sub prime assets, and although not Muslim, does not believe in Interest nor Loan Sharking. The last Viking to depart my shambles said, "Mr. Adeejeeree sends his compliments." I gathered my wits and hastily donned my clothes, beating a straight path to the nation's capitol ( it is a small country and the capitol is at the 4 corners at the traffic signal) and to the Ministry in charge of such outrages. Mr. Adeejeeree is the Minister of the Interior. I have a feeling we traded for him with Sudan (after his posting in the Darfur region) for a draft choice to be named in the future. He saw me, smiled broadly, and said something sporty about the Uqbar Soccer League. I cut him off with wildly gesticulating hands, flailing arms, and an incensed brow. Long story short, I had spoken to him a week previously about encouraging Tourism and by a singular Malapropism of the Memory, Mr. Adijeeree remembered the conversation as being about Barbarism. It was partially my fault, for I had also spoken about George Bernard Shaw and his pacifism in WW I and WW II. Since Adijeeree had read Lit. in the day, we had talked about some Shaw plays. Thus did I contaminate Adijeeree's memory. I asked, "What did we speak of last week?" "One of Shaw's plays... Major Barbara, I think." And protean memory became Barbarians At The Gates, barbarian invasions, the Barbary Coast, barbarous table manners...all forms of barbarism...which is a state of being a barbarian and not a state of being a tourist. "Major......Bar...bar...a." I repeated with scorn and disgust- no, not for the play, rather the object of scorn was the Minister himself, or more correctly, the misfired actions of his Ministry. "So...you are encouraging...not tourism...?" "No. Barbarism I'm afraid, old chap." Now I do not like being called "old chap". It reminds me of (1) discarded lip balm containers on the pristine slopes of Vail, and (2) an old leathery cowboy costume. I sensed that the English suffix for denoting dogmas: the "-ism" , had once again wrought havoc upon the hapless non-native speakers of the English tongue. I began to understand why, when one arrives at this quaint nation paradise, the customs officials at the airport or the quay insist on everyone exchanging insurance information, just as it if were a no-fault automobile collision rather than an entry into an idyllic Eden. Note: the Ministry has set up a committee to look into changing focus to "tourism" rather than "barbarism".

In Tempore Rerum Novarum

What a thrill it is to live in such exciting times!
Our understanding of the universe in which we live has undergone more changes in 100 years than it has in the previous 100,000. Even now Science tries to discover the secrets of Dark Matter. Dark Matter is supposed to be a prime constituent of the universe, but it has never been observed and was originally included into theories to explain why the universe was, after all, not literally flying apart in its rush of expansion.

Dark Matter has mass and is invisible. When the "matter" is settled, another revolution in thought will have occurred; that's about the 344th paradigm shift in my lifetime. The Dark Matter is so preponderant that some scientists have described the observable entities of the universe as floating within a wash of Dark Matter, this dark matter keeping everything compact, so to speak. If this is not the ancient - not to say discarded-notion of the Aether, then I don't know what is.
The Aether goes back to prehistory, I'm sure, and we catch on to the grab bar of its careening trolley about the time of Heraclitus. The Aether is a medium in which the entities of the universe swim about in ptolemaic regularity. Newton saw no need for the Aether. Subsequent generations saw no proof for the existence of the Aether, and so it was consigned to the dustbin of thought. In fact, I think the Aether hung around the old pool hall of Natural Philosophy, hustling games from kids, until J.J. Thompson proved that the speed of light was a constant.

Not so fast, pally.

We are digging that concept back out of the tip, dusting it off, and bringing it into the house. The story of Dark Matter and Aether reminds me mightily of Boudou Sauvé des Eaux, or Down and Out in Beverly Hills, take your pick. wherein the disreputable downer-on-his-luck is samaritaned, brought in and fed, and is taken to buy a new suit of clothes.
And the old guy looks pretty good when you dress him up.
And, pace my grandfather, you apparently may make a silk purse from a sow's ear.

I touched on this refurbishment of old concepts- sort of Flip This Paradigm or Conceptual Intercession-once before in http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2007/02/football-of-pythagoras.html wherein we see :
 
More precisely, we may inhabit a dodecahedral cosmos. It is, according to the scientists, the best way to account for the latest satellite observations.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3175352.stm

and a dodecahedron is but a soccer ball, and this soccer ball was what Pythagoras said was the Holkos, the prime element which contained all the other elements of the universe. So Pythagoras beat Science to the punch and had to wait 2,500 years for royalties.


Also Democritus with his Atomic Theory.
People will say that the ancient ideas had no connection to the modern scientific ideas. This claim is based on the fact that the ancient did not have a scientific method with which to cast their theoretical nets wide upon the face of the Deep, so to speak. (This view ignores the Antikythera device, as well as Archimedes and many others.)

However, I find it striking that the same essential ideas recur in grossly differing milieus. It is as if the human mind is constituted to be aware in certain ways and certain ways only, just as the eye sees only in the visible spectrum. Thus, certain great motifs, emblems, paradigms and templates of understanding are repeated throughout history.

Thus, the Aether as the medium wherein we all bathe. If I were to say "...wherein we all float," then the effect is transformed into something alien and frightening: Pennywise of Stephen King's IT. However, the medium where we swim, bathe; that is comforting. The aetherous medium has both aspects of Love and Comfort versus Fear and Flight, combining these opposites within its meaning. It is a very wide ranging concept, therefore.

We live our lives between The Fear of God and The Love of God. There will always be an Aether and there will always be a Vacuum; the Full and the Void; the Plethos and the Kainon. We fast to purge, to empty, to be void in body and to be abased and humble in the mind. We eat to fill, to feast, to be sated in body and to be exalted and drunk with nutrients! All life is what we already know, see, do, and feel. We only have to try to pick Life back up out of the dirt ( or the swimming pool as in the films mentioned above), brush it off (or dry it out), and everything will be...not necessarily fine, but everything will be better........

--

How Long Do We Have?

I prayed for rain with the Governor of Georgia, as well as a few millions other people. How much time do we have with climate change? Goldman Sachs says the amount of credit crunch damage might well be $400 billion. As a coda of despair, Alan Greenspan says that things are going to be mighty different for Western society in the future. How long may we continue with a government that does nothing intelligently, not even waging war? Not long. We do not have the time. In the words of Oliver Cromwell, "In the name of God, GO!"

Marginalization=Slavery=Our Way Of Life

I had written about how our society "marginalizes" large numbers of individuals and effectively removes them from the mainstream, thus freeing up more "goodies" for us, the consuma-trons that have not yet been marginalized.
I said some things about Black Americans. SO I was taken to task by one of the 2 black members of the Grey Beards, essentially for the reason that I am not black, and so on... I have aged beyond the point of being politically correct and feeling obligated to give way to (1) black people, or (2) women, or  (3) black women.

Now Robert ( we shall call him "Robert" in this post......mainly because that is his name) is a black man and he was calling me out. Of course, I did not back down. We were not discussing the black experience as seen through the eyes of black people; we were talking about the black experience as seen through the eyes of other observers.
What is the status of Black Americans? Consider the present situation of foreclosures on householders with sub prime mortgages. I have heard this discussed. I believe all the rational heads on Cable have talked about it. I believe I heard Ms. Orman discuss it. They ended up by saying that people should have given enough weight to the "fine print" ,as it were, that the mortgage rates would escalate in a few years.

Another trap, like gambling, like drugs, like alcohol... First, society spends money and time to create Icons of Responsible Citizens. One of the icons is Home Ownership. So we pitch Homes to the black populace and create wondrous landscapes for hours...then a minute of "read the fine print."
Now this is not the end of my tirade, for it is obvious that the injunction "read the fine print" is also related to education. Now just how good is the Educational System? Briefly, it is terrible. People are not being taught to read. People are not being taught to see through the lying Icons that consumer society serves up to them, for the society depends on consumerism. If people did not buy, the whole thing falls apart. So people must not be taught to think critically.
In Detroit, if I recall, the graduation rate from High School is 25% as reported in 2007. AND if you do not believe my baloney anymore, I will quote the following: Talking Points Memo: TPM
 
The Plunging Homeownership Rate for African Americans
http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/nov/14/the_plunging_homeownership_rate_for_african_americans  

"The rate of homeownership among blacks increased sharply from 1994 to 2004, rising from 42.3 percent in 1994 to 49.7 percent in 2004. In just three years it has now fallen back to 46.7 percent and it is virtually certain to decline further in the next year and a half. In other words, the big push to increase African American homeownership rates was in reality a big push to increase foreclosure rates among African American households, but the ideologues of homeownership were too blind to notice the impact of their policies."

We shall remain slaves until we stand up against this oppression.

Addendum
In the New York Times, November 11, 2007, page 12 of Sunday Business section in an article beginning on page 1, same section, dealing with Countrywide Bank:  

"...At a conference sponsored by the Milken Institute about two weeks ago, he [Mr. Angelo Mozilo, founder of Countrywide Bank] explained that borrowers forced lenders like Countrywide to lower their mortgage standards. The industry faced special pressure from minority advocates to help people buy homes, he said."

Forced? This is all rather like the AMA saying that minority advocates forced doctors to provide more health care by eliminating the extra cost of anaesthesia.
It makes a grammatical and syntactical sense, but it is entirely laughable. If advocates knew what was going on, they were in on the feast off their own people. If they did not know, then what kind of educational system do we have when leaders are ignorant?
The sub primes were a scam on the poor just like state-run lotteries. The sub primes were a destroyer of a group of people just as insidious as drugs, as violence, ...and as non-nutrtitional food that fills them to an obese childhood and an adulthood of disease, during which the chances they will have health care are not rosy.
--

Various Semitic Forms Of Fascism

The Grey Beards Club has grown quieter now. We sit around in Hanaan's place, satirically referred to as a restaurant, and listen to our digestive processes. There is nothing to argue about. If some one says "What about Hillary...?" we silence them with a deadly scorn. As if...as if the political process has usurped Paris Hilton's venue and now reigns supreme on the Cable media we...satirically...call "The News". We are burdened by everything from the start of Iraq through Abu Ghraib through Faluja up to the present where all the inhabitants of Iraq are smiling ( they are if they know what's good for them!) and saying that everything is hunky-dory and good-bye Americans...we love you!! (That's all Bush wants; to have Muqtada As Sadr say "Thanks"...or "Shukran".) Then they will turn around and kill each other. And every life we spent will be...what? We do not seem to be able to look at the possibility that the lives are wasted, so we will have to endure another 30 years or so of the dim wits that make up public opinion come up with ways to ensure that the lives were not wasted....theoretically, at least. Thus, we now look at the concept of Islamofascism. Since the President seems to use it, it is obviously a crock. I don't think anyone in the administration knows fact 1 about fascism. Clearly, when we use "fascism" in a perjorative sense, we cannot be referring to General Francisco Franco whose fascism did not bother us for the longest time...if ever. When I was a child, all we children in the Catholic schools were taught to revere the great General Franco who saved Spain from Communism and Anarchism. In short, we were taught that some Fascism is good: Franco's form of it. Anyway, there are other forms of fascist-like behavior. The good Levine, der Engel, brought to our attention a situation which may be of interest to so-called Christian Zionists. Reading in the Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/10/13/wspit13.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/10/13/ixnewstop.html we see some verification of Levine's tale: "Christians in Jerusalem have attacked what they say is the increasingly common phenomenon of ultra-orthodox Jews spitting on them. The statement followed a brawl between an orthodox Jewish yeshiva (religious school) student and an Armenian archbishop." ... "Daniel Rossing, the director of a Jerusalem centre for Christian-Jewish dialogue, said there had been an increase in such incidents recently as "part of a general lack of tolerance".

The Third Party

Conservatives...Conservative in the sense it was applied to Barry Goldwater...have found a candidate and are raising funds for him via the internet. The candidate is Mr. Ron Paul. This may be the first steps in a real multi-party system, also. I mean, why just stop at raising money? If the people of the USA begin to use the internet to create and nurture their own politicians and their own parties, you will see the Democrata and Republicans join hands hastily in the best spirit of working together and apply some sort of censorship to the internet. A good start would be to tax internet usage. In 7 years they would not place a temporary ban on taxing the internet. They would allow the individual States, most of which are now run by fools, to kill the internet and turn it into a docile creature of the corporate state. And so it goes.

A Zero-Sum Game

In a zero-sum game there is a clear cut winner and a clear cut loser; there is no sharing of the "pot" or the goodies.
I tend to view our society as one based on zero-sum principles: the more you have, the less I have.

Therefore, I must expend every effort to ensure you have less. One of the ways of doing this is the process of marginalizing large portions of the population. We quote Juan Cole:  
"Cranky rich people hire sharp-tongued and relatively uninformed young people all the time and put them in their mass media to badmouth the poor, spread bigotry, exalt mindless militarism, promote anti-intellectualism, and ensure generally that rightwing views come to predominate even among people who are harmed by such policies. One of their jobs is to marginalize progressives by smearing them as unreliable." [Cole, Informed Comment, Feb. 8, 2005])
(emphasis mine)

Mr. Cole is speaking of marginalization in political discourse, but the principles remain the same: Debase, Defame, Discredit, Dispossess.

Of course, the text book case would be the history of Black Americans. Black Americans have been marginalized and they still are. The greatest leaders were killed off. Drugs were allowed to flood the nation's cities. Even today the stereotypes of laziness are invoked to argue for vast illegal immigration to perform labor that American citizens are purportedly too shiftless to do.
Black America is a vast population which has effectively been shoved aside into a cocoon of its own and left to its own devices. There are leaders, but they are not creative leaders. They tend to the masses of people dispossessed within their own country, but they will not counsel them to rise up and claim their rightful patrimony.

Why? There is money and livelihood in not doing so. Most black leaders have a vested interest in the status quo and the illusion of progress. To become radical is to jeopardize all that. People of whatever color are tempted with the concentrated fruits of exploitive capitalism: Drugs, Palaces of Gambling, colorful bottles of alcohol, insinutating advertisements of tobacco, pornography of sex, pornography of violence, pornography of fear... Sooner or later, a soul falters and is entrapped.
Now they are prey of the Criminal Justice system, a system which will never let go and which will brand them indelibly forever...lest they try to redeem themselves. It's quite a system, this marginalization. The more that the poor do not have, the more there is for the rest of us. Happy Holidays, you cute little consumers!

In The Name Of God, Go!

In the Asia Times:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IK10Ak01.html
we read  
Spooks refuse to toe Cheney's line on Iran  
By Gareth Porter WASHINGTON - 

The US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear program. The aim is to make the document more supportive of Vice President Dick Cheney's militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts provided by participants in the NIE process to two former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers... ...But this pressure on intelligence analysts, obviously instigated by Cheney himself, has not produced a draft estimate without those dissenting views, these sources say. The White House has now apparently decided to release the "unsatisfactory" draft NIE, but without making its key findings public. ...Cheney's desire for a "clean" NIE that could be used to support his aggressive policy toward Iran was apparently a major factor in the replacement of John Negroponte as director of national intelligence in early 2007. 

And so it goes.
Cheney wants to cook the books to agree with his office, The Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense want something more representative of the range of opinion of the intelligence community. Of course, what this makes immediately obvious is the fact that Mr. Cheney and crew obviously use this method to get their way and it is clear that they did so in 2002 and 2003 in beating the drums for war in Iraq. In essence, the tiger does not change his spots.
This is not news.
Mr. Cheney knows he perverted the truth and is quite proud of the fact, secure in his opinion that it was all for a higher goal, a goal of such prisitine morality that its achievement would absolve all sins and crimes implicate in the pursuance of that supreme goal. There is still talk about intelligence being wrong, not perverted, merely because so much of the population is rather dim and witless and still thinks the intelligence community as a whole played dumb.

What is to become of the American Empire? This empire has existed in various stages of growth and development since the USA became a colonial power. What distinguished the American Empire from the other empires of its times: the Russian, the British, the German, etc., is the thread of democracy and law, extensively written, spoken, debated, by the Founding Fathers who were products of a time when public life and private were consonant with the spiritual lives and produced a moral sense of remarkable acuity.
The American Empire is now beginning to fall apart. Iraq is not the beginning; it is the end, or the presager of the end. The American Empire will be destroyed by its own enormous creations: the financial system which becomes perverted by greed, the ecological system which is perverted by lies and chemistry, the political system which is perverted by greed and lies, and so on. Under the Empire, Genetically Modified food will eventually be force fed us, as if we were geese for foie gras, in order to increase profit for global corporations.

The American Empire will strangle on its own excesses: an excess of greed, an excess of pride, an excess of ego pure and simple coupled with its own bizarre taste for gigantism and monsters which it quaintly refers to as "economies of scale" or whatever the buzzword is. Nothing is inevitable. I would feel a chance to escape some impending doom by having the present administration resign.

In 1653, Oliver Cromwell addresses the Rump Parliament, "Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go! "
 

In the spring of 1940, as German Panzers raced across Europe and the British reeled back from their failed Norwegian campaign, the peace policy of Neville Chamberlain was revealed at last to be a disaster, Leopold Amery, MP, ( who had been two years senior to Churchill at the Harrow School) rose in Parliament to condemn this policy and quoted Cromwell, “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

Now as Mr. Cheney attempts to cook the intell books again, we raise our voices to proclaim that enough is enough. Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, we cannot take another year of your administration: IN THE NAME OF GOD, GO!

Peace Poem 23

I am fasting a day early, hence, the poem. The originals are on http://peace-weaving.blogspot.com/ ( see link at right). My Southern Rose The willows stand stiff daguerrotypes; Generals of the War between the States; their beards so full and majestic in their stance. They maintain their verdant burden and sweeping low in gallant bow! chorus My rose of Maryland! Bloom forever! The South’s own herbal honey! The Balm of Appalachia; sweet liquor of Antietam! The wild flowers strewn up to the sky, Soldiers of the war; their eyes so young and filled with hope: like idols in their fane. They stand in silent loyal witness, reeds in ponds innumerable. chorus My rose of Maryland! Bloom forever! The South’s own herbal honey! The Balm of Appalachia; sweet liquor of Potomac! We’re coming east from Morgantown, from the Cumberland. We stop to eat at Hancock where you can stand and throw a stone apiece into Pennsylvania’s green fields and into West Virginia’s land. chorus My rose of Maryland! Bloom forever! The South’s own herbal honey! The Balm of Appalachia; sweet liquor of Patapsco!

Shall We Bomb Pakistan?

It entertains me to no end that a Zogby poll ( or was it a Zagat's review?) at the end of October stated that 52% of Americans favored bombing Iran. Of course, they had little hint that the most profound threat of nuclear instability was always going to come from their good old friend Pakistan. A year or so ago, while talking about Mr. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of the state of Pakistan, I managed to say something glib along the lines that he would disapprove mightily ("be spinning in his grave") over the developments of the present: Mr. Musharraf, a man who was both President and Head of the army. A lady recently emigrated from Pakistan (and, thus, imagining herself to be more knowledgeable than I) took me to task and said something to the effect that outsider don't know nothing! Or, at least that outsiders should let Pakistanis make the judgements about their leaders...or some such nonsense. I mean, if we were to allow Pakistanis to make the judgements about their government, that means I would not be able to condemn General Zia al-Haqq to the deepest pit of hell, which is where he most certainly is. Anyway, events have proven me correct again, and democracy has had its left hand chopped off, as it were, by a man who is along the historical lines of typical American allies outside of Europe: despots, tyrants, and usurpers. I am lead to believe that our government is frantically trying to re-establish some semblance of democracy, preferably by getting the Pakistan police to bash some heads wearing dirty turbans rather than clean bowler hats; to cut a few throats girded by ragged shirts rather than tasteful cravates; to whack a Waziri instead of a Iuris Doctor or lawyer. Mr. Jinnah himself was a lawyer. He was called to London's bar from Lincoln's Inn in 1896. He does not approve.

Anna And Her Machines

Above is the infamous Woking RR. Wet Spot Machine, thoughtfully supplied by AnnaMR at one of those links over at the right side of the blog.
I have pondered over other enormous products of industrial society designed to accomplished other ( ostensibly) homely tasks. I submit the following:
The Whitby Angler Hook Baiting Machine ( designed to automate the placement of "bait" upon the hooks of fisher folk.)

American Empire Revisited

It is fairly obvious that the American Empire is already in existence. I have been writing as if it were a future phenomenon. Sorry about that.

Arab American Film Festival

My daughter and I went to a few screenings at the Arab American Museum's Film Festival on November 3. It is a beautiful building. On the way to the auditorium, I saw some art work by I.M. I use only the initials since the artist wishes to remain anonymous.
Anonymous, I thought, yet Acronymous:
I.M. indeed! I know who the artist is. When I see signs of peace enclosed within a climate controlled glass case, looking for all the world as if they were ancient mummies under the control of Zahi Hawass, I know who is responsible. I know who's behind it all when I see the signs enwrapt in gilded wire, imprisoned and forced to our rude gaze, while we abuse these ancient icons with our uncomprehending eyes. Eyes wild with inchoate desires...

Well, on to the film.
We saw Ar-RaHalat ul-Kubraa or, as it was translated, Le Grand Voyage, or "The Great Trip". It was about a father's Hajj to Mecca.

The father, portrayed by Muhammad Majd, was driven to Mecca by his youngest son, played by Nicolas Cazale. The family lived in France, having emigrated from Morocco some long time past. At the beginning of the film, there were various attributions and kudos to a couple of choses de Maroc, so I thought perhaps the trip was from Morocco to Mecca. However, it became clear that the trip was through Europe, and would be even longer than the trek across North Africa to Arabia.

The Arabic title actually means "The Greatest Trip", or Le Voyage Le Plus Grand, and not merely a great trip among other possibilities. Since this is the father's one and only Hajj, and since the son was brought up more French than Moroccan, or more secular than Muslim, this is a great and singular voyage to adulthood and a preliminary approach to the holy traditions that are the warp and weft of humankind.
Afterwards there was a panel discussion. I became unruly and said unfortunate things. The security forces hustled me upstairs past ullulating women who keened my passing in despair, reaching out to touch me and saying "Dummuzi!" I was thrown ignominiously into an exterior cul-de-sac which had a sign titled: The Dustbin of History!

--

Peace Fast

The poem for fast day 22 is at http://peace-weaving.blogspot.com/ I took part in a Poetry Slam last week. I came in in the middle of the pack...pack of ravenous auto-centric despots who are yet enslaved to their wild desires. (silence)

Night And Silence; Who Is Here?

Resolved:  Whether Dumbledore be gay, or no.

"Weeds of gay pride doth he wear."  
Antonio: 'sfaith! 'tis old Dumbledore!  
(quote from my book Le Shakespeare Imaginaire)

I am appalled at this nonsensical 1984 Stalinist attempt to rewrite history and tell us that Dumbledore is gay. We did not know it before; the author did not know it before...perhaps she hid the fact until she had amassed limitless wealth, then sprung...what?...the sorry truth...the love that dare not speak it's name?... I mean, how can it be part of the story when it is dumped on us like a deus ex machina that has no particular part to play in the story...the deus just stands there on the stage and looks ill at ease, waiting for a player or two to toss it a line.  
(I was about to write "waiting for one of the protagonists to throw it a line" but I got into an internal debate of Fowler versus the OED...and Fowler triumphed! Absolutely wizard debate.)

The author should have said that Dumbledore is not gay. Then we could have said, ahah! we thought so! Surely no sane gay person could have decorated Hogwarts, the school being more Huysmanian than gay.  

( In re Huysman, Huysmanian trumps gay every time; that is, the concept "gay" is rather tepid next to the real deal and sort of squinches down like a feline that knows it has met its match...and vanishes.)

Our Lives In The Bush Of Ghosts: The Mystery Of The Afghan Opium

Not really a mystery, I suppose. So, recently our client state of Afghanistan under the presidency of Hamid Karzai had the good fortune of producing a bumper crop of opium, perhaps the largest in its agricultural history. What has become of it? Where did it go? Who is enjoying it now? The entire situation is menacingly farcical: our Afghan ally producing opium to poison our cities...and we cannot do anything. The only thing the government can do is hope that no one notices. This was my tax dollars at work. In the Bush world of ghosts, there are NO good options; all the forks in the road lead to a sovereign and malignant ghost.

Lies My President Told Me

One of the most outstanding developments in the USA throughout my life has been the coming forward of our most prestigious political figures as liars. Not so much bluffers anymore, as in poker. More like obsessive liars. Anyway, the present holder of office seems intent on a missile defense system in Europe to protect our European allies in Eastern Europe against attack by Iran. I seem to have forgotten when Europe was threatened by missile rattling mullahs, but it must have happened. Why the mullahs and ayatullahs would threaten Europe with atomic missiles when they are simultaneously denying any work on an atomic bomb is somewhat counter-intuitive. If our guys were smart, they would pick up on it. India has tested a missile capable of carrying an atomic warhead. This was within the past week. Thank goodness the only coutry threatened by Hindu warheads is Pakistan and not any of our European allies. At this point, one wonders if the development of this missile delivery system was included in the USA-India nuclear freebie pact. However, it seems India has been dragging its feet on the pact, anyway, so there India is: with a bomb and with a missile. The pact probably made demands upon the Indian government that it act responsibly. No wonder the pact is dying. Russia seems to think the missiles are directed against them merely because they will be located in neighboring countries. Not at first, President Putin. They will not be so directed...at first! We may always change the directional settings later, however. President Putin was talking about these missiles recently. He went through a list of negatives, then ended by saying no evil would come from all of this, because he and George Bush were such friends. BFFs, in fact. The sarcasm dripped cyrillic. When all is said and done, Iran is in the Middle East. The only enemy of Iran we can see is Israel. Iran has said a few impolitic remarks about Israel, while it hasn't said much at all about Europe. So this business about Iran is a procedure to ensure the continued dominance of the nuclear power of Israel in the Middle East. Of course, we all know this. It is talking about it that is forbidden. Haraam 'alayya, Folks!

The Road To Iran 2

The V.P., or the Notorious V.I.P. ( Vice Intensive President ), seems to see a good deal more to Pres. A. of Iran than I do. Pres. A. did not come off to well during his recent visit. Actually, nobody involved in that charade came off too well. As I said at the time, it is hard to build a case that somebody is a cunning and malevolent evil entity when said entity is acting like a dimwit. Yet the V.P. seems determined that this country Iran, a country which cannot control the distribution of gasoline to its citizens without having riots break out on every corner, is the source of all our woes.

To quote Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek:  
Stalin, Mao And … Ahmadinejad?

Conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers. Oct 29, 2007 Issue  
"Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?" 

... "We're on a path to irreversible confrontation with a country we know almost nothing about. The United States government has had no diplomats in Iran for almost 30 years. American officials have barely met with any senior Iranian politicians or officials. We have no contact with the country's vibrant civil society. Iran is a black hole to us—just as Iraq had become in 2003."

and finally  

"Last year, the Princeton scholar, Bernard Lewis, a close adviser to Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal predicting that on Aug. 22, 2006, President Ahmadinejad was going to end the world. The date, he explained, "is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the Prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to 'the farthest mosque,' usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world" (my emphasis). This would all be funny if it weren't so dangerous."

More wit and comedy from the Bush White House. Seriously, if indeed we are the wealthiest and the most powerful nation in the history of mankind, is this really the best we can do? George W. Bush? Richard Cheney? And President Amedinejad was really, really - literally - going to end the world?

Th-th-that's all, folks!

Comments: A Christmas Carol

I have received information that comments...1 or 2...are not being accepted.

Well, I do not know why. I've checked everything, even sending myself test comments, filled with unstinting praise- merely as an exercise to be sure- and everything seems to work. Odd. Maybe people assume that comments are not accepted because I take my own sweet time taking a gander at them and allowing them publication. This is very possible. They are so few and far between that the mere mention that there is a comment waiting upon me in the sitting room, top hat in his hand, puts me in a tizzy. I slowly descend the main staircase and peek through the carved balustrades, quite like a child on Christmas morning early. Then silently I continue my descent.

Standing outside the sitting room door, I practice harrumphing and saying things like "bushwah!" I recall comments from the past:
"How much shall we put you down for this year, Mr. Montag?"
"Harrrumph! How much? How much, indeed! Are the workhouses not open? And the treadmill...is it not in force?"
... and so on.

Really. I mean, how presumptious can you be? I actually received an e-mail from an entity yclept The Frog Dwarf who took me to task for my opposition to gambling. And my reply that shall be a posting soon to open at your local PC. Of course, given Blogic, that subsequent posting will actually precede this one in the reading area and nothing will make any sense at all...a situation which has been asserted by past commentors to be the case most of the time. Send them to the Commentors Treadmill and get some work out of 'em!

A Wall Of Silence

There are some photos of the walls built in Baghdad to separate neighborhoods. The ones at http://nonarab-arab.blogspot.com/index.html show the Sunni Dora being separated from surrounding Shi'a areas. One must go to the site in order to be able to see the enlarged images in which the walls are quite clearly seen. The violence has decreased by separating the warring peoples. Of course, this is hardly a political solution, rather a Mural Solution...or extra-mural...or trans-mural...or cis-mural ( our side) and trans-mural (their side). I am sure Ms. Rice can come up with some brainy description. What happens when the walls go away? There is also comment of the Great New Age of Wall Tech: walls in Baghdad, walls in Israel, walls along the borders, walls between Saudi Arabia and Iraq...the new walled community of the 21st C. I find it hard to believe that the USA p'd and moaned about the Berlin Wall for so long. Then, within 20 years of its downfall, the technology loudly touted by the US government is walling areas off from others. (There is a sense of destiny, however. In my youth, I had received the nickname "Walls". My friends were "Door", and "Lintel", among others. There was "Joist" and there was "Sanitary Hook-up"...all quite inscrutable.)

Rappers' Delight

The Notorious V.I.P.

To The Soldiers Returning Home

I'm the MC that rocks tha world. I’m the V.P. that shuts you down. I’m tha V.I.P. in home and in town! Somebody's gotta die Faluuuuu-ja! If I got, you gotta go. Somebody's gotta die Faluuuuu-ja! Let the gunshots blow. Somebody's gotta die and somebody's gotta lie; Nobody gotta know That I killed yo ass in the mist, kid

What Would The American Empire Look Like?

If there is to be an American empire, it would resemble the USA.

It would grow the way the US grew. In this process, the inhabitants of the USA will see similarities to their glorious past and thus conclude that the imperial present and the 1,000 future of the American Empire will be particularly blessed by God.
There will be interludes resembling the American Wars of Indian Extermination. There will be comical sketches based on a humbug understanding of new science that will resemble the Eugenics schemes of the early 2oth century. Please recall that the earliest scheme for a travelling extermination chamber to kill undesirables was in the USA, not Nazi Germany.
There will be the insidious belief in our own rectitude and alliance with the will of God, a bit of hybris we like to do 3 times before breakfast and which will lead the USA to a spiritual vacuum where the only thing they believe in is the perverted creations of their own puny intellects, rather like the schemes of Pastor John Haggee of San Antonio. Pastor Haggee is merely the precursor of the deception.

No empire is exactly like another. Many foolishly believe America will follow Rome,...or Byzantium. No empires exactly parallel each other. We are facing a serious loss of sense of Community. We prat and chatter about being a Christian country, yet we hold all men to be islands, complete unto themselves. Our commitment to the welfare of the community is vestigial. This commitment is what Christianity is about. This commitment is what Islam is about. This commitment is what Judeaism is about.

How can Community survive in the midst of Wars based on deception, whose very being is a scandal and whose support requires a cycnicism beyond anything we had hitherto dreamed of? A War for Oil...and everyone stands in foolish crowds and moans: what of the soldiers who died? did they die for naught? How do you make evil right? By what machinations will you pervert the perversion? The soldiers say: tell them at home we fought and died here, according to their command. Our command. Our responsibility. Our evil. When the sense of being a community dies, the community itself has died, and what is left is the hulk of Imperium and Compulsion and Power and Force.

Jihad And Revolution

If we ask whether Jihad is an integral part of Islam, are we being serious? I do not think so. We should first address something we are more familiar with: is revolution an integral part of Christianity? We might start of with the Magnificat: He casts the mighty from their thrones and raises the lowly; He fills the starving with good things; sends the rich away empty. All the pundits out there, tell me. I cannot wait to hear what you have to say. If you diminish revolution in Christianity, why do you magnify jihad in Islam? Explain the one and then the other. I await.

Damien?

In Ha'Aretz: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/915701.html Rabin assassin's wife: Yigal Amir sacrificed himself for his people The pregnant wife of Yigal Amir, the jailed assassin of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, said Monday that she intended to tell Amir's future child that his father had "sacrificed himself for his people." ... and so it goes.

Politics

I caught the Republican debate at Mrs. Robinson's house last Sunday. I was impressed by them all. There was one whom I had never heard of before, a Mr. Hunter. He did not seem to be a real candidate and said a lot of non-sequiturs that seemed to be solely for the audience in Florida where the dabate took place. I assume he was the local US Rep or some other lowly life form. Ron Paul was not overwhelmingly popular. When Mr. Paul observed that 70% of the populace was opposed to the continuance of the war in Iraq, there was disbelief and displeasure expressed by the audience. Mr. Paul's observation that pursuing some ideal of an American Empire would bankrupt us financially and morally met a similar response. I really do not know quite what to make of the Republican Party. Other than kissing up to groups that label themselves "values voters" and purposely avoiding debates or symposia held by Black Americans...and making a rather large point of not mentioning George W. Bush by name, I do not understand them. I mean, once Roe vs. Wade is reversed, what are you going to do? You spend like drunken sailors, your conception of the world is on the level of trailer park trash, your works of charity are scripted by CPAs...you are a beautiful and wealthy corruption.

Then we turn to the Democrats. Tell me the names of the wealthy Armenian backers of Nancy Pelosi. There must be a couple who have an idee fixe about the Armenian Genocide. Nancy Pelosi did not come up with this on her own, although we had hoped that it would not have been beyond her faculties to perceive that it was not a good idea. What's wrong with a resolution condemning Armenian Genocide? I am reading a book titled Halsey's Typhoon. It takes place in World War II and features Admiral Halsey and General MacArthur. Now I am doing this from faulty memory, but I seem to recall that in giving a short bio of General MacArthur, there was a run through of the life of MacArthur's father. I seem to recall that the book stated that the senior MacArthur was in the US Army in the western part of the country in the late 19th century. Now at that time, since the Indian Extermination Campaign was coming to an end, he had to make a decision about his future. Indian Extermination Campaign??!! Well, I have not heard it called that in a while. Maybe never. That was the only reference to it in the book, as the book was focused on WWII. Ahhh...the panoply of pots and the treasure cache of kettles!...and the blackness thereof!

The Night Of Long Memories

The Notorious V.I.P. has rapped a rap Sunday past about Iran. "This same regime that approved of hostage-taking in 1979, that attacked Saudi and Kuwaiti shipping in the 1980s, that incited suicide bombings and jihadism in the 1990s and beyond, is now the world's most active state sponsor of terror" 1979?! Well.....I am down with Notorious V.I.P, but magis amicus veritatis: I am more a friend of truth. It sounds a lot like Marc Antony at Caesar's funeral. When all else fails, welcome Octavian!

Gambling

"If you give a man enough rope, then he will hang hisse'f (thereby saving the county the cost of incarceration)." Judge Roy Bean Gambling is neutral. It's all what you do with it. The hybrid of gambling and capitalism is abhorrent. The embrace of gambling by our state and local governments argues a spiritual and ethical vacuum of profound depth. There is NO Choice. Once gambling becomes big business, there is no choice. We pretend there is, but that's because we are all of us...essentially...idiots. Business has found that advertising will sell products, even things we have no need of. By the lure of sexuality or power or all the other appetites we are lead to consume and partake in the feast of 21st century capitalism. We pretend there is a choice. Even we who do not gamble say there is a choice: we choose not to gamble. No. It is merely not the correct vice for us. By our neutrality in not condemning gambling, we enable it to continue until there are only (1) Gamblers, or (2) Enablers. We have lost the choice of being neither !!!!!! Capitalism seeks to lure you with a feast of "choices". If these choices in no way improve the quality of your individual life nor the life of the community, then they are not choices, they are enticements to sate appetites which work against the social good. If I am grossly overweight and am presented with a groaning board of delectable sweets all high in trans and saturated fats and sugars, am I to choose for myself? Or am I to destroy myself? If all the "choices" are bad and I am very hungry, is it a choice? Or is it not the case that I have - all my life- been led down the garden path of obesity by Big Food business and become inordinately fond of certain combinations of fats and sweets and carbohydrates...all of which leads to my hubritic indulgence...NOT a choice! Which is it? When there is another gun crime, we hear that no one forces anyone to bear a gun: it is a choice. And we are all rational enough to make choices. We also hear that if you give a man enough rope, then he will hang himself. The latter maxim is not a choice. Popular wisdom as summed up in the above recognizes that there sometimes is choice and sometimes there is not. We had better wake up to the fact that many of our choices are forced and compelled.

Peace Fasting And Poetry

New poem at http://peace-weaving.blogspot.com/ Very gingery...spicey...cumin and cardamon...exotic odors and a thick paste of love.

Give Democracy A Chance!

My favorite memory of the attacks of 9/11 was the President of the United States of America addressing the nation. It reminded me of past presidents. It brought to mind FDR addressing Congress after 12/7 (1941), "...a day which will live in infamy." George W. Bush told the American people to go shopping. I'm serious. Look it up. The entire populace was to go to the Mall and go shopping. This was our bit in the war on terror. We were not supposed to bother our dainty little minds with things like big, bad old Sammy B. Laden. We were to shop. Probably with the extra money from the tax cuts. In essence, leave the big work to the big guys: Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Wolfowitz, Ms. Rice...the entire rougues gallery together with their enablers in the Congress who also gave up any meaningful role and went shopping. Now look where we have gotten to. After six years we are not only in a much tougher situation, we ourselves have committed crimes on a scale that even Sammy Bin Laden never dreamed of. In a democracy, the sleep of the people that form the nation gives birth to monsters! Give Democracy a chance!

Why I Do Not Believe, Rather I Expect

Earlier I wrote that I do not believe in God. I do expect God, however. I expect Him to be around every corner and to fill every niche. This is what God is: that which is always expected and welcomed. Mankind has believed in God as long as we can tell. Mankind has not believed in some emotional nonsense, rather they have beheld the presence of God in the vestments of what we consider Good and Evil: that which overwhelms us with Love and that which overwhelms us with Fear. God cannot be trapped with words. Only silence. Some fear the silence of meditation, fearing that the mind empty of words and chatter will be filled by the tempting of the devil. It is possible that silence will be terrifying. God can be overwhelming. We must learn to deal with our Fear just as we do with our Love. God exists in between time space. He is the great fullness and the great emptiness; the plethora and the void. He is the great yawning gap between the Creation and the fullness of the moment. "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace."(Ecclesiastes 3:1-8) The world swings between Love and Fear; building up and tearing down. It is not necessarily the way God is. Ecclesiastes does not attempt to describe the mind of God as being committed to the coincidence of opposites: it is how we understand things. Thus, by using the opposites, such as peace and war, we show that God covers the entire range of creation. Some have used the above to argue that God wants war. God does not WANT anything. Mankind wants war when it tires of peace, and it will continue to do so until it stops living in the allegories of its minds. When mankind tires of its logic and its paradigms, maybe they will be silent and listen once more, just as the great ones of old did. So...I do not believe. If I believed, you would insist that I tell you what I believe! What an inane question: what do you believe? I am living in God's presence. I expect God at any moment. I await my good and my bad, the love and the fear...even though I pray to be free from fear. I never say what God should be. I accept God's creation; I accept myself; I accept life. To believe in something allows that it may be false. God is not subject to the logic of what is true and what is false. To expect is neither true nor false, for expectations may be infinite in length.

Philosophers Read Cal Thomas

I know one who does. This was the event that made me realize even Socrates may say something quite stupid. Ask Xanthippe if you do not believe me. Anyway, Cal Thomas has written an article called: The Same God? and I picked it up from a site called Townhall.com.
Now the article is embraced by a picture of Ann Coulter on the right side. She is looking alluringly sluttish as is usual. She is a regular Right-Wing incubus...or succubus...or Wraith. Quite the picture. Amazing, isn't it, that the Bush-type conservatives ( i.e., interventionism, the heck with fiscal responsibility in government, etc.) discovered that Truth may be subliminally associated with almost bared breasts.
There is a photo of another young girls chest, suitably covered with a T-shirt with some slogan that passes for witty. Beneath that, there is another young girl in some sort of office milieu wearing extrememly short shorts. The camera is at floor level and aimed upwards. Since the article itself is about God and whether the Christian God is the same as the Muslim God...( I have not gotten to the punch line yet.)...there is also a picture of Palestinian women demonstrating for Palestinian unity. They are dressed conservatively Muslim and do not seem to be saying anything about Allah, at least according to the description under the photo. More subliminal stuff: Christian God is frat boy, Allah is kill joy ? It really is worth a look.
Here's the url: http://www.townhall.com/columnists/CalThomas/2007/10/09/the_same_god?page=full&comments=true

Anyway, Cal Thomas starts:
 
"Whatever else his critics say of him, no one can fault President Bush for failing to go the extra mile in his efforts to show that neither he, nor the United States, is opposed to the Islamic faith, or to Muslim nations."

Yeah. Right. Right on, Cal. He differentiates between the "Gods" of the two religions:

"God calls himself "I Am" and says He is one, but with three personalities. Muslims believe God's name is Allah and reject the Trinity."

THREE personalities!!?? As if the Christian God were Sybil!?

"The president can be commended for sincerely reaching out to Muslims, but he should not be commended for watering down his beliefs and the doctrines of his professed faith in order to do so. That's universalism. There are "churches" that believe in universalism, his Methodist church does not. No Christian who believes the Bible believes in universalism. And No Muslim who believes the Koran does either. President Bush is wrong - dangerously wrong - in proclaiming that all religions worship the same God."

Here we have the observation that "watering down beliefs"= "universalism", and churches that believe in universalism must be churches that need to be spelled with quote marks= "churches". He depicts the admirable cognitive states existing is modern day Christians and Muslims as if (1) he were exhaustively familiar with them, and (2) these benighted souls were the paradigms of belief. A true buffoon is Mr. Thomas. Fit reading for any philosopher. Actually, he is quite fit and proper for the modern age of Neoconservatism.

The Road To War With Iran

It is not easy. President B wants war. President A. sez things like Jews should live in Canada and Alaska. It's hard to create a spectre of a terrible threat when the opponent acts rather childlike.

Vampire Economics 2

OpEd News has a piece on Vampire economies! Will species extinction be the scientific effect of elitist greed? http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/opedne_w__chris_071007_will_species_extinct.htm Yah! This reminded me on my post: Vampire Economics 101 http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2007/07/vampire-economics-101.html I would like to say that my genius feeds the fertile minds of other wits, but the notion of Vampire elites is much too obvious and, truth to tell, we are pretty much all aware of it. We grin and bear it, just like Mina's friend, Lucy...a rather ghastly grin, come to think of it.

Does Sarah Silverman Suck Lemons?

I saw the headline just as it is above, only I added the word "lemons" since they had obviously forgotten it.

When I was young, saying something "sucked" was not merely an abstract concept for "not up to snuff, mediocre" and the like. The article was in AlterNet and I forgot to get a link for you, so you are on your own. Ohh, wait. the link is below:  
Does Sarah Silverman Suck?
By Kera Bolonik,
TheNation.comPosted on October 6, 2007,
Printed on October 6, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/64563/  

"Is she or isn't she funny? Is she genuinely mean, or is she making a commentary about American ignorance? Any confusion I had over these questions was cleared up by her monologue at MTV's Video Music Awards, during which she unrelentingly reamed Britney Spears's God-awful performance and referred to Spears's two little boys as "the most adorable mistakes."

There is no Britney Spears. That's what Sarah is pointing out to us had we but the intellect to understand. There is actually one blonde girl who drinks a lot and does drugs and she is hired on to "play" Britney, Lindsey, and Paris. Impossible? Please note that never but never have these 3 been in the news as a main attraction at the very same time!!!! Paris goes to jail...Paris gets out...not a peep from the other 2. Then, when Paris is below the horizon, Lindsey kicks ass. Lindsey becomes yesterday's news and Britney goes to jail. They have never shared the main spotlight.  

"If comedy means pissing people off and loving that about oneself, appearing more self-entitled than self-aware and spearheading an even more discomforting subgenre of comedy -- then Mazel Tov, dahlink! "

Actually, that is what comedy is.
The fact that people are offended and hurt deals more with what the people are than what Sarah is. If you are offended by being photographed drunk driving, then you have a number of options available to yourself. Take them.

Lily Tomlin once said something to the effect that the more cycnical she became, she always was less cycnical than warranted by society's foibles. Sarah Silverman is not only funny, she is quite stunning, appearance-wise. I think she is rather beautiful, but I also think Ms. Spears is rather commonplace. I am at odds with the rest of you.

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Peace Fasting and Poem October 5, 2007

The poem for the week is up at my other site: http://peace-weaving.blogspot.com/ This should also be the first link in the link column.

Ann Coulter Talks, But...

...I started to read it, then did not. All the newspapers that have been filled with all the nonsense Ann Coulter speaks would wrap a lot of Fish and Chips.

SCHIP

Mr. Bush vetoed the SCHIP bill because it was fiscally irresponsible!!!??? Who is kidding whom, Mr. Bush?

We refer to an earlier post here, relying on the site Jewschool: http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2007/07/thrifty-george-w-bush.html Mr. Bush, we may have eaten this particular plate full of offal from your White House kitchen 6 years ago, but not now. The rest of your term will be interesting, estranged even from your own party on important issues. Very interesting. note: William Kristol of The Weekly Standard , one of the great intellects behind the Iraq Crime, thought the veto was good for a laugh and proceeded to joke about it on national television. I guess the viewing public gets what it deserves. Since Mr. Kristol was influential in starting a long term war that will cost trillions based on disinformation and distortion and laughs at a pittance for children's health care, we offer a jolly paraphrase:

Billy Kristol:

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done; The SCHIP is broken on the rack, the prize we sought is won;

The Great Wonders Of The American Empire (3): Deputy Assistant Undersecretary Debra Cagan

Deputy Undersecretary Debra Cagan

It is unusual for one of the wonders of the civilized world to be a human being, but some entities are so strange and the stories so compelling that the usual methods of selection must be held in abeyance and our overwhelming sense of awe and amazement just lead us to give the treasured place on the list of wonders to a human being...but not just a mere human being. As far as I can tell, all this is true and the pictures were not taken at a fun house. Ladies and Gentlemen, we present the seventh wonder of the world: Debra Cagan, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Coalition Affairs to Defence Secretary Robert Gates.




Daily Mail I hate all Iranians, US aide tells MPs
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=484762&in_page_id=1770
"Britsh MPs visiting the Pentagon to discuss America's stance on Iran and Iraq were shocked to be told by one of President Bush's senior women officials: "I hate all Iranians." " "The MPs say that at one point she said: "In any case, I hate all Iranians. Although it was an aside, it was not out of keeping with her general demeanour. "

The picture above was taken at a gathering covered by several blog reports: Sadly, No! http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/7354.html

We met...this crazy woman in a leatherette tunic, she gave us her business card, and was drinking heavily and dancing like a dervish. She tried to befriend us, but as she is obviously insane, and SCARIER IN PERSON THAN IN PHOTOS, we kind of slipped away. We thought from her rambling discussion that she was an arms dealer, she had just returned from what sounded like a sex junket to our fighting boys in Iraq. She was telling us how sexy the front line guys were, and the whole live for today ethos that prevails in the Green Zone. A truly, truly mad woman, and now Gates’ right hand man (she really looks like a bondage dude). and "...could the Republican party be a bigger freak show ...?"

Cagan in Iraq

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ps.

Wearing her cross in the first photo, she unfortunately resembles someone from World War II.

Desmond Tutu Among The Vultures

The Catholic University of St. Thomas in Minnesota has dis-invited Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu to appear and speak. The University adminsistration seems to have pressured by persons unknown. Bishop Tutu was held to have said Israel=Hitler or some such fantasy equation of fools. We shall give you some background and you can make up your own minds. First, the report from the Minneapolis-St.Paul newspaper: The Star Tribune http://www.startribune.com/462/story/1463394.html From Tikun Olam: Tikun Olam-תקון עולם http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2007/10/03/university-disinvites-tutu-for-allegedly-likening-israel-to-hitler/ and http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2007/10/04/jta-publishes-zoa-fraudulent-tutu-quote/ We give the original 2002 report from the BBC: http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2007/10/04/jta-publishes-zoa-fraudulent-tutu-quote/ We have been an admirer of Israel forever. We have spoken of the fact that Israel is not perfect, nor necessarily the closest thing to perfection: Israel is a nation of human beings just like any other nation. After President Ahmindinejad first uttered his views on whether the Holocaust took place or not, there was a good deal of discussion. We have found a growing understanding among the people we have talked with that the Holocaust is historically accurate, but the importance of the Holocaust varies from intense to nothing; President A. probably meant to say that Iran has had its own slaughtered millions and the Holocaust of the West is nothing to Iran, except as far as you keep shoving it down our throats. Exerting pressure is AIPAC's game. They are big boys. If people start to get tired of them, they will try something else. I love Israel, but I love other nations, too. I do not love fairy tales being foisted on adults. I do not love being pressured. I do not love having my arm twisted by another Big Brother. I have lived long enough to see my native country turned into an object of scorn because of a government of people who believe smoke and mirrors to be true and fairy tales to be real McCoy and intelligence to be a matter of uninformed opinion. They have even created their own disingenuous fairy tales for a credulous populace, meanwhile undermining every good and noble institution of the land. I shall not accept the distortions of fools any longer. The University of St. Thomas could at least have pulled a Lee Bollinger and act the role of Tom the Fool from King Lear, dancing while some else pulls their strings and the voice of the Ministry of Truth provides their voice.