Governor Snyder of Michigan: The Anti-Robin Hood

So far I see no evidence that Governor Snyder's "Modest Proposal" - and now, our law - to tax the elderly and give the money to corporations is working. In fact, if Governor Snyder had two brain hemispheres to rub together (he only has one!), it would be bloody obvious that there are no jobs not because of taxation, but because of reduced demand: people are not spending.

August 16 2011

Interview with Nouriel Roubini by the Wall Street Journal

WSJ: (~4:00) So you painted a bleak picture of sub-par economic growth going forward, with an increased risk of another recession in the near future. That sounds awful. What can government and what can businesses do to get the economy going again or is it just sit and wait and gut it out?

Roubini: Businesses are not doing anything. They're not actually helping. All this risk made them more nervous. There's a value in waiting. They claim they're doing cutbacks because there's excess capacity and not adding workers because there's not enough final demand, but there's a paradox, a Catch-22. If you're not hiring workers, there's not enough labor income, enough consumer confidence, enough consumption, not enough final demand. In the last two or three years, we've actually had a worsening because we've had a massive redistribution of income from labor to capital, from wages to profits, and the inequality of income has increased and the marginal propensity to spend of a household is greater than the marginal propensity of a firm because they have a greater propensity to save, that is firms compared to households. So the redistribution of income and wealth makes the problem of inadequate aggregate demand even worse.

Karl Marx had it right. At some point, Capitalism can destroy itself. You cannot keep on shifting income from labor to Capital without having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand. That's what has happened. We thought that markets worked. They're not working. The individual can be rational. The firm, to survive and thrive, can push labor costs more and more down, but labor costs are someone else's income and consumption. That's why it's a self-destructive process.

If Mr. Roubini is remotely correct, then Governor Snyder has made the situation greatly worse!
To be honest, I consider Governor Snyder to be little more than an educated "footpad" (an archaic term which I use all the time) or highwayman who saw it his duty in a time of reduced demand to deliver more of the money of the poor to the rich!... since the poor did not see fit to spend it right just now!
He is the perfect Anti-Robin Hood!
--

Thoughts on 9/11

What is a sense of national solidarity and purpose born from a senseless act of violence? Where does it lead us?

Apparently, our national sense of purpose led us to War and Excess.

And it has been dissipated entirely back into the cosmic noise of our antipathy for each other.

--

The Dream Factory: The Gifts of God

The gifts of God are small, yet they are in a steady supply, like beads of crystal falling from a torn rosary, and endless streaming throughout our lives. Miracles, on the other hand,  are in-your-face and somewhat rare.

I woke up and today was September 9, not the 13th, and looking out my window I saw globes of glittering lights, some whole, some broken into dawn-fire-reflecting shards, and wondered "What are these things?"
I said it over and over, louder and louder.
Were they those beads of crystal? What is it that I see on the tree branches?

As I got out of bed - I assume I was still dreaming at this point - I realized it was an ice storm, and ice covered the tree branches like a crystalline glove wrapped around their mystic fingers. An ice storm! On September 9th!
On the river, there were floes of ice, and a few polar bears and penguins enjoying the climate change. It was warming as the morning drew on. The neighbors were pointing at the animals. One guy got a Bobcat loader and began building a stone and sand bridge towards the ice. It would change the dynamics of the waves breaking along our shore, and I yelled so at him, but he ignored it, drawn on with curiosity or maybe a feeling of religion to reach the ice which was decreasing in size rapidly now.

All the lands were the usual river lands of my dreams: the Canadian shore across from me, the hidden kingdoms of the East where the sun came from. There were reeds and cattails and grasses. There were no boats, but if there were, they would have skipped rather than sailed... I knew that.

I have been concerned about beach erosion - real life - and that explains some of it. The yesterday-winds down by the Clinton River were up in the tops of the trees, which gave the leaves a tenor quality, and the first leaves tinged with yellow fell here and there.
I am still waiting for "ice" or diamonds to festoon the trees outside my domicile.
--

The Watercolor-Origami Universe

The Universe seems to me to be a watercolor done on paper which is then folded into an origami object. The folds are structure and time. 

The watercolor (or, watercolour, if you prefer) is the material universe, the origami process is the "process" of Alfred North Whitehead: it is the "Story".

This is an amalgam of what we used to call Materialism and Idealism.

Time does not exist other than as the folds in the origami object, each fold creating a new facet or aspect of the entity involved, just as each moment of time is a newer and older "me".

How do I create "story" within such a universe?

I am a part of the painting, and the moisture of the watercolor wets the amorphous fibers of the paper. Then, as the watercolor dries, the fibers dry out and contract, causing stresses to align fibers in various ways and making lines of contraction where the paper creases.

--

Cynicism

To be a cycnic is to try to place oneself on the outside a "story".
Those who are inside the story have hopes and happy endings, or they have despair and unhappy endings, but the cycnic is the person who stands back at and views everything from the standpoint of an all-seeing entity and judges that what people wish for in the story means nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Neither the cycnic nor the happy-enders nor the unhappy-enders have any proof of their beliefs, but the happy-enders are happier.

--

Tigers Beat Twins! 3 to 2!

A Mr. Inge, recently called back up from the farm system and batting .157 was up in the bottom of the ninth for the Detroit Tigers. The score was tied 2-2 and it was looking like extra innings.
I was at the game with my friend.

I had not paid much attention to baseball since 1994 or thereabouts. During the eighth inning I was looking from where we stood in the stands down on the fans below us, and there were numerous patrons wearing shirts with the names of players on.
One in particular was " INGE ", which I took for a joke meaning the playwright Inge. I thought there might be some people with "ODETTS" on theirs, or "ALBEE"... "WILLIAMS" would be good: there would be the ambiguity between "Ted" or "Tennessee".

So I enquire, and my pal, Mike, sez...

...and I do mean "sez"! He has kept up with baseball and has a familiarity, at least, with the players on the teams, whereas I only knew of the Tigers catcher, Avila... I knew he was a "cracker jack" player, too. That's about it.
But Mike was different. So being in a group of about 30,000 similarly minded baseball buffs for a couple of hours, Mike tended to get a case of "Subway Series"... which is what I call the tendency to talk like Leo Durocher when one explains the finer points of the game to the clueless.
It put me in mind of one of the cannier Dead End Kids - say, Whitey - trying to explain the complexities of urban life to his snobbish cousin - say, Percival, named after Percival Lowell, the astronomer -  from Boston whose "mater" had decided to visit Brooklyn on a one-day hop from the Cape for unexplained reasons....

...so Mike sez that Inge is either loved or hated. A great natural athlete, Mr. Inge has a dismal batting average which drove many of his erstwhile fans and allies to despair. In fact, he had been sent down to Toledo, the Tigers' AAA farm team, and had only recently been recalled for the push for the pennant.
There was more, but it was variation on this theme: sort of Beowulf had showed up at Hrothgar's Hall and had brought a hostess gift of the wrong vintage sword, and all the nobles and serfs now looked at him with considerable jaundice.

So Mike absents himself briefly after the Twins go down in the top of the ninth, comes back when the first two Tigers have gone down with two pitches, and up comes Mr. Inge. So I look and then rock back and forth a bit, wondering how long this game might last.
Mike says, "Are there two outs already?"
I nod.
He adds, "And Inge is up!"
I say "I think he's going to win it for them."
He says "More likely he'll strike out!"
And he did not really say that; he more snorted it... contemptuously... as a wild boar might snort contemptuously at, well, just about anything.
Less than forty seconds go by, bingo! Home run, game over. Mr. Inge is a hero again.


Moral:
Story is important and it is much stronger than people believe. Most people think Narrative is what chatterboxes do after the real, important, substantial... and MUTE!... stuff is done.
Not so.
The Inge story was Irony, an ironic reversal: just as we may reverse from riches to rags, we may turn from rags to riches. In essence, Horatio Alger wrote Irony, too, although we do not usually think of it that way. We usually reserve Irony for the fall from blessedness.

One hour before his home run, I had never even heard of Inge, but I took the story I had heard and made a reversal and a happy ending. Mike went with the already existing story of gloom and doom. Obviously, the Fates prefer happy endings, when they have gotten their fill of retribution!
--

Social Security and Medicare

It seems that Social Security and Medicare are to undergo treatment at the Frankenstein-Congressional-Presidential laboratory, according to this morning's NY Times. The Parties are ready to talk how to cut benefits rather than any increase in revenues.

So everything will be fixed upon the backs of the old and sick!

I may very well not vote in the next election to avoid the appearance of supporting either candidate if this is the route we are going to take.

I shall not say anything further at this point, but I am beyond anger.
--

The Dream Factory: A New Version of Flint, Michigan

 Anna Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory, Belle Isle, Detroit, Michigan

We seemed to be in Flint, Michigan. I have a feeling we were near the sight of the old "Chevy in the Hole" factory, which was not all that far from where Millard Saxton used to live in his house designed by Alden Ball Dow (you may look it up!). We had lost our car, or rather it had progressively diminished in stature, getting smaller and smaller, until it reached a point when it split into two motor bikes, like a cell replicating. We left the parking lot of the old Middle School - where we had attended some frivolous and forgettable function - through the far end of the parking lot which led through a service station, where various freight trucks parked in a irregular fashion, like hobo trucks behinds Wal-Mart in one of the less affluent neighborhoods. We followed a small white service truck.

The exit street dead ended within fifty feet and the truck turned. We continued straight over a grassy section where a street had once been, bisecting these residential blocks, but had been removed in the past, and now this grassy swath ran straight through, even though no one had removed the stop signs from the streets that perpendiculared into the one-time street: there were still four-way stops, even though the cross street was now a lawn covered walk.

We ended at a circular court amidst small hills, about 5 meters elevation, where the remains of an educational institution occupied half of the circular prominences. It had been a High School until recently, and now its windows were boarded up, blind as Oedipus at Kolonos of the Horses awaiting some blessing from the Eumenides, or the Fates...

On the other side of the circle street was a still flourishing conservatory with tropical flowers dimly visible through the windows. I told her to look at it, She did not seem to distinguish it at first. Then she, too, saw it. She had been looking at the higher level, but the conservatory was at street level and backed up to the hillock surrounding. It had a strange angularity to it, but we assumed that was a necessary of design to fit it into the area constricted by street and hill.

--
That is all of that dream.
This morning I discover Firefox has not only updated its miserable self, but has apparently played "52 pick up" with my bookmarks. I found the "Detroit Zoo" and the "Detroit Friends of Belle Isle" and the "Belle Isle Conservatory" sites in a second "Medicare" folder.
I opened them all up inadvertently and on the "Belle Isle Conservatory" site saw a picture of the ceiling of the Anna Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory on Belle Isle, Detroit, Michigan.

I have wondered whether to call such dreams "prescient", but that is probably a bit too much for many people to swallow, so I think I may call them dreams of "prior-imaging". (Note that most dreams of "Warning", or "Monitory" dreams would come under this heading of prior-imaging. The usual run of dreams made up from images of one's experiences are "anterior-imaging". I use the hyphen to indicate that we are talking Imaging equivalents to things such as "Present Tense" in Language.)

To reiterate - and I know I overemphasize things until I drive people crazy! - when we regard things like Prophecy - outside the privileged and peculiar realm of Religion - we are merely talking about Images and Languages and Times: Past, Present, and Future.

To wit, the main difference between my Prophecy about the fruits of Politics and my statement about my indisposition following my dinner of too many hot peppers is a distinction between the Future Tense in the one versus the Present Tense in the latter. Similarly, if Images are involved, prior-imaging versus anterior-imaging.
The "real" differences are sought elsewhere.

--

ps.
As I write this, I am being notified that yet another Firefox update is available!

Conservatism

I am a very traditional and conservative person.
What I am very much opposed to, however, is the Ignorance Inflated by Wrath and Intolerance which passes for Conservative thought in the USA.

The Dream Factory: Stories from Port Desespoir, Michigan

Within the strip of wetlands between the landscape and builders' supply and our plant property were two dead trees: one a young elm we called Gracey, the other an older Red Maple we named George. The other motley group of trees seemed to thrive in their fractal way, but these majestic ones seemed to fall victim to the noise and hub-bub around them. The wetlands were struggling, too. It was a small area caged by a fence on the old railroad property.

I looked around for old photos and films. The technology exists to rebuild the site, to photo-shop the reality and to refurbish George and Gracey, if only we could retrieve enough detail: then we would have not the infinite detail of reality, but we could emulate it, we could make it Mobius on itself, build a Klein Bottle topological film out of it and make pretend that what we had was endless!

So I went over to the yard next door and talked to the manager, who had an office next to the truck scales where they weighed the trucks in empty and weighed them out loaded with mulch, top soil, and what ever else they sold there... see if they had any digital records and images of the trees. He had a beard and was husky... affable and busy. He said he look into it. I never heard back. People just don't care about rescuing the past from itself.

Last time I saw him, he was one of the poor slobs rushing to get out of the old Pantages Theater/Shopping Mall which had been apparently scheduled for demolition, but nobody had posted the notices... nobody had told anyone, so the old Victorian structure was coming down around their ears as they rushed down the staircase!
I saw a portly banker jump out a side window and grab onto the portico of the building next door. He swung himself up with surprising ease for a big guy with a gut. His morning coat was open and I could see his gold vest with $ signs.
--

The Bonfire of the Inanities #2

 http://triplecrisis.com/the-sound-finance-and-the-fury/#more-4021

...once governments bailed out the financial sector, rather than guarantee that another crisis cannot occur by imposing severe restrictions on financial speculators, cuts in social spending are being imposed in both the US and Europe.  The elites in developed countries are certainly not letting this crisis go to waste.  In the US a few Republicans want to raise taxes, but on the poor! A financial crisis caused by the excessive borrowing of the private sector has been transformed into an opportunity to roll back the Welfare State.

--

Joey the Prophet

I have told this story before. I will repeat it because of its importance.

I worked with Joey for years. He became interested in a certain Bible reading group, and began to see signs of the End of Times everywhere in the Politics, the Weather, The Seismology, the Philosophies, the Sexual Mores around him. (Keep in mind this was 30 years ago or more!)
Joey was convinced that the End of Times was coming soon. He would refer to it in his conversation, even though his own behavior did not seem to be going under any "major overhaul": he still smoked, he drank alcohol, and he was an avid reader of skin magazines.

After about three years, things came to a climax: his wife had a serious stroke at a young age, leaving him to take care of her as well as their three kids. His life was in turmoil. After she recovered and had undergone rehabilitation, she divorced him, leaving him with custody.

Joey was right. He was focused and knew that "something evil this way comes", but like so many of us, he neglected the details. He focused too easily and too early on a script of radical change and upheaval that was quite wrong for him.

We all of us intuit the future.

Most of us leap too quickly into a set description and scenario of it, using ready-to-hand literary and religious tracts that do the heavy work of making the Intuition intelligible in language and imagery.

You have to do the work yourself.
That means that if the intuition is fearsome, you have to learn to cope with it, and not go running off to some totally inappropriate scenario of someone else's End of Times Follies. And this may be the most important reason to control Fear: to allow ourselves to write our own futures - whether they are filled with joy or suffering - we have to do it ourselves. That is the teaching of all our religious geniuses.
--

8 1/2: The Final Dance

I was asked about overcoming Fear, so I had to think more about it.
I had to go back through all the deep archives of my mind.

The Dance at the end of Fellini's film "8 1/2" is Triumph over Fear, and thus is Life's rejection of the Danse Macabre, or the Dance of Death, an icon of the Plague Years.  It is the response of the sunny Mediterranean to the cold north of "The Seventh Seal".

--

The Bonfire of the Inanities

I notice that CNN is sponsoring a Republican Party / Tea Party Debate sometime soon.

Will it feature Governor Christie debating Rep. Cantor on disaster relief?
Or will the Republicans and Tea Partiers be on the same side? Probably on the same side. Yet, there is a promise of all heck breaking loose and having Republican attacking Tea Partier. What could be more natural than a man or woman of sense and moderation being driven to the extreme of assaulting an ideologue of exasperating obtuseness?
--

Upbeat

I had a downbeat post this morning. Now I feel more upbeat... or beaten up. Anyway, I perused a book by someone named Mark Steyn about how everything is being destroyed, and Armageddon is a-coming, and the US of A is going to be going down for the count.
On the back jacket, there were positive blurbs from Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter.
Once I saw that, I knew it was tripe. Those two are nay-sayers because they do not like President Obama. They had nothing but praise for the trends of events that were ocurring pre-Obama, such as out of control budgets, wars fought off-budget and on-the-cuff, and loss of manufacturing.

There is infinite detail.
We can see good and evil by the bucketful everywhere we look. We can see bad, even when things are going good. It takes no brains to be downbeat when things are down... look at me this morning! It takes brains and guts and perseverance to set one's course to better things when things are down, and similarly it takes guts to call a spade a spade when our country is doing stupid and vile things in times which seem good, such as the things Mr. Cheney is now striving to rehabilitate with his own book.

We have to have the strength to switch our focus from the siren song of destruction to the symphony of creation and life. Fear is a powerful focus. It fascinates and pervades the body and soul.  It is an ancient Medusa whose glance turns men to stone!
Do not look the Gorgon in the eye, lest you be turned to to stone, to a pillar of salt... lest we become rigid with unnatural panic.
--

On Viewing Fellini's "8 1/2"

I have probably viewed this film more than thirty times over the years since it came out in 1963. As I have stated elsewhere, sometimes it takes my mind a great deal of time to process the tons of information contained within a film: sometimes it takes me years.

Since I do not possess the discipline of a Historian and the ability to restrict myself to events and influences that lead up to the film, but on the contrary I allow my memory and interpretation of the film to change with me as the years go by, it may take some time for me to state a final opinion; actually, it seems that I probably never attain a final statement about a film, nor a book, for that matter... nor for a person.

In 1993, Chicago Sun-Times film reviewer Roger Ebert wrote that "despite the efforts of several other filmmakers to make their own versions of the same story, it remains the definitive film about director's block".

Wikipedia, Article on "8 1/2"

I am amazed at what film reviewers write, but they have deadlines to meet, and they do not have the luxury of holding their review up for forty years while they mull over a film.
Truly, as Mr. Ebert says, the film is exactly about "director's block"; approximately it is also about "writer's block", a dry period in a painter's life, a lack of motivation and inspiration for a poet...
I think it may even be extended to a general inability to do one's work with joy, a general malaise, a depression born of a sense of futility due to one's inability to speak or sing or depict or express one's sense of life: every man's sense of alienation and lack of joy; a block in our lives. The film's range of meaning has now become the vast wasteland of modern life.

We experience an immense "Government Block" and "Community Block" at the present time.

I experience an enormous Pain and Loss as I watch our way of life destroy itself.
I feel as if I am standing in Cairo, standing in the Mokattam Hills... I am looking at the limestone and marble buildings in the City of the Dead.

--
note:
The City of the Dead in Cairo is a vast cemetery the tombs of which are now inhabited by many dispossessed people.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_the_Dead_%28Cairo%29

Governor Perry and the Inconsequentiality of Government

As recently as May, Texas Governor Perry and the two Republican Senators from Texas were wailing about not receiving enough federal aid for their wildfires.

Now Gov. Perry is going to have to miss a Tea Party Sleep-Over at Jim DeMint's in South Carolina and go back home to Texas, because the drought drags on and the fires continue.
He may have to beg the Federal Government - which he wants to makes "inconsequential" in our lives - to provide aid "on the sly" so he may maintain his Tea Party bona fides, and to avoid seeming to make government awfully consequential and important to the welfare of Texans.

Irony; reversal; pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall... unless it rains soon. Welcome to the crowd of the rest of us shlubs, Governor Perry.

--

9/11

In 2004 a Bush aide (widely believed to be Karl Rove) chided a New York Times journalist for working in the "reality-based community", meaning people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do".

Karl Rove is a fine individual and I do not mean to single him out, but he provides an exemplary display of being out of touch with reality in this attributed quote. Ever since 9/11 - and quite possibly for a while before - we have been out of touch, and it is getting worse.

For a long time I was very negative in my outlook, while everyone else slapped a big smile on their faces and marched off to Iraq... a war not really won and barely paid for. It's easy to be negative: look how many people have picked it up now! Everywhere one turns, one may hear a doom and gloom from someone making comments in the media.
Now I like to emphasize all the positive possibilities.

It takes no brains, strength, nor insight to be negative when everyone is negative.
It takes even less brains to be mindlessly positive about very dubious adventures.

If we are going to memorialize 9/11, we had best memorialize the firemen and police and disaster responders and forget the horrors... we have more suffering ahead of us, so I see no reason to dwell on our past suffering. And we have better not memorialize the Rove attitude of being totally in some different universe from the rest of mankind.
--

The Morality of the Extended Mind

Most of the world's great religions have done a pretty good job with individuals and their morality.

However, they have uniformly failed when we consider Group behavior and morality.

As difficult as it may be to find one's personal "savior" or definition of The Holy, the only shared metaphors and attitudes we possess with others of our religion are Coercive, Violent, and Xenophobic.

The Future is the redemption of the Extended Mind of Mankind.
--

Holidays

 

A blessed  holiday

--

Blind Poker

There were no jobs added in August and people are surprised. The markets are down, and I think it is time that anyone who thinks everything is really hunky-dory and keen ought to get out of the markets, so every time bad news comes down the pike - and there has been a whole gaggle of bad newsies walking down the pike... resembling the soldiers of Napoleon struggling back to Paris after a sojourn in Moscow - we do not have to watch them all run for the exits.

The History of our times - we here and now, in the USA and all around the world - is in front os us on the poker table.

We like to pretend that we are playing Draw Poker, and if we do not like our hand, we can draw a couple of cards after the first round of betting is done; and we'll do the same thing after the second round. New cards are our new and better ideas: new ideologies! new ways of doing things! everything will be better if we all just (a) have common sense, or (b) run government like a business, or (c) don't compromise or negotiate!

The problem is that the poker game is a Blind Five Card... all the cards are dealt out, face down, and we are turning them over one at a time, very, very slowly, and betting. We are turning them so slowly it'll take 10 years.

The cards are dealt. We may as well be optimistic and give each other and the future the best we can!

--

China's Military

Since China has commissioned an aircraft carrier, there has been talk over military and army and navy type stuff, and whether the good old US of A is top dog still, yet, or even now, and how if you're not the lead dog, the scenery never changes.
I do not think the PLA of China is a volunteer army.
So, I think there will be real concern when the political types start talking about re-instituting the draft and service to one's country, even when there is no war going on.

--
ps.
I expect this to happen within the next few years, partially to reduce the unemployed ranks of young men and women.

Capitol Hill Has Eyes... and Eric Cantor's Glasses!

From FrumForum:

Eric Cantor has announced that regulatory reform of the Clean Air Act and labor laws will top the GOP agenda when Congress resumes its work. As far as these proposals go, baring the National Labor Relations Board from restricting where employers can locate (a key component of economic freedom), and delaying potentially burdensome Clean Air Act regulations (something the economy probably can’t afford right now) are worthy enough.
The problem is that, like much of what the Tea Party dominated House has done so far, this substitutes style and anger for real substance. The NLRB, although entirely wrong in trying to stop Boeing from relocating within the United States, is not the major reason that job growth is sluggish. Potential future Clean Air Act regulations, no matter how poorly designed, aren’t killing jobs today.

You would imagine that Mr. Cantor, wishing to eliminate the deficit, would want to address the exponentially escalating costs of Health Care in this country, and do it by some other means than merely slashing benefits for the elderly on Medicare!
Apparently, he does not.
--
http://www.frumforum.com/reg-reform-meh

Statistics and Storms

 

The image is from Google Earth, and the yellow figure is Tropical Depression #13, the orange to the lower right is tropical storm Katia, and the red in the center near the top is an extratropical storm 450 miles southeast of Nova Scotia forming in a place in the ocean we do not usually expect such things.

Extratropical storms rely on the release of energy when cold and warm air interact, and not upon the heat of the surface water of the ocean, as the more familiar tropical storms (cyclonic storms) do.

I include a picture from October 2010 of an extratropical which formed over the USA:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=46662

Meteorologists get excited about the storm because it set a record for the lowest pressure (not associated with a hurricane) measured over land in the continental United States.

I don't recall the storm - we have so many of them here - but I find it interesting that we are in the "black swan" area of the normal distribution again; we might not be seeing more storms, but we are finding that the averages are shifting towards the extremes, and what used to be very unusual is now merely a bit odd.
Think about it: we have experienced many "black swan" or statistical outliers over the past 3 years, not only in weather, but in our everyday affairs. Now certain presidential candidates would say that a bunching up of the data towards the outlier area of the normal distribution means that God sez we should vote for Bachmann. I won't go that far, but it does give one pause.
--

Tea Party Problem # 1

The big problem for Radical Republicans is that they are just plain nasty and cruel and proud of it, like House Majority leader Cantor, who said that disaster relief must wait on matching cuts.

http://www.talkradionews.com/news/2011/9/1/gop-gov-christie-slams-cantors-idea-to-negotiate-hurricane-a.html

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie warned House GOP Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia today not to hold hostage the states’ need for Federal Emergency Management Agency aid money to another brutal budget battle like the country endured with the market-tanking debt ceiling negotiations.

“You’re going to turn it into a fiasco like that debt-limit thing where you’re fighting with each other for eight or nine weeks and you expect the citizens of my state to wait? They’re not gonna wait, and I’m going to fight to make sure that they don’t,” Christie said putting the Tea Party-driven House on notice that its slash and gut politics will not be tolerated.

“I don’t want to hear about the fact that offsetting budget cuts have to come first before New Jersey citizens are taken care of,” the boisterous New Jersey chief executive barked.

--

AT&T and T-Mobile

I have a T-Mobile phone and have had one for 8 years. When my original went belly up, I took over my daughter's; she had graduated to a Blackberry, but I was satisfied with the old phone. Of course, her display had a teddy bear on it, which I have not yet figured out how to change, but so what?

My wife has AT&T.

Comparison? T-Mobile is vastly superior. I have always had a pay as you go plan, and it has worked well to keep me from gobbling up minutes (I only talk at length with a few people, like my Arabic teacher, and you can tell she must have a heck of a plan, because she will just talk and talk...). My minutes are good for a year, and that is better than AT&T would ever dream. I think AT&T  has minutes good for 90 days.

If the merger goes through, T-Mobile will be changed adversely; AT&T will not be changed for the better. It is the nature of American Capitalism 2011 that a blending of Profit and Customer Service is like mixing oil and water.

Keep T-Mobile mobile!
--

Gulf of Mexico Aftermath... Again

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/332971/title/Science_%2B_the_Public__Eels_point_to_suffocating_Gulf_floor

Substantial portions of the affected Gulf weren’t just low in oxygen, but virtually devoid of it from the surface to the seafloor. And researchers could literally smell the problem, notes Nancy Rabalais, executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, based in Chauvin. Where oxygen loss occurs at the seafloor, she reports, the sediment gurgles up hydrogen sulfide — a gas that carries the stench of rotten eggs to the surface.

Various ongoing concerns.
--

Political Accelerants 2

http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2011/08/political-accelerants.html

I was asked if I were drawing an exact and prophetic picture of the future under Radical Republicans, such as Ms. Bachmann.

I answered, or course, no, I was not, because the future is extremely flexible and malleable and can be molded into an almost infinity of different shapes. What I described was one such form: a form in which the anti-democratic tendency combines with the political accelerant of hatred... in this case expressed as hatred against Muslims, and not as hatred against racial groups.

Keep your eyes open and be involved! Watch which way the winds blow! I have said for years that there is a group that has a vision of the way things should be - an absolute ideology - and they have chosen us as the generation of lab rats upon which to proof their beliefs!
They seek to prove their theories upon our backs, no matter how much suffering they add to our lives, for in the view of their ideology, all suffering of other people is merely proof that those poor souls are already East of Eden... while they themselves remain in the Garden, the elect, the elite, the chosen!
--

Republican Disaster

Rep. Eric Canter has appeared on FOX News and affirmed that cuts in spending must be found before money is made available to victims of Hurricane Irene. In other words, if it goes like the debt ceiling debate, the people on the East Coast may wait 3 or 4 months, and then receive something insufficient.

--

Political Accelerants

Anti-semitism has a long history as a political accelerant, working like gasoline or kerosene to ensure that the fire of hatred and, thus, the political views which espouse the hatred, are spread quickly and effectively.

The Center for American Progress has issued a report on Hatred of Islam (the term used by them - and by everyone - is "Islamophobia" which is a nonce word made up for cable tv that I really cannot bring myself to use).

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/08/islamophobia.html

Rep. Bachmann is cited for her gifts to the bonfire of the inanities and hatred in general, as well as FOX News, which is not too shocking, since they have already as much as admitted they are an organ that advances a political agenda... the fact that the agenda might contain the roots of fascism does not strain credulity in these times of dishonor and disrepute.

Many political movements have used the crowd appeal and the motivation of hatred of some target group to get the masses going. It was an important component of Nazism, although it was not so much in Italian Fascism nor Spanish Falangism.
However, everybody has somebody they hate, and many political movements try and use that hatred as a prime motivator, and it works very well.

As I see it, we have the Radical Right and the Radical Republicans with:

1) an opposition to democratic processes as displayed by their refusal to negotiate and discuss, showing their essential authoritarianism, and

2) a large part of this group displaying different types of Focus of Hatred politics as a primary motivator for their adherents.

By the time we have exhausted our catalogue of their infamy, we shall have lost everything.
--

Hurricane Aftermath

Are the Radical Republicans insisting that any aid to communities following Hurricane Irene insisting - as they did do after the tornado destroyed Joplin, Missouri - be balanced by an equal amount of cuts?

That still makes me mad. Bob Cumming's grandfather, who flew the mail in Joplin, would have made mincemeat of 'em!
--

Capitol Hill Has Eyes 5: Bachmann Prophesies!

 

Hurricane Irene was, according to the Prophet Bachmann, a warning from God that our politics must change. I agree with her, but I think she is the Jezebel that needs to be removed.

A puny little hurricane obviously would not transgress the solemn agreement God made with Noah, so I suppose we could not sue God for breach of contract.
How small was Irene? It was so small that my daughter's Maryland community did not lose power, and that place loses power when somebody flushes the toilets in the City building!

I suppose Glenn Beck sees the hand of the Almighty in weather events, too. If so, then why do these dolts oppose the notion of Climate Change? Climate Change for a Bachmann and a Beck would surely be equivalent to the Voice of the Lord! So by denying the chaos of climate change, they deny their own best prophecies

Why do we look to Al Roker and The Weather Channel anyway for our Eschatology study of the Last Days? Why don't we look closer to home? Why don't we look at the fact that suddenly the Red States (Republican and conservative and Southern) have a higher divorce rate, according to the Times over the weekend? Divorce is the one offense dealing with sex mores that is definitely condemned in the New Testament... there is no mention of hurricanes at all.
Back in aught-3, I thought that the incredible arrogance we demonstrated in our rush to war in Iraq was a warning from God: Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. As it turned out, that prophesy was pretty close.
Nowadays it's all earthquakes and hurry-canes! Might as well read The Farmers' Almanac as The Bible. What kind of coat are the woolly caterpillars sportin', Michelle? Any word from above there?
--

Ade Ileke 27: Linhas na Amazônia

linhas na Amazônia...
gravuras dos deuses antigos?
Do Rio Bravo à Boca do Acra
há enchentes e ameaças de dilúvios.
os deuses voltam para casa.
 --
Lines in the Amazon lands...
etchings of the ancient gods?
From Rio Bravo to Boca do Acra
there are floods and threats of deluge.
The gods are coming home.

pix: Google Earth

Does Mind Matter?

Do a thought experiment and imagine a Universe where there is no Intelligence: nothing to perceive the physical processes, nothing to record them, no narrative of the passage of time, no histories, no sciences; there is merely the "stuff" of Science if Intelligence were ever to exist.

Is such a Universe possible? Would Matter exist in that way without Mind or Intelligence?

The answer is actually No, it does not nor would not exist in such a way.

The Thought Experiment of a Material Universe without Mind is itself an element of the Universe that has Mind. The Universe without Intelligence is part now - since we have just made the thought experiment! - of our history of Intelligence. And Universe without Narrative is obviously part of the Universe of Narration.

In other words, the "Material Universe Without Mind" is a concept that cannot be conceptualized, else it disappears.
--

Gold

Olaf Stapledon somewhere writes about a primate society of the future which exhausts itself in the frenzied pursuit of essentially useless bright and shiny metals, and they melt back into the undifferentiated mass of primates from which they sprang.

He also wrote in the same book about the frenzied use of fossil fuels by mankind, mostly in aeroplanes and ritual flying, but he was spot on about the eventual depletion of fuels and the baleful effects this would have on the present and the future.

Getting back to the apes and their pursuit of Gold and Shiny Metals: as much as we have inveighed against Wall Street working at phantom financial instruments that add nothing to the "real" economy, we do not seem to mind that Gold adds nothing to the economy, either.
We are so used to phoniness that real investment eludes the majority of us. Gold is a bright, shiny, and essentially worthless metal, unless you need its malleability or the fact that it does not tarnish.

This business of phony investment seems to be so ingrained that only a catastrophe may change it. When a society values economically worthless things over items that have real value and contribute to the betterment of society.... well. draw your own conclusions.
--

The Other Side of Fear...

Wisdom is on the reverse side of Fear... it is the side B, the side rarely played.

This side is the side of Miracle.

I really cannot explain it beyond this.
--

Pure Ideology is the Death of Democracy

The Club for Growth sez:

http://www.frumforum.com/lets-primary-this-rino-reagan

... America would be better off served by somebody like Michele Bachmann. She is ideologically pure. 


To be ideologically pure is to remain "chaste" in the face of differing opinions; it is to refuse to compromise and negotiate.

Any politics that does not listen, negotiate, and compromise, must by its very nature cycle between eras of violence and discontent, for the only way that parties "out of power" can make themselves heard is by acts of violence or separation and withdrawal.

Consider the Fascists, the Bolsheviks, the Nazis... all insisted on ideological purity and they all realized they were enemies of Democracy, and they made it plain that they were above and better than feeble Democracy that cannot accomplish anything because it was always locked in confrontation. Back after World War I, the democracy in Italy could not agree on things, so it needed Mussolini to effect even such mundane things as "making the trains run on time".

We are not viewing dysfunction in Washington, D.C.; we are viewing an alien ideology and philosophy which seeks to actively subvert a Democratic process. It seeks to destroy the Government by refusing to allow revenue increases in a sane long-term proposal to reduce deficits; the aim of this alien ideology is the death of the country as we know it and the introduction of some new version that is "cleansed" of the bad elements of a "promiscuous" Democracy.
--

Reverse Darwinism

I has been pointed out that Tea Partiers are not Evolution deniers; they are proponents of "Reverse Evolution"; i.e., survival of the goofiest.

I'll be darned.
--

Am I "Frum" Canada?

Someone asked me why I read FrumForum. And why, in the name of all that is holy, do I have a link to it? Why do I not have a link to a liberal outlet, for example, and balance things out?

Well, Frum is a conservative from Canada...

I was at University in Canada, and I spent 6 of my most formative years living in Canada for 9 months of the 12, and spending the remaining 3 visiting my Canadian girlfriends. All of my friends from that time (who still speak to me!) are Canadian, and my wife's family on the maternal side comes from Quebec. My brother-in-law Bill, God rest his soul, has a place on Lac Achegan, near St. Hippolyte, Quebec, that his boys still own - even though they now neglect to send me invites.

There is a Canadian way of looking at things that is extremely different from the American way, and is also quite different from the British way.

Everyone that has been touched by Canada experiences things differently, and they never lose their sense of Kaskeyihtamowin... their "nostalgia", their painful longing (and that is what 'nostalgia' means in Homer) for their home, for Canada.
Love America as I do, Canada is my Godfather and Godmother.

--
note:   kaskeyihtamowin is a Cree language word.
-

Ah! In My Youth... #2

Who'd of thought:

we would ever see an Anti-Science wing of politics become influential in the Republican Party, starting back in the days when George W. Bush, clueless in Gaza, used to allow faith-based administrators into Science programs; it is a far cry from the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, when Science was an important part of public policy.
Other countries continue the quest into Space. We shall be there, acting as their faith-based janitors.

--

Reprise: Night People

I am repeating this post from 2009 as it fits in well with my post "Image of Obsession: Old People in Exile"
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2011/08/image-of-obsession-older-people-in.html
on August 20, 2011.

The old people come out at night. The have become feral and feline, sleeping during the day. Night is not a metaphor for the darkness of the soul anymore, not the evil of pitch black, but the silhouettes of night have become the archetypes of all things.

We, the old, stalk the shadows of the city on our quest for the Virgin Mary's bicycle parts.

The things of the earth lose their detail, the thorns of life that prick us, bleed us; the day people want to help - so they say; they want to minister to us, to provide medicals. We call them "leeches", like in old times; they want to leech us to whatever icon they have of old people should-being. They task us. They harry us like dogs chase the fox. Their old-age homes are dungeons run by their Ministry of Love.

They leech and suck our blood with their taxes, and their wars, and their guns and violence.

They speak in a cenobite tongue of the most profound profanity. We hear their blasphemous language, which they find comical, and it tears at us. All words are used: every vulgar profanity, every curse gets a laugh.

Discourse is invective.

The old word for conversation was "intercourse". Intercourse of days is now vile: it is either violent, or it is a graffitti on the walls for everyone to gaze at, hard colors on concrete drawing tears from the tender eyes of the day people...eyes used to Death and Cable.

We drive at night and see the blackwork buildings sentinel on silent streets. We watch the Sunset Channel with its documentaries of nightime streets, where you can actually see the streets and sidewalks; they are not obscured by the opprobrious burden of multitudes of people, walking like a living carpet of many-coloured knots, woven at random seeming along the night-time weft we inhabit. At night, the weft is empty...Penelope-like, the ragged carpet of care is unwoven every night, and we wait for the Master Weaver to come...

The day is the time of massacre of the two-year old boys, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed and busy with their toys.

Christmas was at night, our loves, our joys...

Night is the holy time, when we mend broken hearts with bicycle parts, straighten spokes, adjust the brakes, pump up the tires; night time, priapic with meaning and engorged with arts!

pics 1,3,4: arnold pouteau
pic 2: broken hearts & bicycle parts

Ah! In My Youth...

Who'd of thought of:

a major political party having the majority of its presidential candidates not believing in the Theory of Evolution?
--

My Goddaughter

Goddaughter Throws Frisbee At Pontiff

Elsewhere I have mentioned my travelling goddaughter and her uncanny propensity for tossing frisbees at people. She is a member of an Ultimate Frisbee team (Manchester United Tossers, or Ann Arbor Chuckers or something like that) and to them it is equivalent to a "G'day, mates!"

The photo below was from when she was on the Amazon River causing wonderment among the locals:

Recently she was in Rome:

If Benedict calls, I'm not here!

American Sign Language and "A Stedman Caters Of Crows"

This post was to be about using Sign Language in employing Venery (definition #2 below!) terms, but I'm not sure it ever came fully together. That is a sad fact, but I'm sure it will be taken care of by some other brainy, signing type.

Venery comprises two arts: (1) the art of love, and (2) the art of giving names to teams and squads of animals. I am talking of the second. If I were to be involved with the first, I would indeed be "just talking" and/or "blowing smoke" as I did so.

An example of a term of venery would be a "pride" of lions. There very often is a conscious effort to do synecdoche in the venery term: a part standing for a whole, as in our example, the lion's proud bearing is extended and changed to mean a group of lions.
Of course, there is a lot of the joker and trickster in all this, and good venery terms should bring a smile to the face, a good example being a "rash" of dermatologists.
For other example, we see that The Periodic Englishman has a post titled Like A Murder Of Crows - That's All  http://cricketpage.blogspot.com/2008/11/like-murder-of-crows-thats-all.html 

The word "murder" in the title is a venery term for a team or herd or whatever of crows. Since "murder" is a bit too "zero at the bone" for a whole bunch of us, I tried my hand at it, but the best I could do was the latter part of the post title above.
A "stedman caters" is a type of English bell change ringing, and I have heard it used in memorials, so there you have it. The crow is a somber and sullen bird, even when dipping the old beak into a festive road-kill gazpacho.
Well, I never was one for the brisk, light, and breezy. I prefer my attempt over "murder", since "stedman caters" sounds a good deal like "Scatman Crothers", an actor, whom I enjoyed, and a "scatman crothers" of crows is not too bad, either.

There are other possibilities. Arabic has a phrase: slower than Noah's crow which suggests other routes. I think of Noah's crow as a guy taking advantage of the situation: there Noah is, water all around, no place to go, totally castaway and isolated... except for the winged breeds. They can just fly away.
Of course, crows, being crows, would milk this opportunity for everything it's worth, neglecting the fact that sooner or later, the flood would recede, and the slow, cud-chewing bovines would again rule the world of Hamburgers and Light.

This post actually was to deal with signing among the deaf. There is the possible "venery" term : a hush of deafs, or a hush of hearing impaireds. Personally, I think "hush" is becoming over-used, being as it is already used in the well known "a hush of ushers", which usage seems to be the definitive usage, according to H.W.Fowler, who spoke of the officious blighters who "ushed" the chapel in his youth, and went about with their index fingers held to their thin, pale, manta-ray-like lips shushing all the lads.

Signing has always been a very sensual experience in my part of the world.  I mean, the utter joy of the flow of words from a good speaker - or signer - added to the fluid gestures... and if she plays the acoustic guitar afterwards, so much the better. I do not mean to imply anything here. I just happened to have delved into the joys of hearing-impaired intimacies in my youth.
I was, indeed, magna cum gallaudet for a brace of years.
--

The Central Bank and The "New" Wall Street Journal

Read it there:
http://www.frumforum.com/nice-central-bank-you-have-here#more-102030

and

http://www.frumforum.com/time-to-downgrade-the-journals-editorial-colum#more-101814
--

To The Climate Deniers

Bertolt Brecht

Truly, I live in dark times!

The guileless word is folly. A smooth forehead

Suggests insensitivity. The man who laughs

Has simply not yet had

The terrible news.

What kind of times are they, when

A talk about trees is almost a crime

Because it suggests silence about so many horrors?

Bertolt Brecht, To Those Born Later

--

The Future Is Not Fixed

An important thing to learn is that it is impossible - absolutely impossible! - to talk to God.

Once you learn this fact, you discover that you may talk with God.

This leads you to your first understanding of how Irony - or Reversal - works in the scheme of things.

Similarly, you will soon learn that you can see far into the future, but the future is infinitely flexible and can be changed at a moment's notice, for the future is filled with potential Reversals, and all it takes to change it is a change in the hearts of mankind!

That's why the future seems so determinate and unchanging, not because it is a rolling rock whose momentum will cause it to overwhelm us, but because our hearts are so dull and sluggish and refuse to make even a little change.

Wisdom is not discovering Hardship and Fear and believing it to be forever. Wisdom is finding the other side of Fear...

--

La Grande Illusion

I saw La Grande Illusion on Turner Classic Movies the other night, and I recorded it, and so far have watched it twice. It was made in 1934 (or thereabouts) by Jean Renoir. Jean Gabin was a lead in it. It seems to have been Jean Gabin day at TMC. Pretty good stuff.
It is a very good film about war, and if you watch it, you will readily pick out scenes which were bodily lifted into other films, like Casablanca and The Bridge Over the River Kwai.

What caught my interest was the fact that Captain Boeldieu, a member of the aristocracy, was pessimistic about the place of his class in the future. He apprehended that after this bloodletting, things would change, and the privileged class would sort of waste away.
The film was set in World War I, and was a creation of the mentality of those who lived through that time.

I mentioned that I had been reading Mary Roberts Rinehart's murder mystery, The Yellow Room, which was published in 1945, and was a World War II creation. Similarly, the rich and privileged were sensed to be passing away after the present bloodletting. Carol Spencer, the main character, muses on how different things will be after the war, when the privileges her dowager mother is used to will continue their erosion, which had been started by the rationing and shortages of war.

Now once again we face a privileged class: the 5% of the population wherein most of the wealth is concentrated. Shall we once again face some cataclysm and general bloodletting? Will it be war, civil war, or oppression?
I do not know, but it seems that our Capitalistic way of life is cycling through similar scenarios every generation, and there are plenty of warnings, but I guess the overall message is that we are too stupid to see them, for it may well be that concentration of Wealth and Power in the hands of the Few may not merely be injustice and rapacity, but instead may be a symptom of a cancerous disease rampant through the fabric of the Body Social!

The dynamics of history are not Capitalism nor Socialism. The driving force is nothing we have been able to put our finger on. But the stories are there in front of us: Pride goes before the Fall. And all the violence and bloodletting are just the murderous implements that are used by a people who know no other way to conduct themselves when their lives are out of joint.

Over and over, the bitter ironies play out, because we cannot grasp the need to avoid being put in the position where a sudden reversal will wreck our lives.
--

Blue Heron

The Blue Heron is my totem animal. Most of the time I see him, he has nothing much to say. He is searching for food.

So I go on and leave him to his hunt. You cannot force meaning. But you should not ignore meaning, either. We have those two problems: we force meaning where there is none, and where there is something, we are too busy to attend to it.

Those powers are not like roses that you can stop and smell. The power in the universe - if you mean to pay attention - demands a chunk of your life.

--

Veritable Cinema

If you read this blog, you are used to my heavy-handed use of films for just about anything: I use them as my logic, my inspiration, my references, and my whipping boy. I use films like slate: throw them down as stepping stones on the wet ground to get from Point A to Point B. I disregard them like Schopenhauer's Causality Tram... once I get to Point B, I dismiss the means of my transport, and send them packing back to the archives.

Now, if you wish top read an account of film done finely and insightfully, try this review and discussion of Ozu's films:
 
http://oliverlunn.blogspot.com/2011/02/great-paradox-of-ozus-masterpiece.html

--

Image of Obsession: Older People in Exile

 Fahrenheit 451 Monorail Scene

An Image of Future

I have been obsessed by Images and complexes of Images all my life. Their vividness has interfered with my ability to function at some times. For most of my life, they were just nonsense Images, similar to OCD behavior maybe, not quite as strong, not quite as compelling... maybe. Since the turn of the century, however, these Images have taken on more reality and seem to have been forerunners of the images we see in the daily news.
One of the Images that have beset me throughout the last 40 years has been that of old people gathered into their own communities of exile, living out their days apart from a society which does not want them. Over time it became a mimicry of the final scene in Fahrenheit 451 : Oskar Werner reciting and memorizing a forbidden book, walking with Julie Christie, surrounded by the other old people who recited the forbidden books they had memorized; as the camera pulled back, snow began to fall.

It also took the form of an elderly Lord of the Flies, and at times a Swiss Family Robinson combined with Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome... and every day we recite "the Tell", the story of who we once were and where we came from.

There is a sense of having escaped into a refuge; it is a hard life, but better than the one we (yes, "we"!) escaped from, and there is a good life somewhere in the Future!

From Beyond Thunderdome:

Time counts and keeps countin', and we knows now finding the trick of what's been and lost ain't no easy ride. But that's our trek, we gotta' travel it.
And there ain't nobody knows where it's gonna' lead. Still in all, every night we does the Tell, so that we 'member who we was and where we came from...
And we lights the city... for all of them that are still out there. 'Cause we knows there come a night, when they sees the distant light, and they'll be comin' home.

I am beginning to see the Image become Reality in the News.

 

Monorail Trash being used to Shelter the Homeless

--
pix
http://oliverlunn.blogspot.com/2010/12/british-landscape-in-frenchmans-film.html
http://zapatopi.net/blog/?post=200412114840.french_monorail_trash

Old Posts

Over time, Blogger has had some issues which have caused all of my older posts (and I do not know where the dividing point is)to have lost all paragraph separation, so everything is run together in one paragraph.

Sorry. I'll try to fix some.

--

Literary America

"The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer."
D. H. Lawrence


I had this quote on a post about Fight Club, and I never felt entirely comfortable with it... until now, that is.
Having read part of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, I see that it is spot on, at least to our souls. The book deals with  KGB sadistic rapists, bisexual girls with fetishes being raped and brutalized, and evil psychiatrists who - by the way - are pedophiles.

What a glorious Boschean depiction of Hell! And how much we enjoy it, turning the book into a phenomenal best seller! What a thrill it must be to read it!

I thought it juvenile... nasty juvenile... juvenile of the dark side, and I threw it away from me and returned it to the library, for I think it bad luck to leave such items within one's house.

The essential American reader's soul is hard, isolate, and a killer.
We are what we create with consciousness. Please stop creating echoes of evil within yourselves.

--

Evil

Evil does not require the stereotypical expressions of actors portraying villains. It does not require harsh laughter, sneers, icy genius, darkened rooms; evil can be bright and sunny and just as normal as that guy next door who would not hurt a fly.
Evil may be eight kids on a camping trip to the cabin of the uncle of one of them, and there may be no escaped lunatic killers lurking nearby, nor any mutant sharks in the lake. Just a sunny day and friends. Good and evil are aniconic: they have no real depictions. They are real choices of real people and are as ordinary as the morning toast.

--

Sand Dune Therapy

For my birthday, we decided to go to The Pinery Provincial Park located at the southern end of Lake Huron, about 33 miles ENE of Sarnia, Ontario.

It is all about sand dunes, man! Just as there are enormous sand dunes in Michigan on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, there are dunes and sand on the eastern shore of Lake Huron. There are nine beach areas in the park, and the young girl at the entrance did not give me a senior discount, saying it was reserved for Ontario seniors.  However, she did not give me a map of the facility, either, so I think she was merely incompetent. I am going to write to the proper department anyway.
I have to complain a lot to Parks departments. I suppose it is all due to budget cuts. Last year in Maryland there was one that suckered me out of my money at the entrance, leaving it for me to find out after I drove in that nothing was actually available on that day, and, by the way, thanks for the eight bucks!
Using the telephone number on a sign at the entrance, I managed to get hold of the part-time manager while he was eating lunch. He was taking a break from selling real estate, his full time job, and expressed considerable sorrow that I felt short-changed. He gave me an address to write to ask for my eight dollars back.

Getting back to The Pinery, I found that after a day of sand-surfing up and down the dunes, the next day that the ligaments and muscles in my legs felt better than they had in months and possibly years. I had feared re-straining a ligament, but discovered upon waking there was a sense of youthful wholeness I had forgotten ever to have possessed, leg-wise. (I had a full six weeks off from jogging due to the ligament in my right knee, and was now slowly working back into running again.)

I remember runners that used to train for the Olympics by running on beaches and sand. I think they were New Zealanders, or Aussies... it was a memory from a long time ago. People probably still do it. It could have been the swimming, too: the movement of the legs against the slightly resistant medium of the water.
It could have been both things. And it could have also been sun and clean air.

We had ended up on the dog beach. We do not own a dog. There were many well-trained dogs that were a pleasure to see. There was no inconvenience whatsoever to anyone... except for the fact that just before we were going to leave, a golden retriever caught a frisbee in the water and stopped to do his business right there... in the water.
The owner went through the motions: he held the bag up where everyone within eye-shot could see that he did indeed pick up after his dog (or "stoop and scoop" as they say in Toronto). He stood at ground zero and surveyed the scene with intent. But he showed no inclination to step into the water and aggressively deal with the situation. As the waves broke upon the beach, there was enough turbidity that he could not see the object he wished to take care of, and, being a normal bloke, he did not want to go thrashing around blindly and run the risk of stepping on the blasted pile.
Which, of course, was the entire point for the rest of us. Or, I think it was. Perhaps I was alone in this. This was the dog beach, after all, and perhaps the major portion of the clientele was much more blase to what I took to be serious social gaffes.
I do not think that I have never seen a dog do anything like that in my entire life, and perhaps, being a hunting dog, this dog may have been trained to go in the water so as to not interrupt his hunting chores of looking for ducks and charging through the bullrushes to retrieve them. And believe me, I have seen a lot of dogs romping in the water, too, in my life near lakes and rivers.

Oh, well. We also went to a ghastly restaurant in Grand Bend. I cannot understand why a restaurant that is within 10 miles of a maple syrup producing farm feels that it has to provide one with a container of "pancake syrup" to accompany its grisly pancakes. It is a syndrome associated with vacation areas, I guess. They have a knack for sucking the life from food.
The antique stores were pretty good, and everything was enjoyable. Just "caveat" swimmer on the doggie beach, and always "caveat" eaters in restaurants: beware of the things one knows are fraught with slapstick and enjoy the time.
--

Ade Ileke 26: Famille Féerie

la mère était Brillante, qui en Arcadie a vécu;
le père était Arcas, éloigné et disparu;
les enfants, dix en nombre:
Maia, Gaia, Ciel, Thermidor
Halcyon, Marin, Ambrée
Le Feu, Le Gel, et Victor;
en Arcadie ils ont vécu,
en Arcadie, où oeillets de poète ont poussé.

--
the mother was Shining, who lived in Arcadia
the father was Arcas, far away and disappeared;
the children, ten in number:
Maia, Gaia, Sky,Thermidor
Halcyon, Marin, Ambrée,
Fire, Frost, and Victor;
in Arcadia they lived,
in Arcadia, where the Sweet William grows.

The Fruits of Unreason

Standard & Poor’s director said for the first time Thursday that one reason the United States lost its triple-A credit rating was that several lawmakers expressed skepticism about the serious consequences of a credit default — a position put forth by some Republicans.

Without specifically mentioning Republicans, S&P senior director Joydeep Mukherji said the stability and effectiveness of American political institutions were undermined by the fact that “people in the political arena were even talking about a potential default,” Mukherji said.

“That a country even has such voices, albeit a minority, is something notable,” he added. “This kind of rhetoric is not common amongst AAA sovereigns.”

Capitol Hill Has Eyes 5: Bachmann Steals My Birthday!

 

Leave me alone, Michelle Bachmann! I do not like running stuff about you! 

Today is my birthday! Mine! Not Elvis Presley's, like you said earlier on the campaign trail. You are an embarrassment to dimwits! How dare you try to steal my thunder!

August 16th: the day Elvis passed to his reward, the day Babe Ruth passed, the date of the Harmonic Convergence back in the day... which happened to be the very same day Flight 255 crashed in Detroit, killing everyone on board, except for one small girl. Many things of importance, indeed, but Elvis was born - as my wife can rattle right off, having committed it to heart many years ago - on January 8th!

My birthday.... mine.

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Mr. Buffett on Taxes

From the BBC:

Mr Buffett explained that, like many top earners, his income came entirely from investments rather than from employment, which are subject to lower taxes in the US.
He said last year he paid an effective tax rate of 17.4%, less than the 33% to 41% paid by the employees in his office.
He dismissed arguments made by senior Republicans, including John Boehner, speaker of the House of Representatives, that taxing higher earners more would damage investment and job creation in the US.
"I have yet to see anyone... shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gains," he said.

Mr. Bloomberg said two weeks ago that he thought he got value for his tax dollar, and was not averse from a reasonable increase.

It appears that the Republican Party is splitting into two camps: those who understand economics and those who believe in fairy tales. It is painful to watch Mitt Romney raise his hand when the candidates are asked "Who believes in fairy tales?", but so it goes.
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Benoit

I stopped cursing other drivers for a while. It makes driving so much easier. However, I have encountered so many odd ones, I have started up again.
I have exhausted all the old epithets and references to hygiene products and erotic paraphenalia, and I startled myself with a new one that popped up:  Benoit!

So I yell the name "Benoit!" at people, as if I am addicted to fractal geometry and scream "Benoit" in memory of Benoit Mandelbrot. If I am in a Jewish neighborhood, I yell "Baruch!" and if I am around Roman Catholics, I call out "Benedict!" or "Sons of Benedict!" or whatever.

The point of all this is the original "Benoit!" or "Chiens de Benoit!" ("Dogs of Benoit!" in French). One has to know how the name "Benoit" is pronounced. Baruch and Benedict are variations on the name Benoit, but only "Benoit" has the right sound.
--
ps.
I shall not explain this further!
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Ade Ileke 25: Orthodoxy, an Opera by Mozart

Wie werden wir entfűhren sie

aus dem Serail wohin

Orthodoxie lebt ganz allein,

nähe von wachsamen Augen?

--

How will we abduct her (i.e., Orthodoxy)

from the seraglio (harem) wherein

Orthodoxy lives all alone

under watchful eyes?

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