Here, Cymbalta! Sit, Zoloft!

At the end of June, things have calmed down. My father's aneurysm has been taken care of and he has - mirabile dictu-recovered to full health. Well, he wasn't all that spry before the operation, so he is not doing somersaults, but he is amazingly well and has taken a new lease on life by being extra picky about the meals he is served. My brother lost part of his lung, but we can put that down to experience. He says he isn't smoking anymore, but when I visit I see evidence that his friends do smoke, they smoke his old brand, and they have been by rather recently - say 2 minutes ago- and must have ducked into the broom closet when they heard me buzz. My 3 nephews gave me 2 dogs which they have named Zoloft and Cymbalta. What joy. In the early part of March, AnnaMR had chased me around the jungle gym , tripped me, and hit me with her book bag. She yelled "You're IT!" and flew off. I was not sure what being "IT" was, other than it obviously had some connection with cooties and cootie-bearing vectors of infection. It may have been a reference to Stephen King's novel IT. It may have meant that I was the "IT" guy, just as Clara Bow had been the "IT" girl. However, as nice as this illusion was, I did not believe AnnaMR to be Elinor Glynn, and thus not in the habit of bestowing nicknames with the abandon of a small, female child relative whom one traps into the role of flower-girl at some hideous wedding. Well, "IT" succintly was a process by which I contacted 5 other friends at their websites, chased them around the jungle gym, etc., and hollered "You're IT!" Now, there's the fly in the ointment, as it were. "Contact 5 friends"... I don't have 5 friends. Let me be quite clear on this business of friendship or amicitas or Freundschaft...5 representatives of the species are not in my possession. Any friends I may have accumulated through the years, any kindred spirits which attached themselves to me - sort of like conglomerated aggregates or globules of adhesive substances- have gone the way of the Dodo. Not that you can fault them. If the SS didn't shoot them, or the Stasi didn't put them in jail, then I made impossible demands. Most recently I have been shitcanned by a fellow for whom I was best man at one of his weddings. I am quite...impossible. And I have no friends at all with websites. My own family is determinedly anti-technological. They make a good portrayal of benighted savages living in a Benthamistic state of nature. People whose websites I have visited have been grossly offended by me. Sooner or later I make some inappropriate remark. However, in my defense, there is only so much self-aggrandizing crap I can put up with at any given website! I did this at the website of a journeyman philosopher, poor shlub that he was. She-who-must-be-obeyed says that I don't need friends...I need (1) an audience, and (2) a therapist. So I sit here in the library with Zoloft and Cymbalta nestled at my feet. I must teach them to play poker!

Reasons To Not Invite The 20th Century To A Party 1

Some people have asked me what I am ranting about when I say that this society has a fixation on stories about disaster. They point out that all societies have disaster stories. They have stories of heroic progress, too. Well said. However, you are missing the point. Consider the 20th century in all its gory aspects. Consider Freud. Freud was absolutely lionized in the 20th century. You may look at a picture of his couch at the Freudmuseum. Imagine! His couch is preserved like the accoutrements of some mediaeval saint or the nail parings of a miracle worker!

His accomplishments are very sketchy, however, once you look at them outside of the narrative of Freud as a Genius. Freud as a real person has some very questionable events surrounding him. Freud, this great hero of the 20th century, created the concept of the Death Instinct. And we lapped it up. Are you getting the point yet? So Freud created the concept of the Death Instinct to explain why the denizens of the 20th century were so fond of killing each other, you say? Freud was trying to clarify what was going on? Well, duh. Of course he was. However, like so many of the rest of us, Freud chose Death and Disaster and Destruction to aid understanding. And he chose an Instinct, a concept which implies necessity and determinacy... like you should be condemned forever to a Death Instinct whereby you are bloody in tooth and nail...and your reading of choice is short stories of Hannibal Lector! The 20th century was - and is in the lives of us born therein - a HyperReal prison of Disaster. As you choose your Consciousness, so do you choose your life. And we have been led since birth into a Consciousness of diabolical cruelty.

In Case You Missed It...

http://www.energy-daily.com/reports/US_Finds_Venezuela_CITGO_Oil_Company_Guilty_Of_Pollution_999.html US Finds Venezuela CITGO Oil Company Guilty Of Pollution " For two felony criminal violations of the act, CITGO faces fines of up to 500,000 dollars for each count, or twice the profits it made since the violations were first detected -- whichever is greater, when sentencing is due on October 18. CITGO, which runs thousands of gasoline stations around the United States, has often been the target of negative campaigns dissuading Americans from buying its fuel so as not to benefit the administration of Venezuela's anti-American President Hugo Chavez. In particular, Chavez and CITGO irked the US government when they provided heating oil at a 40 percent discount to some 400,000 homes in 16 US states, in the winters of 2005 and 2006. The offer was branded by some as propaganda." Interesting. What was British Petroleum's fine for sloshing oil all over the Northern slope? And their spill was due to maintenance not done in a timely manner, as I recall.

The Crackpot Jew Norman Finkelstein 4

Referring to "The Crackpot Jew Norman Finkelstein 1" we see how Professor Finkelstein earned his sobriquet: http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2007/03/crackpot-jew-norman-finkelstein.html This is how an article in Commentary portrays Mr. Finkelstein. This is due to the fact that Mr. Finklestein disgrees with the opinions expressed in Commentary.http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/main/viewArticle.aip?id=10136&page=all Neat,eh? Actually, they went further; they said " crackpot anti-semitic Jew...". I rather like the notion of anti-semitic Jews; it is so Alfred Rosenberg-like. It is so redolent of representatives of other long lived groups: the Armenian who hates Armenians, the Ethiopean who is virulently anti-Ethiopean, and the Native Americans you see at the moving picture show always rooting for the settlers and General Custer.

In The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/news/index.php?id=2562
June 25, 2007  
Students Will Begin Hunger Strike in Support of DePaul Professors Denied Tenure
We read in the comments such insights as: ( all errors are as they appear in the comments.)

"...He did not get tenure becasue he was NOT ACADEMICALLY QUALIFIED, not because of any other reasons. Let him get a job where he belongs, like in QUatar , Libya, or Saudi Arabia. Let him work in Iran, I am sure they will give him tenure there. He is not an academic who has had jpapers published, just his books on the Holocaust, in which he has PROFITED..." and "Well now that school is out, his childrens’ crusade has another love-in planned. Don’t any of them have summer jobs, or anything else to do? I suppose not. Let them eat their secreted Mars bars! Universities are not required to grant tenure to vicious, clownish bogus academics who peddle opinion as “study.” And these cheap pressure tactics by a group of brainwashed kids is pathetic." and "Finkelstein actually defines the syndrome of a self-hating and efffectively antisemitic Jew. It seems topsy turvy, but this kind of Freudian inversion is a classic psychosis. Children who know no better, have been influenced by his charismatic, rebellious mien. He deserves dismissal (let alone tenure) as as a pathetic manipulative and racist headcase and poor role model. Would you have an amoral freakish charlatan who peddles such violent sickness on his own personal webiste[sic: website] to teach your children right from wrong?If he’s your idea of a hero, then fill your boots. "

Ah, what buffoons we mortals be ! I particularly liked the last comment above, since it demonstrate such a profound psychological insight: the illusions of the 20th century psychology in the habit of Freud. There are way too many oddballs on the Internet who posture and preen themselves on their pseudo-knowledge of Freudian psychology. Another intriguing aspect is belittling taking a Moral Stand: do they not have summer jobs? Truly, a summer job at Pop Tate's Choklit Shoppe is superior to taking a ( snicker! ) moral stand.

Good Morning America

It was ABC who had Ann Coulter give vent to her wish that John Edwards had been killed at some time in the past. Keep putting her on. Fire Imus, keep Coulter.

Although ABC seems to be very dogged about Political Correctness, they care little about their guests issuing calls for murder - fatuous fatwas, as it were.

Homefront Heroes

High School Heroes

My wife listens to the television news. I won't have anything to do with it. However, I did hear a bit about a great story the other day: a group of high school seniors visiting the White House surprised the inhabitant of the mansion by presenting a joint letter condemning torture! Thank God for the young! President Bush was presented with a letter Monday signed by 50 high school seniors in the Presidential Scholars program urging a halt to "violations of the human rights" of terror suspects held by the United States. The White House said Bush had not expected the letter but took a moment to read it and talk with a young woman who handed it to him. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070625/bush-torture/ So, we have a government whose actions are causing the new generation to have long soul searching hours, wondering how this can be America. Interesting, isn't it?

Violence 1

abc

I believe: Violent imagery, stories, imaginations, and narratives increase the acceptance of such behavior by the great mass of a society; This same imagery, etc. increases the tendency to increasingly sophisticated, final, and satisfying forms of violence by a select sub-group of a society; The acceptance of the great mass of the society, thus, effectively enables the sub-group in in quest for horror. With such enabling, the sub-group grows in size. At this point, you may think "Virginia Tech", or "John Muhammad", or "Natalee Holloway", or what have you. In the past, bullying occurred. It was violent behavior and often called forth violent behavior in reply. In a place called "Columbine", those who were bullied refined their response into an "Endlosung" - a final solution. Herein, we see the wicked wedding of Reason and Analysis and Violence again. We have already seen it in warfare. War was nothing compared to what it became under the rein of Reason when Professional Scientists created and continue to create hellish weaponry. Under the kingship of Torture, Violence, and Mayhem parading as Governmental Policy, we are setting the stage for our own Wagnerian "Gotterdammerung"........... Ah, what gods we were! So sublime in our aims! So ethereal in our means! We were the greatest nation ever! We were indeed. We still could be if we would divorce ourselves from the Scripture of Disaster, the Fear of End of Times, the Pastor Hagees who PowerPoint the mathematics of Death and Rapture! It is now a Godless generation. (To be with God, it is not enough to cry "God! God!" all the time. It is nothing to say Jesus is your savior. Your words cannot move the hearts of men nor stop your own wars. Your words cannot move God.)

We are missing God. We are missing the stories that come from God.

The missing stories of heroes are the stories inspired by God. They are missing because we no longer have such stories. We have none at all.

AND we are so corrupt that during this war we had to conspire to fabricate hero stories. We lied about Pat Tillman. How can you be so corrupt and low as to lie about a soldier who gave his life for his country? We had to. There is nothing heroic anywhere, so we have to fabric it in the Goebbelsian Factories of our 1984 Fuseli nightmare ... and send it to the Coulters to read on the compliant Media.

(It reminds me of the children's song:

Papa Goebbels dead and gone,

but his memory lingers on.

When his mood was one of bliss,

he'd tell jolly lies like this.)

The Club Of Ariminium And Caesena: 4

(Ariminium and Caesena were towns on the Rubicon. Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon to set into motion those events which would destroy the Roman Republic. The name is a play on "The Club of Rome" which was concerned with nuclear destruction.) In consortiumnews.com: America's Fragile Republic By Robert Parry June 13, 2007 By a two-to-one margin, a federal appeals court has repudiated George W. Bush’s right to snatch a civilian off the streets of America and hold the person indefinitely without trial. But the makeup of the three-judge panel was a fluke, with two Clinton appointees comprising the majority. http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/061307.html I would tend to support a REAL president who was fighting a REAL war. However, the deaths in Iraq are REAL. Why don't you read and listen to how the young people text each other to see whether they are still alive?

Eliminate The Income Tax, Hooray!

Serious degradation of the Individual began with the institution of the Income Tax. Of course, it was one of those great advances which find their genesis in war and war related industries. War has done so much for us. If advances trickle down from war and arms research, think how much would happen if the government invested in the affected industries directly. But they can't do that. It's not free market. I've got news for you. War and arms production and research account for well over 33% of the economic activity in this country. This is funded by, paid for, and promoted by the Government. This is NOT free market! It's directed investment. Like the Manhattan Project!!! The Manhattan Project was directed investment and research and application. No Free Market. Whew... O.K. The Individual began to lose importance when the Individual began to be taxed like a commodity or a manufacture. Our ancestors had the guts to protest a commodity tax on tea. We cannot even protest this uncontrolled taxation of an Individual. Those who love our life as a commodity say we owe it to the USA, for its is this country that gives us our freedoms. We say it is we ourselves who established our freedoms; we are the USA, not some government of elitists!

Ann Coulter's Interview In Samara

AC has done it again. She has contemplated, wished for, and potentially called for the death of a presidential candidate.

She not only thinks like a death's head, she resembles a Totenkopf more and more every day. It must be some sort of heavy metal, satanic thing she has. No uproar. No Rev. Sharpton. No one cares? Let's get it right: Imus says something and gets fired; AC calls for Death and it's all a laff. Cute Country. Keep calling for Death and see what happens. AC, go to Samara and drink black coffee in the early evening.

Try to keep your Appointment in Samara. Your friend, Julius Streicher, looks forward to seeing you again.

Interview With A Really, Really Bad Guy

Always wanted to interview a really, really bad guy, one who caused a war sort of. -So whaddya think of the war so far? -I thought it was supposed to be over when they knocked over my statue. Even when they executed me. But...I mean, who's the really, really bad guy now that justifies this thing? -Hey, we're supposed to ask the questions. You were the really, really bad guy... -I know you are, but what am I? This is what I call the light side of war.

And...what have we all learned? Anyone...anyone...?

Inquiring Minds Need To Know...

A rabid anti-fan of my blog, a professor of philosophy no less...and no more...took issue with my naming the blog " A Father Talks With His Daughter About God" and then going off on numerous tangents having nothing to do with the divine. So I said, in my poor imitation of Socrates, do you mean that I say I'm going to talk about God, then I talk about other things?
"Yeah. You're really quick on the uptake today", he sneered.

I replied that in his blog he purports to talk of non-divine things and never himself says anything about God. He allows his flunkies and commenting-minions to growl and snarl about God and how wonderful atheism is, but he himself says nothing.
So I say I'll talk about God and diverge into other things. He talks about other things and NEVER detours to the Holy. For me, God is not set apart in time (only on Sunday) or place (only in the Church).
I will talk about politics and the economy and without missing a beat will speak about the love of God. God does not embarass me. I'll talk about Him anytime. And I'll talk about Him the same way I talk about anything else. I do not withdraw into some arcane Bible-speak to talk about God. Anyway, my best friend makes fun of this blog. He says it's "blah...blah...blah...blah...The HOLY...blah...blah...blah..." It's good that I think I have a sense of humour.
--

I Miss IMUS 2

As previously mentioned, my daughter gave me an "I Miss IMUS" sweater for Dad's Day. Every now and then I look to see what's on MSNBC. Recently it has been Joe Scarborough. He is competent enough on his own show. However, the early morning gig seems strained. The other day he had Laura Ingraham on. It became apparent what the problem is: being sarcastic, opinionated, caustic, and somewhat intelligent ( referred to hereafter as SOCI), is not quite enough to make it in the morning. SOCI is like Earl Grey tea. The bitterness of the bergamot makes it ideal for afternoons or early evenings, but not first thing in the morning. It is too much of a shock for the system. The people are not funny. That's the problem. They are SOCI, but they are not funny. They are witty...but not really in an endearing way. You can cut your finger tip on their wit, but your laughter is abrupt and short, furtive and suspect, leaving you with a feeling of being sordid. SO much for Scarborough. And the David Gregorys, as I have said, are much too saccharine. I think I shall soon tell a nasty story about Political Correctness and how PC without the other virtues - and, believe me, we may learn PC but we don't learn virtues - becomes a lash of scorpions itself. PC is nothing more than the good or the evil of those who wield it.

Peace Fasting 3rd Week

Since my imagination is so limited, I transport here the things I labor over elsewhere. This was the doggerel for the third peace fast on Friday, two days ago. If you do not wish to read it - and I DO understand- then print it out and throw darts at it. Peace Fast-3rd Week I have a shaddouf... a one camel shaddouf. It's not much to look at, but it's all mine. And it brings water like 60 to the terraced field where I "crash" ...my manzil... my landing place place of quiet place of rest place of sakeena. There is a snake there and there isn't. sleek as a sheath and sharp as a sword. She whispers in my sleep, brews black coffee, sees the USA in her Chevrolet... ma amlasuha! how sleek she is! shining like a jewel... ...my Chevy... not the snake. I have a jihaaz... it's more like a whatchamacallit... it's very gold rubeberg and it's all mine. And it does it's...thing. It's the best thing since Nasruddin took a mudya to a loaf of bread... and sliced it. bread of life bread of love bread, gift of Allah. The site itself is over in the group of usual suspects on the right...the link field: peace-weaving.blogspot.com notes: ma amlasuha = how sleek she is! jihaaz = a thing-a-majig mudya = a butcher's sharp knife manzil = a landing place, your pad shaddouf = a water wheel for irrigation

Voting

Hand written votes on paper that can be conserved for recounts and other types of scrutiny...that's what I want. I do not believe in letting big business get into voting and mucking up the Constitution. DIEBOLD! What utter contemptuous nonsense! Paper ballots...or if you really are a government voting official who wants to be "with it", up to date, and super efficient, why not just text the vote in on a cellphone through a Diebold router-interface? SO, my family is voting for Ron Paul for President. He seems to be an excellent choice.

Hilary and Barack seem too ready to wage war and deprive us of our rights to enforce their own Liberal ideals.

Peace Fast 3rd Week: I Am Not Gandhi

Today is fast day, faestdag if you are an ancient Anglo-saxon. Darn. I hate fasting. Along about 15:00 hours you begin to seriously decompose. Food, it seems, is the glue that holds the self together. Food is the soul of man. There, I have been up for a couple hourts and already I am singing paeans to food. The picture of Gandhi is there for IRONY. The meaning is that I am not Gandhi. I like that. I like the sound of it. I AM NOT GANDHI! WHAT WOULD JESUS NOT DO?

I AM NOT THE CALIPH OMAR! I AM NOT LINCOLN! I AM NOT KAIZER SOUZE! It sounds wonderful. It reaffirms what schlemiels we all are for letting this Administration run rough shod over just about everything.

In The News

An excellent article in Asia Times: How currency devaluation destroys wealth By Henry C K Liu http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/IF14Dj01.html and Chile has lost a lake: Chilean Officials Stunned By Missing Lake http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Chilean_Officials_Stunned_By_Missing_Lake_999.html and-contrary to what big agribusiness and the government would have you believe-GM is getting out there: Banned Chinese GM Rice Protein Found In Dutch Shipment To Cyprus http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Banned_Chinese_GM_Rice_Protein_Found_In_Dutch_Shipment_To_Cyprus_999.html

Concerning GM ( genetically modified ) products, all one had to do is refer back to Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park to realize that the Pandora Box cannot be held closed, even though a slew of government and business people have misrepresented the case.

When you have reached a point where comic book characters and characters in films are far more intelligent than real people, it's time to move to Virtual Reality land.

In OpEdNews, we see the scary world of nuclear material which could have been brought under control, but has not been:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_russ_wel_070621_come_on_2c_you_slacker.htm

You may find this writing a bit trying. I know I do. For years I have railed against the Bush Administration and his compliant Republican culprits in Congress. However, that does not mean I Like Lefty.

Most political activist writing is sophomoric.

Soldiers And Their Leaders

Senator Clinton said that the Military did everything it could in Iraq. It was up to the Iraqis now. I would say the soldiers did everything they could. Their leaders, the generals, however, are another matter entirely. John Ralston Saul said back in 1993 in Voltaire's Bastards that it was problematic whether the American Military could win any fight anymore, other than those fights were there was an enormous imbalance of forces, such as Gulf War I. The reason was the generals. They had become men of reason, businessmen...public relations. The generals might not know how to fight. Certainly the politicians don't. Consider: Donald Rumsfeld spent years working on his vision of the Military, the sleek surgical incisive forces, the smart bombs... He spent so much time that he could not properly plan for Iraq. And no one called him on it until late 2006. The Secretary of Defense could not fight. His generals could not fight. The Administration could not fight. They leave it to those who are giving their fullest measure, fighting and dying every day.

School Daze In Afghanistan

I was arguing with a philosopher who has a blog. We were arguing about the killing of 7 children in a Coalition attack on a school. He said the Taliban were using children as shields, the cowardly scum! How do you know that? I asked. That's what is says in the report, he rejoined. The only thing that tells me is that either (1) somebody made that up, or (2) they knew that there were children in that school and they decided to bomb it anyway, figuring the children would be collateral damage: a necessary evil. How stupid can you be?

The Club Of Ariminium And Caesena: 3

We are now 4 steps from the Rubicon.

It is time to seriously begin considering impeachment.

A Necessary Evil

A Coalition air strike bombed a school in Afghanistan Sunday. At least 7 children were killed. Although regrettable, some argue that such "collateral damage" is a necessary evil if we are to accomplish our goals. How come there is never a necessary Good? Why is it that in our way of looking at things there can be necessary Evil, but not necessary Good?

I Miss IMUS

It's my birthday and... No, it's not my birthday. It's some other gift-producing, present-genesis type of day... Oh, it's Fathers' Day. And...my daughter has given me a beautifil sweatshirt that has the logo "I miss IMUS". Excellent. (As an aside, I noticed that his nemesis, Al Sharpton, was taking issue with the LA sheriff about Paris Hilton. I'm not sure what this was all about. I do not think the Rev. Al Sharpton actually knew what it was about either.) I have been catching some of the pathetic attempts to air something in his old slot. The news types are quite bad. They were o.k. when they were on Imus for a brief visit, but longer chunks of time are indigestible. David Gregory, for example, seems to melt into a shallow puddle of a smile. Joe Scarborough is o.k., but he is not funny. He and his guests talk all over what each other is saying. Not good. We want Imus.

Death On The Installment Plan

Born In Sin, Come On In

(1) I have mentioned my discussions - if you may call such painful wordplay "discussions"-with a young man of the evangelical frame of mind, and that he was surprised at what appeared to be my personal relationship with God. I think what he meant was that he was surprised that anyone could have a relationship with God...outside of his own evangelical belief system. I mean, how could anyone not evangelically aware have a relationship with God!? Everyone who does not sing "Jesus is my Savior!" is some poor, misguided, misbegotten shlub who desperately needs the true hoodia of Evangelical Christianity. Oh, well. They use Reason as a snare to entrap you. Then they quote Bible verses at you to make you feel inadequate. Then they put you on their trophy wall, along with the other beasts they've preyed upon. (2) I saw Tim LaHaye on the TV. He is the author of the "Left Behind" series. The Rapture is extra-scriptural nonsense of the most pernicious kind. It is another form of modern idolatry, similar to its tainted sister, Intelligent Design. When the Deceiver comes, he will deceive you by using enticements that are fair to your eyes, not some outlandish and novel things. The deceptions will be easy, for they will be based on things we are so very familiar with. How easy is it to deceive when you are using folksy and homey notions? It's pretty easy. We got into the Iraq War because we were thinking things like "Saddam is a really, really, really bad guy"...and bad guys should be given their comeuppance, right? The UN weapons inspectors said there were no weapons, but European types are stupid, right? And the little Iraqi people will dance like Muchkins welcoming a great and big Dorothy to their little OZ, and will put flowers on our guns...and we will give them all candy bars like there was no end to chocolate and almonds... I mean, do you really think we Americans are smart enough to see through the Deceiver when we cannot even see through the most bald-faced inanities uttered by mere men, and men of no particular wit, at that? (3) Asia Times http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IF15Ak01.html A general in God's patriotic army wherein we read: Mike Evans is a shock jock for Armageddon, a cheerleader for the apocalypse. These days, the best-selling author and head of the Jerusalem Prayer Team", a US-based pro-Israel Christian evangelical organization, is at the top of his game. On June 3, his new book, The Final Move Beyond Iraq: The Final Solution While the World Sleeps, made it on to the New York Times best-sellers' list at No 1 in the paperback category. ... His prose is pugnacious, a style you might expect from a writer who claims that he is giving the US its "final wake-up call". In the book, and in its promotional materials, such terms as "appeasement", "secular humanist God-haters" and "pro-Islamic radical sympathizers" are tossed around as easily as if he were playing catch in the back yard. Your God is Compulsion and Force. Your God is Inquisition and Fear. I do not even know what those notions mean that you fling around like hash in the short-order grill of your mind. The author loves his end of time, his Armageddon, his time of Rapture. He loves the images of Death. His book is the theological equivalent of the films SAW or Hostel. Dispell the nightmares of Destruction and Decay! This should be a time of Rebirth and Life, not Death... ... NOT the Fulfillment of God's Plan by Death on the Installment Plan. Which is all Easy Credit...easy belief...maybe even free! What could be easier than to let yourselves go mad...and lose all restraint? Thus, you are under no obligations, no duties, other than to fight with the Beserker God, a god who makes no demands on you except that you indulge your frenetic actions fueled by an immortal and unlimited supply of epinephretic blood. These men are legion, and they are wolves.

Hyperreality And The Common Man

Someone read my post on Hyperreality and Jean Baudrillard and said I was gibbering nonsense. Not so. Consider this: Money is essentially a promise by a government to pay. Money has no intrinsic value. The Money System works because everyone plays the game: the government promises to pay, and we accept the promise. Thus, Money is an instance of Hyperreality. (This maybe why Baudrillard wrote so much about Economics.) Money derives its particular effectiveness from its ability to quanitify and to be exactly quantified.

Fathers' Day 2007

My daughter is coming to visit. Yippee! I feel like dancing. I should like to be animated like Sponge Bob and Patrick, but I am more like Papa Smurf...in slo-mo. So...I look like Tintin, dance like Papa Smurf...Manga! ("Manga!" is a pun on something that the people from Rochester, NY, used to swear with.) We shall go to visit my parents. There will be many people there. There will be animals, too. I shall have to search for a place to sleep. I am always out of sorts. People will ask: whatcha dooon? I still muster a smile. Perhaps I shall go to a motel to sleep. Dance on, little princess of day and night, dance by the water's edge and we shall watch your memory!

Peace Fast 2nd Week

I finished my second fast for something nebulous and undefined in Iraq...peace, maybe. But I don't think this group here in the USA will ever let Iraq have peace again, certainly not within my lifetime. They will afflict and bedevil that country; they will "gitmo" it and washboard it; they will use a "Salvadoran" model for death squads, then a "Korea" model for disunity, then some other nonsensical theoretical construct as a Procrustean bed to torture that Islamic forcing garden of unhappiness. Fasting is gruesome, as I have said. Add to that the fact that everyone thinks a faster is (a) a nut, and (b) a wierdo, and you have a situation where you doubt your own bona fides and no one to say no to these doubts. The only thing that keeps me going is the realization that I can still count on a good number of Iraqis to die every day. I do not think I am more noble or moral than any one else. That old business of judging oneself or one's group relative to what others do is really quite jaded for one of my advanced years. It is a child's game and I am too old to play it anymore. If I have to fast, then I fast. It means absolutely nothing about anyone else. And this is true even though I justify my actions by delineating the actions of others in unflattering terms. Writing and arguing is something we are used to. It is how I must inter-act with you. Fasting is between God and me. God and us... I decided to fast and write a poem each week. Jeezalou, as Frank Barrone would say. The Second Week's Poem. (apology for rough drafts. I do not possess a fund of pre-written poetry to put on the peace blog:http://peace-weaving.blogspot.com/ ) The Party Store Of Peace They were tearing up the roadway by the party store of peace. (no esta bodega…cerevisa no se vende aqui) The sidewalk had been swallowed up and there was no place to park, so we drove around to the lot around the corner, by the flood plain, but it hadn’t rained for a while and global warming gives us places to park. So we got a meter with time on it, near the killer colored tiles from a mural made in oaxaca- broken into pieces and half buried that had lain next to the electrical transformer ever since the city threw it out… every year some kid stumbles onto it for the first time… and wonders what the hell! and wonders what the oaxaca? and then forgets. I’d forget all this, too, if it wasn’t tethered like Paris Hilton. We walk by a ladies’ store a fossil found in stone, with clothes in showy windows as you funnel to the door. Inside the Andrews Sisters sing on the PA. Finally we arrive at the party store of peace: (no esta bodega…cerevisa no se vende aqui) the a/c is on the fritz, the peace owner is wearing an orangey plaid shirt with striped shorts and hot pink alligator shoes- his white hair as long as that of a guy that makes candles and soaps for the farmers’ market- somewhere a woman screamed; the supplier in Carolina had a new batch of ink; the crescent moon silver is now a battleship grey…I mean, don’t you think you’d let us know? 2,000 cards! she will call! we will hear about this! and mrs. ormond’s order wuz never even shipped! called Virginia myself…liar! fedex got zippo from zip code there to zip code here! bupkis! bupkiss! buttkiss, egypt! So I said, yeah, my suppliers used to change quality and leave it for us to find out… it is so damn hot! May I get a peace card? all out. When…? Next week for the fast? dunno. haven’t paid the peace bill… It was so hot; we went to drown our thirst in the ABM Sports Bar next to WMD Books. Drinks were on me and I paid with what little was left from my peace dividend.

Advance Token To Boardwalk

A good article on Economic Inequity in Inside Higher ED: The Perpetuation of Privilege By Walter M. Kimbrough http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/06/12/kimbrough

The Crackpot Jew Norman Finkelstein 3

Professor Finkelstein has been denied tenure at DePaul University.

Read about it in Inside Higher ED
http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/11/finkelstein

There has been an ongoing battle between him and Professor Dershowitz for a while. It is a fight in the realm of Hyperreality. This is usually described as an attempt to discredit the Holocaust. It is also called an attempt to deny the Holocaust.

But, as written elsewhere here, my friend, Levine, der Engel, hit the nail on the head when he implied that the Holocaust means different things to different people.

Not such an earth shaking observation, is it?

Well, it is earth shaking when you realize that a good deal of effort is expended to make one believe that the Holocaust means ONE things for All people. The discussion is in Baudrillard's Hyperreality. And that's where just about everythings these days are. The reason why there is so much focus on the past: Flags of our Fathers, Discussions with our fathers- Tim Russert's dad, Larry King's dad - the list goes on, is that we are looking at WW II.

World War II was a time when things existed in reality. There was reality with a vengeance. One did not have the time to spin hyperrealities. The guys fighting in Iraq: they are in Reality with Teeth. But we are not. Our presidential beauty pageant is Hyperreality.

That's one reason we call it "hype". Everything is real...some things are more substantial than others. I find this Hyperreality - that of the Holocaust Ultimate Cage Fighters; i.e., those locked inside a cgae and fighting to the death - to be very interesting and we shall talk more about it. I find Prof. Dershowitz to be a most interesting individual.

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Philosophy And HyperReality

I was trained in the British-American tradition of philosophy. In my senior year at University, I discovered Sartre. I resisted at first, but then fell into complicity with him. I do not think I have ever come across a philosopher I did not like. I mean, I agree with them all. Where some people see some chasm or dichotomy between the British and the Continental tradition, I see different ways of looking at the same phenomena and a sort of a parable about men in blindfolds describing a pachyderm: the one touching the truck says that the elephant resembles a tentacular creature while the man touching the leg say it resembles the pillars at the ends of the earth.

I think one of the things about the Roman Catholic Church I found most displeasing was the tradition of Thomas Aquinas' philosophy and little else: a myopia in philosophy. I could never quite reconcile my vision of Jesus with the mediaeval obsession with philosophy applied to divine things. I always had a sneaking suspicion that if somehow Jacques Maritain could appear to Jesus in His own day, Jesus would think a new type of Pharisee had come for a visit.

Jean Beaudrillard passed on this year and he spoke of hyperreality. The realm of philosophy is similar to other realms of hyperreality. I have always been fascinated by the enclosures of fancy we create and then try to insulate them from contamination by an intrusive reality. I considered the run up to the War in Iraq just such a hyperreality. It was an excellent experiment to observe how such things are created.
We see today in Global Research http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHI20070521&articleId=5720  

The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive, signed on May 9, 2007 declares that in the event of a “catastrophic event”, George W. Bush can become what is best described as "a dictator": "The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government." This directive, completely unnoticed by the media, and given no scrutiny by Congress, literally gives the White House unprecedented dictatorial power over the government and the country, bypassing the US Congress and obliterating the separation of powers. The directive also placed the Secretary of Homeland Security in charge of domestic “security”. The full text is below. A critical analysis on the directive can be found here. This is another step towards official martial law (see “US government fans homeland security fears”), which suggests that a new "catastrophic event" 9/11-type pretext could be in the pipeline.

It may be surprising that the most interesting thing I find in this is that it is another thread of End Of Time, or Approaching Disaster, or Armageddon Is Just Around The Corner; these are the hyperrealities which infest our minds.
There is a difference between a dispassionate appraisal of reality and a hyperreality, a virtual reality, if it please you, that exists in another dimension, whether it be in the individual mind, or the collective social awareness of a nation, or in cyberspace.

Since 9-11, we have been mostly dealing in states of hyperreality. We have chosen up sides and each side has striven to delineate the parameters of its own hyperreality. Then we scream back and forth. We scream because the taste and smell of the real is so intense, how could we see that hyperreality is not the same as reality?
Hyperreality is constructed of the same building blocks of Remembered and Historical Events with which we create the real. Thus, its smell must be the smell of reality. Its taste must be the taste of reality. Its remembered beauty must be the remembered beauty of reality. It is the Logic that has lost its sense of direction.
The Logic which compels the construction of Reality is no longer the hidden algorithm of many nodes, web-like wherein we balance like spiders in a filmy gauze suspended above the void. The Logic has become distorted and no longer an inborn song of creativity. It is an inflexible and rigid mechanism, unbending and without a sense of History - neither coming from the past nor going to the future, but merely a focus of a moment of present obsession.

The Themes of Disaster flows in and out of our lives: from Virginia Tech to Iraq to Homeland Security Presidential Directive (HSPD). The Disaster Figure always wears a new face: Virginia Tech or John Muhammed or Saddam Hussein...or Iran...or the Religious Right or Islamic Fundamentalism. But the god of Disaster is always there in our minds and in our prayers...and in our hyperreality. When I have said the mind can be a prison, this is what I was referring to. Philosophy should not enslave, not incarcerate.

Iraq = Korea And We Have Another 60+ Year War; Huzzah!

Also in the news from TomDispatch: How Permanent Are Those Bases? http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174807/how_permanent_are_those_bases_ excerpt: ...What's finally coming into view is just what George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, the top officials of their administration, the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, and their neocon followers had in mind when they invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003. .. the "Korea model," which, according to the New York Times and other media outlets, the President is suddenly considering as the model for Iraq. ("Mr. Bush has told recent visitors to the White House that he was seeking a model similar to the American presence in South Korea.") . ...Remarkably enough, when asked late last year by pollsters from the Program on International Policy Attitudes whether we should have the "permanent" bases in Iraq, a whopping 68% of Americans said no. Read 'em and weep, as we used to say when I played poker. Now, in response to those who decried my fast for peace...and those 3 nephews know who they are...I remember why what I have done is correct. No sane person can continue to live like this...unless they made some small change to distance themselves from it, whether it is fasting against it, or writing against it, or speaking against it, or praying against it...or just thinking silently against it. But you cannot live without demurring even a little. If you cannot distance yourself even a little bit, you are already dead...and not from lack of food.

Founder of the State of Constant War

Condoleeza's Boat

SS Shaka Naw

( shock and awe)

Joey Nasser told me that Conny Rice used to have an oil tanker named after her. No way, I said. Way, he replied. She was on the board of some oil company before she was in government. So I Googgled it. The Secretary of State was on the board of Chevron for 10 years, she did have a tanker named after her, and Chevron changed the name later for reasons you may speculate about. ... As if this is surprising.

June 9, 2007

News from Ha'aretz: http://www.haaretz.com/ including an interesting discussion prompted by the 40th anniversary of the 1967 war: 1967 - The war that ended Judaism http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/867362.html From Al Jazeera: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/55ABE840-AC30-41D2-BDC9-06BBE2A36665.htm From TerraDaily: http://www.terradaily.com/ including a discussion on the Russia-US confrontation over missiles: NUKEWARS Putin Missile Threats Seen As Rational By Some As Putin Confronts G8 Critics http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Putin_Missile_Threats_Seen_As_Rational_By_Some_As_Putin_Confronts_G8_Critics_999.html (The administration now says it has offered to talk to Russia about this matter. Apparently such talk was impossible hitherto.) From Al Ahram of Cairo, Egypt: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/index.htm particularly the very good Cairo Review of Books: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/788/books788.htm And the Arts & Letters Daily: http://www.aldaily.com/

Peace Quickening, Peace Weaving, and Frith Faesten/ Peace Fast 1st Week

4-color totalistic cellular automaton with rule 600116

being used to represent a weaving process.

I find it undbearable to let this thing in Iraq continue without doing something. The war ended, yet it did not end. How can this be? It may have something to do with our refusal to leave. Let me clarify: when I say the war ended, I mean that we pulled into Baghdad and took over. The war is over. What happened after is not "the Iraq war"; it is something we created. We call it the "war" so we can keep on keeping it on, a state of constant war, just as if we lived in Orwell's Oceania in 1984. It is we the American people who refuse to accept an end to hostilities. This is due to the fact that the Iraqi populace was not sufficiently docile for whatever our real plans and intentions were - those motives which extended beyond removing a "bad guy" from power, toppling his statue, and stretching his neck. In the meantime, we are doing politics as usual and running a presidential beauty pageant that will last a year and a half, which gives us a terminus for a minimum amount of time that Iraq must continue to die: Iraq must continue to die until the new president takes over in January, 2009. This is due to the fact that we the American people will not do anything to end the war. As a act that may be futile, but also may be the first of other acts, I shall institute a fast once every week until this war is ended. The fast day will be Friday. If Friday isn't suitable, any day will do. Fridays have always been important. There is sun down on Friday, there is prayer at the mosque, and there are what RCs call First Fridays. Since there is no notice of what I do, I am obviously fasting away from public view. Gandhi at least had his newspaper guys. Gandhi was a fanatic for publicity, and that is why he was so succesful in creating a political entity. I shall only fast for my own peace of mind. I cannot sit by idle and watch the entertainments we consider news while the Great Dying continues. I hope that I may soon be able to do more. Dream girl weaving, dream boy running these are the residue of life. On both sides of the street there were doors of iron but the hinges were of straw. The reeds along the river shu-shu in the voice of ghosts. I saw a ghost once, I thought it was my sister's daughter, little Maha, her only child. But she snarled like a dog when I came by and she vanished... I heard a splash and ran to the river. But there was only a widening ripple, widening into a tsunami of regret... I cannot eat the food and chocolate I had set out for myself. ps. There is a site: http://www.fastforpeace.com/ set up by Felix Arroyo. I expect to hear something from them. pps. "Quick" in the title means "living" or "coming into being", as in the contrast "the quick and the dead". Peace weaving is probably a new concept for most of us, coming from the old culture. It deals with the "web" of contacts created by women between the tribes. These contacts are often alliances by marriage. Present day scholarship tends to focus on the womens' role. "Frith Faesten" is Anglo-saxon for "Peace Fast"

Is Christ Your Savior ? : 2

After my most recent post, someone threw a blog at me. I ducked. ...and it was about something else I had done that irritated them. So, continuing the line of thought from yesterday, does it not strike you that even yet today there are the Scribes and Pharisees who will go about setting traps for us of the little understanding? They will cite chapter and verse - usually without an explanation of the context - and try their best to undermine us. Someone described my view as an approach to anarchy. My views were akin to Moral Relativisim- if I think it is good, then it is good for me! Let them rave. If we approach anarchy, take us to the judges and let us bear witness. Surely the Sanhedrin has an opening on its docket. And as regards your Moral Relativism, as I have said before, the only thing more stupid than Moral Relativism is the criticsms of Moral Relativism. I have found the criticisms to be uniformly inane. This would have been the proper situation to have learned to be silent ASIDE: my wife asked me what today would have been... it would have been my daughter's 10 wedding anniversary...if she had married that fellow. Ma Sha'a Allah, I said. (thanks to my friend bARABie who told me the correct context for this expression. It literally mean "what Allah wills" but the sense is "what Allah wills (but may He not will evil!)".

Is Christ Your Savior?

I refer to the recent posting: http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2007/06/talking-about-divinity-1.html wherein I pretty much lost a potential friend because I would not play what I considered his logical games about God.

This person asked me first: are you a believer?
So I said yes.
This was not quite enough.

Perhaps he thought that I should go into a song-and-dance routine. So he then asked: is Jesus your Savior? And I refused to answer. I said: guess. I indicated it was none of his business. I do not make a habit of going about answering a battery of questions. I do not believe that the way to God is through discussion. Although I talk about God, I do not think my words are those of a teacher. Nor did I think my friend's were. I consider them to be a method of compulsion, whereby certain people barrage you with questions and quote scripture with such precision that they leave you feeling - and THIS is their actual intention - feeling insecure and inadequate. It is an abuse.
Paul writes, "For some men, straying from these things, have turned aside to fruitless discussion, wanting to be teachers of the Law, even though they do not understand either what they are saying nor the matters about which they make confident assertions."

I told him the story I have told you: when I felt as if everything I ever knew about God had disappeared, there He was. Christ died to free me, thus I am free. I am particularly free of those who wish me to speak...Say something...Say whether Jesus is your Savior !!!!!!!!!!!!
I am free of their compulsion. I am free from the prison of words and fruitless discussion they wish to weave about Absolute Truth and the Idolatry of their imaginations.
I cannot run a scam and get on the right side of God. I cannot promise anything. I cannot promise to be good, especially in return for some benefit. Jesus died. I am free. That's all there is to it. If I do good works, I do not do them to honor God or try to get on God's good side or to be buddies with God or to be nice to God the Father. If I do good, it is my personal history showing how I have listened to God. I am lucky to have done something good. I have tried to listen to what He says, but what He says are no longer directives and order and the Law. Christ died.

The Law is gone by. I am free. I listen to God. Most everyone else listens to their own voices, their own memories of what they've been taught or had beaten into them, their own desires, their own lusts, their own fears and their own despair. Dig it.

Copenhagen

Werner Heisenberg:"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." I saw the play "Copenhagen" in New York in January of 2001. I had gone there to comfort my daughter who had lost her job in dot.com melt down. I had spent the Christmas season insulting my friends - actually my ex-friends by the time I saw the play- and generally squandering the amicitas of 30 years in a few months of degraded behavior. Oh, well. The play was about how people cannot really communicate until after they are dead anyway. Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Master and pupil. Very poignant, eh? That's my life: poignant when I wish it were piquant. Anywho, Heisenberg's quote is very Immanuel Kant in that the Ding-an-sich we call Natur ... excuse me, but at this point I suddenly remembered that I spent a good deal of time dreaming in German last night... so was it prescient to this posting about Heisenberg? and it makes me think that the universe is music to the musical, and it is literate to the literal ( remember what I recently wrote about Joan Didion), and it is sensual to the sensuous, and it is something to exploit to the exploitive. And to the ones who still hear the voice of God, it is divine.

News From Iraq

The young lady Layla Anwar ( a sobriquet if I ever heard one; 'night of lights' indeed. so...my nickname will be day of darkness: Nahaar Qaatim....brrrrr! this is all to close to the bone and makes my skin crawl....) reports from Iraq: Oh and I forgot, over 200 men bearing the name of Omar have been killed by the Mahdi and Co criminals. Someone found a whole line of Omars lying next to a mosque, around 12 of them with a tag saying "My name is Omar and now am dead."Seems that the turn for the Bakrs has arrived. Cousin Amal and her only son Bakr have fled to Syria... You may read it all at http://arabwomanblues.blogspot.com/2007/06/on-friday-night.html Right about now, you are probably wondering what's all this fuss about Iraq. Well, I just want to experiment and see how long it takes a government run by idiots who are ruling over a society which has no greater interest than Panem et Circenses ( bread and circuses - or, better, Super Bowl LXV and HDTV and iPods and Paris Hilton) to commit a moral act.

The Club Of Ariminium (and Caesena) 2: Approach To Imperium

Iraq has always depended upon the kindness of strangers. So, as we mull over whom to run in 2008, we allow them to twist in the wind. Take solace in the realization that if there is to be retribution, perhaps we may confine it to the Grandkids!

The excellent Secretary of Defense has stated that WE shall be in Iraq for a long time. He envisions something along the lines of Korea, North and South, where we kept troops in the South for more that 50 years. Nothing surprises me from this confederacy of dunces anymore. In Korea we had the Communist countries of North Korea, China, and the USSR.
In Iraq, we defeated the Iraqi army and face disparate groups of insurgents and militias and maybe 5,000 to 10,000 Al Qai'da irregulars. So why shall we stay there forever? I suppose that was the plan all along. The new US embassy built within the green zone is enormous. There were pictures on the Internet until they were removed. The security people thought that digital pictures of the swimming pools and tennis courts might be a security risk. You may read about it at TomDispatch http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=199798 The Mother Ship Lands in Iraq The Colossus of Baghdad 

The enormous embassy is the newest Icon of the Imperial USA. It sheer bulk brings to mind Albert Speer and Arno Brecker.

I got a bird's eye view before the pix were removed from the architect's site:

From memory, I think ot covers 14 acres and will cost $ 1.2 billion to staff and run. There is something famously Domus Aurea of Nero about it all. Perhaps our descendants will creep about in its subterranean grottoes, too, and picnic amid the glories of the departed imperial race.

Now, let us recall Albert Speer:

Grosse Halle

who was to build the new Berlin, and Arno Brecker whose sculptures would adorn the 1,000 year buidlings:

Kammeradschaft

In all fairness, we should only ask the President and Vice President how long, in their estimation, the hegemony of the United States of America will last? Would it be unpatriotic to suggest it would not be 1,000 years?

Or would the mere asking of that question cause an explosion of the entire charade. The smiling masks would drop, there would be frowns, and good men scurry about looking for hemlock.

As I Was Saying To Joan Didion...

Joan Didion is a writer. She understands reality by writing. If she is not writing, she is merely going through the motions, or at least that is how I understand her. Where did the month of May go? I did not write here for almost the entire month. If a month goes by and one does not write, did one actually exist during that interval. Or was one merely going through the motions; inhaling, exhaling, ingesting...and so on. This year is so long and so short, so interminable and so quick. On March 9, my 86 year old father had surgery for an abdominal aneurysm. My parents live 60 miles from myself, and I live 8 minutes from the hospital. My mother was invited to bring her cat and stay with us, but she insisted my wife go North and cat sit, while she would spend a night with me at our place. There was a good deal here, but I do not feel like writing about it now. My father is doing great. He is gardening and living with all the gusto he used to. By the beginning of April, my brother experienced a collapsed lung. He lives in the same city as do my parents, Port Desespoir of infamy - the sort of a place you'd expect Beau Geste to turn up in after leaving the Foreign Legion. Closer to reality, it is the kind of wonderful place where you'd expect to run into Sebastian's Kurt in a bar...or tattoo parlor. One day my parents said something along the lines, oh, by the way, we saw your brother Monday. He can't breath. So after he had allowed 1 week for the lung to heal itself, I took him to the ER of the local Hotel Dieu on Sunday. He's better. I suspicion that he is back on the nicotine rag, however. ( not the nicest turn of phrase...sorry.) Let's see...what else? Taxes. Imus. Iraq. I have started to write out the stories of Zakaria Tamir to aid my study of Arabic. My favorite writers are Tamir, Amos Tutuola, Kazantzakis, Anais Nin, Avivah Zornberg...these are the ones that insinuate themselves into my being in alarming and private ways that exceeds the allotment of access to the soul normally extended to writers. Did I ever tell you that I can not read Anne Rice? I tried 3 times, and I can not force myself to read her writing. What I mean, I guess, is that my eyes rebel from the printed paper. It is not the imagery or stories, it is the brute phalanx of the letters in black upon the white, desdemona-like page that becomes decimate...and I can not go on. I have the same problem with Danielle Steele. Odd. Anyway, I shall write a tad more now. I sense things are better. After a long journey, you step down from the train. You say what a strange country this is in which I find myself...then you smile.

Talking About Divinity 1

More about divinity, less about politics.

The only reason I wrote so much about politics is the present group in power. The future of our country will be played out as a battle between those who will lead by compulsion and those who will lead by attraction. The knifes are being sharpened as I write. Ah...society and politics has sneaked in again. Gotcha ! Now, a few words from our sponsor.
I met a fellow as I was involved in a part-time job. He was of a religious bent and talk naturally turned to divinity. He asked if I believed in God. I said yes, of course I did. Then he apparently decided this was not quite enough, so he asked if I had accepted Jesus as my savior. Trying to be as polite as possible, I indicated that I do not respond to such questions...usually.
Going back to the original query: ' are you a believer? ', I actually find this to be an odd question and more along the lines of something you would hear from the mentally challenged. Instead of answering yes, I should have patted him on the head and handed him a sweet. It is a mistake to think that an infinite number of questions deserves a response from me, for I shall not answer them. I really do not care whether you think I am this or that. Nor do I care whether our beliefs are the same, for I am not searching for a group or forum or political party of similarly-minded individuals to get together and use power over others. Ya-da ya-da ya-da...time drags on...lips move...ears ache...bladders do what bladders do when the mind is bored and desires to mediate upon the clepsydrical nature of a Bladder...

He said that he often thought of God's love as that of a father for his children...loving, yet firm...a metaphor for the entire universe, no doubt. So I told him that God is the big, ugly, scarey guy. My friend's eyes went wide with astonishment. God is the big, ugly, scarey guy that drags us to a desolate pinnacle and shows us the emptiness of the universe. Then, when we have been reduced to hopelessness, laughs loudly and slaps us on the back so hard we almost lose our balance ( and fall from yonder pinnacle ), saying He was just kidding... just like He did with Job. God the awe-inspiring and God the awful or filled with awe. There is the coming together and the running away.
What is the fear of God? What is the love of God? Fear is a state of being that God used for the preservation of man, causing a flight FROM an evil. Love is a state of being that God used for the preservation of man, causing a flight TOWARDS a good. Both fear and love are mindless fevers that fill the soul. Fly towards. Fly away from.

When my friend describes what he called a father's love, he was not describing love. He was describing responsibility, duty, filling a role. He was describing what the good soldier Schweik must do to live his life and be loved, honored, and respected. None of this applies to God.
To be Humble is to learn that God has no role to live up to; He is writing the rules and the roles as things seem to unfold to us. To have faith, then, is to be humble and trust. It is in no way asking a number of inane questions to a hapless individual. It is not to try to respond to the infinite number of things which may be asked as questions.
I told him that if he must ask questions, ask impossible things...ask the outrageous things. He clearly could not make head nor tail of this odd statement of mine. "There," I said. "That is what God is like. How does it feel? You look for a furtive certainty by asking questions and affirming your answers." I paused. "But God cannot be grasped so easily, He cannot be chased down a burrow and trapped by the jaws of your logic." I lost this friend...just as I lost all my other friends. (Sometimes I used to wonder: Freund oder Feind ...?)
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Back From The Dead

I was feeling Joycean, as in The Dead.
In the midst of a hot, spring day, I felt the cold winds beat my back, hitting me between the shoulders with a fury of a glad handing salesman of Arctic goods. (ColdWare...or HotWare as we shall soon be calling it, thanks to Global Mobile Warming.)
Or are we merely Los Olvidados, feeling a bit Bunuel. Or will it be a madeleine of Chekov today. My eyes are slammed shut like Giorgio de Chirico's father's eyes...and the Greyhound buses and the on time trains creep past my recognition. I shall be 90 this year. I suppose I shall have to face reality now.
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