SCOTUS And Hobby Lobby

The US Supreme Court handed down another of its truly bizarre decisions granting corporations status as human beings. In the Hobby Lobby case, the majority of the court extended religious freedoms to corporations, paralleling its earlier extension of freedom of speech to corporations.

This inane decision promises to creep towards all corporations, not merely "tightly held" ones such as Hobby Lobby.

As this occurs, corporations will find their true "religion", and they will begin to opt out of other legal obligations where they smell a chance to do so.

When a corporation can bears arms and die for one's country, then it may be considered a person, and not before.
A corporation must bear burdens in the same sense and way that real individuals do. If it does not, it does not merit the benefits that accrue to such burdens.

The Supreme Court is indulging in judicial activism in favor of non-human entities. What is going on in their minds? What corrupt philosophy have they been bred on?

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The Age Of Puritanism

I have been wondering whether to mark the beginning of the present age with the passage of the Volstead Act, which introduced Prohibition to the USA. This was a species of Puritanism which demanded absolute obedience by all, and was intolerant of any deviation, and seems to presage the mid-century crusade of anti-Communism and loyalty oaths, the Vietnam War, and the rise of the surveillance state.

Maybe not.

I read two stories which give some light to the matter.
The first is from the age of Prohibition, around 1916:

Prohibition and Civilization
By Albert Jay Nock 
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/repository/prohibition-and-civilization/

... The advocates of prohibition ought to get a clear grasp of the fundamental objection to their theory, and meet it with something more substantial than feeble talk about the influence of “the liquor interests.” Our objection is to Puritanism, with its false social theory taking shape in a civilization that, however well-ordered and economically prosperous, is hideous and suffocating.

One can at least speak for oneself: I am an absolute teetotaler, and it would make no difference to me if there were never another drop of liquor in the world; and yet to live under any regime of prohibition that I have so far had opportunity to observe would seem to me an appalling calamity. The ideals and instruments of Puritanism are simply unworthy of a free people, and, being unworthy, are soon found intolerable. Its hatreds, fanaticisms, inaccessibility to ideas; its inflamed and cancerous interest in the personal conduct of others; its hysterical disregard of personal rights; its pure faith in force, and above all, its tyrannical imposition of its own Kultur: these characterize and animate a civilization that the general experience of mankind at once condemns as impossible, and as hateful as it is impossible...

 
Albert Jay Nock (1870 – 1945) was an American libertarian author, educational theorist, and social critic of the early and mid-20th century. This essay first appeared in The North American Review in 1916.
 

and we can compare this to a recent article:

Interrogate Thy Neighbor
By Rod Dreher • June 28, 2014, 8:13 PM
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/interrogate-thy-neighbor/

A reader writes:

I have had some new neighbors for several weeks. They are lesbians. They have been nice enough. We have spoken and I have helped them out with cutting some limbs on trees. Last night my wife made zucchini bread for the neighbors and we walked it over to them. One of them asked me what I read every evening outside. I told her I read a chapter in my Bible and some out of other books. She then proceeded to ask me what denomination I am. I told her Methodist. She asked if they recognized gay marriage. I said officially no. She then asked if I agreed with that. I said yes. She said that made her uncomfortable and that I made her feel threatened. I said sorry and left the food.
She stopped me as I was leaving and asked how could I hold to that old belief when people like the Episcopalians have shown that belief was not actually Biblical anymore. I intend on letting things lay low for a while and go on trying to be a good neighbor. Hopefully my actions can overcome their thoughts of me.

Can you believe this? The guy comes over to be a good neighbor by bringing his lesbian neighbors zucchini bread, and she gives him the third degree, then calls him “threatening” because he doesn’t share her opinion of gay marriage.
Why must we ideologize everything? What business is it of this prickly person’s to know what her neighbor’s religious beliefs are on anything. I bet that couple will have trouble making friends, because on the face of it, they are not friendly. They’ll probably chalk it up to homophobia, when the fact is, at least one of them is a jerk.

UPDATE: A happy ending is reported this morning by the reader who bore the zucchini bread:

I am on vacation now and will not be around much. Saturday afternoon one of the two women flagged me down. She apologized for her partner and wanted to remain on good terms. I said no problem. The defense she offered for her partner is that when she came out she was banished by her evangelical family. They have not talked in over 5 years. I now understand her reaction and feel sorry for the massive pain that she has in her life because of Christians acting unChristian.

Am I stretching things a bit by seeing the absolutism of Puritanism as at least one major defining factor of our age? An absolutism mixed with incredible technology and science?
Can you imagine a Puritan Prohibitionist taking a drink with a buddy to see what beer drinking is all about?
Can you imagine a country founded by Puritans escaping from religious oppression sanctioning genocide against the native inhabitants?

If a Teetotaler had the bomb, would they bomb all beer-pong parties back to the Stone Age?

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Why We Should Outsource Foreign Policy

Just think how far we have come since we sat around the TV set in the 1990s and watched Baghdad being bombed in the Gulf War.
Great TV!
They picked up the option and it has been running ever since.

 
Syrian Rebels Buckling in Face of Jihadis
BEIRUT — Jun 27, 2014, 4:28 PM ET
By ZEINA KARAM Associated Press
Associated Press

The Syrian rebels that the U.S. now wants to support are in poor shape, on the retreat from the radical al-Qaida breakaway group that has swept over large parts of Iraq and Syria, with some rebels giving up the fight. It is not clear whether the new U.S. promise to arm them will make a difference.

Some, more hard-line Syrian fighters are bending to the winds and joining the radicals.

The Obama administration is seeking $500 million to train and arm what it calls "moderate" factions among the rebels, a far larger project than a quiet CIA-led effort in Jordan that has been training a few hundreds fighters a month. But U.S. officials say it will take a year to get the new program fully underway. The U.S. also faces the difficult task of what constitutes a "moderate" rebel in a movement dominated by Islamist ideologies...

Why does The President and the Secretary of State want to arm people who could not succeed in Syria neither against Al Assad nor against their own jihadist allies?

As my grandfather used to say, "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."
Yet here we are giving it a try.

If the administration wanted to succeed, to actually win something in foreign policy, they should give up their poorly rationalized animus against Al Assad, back him, let the Syrian army push the rebels out of Syria, and then attack ISIS from the north at the same time that Iraq pushes from the south.
The pincers would grind ISIS into dust.
Then allow Iraq to reconstitute itself as a Shia, Sunni, and a Kurdish Federation, or even as separate states, if that's what it takes to keep the peace.

Since we, as Americans, find the taste of success alien from our diet on foreign policy, we might then consider outsourcing our foreign affairs.
I think Russia might be able to do us a good job. They do not seem to shrink from strategies designed to achieve their goals.

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Follow The Astral Road

I have been with two family members who are ill. They may be near the end of life.

One told me he dreamed of walking an astral road from Detroit to Port Huron, and the pavement was 3D, with not only stars but deep space galaxies and nebulae. He said it was terrifying in the sense of being overwhelmingly awesome.
I thought he may be getting ready.

The other, a lady, is visiting. My wife spends time with her while I was battling the various epochs of windows in my mother's summer house, a vast reliquary of tschotches and styles and designs, and a museum of window types.
One window design was the prototype of sliding summer porch windows, containing 50 inch x 36 inch sliders which must be removed to get the screens out and to be able to wash both sides of the sliders. These things weigh about 35 pounds distributed over 3,600 cubic inches. They really required a small crane or cherry-picker to properly work with, sort of a TonkaToy crane steroidical and a back brace.

My wife says that the lady seems detached.

When she said that, I looked at my left hand, which was resting under the lamp next to the computer. I seemed to sense that the quantum particles - atoms, molecules, and all the body parts no larger than an alderman's ring -  could act detached as they were getting ready to leave their Lover, this paramour, the Self of more than 70 years cognition, faith, fear, hope, and striving;  filling their minute minds with memories of passionate penetrations into the body, in order to remember in the vasty future.

There was a terrible Love going through the small space enclosed by that left hand... terrible in the sense of awesome.

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I'm So Wonderful!

Yesterday She-who-must-be-obeyed was awaiting my return from running to shirr a few eggs for the fast break.

I came back and said "Fiant Ova!"

"Let there be eggs!"

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A Dream Of Frankenstein 1

 The Villa Deodati

The breeze began to blow from the lake, reinvigorating the air about the Villa Deodati and its environs. Byron looked down to the sea  (1) , watching the Shelleys begin to walk  back to the house. Polidori was in the library, sleeping.
The tedium was thick, and he felt as if he could cut it with a sword, possibly to make marzipan-filled côtelettes d'ennuie  ( cutlets of boredom) for holiday gifts.

He looked forward to hearing the continuation of Mary Shelley's new story this evening, her gothic tale of impossible and forbidden romances.
A noise from the library disturbed him. He brusquely walked into the room where Polydori slept undisturbed, and walked over to the television, which was filled with images of mobs of poor people in some European capital or other. The people in the hi-def images were talking rapidly in a dialect he could not understand, so he assumed it was London.

Byron looked for the TV remote, whose tiny wheezy steam governor disclosed its location, and turned the TV off.

" 'The poor you shall have always with you' " , he thought sardonically, "but certainly not in the library or the great room."

--

notes

(1)  sometimes Lake Geneva was referred to as "the sea", 

Who Is ISIS? 2

 AP Photo of Syrian Rebel

ISIS is our creation just as Osama bin Laden was.

ISIS is a group of monsters and mercenaries we - and our "friends"... the wispy-minded Doctors Praetorius that infest the graveyards of our foreign policy - hired to do our dirty work. Remember the post I ran about the Syrian Civil War, in which the photo above appeared?
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2013/03/tattoed-muslims.html

Not only tattoed, but tattoed with blatant female imagery. That is just the type of thing an observant and pious Sunni Muslim would do, right? Not!

The so-called "militants" are monsters and mercenaries.
They are not a group of Sunni religious minded people who just happen to kill and crucify other people.

So, who has lied to us?

The President has lied to us about our support of monsters in Syria.
The House of Representatives has lied to us, particularly Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan.
The Senate has lied to us.
The Media has lied to us.
And we lie to each other.

People that continuously believe that they can control their own monsters, even after copious experience has shown otherwise, are the veritable monsters.


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postscriptum:

 Photo of Dr. Praetorius

Meditation

Meditation is the return to our original consciousness.

The original consciousness was the awakening to self-awareness, which was soon overlaid - or "paved over" as if turning it into a "parking lot" - by the collage of daily nonsense.

Original consciousness is the state in which we may communicate just by being conscious beings.

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Who Is ISIS?

ISIS or ISIL are described as Sunni muslims.

The way they act is anything but Sunni. They are radically removed from Sunni traditions.

ISIS is the group is monsters that we and our allies gave birth to in Syria, in order that they could fight and die against Bashar Al Assad.

Losing in Syria, they turn to greener fields of tender Iraq.

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Karma Or Not

Now that Iraq falls into discord again, we think maybe the concept of "karma" has something of the eternal and the divine in it. Maybe we are accountable for our actions, and maybe we are accountable in the here and now, as well as in the world to come.
Maybe.
I myself think more of "ironic reversal", much along the lines of "the bigger they are, the harder they fall", or even more iconic, "the bigger the black silk top hat, the more snowballs thrown at it".

We acted violently based on lies and deceit, and we expect the kingdom of heaven. Which crime is worse? The deliberate self delusion? The descent into violence and war? The inexplicable arrogance of expecting rewards accruing to immoral acts?

There is Divinity, whether it be karma or not.

Just before the start of the Iraq War in 2003, I was intensely involved in the news about what was going on. I fell asleep in front of my computer, after praying for clear understanding.
When I awoke, I awoke with the intense understanding that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs).

I was uncomfortable with this.
At the time, even though the UN weapons inspectors had said there were no WMDs in Iraq, it was very, very reasonable to assume there might be a few stray bombs or uranium centrifuges laying about on the beach, chillaxing.
After all, we had backed Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, the country that was the demon du jour or de l'an at that time. We had a little list of the bombs and planes and chemicals we had supplied him, and we had lists from our friends concerning what they had supplied to Iraq.
We knew they had had WMDs at one time.
In our age, it was madness to have had a weapon that could so easily destroy life and give it up. Saddam Hussein was not mad. Therefore, Iraq still had WMDs. QED.

So I was uncomfortable in taking such an extreme view. Surely there must be some atomic bomb blueprints in some commissary that had been used to wrap sandwiches. Surely.

Only there wasn't.

And that was terrifying... for my country to have been entirely wrong. The wrong-side had given 110% as the sports section has it.

That was an awesome thing to look at.

At some point, given the absolute falsity of our beliefs and the violence we started and engaged in, we should have attempted some sort of reconciliation between all the parties involved. That was our responsibility.

However, we did not even do that.
We left Iraq. We allowed a civil war that mirrored the Iraqi sectarian strife to grow luxuriantly on Iraq's borders with Syria. We supported the radicals in this Syrian war and allowed and encouraged our "allies" to support them even more.

Now we are arguing and fighting our old political battles of six to eleven years ago, as Dick Cheney is on the TV with his nonsense daughter, and we write arguments against his arguments.

Karma will not harm us if we strive to be as perfect as possible in the work of the present. Karma arises from the imperfections of the body and the spirit. Remedy it.

--
ps.
The gross spectacle of the hanging of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, is not forgotten, and - as usual - is coming back to haunt us. We could have prevented it and made the execution clean and precise, but we allowed it to become a Shia vs. Sunni YouTube event.
Failures mount upon failures.

And Saddam's life thread was colored by karma coming on the Ba'athist killing of Abd al Karim Qasim.

 

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Dr. Moriarty And The NSA

“I can open any door, anywhere with a few tiny lines of computer code,” Moriarty tells Sherlock over a cup of tea in “The Reichenbach Fall”, “No such thing as a private bank account now. They’re all mine. No such thing as secrecy. I OWN secrecy. Nuclear codes? I could blow up NATO in alphabetical order. In a world of locked rooms, the man with the key is king. And honey you should see me in a crown.”

Sound On Sight
 http://www.soundonsight.org/monster-moriarty/


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Why I Don't "Believe In" God

As I have said before, I do not believe in God. I expect God.

God is an Event.

We do not believe in Events; we experience Events.

Religion is the Memory of an Event or Events.

Ritual is Memory made Concrete.

The Only way to experience God is as radically embodied entity that lives the Event.


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Beau Birddog

 

Beau Birddog, Football Hero, Receives 

Pre-Game Attention From Lucy Collins, 

2014 Recipient of Iowa  4H  Scholarship

When I first heard news of the prisoner exchange of the Afghanistan War, I heard the name of the American soldier as "Beau Birddog".

I could not quite believe it, so I listened more attentively. There it was: Beau Birddog.

Well, I thought, this ought to be quite a shin-dig when Beau comes home! I anticipated that Beau Birddog was a very good old country boy, who when he hunted, either prepared the kill for his own meals, or donated the dressed deer to the local poor.
I assumed Beau got up before sunrise to milk the cows back when he was in grammar school. I expected his first experience with technology was reading the monitor in the cab of a high-tech farming combine, which calculated yield per acre of new and improved breeds of corn.

I fully expected a large group of men gathering in the morning at Nancy Jack's Cafe, just down the street a bit from the grain elevators of the Co-op, and opening their early newspapers to find that everyone's favorite high school football quarterback, who had broken every sports record and quite a few hearts in his career before the Army, was finally coming home.
And plans must be made for a "Welcome Home" party.

It did not work out like that.

The young man's name is Bowe Bergedahl. He was exchanged for terrorists. He went AWOL from his post and was scooped up by the Taliban.

Only, who in their right mind's goes AWOL in the midst of enemy territory, an enemy depicted as blood-thirsty terrorists.
Then it comes out he was mightily affected by the sight of an Afghan child being run over by an Army vehicle, and he began to act oddly. There was indeed a trauma, but no diagnosis of PTSD

What was he doing there in that condition?

And as for the terrorists, the reports I read is that they were Taliban people. Much as I dislike the Taliban-type, it was we who invaded Afghanistan.
The Taliban had been asked by Osama bin Laden for a refuge. The Taliban agreed if Osama and Al Qai'ida killed the leader of the Northern Alliance rebel group, which murder Al Qai'ida did achieve shortly before 9/11.
No one has ever claimed the Taliban was involved in 9/11. They refused to hand over biun Laden to the USA, upholding their end of the murderous refuge agreement. The USA invaded Afghanistan and drove the Taliban out.
Then the USA detoured into Iraq, and thus allowed the Taliban 10 years to re-establish themselves.

Since we invaded the country ruled by the Taliban, it sounds as if the exchanged prisoner from Gauntanamo were Prisoners Of War, and not terrorists, so it was a POW for POW exchange.

Another failure story. Another rush to judge. More sound and fury signifying the usual outcomes.

--

note
In today's NY Times, there is a story in which the soldier's of Bergedahl's unit vehemently deny the story pof the Afghan child's being run over, an accident Bergedahl reported to his parents in an email.
How vehemently do they deny it? Too much?
Are they partisans of truth or of their own tenuous sanity?

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Krauthammer Reflected

Floats Like A Vulture

Instead of rescuing forgotten truths, neocons like Charles Krauthammer devise novel fallacies.
George Scialabba
May 20, 2014

http://www.thenation.com/article/179946/floats-vulture?page=full#

... He [Charles Krauthammer] is furious, for example, at the suggestion that the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World should be an occasion for “repentance and reflection” about the unhappy (for its inhabitants) sequel. “For the left,” he jeers, the anniversary “comes just in time. The revolutions of 1989 having put a dent in the case for the degeneracy of the West, 1992 offers a welcome new point of attack.”
True, mistakes were made. “The European conquest of the Americas, like the conquest of other civilizations, was indeed accompanied by great cruelty. But that is to say nothing more than that the European conquest of America was, in this way, much like the rise of Islam, the Norman conquest of Britain and the widespread American Indian tradition of raiding, depopulating and appropriating neighboring lands.” Besides, he concludes, “the real question is, What eventually grew on this bloodied soil? The answer is, The great modern civilizations of the Americas—a new world of individual rights, an ever-expanding circle of liberty.” ...

I left my psychopathological side back in adolescence... which lasted, in my case, about thirty years.

I hope that I would not write a paean to the efficiencies of irrigating new soil with blood, nor find inspiration in the transition from cruelty and oppression to love and liberty...

Anyone can undergo oppression and love the liberty denied them. The trick is to gather all those virtues of liberty and charity and beneficence into a bouquet of flowers without destroying the fragile growths which bear the blossoms.

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Islamic Jurisprudence

A Judge Of France, Symbol Of The Law

I have been reading about Islamic Jurisprudence, and today I began to read Surah 5, The Table Spread, with reference to the views of Abdul Qadir Awdah, who writes in Islam: Between Ignorant Followers and Incapable Scholars :

[...]

God has sent this jurisprudence, complete and comprehensive, as it is, in a short period of time, starting from the first day of the Prophet's mission, and ending on the day of his death, or on the day when the following verse was revealed:
 
"Today I have perfected your system of belief and bestowed My favors upon you in full, and have chosen submission (al-Islam) as the creed for you".
(The Holy Quran, Chapter 5. "The Table Spread", verses 3)
 
This verse is the authoritative pronouncement relative to the perfection and permanence of the jurisprudence, especially since another verse has expressly stipulated that Muhammad (pbuh) is the last Prophet:
 
"Muhammad is not the father of any man among you, but a messenger of God, and the seal of the prophets".
(The Holy Quran, Chapter 33. "The Clans, The Coalition", verse 40) ...

First, the translation of "system of belief" is the word "Deen", which is the ordinary word for "religion". The only warranted translation is "Today I have perfected your Belief...", or "Today I have perfected your Religion..."
The implication that the "Deen" is a "system"made up of many individual parts which may be cut out of the body of scripture and autopsied is a gross error in my opinion, notwithstanding the fact that most people - European and Islamic - have such a view.

There is no separating out small truths from the larger Truth, for just as Muhammad be not the father, but the messenger of the message and the seal, so also is the Quran a message which does not give birth to new messages.

When we come to:

"As for the thief, whether man or woman, cut his hand".
(The Holy Quran, Chapter 5. "The Table Spread", verse 38)

and we interpret this as a solitary and full-standing injunction to punishment, we have allowed a system of belief to be born anew, establishing a new entity called Law, about which future scholars may argue.

No part of holy scripture may be considered apart from the entirety of the scripture, for on its own, it calls forth new and different meanings from the souls and minds of those who look upon it, effectively setting up a new system of belief of changeable parts derived from the original scripture.

Everything within a scripture must be lived and be breath before we speak on it. Therefore, the spirit of forgiveness and tolerance will inform the shape of the spirits of punishment, and there is no enrichment of punishment over charity, nor is there a magnification of tolerance over rectitude. The quote:

“Far better that I should err 1000 times in forgiving than once in the application of a sanction"-Umar ibn Abdul Aziz

is not a hypertrophy of charity, but a desire not to apply a sanction in error, which is far more acceptable to a community than a desire to err 1000 times in harsh punishment than once in forgiveness, which would be despotism.

Once the seal is set, that which is given us is whole and unbroken, no matter how hard we try to winnow the words of the Holy into small and separate kernels of wheat for our daily bread. How this view affects the desire of people to have their systems of Jurisprudence, which indeed are heaps of laws and interpretations, is not my concern.

(I have expressed similar views about those who slice and dice the Bible, particularly parts of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, taking the parts choicest for their "system of individual beliefs" and leaving the rest.)

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Connexion

 Running Through The Parliament of Front Doors

JRR Tolkien in a letter to Arthur Greaves from 1930:

“ ... in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations ...  that perhaps was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood – they were not mistaken for there was in a sense real (not metaphorical) connections between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air and later corn, and later still bread, really was in them. We of course who live on a standardized international diet…are artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours.”

 quoted in Rod Dreher, The American Conservative

Over Memorial Day weekend, my nephew's fiancee and I had spoke briefly about running outdoors, and how over time there is established some sympathetic connection ("connexion" to Tolkien) of which we are very aware, but cannot be encapsulated into words and descriptions.
It must be lived.

We spoke briefly for that very reason that there is little to be said. We only recognize it and wonder how others feel about things, such as gardeners who spend their entire days in the open nurturing growth in the spring and summer and making preparations in the fall for the dead of winter.

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Metropolis Again

 Bust of Hel 

I was aware at a level beneath overt awareness that the faces of Hel and the false Maria (the robot) in Fritz Lang's Metropolis were the same face. Watching the film again, it jumped into awareness.

Robot Maria

Joh Fredersen supposedly stole the love of the lady Hel from the scientist Rotwang (who is kneeling before her bust in the picture).
Fredersen also used the robot Maria to mislead the workers into rebellion, which he wanted to violently crush.

I had never realized how cruel and bloody was Joh Fredersen - the supremely rational man who ran the city Metropolis like clockwork.

I am reading the  novel by Thea von Harbou. Metropolis is one of those films that escapes like an errant gingerbread boy from the care of its creator, and finds a new life of its own in the minds of the audience.

--

ps

I read John O'Hara's The Swimmer this morning before my shower. One of the neighbors in whose pools he swims are the Biswangers.

Erwin Biswanger (below) portrayed the character "Worker 11811" in Metropolis:

Coincidence.
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Nature And Nature's Laws

  King Canute Command The Tides To Withdraw

It has been reported that government meteorologists in Canada cannot mention nor write on the topic of Climate Change.

Galileo fought against a church establishment that had an ancient scholastic outlook, and held true the natural philosophy that held the Earth to be the center of the universe, and that the Earth did not move around the sun.
That was God's way.

Canadian meteorologists working for the government are in a potential conflict with an establishment that tends to see Money and Power as sacred, even  though God Himself has been banished from 6 of the 7 days of the week.
The Canada of Stephen Harper believes it can control the tides and the climate.

Interesting.

 King and Lady Canute Chilling

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