Res Nova... New Thing

New way to speak. Silence is preferable, being the humble aphasia that allows it cannot measure up to the task of speaking of The Holy. New way...

Litany

Mary, Miriam, holy Mother...
autumn tanager!
passenger of time:
owl of foresight,
goldfinch teenager,
child-sung blue of robin.
habitat and grassland -
prairie falcon eyes -
niched on high places!
bluegrass and winterfat,
squirrelgrass, wheatgrass,
tumbleweed and sage!
Lady sachem paint the world
with the autumnal palette!
I want some cloth of this color!
Hey! A cloth to give my sweet one!
She will make a coat of it!
--

Death & Taxes.... and War

Baysage - the Oklahoma Orpheus - mentioned that the Tea Party, or at least a large portion of it, seems to want to do away with taxes while favoring wars and our global military presence. That is going to be one interesting political agenda.

It is truly anomalous. It is beyond logic. Only people with intense faith in their own delusions could possibly believe that War is free. I mean, just because we derive so much pleasure from it, that doesn't mean we don't have to pay the piper.

War is the time, place, and the system when Habeas Corpus is in real danger of being suspended; War is the time when Martial Law law supplants the constitutional Rule of Law; War is the time when freedom may be suspended or infringed - when citizens may find their communities physically transported to gulags and camps, like the Nisei in WW II.
War is the time when free markets may disappear, when prices may be frozen, when resources may be rationed. The citizens accept all this because is is only for the duration, and it is for the good cause.

War is the center of its Universe. It is Central Planning to the max. It is a Manhattan Project magnified a million times. If it goes on too long, it is the death of freedom. War destroys assets and value. It destroys those of the other side as well as our side. And War requires taxes. There is no more illusionary and delusionary economics such as was permitted to exist from 2000 to 2009, when the USA could have all the War it wanted and not have to budget for it: the cost of War was a cost that did not seem to have to be accounted for.

We have been at war since 1941. We do not know how to live without war. We do not know how to view the world without the blinders of us versus them.
Furthermore, we do not know how to live without the insufferable burden of a Leviathan size Government which provides fundamental services we want and require, boondoggles for the favored few, and War.

“The United States faces a fundamental disconnect between the services that people expect the government to provide, particularly in the form of benefits for older Americans, and the tax revenues that people are willing to send to the government to finance those services. Changes of the magnitude required to make fiscal policy sustainable could have important economic and social effects — but they also provide an opportunity to address existing concerns about tax and spending policies. Given the time required to implement significant policy changes, determining those changes is an urgent task for policymakers.”

 http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/20878/#more-20878


And then there is the Tea Party....

A Nation called "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" 2

 Tennessee Williams discussing the play in 1958:

I think that deliberate, conscienceless mendacity, the acceptance of falsehood and hypocrisy, is the most dangerous of sins. . . . I meant for the audience to discover how people erect false values by not facing what is true in their natures, by having to live a lie, and I hoped the audience would admire the heroic persistence of life and vitality; and I hoped they would feel the thwarted desire of people to reach each other through this fog, this screen of incomprehension. What I want most of all is to catch the quality of existence and experience. I want people to think, “This is life.”

An entire nation living a lie!

Hanaan's Diner 2010

Things are not as full of the old joie de vivre  as they used to be at Hanaan's Diner. It's more like a peur de manger, truth to tell: a fear of eating. Across the street there is a sign which totals up the cost of the wars we are waging, the Glorious Homeland Wars taking place around the globe: shooting wars, drone wars, assassinations, and torture.
It is becoming impossible to eat there while watching the nation's money go down the sinkhole. Hank Jacubowski's son-in-law is out of work going on one year, and I see him grind his teeth when he sees that sign flashing its crimson numbers.
"Going to get a rifle... shoot it's lights out!" Hanaan muttered as she wiped the doomsday formica of the table where I sat. I looked at her and made an inquiry with my eyebrows. She pointed at the sign across the street.
"How can anyone eat watching the future go down a ----hole?!"
I saw her point. I mean, 50 to 100 million per day would go a long way to bucking our depressed state of affairs back into the pink. I'd settle for 500 million and spend it on education, health, and doing something about all the "failed" communities that found themselves in 2007 and 2008 in a bad place of being unfinished, and at considerable risk for the future. I suppose there'll be more about that in the future; right now we're too pre-occupied with stories about not doing anything about families losing their homes, the usual family values stories.
We sat there silent and morose, even despite the fact it was Coney Day, two for $3.00. And we, the TYBALTS ( the young bucks at lunch together ) did not even grunt when the ROMEOS ( retired old men eating out ) came sashaying in at noon. Reminded me of an O.K. Corral confrontation between gunfighters suffering from Alzheimer's.
Come to think of it, 50 million a day to cure Alzheimer's wouldn't be such a bad investment.

Glenn Beck's Rally 2

Mr. Beck said that God is our king.

I really find that type of statement insufferable.
The only "kings" that actually give out orders and have people jump  that I am familiar with are those in fairy tales. So we have a metaphor of God and fairy tale entities. So much for putting aside the things of a child.

We are created free. The relationship of Man to God cannot be expressed in the same terms that we used for Caesar and his heirs. What nonsense to have labored to have escaped the catacombs of Rome, only to come up to the sunshine to be trapped in a political metaphor!

Furthermore, the blotational device known as John Haggee was there, signing us all up to go to war to defend his policy in the Middle East. If the Tea Party and its hangers-on wish to be end-times-idiots, let them find their own bit of earth to wreak their havoc.

Glenn Beck's Rally

I know some people who went to the rally. I sent them off earlier Thursday last with a wan smile, and the wishes of a safe trip.

What do I think of it? I seek no leader among men or women: I have seen the depredations of absolute power and politics. There was no mention of politics, but who doubts that there will  be? The people I knew were Tea Party workers, on and off. They will render unto Caesar, and dismiss God to the realm of Honor, Loyalty, and Repentance. My point has always been God is here and now; there is no high level word like Honor that applies to God nor his ways. Words like "Honor" apply to describe certain punctuations of our lives - the good and honorable parts - but not God.

Honor applies to histories and stories of lives that have already elapsed, and words like "honor" sum up in a moral sack the lives of men and their steadfast actions when needed. I can think of many parts of my life to which the concept "honor" would never be mentioned: all the hours doing laundry and ironing would probably not be brought up in my eulogy to describe my loyalty, nor my time spent ion the "head" be mentioned among the list of my honorable attainments!

God has no intermittency, no punctuation - all is detail and summary at once.


ps.
As an aside, I fail to see how a nation that specifically ignores the injunction of the founder of its religion never to set aside one's wife may ever "come back to God" in any meaningful sense. Gay marriage is not the problem to a Christian; Divorce is.

Great Society

The Great Society of Lyndon Johnson may have had numerous problems, and immense, too. It may have been poorly thought out.
But it was an investment in the future of the country and its infra-structure and our fellow citizens: health, education, welfare....

The country is the exploited timberland of my earlier post. We treated our favored position in the world as an unending resource. Instead, we have discovered it takes husbandry: investment in time, money, effort, and caring.

The Best & the Brightest are at it Again

Slashing R&D in favor of more important things, like wars and profits. Who cares about America’s future?


At Fabius Maximus:  http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/20714/#more-20714

Essentially, yet another way the wealthy exploit the present and destroy the future.

Take a Breathe...

...and ask yourself, what is it, exactly, that we as a nation are supposed to be doing?

It ain't this.

Fleeing Choirs

M.S. Taitt, iconographer of Detroit et alii, mentioned that I am preaching to the choir. That's true. Any choir-outsider would absolutely snort with contempt at anything I say.

My friend of 30+ years lost his job a year ago; he has looked assiduously for work since, and had no luck, he may not be able to afford his health care costs soon.

He has mentioned a number of times recently that he recalls the days when we used to run together in the early mornings before work - back in the 80s and 90s. He said I always had a "thing" that some catastrophe was in the future that would change us all. Since we were friends, he thought me merely quaint and "funny" in a nice way.

Well...................
He's in the choir now. But I can't help him either. We are living in an Age of Irony: great reversal. How ironic it was that the Tower of Babel, supposed to have been a proud monument, led to the peoples been dispersed over the face of the earth in consternation! Irony. Great reversal of fortune.
We must change to handle change. Suffering breaks us down - like brainwashing - and lets the future rebuild us. I just had a jump on it. I have told the tale of looking about at the wreckage of 2008 and being aware that this was the train wreck I had sensed coming. How could anyone have thought such a thing about " the mightiest power in the history of mankind" ( as we were so fond of refering to ourselves back then ).

The Effect of the Frontier on American Capitalism

Suppose you were a lumberman, and you had a well-defined and delimited parcel of forest land which contained trees sufficient to occupy your lumbering facilities for 15 years, and assume trees took 13 years to grow from germination to a stage ready to be harvested.  How would you go about harvesting your trees, figuring that you would live another 50 years or so from now, and wanted to work and provide for your family throughout that time?

How would you go about it if, when you had cleared as many trees as you could, you had merely to move on another ten miles to confront another virgin forest ready to be harvested, and the cost of shipping was low, most lumber being sent down the many rivers to the sawmill?

When Jackson became president, he wished to move the indigenous Indian populations west of the Mississippi, where they would inhabit the fair plains between the river and the Rocky Mountains. The Frontier was so immense on both sides of the Mississippi that he did not foresee the day when the Indians needs be displaced from the plains and constrained into Reservations.
Unlimited chances, unlimited resources create one set of circumstances. Limited resources create another. We have entered the Age of Limitations. It only seems so frightening to us because we have been so used to scenarios of endless resources, endless power, and limitless wealth. We shall adjust.

However, the story of the poor boy making his fortune in the New World also comes in for revision. As the resources become limited, and wealth concentrates in the hands of the few, it becomes harder and harder for the Horatio Alger story to come true. Go West, young man! was a formula for success when the Frontier was still being pushed westwards; now that California has a multi-billion dollar deficit, the rules of the game have changed.

McChrystal Lives !

The tradition of General McChrystal - along with the simple-minded brutes who started wars they refused to finish properly - lives on in the cult of assassination in Afghanistan:

"I want to ask one question from American — why they are killing our innocent people," he says. "They are killing student and saying they are Taliban, [that] they are al-Qaida and they are belonging with the terrorists."

I suppose we kill them because we can do so with impunity. Hearts and Minds are what we say we seek, but we have to truthfully admit that we seek those things in a manner that recalls the less appealing Aztec gods receiving their sacrificial victims.
We create despair at home while we kill abroad. Even though individually most of us are decent people of humble faith, when we exert ourselves as a group, as a polity, as a nation, we become the paradigm of Nature red in tooth and nail. When we pray alone, how many of us declaim against other faiths and their faithful? Yet let us come together for worship, and worship gives way to the politics of denunciation and confrontation where we pit soapstone idols against each other like cocks fighting in a pit.

Totalitarianism

Stalinism exalted the Collective over the Individual.

Now the US Supreme Court has exalted the Corporate over the Individual.

The Slave Empire & Christ

Reading Friedrich Hayek, I realize now I have to try to understand ancient Rome's economics and politics to get a grasp on the slave empire mentality of Rome. This may assist me in understanding the residue of such slave empire mentality in the present day USA.

One thing immediately jumps out: the strict hierarchy of gods, emperors, patricians, plebians, clients, and slaves. There was a hierarchical system, a caste system, symbolically and physically.

This leads us to how Christianity was enslaved by the Empire which it thought it had conquered. For in its inception, Christianity was a brotherhood of equals with their Teacher, the Teacher differing from the rest of the brotherhood in knowledge and spiritual progress. This community by and by passed into the rigid hierarchy so typical of Rome.

Martyrs

I have witnessed martyrdom in my life.

It may have begun with the images of Buddhist monks in South Vietnam immolating themselves in protest against the regime at the time, a regime which - once again, it goes without saying - was the government which we supported.

I have heard testimony of such from Palestine, Israel, and Algeria during its civil war.

How many great mathematicians have committed suicide? A surprising number. How rapidly is the rate of suicide among US soldiers increasing? Rapidly. Is suicide martyrdom? Is every suicide a protest, or may it also be a failure to come to terms?

Martyrdom is a response to a world which the suicidal intelligence can no longer inhabit. The intelligence has become too alien to the symbolic landscape where it finds itself imprisoned.

The Rule of Law and Good Will

The Rule of Law is important to society. Without Law, there would be anarchy. Paradoxically, with Law, there may be something worse. The world is full of paradox, and usually we try to ignore it.

However, consider the fact that Hitler came to power in Germany by completely legal means. To be sure there was a lot of extra-legal thuggery, but that was more how the party kept itself in a ferment and within the public eye; President von Hindenberg offered the Chancellorship to Herr Hitler in the exact same tradition of legality by which the position had been offered to others.

Thus, the Rule of Law may destroy itself.

If the Rule of Law may destroy itself, what is there to prevent it? Only the good will of men and women. The ultimate basis of human society is the good will and good faith of mankind. Lose faith, lose good will, lose the Golden Rule and everything becomes problematic.

Food Poisoning Again

We have had it too good for too long. I used to make a great Xmas egg nog with egg whites, yolks, heavy cream... and it was a wonder. Of course, that all came to an end back last century when Salmonella swept through the egg industry.
Then Salmonella was gone !
Now it's back.
Soon E. Coli will be in the lettuce no doubt.

Our way of food production seems to be inherently susceptible to epidemics of toxins. I suppose this is due - in eggs - to the way we mistreat the poor chickens: standing on tiers of wire cages, fecal matter falling on those below. Everything is done for the lower cost and the highest profit. E.Coli and Salmonella are incidentals to running a profitable business. I was in one of those egg gulags years ago and was appalled.

Once more, the way we live our lives and run our businesses is what will destroy us, and we are well into it. We need to learn respect for other beings, for starts. We need Kosher and Hallal not by the type of animal alone nor how it is slaughtered, but also by how the animal is raised and cared for. The Eggs of the present day Egg Industry are treif; we need a Baiza Yisrael product, not the result of filth, greed, and degradation.

A Nation Called "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"

 Big Daddy

I'm started eading F.A. Hayek yesterday, co-winner of the 1974 Economic Nobel, and taking notes. Then I decide to take in a little Tennessee Williams on TCM where "Cat" is playing.
I am impressed how much acute intelligences have in common with each other; I would never have guessed that Williams would illustrate something like Hayek's The Road to Serfdom to me.

"I've given you an empire, boy!"

Burl Ives, Big Daddy, yells this at Paul Newman, Brick - his son, in the mansion basement, filled with hundreds of objects bought in Europe - Europe was on fire-sale at the time - mostly untouched and packed away.
Brick's grandfather, Big Daddy's dad, who died a penniless hobo, gave Big Daddy an empty wicker suitcase as his inheritance, and Big Daddy built his empire from nothing. Brick makes the point that granddad took Big Daddy everywhere with him, he gave him love, he gave him the foundation of a balanced soul that could do anything it wanted - good or bad - but a soul which would not be afraid to grasp life and put its foot down where it wanted to stand: a soul without love would jump and dance like a cat on a hot tin roof, never taking a stand. That cat would forever jump from the heat of mendacity and lies to find a cool spot where it could be comfortable.

"I've given you an empire... !"

Hayek is very much opposed to socialism under the rubric of "central planning", the type of socialism opposed to markets and which for its implementation requires the entire power of the state to run the economic life of the nation. Hayek is very much a libertarian - so it seems thus far - and emphasizes the individual as decision making unit of interest, not the collective.

At this point early in my reading, there has been a brief discussion about how wartime requires central planning for the allocation of the nation's resources, and how prices must be controlled to inhibit inflation: since the nation at war wants to sell war bonds to people, these people would hold the debt of the government and the last thing these people would want is inflation to decrease the value of their holdings. Inflation would discourage bond holders - no one would buy war bonds.

Fortunately, wars and their pernicious system of central planning are of short duration. Or are they?

World War II's Manhattan Project is not only the paradigm of success of American know-how and determination, it is the paradigm of the success of the central planning system; i.e., it is the emblem of a type of extreme socialism.

World War II never ended; it just took a short intermezzo and swung into Act III, called the Cold War. Military Economy is planned economy. Fully 50% of our budget is spent on the Military - essentially a planned type of economy where there is no free market to direct investment: 50% goes here ! Period !
Perhaps the dimly perceived threat of the Military-Industrial Complex is the fact that a Military-Industrial Economy is a thoroughly centralized and planned economy which requires the full force of the state to enforce it: the military, the tax system, the police, the media.

The full example of Socialism in its worst form - a type of Stalinism - is what we have in front of us: the CIA and Special Operations who have absolutely no accountability to anyone nor anything. They are funded by imperial fiat. There is no transparency. There is no external regulation.
We have moved far beyond Stalinism.

 Big Daddy

I've given you an empire, boy! What the heck that I had to destroy your freedom to do it!

A Game

Used to play this...

If you were somehow forced to be a prisoner in the Library of Congress with access to all the books of the world, yet could somehow magically move your prison to anywhere you wanted, to which deserted island would you choose to relocate it?

A Life Interrupted

If I speak of my sweetheart, and if i sing of my mother, and tears come to my eyes now and then, realize how my life is punctuated like bullets from a tommy gun: brief light, much darkness. How impaired we are ! Love is left to me like tattered linen, and no one left to mend it. I only live in the wind and storm. I pray only in the cathedral of the clouds. Let our love flow again to the sea...
Let the Colorado flow to the sea again.
End the interlude of our unnatural and selfish sleep and greed.
Let our songs never end.

The Terrible Tontines

Mr. Burns and Pals Forming a Tontina in WW II

We were talking about senility and dementia, sickness and health care - Canada vs. the US - and the future of work with underemployment permanently built into the way things are.
We were also talking about the disaster we face economically: some people say that we won't be back to where we were  asset-price-wise in early 2008 until 2021 !

We talked about the New Feudalism and Creative Serfdom where we are tied to mortagages we can't afford - rather like "I owe my soul to the company store", don't you think?, and where we are forced to live in houses that are worth 50% of what we paid for them, and which we can't sell anyway even for the reduced figure - no one is buying.
If you need to move into a home for the aged, oh, well...... money's all tied up in the house, and who's going to take care of it anyway if you're not there?

So my sister-in-law said we should have a Tontine to take care of such eventualities:  mad, insane, sick and imprisoned in our homes !

I got her point. It was just shy of the mark. The reason it was not exactly on the logical bull's-eye is that such things as she was talking about never existed before.
A Tontine - or Tontina in the Italian, I believe - was the beginnings of the life insurance industry. A group of people would ante up money, and the last surviving member of the Tontina would claim the pot after all others had passed on.

What my sister-in-law was aiming at was sort of an agreement to pull the trigger... I think. A mortal tontine where in the near-future, when assisted-suicide will the the growth industry, we have this agreement to assist each other. As our enslavement to the shreds of a decayed system continues without abatement, things will get real zero to the bone !

I said that in five years, we were going to hear a lot about these "terrible" tontines.

pic: 
http://pacolopezbarrio.blogspot.com/2007/07/la-tontina-algo-ms-que-un-artilugio-de.html

Dr. Laura

Dr. Laura Schlessinger has made a "philosophical" point about the "N---" word by ranting on about it. Not sure what point she may have in mind about the word "philosophical", but that discussion would be wonderfully perplexing, also.

She has reached a stage roughly approximate to what I call  "Pre-Work" Joan Rivers and looks as odd as what she says. However, so do I.

Here's what it is in my mind: back in the day, Daniel Moynihan issued a report on the black family in America. Roughly speaking, it was time for America to make its very best effort to create African-American Infrastructure of Life that would flourish in this country for the future.
What did we do?
We saw the neighborhoods flooded with drugs, we spent our money on foreign wars - none of which added one penny to the infrastructure upon which our future was to be built - and we watched it all with benign neglect as we played "Casino Royale" with our investments during the Clinton-Bush Fiasco Years, and now we have more wars and education has been destroyed...
... Detroit is a post-Chernobyl Society...
Now, Dr. Laura, why is it that someone like you with the Slave Empire mentality can't use that N--- word while young unemployed men on the corner may? Why don't you drag your withered blond hair down to Paradise Valley and find out?

Dead Doctors 2

Two of the Doctors were Dan Terry and Tom Little, and they fulfilled the definition of Missionary.

Both men came to Afghanistan in the 1970s, inspired by their Christian faith to help the poor and in love with the high mountains of this country.

Optometrist Tom Little was the team leader of the group

They brought their children up here, staying on through coups, invasions, massacres and bombings and touching the lives of countless people.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8909049.stm

Grotesque

The word "grotesque" comes from the Italian "grottesco" meaning "of, or pertaining to a cave".  The caves in question were the antiquities from Roman times, especially Nero's Golden House, the Domus Aurea, which by the Middle Ages had been covered over and buried  by later buildings and improvements in the city, their rooms becoming "caves" the later inhabitants of Rome could climb down to to explore and wonder at.
The paintings that remained from Roman times, containing the wonderful and incongruous, gods, men and animals of fantastic shapes and forms, led to the word "grottesco" meaning "bizarre" and "unusual".

Thus pass away the glories of the world - sic transit gloriae mundi - from gold encrusted domes of the Golden House to subterranean caves visited by bats and vacationing spelunkers.

And at the time of Nero, the Christian community worshiped underground in the catacombs, subterranean tombs. As the evidence of Rome subsided beneath the ground, the Faith resurrected from the catacombs.

That is irony: the change of fortunes; a paradox of the Canticle of the Virgin as the Mighty are cast from their thrones.

Welcome

Welcome, Alexander Mikhailovich !
Your presence reminds me how long ago it has been since I studied and read Russian... now I can barely get through Mussorgsky's Boris Goudunov without asking what someone just said and who's this Feodor character, anyway?

Pruned

The wonderful blog Pruned has made blog of note.
Imagine that; only a few weeks after some blog whose sole purpose seemed to have been complaining about blog o' note, not being blog o' note, and jokes about blog o' note, this exquisite blog that has been here for years and years finally makes it.


Awards............
http://pruned.blogspot.com/

Dead Doctors

I believe the number was ten; ten dead doctors in Afghanistan; doctors in the north, treating ailments of the eye among the population, killed by the Taliban. The Taliban said they had distributed Bibles. Although the group for which the doctors worked had a religious affiliation, there was no missionary work - nor distribution of Bibles among the populace.
That sums up what I recall.

I do not like the Taliban. They are among the more disgusting results of the CIA and American meddling in the boiling pots of wars against America's enemies: our country has spent considerable money supporting intolerant forms of Islam to create surrogates to fight the USSR and Communism years ago. We found that after the USSR was gone, the intolerance grew on its own, like a genetically modified rare plant escaped from the laboratory.

What I want to talk about, however, is missionary work. This has been a topic that has exercised my mind ever since someone quoted the Bible at me: Going forth to nations, baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
What did that mean?
I have to admit that I do not like the manner in which many groups push their missionary work upon the world. I do not like the large-scale pushes to gain cathecumens, nor the mega-church with millions sending its emissaries tax-free to engage and enrage the local population....

The doctors in Afghanistan spent some time there. They worked for better eyesight. They could not miraculously make the blind see, but they could do all medical science could do.
And this seems a close approximation to what the meaning of the Going Forth to all Nations means: live and teach as I have lived and taught: live your life as one living among the nations: do not take a few years of your life to do what you believe is mission work and then return to the home you actually love... for you must do the most difficult things, leave your home and families - forever ! Abandon your father and your mother.

Teach by act and example.
Teach by paradox: the meek shall inherit the earth! the mighty shall be removed from their thrones! Although there may be holy books to quote, these holy books obviously cannot be the length and breadth of the Teaching, for there was need for parable and paradox to make the mind escape from the mundane bonds of mens' thinking and mens' hearing.

There have been some missionaries like this.
Avoid the inhumanly large scale of efforts; avoid large churches and assemblies. There is the work of mankind here: politics rather than the work of the spirit.These approach God as did the builders of the Tower of Babel, demonstrating their own superiority, not their abject humility.

The work of God transforms. It is the most difficult thing in the world, for it is not of the world. Missionary teaching will possibly transform the hearers, but it must also transform the teacher.

The paradox of missions is: you must teach in absolute humility - a humility equal to the awareness that your message is one of many. This is not to say all messages are the same; it does set forth the paradox that our teaching is enveloped in the humility of one who knows nothing.
And by knowing nothing, we find the way to know all.

The Hate That Was Always There

Someone once asked me if I were racist. I answered that I did not know, but I had been  born in America and lived here all my life. So what do you think?

They immediately understood what I meant.

We are in a time of hate, disguised as political difference. I know. I've lived here all my life and  I know what we are like. I remember the days past when the hatred was not acceptable where I lived and worked, and we had to find sanctuary for our racism: rather like cigarette smokers nowadays who have to huddle together in far away places.

Now we are back to breathing the second hand smoke of the racist hatred of so many of our fellow citizens. What it amazing is that they seem to assume that it is acceptable to say these things in front of us, as if no friend or acquaintance could think differently from them.

However, we were brought up in the faith that all men stand equal before God. We are firm in that faith. The cries of our wretched brethren - pitiable and afflicted as they and we all are - cannot change that faith. We believe Jesus spoke to all men as equals. To think otherwise is the work of the evil one... and evil does indeed have a face, if you have ever been so unlucky as to gaze upon it.

Economic Terms

Now consider this:

Put yourself  in  the position
 of a business owner and think of all the problems that
are  associated  with  human  employees:  vacation,  safety
rules,  sick  time,  payroll  taxes,  poor  performance…
maternity leave. If an affordable machine can do
nearly  any  routine  job  as well  as  a  human worker,  then
what business manager in his or her right mind would hire
a worker?

Firstly, we note that the portion of the infinite detail of human life dealing with work has been collapsed into a few key terms: vacation, sick time, etc. The terms function the same way other higher concepts do in gathering, or seeming to gather, a large amount of detail and reducing it to manageable proportions, in this case, economic statistics.

This is totally valid. However, when we start viewing people themselves - as people, as real human beings - as entities that are subsumed under these Economic concepts, we lose the humanity. Because we may do this in economics does not mean we can do it in morality or interpersonal relations. In essence, after high flown philosophizing, we must always come back to the terra firma of our humanity.

One of the signs of Asperger's Syndrome is an inability to interact in social situations. Social situations are filled with details: images, emotions, cues, odors...  One paradigm of Autism, Rain Man, shows an autistic individual who may memorize and entire phone book, but even though this is incredibly impressive, it is still devoid of detail: this memory is nothing more than a neural phone book containing large sequences of letters and numbers: there is no human detail. It is statistics devoid of life.

So also do we let our Sciences act when faced with human situations: we find our efforts are like those of children with Asperger's.

We need a Science of Life Together. That Science must then help us find our way into the future of new technologies. We can no longer allow our higher-level concepts to run rough shod over the reality of life's robustness and variety. Decisions must be made balancing "vacation time" with "quality of life" with "family life" in a meaningful way.

One of the most vicious parts of the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions has been the Viewing of People as Entities within the framework of the phenomenon of the technology, instead of seeing that Humanity must retain individual value - given by Nature and Nature's God - that always remains OUTSIDE whatever higher-level philosophy may be in vogue.

notes:
quote;  The Lights in the Tunnel, Martin Ford, page 2
see:             http://econfuture.wordpress.com/


( I wonder how much our warlike history has to do with this. War is well known for taking people and turning them into "warriors" that view other people as Ally or Enemy, Body Count Collateral Damage, etc... A long process of sanitizing that which is most disgusting. )

Fear

"Fear" is a term a good deal like Moral terms; it describes a long sequence of events, a life, a history sometimes. These are broad brush terms, covering a large expanse, overwhelming the detail.

Like a biography, like a Lives of the Saints; everything is quick and fast: the passage from birth on, stopping only in the areas of our special interest: the loves, the prayers, the miracles...

The Nature of Moral Terms

I have been fascinated all morning about the concept of Duty, having heard Commander Data use it in a Star Trek: The Next Generation. The episode was The Offspring and Data spoke of the Duties of Parenting. Duty, Loyalty, Love... all concepts that cover a lifetime, not just a moment of a life. They cover a wide span of living, containing within their grasp all the unattractive details of life, as well as the glorious highs and the tragic lows.


Moral concepts cover a life, a history. They are endless carpets we weave as we walk.

What strange logic and language they are !

Vocabulary

Some people have wondered at the words I use, thinking them unusual. I was taught in elementary school and in High School and in University to acquire a good vocabulary. It has always been a problem how to talk to people. I confronted the problem and decided I could not appear to talk down to people. If they thought me to be elitist and affected, it would be better than to be seen to be patronizing and talking down to them.

I also use a dictionary published in 1932. It has a large number of archaic and obsolete meanings for words. Using it gets one back to the basics.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, No. 08-205 part 2

Ned Beatty in Network delivers the paean to Corporatism: a world where everything good is corporate, not individual.
Paddy Chayefsky was very prophetic in this, just as Chuck Palahniuk was so darkly prophetic in Fight Club of the coming Terror.

Verses to Memorize

I decided to argue with a local straight-laced type about a local Gay festival. It started out as a friendly discussion, quickly turning into an argument, finally deteriorating to the point where we quoted the Bible at each other. This is the stage just before fists fly, and we are detained by the local constabulary. Fortunately, we ended it with mutual anathemas before the pugilism started.

My arguments are almost totally based on the misuse of the Bible to argue the morality of anything, and I take the tack that the Bible condones Slavery, not to mention Genocide, especially if you are unlucky enough to be a Midianite whose neighbor is Moses. Should we proceed to those worthy works because they are in the Bible?

I have some extra-biblical quotes, too:

"[Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God...it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation...it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts." Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America.


There is a treasure trove of churchmen and divines arguing that the Holy One sanctions slavery, mostly from the years before the American Civil War. For most purposes, the story of Moses and the Midianites works, aided with a few well chosen Confederate quotes.

New Project

I am thinking about a e-zine. Originally it was for poetry; needless to say I get tired of sending things out to "poetry" publishers and being rejected, so maybe I should do my own. Then why not extend it a bit? Why not extend it to anything that may be represented in the format of an e-zine: writing, photography, drawing, etc.

I was thinking of calling it Poesis which is Greek for "a making",  but not that many people know or actively care about Greek and our Graeco-Roman history, so nix on the Greek.
So why not just "Making"... or "Making It..." ? It nicely reminds me of Simon & Garfunkel: "...not really making it.... this feeling of faking it..." so it would be a title that is not only not pretentiously preening itself on the pedestal of Academia and Greek and Latin, but contains within itself a sense of the Ironic.
Any suggestions will be considered, however. I jump at "Making It" because I am slothful and don't want to spend a great deal of time on titular work.

Ruth seems enthusiastic. I shall impose on her for a great deal of work.
What about you, Baysage? Oh, Oklahoman Orpheus !

Obama Care

There is a political ad on TV criticizing someone who supported "Obama Care".

What is Obama Care?

In the language of the Slave Empire, it is the extension of Health Care coverage to millions on people who could not afford it before: coverage to poor, Black, Hispanic, whoever. The Slave Empire lives and breathes Apartheid: otherness in class, otherness is opportunity, otherness in health care, creating shifting class lines which exclude like highly efficient and mobile fences on the gated communities of the right people, keeping the "others" at bay.

The words used by the Slave Empire are not code words; they are branding irons, hot from the fire.

Pictures from the 313 and 734

Sunset Over St. John's Marsh

http://detroitd.blogspot.com/

Mary Stebbins Taitt

Sunflowers

http://ruthie822.blogspot.com/

Ruth M.

notes:
I have gone by St. John's Marsh all my life. The structure is located at a 1920s development called The Colony. There used to be a golf course in the marsh back then, but most of it has been returned to wetlands, except for a small area that was filled in in the 60s and mobiles were deposited there.

I like barns. I remember the barns from more than 50 years ago, and the siloes painted with New Era Potato Chip advertisements.
I remember the road to Marine City... I remember there was a service station or area on the way that had a bear in a cage set out in the sun for people to marvel at. Sweet times! Carnivals and barefoot boys and bear-baiting!

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Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, No. 08-205

Shadow Play

This Supreme Court decision early this year extending the "rights" of individual citizens to Corporate entities, barring limits on campaign contributions, has effectively destroyed the 18th Century concept of the Individual and the Rights of the Individual - "Individual" conceptualized as an individual man or woman - that is enshrined in the Constitution of the United States.

It has done more than allow unlimited funds to buy votes; it has struck at the very bedrock of our way of life and liberty.

To put artificial, fictive, and legal entities up on the pedestal where stand those who have received their rights from "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God"  is to deny the rights of man and to embrace the rights of the artificial collective.
With all the talk about socialism, you are surprised that I find the most iniquitous proof of its presence in a conservative Supreme Court decision? We are too habituated to the symbols we have grown used to; in the age of Revolution, things are never what they seem: they have moved on while we stand wondering.

All the talk about Conservatism or Liberalism, all the talk about Strict Constructionism, all the babble about trying to understand what the framers' of the Constitution meant... all that is meaningless. We are in adifferent place, and we are moving to enshrine the artificial entity of Corporation as a recipient of Rights and Laws of God and Nature on a footing equal to men and women. Call it whatever you will, it is a "strictly monstrous" construction.


pix: http://bellinghamdailyphoto.blogspot.com/

Black Swans

Black Swan: symbol of outlying, extreme cases of low probability

What is the probability that the nation's worst financial crisis and worst environmental crisis occur within 2 years of each other?

Or, add a war based on non-existent WMDs, and what is the probability that these occur within the same 7 years span?

Are all such cases extreme cases and of low probability? If so, why are they all occurring? If not, how have we skewed the probabilities so that what was once extreme is now moving more towards the average?

Watch the films Network and Fight Club. Observe how the 1975-mordant satire of Network has been supplanted and rendered quaint by Fight Club's darker and deeper biting satire, Fight Club itself being made obsolete by events since 2001 on.

How can our outlook change so fast?
So fast... that is the emblem of this radical age. If you don't believe this age to be Revolution Incarnate, just wait... it'll change so-o-o fast.

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Transformative Anti-Semitism

Perhaps you are unaware of the full range of Jewish society and culture. If you have ever stood on a street corner in Jerusalem and watched a group of Orthodox students harass women who are not demurely dressed, you know how close conservative Jews and conservative Muslims are in many respects.

In fact, the fact that Muslims in Europe - I'm thinking France right now - are generally separated into their own lower class enclaves is  Ghetto Nouveau - a new ghetto.

Anti-Semitism is alive and well in the world, only the Semitic populations which are the targets now are the Muslims - even those far away from the Middle East. Their very conservative placement back in some historic past renders them as unpalatable to modern taste as did that of the strange Jews in Europe, who labored under the stereotypes of mediaeval content.
Look at illustrations from Jud Suss, the Nazi film; are not the illustrations spot on for the modern cartoons of Muslims?

We have formed a momentary alliance with Jewishness. It remains to be seen how long it will endure in the transformative world of constant conflict and reduced expectations which seems to be our lot.

Islamo-Fascism

The Siege and Destruction of Jerusalem under the Emperor Titus

The concept is a nonce concept, a word defined for special occasions... an Ad Hoc word, totally owning its existence to those who wish to spend Billions for Bin Laden. It is a perplexity put forward to demonstrate the wisdom of the war party.

Lucius Flavius Silva muttered about the madness of Eliazar ben Ya'ir at Masada; does Tacitus record that the Emperor Titus cursed the spirit of Judaeo-Fascism animating the souls of those who opposed him in Judea?

The Devil is in the Details

Religion is a phenomenon emergent from God and Man. Therefore, from different perspectives, it will seem like divinity or like humanity; it is the elephant in the old story who, being inspected by five men who could not see it in its entirety, was described as massively columnar - the legs - to lithe and snakelike - the trunk - each description according as the portion of the large animal each man was limited to in his study.

Holy writings are inspired by God, but it is mankind which reads them, interprets them, and speaks of them.
Divine commands emanate from God, but it is mankind which hears, understands, and promulgates.

What is human takes on the myriad faces of humanity: quot homines tot sententiae, there are as many differing opinions as there are different men. The human is the intense and obsessional attention to detail, eventuating in an unfortunate chain of misapprehensions: obsessional focus becoming Faith and obsessed over by our descendants and future devotees.
To occupy his obsessional intelligence, man creates detail, the easier to make a fetish of it. Language is the basis of the splintered reality which we spend our time putting back together, then ripping apart, only to resew the hems - the tattered seams - of what is left.

What is Divine is so rare and so prone to escape intelligibility that it takes lifetimes to grasp. It is silent and is mirrored in the silence of monks and nuns in all the lands of the Earth who devote themselves to God. Its intelligibility is action and doing, not speaking and reading: hence we have to learn from mentors who teach us the most important articles of faith in silence, in zen koan, in  parables and ironies, pointing to paradoxes to jolt our minds from the details of the ordinary.

If the modern is ungodly, it is ungodly in its deification of Laws and Writings and Symbolic Speaking, and its ensuing tendency to trap God within the bounds of human symbolisms. It reduces God to an article of our science, whose divine soul is known by mere men, so well known that we are completely at ease discovering the intention and will of God, and destroying those who disagree.

God is not an object of belief. He is an expectation when I awake into the waking state from the sleep state.
God does not prescribe, nor does He compel. He attracts.
God does not speak, urge, nor exhort. He persuades us by our natures and lives.
We pull the carriage of the universe, like teams of horses and mules. The carrot dangled in front of us to get us moving is a Mobius strip - a topology extending forward, yet based on the past; it attracts and pushes by a bright and shining orangeness of the carrot of our quantum desires.

In the world of detail, there are too many carrots, and they are haphazardly strewn about; in the world of detail, it is dark and no one has kindled a fire, nor has anyone struck a light.

Morality

Are there two moralities?
One is the morality of mankind trying to attain the Good, and avoid the Evil.
This is what we talk about when we discuss morality.

The other is that of God.
That morality is silent: its Honor is not feted and saluted; it is quiet.
Its Perseverance is never noticed... for all is perseverance.
Loyalty is not celebrated, for there is no wavering from loyalty... ever.
It is majestic, silent, and mountainous.

Met Office

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/

This is the link to the Met Office, referred to in the post Climate?  of July 25. They predicted the heat waves of 2010 through 2014... some of this is present and some is future, so you will have to mentally process it in temporal parallel layers!

The War

This Gang of Six Has A Price of $ 1 Billion on Their Heads

The Afghan War, to be precise. Not the Iraq War - or the Iraqi Attacki as I originally called it, differentiating it from Shoq 'n' Awe, or whatever that profoundly arrogant name was our idiot leaders applied to their criminal war ( they stood in a public place and implored the Fates and the Furies to prepare the retribution on us and our children, which came around, by and by, in 2008).

I am in favor of the War in Afghanistan.

Why?

The Taliban did cowardly attack Pearl Harbor in a sneak attack, did they not?

No?

Well, the Taliban were brilliant strategists and engineers who divided their time between nuclear physics, testing the aerodynamics of the 9/11 plot, and stoning women for adultery!

No?

Well, surely the Taliban defended Bin Laden until their last breaths!

No? They didn't? They merely allowed him to continue on since he had thoughtfully killed the leader of the Northern Alliance two days before 9/11?

They sell drugs?

No? The Taliban were the ones who outlawed opium?

Jeez, Louise!

Ashes

The Periodic Englishman " izup" and running again. He has begun to use slang expressions. He is still at a tentative phase, not quite sure how to mix the spices and whether one should wear gangsters' argot before Labor Day ( or Bank Holiday, if you will ). He is still getting his "sea legs", so watch out: there may be a few zingers and double-entendres... or triple-entendres of which he was aware of only two.
He seems to have recovered from his bout of whatever it was at the local Hotel Dieu, and is quietly leading a rural existence with tabbies and labradors, very redolent of those antique still-life paintings of which we were once so fond: meadow and lea, dog and cat, peaceable kingdom.

Amen

Climate?

It is hot in Japan. It is also hot in Europe, and the heat is stunting the crops. Lord knows it is hot here... also ruining growing things: green beans are totally messed up, hollow and useless.

Let's go back Mr. Peabody and Sherman to the year 2007 
where we read in the Deseret News:

Global heat wave after 2009?
By John Lauerman


Bloomberg News

Published: Friday, Aug. 10, 2007 12:05 a.m. MDT

The Earth is headed for a record-setting heat wave after 2009, a team of U.K. climate experts said in the first such report based on observations from recent years.

Each year from 2010 through 2014 has at least a 50 percent chance of being warmer than 1998, the hottest on record, researchers led by Doug Smith of the Met Office, a government weather-forecasting agency based in Exeter, said Thursday in the journal Science.

The estimate is the first stemming from data collected since 1990 on ocean temperatures, heat-trapping gases and other factors. Other forecasters used information gathered from 1960 to 1990, the researchers said. By focusing on the next few years, rather than the longer time frame in earlier studies, the new report adds urgency to the challenge of reducing emissions that heat the atmosphere, Smith said...

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695199448,00.html

Dealing with change that will severely impact our lives... another thing we don't do too well anymore. Look at the Health Care Bill we passed. Look at Afghanistan, Iraq. Look at the out of control Intelligence structure. Look at controlling defense spending.
We the people are going to have to do it ourselves.

The Wikipedia picture above is from the European heat wave of 2003 - which I have frequently mentioned here - with a sign in Paris, saying that if one is looking for a victim of the heat wave, Paris has a "green" telephone number to call...

To me, this sounds a lot like Paris in the Plague Years !

pic: Wikipedia:    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Affiche_canicule_Paris_plstaugustin_27082003.JPG

Fight Club & John Brown

When I write about the film Fight Club, I am probably going to also speak about John Brown, the abolitionist who led the raid on Harper's Ferry before the Civil War.

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Fight Club & Project: Mayhem

I watched Fight Club in its entirety for the first time. Previously I think I watched maybe 80% of it, but I needed to see the entire thing.

I always thought the film was a mindless re-hash of Palahniuk's trash writing; then, one fine day, I saw the last 20 minutes of it. Oh -ooh! Trapped in a device of my own making.  Well, I was absolutely fascinated by Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter, and Brad Pitt. I did not know what was going on beyond what was immediately on the screen, but it did not matter - I often prefer watching things without the "canned" version of "reality" : the script, so I can try and make sense of it without any other inputs and preconceptions.

I saw some bizarre parallel to The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, the dream world of a mad man interspersed with the real world. Being a calligarista, this obviously made me warm to the film. Caligari is an important film and mirror of its time, and suddenly I saw Fight Club aspiring to the same pedestal.

See the film. Remember that it was made in 1999. That is very important: pre-2001, pre-2008 financial collapse. Very important.
I shall talk about it later when you have. I don't like lecturing people about things. They should go out and do it themselves; then we can have a discussion, not a sermon or a lecture.

I am going to have to read the book, too, and I suppose I'll have to admire Mr. Palahniuk's writing...

I strikes me that cinema might be the best medium for this Poesis, Greek for " a making" - the root of the word "poetry". There is some philosophical babble, but it is kept to a minimum in the film. The philosophy rightly comes through in action, character, brief speech, and settings. Now the book, being a wordy entity by definition, might have too much pretentious chatter; I have to find out.
This is the other important aspect of Fight Club, however:  the concept of the right medium for a poesis ( let's pronounce it poy'-ay-sis... I hate the words  Art and Work of Art ), thinking how cinema differs from literature and from painting and from music, etc. It tells us something important about ourselves and how we see the world.

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The Joy of Latin

Cicero is the book on the right,  Apuleius to the left, and a self-made greeting card above right.

The Importance of Being Ice & My Wife Stands Up for Everyone

People on a Front Porch in the Old Days,

When They did not Curse and Malign -

a Long Time Ago

Spent the weekend with my parents. My father had his usual round of conversation: the garden, the hydrangeas, the rain or lack of it, the water level of the river. I keep telling him that the amount of rain where he lives across from Squirrel Island, part of Walpole Island First Nation, Bkejwanong, is unimportant to the level of the river.
What is important is the amount of snowfall up north in the Lake Superior drainage basin. As the snow gradually melts over April;, May, and June, it builds up the reservoir of water in Lake Superior - the greatest amount being added as we approach summer and the temperatures up there rise.
It all works like an enormous dam: the Lake Superior Dam, accumulating water and releasing it slower than would happen if there were no snowfall, rather rain storms. These would immediately dump water and that water would immediately head downstream, more of a flood than a gradual release.

In fact, that's what happened in the winter of 2009-2010; the temperatures were warmer than normal and a good deal of the precip up north was in the form of rain rather than snow; the rain just washes downstream when it falls in the winter, with no snow build up of water reserves. So the St.Clair River is lower even than it was last year, after a couple of years of rising levels.

OK. The point of this is that glaciers are retreating. Particularly glaciers in the Himalayas, as noted by the BBC this morning.
Glaciers are water dams; they store water and gradually release it, and as it flows, it creates rivers. Specifically I can think of the Mekong River - called Lanang in China ( I think !) - which rises in the Himalayas and flows thousands of miles down to the delta where Saigon used to be.

No water dams, no reserves of water. Rainfall will still occur, but the rivers of the world will tend to resemble great wadis, seasonal rivers and creeks, which will flow when it rains, but dry up when there is no rain, having no glacial melt in reserve to keep up the flow.

This will be a problem that becomes clearer to us very soon.


Now late Sunday, my parents' idiot financial advisor, Mark, came to visit. His idea of financial advice is to plunk his ass in a chair on the front porch and proceed to talk about his family, his church - where he is a deacon - parish gossip, politics... what's wrong with Blacks,  the good thing about Obama is that there'll never, ever be another Black President, banks can't loan money ( for the past 2 years )  'cause they don't know how the new financial regulations will work out ( just passed into law! ), and on and on... the economy is tough, that's why some of the inappropriate investments he had them in are touchy still... he has an answer for everything; pretty much the same answers he had back in 2007 and early 2008; he is seemingly unaware how they actually worked out.

You can feel him straining to use the N-word a couple times; N's are going to riot again; it'll be just like the Sixties and that fool MLK.

I remained listening in the front room, monitoring his chatter to pick up on any suggestion of his that my parents hand over any money to him, but my wife went in and told him that he was the biggest hypocrite she'd ever seen:  standing up on the altar Sunday morning, then coming around spewing his vile hate.

He was unused to people not joining into his buffet of crap, so he sat goggle-eyed. muttering that he didn't think it "wuz" hate, and mumble, bumble, stumble.

I went out front soon to clean the canoe. He waved towards my general area, so I held up my arm  with the middle finger straight up. But that was nothing. My wife was the heroine. I am so proud of her... and I am so devastated by this side of my parents which has been developing as they age:  to allow the right-wing hate speech to be uttered in front of them.
When I was young, they may not have agreed with Democrats and Liberals, but they never uttered the type of crap which has now become normal for them and much of the country.


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Deep Impact Horizon

Did you ever wonder what it is like to live in a failing society? I think it will be just like this. In fact, we are failing. We never address the burning issues until it is late, then we throw money at the problems. But that is just re-living the mythic scenario of the Manhattan Project. I have heard people say we will pull out of this malaise if we throw enough money into.... something... and it will be like the dot.com era: new technology and new immeasurable profits.
I say, O.K. How long did it take from DARPA to the world wide net?
So I guess we will have to wait another twenty years at least.
How long did it take for the A-Bomb? Well, arbitrarily say the Solvay Conference in 1926, and you've got almost twenty years to the Manhattan Project.
Won't happen for a while... if ever. Sometimes things just poop out.

Another mythic scenario ( mythic so far, thank God! ) is mankind threatened by asteroid impact. You've seen the films. Want to know what will really happen in a failing society? It'll be somewhat like Deepwater Horizon and Deep Impact mixed together.
The government response to Deepwater Horizon was nothing less than bureaucratic criminality. The system does not work for us anymore. If it doesn't work for us, it is an oligarchy of despair, destined for destruction as the next technogenic catastrophes accumulate.

Joy of Kids

The wedding is a little over a month past. It took about three weeks, maybe four, to re-acclimatize ourselves to the world. I understand weddings now: the pomp, the pageantry, the ritual, the celebration. To create another reality, if only for a time lasting no more than one day, is to participate in the greatest Art which transforms the human soul... again if only for a brief time.

And it seems to be brief, usually. We are not transformed by the great Feast. The momentum of the past forbids us to let ourselves be transformed; we even have been taught to fear radical enchantment which leads to a change of being, so we always come home... we always return from vacation and de-pressurize our bodies by a gradual return to the mundane, allowing the gases of freedom which infused our blood to gradually leech away, become inert, so we do not suffer from a fatal decompression as the state of freedom leaves our bodies.

Oh, not so me. The wedding created a tent of veils, painted with wizardry, blown in the wind, remaining dry in the rain and sheltering us from the wet with intermittent slaps of fabric of the Jinn against elemental storm.

I have seen and read Romeo and Juliet many times, and have been moved to joy and tears, but the effect was always transitory, the experience did not move me in the sense of chess: a move to a new locale, a move with finality and importance in the ultimate outcomes!
The experience of having a family and raising children, then seeing them start a life of their own has, however, changed me immensely. Friends have become multi-dimensional and mysterious; I value the few I have with a new sense of community - although I haven't whispered a word of this to them.
And children! Ha! I tell people now children  are a blessing: the good and the bad. They smile and agree, but I wonder if they have any idea what I mean. I mean Children, not the the 4 hour-long Mike Todd or Abel Gance or D.W. Griffith version; I mean a lifetime of involvement and intertwining....... the infinite director's cut!

I never, ever in my life had any feel for the intricate filigree of intertwining threads that hold life together until my daughter was wed; I never saw life in more than merely 3-dimensions until there was a "separation". I do not feel regret; I cannot say the commonplace "I did not know what I had until it was gone". No. It was something very different: as I felt the separation, I felt the entire process of my life, from birth to family to families of my children: I saw an infinite garden carpet of life being rolled out ahead of me into the future, and the carpet was woven by the joys and happiness, the tears and sorrows of the entire family of humanity - not mine alone.
Being in a sense "alone" - my daughter moving away - I suddenly was no longer alone.
And the carpet is still beneath my feet.

To not know Unity until there is Separation is a paradox, and as I have mentioned elsewhere, paradox - by disrupting the commonplace - is the underpinning of the Most Uncommon, the Holy.


pix: Catherine Schutt / the War Memorial, site of the reception.

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TV D-Day

Today we find whether AT&T or AMC wins their battle. It is also Bastille Day - en France - and is noteworthy for that, too.

We like AMC a good deal.
We have always been AT&T customers - like eons! - and have never felt we have been abused like we so often feel in our dealings with banks and other businesses nowadays. ( note: I also feel very good about T-Mobile, having been a customer for about 7 years.) We jumped from Comcast to AT&T Uverse and loved it. I myself actually check schedules for TCM. AMC, Sundance, and IFC for films - sometimes recording them; something I never used to do! - and thoroughly enjoy it.

I know it will be brief. My intro plan ends in October, and I don't feel the experience is worth another $60 per month, but that's a business decision; can't fault AT&T for that.

If providers of access and providers of content continue to squabble, and if access providers act begin to "comcast" the consumer more, the best outcome would be to default from television altogether.

Talking With God

Endothermic Energy Levels of Prayer

I am an early riser. Up and at 'em before sunrise. I throw on my clothes laid out the night before; I actually do put my pants on two legs at a time - or simultaneously, leg-wise - contrary to the popular maxim that we all put our pants on one leg at a time. Contrarian. I sort of slide them on while sitting on the side of the bed and jump, leap - sometimes somersault - into them, both legs pipe-stemming their way inside. Of course, now I'm wearing shorts first crack out of the box, so the process is a lot smoother and less prone to error.

Thus nattily attired for someone fresh from six hours of the dreamy solitude of Morpheus, I stumble to the door, muttering my morning prayers, "Our Father... and the rest of it...", followed by a "Hail Mary... and you know the drill...", and climaxed by "God's nightshirt!" as I stub my toe against the jamb.

So today I did not get away with it as I usually do. While I was reading the BBC and drinking coffee, God stuck his head around the corner...
[ note: when I write about God, I no longer capitalize pronouns, like "He". I just write "he". I do rely upon a transcendental editing device which, when I have finished, will magically change all lower case pronouns to upper case by wafting an angel's wing over the composition. It was fairly expensive. I also have trouble with people who spell "God" as "G-d" or some other such stuff, pretending they are students in a Yeshiva saying "Adonai" instead of...well, that other word... or Word...or W-rd !?

My biggest problem is that everytime I come across "G-d" I read it as "goddam!!" which usually throws quite a monkey wrench into the process of reading things with a theological bent to them. It is a shocking experience, and I never seem to get used to it. ]

Anyway - a longish note there - God sticks his head around the corner... and this may surprise a lot of you, but the divine head is not some sort of monstrously large thing, bigger than all other heads, real or imagined in the history of the universe. It is a bit largish, but not so large as to be a topic for the SciFi Channel. He may have to have his hats custom made.

So, having stuck said head around the corner, he asks "Any breakfast for you? "

"Breakfast?" I murmur.

"E & B" he says.

"E & B this early?" I ask.

"Got to get to work." he says. "I have things to do, physical things..."

"Physical things?" I ask.

"Well, difficult things." he says. "Things that a man needs a good breakfast..."

"Man?" I ask.

"Well, "entity", if you will. Entity. And I will mention that bit of Monophysitism to my son. A day filled with things that require an en-ti-ty have a good breakfast under said entity's belt."

He held the big, black iron skillet in his H-nd, smiling.

So I said, yeah. Why not? Sure. Eggs and bacon.

"Bacon?" I asked as he went towards the kitchen, thinking kashrut and animals whose blood might have been spilled in anger.

He paused. "Yeah. I see... O.K. No B. Ummm, toast?"

I agreed without speaking. I sort of did a closed lipped yum-yum type thingy that I immediately regretted.

He turned around. He did a sort of Captain Kirk gesture from Star Trek Generations as he dropped the bread into the toaster...from afar. Action at a distance, the sort of quantum stuff Einstein had such a bugaboo about. Anyway, bread tossed into toaster and it swished right in, nothing but net, or - rather - nothing but wirey supports, and he smiled at me briefly as if I were Jean-Luc Picard... in S.T. Generations, needless to say.

As we sat down to eat, he asked "What's all this with the prayers?"

I was mopping my plate with a piece of bread, thinking mop-type things, humming the Swifter ad to myself: who's that lady? who's that laaay-deee? "Huh?" I said.
"The prayers. The abridged versions."
I tried to remember. I couldn't. Fried eggs over-easy are pretty much an exothermic process, and the whole art involves breaking, spilling,  and mopping as fast as one can before the ultimate heat-death of the universe.

[I remember July 4th past when everyone was at my parents, and they all have spirituous drinks, and tend to have a dolce far niente approach to the dinner hour - which I don't. When I'm hungry, I eat. Ditto sleep and other bodily prox ( note to self: "prox" for "processes" has been tried out and it works.). The time-honoured cocktail hour to me is nothing but filler material in novels about the English Catholic gentry in the period between World Wars; filler for that chiaroscuro time between tea and the evening repast.
So I grilled the food and grabbed the odd family member who stumbled by to toss the salad, to set the table, and to bun the burgers. I set my hot dogs at my place and did a final check, making sure the food was out and the gaping maws were sitting about the familial table. By the time I sat down to eat, the wretched fan nearby - it was 94 degrees Fahrenheit that day - had turned the hot dogs into a state of cool, cool entropy. I ate.]

I took it that he did not care for "Our Father, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth..." .
I tried to explain. "Well, we all know the words, and words are just a way to induce a transcendent state or meditation; it just "shines" after that. I just "shine" the rest of the prayer. You know, like Stephen King's The Shining."
I paused. "Shine." I said again.
He ate his breakfast.
"It's not Me..." he said, and he said it with a capital M. " I can dig the 'shining' business." he said.
I smiled, relieved.
He continued, "However, it sets a bad example for the rest of creation. Creation doesn't see much difference between a yawning gap of destruction and...well, an unexpected lacuna in a prayer."
"Lacuna ?" I said, with a very small "?".
"Lacuna. Gaps. Missing sections." He repeated, then corrected. "Lacunae, I should say; plural. Many lacuna make lacunae."
I nodded. He was acting very much like Atticus Finch all of a sudden.
"I did not mean to cut it short." I had the sudden image of a director in a radio studio making the "speed-it-up" sign with his hand, followed by a "stretch-it-out" sign, ending in a "finger-across-the-throat" sign.
"I mean, well, words don't really do you justice...so I just sort of run out of words and just let the silence continue the prayer."
He brooded over this, almost as intensely as he did over the Deep.
Breakfast continued to its pre-ordained end in silence, and I cleared the table, and rinsed the dishes, leaving them in the sink. I sincerely hoped he would do a finger-snap and finesse them through wash and dry cycles and into cabinets.
Finally, he spoke. "I see what you mean. A lot of people refer to me as "a higher power". Pastor Haggee says I'm the highest, the greatest, the absolutest all-time smartest... All those superlatives. It makes me feel like I'm surrounded by obese guys gobbling pies in the last 2 gut-busting minutes of the closest, hardest-fought, and nastiest pie eating contest  at the sleaziest county fair ever imagined."
"Words sometimes don't do it; sometimes words turn into an idolatry of words themselves. W-rds, as you say."
He smiled and left. Quite abruptly. I felt pretty good. I looked at the dishes still in the sink.

Solzhenitsyn & Goethe on Politicians

"Don't believe them;
don't fear them;
do not ask anything of them."

It is good advice. Start now by beginning to ignore politicans. They cannot help us. They are a class created by the media to fill in a charade of our History.

Do not even mock them, like Jon Stewart. Mocking them gives them a reality they do not possess: it mocks their power - but they have no power except that we surrender to them!

Ignore them all, from Obama to Palin. And foreswear the juvenile pleasures of listening to those that re-affirm your prejudice: ignore the Rushes and the Glenns... you must be prepared to handle them, but you must not give them any power of your attention. Under the guise of saying yes to us, they are the spirits that always deny... die Geister die stets verneinen.

-

Lindsay

Ms. Lohan was.. and is... wonderful and beautiful in A Prairie Home Companion. A great film and a potentially great talent.

It is a great film, not as a purely filmic experience, but as a representation of the ethos behind the radio show and its creators.

American Chernobyl

Chernobyl on my mind. First the parallel with Deepwater Horizon, then Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith, a very well-written novel I am flying through. Now Club Orlov's analysis of Big Oil Spill as American Chernobyl, dated back in May:

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2010/05/american-chernobyl.html

The list of similarities is... well, frightening if you haven't caught on yet to which way the wind is blowing.

The concept of  technogenic catastrophe  is mentioned, having come into vogue after Chernobyl:

It is rather more descriptive than the rather flaccid English phrase [industrial accident], and it puts the blame where it ultimately comes to rest in any case: with the technology, and the technologists and politicians who push it. Technology that can and sometimes does fail catastrophically, causing unacceptable levels of environmental devastation, is no good, regardless of how economically necessary it happens to be. It must be shut down.