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?

--

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?

--

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.

--

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!"

--

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.


--

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.

--

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.

--

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.

 

--

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.


--

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?

--

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.

--

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.)

--

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.

--

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.
--

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

--

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita 1

 A Straw Dog

In the middle of the journey of our life...

Some would find it hard to believe that "middle" would apply to my situation, and I should write something like "bucket-list time" - to use a favorite description of the present age; "bucket-list"... the expression just drips a tedious lack of lively creativity.
Might as well say something about paying cash for some agricultural acreage, and smile about buying the farm.

I have not posted much over the past two weeks.
I am bored.

I do not read the news anymore. I had stopped watching or listening to it years ago. One can't write about the foibles of the time if one does not acquaint oneself with said foibles.
I can be assured, however, that the process towards a fully weaponized society will continue, and unhappy groups, sad scads, and weepy heaps of kids and adults will continue to be gunned down by psychopaths and/or their own family members as we struggle to accomodate our vision to the new reality.

I think along the lines that my life started in the revolution of Rutherford, Einstein, Bohr, Compton, Hahn, Meitner, Lawrence, Seaborg, and Robert Oppenheimer, eventuating in the atomic bomb, then continued through the great engineering feats of myriads minds leading to the journey to the Moon in 1969, and then reached a ante-climax in 2008, with its foretaste of disaster.

I spend a lot of time with my mother, trying to get her house ready to sell, finding her a new place nearby, maintaining her summer place. My wife assists. The rest of the family is not close by, or they are physically incapable of helping. In some situations, they are spiritually or mentally incapable of helping.
It is the perfect background for a Stephen King story about pent up resentment and poltergeists. However, as Lao Tse held and Sam Peckipah believed, heaven and earth regard mankind as nothing but straw tied to look like dogs and to be jettisoned into the fire of sacrifice.

Over many years my mother and I were not close; hardly even friendly.

My daughter was allergic to dogs and my mother used to have at least two. My daughter could not go to Christmas at Grandma's. She could not attend Thanksgiving over the river and through the woods to Grannie's.
In the summer, she could only stay outisde at my parents' summer place. Obviously, she could not spend the night.
Everyone said how sad it all was.
Sad.
Very sad.

No one ever got rid of the animals. They died off in their own time. Even now, a certain family member brings dogs to the summer cottage. Over Memorial Day weekend they were present, both aged, both gasping for breath in an appalling manner which was an argument in itself for euthanasia.
One has numerous tumors, rheumatism, and incontinence.
They have a right to life, but they have no right to share my space.
We played second-fiddle to animals for our entire married lives.

Perhaps my analogy with Dante goes even further than I had thought.

The point is I am beginning to have a relationship with my mother. My father passed last year, so that is very different.
One month before he died, he was determined that certain changes be made to my parents' trust and that they had established for my brother who is disabled. No details are available from me, but my burdens are increased thereby. That is enough to say.

So they trust me. I am a trustworthy and simple soul. I am merely a difficult person to be with; totally different stuff.

My mother enjoys the time we are together, because we interact as equals, and we don't take any prisoners. Nobody else has such a relationship with her.
I suppose it would be even nicer if she did not chatter on quite so much, but I have discovered that she does not expect an answer to what she is musing out loud about.

I think we will be going to the ear doctor together soon to get our hearing tested. People have indicated a need exists. She seems resigned to it if I also am hard of hearing. However, I absolutely refuse to spend vast sums of money - $3,000 or more! - on hearing devices that buzz, whirr, chirp, and gobble up expensive batteries!

I intend to use a modified ear trumpet. To fill out the appearance, I shall ditch the spectacles and adopt a lorgnette, fastidiously emulating Des Esseintes, the aesthete and recluse anti-hero of Huysman's A Rebours!

à bas l'epoque actuelle...

--

Got Virtue?

So I was arguing with some fellow about ethics and violence:  he said that true Christianity necessarily includes the command to "turn the other cheek" after all and sundry offenses.

I stated that the passage of the New T. in question states that when struck on one cheek, we turn the other, but leaves silent what to do if the abominable cheek-striker also hits the second proffered cheek.
I said that this passage was all about the first response, and nothing subsequent to that.

When confronted, let your first response be the peaceful response. Things being what they are, the majority of people would respond well to the peaceful response; they would let their anger subside, and there would probably be no escalation.

Beyond this, however, it may be time to kick tukhes.

The way I understand it, the cheek-turning could be interpreted as a strategy at the very beginning of a confrontation, which if successfully done, could avert conflict.
However, once this fails, we are in the realm of Virtue.

Whatever we do should be formed by our upbringing in Virtue - our reaction after our first peaceful response is rejected should be in accord with what we understand Virtue requires of us.

Virtue has a duality.
It has an eye on the Holy and morality, but is also has an eye on our humanity - "virtue" being derived from Latin "vir" meaning "man", and usually "man" with some notion of strength, not just generic "man", which would be "homo".

Within that duality we act out our morality play about violence and peace.

Pity the guys and dolls who skipped school the day Virtue was being taught, however.

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The End Of An Era

 

J. Robert Oppenheimer

It is the end of an era, not the nuclear era - unfortunately - for nukes are still around, but it is the end of a time, a small saeculum (a period of time) whose beginnings we can just feel and who ending is slipping by us unnoticed.

 Niels Bohr

PHYS ORG
HADES searches for dark matter
May 12, 2014
http://phys.org/news/2014-05-hades-dark.html

Although Dark Energy and Dark Matter appear to constitute over 95 percent of the universe, nobody knows of which particles they are made up. Astrophysicists now crossed one potential Dark Matter candidate – the Dark Photon or U boson – off the list in top position. This is the result of recent HADES experiments, where researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and from 17 other European institutes try to pin down the nature of Dark Matter. These negative results – recently published in Physics Letters B – could even lead to challenges of the Standard Model of particle physics.

[...]

While evidences for the Higgs boson were found recently at CERN, the Standard Model looks now complete when supplemented by some neutrino masses, and nothing else seems to be needed to understand the wealth of atomic, sub-nuclear and particle physics phenomena. Nevertheless, Dark Matter appears not to be explained by any of the constituents of the Standard Model. This status of the affair has initiated worldwide efforts to search for Dark Matter candidates.

[...]

 

Albert Einstein

[...]

Up to now the search for such a signal of a U boson as a candidate for Dark Matter has remained unsuccessful. Together with many other searches for the other candidates of Dark Matter the situations becomes more and more intricate. Cosmology on precision level requires the existence of Dark Matter; however, the various experiments have not found any positive hint. The negative results on the U boson by HADES and other experiments make the hunt for new physics beyond the Standard Model more challenging.

[...]

The HADES collaboration has accumulated more than ten billion analyzable events during the last years. The notion "events" means that in collisions of energetic protons with target protons or atomic nuclei or in collisions of atomic nuclei with target nuclei, among other final-state particles, an electron-positron pair could occur. Sources of these pairs are, e.g., unstable hadrons being transiently produced in these collisions. The highly sophisticated apparatus HADES has the capability to select out of a huge background of other particles such electron-positron pairs which can be attributed to primary sources.

 Peter Higgs

Something terrifically new is in the air.
The Ptolemaic Dark Matter quest will come to a timely end, and... something new.

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Angry Matthew

 People Whose Job Is Memorizing Books

Matthew 6:

28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?

31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.

33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

And this brings us to The Angry Bear on Automation and Jobs and the very, very near future:

Eighty percent of current jobs may be replaced by automation in the next several decades.

Steve Roth | May 18, 2014 11:46 am
http://angrybearblog.com/2014/05/eighty-percent-of-current-jobs-may-be-replaced-by-automation-in-the-next-several-decades.html

That’s the conclusion of Stuart W. Elliott in his recent paper, “Anticipating a Luddite Revival.” (Hat tip: RobotEconomics.)

We’ve seen that scale of transformation before. But this one promises to be roughly four times as fast, dwarfing Luddite-era concerns:

…the portion of the workforce employed in agriculture shifted from roughly 80% to just a few percent. However, in the shift out of agriculture, the transformation took place over a century and a half, not several decades.

But there’s a much bigger difference this time — a hard limit that time can’t ameliorate:

...The level 6 anchoring tasks in Table 2 are not only difficult for IT and robotics systems to carry out, but they are also difficult for many people to carry out. We do not know how successful the nation can be in trying to prepare everyone in the labor force for jobs that require these higher skill levels. It is hard to imagine, for example, that most of the labor force will move into jobs in health care, education, science, engineering, and law.

I’ve said it before: the median IQ is 100, by definition. Fifty percent of people are below that level. We (and they) are facing a hard cognitive limit that the Luddites never approached. I don’t think anybody reading (or writing) this post can appreciate how hard it would be to make a go of it in today’s technological society — even get through high school, much less provide a healthy, happy, financially secure life for one’s family — with an IQ of 80 or 90.

Are people who aren’t born smart lacking in “merit”? That’s what meritocrats are claiming. (Though they will vociferously defend themselves, deploying endless arguments both specious and obfuscatory.) If you’re in the low-IQ group (and don’t inherit), your miserable position in life is fixed at birth. Get over it.

Currently, work is the only way for the majority of people to legitimately claim any significant share of our remarkable prosperity. (Social-support programs provide a pretty insignificant and tenuous, insecure claim that’s not generally viewed as legitimate, only unfortunately necessary.)

If those folks 1. can’t find jobs that they can do, and 2. receive negligible claims on our prosperity if they are lucky enough to find one of the few remaining, we’re facing a world of haves and have-nots. Sound familiar?

[...]

One fundamental belief has to change: that finding and doing a job is the only thing that gives you any claim on a decent life. Because for many, jobs that provide decent claims simply aren’t there, or won’t be soon. (Likewise the belief that rebalancing your financial portfolio annually — doing the arduous, taxing work of “allocating resources” — is extremely meritorious and gives you a just claim on an outsized share of our collective prosperity.)

Horses faced exactly this situation in the first industrial revolution. They could never learn to drive tractors and trains.

I’ll be the first to say that people aren’t horses. Which gives rise to the ugly next thought:

They shoot horses, don’t they?

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The Liars Avoid Gorky Park (Парк Горького)

 

Mike Rogers (R.) of Michigan:

Will Betray Your Freedom For Radio Job

From The Guardian:

Everyone should know just how much the government lied to defend the NSA

A web of deception has finally been untangled: the Justice Department got the US supreme court to dismiss a case that could have curtailed the NSA's dragnet. Why?
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/17/government-lies-nsa-justice-department-supreme-court

If you blinked this week, you might have missed the news: two Senators accused the Justice Department of lying about NSA warrantless surveillance to the US supreme court last year, and those falsehoods all but ensured that mass spying on Americans would continue. But hardly anyone seems to care – least of all those who lied and who should have already come forward with the truth.

Here's what happened: just before Edward Snowden became a household name, the ACLU argued before the supreme court that the Fisa Amendments Act – one of the two main laws used by the NSA to conduct mass surveillance – was unconstitutional.

In a sharply divided opinion, the supreme court ruled, 5-4, that the case should be dismissed because the plaintiffs didn't have "standing" – in other words, that the ACLU couldn't prove with near-certainty that their clients, which included journalists and human rights advocates, were targets of surveillance, so they couldn't challenge the law. As the New York Times noted this week, the court relied on two claims by the Justice Department to support their ruling: 1) that the NSA would only get the content of Americans' communications without a warrant when they are targeting a foreigner abroad for surveillance, and 2) that the Justice Department would notify criminal defendants who have been spied on under the Fisa Amendments Act, so there exists some way to challenge the law in court.

It turns out that neither of those statements were true – but it took Snowden's historic whistleblowing to prove it...

And the ex-FBI agent Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, who heads the House Intelligence Committee, would never have done anything. He's leaving Congress to become a radio personality. That's a step forward for everyone. We do not need leaders like him.

A Betrayer gets rewards, and Snowden sits in Gorky Park.

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H.R. 2847

I have seen a number of advertisements about the coming collapse of the US Dollar on July 1, 2014, when House Resolution 2847 takes effect.

It is also the FATCA, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, and it targets non-compliance of US taxpayers using foreign accounts.

It can be viewed as a part of "currency controls", which constitute part of a scheme of financial repression, which is the only politically acceptable way politicians will deal with the debt.

No particular harbinger of catastrophe. If you think it is, send me $50 for my catastrophe newsletter.

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MotorCity ComicCon 2014

I went to the MotorCity ComicCon at the Novi Suburban Selection Showplace (whatever that means!) yesterday.

I looked at comix, books, geegaws, toys, clothes, and some costumes. Saturday is CosDay, so there will be more today. Yesterday, about 15% were in cos.
I never realized how short skirts are in cos. Kilts remain standard length - whew! - and I saw one on a bloke who had a bumper sign that read "This is a kilt. If I were wearing something beneath, it would be a skirt!"

I was most impressed by the use of the subjunctive "were" instead of the usual "was" or even the more usual and frequent  "wuz".

I think everyone should attend a ComicCon wearing. Next year, I shall be wearing.
Wearing what, though, is the question.

She-who-must-be-obeyed suggested we do Little Lulu (by Marge). That sounded OK. Only I am not tubby enough to be Tubby. And my grey Wolverine beard would make for a strange Lulu.

So if we do Lulu, I shall be McNabbem, the truant officer. I shall probably have to have a button or card on the lapel saying "Truant Officer", since McNabbem is not a figure of general knowledge. However, that is to my advantage, too, since McNabbem is a bit rotund.
I could be Mr. Gruffly, the principal, or Mr. Tompkins, Tubby's paterfamilias.

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Cuba's Black Hole

 

The Spaceship USS Cygnus in The Black Hole

If you have never seen the film The Black Hole, I shall let Wikipedia synopsize it for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Hole

The Black Hole is a 1979 American science fiction film directed by Gary Nelson for Walt Disney Productions...

Nearing the end of a long mission exploring deep space, the spacecraft USS Palomino is returning to Earth...

The Palomino crew discover a black hole in space with a spaceship nearby, somehow defying the hole's massive gravitational pull. The ship is identified as the long-lost USS Cygnus... The Palomino...  manages to move back to the Cygnus and finds itself able to dock to what initially appears to be an abandoned vessel.

The Palomino crew warily boards the Cygnus and soon encounter the ship's commander, Dr. Hans Reinhardt, a brilliant scientist. Aided by a crew of faceless, black-robed android drones and his sinister looking robot Maximilian, Reinhardt explains that he has lived all alone on the Cygnus for years....

 

 Dr. Reinhardt and his Robot, Maximilian

Reinhardt then reveals that he has spent the past 20 years studying the black hole and intends to fly the Cygnus through it...

The rest of the Palomino crew grow suspicious of the faceless drones' human-like behaviour: [one of the Palomino crew] sees a [drone] limping and [another] witnesses a [drone] funeral and discovers the Cygnus crew's personal items in the ship's living quarters...  a battered early model robot... explains that the faceless drones are in fact the human crew, who mutinied when Reinhardt refused to return to Earth and had been lobotomized and "reprogrammed" by Reinhardt to serve him...

 Dr. Reinhardt's "Drones"

When I first saw the film, I thought the drones were zombie-like creatures, who although dead, were kept functioning in some ghastly  science-techno-"there are things man was not meant to know"- manner,  which would have made the film even more gross. Not to say the film was entirely disturbing: Slim Pickens did the voice of the loveable little good robot, and there was an uncommon mixture of horror and slapstick.


Now we turn to this:

Al Jazeera America
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2014/05/us-stops-force-feeding-guantanamo-inmate-20145172313714654.html

A US judge has ordered the military to stop force-feeding a hunger-striking prisoner at Guantanamo Bay naval base.

The temporary order, issued on Friday by Judge Gladys Kessler, means that staff at the facility cannot feed Syrian prisoner Abu Wa'el Dhiab until a hearing next Wednesday.

"While the Department follows the law and only applies enteral feeding in order to preserve life, we will, of course, comply with the judge's order here," Defense Department spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Todd Breasseale said in response to the ruling.

Kessler also ordered the US military to stop taking Dhiab out his cell if he refused to go to feedings and said the government had to keep all videotape evidence of forcible cell removal and force-feeding until the hearing.

It is the first time a judge has ordered an end to force-feeding of a prisoner in Guantanamo...

It seems to me that the government does not know what to do with the people in Guantanamo, yet will not part with them, nor put them on trial.

It will not even let them die.

Perhaps we can look forward to zombie drones in Gitmo in the near future.

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The Rabbi Deconstructs

It finally became clear that Deconstruction is Midrash.

And Creation is the exegesis of the Holy.

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Deadpool States: Saw VII - The North Dakota Car Wash

Al Jazeera America
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/5/north-dakota-workerdeathsbakkenoilgas.html

At night North Dakota glows almost as brightly as Chicago as gas from more than 9,000 wells is just burned off, NASA satellite photos show. A third of the natural gas gets wasted this way, according to Ceres, a nonprofit that tracks the environmental records of companies. If companies are willing to waste $1.2 billion of natural gas per year, imagine the calculus on job safety.

Oil-field work, while inherently dangerous, need not result in nearly as many deaths as North Dakota reports. The problem is that state legislators have enacted laws that place a low value on human life. That value is so low that it makes no economic sense for employers to invest in worker safety. In North Dakota, preventing accidents costs much more than paying off the families of dead workers.

Here are the facts. The one-time death benefit for workers killed on the job in North Dakota: $1,200. If the worker has dependent children, that payment goes up by $400 per child. The state also covers documented funeral expenses, but only up to $6,500.

Those rates of payment may have been appropriate in 1919, when North Dakota’s workers’ compensation law first took effect. But in 2014 they are worse than heartless — they are an incentive to avoid investing in equipment and practices that will reduce worker deaths.

[...]

But the best single indicator of callous disregard for human life shown by North Dakota lawmakers is the benefit authorized for orphans, a maximum of $15 per week. You read that right — 15 bucks a week.
At current staffing, it would take federal job safety inspectors 111 years to inspect every job site in North Dakota.

That strikes me as a form of state-sanctioned child abuse that every child advocate, every member of the clergy, every moral leader in North Dakota should denounce daily until it is replaced by a payment schedule that reflects the needs of orphans, not the greed of those who donate to political campaigns.

[...]

Years ago I interviewed Joshua Zimmerman, who was 15 years old and working at Valley Dairy Car Wash in Grand Forks when his arm was ripped off by an industrial-size cloth-drying machine that was being used without a door.

The North Dakota workers’ compensation program held that the teenager was entitled to nothing for the loss of his arm despite the fact that the machine had been used for months without safeguards and a manager had been warned about the risks. Josh told me he never got a dime...

We have freedom.
We can behave like Andy Hardy and his pristine family, or we can behave like monsters.

However, when the government supports the monstrous, then the scales are tipped and the game is rigged for the outcomes of a future of Saw, Hostel, and The Walking Dead.

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Freighter In Aspic

 Oeuf en Gelee - Egg in Aspic (with parsley)

Some of the freighters were still at anchor in lower Lake Huron Tuesday past. Some had left, ostensibly to their now ice-free destinations.
On Mothers' Day, my brother looked at a GPS display of 15 vessels at anchor using a ship tracking site. Although there was no ice in the lower lake, those freighters were held by ice as sure as larks' tongues in aspic.

I rose early Tuesday and looked out at the lake. The lights of the one vessel I could see were bright.

I remembered all the films I ever saw about ships, ghost ships, haunted ships, great ocean liners, ancient triremes.
I thought of Oliver Platt and Stanley Tucci singing Skokiaan in The Impostors.
I dreamed of grim, icy enclaves where small groups huddled together against the cold and terror: John Carpenter's The Thing, Ian Holm and Adrian Lester in The Day After Tomorrow, the blog of the British Antarctic Expedition, the story of the intrepid Robert Falcon Scott and his crew...

The lights were mostly in a line following the far away boat deck, and it was a line such as Orion's Belt, and it filled me with promises of the future and threats of the future.

Mostly it reminded me of the day I was backing down the driveway on my way to the store. The moon was up early that day. I glanced at it and thought it looked large. Then  my sight zoomed in on it, and it filled the horizon, and I was on my way to the spaceport...
and I was taking a trip to the moon as if it were an everyday affair...
and freedom! I could taste the freedom! For there was the Moon and Mars beyond, Mars where the dispossessed of Earth were granted asylum:  people from Uganda, from Palestine, from Bahrain...

Now I remember the film Melancholia, and realize that the Moon fills that sky where we sit within a naked and bare wikiup awaiting the unfolding.

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Beat! Beat! Drums!

 Holocaust's unholy hold
The deeper we are stuck in our Auschwitz past, the more difficult it becomes to be free of it.
 By Avraham Burg 
 November 16, 2008
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-burg16-2008nov16,0,4227786.story

 ...The Shoah is so pervasive that a study conducted a few years ago in a Tel Aviv school for teachers found that more than 90% of those questioned view it as the most important experience of Jewish history. That means it is more important than the creation of the world, the exodus from Egypt, the delivering of the Torah on Mt. Sinai, the ruin of both Holy Temples, the exile, the birth of Zionism, the founding of the state or the 1967 Six-Day War...  

...I voluntarily withdrew from political life in Israel. I couldn't help feeling that Israel has become a kingdom lacking in vision and without a prophetic horizon. On the surface, everything is in order; decisions are carried out, life moves on, the ship sails along. But where is this movement heading? No one knows. The sailors are rowing without seeing anything; the lower-ranking officers are holding their eyes up to the leadership, but the leaders are not capable of seeing past each coming, rising, tumbling wave...

  ...utopian vision has fallen silent in Israel. Concerns for personal survival and well-being, as well as fear about the ongoing bloodshed and security emergencies, about Gaza and Iran and the realities of demographics and population, have silenced the moral debate and blocked the horizons of vision and creative thinking. I believe Israel must move away from trauma to trust, that we must abandon the "everything is Auschwitz" mentality and substitute for it an impulse toward liberty and democracy...  

The Past as a Mutual Panopticon Prison, wherein the Past imprisons the Present, the Present imprisons the Past, and both imprison the Future.

Time is growing short everywhere: Israel, the USA, Russia, the Ukraine, China, Vietnam.
There is an unholy gigantic drum and there are years between percussions.
The drums are beginning to beat again.

Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!

Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,

Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,

Into the school where the scholar is studying,

Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride,

Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,

So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.

Walt Whitman
--

reprint from 2008

Setting The Bar

Old-Timey Police Commissioner

Town's white police official calls Obama N-word
https://news.yahoo.com/towns-white-police-official-calls-obama-n-word-204931723.html

WOLFEBORO, N.H. (AP) — A police commissioner in a predominantly white New Hampshire town says he won't apologize for calling President Barack Obama the N-word, and he sat with his arms crossed while angry residents at a meeting called for his resignation on Thursday.

Wolfeboro Police Commissioner Robert Copeland, who's 82 and white, has acknowledged in an email to his fellow police commissioners he used the racial slur in describing Obama.

Town resident Jane O'Toole, who moved to Wolfeboro four months ago, said she overheard Copeland say the slur at a restaurant in March and wrote to the town manager about it. Copeland, in an email to her, acknowledged using the slur in referring to the president and said he will not apologize.

"I believe I did use the 'N' word in reference to the current occupant of the Whitehouse," Copeland said in the email to his fellow police commissioners, part of which he forwarded to O'Toole. "For this, I do not apologize — he meets and exceeds my criteria for such." ...

 "He meets and exceeds my criteria for such."
I like the pretense at rational evaluation, which is exactly how such people disguise their racism: a pretense of rational evaluation of capital punishment, of crime statistics, of popular music; the list is almost endless.

Of course, my mother will say that the poor guy is 82 - two years older than Donald Sterling - and comes from a different generation. I usually ask her, "Do you mean a racist generation?", and she agrees, although she does state that she herself was not.
In her case, I believe it true, for she is an unusual person. Genetics. Her mother was very unusual.

The smug face of Racism masquerading as Homespun Wisdom of the Aged is an image that reminds me of the last stages of cancer, the hidden guest of the body politic becomes death triumphant.

I refer to the police commissioner as a slimey old coot; he meets and exceeds my criteria for such.

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In Which We Think Ourselves Gods

 

Mr. Sasse's Concept of Celestial Choirs and Bands

The Raw Story:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/05/14/gop-favorite-in-nebraska-senate-race-claims-religious-belief-justifies-breaking-any-law/

According to ThinkProgress, the winner of Tuesday’s Republican primary in Nebraska believes that the United States “cannot force citizens to violate their religious beliefs under any circumstance.”

Republican “rising star” Ben Sasse is predicted to win the Senate seat being vacated by Republican Mike Johanns in November by a wide margin, as Nebraska is a solid red state. On his official campaign website, Sasse claims that he “believes that our right to the free exercise of religion is co-equal to our right to life. This is not a negotiable issue. Government cannot force citizens to violate their religious beliefs under any circumstances. He will fight for the right of all Americans to act in accordance with their conscience.” ...

"He will fight for the right..."?

I can just see God humming "From the Halls of Montezu-u-ma to the shores of Tripoli, humty-num-tum."

Mr. Sasse does not know the distinction between himself and God. That is usually a bad sign.

Notice that Mr. Sasse is referred to as a "rising star"...  perhaps a "light bearer"?

--

Bayna Yaday Allahi

Mr. Redogan of Turkey

Between the hands of Allah; our lives are between the holy hands.

You would think that Mr. Redogan, the PM of Turkey would know that, especially since he has traded politically upon Islam, and often been seen as imperiling the secularism of Turkey as set up by Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s.
You would think Mr. Redogan would be aware of the twists and turns of fate as we wish it to be versus what it is veiled from our sight within the folds of what is as yet unfolded.


Los Angeles Times:
 http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-turkey-mine-toll-20140515-story.html

As public fury mounted Thursday along with the casualty toll in what officials were describing as Turkey’s deadliest mine accident, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan found himself on the defensive in the wake of a seemingly tone-deaf response to the disaster.

The number of confirmed dead rose to 282, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported, citing Energy Minister Taner Yildiz. Outside the town of Soma in western Turkey, the families of miners still missing kept a grief-suffused vigil, even as prospects dimmed for finding any survivors.

[...]

The disaster cast a spotlight on harsh and dangerous working conditions endured by miners in Turkey, and raised troubling questions as to whether cozy relationships between mine owners and the government had quashed stricter safety standards. Two weeks ago, Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish initials AKP, had rejected calls for a parliamentary probe of safety practices in the Soma mines.

"Two weeks".

That is how quickly one can go from the summit of pride to the abyss of harsh reality.

Irony, eh, Mr. Redogan?

--

Starving In The Midst Of Plenty

 The Old Rugged Bridge

Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/la-na-transportation-bill-20140515-story.html

Without quick action by Congress, the U.S. Transportation Department may begin scaling back or halting work on thousands of roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects at the height of the construction season this July, when the nation's Highway Trust Fund is expected to run dry...

"Quick action"? Did you say "quick action"?
The way Congress acts, it makes me think that they have read the biblical quote as a mutually exclusive choice: the quick or the dead, you may have one, but not the other.
They have often chosen the dead and moribund road to the future.

There is so much money and wealth, yet there is so little available to re-build roads, lower the national debt, fund social programs, etc., etc., etc.
Many people seem to believe that projects such as Keystone will do miracles, but they strike me as akin to "9 day wonders", and their effect is soon swamped by the general depression of the state of the society.

The roads around here are incredibly bad after the winter.
We have to change normal routes which went directly to our destinations into maze-like twistings and turning to avoid the pot-hole swamps that infest the area.

Part of the history of the USA is the great history of building roads and connecting markets and getting goods and commerce around the country and around the globe. If we cannot support it, we are criminally stupid, and we will merit to opprobrium of our grandchildren and their offspring.

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