Elephants, Snakes, Blue Candles and Red Feathers

Elephant repellent can be anything you like from the whimsical to the outrageous, from crossing your fingers to an excuse for public flatulence. As long as there are no elephants in view or recalled in recent memory by the audience any action serves to repel elephants. Generally the audience is young and gullible. Snake repellent works about the same way as elephant repellent. Always looking out for an elephant you might miss the snake and get bitten, while always looking down for the snake you might get squashed instead. Looking out and listening for elephants and snakes is hard work but having a repellent is much eaiser. Elephant and snake repellent is great fun but only if it is facetious. Let's go back a few years and search Wikipedia - admittedly not the best reference source but a convenient one - for some recent elephants and snakes

World Trade Center bombing on February 26,1993 in New York City; The Oklahoma City bombing on April 19,1995 of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building; Centennial Olympic Park bombing on July 27, 1996 in Atlanta; The September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.; Anthrax Attacks in the United States during the Fall of 2001 following the 9/11 event; Bali Nightclub bombing on October 12, 2002; Beltway Sniper Attacks during October 2003; Madrid train bombings on March 11, 2004; London bombings of the subways and buses on July 7 and 21, 2005.

Just a few of the major elephants and snakes in the last thirteen years or so. Some are solitary snakes that would have been hard to detect, some are either dens of snakes or herds of elephants, depending on your point of view, that should have been at least partially detected. Wikipedia has even more comprehensive lists and I'm sure better sources like LexisNexis and others could reveal a mountain of events that could be termed snakes or elephants in the context of risk here. There just seem to be snakes and elephants everywhere. Damn! Maybe we live in a jungle. Who knew?

Real threats, real risks if you will, require serious avoidance measures. Risk avoidance requires risk detection and assessment. Detection is the real problem and precedes assessment and avoidance. Quine and Wittgenstein are correct, no matter how much they are ignored, how the question is framed is crucial to getting an answer, a real answer. No one wants to get bitten by a snake or squashed by an elephant. But, poor detection methods, poor ways to see snakes and elephants, ways that are very high tech but have very poor discrimination, ways that generate mountains of data about all the animals in the jungle but are very poor at unambiguously finding snakes and elephants or even traces of them, ways like the NSA's data mining of communications records, are in the last analysis nothing more than snake and elephant repellent. 'Who is talking to who?' may not be the best question, especially when the question is more like 'who is everyone talking to?'

Until the NSA either publicly fails, God forbid, in the face of another catastrophic event or publicly succeeds in foiling such an event the current methods will serve only to set public opinion against responsible and productive detection work. Maybe, just maybe, Stephen Kappes return to the CIA as the second in command under General Haden will produce more real detection and less in the way of snake and elephant repellent. I wonder what General Alexander will do now at NSA, will he continue the mining?

Maybe trying not to attract snakes and elephants unnecessarily would be better than believing that the current actions have repelled all the snakes and elephants. It's been nearly a year now since any snakes or elephants caused any trouble. Let's sift and chain another terabyte of communications records this week and see if the elephants and snakes stay away, eh? I hear they're lighting the blue candles and using the red chicken feathers this month in New Orleans too. Nope, no elephants, no snakes, no storms here, not a one. Anyone got any more rum, my hurricane is getting a bit light?

More light reading on snakes and elephants, feathers and candles

The NSA is on the line -- all of them

LISTENING IN

Big Brother Is Listening

Wiretaps: How to Fix FISA

How the NSA Does "Social Network Analysis"

Blue Candles, Red Feathers

Mo rum, pleeze

KISS, bad ideas are reason enough

God bless Anthony Lane who in his recent review of The Da Vinci Code, both the book and the movie, points out the most fundamental and best reason to ignore the book, it is quite simply badly written.  And, the movie can be ignored for the same reason since in the director Howard's own words it is a faithful adaptation of the book.  All the press about the premises of the book, which are laughable at best,  immediately turned me away from any attempt to read it.  Like Lane I was able to see the movie fresh without being contaminated by the book experience, and like Lane I found the movie a complete waste of time except to have been well received as an entertaining outing by my mother-in-law, a retired librarian, who has read the book and found both lacking in merit.  I am sick to death of all the Christian hand wringing over the Brown's book and Howard's movie and amazed, if not envious, about the cottage industry that has grown up debunking the book.  Oh! Should I be so smart to write either the bad book or one of the debunkers.  Forty million copies, who knew? 

 

All of this hullabellew leads me ponder Lane's idea

Should we mind that forty million readers - or, to use the technical term, "lemmings" - have followed one another over the cliff of this long and laughable text?

a bit more deeply as regards the blogosphere.  Brown's work, at least from what I've seen in the movie resembles nothing so much as an extended blog entry from one of the tens of thousands of blogs claiming to have the truth about everything from Hiroshima to hemorrhoids.  Bad ideas, and from what Lane says just plain bad writing also, are more than reason enough to ignore a book like Brown's.  In the same way much of the blogosphere can also be ignored.  Lemmings, perhaps like the poor, will always be with us.  Watch the lemmings carefully and quietly move quickly out of their way.  Hell hath no fury like lemmings blocked from their journey to the edge.  Oh, by the way, did I mention the mid term elections are coming up.  Lemmings anyone?

Earthworm Tractor Co

Miserably slow here at work.  The strangest things come up when you have idle time with the Net.  I may have mentioned to you in the past my interest in reviewing old Saturday Evening Post archives to uncover the author of the Earthworm Tractor Co. fiction pieces I recall reading as an eleven year old.  Searching on Wikipedia I found a very nice entry for The Saturday Evening Post which led to the web site for the current incarnation of the magazine which is now a bimonthly.  A bit more digging found LookSmart FindArticles which produced

Botts and the biggest deal of all: the world's greatest salesman was face to face with the world's toughest customer

which revealed the author as William Hazlett Upson.  As you can see from the link on Upson's name some of the work has been collected in books.  The article linked above recalls all the flavor of what I remember reading as a ten year old, sort of Wodehouse like but not nearly as good as Wodehouse.  Armed with Upson's name finally a treasure trove of information came up on Google and other sources.  Perhaps the material is too dated to be of interest to any eleven year old today.  We shall see since I plan to turn one of the books over to my eleven year old this month.

Before & After

Dear Reader,

 

Rugs, that's what it's all about really. Absolutely the most amazing Dubbya piece recently. Thanks to rj for the heads up on this one. On the way home today Before and After: Telling Time by Calamity by Andrei Codrescu got me to thinking in a similar way about the ampersands in my life, the events that like an ampersand come between the befores and afters that demarcate ones life. Today the third child turns twenty one and that would get anyone to thinking, especially if, as in my case, you would be sixty five when the fourth child graduates from high school.

Before & After

High School

The living with mother of the first child

The first year of college

The first new car - a 1967 Austin Healey

The marriage to the mother of the second child

The second attempt at college

My twenty first birthday

The hospital jobs

The third attempt at college and finally the degree

The sales jobs

The marriage to the mother of the third and fourth children

The death of the mother of the first child

Driving the truck all over America and Canada

The irrepairable death at 250 000 miles of the last new car just last week

This current bout of the blues

Perhaps I just need a broader scope, say, something more like

Before & After

Dubbya

Peak Oil

GWOT

Or, maybe a narrower scope

Before & After

this next bite of birthday cake

writing the next entry in this list

Yup, that's it narrower scope.  Breathe in, breathe out, enjoy.  That's it, enjoy the moment,

Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you ... 

 

Don't drink to much, dear, and drive safely ...  Call, if you're not coming back home tonight, please.

at least for now while the larger scope seems to be, at least in speculative anticipation, thoroughly unenjoyable.

 

Perhaps Codrescu has it right, shared calamity is the ampersand that builds community.  Perhaps that's it, not having anyone who has shared all the calamities of my life.

 

RJ says it helps to write.  Everyday he says write everyday. For me it's like knitting, I simply enjoy the typing.  The prose suffers from that enjoyment of physically plunking down the words I'm afraid.

 

Wondering now if fifty nine is too old to go back over the road in a big truck.  The simple life, 'git 'er done', get it from A to B on time more often than not.  Two hundred and sixty nights away from home more or less but a hundred at home, maybe a few more.  Not all bad, an individual income level that begins to break into the lower levels of middle class, generally all of Christmas week and New Year's week off.  Money in the bank, relatively low stress, low oversight, see America.  Hum!?

 

Join us later for the next entry in the continuing saga of George goes on with the continuing calamity of his life.

 

Cheers,

 

G

 

 

 

 

 

Points of Interest

The careful reader ( I judge that there are perhaps as many as six readers of this blog worldwide ) of this blog will note some subtle changes in links and an increasing sparseness of postings.  I have friends who live in the blogosphere and one in particular who is a master of the art of blogging which is only to say that he has been at it, blogging, for nearly a decade and really at it, writing, for a lifetime.  Various factors have contributed to my dearth of postings over the last six months and my appraisal of these factors has changed over the months.  At first I attributed the decline in postings to technical issues not the least of which is the miserable nature of a dialup connection, and then to spam comments, spamments.  And now finally, I have come to see it as nothing more than a very delayed mid-life crisis.  I am nearing the end of the sixth decade of life and will be half way through the seventh decade when the last child graduates from high school.  From the last fact it should be easy to imagine that my history might be somewhat off the norm.  That history for me seems to demand some recounting, if not explanation, but for now any effort seems to be blocked by what at first seemed to be regret which has now turned to remorse.  Perhaps it is akin to K-R's stages of grief.  Perhaps the progression is regret, remorse and then reappraisal with final acceptance of what has been brought forward that is worthwhile and what can be left behind.  A tall order to pursue in writing for anyone but I'm sure my friend, the master blogger, would be the first to point out that the effort is well worth the time and pain.  So we begin again here today with the bare minimum, nothing more than perhaps what is diary entry, some recent points of interest from the radio and the magazines.

 

Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene

Fresh Air from WHYY, April 26, 2006 · Religion scholar Bart D. Ehrman, who chairs the Department of Religious Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, talks about his new book, Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend.

 

Ehrman looks into the lives of three major followers of Christ, plumbing legend and the writings of the New Testament to illuminate facts and details about these figures.

 

Ehrman is also the author of Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why and Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew which chronicles the period before Christianity as we know it came to be.

 

Pentecostals Mark 100 Years of Worship
 by Greg Allen

All Things Considered, April 26, 2006 · One hundred years ago this month, a small house in Los Angeles was the scene of a series of religious meetings where participants had a new kind of spiritual experience. They had emotional displays, spoke in tongues, and experienced remarkable healing -- all manifestations, they believed, of the power of the Holy Spirit "filling" the participants.

 

Today, Pentecostals claim more than half a billion adherents around the world. It's one of the fastest-growing social movements ever, and one that has had a profound impact on even mainstream religions.

THE LESSON OF TAL AFAR
Is it too late for the Administration to correct its course in Iraq?
by GEORGE PACKER
The New Yorker, Issue of 2006-04-10

The lessons that McMaster and his soldiers applied in Tal Afar were learned during the first two years of an increasingly unpopular war. "When we came to Iraq, we didn't understand the complexity what it meant for a society to live under a brutal dictatorship, with ethnic and sectarian divisions", he said, in his hoarse, energetic voice. "When we first got here, we made a lot of mistakes. We were like a blind man, trying to do the right thing but breaking a lot of things." Later, he said, "You gotta come in with your ears open. You can't come in and start talking. You have to really listen to people."

All of these items made me think for awhile putting aside for a few hours ruminating over my own life history.  If you've not been exposed to any of them, I would suggest that all of them are thought provoking and well worth your time. 

 

My connections here are uniquely personal I'm sure.  What has all this to do with retrospection and mid-life crisis?  Simple, it's summed up in McMaster's words from The New Yorker article with only a change of setting from the war zone of Iraq to the war zone of the mind and its brutal neurotic dictators, ego and doubt.  And, then within that setting a consideration of hope.

 

If courage is acting correctly in the face of fear, if courage is not fearlessness, which is likely some kind of brain damage, but rather the ability to act and act correctly when the most basic emotions tend to paralyze, then perhaps faith is the sense of hope that sustains action in the face of doubt.  If faith is acting correctly in the face of doubt, if faith is not surety, which is also perhaps some kind of brain damage as well, then faith is the ability to sustain hope in the presence of overwhelming doubt. 

 

I would modify one of the pulpit pounder's favorites, "I know that I know that I know", to better reflect my reality, I know that I know that I don't know, that nothing is settled in this life, that only hope is the correct response to doubt.  Hope, an abiding, unfathomable, wordless hope not reason is in the last analysis the only counter weight to doubt, doubt which defies words.  There is likely only one correspondent who has been alerted to this posting that can even begin to see my connections here without further writing on my part.  So we have some work to do, eh?  Should you be that one correspondent with some insight, please, post a comment or write to me directly.

 

May the God of Hope fill you all with all Peace and Joy as you trust in Him so that you might overflow with Hope by the Power of the Holy Spirit!

Does it have a name? Dicami, per favore.

In a large twelve inch cast iron skillet bring about three tablespoons of olive oil to sauté heat. Quickly brown one pound of hot Italian sausage in the olive oil. Cover and reduce the heat to simmer.

 

Core and dice several medium bell peppers, one green, one red, one yellow and one orange, if possible.

 

Peel and cube, about sugar cube size, four tennis ball size Yukon gold potatoes. Place the potatoes in a covered microwaveable dish and nuke on high until tender, about five minutes. Similarly, dice, peel and nuke a softball size Spanish onion.

 

Add the cubed peppers and the microwaved onions to the skillet around the sausage, cover and continue simmering about ten minutes.

 

Add the microwaved potatoes to the skillet on top of the sausage, peppers and onions.  Salt the top of the potatoes, and grind on a good measure of mixed fresh pepper corns and a pinch of crushed red pepper. Cover and continue simmering for forty five minutes or so.

 

Drain the accumulated liquid from the skillet and discard.  Remove and reserve all the sausage.  Increase the heat and use a spatula to turn the potato, onion and pepper mixture on high heat until the potatoes are slightly browned.  Add a bit of olive oil, if necessary.  Remove the skillet from the heat when the potatoes are just beginning to brown.

 

Slice the sausage into generous medallions and combine with potatoes, peppers and onions in the skillet.

 

Garnish with a small amount of crumbled crisped bacon, a small amount of freshly grated Parmesan cheese and a tiny sprig of fresh rosemary.

 

Serve hot in broad shallow bowls with a good strong red wine and garliced or plain French bread.  Excellent on bitter cold days under gray snowy skies for lunch.

 

What is it, does it have a name?  Got me, but it tastes great.  It came to me in a dream.

Goda!

Giorgio

 

 

 

Bumbling along

So, my friend writes the other day about reading these Cheever short stories

Just a thought

Late the other night, I was reading a John Cheever story, "The Wrysons," in which a suburban woman is afflicted with a recurring dream of nuclear holocaust. The dream winds up with a sort of yacht-club immolation scene in which boaters are drowned as they over-crowd the waters of refuge. In the dream, she weeps "to see this inhumanity as the world was ending."

Well, it isn't the world that is ending. The post-holocaust planet will go on spinning somehow, and opportunistic life-forms that have been waiting for the opportunity will flourish. (For example, a virus that replicates through the digitized memory of chatted vacuities such as "I'm standing outside your building, where are you?") Life will begin the long trek back to Descartes. This much we know. But I found myself wondering this evening about cultural extinctions in our own long past. One hundred fifty thousand years is no time at all on the geological scale, but it's plenty of time, I imagine, to scrub the traces of human artifact from the face of the earth. We think of the time between the moment of homo sapiens's unmistakable arrival (whenever that was) and the composition of the first granary account as a long, boring and unrecorded progression toward us. But what if we've done this already a few times? What if there were was a New Yorker seventy thousand years ago - and all record of it has been obliterated by natural processes, just as natural processes would clear Earth of our record in, say, fifty thousand years? What if, far from living in savannahs and bumbling our way toward speech, we've done this sophisticated cultural thing a few times already, but with such catastrophic results that We Don't Remember?

As you know, my mind doesn't drift toward science fiction. But I found myself plausibly wondering...

(But it's another Cheever story altogether that I urge you to read, a lovely tale called "The Duchess.")

And, I tried to respond with a comment

RJ,

From the World of Unintended Results

I know you intended to point me to Cheever here and just might not be interested in where the images in your note here have taken me but indulge me for a moment, please.

bumbling our way toward speech, we've done this sophisticated cultural thing a few times already, but with such catastrophic results that We Don't Remember?

My head is still reeling from finishing Sam Harris's End of Faith last night. Harris deserves a good rereading with substantial note taking, but that will wait, I think, until we've finished Freeman's Closing of the Western Mind. End of Faith creates for me its own special flavor of intellectual and spiritual vertigo which is only amplified this morning reading your note here and being led back to Augustine, Manichaeism, Origen and the issue of reincarnation. Spooning out some of the bigger chunks from this soup pot of philosophical rememberances we find the tasty morsel of

THE SENTENCES OF SEXTUS AND OF THE PYTHAGOREANS CHADWICK J Theol Studies.1960; XI: 349

wherein we find

Whatever you honour above all things, that which you so honour will have dominion over you. But if you give yourself to the domination of God, you will thus have dominion over all things.

and

The greatest honour which can be paid to God, is to know and imitate Him.

causing us to remember how in the eighth grade we posed questions to the dear Sisters of the Incarnate Word and the Society of Jesus Fathers about Constantine's influence on the early church and Neo-Platonist influences in Augustine's writings. And, causing us particularly to remember how irritated they all were by these questions. Fortunately for the fathers and the sisters but unfortunately for us we didn't know much about the Buddha then. We really thought we had put all this to bed after the debacle of the first college year in Austin. Perhaps, we are reincarnated but we can only hope that it comes without the memory of the troublesome issues while still somehow preserving and transmitting forward the benefits of whatever positive accomplishments occurred in previous steps. We are perhaps a bit micro-reincarnated every year of the current life and there is much We Don't Remember for good reason. Meanwhile, later that same lifetime we have put "The Duchess", which appears just after "The Wrysons" in The Stories of John Cheever, on the reading list. Page 347 in my copy, how about yours? Likely it's time now to do a bit of sitting, eh?

Bumblingly yours,

George

But, his antispam measures have taken over and everything is now subject to approval.  Approval, the bane of my bumbling life.

Git 'er done!

"Git 'er done!", seems to have a venerable history.

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.

Thomas H. Huxley
English biologist (1825 - 1895)

from The Quotations Page

Perhaps this year we will progress further in a more thorough understanding of this principle.

 

A fine fellow, former Minnesota Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, has passed on, but he will not be forgotten

A fine fellow, former Minnesota Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, has passed on, but he will not be forgotten anytime soon in my house.  The following narrative is taken largely from the AP report today.

Former Minnesota Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, whose insurgent campaign toppled a sitting president in 1968 and forced the Democratic Party to take seriously his message against the Vietnam War, died Saturday. He was 89.

McCarthy was born March 29, 1916, in Watkins, a central Minnesota town of about 750. He earned degrees from St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., and the University of Minnesota.

He was a teacher, a civilian War Department employee and college economics and sociology instructor before turning to politics. He once spent a year in a monastery.

He was elected to the House in 1948. Ten years later he was elected to the Senate and re-elected in 1964. McCarthy left the Senate in 1970 and devoted much of his time to writing poetry, essays and books.

With a sardonic sense of humor, McCarthy needled whatever establishment was in power. In 1980 he endorsed Republican Ronald Reagan with the argument that anyone was better than incumbent Jimmy Carter, a Democrat.

In recent years, McCarthy was critical of campaign finance reform, winning him an unlikely award from the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2000.

In an interview when he got the award, McCarthy said money helped him in the 1968 race. "We had a few big contributors," he said. "And that's true of any liberal movement. In the American Revolution, they didn't get matching funds from George III."

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, McCarthy said the United States was partly to blame for ignoring the plight of Palestinians.

"You let a thing like that fester for 45 years, you have to expect something like this to happen," he said in an interview at the time. "No one at the White House has shown any concern for the Palestinians."

In a 2004 biography, "Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism," British historian Dominic Sandbrook painted an unflattering portrait of McCarthy, calling him lazy and jealous, among other things. McCarthy, Sandbrook wrote, "willfully courted the reputation of frivolous maverick."

In McCarthy's 1998 book, "No-Fault Politics," editor Keith C. Burris described McCarthy in the introduction as "a Catholic committed to social justice but a skeptic about reform, about do-gooders, about the power of the state and the competence of government, and about the liberal reliance upon material cures for social problems."

On his 85th birthday in 2001, McCarthy told the Star Tribune of Minneapolis that President Bush was an amateur and said he could not even bear to watch his inauguration.

In an interview a month before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, McCarthy compared the Bush administration with the characters in the William Golding novel "Lord of the Flies," in which a group of boys stranded on an island turn to savagery.

"The bullies are running it," McCarthy said. "Bush is bullying everything."

McCarthy was an advocate for a third-party movement, arguing there was no real difference between Republicans and Democrats.

In 2000, he wrote a political satire called "An American Bestiary," illustrated by Chris Millis, in which high-level advisers are portrayed as park pigeons -- "they strut and waddle" -- and reporters are compared with black birds who flock together.

He blamed the media for deciding who is and is not a serious candidate and suggested he should have kept his 1992 candidacy a secret, since announcing it publicly did no good.

McCarthy also ran for president in 1972, 1976 and 1988.

For McCarthy, the 1950s and 1960s were the Democratic Party's high points because it pushed the Civil Rights Act through Congress and championed national health insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

"I think he probably would consider his work in civil rights legislation in the 1960s to be his greatest contribution," his son said Saturday.

The bad times, Eugene McCarthy said, began with America's increased involvement in the Vietnam War and the simultaneous failure of some of Johnson's Great Society social programs.

Instead of giving people a chance to earn a living, McCarthy said, the Great Society "became affirmative action and more welfare. It was an admission the New Deal had failed or fallen."

My early involvement during high school to encourage the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was my first exposure to Eugene McCarthy who has been recognized publicly by this nation as a singular force in civil rights legislation

Eugene McCarthy has exemplified the highest standards of public service and dedication to constitutional principles through his efforts to shape legislation on civil rights,

 

From Section 1. Findings, (3),  S. 663, To authorize the President to present a gold medal on behalf of Congress to Eugene McCarthy in recognitioin of his service to the Nation.,  IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, March 29, 2001

 

Campaign activities for Gene McCarthy, George McGovern, and Edmund Muskie form the backdrop of many of the best years of my early and middle twenties back when it seemed possible to turn the behemoth we call American culture at least partly in a better direction.  But, now the words of Emerson in "The Method of Nature", An Oration delivered before the Society of the Adelphi, in Waterville College, Maine, August 11, 1841 seem to ring more true than in the day they were written

The land we live in has no interest so dear, if it knew its want, as the fit consecration of days of reason and thought. Where there is no vision, the people perish. The scholars are the priests of that thought which establishes the foundations of the earth. No matter what is their special work or profession, they stand for the spiritual interest of the world, and it is a common calamity if they neglect their post in a country where the material interest is so predominant as it is in America. We hear something too much of the results of machinery, commerce, and the useful arts. We are a puny and a fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following, are our diseases. The rapid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man. -read more-

Once upon a time Democrats and Republicans alike could inspire young men and women to noble action, but lately the only inspiring actor on the political scene for me has been Barack Obama who has yet to find an enduring national audience.  McCarthy is an enduring inspiration, a man whose life and thoughts are well worth reading into if you're not old enough to have been involved in his presidential campaigns.

Just when you think

Just when you think you couldn't find a better gift than say the John Bobbit signature set of Ginzu knives along comes

Who could resist it at just less than a c-note? I must write to Lorena, I know she'll just love it. And, our thanks to RJ for pointing out this little gem and others that are so necessary this time of year.

Beautiful and not so beautiful

There is a place in China, Harbin, where from time to time some beautiful things happen, namely the Harbin Snow and Ice Festival which has been recorded in magnificent detail in 2003 and 2005 by R. Todd King.  Over the years with the changes in the political and economic climate Harbin has fallen on some hard times

It was once a bustling hub of heavy industry, but many of its people have been out of work for years after local state-owned enterprises collapsed under the pressure of economic reform.

The Sunday Times, 27 Nov 2005

and most recently some very hard times

Cover-up can't hide murky water truth China Daily 20051125

 

Wen visits Harbin; Russia offered sorry AP 200511270918 from China Daily

 

China's premier visits waterless city 20051126

 

When the taps run dry 20051127 

with the recent spill of over one hundred tons of benzene in the Songhuajiang River several hundred miles upriver from Harbin at Jilin.  One hundred tons of benzene is an enormous amount of benzene by any measure, a large economic loss for those who spilled it, and a huge environmental and public health disaster for all those along the river. The immediate and future potential harm this benzene spill can have for millions of people is simply immense.  The sheer ugliness of this chemical spill in every dimension stands in stark contrast to the great beauty that you can see in the photographs we've linked above from the Snow and Ice Festival.  As China races headlong into the industrialized future, one she will likely dominate soon in the region and perhaps globally, the tension between economic and human values will only increase.  We can only hope that broad public exposure of events like the recent ones in Harbin will help to achieve a better balance between the economic and human values.  China will perhaps prove in the near future to be the ultimate test of how large societies can balance economic growth through free market systems, or nearly free market systems, with a broader concern for basic human values like adequate sources of clean water.  What has happened here in China will affect the entire length of the Songhuajiang River downstream from Jilin through China, on through Russia and out into the North Central Sea of Japan which washes the shores of not only China, Russia, North Korea, South Korea and Japan, but also ultimately the Pacific Rim and the rest of the world.  This is a global event that bears watching closely not only for the Chinese response but also the responses of all those affected.

 

More of one thing leads to another

More of one thing leads to another was demonstrated this morning while reading

The Method of Nature

An Oration delivered before the Society of the Adelphi, 
in Waterville College, Maine, August 11, 1841

by R.W. Emerson

we came across the word inchoation

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it? That rushing stream will not stop to be observed. We can never surprise nature in a corner; never find the end of a thread; never tell where to set the first stone. The bird hastens to lay her egg: the egg hastens to be a bird. The wholeness we admire in the order of the world, is the result of infinite distribution. Its smoothness is the smoothness of the pitch of the cataract. Its permanence is a perpetual inchoation. Every natural fact is an emanation, and that from which it emanates is an emanation also, and from every emanation is a new emanation. If anything could stand still, it would be crushed and dissipated by the torrent it resisted, and if it were a mind, would be crazed; as insane persons are those who hold fast to one thought, and do not flow with the course of nature. Not the cause, but an ever novel effect, nature descends always from above. It is unbroken obedience. The beauty of these fair objects is imported into them from a metaphysical and eternal spring. In all animal and vegetable forms, the physiologist concedes that no chemistry, no mechanics, can account for the facts, but a mysterious principle of life must be assumed, which not only inhabits the organ, but makes the organ.

and knowing from the context that inchoate can't possibly have any meaning we look up inchoation and find a caution about the age of the definition and the age of the source of the definition

Quick definitions (inchoation)

(n.) Act of beginning; commencement; inception.

(This definition is from the 1913 Webster's Dictionary and may be outdated.)

And, of course who can ignore such cautions, so we are led to,

inchoation : Webster's 1828 Dictionary

which is nearer the year of Emerson's address and very likely his reference.  And, what do we find but

Webster's 1828 Dictionary, Electronic Version by Christian Technologies, Inc.

where from the tone of the other books available from Christian Technologies I would doubt that the folks at CTI would be much in line with me or dear old RWE in terms of theology, but I would bet my bottom dollar that CTI claims American culture as Christian in origin.  In fact we find on the page titled The American Student's Package on CD a note at the bottom of the page

*American Quotations includes a comprehensive compilation of nearly 4,000 quotations throughout American history from Presidents and historical figures plus biographies, all based on the US Christian heritage; passages and phrases influencing early and modern American history, referenced according to their sources in literature, memoirs, letters, governmental documents, speeches, charters, court decision and constitutions.

which if it doesn't give the game away certainly begins to make my speculations more solid, eh?  When will these dunderheads realize that Jefferson, Franklin, Emerson, Parker and scores of others were Christians whose theology would mystify if not totally appall the modern American Fundamentalist Christian?

Recently we saw the movie Kingdom of Heaven, and it wouldn't seem to me to be much of a stretch to me to give a sound Biblical basis to a line from the movie, where Balian hammers home the point about the supremacy of religious tolerance when he hands over the Holy City to Saladin, he tells his followers

God is in your head and your heart, not in any particular place.

And, we might logically add not in any particular book. It would seem easy to me to use no more than

Luke 12:34 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

and one of the last verses of Matthew

Matthew 6:33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

to give Balian's line a Biblical basis.   As we mentioned yesterday, the only unforgivable sin Jesus spoke of

Matthew 12:31,32 And so I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.

was to deny the presence or power of the Holy Spirit. So it would seem to me that the only dispute would be the manner in which I choose to see that power and presence expressed and the mode of my connection to it. But, then what do I know, the RC church excommunicated the likes of me a long time ago.

Jesus remains to my mind one of the best kept secrets of the Bible and the most unknown figure of Christianity.  And, America's Christian heritage remains the best kept secret of American history.  A little more reading of American history wouldn't hurt anyone, and a good deal more reading of Emerson and Jefferson would be of great benefit to the "Christian Heritage of America" crowd, they just might realize that they are not in the same room with these folks.  Or, Praise God!, they just might become Christian Deists, or Christian Transcendentalists, or, wonder of wonders, Christians tolerant and accepting of another view of the world.  For a good take on the simplified view of life try "A Little Knowledge" from our friends at Outer Life.

Read more Emerson!

Who knows one thing might lead to another for you too.

 

 

 

 

Miracles and Metaphors

A number of people seem to be reading Erik Reece's recent essay in the December Harper's "Jesus Without The Miracles: Thomas Jefferson's Bible and the Gospel of Thomas" and writing about the essay. The two best that I've seen so far are

"Thomas, Jefferson, and Stewardship", posted November 24, 2005 at The Daily Blague

and

"The gospels of Thomas", posted November 23, 2005 at Philocrites

Particularly interesting from Philocrites was the link to R. W. Emerson's 1838 Address to the Divinity School. These three pieces have reminded me once again how small, how absolutely petty, and contentious the legalists can be and they, the rabbis dancing on the head of a pin as I like to call them, can absolutely suck the life out life itself leaving a hollow tasteless husk that they will claim to be the essence of life when in fact it is nothing more than the wrapper. And, before the metaphorical apologists get started on wrapper, let's set that straight, I said wrapper, not peel or skin. Wrappers are external to a product and of no substance, peels and skins are integral to a fruit, vegetable or animal and do contain nutrients. But, we said wrapper didn't we, so don't start with the wrapper having the life in it, eh? The richness of Emerson's language and the depth of his thought along with the interesting takes on Christianity by the blog authors and Reece which again have a good deal of depth and richness stand in stark contrast to the tedious legalism of the Fundamentalist Christians and their tag alongs who have recently been seen featured in the national news magazines and other venues cheerfully wanting to explore the arguments about the origins of life from a point of view they want to term "intelligent design" so as to some how separate it from the arguments of "creationism". The "intelligent design" arguments real flavor can best be tasted in the near charlatanism of the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture and its director, Dr. Stephen Meyer, in the position paper THE WEDGE STRATEGY the opening introductory paragraphs of which would be nearly laughable if only they weren't presented seriously, and especially if they didn't have the ear of a number of members of the current administration in Washington. We have been down these roads before with the conservatives so perhaps there is hope in this instance, but the road was last time a bit of a rough ride down to the intersections where reason was available and there is no guarantee that this time we will not be swallowed by one of the potholes the conservatives have created like the War in Iraq.

The only unforgivable sin Jesus spoke of

Matthew 12:31,32 And so I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.

was to deny the presence or power of the Holy Spirit. So it would seem to me that the only dispute would be the manner in which I choose to see that power and presence expressed and the mode of my connection to it. But, then what do I know, the RC excommunicated the likes of me a long time ago.

Jesus, the best kept secret of the Gospels and the least known figure of Christianity.

I am rambling again. In any event read R. W. Emerson's 1838 Address to the Divinity School and the other items I've cited above and then compare them to what passes for thought with the creationists. Consider the broadness of Emerson's view and the narrowness of the current administration's view of life in general and then perhaps you can wonder as I do if the root causes of the conservative malfeasance in thought and policy like we've seen from the Bushies are not really spiritual in nature. Miracles and metaphors are in many ways the same and as I recall the mircales were not for those who had eyes to see and ears to hear, but for those to whom the Gospels would appear as foolishness.

Honk, if you like "Horn Of Plenty" aka www.hornofplenty.co.uk

Recently, we wrote to the author of Horn of Plenty, a site well worth your time I belive.

Mr Quink,

 

Honk, if you like "Horn of Plenty" aka www.hornofplenty.co.uk.

 

We held this sign up recently on my block and the noise was deafening.  Of course mine is the only house on the block.

 

A small typo you might want to attend to under the Parodies heading

As we always tell our lawyers, writing a parody does not involve stealing someone else's ideas. It involve stealing their ideas, ...

might better read

As we always tell our lawyers, writing a parody does not involves stealing someone else's ideas. It involves stealing their ideas, ...

 

I found your site attempting to chase down the "Horn of Plenty" link on the sign in page from GMail this morning.  I think I have gotten the far better end of the deal in finding your site rather than whatever GMail was trying to show me with their dead link.  Whatever free time presents itself today will likely be spent in further digging into the strange twists and turns of your mind. What a fine piece of work the collection of parodies on Horn of Plenty is, thank you.

 

We have our own not so nearly interesting nor well done blog, The Quality of the Light, largely as the result of encouragement we have received from an old roommate and far more accomplished blogger who writes, The Daily Blauge.

 

I expect a good deal of resonance from reading your work since I have a number of old workmates who are UK expats and who now live in Texas, an ex in Maidstone who works for the National Health Service, a deep affinity for Guiness and good Scotch Whiskey, and I also spent eight years under the care of the nuns, mainly the good Carmelite sisters and the Sisters of the Incarnate Word. Who could possibly forget a grade school principal whose name was Sister Mary of Perpetual Help. 

 

I think we'll just post this note on my blog to make the world a bit more aware of your site. 

 

Again, thanks for your effort with Horn of Plenty, we look forward to spending more time with you today.

 

Best regards,

 

George

 

Re: Southern Girls

Recently, I had some correspondence with a friend about GRITS, she is from Huntsville,Texas and I am from Red Hill, Texas.

Charlotte,

A clean copy with a bit more material can be found at

G.R.I.T.S. - Girls Raised In The South

All of the entry is good, but if you just want the text scroll down to

I have a friend from Bawston, bless her heart, who thinks it's hilarious when I say I've got to "carry" my daughter to the doctor or "cut off" the light. She also gets a giggle every time I am "fixin" to do something. And, bless their hearts, they don't even know where "over yonder" is, or what "I reckon" means! My personal favorite was my aunt, saying, "Bless her heart, she can't help being ugly, but she could've stayed home."

Southern girls know bad manners when they see them:
a. Drinking straight out of a can.
...

and go on from there. As you may or may not be aware this is also the title of an exellent book

Grits (Girls Raised in the South) Guide to Life (Illustrated)
By Deborah Ford, Edie Hand
Hardcover / 224 Pages / E P Dutton / April 2003 / 0525947264

Thanks for reminding me of a wonderful text that's been passed around the net for quite awhile and the book, which I really do need right now for another question.

I don't think of myself as being from the South do you? I don't find much in common with the Southerners, people who constantly remind you that they are from the South, from AL, MS, GA, SC, AR, VA. I do find a good deal of resonance with people from rural backgrounds or from families where the immediate parents are from rural backgrounds. I think of myself as being from East Texas, The Big Thicket, Texas, but not a typical TEXAN not the loud JR from Dallas type, perhaps more Billy Bob Thorton is my style. As I learned to say in South Texas where I lived for over a decade,

Yo soy un Tejano gringo puro, y yo soy un viejo vacquero tambien, verdad

I am a pure Texas gringo and an old cowboy as well now, ain't that so.

Keep'em coming in Charlotte. You got any fat back so I can make beans tomorrow. Just a bit, if you've got it, please. I've looked the beans and changed the soak water once, tomorrow morning I'll change the water again, throw out the floaters and start them to boiling. You comin' for navies, cold sliced purple onions, chow-chow, bacon and corn bread tomorrow for dinner. And, you know dinner will be after church in the middle of the day don't you now. Supper, the meal closer to sun down than noon, is often skipped on Sundays since dinner is usually big and always after church, generally around two or three, eh? But, lately I've heard people refer to this same meal as Sunday supper and that distresses me, since if they invite me for Sunday supper this time of year I probably won't show up until five or six in the evening.

On 11/12/05, Bioniclady
Subject: Southern girls

> > Southern girls appreciate their natural assets:
> >
> > Clean skin
> >
> > A winning smile
> >
> > That unforgettable Southern drawl
> >
> >
> >
> > Southern girls know their manners:
> >
> > "Yes, ma'am."
> >
> > "No, sir."
> >
> > "Thank you darlin."
> >
> >
> >
> > Southern girls have a distinct way with fond expressions:
> >
> > "Y'all come back!"
> >
> > "Well, bless your heart."
> >
> > "How's your Mama?"
> >
> >
> >
> > Southern girls know their summer weather report:
> >
> > Hazy

> >
> > Hot
> >
> > Humid
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Southern girls know their vacation spots:
> >
> > Hilton Head beach
> >
> > Daytona beach
> >
> > Panama City beach
> >
> >
> >
> > Southern girls know the joys of summer:
> >
> > Golden tans
> >
> > Flip-flops in every color

> >
> > Strapless sun dresses
> >
> >
> >
> > Southern girls know everybody's first name:
> >
> > Honey
> >
> > Darlin'
> >
> > Sugar ("Shugah")
> >
> >
> >
> > Southern girls know the movies that speak to their hearts:
> >
> > Fried Green Tomatoes
> >
> > Driving Miss Daisy
> >
> > Steel Magnolias
> >
> >
> >
> > Southern girls know their religions:
> >
> > Baptist
> >
> > Methodist
> >
> > Football
> >
> >
> >
> > Southern girls know their country breakfasts:
> >
> > Red-eye gravy with country ham
> >
> > Grits
> >
> > Homemade biscuits with mama's homemade jelly
> >
> >
> >
> > Southern girls know their cities dripping with Southern charm:
> >
> > Charleston (Chawl'stn)
> >
> > Savannah (S'vanah)

> >
> > Atlanta (Adlanna)
> >
> >
> >
> > Southern girls know their elegant gentlemen:
> >
> > Men in uniform
> >
> > Men in tuxedos
> >
> > Rhett Butler, of course!
> >
> >
> >
> > Southern girls know their prime real estate:
> >
> > The Mall
> >
> > The Country Club
> >
> > The Beauty Salon
> >
> >
> >
> > Southern girls know the three deadly sins:
> >

> > Having bad manners
> >
> > Cooking bad food
> >
> > Wearing too much makeup in the summer
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Southern girls know men may come and go, but friends are fo'evah!
> >
> > Now, darlin', send this to some GRITS (Girls Raised In The South)
> >
> > or ones who wish they had been!
> >
> >
> >
> > If you're a Northern transplant, bless your heart, honey, fake it.
> >
> > We know you got here as fast as you could.

--
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--
George
www.qualityofthelight.blogspot.com

Up and down, very nice all around, home safe and sound

Up and down, very nice all around, home safe and sound. A fine day with the family up in the air, calm and clear with visibility unlimited and down in the ground, dark and cool with silver mold and the hibernating bats. Days like this are made in heaven but enjoyed on earth.

One thing leads to another, walk don't talk

Recently, a friend posted a piece on precocity, Malcolm Gladwell at The New Yorker Festival in which two paragraphs really caught me

Malcolm Gladwell argued, quite persuasively, that the qualities that produce precocious children are not in synch with the qualities that distinguish productive adults. Children learn things to the extent that they mimic doing them, and precocious children are just faster mimics. Mimicry, however, is obviously not an important, or even desirable, trait in adults. Somewhere along the line, the outer-directed (or -focused) precocious child must grow into the inner-directed adult, and quite often this doesn't happen. One of Mr Gladwell's examples was the Hunter College Elementary School, an extremely selective institution that was designed to nurture future Nobelists and the like. It hasn't produced them. What it has produced is a crop of happy and successful people, but few superstars. Mr Gladwell's hunch is that these kids were so smart that they grasped the great sacrifices that aiming for the top requires - and decided to go for happiness instead. It seems clear that precociousness is not the fruit of ambition; it's simply an inborn characteristic. So it may well be that the gifted children at Hunter lack the deep competitiveness that drives some people toward the attainment of honorable fame.


The downside of privileging the precocious is that it demotes the importance of work. Of practicing an instrument. Of editing a text toward perfection. Of doing all the research that a project requires, unstintingly. Of leaving no stone unturned. Now, you can regard such work as drudgery, the necessary evil associated with achievement. Or you can look at it as the whole point. Achievement? There is no such thing as achievement, not for the achiever. Achievement notifies other people that something remarkable has been done, but it's the doing, not the having done, that matters. The only thing that we ever achieve is, as the French have it, death itself. We are achieved. At the risk of appearing to reinvent an "Eastern" philosophy, I am opening myself up to the idea that mindful work is the thing that counts most, perhaps even more than love. Perhaps the two go together.

And, then later I answered another friend who had written in conjuction with the care she is giving one of our other friends. She takes great comfort in the Christian Bible and was perplexed about someone dear to her who though an avowed athesist had lit candles in the church recently for their parents

Ch-------,

Oh, there is never enough on that subject, we just have other things to do and it is very complicated. Everyone has a religion even if that religion is no religion. We are as a group, a group of thinking primates, apparently compelled to pose and answer the questions, "What does it all mean?" and "How do I make sense of it all?" Why do people light candles and deny a belief in God? I don't really know, I can speculate, but it serves no purpose. I have found from decades of observation that the best thing to do is to keep your beliefs to yourself and do what you think is right, I emphasize you here, not your church, not your family, not your friends, not anyone but you. And, that is a process we spend a lifetime getting down. I can tell from what you've said here that you are actively engaged in the process, and when you say

try to live by God's word that that is what matters

you have got it exactly right as far as I'm concerned. As we say in East Texas where I'm from, up just to the Southwest of Texarkana in Red Hill, Texas

Bring me the baby! I don't want to hear about no labor pains, bring me the baby.

and even more to the point

If you be talkin' 'bout it you no have no time to be doin' it, and if you be doin' it, you no be havin' no time to be talkin' 'bout it, and if you gets to it and you can't do it, well, brother, there you is.

These instructions were generally prefaced by the phrase, "Lil Mark" and followed by the phrase, "Now get yo lil' white butt back out there in that garden and get them weeds pulled and hauled out before noon so's you can come in here and eat lunch like a proper person." Beulah Haskins was about ten years older than my grandfather, black and the caretaker of my grandfather, father and myself when all of us were around the age of ten. Beulah spoke these words to me often when I came in from the summer garden chores complaining about some difficulty, generally the heat or the bugs, in completing my assigned tasks. She has proven, as I get older to be one of the wisest people I have ever known. Beulah went to the Gum Springs Baptist Church north of Red Hill. One of the first 'uppities to not go to our church' as my relatives used to say about Beulah. My family had at one time several sections of land northwest of Red Hill and on the plot that remained, just slightly less than a section, where I went to visit in the summers, there was the family cemetery and the family owned church, St. Luis. Note that I said family owned, we never ceded the church nor the property that my great grandfather built in 1868 to the RC church. We had the Diocese of Dallas and later the Diocese of Texarkana send a visiting priest on Sundays to say mass and on request to say funeral masses, but the church and it's grounds always remained firmly in the hands of my family. Often times we buried our own and the funeral mass was later on when it was convenient for the priest to come out, I've been told. In Red Hill you had four choices for a last name, Henderson, Lambert, Blackwell, or Haskins. If your last name was Haskins, the other three of us used to own your relatives at one time in the past. One thing that Beulah always said and that has held true over the years in my experience is that you can talk all day about God and Jesus but unless you get out there with your mouth shut and show people God and Jesus through your life, you are wasting your time and very likely just might send people running the other way unless you are very careful. I've taken her message to heart and so it seems have you. One of my favorite verses is

1 John 3:18
Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.
1 John 3:17-19 (in Context) 1 John 3 (Whole Chapter)

If everyone who is so quick to quote Jn 3:16 at the drop of a hat would take 1Jn3:18 to heart then perhaps we could all follow this verse more completely

Hebrews 10:24
And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.Hebrews 10:23-25 (in Context) Hebrews 10 (Whole Chapter)

I leave you with the best blessing I know

^{Romans 15:13 (New International Version)}

13May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit,

George

Later that same day I wrote a comment on the Gladwell piece noted above in which I said

Love is no more and no less than the mindful work of constantly holding another in what Abraham Maslow so wonderfully called unconditional positive regard. I do not believe that you have so much reinvented Eastern philosophy, especially a narrow branch of Zen, as you have come to live it, understanding it is beyond all of us.

And, now the same friend who wrote the Gladwell piece has written today Wunderkammer where he makes reference to an article on the web that characterizes blogs as Wunderkammer

A Web log really, then, is a Wunderkammer. That is to say, the genealogy of Web logs points not to the world of letters but to the early history of museums -- to the "cabinet of wonders," or Wunderkammer, that marked the scientific landscape of Renaissance modernity: a random collection of strange, compelling objects, typically compiled and owned by a learned, well-off gentleman. A set of ostrich feathers, a few rare shells, a South Pacific coral carving, a mummified mermaid -- the Wunderkammer mingled fact and legend promiscuously, reflecting European civilization’s dazed and wondering attempts to assimilate the glut of physical data that science and exploration were then unleashing.

Well I don't think I qualify as either well off or learned, though we hope gentelman applies, but this posting and this blog as a whole are if nothing else certainly a Wunderkammer.

As my friend, the author of DB, is so fond of saying, "It's all about connections."

As I say, "one thing leads to another." We hope if for no other reason than to honor the memory of Beulah Haskins but also we hope for larger reasons, as well, that we are "having no time to be talking about it", that in fact the talk has lead to the walk, at least more often than not. We fervently hope that this Wunderkammer would serve in some way to amplify the verse cited above

Hebrews 10:24
And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.Hebrews 10:23-25 (in Context) Hebrews 10 (Whole Chapter)

Yes, let's consider how we might do that spurring. Talking it up is good, but walking it up is better. Given the choice walk quietly rather than talking while standing still.

Mere talk

In Proverbs in the chapter which is the same as today's date we find

22 Do not those who plot evil go astray? But those who plan what is good find love and faithfulness. 23 All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty. 24 The wealth of the wise is their crown, but the folly of fools yields folly.

And, in the news we find

Scandals Take Toll On Bush's 2nd Term
A series of scandals involving some of the most powerful Republicans in Washington have converged to disrupt President Bush's agenda, distract aides and allies, and exacerbate political problems for an already weakened administration, according to party strategists and White House advisers.

Jitters at the White House Over the Leak Inquiry
These days, the routines are the same for the White House. But everything, in the glare of a criminal investigation, is different.

Need we say or compare more? And, just to put the jittery humanists at rest, we do not intend to imply any inerrancy or predictive power to the Bible nor any special weight that you might not want to take from the Bible verses, but rather that what is known as the Wisdom of Solomon seems in a few short words to capture the tone of the times, just like any piece of good writing. Mere talk? Perhaps, you decide, you think about it.

Just in case you didn't get the message yesterday

Just in case you didn't get the message yesterday

Sassoon's protest, "A Soldier's Declaration," written on June 15, 1917:

I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those how have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe this War, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this War should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible for them to be changed without our knowledge, and that, has this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be eveil and unjust.

I am not protesting against the military conduct of the War, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them. Also I believe that it may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those as home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficienct imagination to realise.

Read before the House of Commons, July 30, 1917, printed in The London Times, on July 31, 1917 (ironically -- perhaps appropriately -- the first day of the Third Battle of Ypres, Passchendaele).

How little we have learned in nearly one hundred years.

Write, listen, speak the truth

Write, listen, speak the truth,

14 From the fruit of his lips a man is filled with good things
as surely as the work of his hands rewards him.

15 The way of a fool seems right to him,
but a wise man listens to advice.

16 A fool shows his annoyance at once,
but a prudent man overlooks an insult.

17 A truthful witness gives honest testimony,
but a false witness tells lies.

18 Reckless words pierce like a sword,
but the tongue of the wise brings healing.

19 Truthful lips endure forever,
but a lying tongue lasts only a moment

these traits alone would seem from the text above, taken from the 12th chapter of Proverbs in the Christian Bible, to serve well enough that perhaps nothing else is required. Believer or not these verses should give even the most radical agnostic or atheist some food for thought for the balance of the day. For you old RC types today is Wilfred Owen's namesake saint's day, today is St. Wilfrid's day. Any of Owen's work should give even the stoutest Neo-Con sufficient pause today to reconsider the course of the war in Iraq. And, likely this piece will give any sane person sufficient pause to wonder what the hell is running through my head. In response all I can say is, "Likely better things in the course of the day with this start than you might see without it." Have a good and thoughtful day. For further reference along the lines of what you think is what you are try Paul's note to the Phillipians in the 4th chapter where he suggests that thinking positively is good

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

No matter what you might think of the apostle or Christianity it is difficult to argue against the exhortation to think on whatever is good rather than the converse. Certainly, nearly a century of secular psychological thought and research would agree with Paul. As far as Wilfred Owen giving pause to anyone, it does to me particularly when I think that the thirty something mother of one of my son's playmates is in Iraq. It puts a different twist on Owen's work when mothers, just a few years short of retiring from the military, are the endangered ones. Mothers who have grade school and middle school children at home. Especially, when home is on the otherside of the world from where the mother is, eh?