Observations
We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane. Kilgore Trout -Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions, Ch 1.
Politeness, n. The most acceptable hypocrisy. -Ambrose BierceThe End of Faith?
My nephew Jean-Michel has found Sam Harris stimulating, and recommended his End of Faith for me to read. Harris comes up in the atheism v. religion shouting matches, revered by atheists, dismissed by the faithful. I find there is much to moderate on both sides of the divide.
Book review, Title The Daughter Of Time, Author Josephine Tey, Rating 3.5,
The Daughter Of Time
Josephine Tey
Book review
Getting Over the Hump
My mother read Josephine Tey novels when I was growing up, but I was not tempted to follow in her stead. Her mystery novels held little interest, but recently I noted that one of them, The Daughter of Time, was an historical novel probing the old accusation that Richard III had murdered his young nephews, and so, curiosity piqued, I determined to read it. I found the tone a little too arch, but her historiographical approach was both edifiying and revealing.
Oregon Scribbler.
Supporting Law Enforcement
I have always supported law enforcement - it is a basic need in a country governed by laws, and our police put themselves at risk to enforce the laws on our behalf. For this the police deserve our appreciation and our full support. Yet full support is not unconditional support. Police wield a great deal of power, and they sometimes abuse that power; when they do, they, like anyone else who is in a position of public trust, must be held accountable.
The Peaceable Kingdom, 1833-34, Edward Hicks. Attrib: Wikipedia Loves Art, shootingbrooklyn, CC BY-SA 2.5.
Dominion or co-existence?
Whose view of animals has more appeal? The ancient Jews or Henry Beston's?
What is enlightenment?
"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. ... Sapere Aude! (Dare to know!) Have courage to use your own understanding!" Kant's famous 1784 essay about Enlightenment still has something of value for us today. He argues that the courage to think for ones self provides the impetus for a progressive society. To act maturely means to resist blind conformity and to respectfully question authority.Apocalyptic politics
Donald Trump's latest international provocation, the decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, marches Trump-backing evangelicals a step closer to their deeply held desire for the fulfillment of Biblical end-times prophecies. A recent CNN article by Diana Bass suggests that, for many evangelicals, Jerusalem is about prophecy, not politics. I would partially agree: It is about prophecy, but it is also explicitly about politics.
With liberty and justice for all
Is kneeling during the playing of the national anthem unpatriotic? I served my country, and honor those with whom I served and those who have fallen in service of our country. I also acknowledge those who have fallen at the hands of a police officer during a traffic stop. It is not an either/or proposition. Love of country for me includes looking critically at things that need to be changed.
American Soul
Aretha Franklin recently sang at the Kennedy Center Honors tribute to Carole King, reprising the song Carole wrote for her, A Natural Woman. The performance was glorious, and drew tears from the President, as well as from myself as I watched and listened to it later on video. Obama said of Aretha afterwords: 'Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R. & B., rock and roll—the way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty and vitality and hope. American history wells up when Aretha sings.'Crude, Rude, and Impolite
Today's Republican Party, in choosing a clearly unqualified candidate for the presidency, in choosing to wallow in the deepest trough of political mud in my memory, in choosing to embrace the grossest of lies and the most laughable of conspiracies, in choosing to generate fear and hatred instead of exercising civilized, reasoned judgment, has embraced my 5th grade teacher's admonishment for a ten year old's bad behavior: "Crude, rude and impolite".
Oregon Scribbler.
The Law of Political Scruples
In the world of politics, the degree to which scruples are exercised is in inverse proportion to the degree to which moral rectitude is claimed.
What could be more fun than to use some dry mathematical humor to add some refinement to this political epigram? And so is born the Law of Political Scruples.Looking back at O. J.
After viewing the mini-series O.J.: Made in America, Ta-Nehisi Coates looks back twenty two years and finds that as a young black college student he missed what most outraged white people missed: Many in the black community celebrated O. J.'s escape from a brutal justice system that they lived with every day.Is Cuba an exemplar of U. S. foreign policy?
President Obama's Cuban plan started the process of normalizing relations between the U.S. and Cuba. President Obama's Cuban policy has components found in other of his administration's foreign policy efforts: To fix the present by symbolic attempts to mend the past. They are marked by a recognition that: incremental and indirect change can be just as important as more obviously interventionist moves can be; change in other parts of the world is usually shaped more by internal efforts and perceptions than external; dialog with other countries is a vital part of exerting influence on change outside our borders.
Political epigrams
In the world of politics, the degree to which scruples are exercised is in inverse proportion to the degree to which moral rectitude is claimed.
Political ideologies, or ideologies wielded in the service of politics, share the property that they can erase any reality that contradicts them.
(1). See also The Law of Political Scruples.There is "spin", and there is bearing false witness
One of the most difficult things for me is to watch politicians, governments, corporations, and organizations of all stripes, tell lies in order to persuade their intended audience to support them. This is clearly a naive reaction on my part: Why be perpetually bothered afresh by something that is pervasive and nearly universal? After all, "everybody cheats", and the most important thing for these entities is that they survive, they prevail, or that their influence waxes rather than wanes, not that they do the "right thing". To this question I have no pragmatic answer, except to say that I believe that honesty has more potential to make people and organizations successful, to make the world that more loving place called for by the major religions, than does the selfish manipulation that is the lie. The lie all too often gets you what you want, but at what cost to others, and at what cost to yourself?Large Scale Genomics in Beijing
Beijing Genomics Institute, BGI, situated in Shenzhen, on the border between Guangdong and Hong Kong, claims the title of the world's biggest Genomics institute. Their president Jian Wang said, 'For the last 500 years, you (the West) have been leading the way with innovation. We are no longer interested in following.' The scale of their sequencing capability is large, as are their goals: to crack hunger, illness, evolution - and the genetics of human intelligence.Is the Lost Cause finally getting lost?
In a response to the recent furor over the Confederate flag and its removal from public grounds, Kevin Drum just nails it:
"Are we still arguing about whether the Civil War was really fought over slavery? Seriously? What's next? The Holocaust was really about Jews overstaying their tourist visas? The Inquisition was a scientific exploration of the limits of the human body? The Romans were genuinely curious about whether a man could kill a hungry lion? The Bataan death march was a controlled trial of different brands of army boots?"
Oregon Scribbler.
The Sylmar Scribbler gets a new name
The Sylmar Scribbler has a new name: The Oregon Scribbler.
Cindy and I are preparing to re-locate back to Oregon, in the Portland area, next year. We will be leaving Sylmar. We love living here. The weather is amazing. But changes are afoot. My thoughts are already turning to Oregon, where we have deep roots; I felt a name change for my website was in order, to celebrate our impending return.
The new website address is oregonscribbler.com. If you use the old sylmarscribbler.com address, it will seemlessly redirect your request to the new address, so no worries, but please change your bookmarks, etc. to the new address when you can. Vielen Dank!
Book review, Title The Last Kingdom Series, Author Bernard Cornwell, Rating 3.5,
The Last Kingdom Series
Bernard Cornwell
Book review
The Last Kingdom
Bernard Cornwell's The Last Kingdom series, ever growing, takes place around the reign of King Alfred the Great of England, and describes the forging of Saxon and Norse territories into the the fledgling nation of England. It is generally solid historical fiction, in that it fleshes out a historical era with care, and adds a somewhat plausible adventure story to liven up the slow turn of historical events. The main character, Uhtred of Babbenburg, like, say, Little Big Man of the Wild West, experiences and absorbs all of the main cultures of the time, providing a sturdy historical vehicle for Cornwell's tales.
If I ruled the world
The old high school essay theme, "If I Ruled the World," endures long after the writing struggles of adolescents fade into adulthood. My current response is simple:
If I ruled the world,
I would step down;
one less autocrat,
one less crown.Why read history?
Adam Gopnik recently asked: Does it help to know history? Here is the first part of his answer:The best argument for reading history is not that it will show us the right thing to do in one case or the other, but rather that it will show us why even doing the right thing rarely works out. The advantage of having a historical sense is not that it will lead you to some quarry of instructions, the way that Superman can regularly return to the Fortress of Solitude to get instructions from his dad, but that it will teach you that no such crystal cave exists. What history generally “teaches” is how hard it is for anyone to control it, including the people who think they’re making it.
The full essay can be found here.
World cup philosophy
My brother Peter showed me a comic from the witty Existential Comics that captured the Zeitgeist of the world cup this year, or is it l'esprit du temps? Such questions are to be decided on the pitch.
Punctuated equilibrium
American football combines two of the worst things in American life: It is violence punctuated by committee meetings. – George Will, occasionally lucid, occasionally witty. Re-quoted from Lexington, the Economist.
Vox de intellectu – the voice of understanding
"There is always an easy solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong."(H.L. Mencken, Mencken Chrestomathy, p. 443 )
is a brand-new website dedicated to presenting and analyzing news and public policy. Rather than oversimplify for the sake of concision or demagoguery, Vox.com intends to provide more depth of coverage in an accessible way. Ezra Klein, a well-known journalist, leads the effort. Watching Woody Allen movies – or not
When I first met my future wife, one of the things we quickly found in common was that we both enjoyed Woody Allen movies. Over the years, we watched perhaps half of his movies together, until he started a public relationship with Mia Farrow's adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn. I was appalled by this, even though he wasn't her adopted father, and technically it was not incest, I felt he had crossed the line regarding his responsibility as an adult and a 'parent', whatever the legalities. I stopped watching his films for some period.
The many ways of misusing quantum physics
Doctor Moriarty, that is physicist Phil Moriarty, holds forth on the various ways of misapplying quantum mechanics, to philosophy, religion, and just about anything but the world of the atom for which it was constructed. He is charmingly cranky about such "Woo".
Quelle est la quenelle?
French footballer Nicolas Anelka, who plays in the English Premier League, has gotten international attention by using the quenelle gesture as a goal celebration, a reverse Nazi salute. The gesture was created by controversial French comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, who makes openly anti-Semitic statements (Sample: “When I hear Patrick Cohen speak, I think to myself: Gas chambers … too bad they no longer exist.” Cohen is a French journalist who is Jewish.)The Era of Open Information
The ascendant Era of Open Information might be described as freely available online content from a vast number of sources. Today, unlike fifteen years ago, I can access media that I had been entirely unaware of, or had no access to, or simply could not afford, via an Internet browser and a search engine, including any number of venerable magazines and newspapers, without paying for it. Will this last?
Darwin’s endless forms most beautiful
The final paragraph of Charles Darwin's epic Origin of Species is still a viable and beautiful summary of biological evolution. The last phrase reveals both the scientist and the poet:. . . from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
To the power of love
Pope Francis, recently elected, has my attention and admiration. I must admit to having been uninterested in those men who have occupied the papacy during my lifetime; I am not a Catholic, nor particularly religious for that matter. But Francis seems different: He has humbly eschewed the pomp of the office, worries aloud and often about the poor, opens the door to all, emphasizes a loving attitude towards homosexuals (contrary to so many fundamentalists of various religions), openly questions the excesses of the marketplace, has recently taken steps to deal more honestly with the pedophilia issues within his Church, and emphasizes much more the mystery of God rather than the rigid confines of orthodoxy and doctrine.
In celebration of curiosity
I was asked once by someone close to me why I read the kinds of things I read, or why I would read some things more than once, when much of it didn't seem immediately useful. Upon some thought, I replied that I was simply curious, and that not everything of interest is necessarily or immediately of practical value.
False confession? How is that possible?
In various studies of U.S. legal cases involving confessions, more than one quarter of the confessions are found to be false, and nearly all of those resulted in conviction. These same studies show high rates of suspects who waive their Miranda rights. Why would someone admit to something they didn't do, particularly if they would go to jail or be executed as a result? Why did they not avail themselves of the Miranda rights to refuse interrogation?
To the Hebrew congregation in Newport Rhode Island
A remarkable and short exchange of letters between George Washington and Moses Seixas in 1790 beautifully illuminates the Constitution's 1st Amendment protections for religious freedom as intended by the founders, written as the states were still ratifying the proposed Bill of Rights.
Family.
AVID teacher
My brother Peter was pictured in the Eugene Register-Guard newspaper highlighting a program he is running for students trying to improve their grades through self-discipline and efficiency skills. The picture shows Peter and two of his students, Demetrious Wiggins and Antonio Thomas in his freshman Advancement Via Individual Determination, (AVID) class at South Eugene High School.
Click the Register-Guard to view the picture.
Oregon Scribbler.
Simple thoughts on religion
Just because you believe something to be true doesn't mean it is true.
Conversely, just because something cannot be proven doesn't mean it isn't true.
Knives? Guns? Or Disarm?
"The rationale of the National Rifle Association (NRA) is to never bring a knife to a gunfight. The preeminent concern of those most affected by violence is to insure that there is no gunfight in the first place."
- Jelani Cobb, regarding Perceived Threats, a discussion about the contrasting views of the NRA and the black community.
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