thoughts

lemon rhubarb pie cake

2011-05-31T15:48:00.003-04:00

This is based on a recipe for a rhubarb upside-down cake from the New York Times. My recipe is considerably better though.

2 lemons worth of zest
1/2 cup lemon juice

1 1/2 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

1 stick of butter
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
3 eggs
1/2 cup buttermilk

3 lbs rhubarb (about 8 cups)
4 tbs cornstarch
1 cup sugar

1 stick butter
1 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup lemon juce
1/4 cup sugar

1. preheat oven to 325
2. line the bottom of a 9” springform pan with parchment paper, cover sides and bottom with butter
3. mix zest and juice
4. mix flour, baking powder and salt
5. beat butter until soft
6. add sugar and vanilla and mix well
7. add eggs one at a time mixing well in between
8. add half the dry ingredients, mix
9. add the buttermilk, mix
10.add the rest of the dry ingredients, mix
11. add the juice and rind, mix
12. chop up the rhubarb
13. mix the rhubarb with the cornstarch and the sugar
14. mix brown sugar and butter in a pan over medium heat for about 2 minutes
15. pour the brown sugar mixture into the pan
16. spoon the rhubarb into the pan
17. pour on the batter
18. bake for about 1 hour and 15 minutes
19. after it is in the oven mix the lemon juice with the sugar
20. mix it periodically while the cake is baking to dissolve the sugar
21. once the cake is done let it cool for 15 minutes
22. while it is cooling, cover the top (that will ultimately be the bottom) with the juice and sugar mixture so that it can soak in
23. run a knife around the edge, put a plate on top and flip the cake
24. release the cake from the pan while it is still a bit warm or it will stick
25. serve with an ample amount of freshly whipped cream

Why can’t lust be love and love be lust?

2011-04-14T20:50:00.000-04:00

Up late watching slug porn, you confess
you had a boyfriend who could spin you

like that, slug grace and slug ballet—we don’t
touch the topic of slime—and those eyes

dangling from tentacle tips must be a
kind of love or lust, sighting farther and

nearer all at once. (But are those eyes?)
Slug sublimity suggests love’s a drag,

touch that lingers and leaves a wet trail of
memory and What did we do before

YouTube? Boob tube. Boobs we have none; slugs,
of course, don’t care, can’t tell girl from boy,

(being, you know, hermaphrodites), and only
want flesh to fly. Forget their infamous

languor—here’s litheness in loving, buoyant
miracles of want, one slug spiraling

on the axis of another like a globe
slapped by an insolent hand. Neither old

nor young, we’re familiar with sluggishness,
too tired to explain why nothing makes us

spin like that: a-swirl, a pirouette, a gyre!
It’s either fucking or marriage, I say,

saying more than I mean. Why can’t lust be
love and love be lust? you’re always asking,

even now as the slugs begin their sluggish
withdrawal—each complete in love and lust;

each mother and father to what they’ve made
together; each alone, content, and free.

by Jennifer Chang

best DH video I've seen

2011-03-31T20:51:00.000-04:00

Insul Cup 2010, IGSA European Championships from Yvon Labarthe on Vimeo.

xkcd

2011-03-29T19:34:00.001-04:00

xkcd on trains

comics 3/29

2011-03-29T13:13:00.002-04:00

a great ride and another broken foot

2011-03-27T22:23:00.003-04:00

I pushed up to Croton-on-Hudson this afternoon. It was hard, a lot of climbing. Gorgeous day though, perfect temperature. The part that sucked was the realization, once I got there, that my foot was broken. How did I manage to push 30 had miles on a broken foot without realizing it was broken? Needless to say, I took the train back. I'm pissed because I won't be able to race in May.

forum post?

2011-03-25T01:31:00.000-04:00

thoughts on Going Rogue

2011-03-07T14:20:00.001-05:00

I recently finished Going Rogue, Sarah Palin’s account of her life in politics to date. Although I of course have preconceptions about our beloved maverick, I tried to approach the book with an open mind. Going Rogue was definitely not written with my demographic in mind; it took some perseverance to make it through as Palin tried in vain to to clear her name in the aftermath of the Katie Couric interviews. Pages and pages of rhetoric were designed to resonate with patriotic gun nuts, the religious right, and the pro life anti-contraception folks. The largest goal of the book, however, was to promote a low regulation, low tax, small government as the only viable course of action for our country.

I can respect Palin’s goal, as the size of government is possibly the single biggest and most important ideological debate currently happening within our government. The size of our government has far reaching consequences, both domestic and international, ranging from health care and welfare to taxing and regulations. In econ 101, while discussing this issue, the textbooks always say something vague like, ‘if taxes rise above a certain or regulations are made more strict market forces will cause businesses to leave the economy’. This interpretation of the situation would support the conservative view on this issue, but it is in my opinion an incomplete interpretation. The missing argument is that there are benefits for businesses operating in a more highly regulated economy; if taxes are higher, businesses can take advantage of the additional services provided, such as a high quality road system or more government funded scientific research. I am by no means an economist, but I know enough about economics that I am sure hundreds of research papers have been written on this subject using fancy economic models and forecasting tools to reconcile these two extremes. Why aren’t these papers more present in the public discourse?

What surprised me about Palin’s account of this debate was how badly articulated it was. She just blabbed the usual, ‘taxes and regulations will make corporations go overseas’. The only example in the entire book she provided of a corporation that came into existence outside of government regulation was facebook. She stated that we should expect more such buisness in a small government economy. Don’t get me wrong, I think that facebook can be a force for good, but more often that not it is simply an advertising platform and a way to procrastinate. So, if facebook is the best example of a company arising from a lack of government involvement, then I don’t believe that small government is the end all be all solution.

While small government may be a viable option for our government, we need to be honest to ourselves about what that means. Namely, we will have a much reduced quantity and quality of public services.

comics 3/7

2011-03-07T11:56:00.003-05:00

first homebuilt longboard deck

2011-03-06T20:11:00.007-05:00

I just finished my first longboard deck, it is based slightly on Earthwing's "Mystery Model". It has a red oak core with a carbon/kevlar shell. Here are its specs:
Length: 39"
Width: 9 3/4"
Thickness: 1/2"
Concave: 1/4"
Wheel base: 33", 31 3/4"
And here are some photos:

the perils of longboarding

2011-03-06T19:00:00.000-05:00

On an average day of longboarding in the city, you can expect to almost get hit by a car a few times. That's not to bad in my opinion, it keeps your reflexes top notch. And also, dodging cars is fun. Yesterday, however, something far worse than that happened to me yesterday. For the uninformed, while longboarding it is possible for a plastic grocery bag to get wrapped tightly around a wheel. Usually the worst possible effect this can have is coming to an abrupt halt. This problem is much greater though if the the bag is filled with dog shit.

Compass and Straightedge

2011-02-28T21:28:00.003-05:00

http://xkcd.com/866/

comics 2/28

2011-02-28T14:11:00.005-05:00

comics 2/21

2011-02-21T01:08:00.004-05:00

quality of life

2011-02-19T15:19:00.003-05:00

I have bought two things recently that have greatly contributed to my quality of life, cycling cleats and a veritas sanding block

Bard in the onion

2011-02-19T14:42:00.003-05:00

http://www.theonion.com/articles/bard-college-named-nations-no-1-dinner-party-schoo,19032/

Democracy and Hypocrisy

2011-02-10T21:25:00.006-05:00

In his feb 9 OP-ED Nicholas Kristof articulately describes the big concerns of Egyptians and US citizens with regards to the Obama administrations actions regarding the recent and ongoing uprisings in Egypt. Fears that the administration is not doing enough to promote democracy and fears that they are blindly supporting Omar Suleiman who appears to be just as much of a corrupt politician as Hosni Mubarakd. I believe though that before we or anyone else get all riled up over this we need to have a conversation about what democracy means. In many ways what is happening in Egypt now is much closer to true democracy than the results of some UN enforced election that will undoubtedly be rigged. We need to reexamine not only what democracy means in Egypt (Iraq Afghanistan etc.) but what democracy means here in the US. Maybe we need to learn a lesson from the Egyptians and the Tunisians; quit our locked blog warfare (how hypocritical of me) and take to the streets when we feel strongly.

amazing animation

2011-02-03T17:58:00.001-05:00

Thought of You from Ryan J Woodward on Vimeo.

xkcd

2011-02-01T18:16:00.002-05:00

xkcd on cooking

opening to our lives

2011-01-28T18:25:00.005-05:00

Love After Love
The time will come when with elation you'll greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other's welcome and say, Sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was yourself. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to yourself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life who you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes. Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. (Derek Walcott)

We call ourselves homo sapien sapiens, which means "to taste," to sense," or "to know." This is one of, I think, the great tragedies of our species so far is that so much beauty, science, art, music, poetry comes out of the human mind. And so much mayhem comes out of the same human mind, same human heart. In a sense — because in some sense we don't know how to run the apparatus that we've been given and sometimes it takes over. And on good days just blinds us and we sort of make mistakes. On bad days, it blinds us to other people's pain, and we can create an enormous amount of pain in the world out of our own pain and of our own ignorance and out of our own ambitious greediness, I guess I'd call it, to want things to be different "so that I will feel better." If we're not careful, we wind up with the kind of conceit that we are the center of the universe. It's an occupational hazard of being packaged in a body, that the whole universe is outside and you are obviously the center of it, and you relate to it through all your senses, including potentially this capacity for knowing. That, to me, is kind of a working definition of meditation.

What is meditation? It's not necessarily stopping in the kind of usual way that we would think of stopping. Stopping is good and, of course, we're all going to be stopped, sooner or later the ultimate stop. We work a lot with medical patients who have tremendous suffering. Our track record with the dead is not so good. [Laughter] So one of the sort of cardinal rules of thumb is that as long as you're breathing, no matter what's wrong with you, from our perspective, there's more right with you than wrong with you.

But can we learn how to pour some energy into what's already OK with us? Which you could call health in the most profound of ways, our own interface with not only the outer world but also the interior world of our own thoughts, our own emotions, our own sensory experience, in ways that would actually have some degree of balance, some degree of interrelationality, because all the senses are actually interrelational. Also, while you're the center of the universe, OK, so is everybody else. So is everybody else. So that means in a sense there's no center. Cosmologists know this. Topologists know this. There's no center and there's no periphery.

But the question is what if we were to take the name we gave our species seriously and actually train to familiarize ourselves with the full perspective, the full dimensionality of what it means to be really human? For learning, for growing, healing, and for that matter, transformation across the whole lifespan. (Jon Kabat-Zinn)

comics 1/27

2011-01-27T19:18:00.002-05:00

from a book I'm in the middle of

2011-01-26T18:16:00.002-05:00

there was a young fellow from trinity
who took the square root of infinity
but the number of digits gave him the fidgets
he dropped math and took up divinity
(George Gamow)

I concluded that unhappily I’d been born into a world dominated by a rampaging monster called law that was both all powerful and all stupid (Fred Hoyle)

i like this

2011-01-23T17:36:00.001-05:00

the hallmark of a civil debate is when you can acknowledge that which is good in the position of the person you disagree with. (Sidney Callahan)

seacocks

2010-10-10T18:01:00.002-04:00

it's not every day that you hear someone recommend to "regularly service your seacock"

a boat photo

2010-10-10T17:58:00.002-04:00

the truman show

2010-10-01T21:34:00.001-04:00

just watched the truman show
phenomenal film

rapunzel and the witch meet the american dream

xkcd

2010-09-30T13:42:00.002-04:00

http://xkcd.com/798/

i'd like to add my three favorite words to the mix
scintillating
nefarious
and
facetious

and one more for good measure
supple

complement form the song of solomon

2010-09-22T09:44:00.001-04:00

"your teeth are as white as sheep, freshly washed"

xkcd

2010-09-22T09:38:00.003-04:00

i think i might pay for this service

entertaining line in proverbs

2010-09-21T23:13:00.002-04:00

finally done with psalms (thank the lord)
now on to proverbs
a line went something like this
"a good woman who is foolish is like a gold ring in the nose of a pig"

next project?

2010-09-14T23:10:00.000-04:00

http://www.guillemot-kayaks.com/guillemot/kayak/night_heron/petrel
or
http://www.clarkcraft.com/cgi-local/shop_new.pl?cart_id=22e9aeed3a8db993edc5a915c407397e&type=item&categ=012&item=933713480

fine (sweet) food

2010-09-14T23:00:00.002-04:00

riesling, homemade donuts and homemade peach ice cream resulted in a lovely evening

Grapes

2010-09-11T13:14:00.002-04:00

had fun making this
it's recommended
concord grapes with the seeds removed blended with ice

this world is so fucked up

2010-05-03T21:04:00.003-04:00

i just got this lovely news today

Press Release: Fromt Tikkun Magazine Contact: Will Pasley 510 644 1200

Rabbi Lerner's Home Attacked by Right-Wing Zionists

Berkeley, Ca. May 3, 2010

Release dare: May 4, 2010

Berkeley police today confirmed that the attack on Rabbi Lerner's home late Sunday May 2nd or early morning Sunday May 3rd was in fact a crime and was being investigated.

The attackers used a powerful form of glue to attach posters to his door and around the property of his home attacking Lerner personally, and attacking liberals and progressives as being supporters of terrorism and "Islamo-fascism." They posted a printed bumper sticker saying "fight terror--support Israel" next to a carcature of Judge Goldstone whose UN report on Israel's human rights violations in its attack on Gaza last year has been denounced as anti-Semitic and pro-terror by right wingers in Israel and the U.S.. The caricature has Goldstone talking about his being kept from his grandson's bar mitzvah, and the caricature of Rabbi Lerner responds by saying "any enemy of Israel is a friend of mine." This attack and vandalism follows on a week filled with Lerner and Tikkun staff receiving hate mail, prompted apparently by Tikkun's announcement that in case the South African Zionists had succeeded in preventing Judge Goldstone from attending his grandson's bar mitzvah, as they threatened several weeks ago, that Rabbi Lerner would gladly hold the bar mitzvah in the SF Bay Area instead, and following Tikkun's announcement that in light of Goldstone's courageous willingness to stand up for human rights in Israel (his report called on the Israeli government to do its own independent, pulbic and credibly objective investigation, punish those responsible for the crimes or show that they didn't happen, and thereby show that these actions were not government policy but the mistakes or evil choices by people in the IDF who were acting as rogue elements and not as a manifestation of the people of Israel) that Tikkun will award our prestigious Tikkun Award to Judge Goldstone in 2011 at the event celebrating our 25th anniversary! This story, which was prominent in Ha'aretz and many other Jewish magazines and websites, has intensified anger against Lerner and Tikkun among those who seek to perpetuate the Occupation, and great support among those who realize that the Occupation is really hurtful both to Israel and to the Jewish people world-wide.

In the 24 years of Tikkun's operation, we have received many death threats and vicious hate mail, including phone calls to our office announcing that "Rabbi Lerner is dead" and others saying "We will kill all of you." This particular attack has two worrisome elements not previously there: 1. They attack Rabbi Lerner's home. As law enforcement people told us, this is a way of conveying the messaget to Lerner: "We know where you live, we know your house is vulnerable, so don't ignore our threats." 2. By linking Lerner to alleged terrorism, they provide for themselves and other extremists a "right-wing justification" to use violence against Lerner, even though Lerner has been a prominent advocate of non-violence. He regularly critiques Palestinian acts of violence when they occur, including the shelling of Israeli towns by Hamas, just as he critiques the violence of the Israeli occupation, and as he critiques the US war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the occupation of Chechny by Russia, the occupation of Tibet by China, the human rights violations agaisnt their own people by the rulers of Iran, the acts of violence of those resisting the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the violence against women and homosexuals in many Arab and African countries (and in the US and Israel as well), the genocide in Darfur, the violence against Jews in some parts of Europe, and the list goes on.

Needless to say, this latest attack, on Lerner's home, has caused great concern to his family.

What can you do? Let people know that this kind of thing is happening in the Jewish world to people who critique Israeli policies.

--Tikkun Magazine

To reach Rabbi Lerner directly: RabbiLerner@Tikkun.org or call the Tikkun office at 510 644 1200.

the sun

2010-04-28T22:12:00.003-04:00

how can we get more lazy?

2010-04-28T22:09:00.001-04:00

fun with powerpoint

2010-04-28T04:54:00.004-04:00

trying to convey a sense of (false) understanding in a situation of chaos is hurtful to the little order we have?

April 26, 2010

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.

The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

In General McMaster’s view, PowerPoint’s worst offense is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic, which was first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” General McMaster said.

Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making. Not least, it ties up junior officers — referred to as PowerPoint Rangers — in the daily preparation of slides, be it for a Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader’s pre-mission combat briefing in a remote pocket of Afghanistan.

Last year when a military Web site, Company Command, asked an Army platoon leader in Iraq, Lt. Sam Nuxoll, how he spent most of his time, he responded, “Making PowerPoint slides.” When pressed, he said he was serious.

“I have to make a storyboard complete with digital pictures, diagrams and text summaries on just about anything that happens,” Lieutenant Nuxoll told the Web site. “Conduct a key leader engagement? Make a storyboard. Award a microgrant? Make a storyboard.”

Despite such tales, “death by PowerPoint,” the phrase used to described the numbing sensation that accompanies a 30-slide briefing, seems here to stay. The program, which first went on sale in 1987 and was acquired by Microsoft soon afterward, is deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world.

“There’s a lot of PowerPoint backlash, but I don’t see it going away anytime soon,” said Capt. Crispin Burke, an Army operations officer at Fort Drum, N.Y., who under the name Starbuck wrote an essay about PowerPoint on the Web site Small Wars Journal that cited Lieutenant Nuxoll’s comment.

In a daytime telephone conversation, he estimated that he spent an hour each day making PowerPoint slides. In an initial e-mail message responding to the request for an interview, he wrote, “I would be free tonight, but unfortunately, I work kind of late (sadly enough, making PPT slides).”

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates reviews printed-out PowerPoint slides at his morning staff meeting, although he insists on getting them the night before so he can read ahead and cut back the briefing time.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and says that sitting through some PowerPoint briefings is “just agony,” nonetheless likes the program for the display of maps and statistics showing trends. He has also conducted more than a few PowerPoint presentations himself.

General McChrystal gets two PowerPoint briefings in Kabul per day, plus three more during the week. General Mattis, despite his dim view of the program, said a third of his briefings are by PowerPoint.

Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was given PowerPoint briefings during a trip to Afghanistan last summer at each of three stops — Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif and Bagram Air Base. At a fourth stop, Herat, the Italian forces there not only provided Mr. Holbrooke with a PowerPoint briefing, but accompanied it with swelling orchestral music.

President Obama was shown PowerPoint slides, mostly maps and charts, in the White House Situation Room during the Afghan strategy review last fall.

Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in slides instead of legal briefs.

Captain Burke’s essay in the Small Wars Journal also cited a widely read attack on PowerPoint in Armed Forces Journal last summer by Thomas X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel, whose title, “Dumb-Dumb Bullets,” underscored criticism of fuzzy bullet points; “accelerate the introduction of new weapons,” for instance, does not actually say who should do so.

No one is suggesting that PowerPoint is to blame for mistakes in the current wars, but the program did become notorious during the prelude to the invasion of Iraq. As recounted in the book “Fiasco” by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Press, 2006), Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led the allied ground forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, grew frustrated when he could not get Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander at the time of American forces in the Persian Gulf region, to issue orders that stated explicitly how he wanted the invasion conducted, and why. Instead, General Franks just passed on to General McKiernan the vague PowerPoint slides that he had already shown to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time.

Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.

The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

Helene Cooper contributed reporting.

luminous fractal

2010-04-27T13:37:00.003-04:00

i recently found a contact juggler who is doing stuff that excites me

(thank you ministry of manipulation)

weaponry

2010-04-27T13:36:00.000-04:00

this saddens me

making nuclear weapons obsolete is not the same thing as nuclear disarmament

April 22, 2010

U.S. Faces Choice on New Weapons for Fast Strikes

By DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — In coming years, President Obama will decide whether to deploy a new class of weapons capable of reaching any corner of the earth from the United States in under an hour and with such accuracy and force that they would greatly diminish America’s reliance on its nuclear arsenal.

Yet even now, concerns about the technology are so strong that the Obama administration has acceded to a demand by Russia that the United States decommission one nuclear missile for every one of these conventional weapons fielded by the Pentagon. That provision, the White House said, is buried deep inside the New Start treaty that Mr. Obama and President Dmitri A. Medvedev signed in Prague two weeks ago.

Called Prompt Global Strike, the new weapon is designed to carry out tasks like picking off Osama bin Laden in a cave, if the right one could be found; taking out a North Korean missile while it is being rolled to the launch pad; or destroying an Iranian nuclear site — all without crossing the nuclear threshold. In theory, the weapon will hurl a conventional warhead of enormous weight at high speed and with pinpoint accuracy, generating the localized destructive power of a nuclear warhead.

The idea is not new: President George W. Bush and his staff promoted the technology, imagining that this new generation of conventional weapons would replace nuclear warheads on submarines.

In face-to-face meetings with President Bush, Russian leaders complained that the technology could increase the risk of a nuclear war, because Russia would not know if the missiles carried nuclear warheads or conventional ones. Mr. Bush and his aides concluded that the Russians were right.

Partly as a result, the idea “really hadn’t gone anywhere in the Bush administration,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who has served both presidents, said recently on ABC’s “This Week.” But he added that it was “embraced by the new administration.”

Mr. Obama himself alluded to the concept in a recent interview with The New York Times, saying it was part of an effort “to move towards less emphasis on nuclear weapons” while insuring “that our conventional weapons capability is an effective deterrent in all but the most extreme circumstances.”

The Obama national security team scrapped the idea of putting the new conventional weapon on submarines. Instead, the White House has asked Congress for about $250 million next year to explore a new alternative, one that uses some of the most advanced technology in the military today as well as some not yet even invented.

The final price of the system remains unknown. Senator John McCain of Arizona, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said at a hearing on Thursday that Prompt Global Strike would be “essential and critical, but also costly.”

It would be based, at least initially, on the West Coast, probably at Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Under the Obama plan, the Prompt Global Strike warhead would be mounted on a long-range missile to start its journey toward a target. It would travel through the atmosphere at several times the speed of sound, generating so much heat that it would have to be shielded with special materials to avoid melting. (In that regard, it is akin to the problem that confronted designers of the space shuttle decades ago.)

But since the vehicle would remain within the atmosphere rather than going into space, it would be far more maneuverable than a ballistic missile, capable of avoiding the airspace of neutral countries, for example, or steering clear of hostile territory. Its designers note that it could fly straight up the middle of the Persian Gulf before making a sharp turn toward a target.

The Pentagon hopes to deploy an early version of the system by 2014 or 2015. But even under optimistic timetables, a complete array of missiles, warheads, sensors and control systems is not expected to enter the arsenal until 2017 to 2020, long after Mr. Obama will have left office, even if he is elected to a second term.

The planning for Prompt Global Strike is being headed by Gen. Kevin P. Chilton of the Air Force, the top officer of the military’s Strategic Command and the man in charge of America’s nuclear arsenal. In the Obama era — where every administration discussion of nuclear weapons takes note of Mr. Obama’s commitment to moving toward “Global Zero,” the elimination of the nuclear arsenal — the new part of General Chilton’s job is to talk about conventional alternatives.

In an interview at his headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base, General Chilton described how the conventional capability offered by the proposed system would give the president more choices.

“Today, we can present some conventional options to the president to strike a target anywhere on the globe that range from 96 hours, to several hours maybe, 4, 5, 6 hours,” General Chilton said.

That would simply not be fast enough, he noted, if intelligence arrived about a movement by Al Qaeda terrorists or the imminent launching of a missile. “If the president wants to act on a particular target faster than that, the only thing we have that goes faster is a nuclear response,” he said.

But the key to filling that gap is to make sure that Russia and China, among other nuclear powers, understand that the missile launching they see on their radar screens does not signal the start of a nuclear attack, officials said.

Under the administration’s new concept, Russia or other nations would regularly inspect the Prompt Global Strike silos to assure themselves that the weapons were nonnuclear. And they would be placed in locations far from the strategic nuclear force.

“Who knows if we would ever deploy it?” Gary Samore, Mr. Obama’s top adviser on unconventional weapons, said at a conference in Washington on Wednesday. But he noted that Russia was already so focused on the possibility that it insisted that any conventional weapon mounted on a missile that could reach it counted against the new limit on the American arsenal in the treaty.

In a follow-on treaty, he said, the Russians would certainly want to negotiate on Prompt Global Strike and ballistic missile defenses.

If Mr. Obama does decide to deploy the system, Mr. Samore said, the number of weapons would be small enough that Russia and China would not fear that they could take out their nuclear arsenals.

the internet and polarization

2010-04-23T12:43:00.003-04:00

david brooks wrote an interesting op-ed last tuesday:

April 20, 2010

Op-Ed Columnist

Riders on the Storm

By DAVID BROOKS

In 2001, Cass R. Sunstein wrote an essay in The Boston Review called “The Daily We: Is the Internet really a blessing for democracy?” Sunstein, a professor at the University of Chicago who now serves in the Obama administration, raised the possibility that the Internet may be harming the public square.

In the mid-20th century, Americans got most of their news through a few big networks and mass-market magazines. People were forced to encounter political viewpoints different from their own. Moreover, the mass media gave Americans shared experiences. If you met strangers in a barbershop, you could be pretty sure you would have something in common to talk about from watching the same TV shows.

Sunstein wondered whether the Internet was undermining all this. The new media, he noted, allow you to personalize your newspapers so you only see the stories that already interest you. You can visit only those Web sites that confirm your prejudices. Instead of a public square, we could end up with a collection of information cocoons.

Sunstein was particularly concerned about this because he has done very important work over the years about our cognitive biases. We like hearing evidence that confirms our suppositions. We filter out evidence that challenges them.

Moreover, we have a natural tilt toward polarized views. People are prone to gather in like-minded groups. Once in them, they drive each other to even greater extremes. In his recent book “Going to Extremes,” Sunstein shows that liberal judges get more liberal when they are on panels with other liberals. Conservative judges get more conservative.

Sunstein’s fear was that the Internet might lead to a more ghettoized, polarized and insular electorate. Those fears were supported by some other studies, and they certainly matched my own experience. Every day I seem to meet people who live in partisan ghettoes, ignorant about the other side.

Yet new research complicates this picture. Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, both of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, have measured ideological segregation on the Internet. They took methodologies that have been used to identify racial segregation, and they tracked how people of different political views move around the Web.

The methodology is complicated, but can be summarized through a geographic metaphor. Think of the Fox News site as Casper, Wyo. If you visited and shook hands with the people reading the site, you’d be very likely to be shaking hands with a conservative. The New York Times site, they suggest, is like Manhattan. If you shook hands with other readers, you’d probably be shaking hands with liberals.

The study measures the people who visit sites, not the content inside.

According to the study, a person who visited only Fox News would have more overlap with conservatives than 99 percent of Internet news users. A person who only went to The Times’s site would have more liberal overlap than 95 percent of users.

But the core finding is that most Internet users do not stay within their communities. Most people spend a lot of time on a few giant sites with politically integrated audiences, like Yahoo News.

But even when they leave these integrated sites, they often go into areas where most visitors are not like themselves. People who spend a lot of time on Glenn Beck’s Web site are more likely to visit The New York Times’s Web site than average Internet users. People who spend time on the most liberal sites are more likely to go to foxnews.com than average Internet users. Even white supremacists and neo-Nazis travel far and wide across the Web.

It is so easy to click over to another site that people travel widely. And they’re not even following links most of the time; they have their own traveling patterns.

Gentzkow and Shapiro found that the Internet is actually more ideologically integrated than old-fashioned forms of face-to-face association — like meeting people at work, at church or through community groups. You’re more likely to overlap with political opponents online than in your own neighborhood.

This study suggests that Internet users are a bunch of ideological Jack Kerouacs. They’re not burrowing down into comforting nests. They’re cruising far and wide looking for adventure, information, combat and arousal. This does not mean they are not polarized. Looking at a site says nothing about how you process it or the character of attention you bring to it. It could be people spend a lot of time at their home sites and then go off on forays looking for things to hate. But it probably does mean they are not insecure and they are not sheltered.

If this study is correct, the Internet will not produce a cocooned public square, but a free-wheeling multilayered Mad Max public square. The study also suggests that if there is increased polarization (and there is), it’s probably not the Internet that’s causing it.

what this article doesn't touch on is if people read the differently online vs in print

food for thought

immodest women + young men = earthquakes

2010-04-22T15:41:00.005-04:00

finding humor in the news when possible is good:

April 19, 2010

Iran: Fashion That Moves the Earth

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

A senior Iranian cleric says women who wear immodest clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes. “Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes,” the cleric, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, was quoted as saying by Iranian media. Mr. Sedighi is Tehran’s acting Friday Prayer leader. Women in Iran, one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries, are required by law to cover from head to toe but many, especially the young, ignore some of the stricter codes and wear tight coats and scarves pulled back that show much of the hair. “What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble?” Mr. Sedighi asked during a prayer sermon on Friday. “There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam’s moral codes.”

(thank you Raph)

war? barbarity?

2010-04-21T07:51:00.003-04:00

"this is something that all military commanders know; war is not an excuse for barbarity"
a quote from an interviewee on the bbc

what is wrong with this picture?

volcano

2010-04-19T22:11:00.003-04:00

some amazing photos of the recent eruption

tea party poll

2010-04-16T23:38:00.002-04:00

i saw these in the times yesterday

definitely interesting

Wes Peden

2010-04-06T22:32:00.003-04:00

on a lighter note

i recently found a juggler i like a lot

he in not only a phenomenal technical juggler but he is far more creative than vova, thomas, anthony, jason etc.

Collateral Murder

2010-04-06T22:20:00.002-04:00

i know that this is horrible and all that but i can't genuinely go around moaning about it the same way that everyone else seems to be doing

HOW IS THIS A SURPRISE?

i don't think that the problem is this particular instance but rather the overall situation

how can you blame the guys flying the helicopter

you can barely make anything out on that little black and white screen

for all they knew that camera actually was an rpg

i am by no means condoning this incident

i just think that it's being blown out of proportion compared to the problem of war itself

new record

2010-03-28T23:52:00.000-04:00

i flashed 7 balls today!

Falco Sheffler

2010-03-17T23:00:00.001-04:00

skill intensive three ball juggling

our prophet

2010-03-15T21:43:00.002-04:00

the prophetic Glenn Beck has told us to leave our church if it promotes social justice as this is code for socialism and nazism

the funny thing is that he's lds

The Coming Insurrection

2010-03-15T15:36:00.002-04:00

looks like a fun read

"...without a doubt the most thought-provoking radical text to be published in the past ten years. It deserves to be read and discussed."
— Daniel Miller, New Statesman

"This is quite possibly the most evil thing I’ve ever read."
— Glenn Beck, Fox News / Glenn Beck Program

Breaking News!

2010-03-15T15:34:00.001-04:00

chatroulette

2010-02-25T20:51:00.002-05:00

i just learned a out this the other day

i have no idea what to think about it

here is a times article about it

The onion

2010-02-19T18:36:00.000-05:00

The onion

2010-02-16T14:04:00.001-05:00

Yay for Glenn Beck

2010-02-16T14:00:00.001-05:00

The Optimism of Uncertainty

2010-02-03T23:09:00.004-05:00

In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?

I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.

There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.

What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. A revolution to overthrow the czar of Russia, in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial powers but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War II--the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German Army rolling through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of Stalingrad, followed by the defeat of the German army, with Hitler huddled in his Berlin bunker, waiting to die?

And then the postwar world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in advance: The Chinese Communist revolution, the tumultuous and violent Cultural Revolution, and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China renouncing its most fervently held ideas and institutions, making overtures to the West, cuddling up to capitalist enterprise, perplexing everyone.

No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires happening so quickly after the war, or the odd array of societies that would be created in the newly independent nations, from the benign village socialism of Nyerere's Tanzania to the madness of Idi Amin's adjacent Uganda. Spain became an astonishment. I recall a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade telling me that he could not imagine Spanish Fascism being overthrown without another bloody war. But after Franco was gone, a parliamentary democracy came into being, open to Socialists, Communists, anarchists, everyone.

The end of World War II left two superpowers with their respective spheres of influence and control, vying for military and political power. Yet they were unable to control events, even in those parts of the world considered to be their respective spheres of influence. The failure of the Soviet Union to have its way in Afghanistan, its decision to withdraw after almost a decade of ugly intervention, was the most striking evidence that even the possession of thermonuclear weapons does not guarantee domination over a determined population. The United States has faced the same reality. It waged a full-scale war in lndochina, conducting the most brutal bombardment of a tiny peninsula in world history, and yet was forced to withdraw. In the headlines every day we see other instances of the failure of the presumably powerful over the presumably powerless, as in Brazil, where a grassroots movement of workers and the poor elected a new president pledged to fight destructive corporate power.

Looking at this catalogue of huge surprises, it's clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience--whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union itself. No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just.

I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?), but I keep encountering people who, in spite of all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me hope. Especially young people, in whom the future rests. Wherever I go, I find such people. And beyond the handful of activists there seem to be hundreds, thousands, more who are open to unorthodox ideas. But they tend not to know of one another's existence, and so, while they persist, they do so with the desperate patience of Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder up the mountain. I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement.

Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society. We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don't "win," there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope.

An optimist isn't necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places--and there are so many--where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

link

classes spring 10

2010-02-01T15:28:00.002-05:00

First-Year Seminar

Quaestio mihi factus sum: Self and Society in the Liberal Arts

One of the few common denominators in the history of the arts, humanities, and sciences has been the quest—through creative, rational, scientific, and spiritual approaches—for understanding the relationship between the individual and the larger world. Fittingly, the very root of the word used to describe both the private and public self, identity, has always entailed a tension between “sameness” (in Latin, idem) and “difference” (if I am x, then I am not y). Whether through philosophical inquiry into what constitutes the person, scientific debates about when life begins, theological disquisitions on the nature of the soul, or the literary construction of the autobiographical persona, thinkers and artists throughout history have explored the moral and ethical dimensions of self-representation while gesturing toward its unsolvable mysteries and productive tensions. In the words of the theologian Saint Augustine, “mihi quaestio factus sum” (“I have become a question for myself”; Confessions 10.33.50). The search for the role and purpose of the human being can serve a powerful epistemological function. In “becoming a question for ourselves,” we establish a position of wonder and critical inquiry vis-à-vis the world.

In First-Year Seminar, we will ponder the relationship between private and public narratives and forms of representation in a range of texts and cultural traditions. While it is impossible to reduce a matter of such complexity and breadth to a set of goals and procedures, we will read core texts that, individually and collectively, engage in a vigorous dialogue over such questions as: What are the claims that political and social responsibilities make upon an individual’s quest for self-understanding? At what point should the conscientious citizen sacrifice such a quest in the name of a collective identity? How does scientific inquiry into the nonhuman natural world connect with what are felt to be deeply human issues? How does the link between a private and public understanding of the self also implicate a spiritual exploration, especially the question of the eternity of the soul or the lack thereof? Finally, how do study and close reading, the foundational activities of First-Year Seminar, shape those personal and public narratives that are the focus of our attention? Together, we will explore these and related questions during a yearlong conversation about singularly demanding texts—texts defined as much by their differences as by their common drive toward fathoming how individual narratives can move beyond the self and into the realms of citizenry, community, country, even identification with humankind writ large.

Texts for spring 2010:

Locke, Second Treatise on Government

Rousseau, Social Contract

Shelley, Frankenstein

Marx, Communist Manifesto

Darwin, Origin of the Species

Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals

Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk

Freud, Three Case Histories

Woolf, To the Lighthouse; or Achebe, Things Fall Apart; or Levi, Periodic Table

PHYS 142 Introduction to Physics II

Part II of a calculus-based survey which will focus on electricity and magnetism, light, electromagnetic radiation, and optics. The course stresses ideas - the unifying principles and characteristic models of physics. Labs develop the critical ability to elicit understanding of our physical world.

MATH 142 A Calculus II

This course, a continuation of Calculus I, reinforces the fundamental ideas of the derivative and the definite integral. Topics covered include L'Hopital's rule, integration techniques, improper integrals, volumes, arc length, sequences and series, power series, continuous random variables, and separable differential equations.

REL 286 Science and the Sacred: Exploring the Intersection between Religion and Rationality

This course will examine a number of important, contemporary issues at the intersection between religion and science. Scientific thinking about God, religious responses to cosmology and evolution, and the writings of both scientists on religion and religionists on science will be included. We will focus on attempts to learn about religion from science, and about science from religion, and on the different methodologies, assumptions, and entailments of the two disciplines.

my new project

2010-01-31T23:59:00.003-05:00

Howard Zinn, Historian, Dies at 87

2010-01-28T16:34:00.002-05:00

Howard Zinn, an author, teacher and political activist whose book “A People’s History of the United States” became a million-selling leftist alternative to mainstream texts, died Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 87 and lived in Auburndale, Mass.

Skip to next paragraph

Associated Press

Howard Zinn

The cause was a heart attack, his daughter Myla Kabat-Zinn said.

Published in 1980 with little promotion and a first printing of 5,000, “A People’s History” was, fittingly, a people’s best-seller, attracting a wide audience through word of mouth and reaching 1 million sales in 2003. Although Professor Zinn was writing for a general readership, his book was taught in high schools and colleges throughout the country, and numerous companion editions were published, including “Voices of a People’s History,” a volume for young people and a graphic novel.

“A People’s History” told an openly left-wing story. Professor Zinn accused Christopher Columbus and other explorers of committing genocide, picked apart presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and celebrated workers, feminists and war resisters.

Even liberal historians were uneasy with Professor Zinn, who taught for many years at Boston University. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once said: “I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don’t take him very seriously. He’s a polemicist, not a historian.”

In a 1998 interview with The Associated Press, Professor Zinn acknowledged that he was not trying to write an objective history, or a complete one. He called his book a response to traditional works, the first chapter, not the last, of a new kind of history.

“There’s no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete,” Professor Zinn said. “My idea was the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times.”

“A People’s History” had some famous admirers, including the actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. The two grew up near Professor Zinn, were family friends and gave the book a plug in their Academy Award-winning screenplay for “Good Will Hunting.”

Oliver Stone was a fan, as was Bruce Springsteen, whose bleak “Nebraska” album was inspired in part by “A People’s History.” The book was the basis of a 2007 documentary, “Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind,” and even showed up on “The Sopranos,” in the hand of Tony’s son, A.J.

Professor Zinn himself was an impressive-looking man, tall and rugged with wavy hair. An experienced public speaker, he was modest and engaging in person, more interested in persuasion than in confrontation.

Born in New York in 1922, Professor Zinn was the son of Jewish immigrants who as a child lived in a rundown area in Brooklyn and responded strongly to the novels of Charles Dickens. At age 17, urged on by some young Communists in his neighborhood, he attended a political rally in Times Square.

“Suddenly, I heard the sirens sound, and I looked around and saw the policemen on horses galloping into the crowd and beating people,” he told The A.P. “I couldn’t believe that.”

“And then I was hit. I turned around and I was knocked unconscious. I woke up sometime later in a doorway, with Times Square quiet again, eerie, dreamlike, as if nothing had transpired. I was ferociously indignant.”

War continued his education. Eager to help wipe out the Nazis, he joined the Army Air Corps in 1943 and even persuaded the local draft board to let him mail his own induction notice. He flew missions throughout Europe, receiving an Air Medal, but he found himself questioning what it all meant. Back home, he gathered his medals and papers, put them in a folder and wrote on top: “Never again.”

He attended New York University and Columbia University, where he received a doctorate in history. In 1956, he was offered the chairmanship of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, an all-black women’s school in segregated Atlanta.

During the civil rights movement, Professor Zinn encouraged his students to request books from the segregated public libraries and helped coordinate sit-ins at downtown cafeterias. He also published several articles, including a rare attack on the Kennedy administration, accusing it of being too slow to protect blacks.

He was loved by students — among them a young Alice Walker, who later wrote “The Color Purple” — but not by administrators. In 1963, Spelman fired him for “insubordination.” (Professor Zinn was a critic of the school’s non-participation in the civil rights movement.) His years at Boston University were marked by opposition to the Vietnam War and by feuds with the school’s president, John Silber.

Professor Zinn retired in 1988, spending his last day of class on the picket line with students in support of an on-campus nurses’ strike. Over the years, he continued to lecture at schools and to appear at rallies and on picket lines.

Besides “A People’s History,” he wrote several books, including “The Southern Mystique,” “LaGuardia in Congress” and the memoir “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train,” the title of a 2004 documentary about Professor Zinn that Mr. Damon narrated. He also wrote three plays.

His wife and longtime collaborator, Roslyn, died in 2008. They had two children, Myla and Jeff.

One of Professor Zinn’s last public writings was a brief essay, published last week in The Nation, about the first year of the Obama administration.

“I’ve been searching hard for a highlight,” he wrote, adding that he wasn’t disappointed because he never expected a lot from President Obama.

“I think people are dazzled by Obama’s rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president — which means, in our time, a dangerous president — unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.”

A staff obituary by The New York Times will appear later.

link

children's fantasy

2010-01-25T14:54:00.002-05:00

link

Where Have All the Joiners Gone? A declaration of dependence

2010-01-17T14:32:00.001-05:00

CHEAP FOSSIL FUEL has made us what we are. Which is to say: rich, powerful—Look at us! We can make the ice caps melt! The oceans rise! But something else too: cheap fossil fuel has made us the first people on Earth with no need of our neighbors. Think, in the course of an ordinary day, how often you rely on the people who live near you for anything of practical value. Perhaps carpooling your kids to school or soccer. If you live in a rural community, there may be a volunteer fire department, which keeps your insurance affordable. But your food, your fuel, your shelter, your clothes, and your entertainment most likely come from a distance and arrive anonymously at that. A meteorite could fall on your cul-de-sac tomorrow, disappearing your neighbors, and the routines of your daily life wouldn’t change.

Now imagine how different things have been for almost all of human history. Two hundred years ago, if an American wanted to eat a hamburger for dinner, he needed to be able to convince his neighbors to, say, help him build a barn in which to store hay to feed his cows all winter. And to help him harvest his wheat crop. Likely they would have come together to thresh it—there wasn’t a surplus of machinery. A neighbor would have slaughtered the cow and another would have baked the bread, unless it was all done in the family. The same went for what was considered women’s work. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, in a wonderful article in the journal Feminist Studies, showed that our notion of the self-sufficient farm family was bunk. There was a lot more to do than just berrying or washing or husking or quilting. Say you needed some homespun woolen cloth: there were eleven separate tasks involved, from herding sheep to dressing the fabric, and, as Ulrich noted, “it would have been an extremely unusual family that commanded the tools, skills, and labor to perform all of these steps at home. . . . What was true of wool was also true of flax,” she said, “for a family might grow its own; have it retted, swingled, and hackled by a flax dresser; bring it home for spinning and reeling; send it out to be woven; and then consign it to the bleach fields or dyer for finishing.”

Some of this exchange might have been paid for, much of it bartered, and a lot of it simply unaccounted for, since the reciprocal hand-lending was inevitable. Douglas Harper, in Changing Works, a poignant account of the dairy farms of northern New York, interviews farmers old enough to recall the time when “we would pitch in and go help. Everyone wasn’t so busy then. Oh, they had time or something.” You can read about it in Wendell Berry novels; if you want to still see it in operation, you may need to visit an Amish farm.

That’s because the advent of cheap fossil fuel, and the prosperity, globalization, and specialization it allowed, changed, well, everything for those who went along (which is to say, everyone but the Amish). You could look at almost any profession—baker to banker—but let’s stick with farming. When you depended on horsepower and human labor, you needed help. When you depended on high-powered machinery, you simply didn’t. Once you had a big combine, you could do it yourself. As one farmer told Harper, all of a sudden “there was no need, no call, really, to go see them. . . . I don’t think anyone has anything against anyone—you just don’t have any need to be there.” And all those machines let farms grow steadily bigger, which had as its logical result a far greater physical distance between the farm families who remained.

We could count this as simply the way of the world except for two problems.

One, of course, is that the era of cheap fossil fuel may be coming to an end, either because we run out or because we take global warming seriously and seriously cut back. Either way, the massive, invisible, industrialized methods we’ve come to rely on for feeding and clothing and fueling our lives may start to break down.

And the other problem is that we may break down. We weren’t designed to be this distant from our neighbors—we descend from apes who spend most of the day grooming each other for the practical purpose of removing lice and for the even more practical purpose of building the deep bonds that give their lives security and meaning. The economic life of Homo sapiens has always been about that kind of contact—until now, until us. Research has shown that when we live on car-filled streets, our number of close friends drops by half. We eat half the meals we used to with friends, family, neighbors. Forget about the flax-swingler; our clothes come through the ether from the mysterious geography of Lands’ End. We don’t need each other anymore, and that’s the saddest thing we’ve done—sadder even than the scourge of climate change, which at least is anonymous and impersonal.

Once we’ve started down this road, it’s hard to turn back; being a neighbor is a skill like any other, and it’s a skill we’ve increasingly lost as we’ve turned into hyperindividuals. Say you need the proverbial cup of sugar: do you turn to the neighbor or turn the car on and drive to the store? One survey found that three-quarters of Americans didn’t have a real relationship with the folks who lived next door. (New upscale houses now routinely come with dual master bedrooms, since even the talent for being a mate seems to be dwindling.) The big question for this century may turn out to be how fast we can relearn the skill of neighborliness.

Take farming again. The local food movement is helping to build demand for small farms. If it continues, we may someday reach the point where we once again have more farmers than prisoners in America—which will be a good thing, if we’re hoping to grow our food with less oil. But if that’s going to happen, it will take more than farmers’ markets—it will take farming communities, with enough small growers in the neighborhood to teach each other what needs doing. One of the best young farmers in my corner of Vermont, Spencer Blackwell, recently graduated from several seasons of growing grain and beans on the Intervale land in Burlington—a kind of incubator for young farmers with a dozen little start-up farms in any given year. “Maybe it was a little bit what it was like in the 1800s, when every other person was a farmer,” he says. “You need to know something—what’s the best time to plant oats as a winter cover crop—and there’s someone right around to tell you.” You can borrow equipment too, which is helpful because, as Blackwell points out, almost everything at the implement dealer is designed for mammoth farms. “I don’t want to grow a thousand acres of broccoli—I want to grow five acres,” he says.

For the rest of us, who aren’t planning to actually till the soil ourselves, relearning neighborliness means joining a CSA or going to the farmers’ market (where shoppers have ten times as many conversations per visit as they do at the Shop ‘n Save).

It means putting solar panels on our roofs and tying them into the grid so that our neighbors can cool their beer with the sunlight that falls on our shingles—and, of course, it means buying that beer from the local brewery. It means buying CDs when the artist is selling them after a concert, and listening to your local public radio station instead of the XM satellite-from-nowhere. It means not just supporting the idea of mass transit but getting on the darned bus sometimes.

It means embracing nonindependence—which to us may seem un-American, but in fact it is just the opposite. Tocqueville, in the greatest clichè of American political science history, called us a nation of joiners. We’ve gotten away from that—become a nation of drive-around-by-ourselfers. But in a world that seems likely to grow a little tougher all around, with weird weather, rising prices, and falling profits, a neighbor is what you’ll need most.

orion

how do i respond

2010-01-17T14:26:00.002-05:00

in the time i have been back several people have said to me "you look good"

in reference to what

i think that it is a parent thing to say things like that

still how do i respond

the golden rule (new version)

2010-01-11T17:31:00.001-05:00

those who have the gold make the rules

masters of war

2010-01-11T00:32:00.001-05:00

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks.

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly.

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain.

You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion'
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud.

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins.

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
That even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do.

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul.

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand over your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead.

al jazeera

2010-01-07T23:05:00.004-05:00

just finished a documentary about al jazeera

definitely worth the watch

ugh why does this media stuff have to be so complicated

the hollow men

2010-01-07T20:18:00.001-05:00

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

ash wednesday

2010-01-07T20:11:00.004-05:00

I

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is
nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

II

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been
contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.
It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each
other,
Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

III

At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitul face of hope and of despair.

At the second turning of the second stair
I left them twisting, turning below;
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jaggèd, like an old man's mouth drivelling, beyond
repair,
Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.

At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind
over the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.


Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy

             but speak the word only.
IV

Who walked between the violet and the violet
Whe walked between
The various ranks of varied green
Going in white and blue, in Mary's colour,
Talking of trivial things
In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour
Who moved among the others as they walked,
Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs

Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand
In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary's colour,
Sovegna vos

Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing

White light folded, sheathing about her, folded.
The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

The silent sister veiled in white and blue
Between the yews, behind the garden god,
Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke
no word

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile

V

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny
the voice

Will the veiled sister pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season,
time and time, between
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait
In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray
For children at the gate
Who will not go away and cannot pray:
Pray for those who chose and oppose

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew trees pray for those who offend her
And are terrified and cannot surrender
And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks
In the last desert before the last blue rocks
The desert in the garden the garden in the desert
Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.

O my people.

VI

Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit
of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

while "studying for finals" i discoverd these gems

2009-12-13T01:35:00.007-05:00

feel the change media is my new favorite news source

never mind
i just realized that i forgot about the onion

for all book loving people

2009-12-11T16:01:00.002-05:00

Galileo describing wine

2009-12-08T13:44:00.002-05:00

"light held together by moisture"

not sure if i agree with him but i love his imagery

class

2009-12-08T13:39:00.002-05:00

the class i am most excited about for next semester

Science and the Sacred: Exploring the Intersection between Religion and Rationality
This course will examine a number of important, contemporary issues at the intersection between religion and science. Scientific thinking about God, religious responses to cosmology and evolution, and the writings of both scientists on religion and religionists on science will be included. We will focus on attempts to learn about religion from science, and about science from religion, and on the different methodologies, assumptions, and entailments of the two disciplines.

snow!!!

2009-12-05T13:14:00.001-05:00

mail order bride

2009-12-04T02:03:00.000-05:00

just heard about this

i am horrified

i miss my cats

2009-12-02T23:56:00.003-05:00

MATE 2010

2009-12-02T23:53:00.001-05:00

mate has released the missions

haven't had time to look over them yet

"The Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan"

2009-12-02T14:35:00.006-05:00

i am continually impressed by the intelligence of youtube comments

here are some highlights from this video

ShiekYerbooty
" THE WAY FORWARD ".....is that the best you idiots could come up with........How About the word .... Victory....or the words.......Bring them Home...........c'mon you tools, shit or get off the toilet

psa100verse3
Judgment Day is coming on May 21, 2011. Please follow my name for a detailed explanation. May God have mercy !

jaguarclaw
I bet you are a chick. Only a chick would believe Obama because of his pretty face. Obama is a fraud and a liar. Above all hes a puppet. He couldnt even locate afghanistan on a map. And as a response to your comment " I hope this works" I cant tell you right now that it wont. The Soviets couldnt defeat them and Afghanistan is known as the graveyard of empires.

PathofReason
Neither Jesus or Satan are real. Fasten your tin foil helmet and shut up

!tofallen
@CloseToChrist Hail Satan.

night photo from the summer

2009-11-24T04:07:00.002-05:00

stargon at night

2009-11-20T00:33:00.003-05:00

from the night of the recent meteor shower at around 3AM

fog

2009-11-15T23:14:00.000-05:00

awesome fog tonight

great sadness and woe

2009-11-12T16:39:00.001-05:00

i broke my mug

spring course list posted

2009-11-12T13:33:00.001-05:00

http://inside.bard.edu/academic/courses/spring2010/

what should i take next semester

inferno XVI (46-51)

2009-11-12T00:49:00.006-05:00

Had I been sheltered from the fire

I would have thrown myself among them,

and I believe my teacher would have let me.

But because I would have burned and baked,

fright overcame the good intentions

that made me hunger to embrace them.

For those staying on campus over Thanksgiving

2009-11-11T01:10:00.005-05:00

i just got this email form the bard dean of students office

FREE THANKSGIVING DINNER
NOVEMBER 26, 2009

The Salvation Army in Kingston will be serving a FREE Thanksgiving dinner on November 26 from 11am to 1pm.

Bard College in conjunction with the Dean of Students office will be providing a shuttle on November 26 leaving from Kline Bus Stop at 10:30am going to the Salvation Army in Kingston.

somehow this seems wrong to me

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

2009-11-10T22:29:00.004-05:00

my mom sent this to me

i think i like it a lot

Manifesto:The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

trash islands

2009-11-09T23:08:00.002-05:00

yikes

"twice times the size of texas"

i wouldn't blame our planet if it blasted us to bits in 2012

shoes

2009-11-08T23:16:00.001-05:00

my feet are sad about there recent lack of barefootedness

war crime

2009-11-06T00:27:00.000-05:00

what a strange term

Ellen Moballa

2009-11-05T00:02:00.001-05:00

i received this the other day

it is amazing

Hello my Dear,

I was especially fascinated by your data's information and I am left with no choice than to mail you at once.You seem to possess some sterling qualities, Am long for in a partner and I`m persuaded that a relationship with some one like you is sure to be mutually- beneficial and fulfilling.give it a thought and let me read from you as soon as possible. Cheers
Thanks,

Yours Ellen Moballa

children

2009-11-04T23:47:00.003-05:00

when two children are fighting over a toy a parent usually is called in to mediate the situation

this ether results in the children sharing the toy

or coming to the understanding that the toy belongs to one or the other of them and that's that

end of story

these children then grow up to be the next parents

mediating over the next generation of children

and the cycle continues

why haven't we learned to be our own "parents" when it comes to foreign policy by now

why do we always take the "childlike" path and go to war

(prompted by a lecture about the roots of the Israel Palestine conflict)

the onion

2009-11-03T21:52:00.002-05:00

take that fox

afghanistan

2009-11-02T00:06:00.007-05:00

i am worried that obama will make stupid decisions regarding afghanistan

even though there is a rational fear that retreating from afghanistan will result in afghanistan being taken over by the taliban it is my opinion that we should still out of there as fast as we possibly can

all that we can do by staying there is prolong the inevitable wasting resources in the process

there is no possible way that the us or anyone else for that matter can prevent ideas by occupying afghan cities

the only way we can fight these ideas is with respect

sending more troops will only make the middle east more mad at us than they already are

come on obama

the middle east likes you (somewhat) at the moment don't give it and the rest of the world reason to dislike you

don't make the same mistake bush made

we have enough to deal with domestically

recession

health care

climate change

. . .

let's not waste tons of money and life on a lost cause

seriously

what can be gained by staying there

i don't understand

if someone could enlighten me on this subject that would be great

hell houses and the devil's playground

2009-11-01T23:40:00.006-05:00

i heard about "hell houses" the other day on this american life

the evangelical church is bizarre

this episode of this american life also mentioned devil's playground

i like the amish stance toward sex drugs and rock and roll . . .

it seems much healthier and also seems to result in better outcomes

original sin

2009-11-01T23:33:00.006-05:00

i had myself some original sin last night

it gets a very high rating

it's up there with my old favorite

cuddle party

2009-10-30T15:10:00.001-04:00

help this is scary

facebook

2009-10-28T22:22:00.001-04:00

i have decided to delete my facebook account

The War Prayer

2009-10-28T22:15:00.002-04:00

from a facebook note

i love this piece

the more people read it the better

The War Prayer

by Mark Twain

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fulttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory with stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener.

It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

Sunday morning came -- next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams -- visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender!

Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation:

God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest,
Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!

Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory --

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, "Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord and God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!"

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside -- which the startled minister did -- and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

"I come from the Throne -- bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import -- that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of -- excpet he pause and think. "God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two -- one uttered, and the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this -- keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon your neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain on your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse on some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

"You have heard your servant's prayer -- the uttered part of it. I am commissioned by God to put into words the other part of it -- that part which the pastor -- and also you in your hearts -- fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard the words 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory -- must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

"Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth into battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it --

For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimmage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!

We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

(After a pause.) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits."

…

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

military spending

2009-10-28T22:10:00.002-04:00

from a facebook note

the solution to the economic problems of the world

is it obvious enough

counterinsurgency

2009-10-27T00:11:00.002-04:00

i love how counterinsurgency "worked" in Iraq

we need to do this in Afghanistan to

Diary of a Country Priest

2009-10-26T23:45:00.003-04:00

i saw this film in fysem today

wow

what an amazing portrait of internal struggle

i hope to go back and re-watch this a few years down the road

i feel like i will appreciate it more then

taking things for granted

2009-10-26T23:41:00.004-04:00

i love it when things happen to me that make me realize and appreciate things that i usually take for granted

like hot showers

Bard tap water

Kline food

. . .