Archive for the ‘neuropathy’ Category
September 6, 2018
Francis Spufford, in his wonderful book, Unapologetic, uses the term HPtFtU for the Human Tendency to F**k things Up. If you watch any legitimate news outlet today, you will see countless examples of HPtFtU on display; especially in Washington DC.
I’m going to quote, frequently, from Spufford in the coming weeks…but not quite yet.
A Facebook page I’m a member of had the question, “how can God and evolution both be true?’ I was tempted to write an answer, but I get tired of people commenting on my comment, who really haven’t given it much thought. So, I’ll do it here.
How can God and evolution both be true? Because a large portion of Scripture is metaphor:
A metaphor is a figure of speech that directly refers to one thing by mentioning another for rhetorical effect. It may provide clarity or identify hidden similarities between two ideas. One of the most commonly cited examples of a metaphor in English literature is the “All the world’s a stage” monologue from As You Like It:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances …
—William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2/7
This quotation expresses a metaphor because the world is not literally a stage. By asserting that the world is a stage, Shakespeare uses points of comparison between the world and a stage to convey an understanding about the mechanics of the world and the behavior of the people within it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor
Yeshua [Latinized as Jesus] said that He was the living water, and those who drink from this water will never thirst. This is a metaphor. Water is not alive, unless one considers microbes—and the people of Yeshua’s time did not know about microbes. Followers of Yeshua get thirsty, particularly in the summer. The operative concept is “thirst.” Yeshua was addressing the ‘hunger’ and ‘thirst’ we feel when we try to understand ourselves; when we try to fill the emptiness we sometimes feel.
Creation of Adam [modified] by Michelangelo; stained glass by Michael Greer
This painting is a metaphor; Michelangelo did not travel back in time, to the “sixth day of Creation” and snap a photo. However, many Christians seem to accept the concept that God is somehow like us [more, next time]. Many/most Christians’ theology is a mixture of Bible verses, songs they like, sermons they’ve heard and Bible Study texts they’ve read.
Some Christians apparently have very thin Bibles—those who manage to completely ignore Isaiah 58, and all of the similar passages which clearly spell out the Creator’s expectations for ‘the followers of God’—the way we are supposed to treat people who are not like us. At present, America is rubbish at meeting this expectation. There are other readers of Scripture who manage to not comprehend the nature of the if/then, Conditional nature of Scripture—“if you do this, then you will be blessed’. They prefer to quote the ‘then’ portions of texts while ignoring the if. “If you do your homework, then you get dessert.”
Getting back to Michelangelo, he was not intending to teach for centuries, from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, that God looks like a buff older man with a beard; surrounded by naked beings. If one looks at this portrayal of the Creator for too long, one can get all sorts of ideas about the Creator that are probably wrong. Michelangelo’s painting is a metaphor for Genesis 1:27; and Genesis 1:27 is a metaphor for the creation of human beings. One of the reasons that Genesis 2:7 differs from 1:27 [both are descriptions of the creation of humans on the sixth day of Creation] is that this is all metaphor: figures of speech, “providing clarity or identifying hidden similarities between two ideas”.
Does this mean that the words of Genesis aren’t true? No. It does mean that the words of Genesis should not be taken literally, as if it was a science text; nor as a history text. Scripture is the story of the Creator’s actions with human beings; and it tells the story of the beginning of the nation of Israel, and its downfall; and most importantly, Scripture tells how the Creator of the entire Universe entered human time and space in the form of a single cell implanted in the womb of a teenaged girl—basically the first “In vitro fertilization” (IVF).
Scripture [meaning the Scripture of the Jewish, Christian and Islam faiths] does not teach about the Creator’s interactions with the human beings of the Western Hemisphere/ the Americas. These people ‘did not exist’ to those in the Mediterranean world. Scripture also leaves out Asia and most of Africa [except by inference]. Why? Because Scripture isn’t a World History text. There are ~400 years between the end of the Book of Micah and Yeshua’s entry into the world, where the Creator sent no prophets to guide Israel. The Creator was silent. Four centuries–most of American history, as a reference. The Temple, the seat of the Jewish faith, was destroyed in about 70 A.D. Consequently, the Hebrew Scriptures have very little to say about the modern state of Israel, and its creation after World War II. There are prophecies: again, metaphors. People who want Israel to be considered an act of the Creator, read the prophecies in the manner they want to read them.
It’s our HPtFtU that causes war, and violent death, and poverty, and shame. These four words create a circle of death.
It is my HPtFtU that causes me sleepless nights, and my FEARs [False Evidence Appearing Real—I am not omniscient]; it is very possibly the cause of the constant pain I deal with. None of my Neurologists have come up with better answers.
It is our HPtFtU that causes us to have broken relationships with other people who have their own version of HPtFtU; we are all broken, we are all in need of mending.
Finally, the quotation from Francis Spufford, from his wonderful book, Unapologetic. I could have written these words, but I lack the talent:
I’m a very this-worldly Christian. I am averagely afraid of dying, but I don’t believe because I expect, or want, to have an unlimited future, tweedling about with a harp while the stars of the Western Spiral Arm burn out one by one. I believe because I know I’ve got a past and a present in which the HPtFtU did and does its usual work, and I want a way of living which opens out more widely and honestly and lovingly than I can manage for myself, which widens rather than narrowing with each destructive decision. Like the Christian Aid slogan says, I believe in life before death. For me and for everyone else. I don’t care about heaven. I want, I need, the promise of mending.
Mended is not the same thing as never broken. We are not being promised that it will be as if the bad stuff never happened. It’s amnesty that’s being offered, not amnesia; hope, not pretense. The story of your life will still be the story of your life, permanently. It will still have the kinks and twists and corners you gave it. The consequences of your actions, for you and for other people, will roll inexorably on. God can’t take these away, or your life would not be your life, you would not be you, the world would not be the world. He can only take from us—take over for us—the guilt and the fear, so that we can start again free, in hope. So that we are freed to try again and fail again, better. He can only overwhelm the HPtFtU with Grace.
Which we can now define. Grace is forgiveness we can’t earn. Grace is the weeping father on the road. Grace is tragedy accepted with open arms, and somehow turned to good. Grace is what the wasteful death on Skull Hill did.
The one thing that I would add is that my encounters with the Spirit of the Creator, over 40+ years simply can’t be considered anything else. I’ve tried. Do I mistake ‘chance’ [something I don’t believe in] for the Spirit of the Creator? Probably; sometimes. I too have to address my own HPtFtU. I can’t convince you of what I’ve experienced; it’s something that one needs to experience themselves.
Peter’s HPtFtU in The Garden of Gethsemane
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September 3, 2018
Francis Spufford, in his absolutely wonderful book, Unapologetic, uses a different four-letter F-word than I’ve used above; I have readers that remember, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, that this word [historically accurate or not] stands for For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge; aka rape. I remain amazed that such a vicious word has become common grammar in the 21st Century; particularly in the light of the #MeToo situation in our world. It raises the question as to whether the way we speak can change the world…
I’m going to quote, frequently, from Spufford in the coming weeks:
“Christianity parts company with the other two monotheisms. Unlike the oldest (Judaism) and the youngest (Islam) of the one-god religions, the middle sibling isn’t interested in coming up with a set of sustainable rules for living by. Jewish laws of behavior and Muslim laws of behavior may be demanding to keep at times, but they can be kept. That’s the point of them, that’s what they’re for…
“The idea is to have a set of laws like a wearable coat, a coat that everyone can put on if they are willing to make the effort. In Judaism and Islam, you don’t have to be a saint to know that you are managing to be an adequately good woman, an adequately good man. Islam and Judaism accomplish this livability, this wearability, this sustainability, by paying more attention to what people do than to what they feel about it. They’re religions of orthopraxy, right doing, not orthodoxy, right thinking or teaching. Do the right actions, and you can be hissing and spitting inside, or bored senseless, or going through the motions to please your family, and it still counts. Virtue has still been achieved. The result is in some ways a lot more moderate, a lot more stable than Christianity; and it can be very humane too, with plentiful opportunities for the unvirtuous or ex-virtuous to rejoin virtue’s ranks. But it does, indeed, produce a judged picture of the world. It produces a moralized landscape in which the good people can be told from the bad people; in which all human actions can be split into two categories, pure or impure, clean or dirty, permitted or forbidden, kosher or trayf, halal or haram.
“Christianity does something different. It makes frankly impossible demands. Instead of asking for specific actions, it offers general but lunatic principles. It thinks you should give your possessions away, refuse to defend yourself, love strangers as much as your family, behave as if there’s no tomorrow. These principles do not amount to a sustainable program. They deliberately ignore the question of how they could possibly be maintained. They ask you to manifest in your ordinary life a drastically uncalculating, unprotected generosity. And that’s not all. Christianity also makes what you mean by your behavior all-important. You could pauperize yourself, get slapped silly without fighting back, care for lepers and laugh all day long in the face of futures markets, and it still wouldn’t count, if you did it for the wrong reasons. Not only is Christianity insanely perfectionist in its few positive recommendations, it’s also insanely perfectionist about motive. It won’t accept generosity performed for the sake of self-interest as generosity. It says that unless altruism is altruism all the way down, it doesn’t count as altruism at all.
“So far, so thrillingly impractical. But now notice the consequence of having an ideal of behavior not sized for human lives: everyone fails. Really everyone. No one only means well, no one means well all the time. Looked at from this perspective, human beings all exhibit different varieties of fuck-up. And suddenly in its utter lack of realism Christianity becomes very realistic indeed, intelligently resigned to our vast array of imperfections, and much more interested in what we can do to live with them than in laws designed to keep them segregated. Christianity maintains no register of clean and unclean. It doesn’t believe in the possibility of clean, just as it doesn’t believe that laws can ever be fully adequate, or that goodness can reliably be achieved by following an instruction book.”
Many Christians do not understand the teachings of Yeshua; they remain stuck in a rule book, one I’ve heard described as the “Owner’s Manual” more times than I can count.
Human beings, in spite of our best intentions, have a Propensity to F**k things Up [HPtFtU]. Not always, not because we intend to do so, but because we are fallible human beings. If someone tells you they never exhibit their HPtFtU, they’ll lie about other things as well.
Religion states that you can follow rules that will ensure that your HPtFtU does not occur. Since we all fail at some points in our lives, this notion is a lie. When Yeshua [Latinized as Jesus] began teaching, he angered all of the religious leaders in the vicinity. When they became angry enough, they persuaded the local Roman government to execute Yeshua as a heretic and an inciter-to-violence. More lies.
Case in point: the Human Propensity to F**k things Up
The United States has become a country that kidnaps children and does not believe it’s a crime because those children have brown skin. We are back in the first half of the 20th Century. We don’t lynch the children; we steal children from their parents and put them into the overworked Foster Care system; often to private corporations whose sole business is the incarceration of human beings. Pundits talk about how their lives are so much better than in the cardboard shack where they lived; ignoring completely the fact that Home is first of all, the family. The mother who carried these children in her body for 9 months; the siblings who teach each other about love. The father that guides.
Depending upon the news service you choose, the number of stolen children our Administration is ignoring is 500, ± 20. The government is making no effort to reunite these children with their parents. Many of the parents were deported without their children; having signed documents they did not understand, which stated that they were giving up their children as a condition of their deportation.
The major problem that too many seem oblivious to: you and I are complicit in this crime. We, the citizens of the United States, without our consent, have become kidnappers. We have possibly ruined the lives of at least 500 children, who were ripped from their mother’s arms with no explanation; and having committed no crime beyond the crime of being born.
Let this settle in for a few minutes.
This crime was committed on purpose, one more crime among many:
There are currently five separate investigations into Trump and his associates from four different investigative bodies. An additional lawsuit brought by two state attorneys general challenges whether Trump is in violation of the U.S. Constitution. There are further reports about probes into the financial dealings of the president’s eldest daughter, Ivanka Trump, and his second eldest son, Eric Trump.
The worst may be yet to come for Trump. Zephyr Teachout, a candidate for the Democratic nomination to be the next New York attorney general, has made a promise to fully investigate Trump’s business the central thrust of her candidacy. “Donald Trump’s businesses are here,” Teachout told The Atlantic in August. “What the New York attorney general can do, and as attorney general I’ll make a priority, is investigating those businesses. That power extends to, in the case of extreme illegality, dissolving businesses.”
Democrats also have compiled a massive list of subpoenas targeting the Trump administration and the Trump Organization they hope to file if they win control of the House of Representatives in November.
The number of investigations and lawsuits targeting the president could easily ― and quickly ― metastasize to more than six.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-investigations_us_5b85861de4b0511db3d229d7
Is the President a bad man? Probably; as are we all. It isn’t my job to make these determinations about other people. In my opinion, he’s an incompetent man, who had no idea what was needed to lead a country. He seems to have not made the intellectual leap of realizing that a country is not a business. Given that he’s bankrupted five businesses in the past, is acumen as a businessman is in doubt.
Not only has our country kidnapped a large number of children, we have also turned our backs on the brown-skinned American citizens who live in Puerto Rico:
The latest attempt to get an accurate death toll in Puerto Rico following last year’s Hurricane Maria paints a grim picture: 2,975 “excess” deaths could be attributed to the storm, according to George Washington University researchers. That’s 46 times more than the 64 deaths first reported last fall.
But the counting is far from over, and nobody should be surprised if the death toll in Puerto Rico reaches or exceeds 4,000 by the end of the year.
Here’s why: Many of the conditions responsible for continued excess deaths remain and are unlikely to be appreciably ameliorated anytime soon…
Hurricane Maria has been one of the deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history, killing roughly the same number of people who perished on 9/11 and about 40 percent more than the number who died as a result of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. If Congress doesn’t help the more than 3 million American citizens who live in Puerto Rico recover from this catastrophic disaster, who will be held accountable?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-puerto-rico-death-toll-will-only-get-higher/2018/09/02/7b5d2eec-ad51-11e8-a8d7-0f63ab8b1370_story.html?utm_term=.9a5ad91d0647
I worked on the Gulf Coast for a brief period of time, after Katrina; the devastation can’t be adequately described.
Spufford again:
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me . . .
There! Did you hear that? He just called himself a wretch. He’s beating himself up in public. Sorry, mate: lovely tune, loony sentiment. Except that “wretch” is actually a very polite word for what John Newton, the eighteenth-century author of “Amazing Grace,” was. John Newton was a slave trader. He made his living transporting cargoes of kidnapped human beings, in conditions of great squalor and suffering, to places where they and their children and their children’s children would be treated all their lives as objects to be bought and sold and brutalized. Some of John Newton’s contemporaries (the ones who weren’t chained below decks in their own shit) may have thought that his profession was only a bit unrespectable; we, on the other hand, recognize that he was participating in one of the world’s great crimes, comparable to the Holocaust. Wretch? John Newton was a horror.
But at least he came to know it. At least he made the journey from comfortable acquiescence in horror to an accurate, and therefore horrified, sense of himself. At least he learned that something was wrong. And “Amazing Grace” is a description of the process by which he began to awaken. The wrinkle is that he wrote it before he gave up slaving. He wrote it under the impression that he had already seen the stuff he should be worrying about—booze and licentiousness, presumably, and playing tiddly-winks on the Sabbath, and not running his slave ship with a swear-box screwed to the mast. In the Holocaust analogy, it’s rather as if a death- camp guard had had a moral crisis, but over cheating his colleagues at poker, and then continued to come to work stoking the ovens, while vowing shakily to be a better person. Yet Newton’s guilt, once found, wouldn’t leave him alone. It went on gradually showing him dark, accurate visions of himself; it went on changing him, until eventually he could not bear the darkness of what he did daily, and gave up the trade, and ended his life as a penitent campaigner against it.
John Newton found Grace.
I found Grace.
Hopefully our President will find Grace.
Donald on the Road to Damascus By Claire Palmer
In June of last year, I was working on an image based on the story of Saul, who was blinded and thrown off his horse, on the way to hunting down the hated members of The Way—followers of Yeshua, who were becoming greater in numbers, and more bothersome for the Religious leaders of Israel. I was pondering the notion of what it would have ‘looked like’ to be there in Damascus at the time Saul was knocked off his horse; or even the more currently applicable incident found in Daniel 4, where:
All this happened to King Nebuchadnezzar [who was king of Babylon c. 605 BE – c. 562 BCE, the longest reign of any king of the Neo-Babylonian empire]. Twelve months later, as the king was walking on the roof of the royal palace of Babylon, he said, “Is not this the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence, by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?”
Even as the words were on his lips, a voice came from heaven, “This is what is decreed for you, King Nebuchadnezzar: Your royal authority has been taken from you. You will be driven away from people and will live with the wild animals; you will eat grass like the ox. Seven times will pass by for you until you acknowledge that the Most High is sovereign over all kingdoms on earth and gives them to anyone he wishes.”
Immediately what had been said about Nebuchadnezzar was fulfilled. He was driven away from people and ate grass like the ox. His body was drenched with the dew of heaven until his hair grew like the feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird…
King Nebuchadnezzar ended up living in a pasture, eating grass like a donkey, for a very long time, until he finally was ready to admit his arrogance, his wretchedness.
And the King found Grace…
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August 24, 2018
The Unindicted Co–Conspirator in the Oval Office
Korea.
Vietnam.
Few who know me would ever accuse me of being patriotic.
Nearly 100,000 soldiers lost their lives fighting ‘to make the world safe from Communism’. The Commander in Chief dishonors every soldier who has ever fought. He calls the European Union ‘our greatest foe’ and sides with the Russian government over his own Intelligence services and the Department of Justice.
The 16 Republican Senators serving today, who so eloquently demanded the impeachment of President Clinton, who was acquitted on all charges,
remain silent.
I am ashamed of what our government has become.
From Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune
“There is one apparent reason the president of the United States was not indicted Tuesday in the same case that yielded a guilty plea from his longtime personal lawyer. It’s not because prosecutors think he is innocent. It’s because he is President.
“The U.S. Justice Department has long taken the position that a sitting President is exempt from indictment. Only after he leaves office are prosecutors free to pursue criminal charges against him. Unless that policy changes, Donald Trump will serve the remainder of his time in office under the specter of prison.
“Let that sink in a moment. Prosecutors may postpone his indictment. Congress may refuse to impeach him or convict him. But Americans will be living under the administration of someone who has been implicated in a crime by a close associate — and who they may eventually learn is guilty of one or more felonies. The nation is being governed by an unindicted co-conspirator.”
President Donald Trump told the Fox News Channel that Michael Cohen’s payments to two women who alleged affairs with Trump were not illegal because they “came from me” and not his campaign.
“They weren’t taken out of campaign finance, that’s the big thing,” Trump said during an interview on FOX & Friends that will air Thursday morning. “That’s a much bigger thing. Did they come out of the campaign? They didn’t come out of the campaign; they came from me.”
The fact the payments didn’t come from the campaign coffers and were not reported in campaign finance reports is exactly why the payments were illegal.
According to the Federal Election Commission:
If any person, including a relative or friend of the candidate, gives or loans the candidate money ‘for the purpose of influencing any election for federal office,’ the funds are not considered personal funds of the candidate even if they are given to the candidate directly. Instead, the gift or loan is considered a contribution from the donor to the campaign, subject to the per-election limit and reportable by the campaign. This is true even if the candidate uses the funds for personal living expenses while campaigning.
And given Trump’s own lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, admitted the payments were intentionally made and then concealed in an effort to silence women and prevent them from negatively impacting Trump’s electoral hopes, the payments should have been reported and should have adhered to federal campaign spending limits.
I wasn’t paying attention the first time an Unindicted Co-Conspirator sat in the Oval Office. It was 1974, I was in my fourth of five years in college; and I only watched television on rare occasions—back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, the only televisions at colleges were in the dormitory lounges. My first shock, when delivering our daughter to Oregon State University [my first college] was finding that portable televisions were in every room…
I’m paying attention this time.
There is very little ‘Fake News’ in journalism these days. Journalists still exist; they painstakingly research every story; they only publish these stories when multiple sources have verified the evidence. The story going on today started in late 2015, when most Journalists couldn’t believe that DJT could actually become President. A man who declared bankruptcy 5 times and could no longer find financing from American lending institutions. Nearly all of his recent projects were financed by entities outside of the United States. There’s a reason he hasn’t let the American people see his tax returns. Now that those closest to his campaign are being indicted for numerous felonies, and some of his longtime business associates have been given Immunity from Prosecution for the information they have, the American people will probably learn where the Trump Corporation has financed their businesses. The Trump Corporation itself is being investigated by the State of New York, as well as the Trump Charitable Trust. The President of the United States has no power to pardon those convicted of State felonies. The Trump Corporation executives—the children of DJT, and their father may all face jail time. This does not even begin to address violations of the Emoluments Clause of the US Constitution.
The President’s statement, “that Michael Cohen’s payments to two women who alleged affairs with Trump were not illegal because they “came from me” and not his campaign,” contradicts records from the Trump Campaign, that have already been submitted in a Civil Suit by the New York State Attorney General.
The Unindicted Co–Conspirator in the Oval Office
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August 12, 2018
A Galactic View of my Wife and I When I Start My Day
Leaving Presidential politics for a moment and returning to one of my favorite topics: the make-up of the Universe. On the left is the HST-Smiling-GalaxyCluster SDSS-J1038+4849-20150210 with an Einstein–Chwolson ring; on the right, the Lagoon Nebula [my wife could not see the frowny face—hence the sketch]. An Einstein–Chwolson ring…
“predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Instead of light from a source traveling in a straight line (in three dimensions), it is bent by the presence of a massive body, which distorts spacetime. An Einstein Ring is a special case of gravitational lensing, caused by the exact alignment of the source, lens, and observer. This results in a symmetry around the lens, causing a ring-like structure.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_ring
Einstein never expected that we would see this effect; the optics of telescopes being what they were in the early 1900s. The Hubble enables such marvels.
My usual statement about things astronomical—I’m a follower of Jesus, and not very religious. I believe the Universe has a Creator. Stephen Hawking determined that the only thing necessary for the Universe to exist is gravity [which no one really understands]; therefore, a Creator is not necessary.
—Or, an example of good engineering design. Creating a system that is self-sustaining.
However, this isn’t something I’m dogmatic about. I don’t believe that humans are fully-capable of understanding the nature of the Creator of the Universe; we don’t have the brain power, nor the imagination to understand.
The Big Bang theory is believed to have been first proposed in the 20th century, but was actually proposed much earlier by biblical scholars, taken from information in the Old Testament/Torah/The Tanakh.
The earliest existing reference is in a commentary on the book of Genesis written by Nahmanides (1194-1270):
From Gerald Schroeder: Genesis and the Big Bang:
“In the thirteenth century, Nahmanides quoted a commentary on Genesis written 600 years before him, noting that prior to the existence of the universe, time did not exist. This was learned from the wording of Genesis 1:5, “. . . and there was evening and there was morning, day one.” It is not stated “the first day.” For the use of first would have implied an already existing series of days or a continuum of time when in fact on this “day one” there had been no prior time to this one day. Not a before and not an after. There was nothing to which one could relate this day. It stood alone as “day one.” For all the remaining days in that week of Genesis, the ordinal terms, second, third, etc., are used and. logically so. By day number two, and thereafter, a series of days had been established. Although it is difficult to comprehend, the creation of the physical universe brought with it a concurrent creation of time…
Nahmanides’s account of the first seconds of the universe reads like this:
At the briefest instant following creation, all the matter of the universe was concentrated in a very small place, no larger than a grain of mustard. The matter at this time was so thin, so intangible, that it did not have real substance. It did have, however, a potential to gain substance and form and to become tangible matter. From the initial concentration of this intangible substance in its minute location, the substance expanded, expanding the universe as it did so. As the expansion progressed, a change in the substance occurred. This initially thin noncorporeal substance took on the tangible aspects of matter as we know it. From this initial act of creation, from this ethereally thin pseudo-substance, everything that has existed, or will ever exist, was, is, and will be formed.
“Nahmanides’s reference to a grain of mustard is the traditional way of saying, “in the language of man,” the tiniest imaginable speck of space. Nahmanides taught that at the beginning, all that is on and within the Earth and all the heavens, in fact all the universe, was somehow packed, compressed, squeezed into this speck of space, the size of a mustard grain.”…
…and became, the Big Bang/the Expanding Universe.
And the Beginning of Time.
Okay, you don’t believe that Time could have a Beginning. Why not? The nature of Time is a progression.
Assume for a moment, that Time began at the moment the Universe began Expanding. All things being relatively equivalent, this would imply that Life began at about the same Time throughout the Universe. Consequently, those processes that eventually created Life and Evolution happened at about the same Time throughout the Universe. I don’t know; how long does it take for a Universe to expand? It appears to be expanding still, away from us.
At this point in Time…
The earliest fossils of anatomically modern humans are from the Middle Paleolithic, about 200,000 years ago such as the Omo remains of Ethiopia and the fossils of Herto sometimes classified as Homo sapiens idaltu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human
…we are unable to travel space at faster-than-light speeds. We really aren’t able to travel within our own Solar System with any human efficiency.
So, these aliens we keep hoping to see—they either need to travel in not-as-fast-as-light craft comparable to cruise ships—travel to our Solar System is going to take decades or centuries. Or, they have managed to accomplish something with much greater facility than we have and have cracked the Code to faster-than-light travel with Warp engines or Einstein-Rosen Bridges [wormholes] or some technology that Earth’s scientists and science fiction writers haven’t figured out.
Maybe the Expansion of the Universe involved some great amount of Time, and we are on the tail end of the Expansion; enabling some lifeforms from galaxies far, far away to be heading to our neighborhood.
One of my favorite theories is that somewhere beyond the Kuiper Belt, perhaps around the relative location of that galaxy sitting above the Sun, there are space beacons warning all incoming visitors to avoid this Solar System, because we carry an infectious plague of violence and hatred not found in other star systems.
Look at our country after a year-plus [I did say earlier, only for a moment]:
1 year, 204 days, 6 hours, 24 minutes and 15 seconds from when I typed this.
http://howlonghasdonaldtrumpbeenpresident.com/
Yes, someone is keeping track.
The infection runs deep; it was not caused by the man that sits behind the Resolute Desk, but it has been enabled by him. The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave has become the country that kidnaps children from their parents and does not have the courage to stand up against our enemies, both foreign and domestic. Many of those enemies have well-padded lives in the Senate and in Congress.
Aliens: stay away, lest you become infected.
There’s a reason it’s called Science Fiction.
Science fiction is written by humans that are limited to their knowledge at the time; and there is no book of rules that determines what information is included, and what information is omitted. Science Fiction is ideas. Ideas about how life could be; both could be good and could be bad. We always hope for the former. People in this country with skin colors other than pink have always found the latter and are a long way from finding the former. Northern European Stock is greatly outnumbered by people of color; birth rates among office-oriented job types are much lower than those whose occupations are more agricultural; it’s simple economics. Children within a family make for free labor [if you’ve ever had children, you know it’s not all that free…]
Gort and Klaatu from the 1951 movie | Zefram Cochrane and unnamed Vulcans, Star Trek First Contact
If you watched the original Star Trek series, Zefram Cochrane, the inventor of the Warp [faster-than-the-speed-of-light] engine, was portrayed by Glen Corbett, and presented more-or-less like NASA’s version of the Right Stuff. First Contact’s version of Cochrane is more like the not-so-right stuff. He did it for the money he’d make.
In 1951, Klaatu the astronaut, and his space-cop companion Gort [he does not give out traffic tickets—you disappear] arrived on Earth after we had bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and therefore posed a threat to the Universe, which apparently had some sort of Federation of planets…
In the Star Trek universe, explorers from the planet Vulcan arrived in the Solar System shortly after Zefram Cochrane made his first faster-than-light trip across the Solar System. The Vulcans came to usher us into the Universe that eventually contained the United Federation of Planets. But, without Gort’s limited interventions, the Vulcans were basically space-cops. The Vulcans were aware of our Infection. We had been broadcasting our Infection by television broadcasts for centuries, by the time the Vulcans showed up. Star Trek First Contact takes place after Earth’s Third World War, which wiped out hundreds of millions of inhabitants.
But, that’s just Fiction, isn’t it…
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July 29, 2018
People who read these writings on a regular basis know how angry I have become that one man could inspire so much damage to our country. It isn’t all on him; there are hundreds of Senators and Congressional Members who share the responsibility for the loss of American stature across the world. And all of the haters that support these people.
For decades, accurately or not, America was seen as the hope for the free world. No longer. We have become one of the “sh*thole countries”—a label that would have never applied before this description became part of our Presidential lexicon.
To deal with my anger, I turn to ‘hero stories’. When I don’t have client work to invest my time into, I work on heroes. Lately, The Doctor, Sherlock Holmes, and now Wonder Woman. She is the about only ‘superhero’ I value these days; Captain America has lost some of his gleam because of the Marvel/Disney epics of collateral damage that is given very little thought.
I watched Star Trek: First Contact (1996) last night as my ‘hero fix’; in the Star Trek universe,
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century.
Lily Sloane: No money? You mean, you don’t get paid?
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.
This incredible change of perspective from our world today, developed by Gene Roddenberry and his successors, was that when we first make contact with intelligent life forms from other worlds—
It unites humanity in a way no one ever thought possible. When they realize they’re not alone in the universe, poverty, disease, war – they’ll all be gone within the next fifty years…
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117731/?ref_=nv_sr_1
There is a desperate lack of intelligent life in our solar system.
Wonder Woman—Valley of the Shadow
Three women have inspired the image above. The “Valley of the Shadow” image is one I created a few years ago, inspired by the health issues dealt with by a couple of guys I know well. One of these women is a ‘c-word survivor’; two are still dealing with the process—the chemicals and radiation that are almost worse than the disease itself.
I deal with my own stuff; I would not trade.
I believe in Guardian Angels. When I think about angels, it’s in the context of ‘Fear Not and Behold’—the words spoken to Mary, when she learned what the next 9 months of her life, and all of the rest of it, would hold. Angels that watch over us; and sometimes intervene. After 40+ years of studying the nature of the Creator, there is still much I do not understand.
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July 21, 2018
“July 18, 2018
WASHINGTON — Two weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.
The evidence included texts and emails from Russian military officers and information gleaned from a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin, who had described to the C.I.A. how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation.
Mr. Trump sounded grudgingly convinced, according to several people who attended the intelligence briefing. But ever since, Mr. Trump has tried to cloud the very clear findings that he received on Jan. 6, 2017, which his own intelligence leaders have unanimously endorsed.”
Take a minute to absorb this. TRUMP KNEW.
The entire time he’s been in office, he has KNOWN that his election was due to Russian interference. He knew. It’s likely that Pence knew. How likely is it that McConnell and Ryan knew as well?
Fool that I am, I just assumed that the President’s ego was so large that he, in some dim corner of his mind, actually believed all of the BS that he spouted. I’ve been around overinflated salesmen speaking from platforms before; I thought P45 was another con-man who had fooled 24% of the people all of the time; and that the distaste for the two major candidates in the 2016 election was such that 50% of the population chose not to vote.
HE HAS BEEN LYING THE ENTIRE TIME HE’S BEEN IN OFFICE.
THE ONLY ‘FAKE NEWS’ IS HIS OWN.
When Barack Obama spoke in South Africa, this last week, he said,
“People just make stuff up. They just make stuff up. We see it in the growth of state-sponsored propaganda. We see it in internet fabrications. We see it in the blurring of lines between news and entertainment. We see the utter loss of shame among political leaders where they’re caught in a lie and they just double down and they lie some more. It used to be that if you caught them lying, they’d be like, ‘oh man…’ — now they just keep on lying…”
I thought it was a general comment on our current President’s habit of creating his own truth. Until today, when I realized…
President Obama knew it was a lie, also. The intelligence people that briefed P45 had also briefed President Obama.
100,000 soldiers died in Korea and Vietnam ‘to prevent the spread of Communism’—now Communism is being welcomed to the White House.
WHY DID THEY DIE?
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July 17, 2018
Korea.
Vietnam.
Few who know me would ever accuse me of being patriotic.
Nearly 100,000 soldiers lost their lives fighting ‘to make the world safe from Communism’. The Commander in Chief dishonors every soldier who has ever fought. He calls the European Union ‘our greatest foe’ and sides with the Russian government over his own Intelligence services; and the Department of Justice.
I am ashamed of what our government has become.
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July 11, 2018
The Force Isn’t With You… [Django Boletus Photography]
I’ve been to Chicago, and I’ve been to L.A., more than 2000 miles all the way… but I’ve never been by way of that Route with which I now can be associated…
I’ve never been fond of birthdays; I don’t really know why.
However, I appreciate every one of you who have sent birthday greetings to me. The longer I grow, the more the presence of people in my life, means to me. I am by nature, a-social; I’m completely fine on my own, without being interrupted by people. ‘Family’ has always been a challenge, and I don’t feel that I do it as well as I should. The same applies to those friends who have become like family…
This birthday is more difficult than many have been; I am saddened and frustrated by all of the anger present in our society; and the cruelty that we as a nation visit upon others, seemingly with no regard to the fact that we all share the same DNA. Below the level of the skin, we are exactly the same as each other person of our gender; with minor differences, we are exactly the same as any other person on this planet. I have trouble distancing myself from the cruelty; a mentor of mine suggested that the pain I feel is simply a part of the pain that the Creator feels over the mess we foolish people have made of the joy of living.
Some of you are aware that I have a ‘degenerative sensory neurological disorder of unknown origin’. Starting in 2009, I began a series of ‘re-calibrations’ to “new normal”. The muscles mostly work the same; nothing feels the same as it did for decades. I’m in the midst of ‘re-calibrating’ again, learning which strange sensations I can ignore, and dealing with sensation I’ve newly-lost. I’m thankful for a skilled physical therapist I don’t listen to as well as I should.
To help wash out my brain, Judy and I went to see ‘Would You Be My Neighbor?’ yesterday. I recommend it to everyone. I was never a big fan of the television show, but I appreciate the incredible gift Fred Rogers was to generations of children. Mr. Rogers believed that television could be an incredible means of educating children; a tool that has been poorly used for nearly all of television’s history. Television in the 21st Century is primarily a tool for consumerism, as it has been since television started; Mr. Rogers realized that it could be so much more.
I carry around a small notebook, one that I used to be able to write legibly in; I used it for capturing thoughts I read in various places in my life. While I still carry the notebook, the document is now about 70 pages of letter-sized sheets. I spent the last half-hour or so trying to find something with which to close.
We can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life… Surely this bond of common fate, surely this bond of common goals, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at the least, to look around at those of us, of our fellow men, and surely, we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again.
Robert F. Kennedy
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July 8, 2018
Mama! [2]
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) said Friday that Trump administration officials have told him and his staff that they view placing separated migrant children in foster care as an equivalent to reuniting them with their families.
“The secretary told us on a conference call they do not have an intention to reunify these children with their parents,” Inslee said on MSNBC’s “All in With Chris Hayes,” appearing to refer to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.
“They’re going to call it good if they can find anybody else who can serve as a foster parent or anybody else who can serve as familial relationship, and these kids don’t even know these strangers,” he continued.
Inslee claimed that the Trump administration doesn’t plan on complying with a court order requiring that officials reunify all of the immigrant children separated from their families at the border under a since-ended Trump policy.
“It’s clear they do not intend to be humane and it’s clear they will continue on this course until he is removed from office,” the governor said, referring to Trump.
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/395912-washington-governor-trump-admin-views-placing-immigrant-kids-in
What isn’t being said is that the children cannot be reunited with their parents because when the children were being removed from their parents, no one was keeping track of parents and children. There is no record. No one bothered to take notes. This has been pointed out in the Immigration process, to the outrage of Federal Immigration Judges.
I think we now know why the Nazis tattooed their prisoners. Better record-keeping.
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.
Do justly, now.
Love mercy, now.
Walk humbly, now.
You are not obligated to complete the work,
but neither are you free to abandon it.
—The Talmud
To be honest, I am daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. I feel that my role, at this point in my life, is to be a Creative. To Create. I find it incredibly difficult to create something worthwhile when horror is being done in my name.
Do not be fooled; do not take this lightly: this work is being done in your name.
If you are one of my Norwegian relatives, reading this at home on your island, the inhumane efforts of the present American Administration to ‘protect our borders’ isn’t being done in your name. But it is being done in the name of your relatives who left Norway in the 1920s to find a new life in America. I know almost nothing about my Norwegian heritage—”the Old Country”. I never heard much about my family’s life in Norway [it’s possible that I didn’t listen]. There was a small Norwegian flag on my grandparents’ mantle; we had Norwegian cookies and lefse at Christmas. I heard Norwegian being spoken between Martinus and Esther; I watched Martinus shuffle around the floor of our family cabin, hands behind his back, listening to Norwegian folk songs. There were photographs of Norway on the walls of the cabin. There’s been a photo of the family house on our wall for a very long time.
Is it possible that when they arrived in America, my Mom and her sisters would have been locked in a cage, while my grandmother was locked in a different cage, somewhere else in the country? Is this only happening to people with skin that is brown, instead of skin that is pink?
How can this be happening at all?
The Greatest Generation fought a world war to ensure that this kind of behavior could not happen again.
The President, on his campaign tours is lying to the thousands of supporters who show up, telling them about all of the rapists, drug mules, thieves and murderers that are showing up at our Southern border; and that he is defending the country from this infestation… And the thousands cheer…
Medicine Bottle, scheduled to be hanged
for the crime of being non-white [1800s]
I always start these thoughts-on-digital-paper with an illustration. I search through my files to find something that matches my thoughts. The most appropriate illustration tonight was the one below, a pencil copy of a Norman Rockwell painting. But I could not start there. Not tonight.
I am a democrat [i.e. a believer in democracy] because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. Whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure. I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people — all the people who believe advertisements and think in catchwords and spread rumors. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows.
C.S. Lewis
I believe in prayer.
Do I believe that prayers will enable all of the locked cages become unlocked; and that that those who are imprisoned simply because they, and/or their parents were looking for a better life, will be able to escape? It happened in the Book of Acts.
No, I don’t believe prayer will open the locks.
“It’s clear they do not intend to be humane and it’s clear they will continue on this course until he is removed from office,” the governor [of the State of Washington] said, referring to Trump.
Prayer can rouse a people from their slumber and cause them to speak up on the behalf of those who simply want their children to live in a land where they won’t be shot for the simple act of opening their door. Parents travel thousands of miles with their children and little else, because they believe they will be welcomed in America. Immigrants have been welcomed in America for generations.
Not any more, not in America today. America is closed.
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July 2, 2018
Mama!
Marching is something my body will no longer let me do…
I can still make illustrations; drawing is complicated by my degenerative Neuropathy.
Children, stolen from their parents, live in Portland, in a number of government-funded facilities; one of which is a few blocks from my home.
I skipped church today. Hardly ever happens unless I’m ill. A different kind of illness today. Today will be the ‘Fourth of July’ commemoration. At a minimum, it will include flag-waving and the ‘hymns’ of our Civil Religion at the end of the service. I admire the woman who will be playing the organ; and I am not willing to walk out on her performance. We have a new guy doing the preaching. I have no idea what the sermon will be. Probably something from the Gospel of Mark; there’s a possibility that he will extol the blessings of living in this country…I can’t stomach that sort of sermon.
I stopped Pledging My Allegiance when my sons were in Boy Scouts. I was working on an illustration project that eventually was named “John 10:16” [look it up], and consisted of several portraits of Native Americans, based on photos by Edward S. Curtis; and quotations from people from the time. It forever changed my viewpoint on this country; researching history can do that to you.
http://www.mjarts.com/portraits.html
A suggestion, for all those who tend to respond to the ‘Fake News’ syndrome: nearly all of the world’s knowledge is at your fingertips. Research doesn’t take more than a few minutes. Stop playing video games and learn something.
This ‘great Christian country’ carries about it, the stink of death. Our country was founded on religious hypocrisy and white supremacism masquerading as ‘spreading the gospel’. When the Pilgrims landed [having been kicked out of England], and discovered that the indigenous people who lived on the Eastern Shore had died of disease and murder, they thanked their god for clearing the way for the Gospel… Only rarely did they reach out to the ‘savages’ and did not care to discover that the Indigenous People already had similar beliefs regarding the Creator of all.
In the last year we have been brought to a new low. The only thing I can say for the current President is that he makes no pretensions about our being ‘a great city, shining on the hill’. Our country has existed for 242 years; since we can fight several wars simultaneously, it may surprise you to know that we have been at war for 520 years. I didn’t know about half of the wars we’ve been involved in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States
Given that our National Anthem is an anthem to war [I don’t know how people miss this], it shouldn’t surprise me that we’ve squeezed 500+ years of warfare into 242 years.
Senator Elizabeth Warren posted a report of her visit to one of the Internment Camps in Texas; she’s apparently ballsy enough to get passed the armed guards keeping people out. What she describes is an environment that is little better than prison camps. I’ve uploaded a pdf of the report to my website.
http://mjarts.com/samples/Elizabeth_Warren_26-0618.pdf
I was told by an acquaintance on Facebook that my concerns for the treatment of the prisoners at the Southern Border was, ‘a load of crap’—information probably gained from the greatest promulgator of Fake News in this country, the news channel championed by the man in the Oval Office. He won’t attend his own National Security briefings, but he makes time for Fake News each day.
I watched “12 O’clock High” this afternoon, a film about the American airmen who entered the war in Britain before American troops arrived in France…
P-38
The Base Commander has the job of turning a ‘hard luck’ base into a formidable weapon, because that was the only choice available at that point in World War II; troops and materiel were months away from arriving.
“You’ve got to help them, Frank, or they will walk out on you. That’ll be a worse failure than mine was. Give them something to lean on? Call it anything you like.”
“Well, Keith…I don’t believe it. Here’s where we part company.
They’re not boys. They’re men. Too bad to have to find out so young. How old is Bishop?”
“Twenty-one, maybe.”
“It’s tough to have to grow all the way up at 21. But that’s the only way we’re gonna get it done. And I think they can do it. Lean on somebody? I think they’re better than that. If that’s not true, then we’re a dead duck. We’d better find out about it right now. Once and for all.”
I’ve never fought in a war. And I have always had mentors to lean on. I don’t think I would have made it through adulthood without those mentors. My first instance of Adulthood happened while I was building the house I’m sitting in; the house I built for my parents. One day in the middle of winter, cold, tired, wet and relying on heat from a palm-sized fire in the newly-built fireplace, I wanted to quit. My Creator has always been my most-reliable mentor; after a time, I realized that if I quit, my parents would go bankrupt—they didn’t have the money to have a real contractor build the house. They were stuck with me and my modest pay [Minimum wage in 1975 was $2.10/hour; I was paid less]. I had to accept responsibility for my actions. Building the house was my idea—I didn’t want to spend the next 40 years at a drafting board. I knew nothing about building a house. Fortunately, a classmate I hired had a retired father who had built a lot of stuff.
Accepting responsibility for my actions seems to be a lifelong activity for me; sometimes achieving a goal can bring disappointment as well as joy. I ‘expected’ to be somewhat famous by now; this seems like a goal that slides away from me like a bar of soap in the bathtub.
If you research the life of our President, I think you’ll realize that he’s never had to ‘grow up’—meaning that I don’t think he’s ever had to take responsibility for his actions. I think he’s always been able to buy or negotiate himself out of admitting his own failures. A hormonal teenager who only got older; never more mature. He’s lied his way through life; using ‘credit’ to pay his way out of difficulty—or simply letting a business go bankrupt; what he calls a “sound business decision”. Not paying attention to the lives he’s disrupted by his irresponsibility. He simply doesn’t care.
The man has built buildings in this country using Undocumented Aliens to perform the work—the Undocumented don’t complain about their wages—and yet, publicly, in his Presidential Pronouncements, he considers the Undocumented to be a pestilence.
Now he wants the Undocumented imprisoned; or better yet, turned away from our borders. The President has a Constitutional Responsibility to accept asylum seekers. This President and the Vice President, by their spoken and tweeted words, apparently do not accept their Constitutional Responsibilities:
Asylum is a protection granted to foreign nationals already in the United States or at the border who meet the international law definition of a “refugee.” The United Nations 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol define a refugee as a person who is unable or unwilling to return to his or her home country, and cannot obtain protection in that country, due to past persecution or a well-founded fear of being persecuted in the future “on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” Congress incorporated this definition into U.S. immigration law in the Refugee Act of 1980.
As a signatory to the 1967 Protocol, and through U.S. immigration law, the United States has legal obligations to provide protection to those who qualify as refugees. The Refugee Act established two paths to obtain refugee status—either from abroad as a resettled refugee or in the United States as an asylum seeker.
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/asylum-united-states
So, what do we do? We vote. Help to bend the arc of Justice.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 