Glass half-Full and Glass Chimera

The Bloomsbury loneliness

2012-03-05T16:59:00.002-08:00

Luminary lady of the Bloomsbury literary clique, Virginia Woolf, published her novel, The Years, with Harcourt, Brace & Co. in 1937.

On page 296, Nicholas, the mysterious Polish sage, is conversing with Eleanor, Digby's niece. In the story, the year is 1917; German bombs are dropping on London whilst they sit in a cellar at Westminster discussing the soul:

"But how…" she began, "how can we improve ourselves…live more…" she dropped her voice as if she were afraid of waking sleepers, "…live more naturally…better…How can we?"

"It is only a question," he said--he stopped. He drew himself close to her--"of learning. The soul…" Again he stopped.

"Yes--the soul?" she prompted him.

"The soul--the whole being," he explained. He hollowed his hands as if to enclose a circle. "It wishes to expand; to adventure; to form--new combinations?".

"Yes, yes," she said, as if to assure him that his words were right.

"Whereas now,"--he drew himself together; put his feet together; he looked like an old lady who is afraid of mice--"this is how we live, screwed up into one hard little, tight little--knot?"

"Knot, knot--yes, that's right," she nodded.

"Each is his own little cubicle; each with his own cross or holy books; each with his fire, his wife…"

"Darning socks," Maggie interrupted.

Eleanor started. She had seemed to be looking into the future.

What is sad about Nicholas' and Eleanor's dilemma is that they never, in the story or even in their lifetimes, harken to the example of the couple in whose home they are sitting. As the two soulish seekers speak of things that matter, with words that must be said, Renny and Maggie snuggle the children in bed upstairs, which marriage endeavor is the antidote to Nicholas' and Eleanor's loneliness and alienation.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Text dumbed down; pics hyped up

2012-03-03T04:26:00.001-08:00

Maybe you think we evolved from primordial elements or maybe you believe God created us from the dust of the earth.

Maybe we used to grunt and groan and then that became language over time or maybe In the beginning was the Word and we are rising to it.

Maybe neanderthals used to draw pics on their cave walls and now we post pics on utube.

Maybe smart people used to use big fifty-cent words like disengenuous and evbody else used little nickel words like like.

Maybe you think and write in sentences and paragraphs or maybe u text.

Maybe you quote shakespeare or maybe jus utube

Maybe you be rich or maybe u b po. Maybe u b hi or maybe u b lo.

Mabe u b in 99 or mabe u b in 1.

Now as for me, I b me. How bout u?

:-)

Glass Chimera

The Conspiracy thing

2012-02-28T01:56:00.003-08:00

Ok so I met this guy who's convinced that this whole big mess is a conspiracy, most especially the 911 thing. And he had me convinced for a few milliseconds that maybe he's onto something, what with mysterious fluctuations in airline stock prices the day before the towers went down, and that its all oil but I knew that anyway and that cheney knew what was going on and it was all a big plan because you know the govment is out to get us and to get us all constricted into a police state, and now we are in a police state and that explains a lot and theres plenty of proof on the internet that it wasn't passenger planes that did the damage on 911, that it was missiles that hit the pentagon and that there were some asbestos problems in the towers that nobody wanted to fix because it would be too expensive and so the conspiracy arranged to have the towers destroyed and that there is no record in history of a steel structure going down without being calculatedly imploded and that the #7 building was imploded because of incriminating evidence that needed to be disposed of so as not to implicate the mayor and there was a puff of smoke at the grassy knoll and so forth and none of this is really new but you know what? it doesn't worry me because Jesus said:

"You will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not frightened, for those things must take place, but that is not yet the end." Mt 24.

So in a way I already knew about this because we can see and sort of feel that there's something rotten in danmark or somewhere or maybe everywhere you go on earth and we know this because Paul said:

"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places." Eph 6.

So it is not new and this conspiracy thing is really very old and there's nothing new under the sun because its pretty obvious that humans are fairly well messed up maybe even rotten to the core and actually ridden through like bullet holes with depravity which is the old term for the sin nature before sin became in the popular way of thinking just an old freudian repression instead of the undeniable reality that it really is which is plain to see if you look around among the rubble and detritus of our civilization's underpinnings and yes I have discovered this sin nature in my very own damn self but Jesus saved me, back in 1978. That doesn't release me from any responsibility to try and do right in this life, but it does release me from the burdens of trying to correct everybody else's messes, or even try to figure it all out and protest, a la quintessential existential dilemma.

And so maybe you're a marxist and you think that I'm imbibing the opiate of the people by accepting religion and Jesus and so forth but hey its a free country or at least it used to be but I'm free no matter how you slice the rumor mill because Jesus has set me free now put that in your pipe and smoke it. Or maybe you're a fascist and you think my religion is irrelevant and based on old mythologies and legends and is therefore no defense against your will to power. We shall see, you damned bully.

Well there is no denying there is some bad shit going down in this world and maybe there's very little we can do about it because we're all tied down to just makin a livin', doin' the 9 to 5 if were lucky enough to still have a job, and we know they're cooking the unemployment numbers so as to manipulate us and its probably closer to 20% if you include all the people who would still like to be employed but the statisticians think they've given up. (Don't ever give up.) and like I said before what else is new?, and so forth, cuz we don't any of us have time to correct all the bad stuff. But its not your fault anyway. Just take care of your own bad self and do what you need to do. Remember Jesus said:

"…but whoever causes one of these little ones to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to the world because of its stumbling blocks! For it is inevitable that stumbling blocks come; but woe to that man through whom the stumbling block comes." Mt 18

So if you are a conspiracy buff you would do better just to put your faith in Jesus instead of trying to figure out all the bad stuff in this world. And if you are one of the Conspirators, then you better get right with God before its too late, and end your wicked ways.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress.

In Atlanta, cool fizzies and fuzzy worries

2012-02-26T05:46:00.002-08:00

A surprise emotion bubbled up inside of me yesterday at the World of Coke: Joy.

There I was, sitting in the crowded theatre in Atlanta. There, at the epicenter of Coca-Cola's worldwide advertising mastery, whilst I least expected it, the tears rolled. Their fuzzy video trip down memory lane worked its fizzy wonders on me.

But then again anything done in excellence has always moved me to tears.

All the cool retro images of droplet-laden green bottles being lifted to luscious lips on smiling faces had softened my jaded mind. That's how it started. Then somewhere in all the carbonated imagery flow, angel choirs of diverse singers appear, gathered on a mountaintop somewhere in our hopeful world. Their universal brother-sisterhood effervesces as a song: I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. That's when I felt the little drop of Coke rolling down my cheek.

I mean, this whole thing surprised me from the start. I went into it with a curiosity about the history of Coca-Cola, which had started here in Atlanta back in 1865. Dr. John Pemberton had concocted the magic formula back in the day, in his drug store that had existed just a few blocks from where we now stood with this myriad of happy Coke imbibers.

Moving steadily through long (though quite speedy) lines of happy consumers, we had entered the huge pavilion. Disneyesque, it was. And large. Big space, bright, colorful, lots of people, children, and fluidic middle-class abundance at sixteen bucks a pop, maybe less for the kids, I don't know. Ours our grown. Katie was with us.

The cool fuzzies exuberance had gotten to me by the time I had gone through the four or five movies adventures inside. All about the fizzy drink, of course. The last phase of your World of Coke experience comes in the samples corral, where those hundreds of excitable drinkers, me among them, get rounded up for some sweet diversities of tasting. The folks are all spiriting around like bubbles, drawing samples into little clear plastic cups, through a multitude of soda fountains with all cokish drinks of the world.

That's when it got to me. These people are having a great time! Its beautiful! Peace and love, man. And hey--it's Coke, not cocaine. American as mom's McD apple turnover and Chevy Volt. Let us teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

And it burst my bubble of environmental worry that had built up a few days ago while listening to a radio show on recycling. The law of unintended consequences is universally at work here, and throughout the world, wherever you see soft-drink bottles laying in the gutter or on some neglected hillside or roadway, not to mention all the unseen containers in landfills. PET plastic, polyethylene terephthalate, everywhere you go in the world, after I have enjoyed the pause that so refreshes.

It didn't used to be that way.

I mean, when I was a kid-- like, about the age of most of those young'uns we saw at the World of Coke yesterday-- we'd pay bottle deposts at the store when we bought the Cokes. After slurping the drinks down, we'd get the deposits back when we returned the bottles.

Whatever happened to that? One of my best memories was thinking that those much-loved little green glass bottles were being washed and refilled in a Coke plant somewhere, for other smiling drinkers to enjoy.

Glass half-Full

Starbuck's Warning

2012-02-19T15:54:00.000-08:00

Starbuck was the 2nd-in-command of the whaling ship, Pequod, in Herman Melville's classic novel tale, Moby Dick. And a very good first mate he was, that Starbuck: a brave man, having great common sense, keen morality and natural leadership. He was extremely loyal to his captain--so loyal, in fact, that it cost him his life.

The captain he served was Ahab, a character infamous in American literature because of his fatal obsession with a "White Whale," the hugely legendary Moby Dick. Ahab was bent on vengeance against the creature because it had bit his leg off during an early whaling expedition, back in the day.

Early 19th century, that is. Herman Melville published his magnum opus novel, Moby Dick, in 1851.

http://www.amazon.com/Moby-Dick-Collectors-Greatest-Written/dp/B000MMRLGC

If ever you read the book, you'll embark on a literary voyage of prodigious explorations about the whaling industry during that era of history. Melville enshrouded his great tragic tale in massive whale-facts, whale biology, and twined it all about with archaic sailing lingo. Quite a maritime education it is, reading Moby Dick, and thus hauling in, chapter by chapter, great biological truths as copious as the squid in Pacific swells.

And very psychological. Captain Ahab was a real looneytune. But he knew how to rein in his own madness in such a way that it was not readily apparent to most folks, including the unsuspecting mariners who signed up for a 4-year whaling expedition aboard the Pequod under his quirky command. The whaling had company recruited thirty seasoned sailors at Nantucket, to sail around the world and gather great riches by collecting the precious, very costly whale oil, valuable for burning in lanterns for light during that era.

But the unsuspecting sailors didn't know what they were getting into. What they understood to be a potentially profitable whaling expedition turned out to be something quite perilous and different. Halfway across the Atlantic, cranky ole Ahab gets up and starts his eerily obsessive spiel about the White Whale. The irrational look in his eyes indicates that his interest in their exploit is manically different from their own hopeful profit motives. Could be trouble.

In contemporary parlance, you might say Ahab was OCD.

These days, you may occasionally hear people mention, in a casual way, obsessive compulsive disorder. They may even joke about it, with a flippant phrase--"my OCD." For instance, my wife points out to me, whenever we're traveling in an unfamiliar city, that I am obsessive about not ever going in "the wrong direction" just for the sake of getting on some main transportation line or interstate highway. I admit this is mildly obsessive, because our sojourn might possibly be simplified just by heading in the wrong direction for a block or two, or a mile or two, in order to eliminate some other logistical problems.

Ahab's obsession, however, was of a different species. His peculiar OCD allowed him to rein in his madness until the object of his obsession was immediately at hand. This didn't happen in its full destructive capacity until the Pequod had sailed over halfway around the world. His eccentric captaincy permitted the crew to navigate successfully across the Atlantic, down and around the the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, through the Indian Ocean, Indonesia, and out into the vast Pacific where they finally encountered the great Leviathan, Moby Dick.

The truly disorderly part of OCD is when a person's obsession is irrational, and injuriously counterproductive. When the fretful sailors find themselves in the middle of the Pacific tropics, having suffered a multitude of dire warnings, omens, prophetic signs, and a perilous near-death encounter with the phantom himself, Moby Dick, Ahab's irrational obsession is suddenly let loose in all its frothy turbidity:

"Quick!--all hands to the rigging of the boats--collect the oars--harpooneers! the irons, the irons!--hoist the royals higher--a pull on all the sheets!--helm there! steady, steady for your life! I'll then times girdle the unmeasured globe; yea, and dive straight through it, but I'll slay him yet!"

'T'was then that Starbuck spoke his warning, passionately:

"Great God! but for one single instant show thyself, ... never, never wilt thou capture him, old man--In Jesus' name no more of this, that's worse than devil's madness. Two days chase; twice stove to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil shadow gone--all good angels mobbing thee with warnings:--what more wouldst thou have?--Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh, oh,--Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!"

But Ahab didn't listen. His OCD had turned darkly agin' him. In this tragic tale, the consequential fate was laid upon not only his own damned self, but also upon the thirty men under his command.

Be careful, all ye sailors upon this world's myriad of vessels, to whom you entrust your fate!

Glass Chimera

The Give and the Take

2012-02-18T06:14:00.000-08:00

If each person produces

a little more than they receive,

then the increase he induces,

our abundance may retrieve.

But if each citizen collects

more than he does contribute,

our collective task reflects

a deficiency to distribute.

So how can each one be induced

in the system and in the fray

to make more of what's produced

than what he has consumed today?

But does it even make sense

to think of productivity this way,

when dollars turn to cents

and abundance slips away?

I mean the world is really not

so logical as we would wish;

some neglect to give from what they've got

when we pass around the dish.

Some will always get more than they give

while others give more than they get.

We see its just the way folks live.

So get used to it; don't fret.

If you're disturbed 'cause of inequality,

and you find this world's so unfair,

just make the most of your potentiality,

and try to do your fair share.

Selah.

Glass half-Full

The Sanctum Sanctorum

2012-02-13T04:20:00.000-08:00

Before men learned how to tap the great resources of oil from earth's crusty mantle, certain bold mariners ventured onto the high seas in search of the Whale. After harpooning the megacreature and bleeding the life out of it, they would drag it alongside their ship, then hoist the expired leviathan and tie it to the side of the ship. In this position, the sailors would puncture a hole in a sperm whale's head and draw whale oil out from it, sometimes 500 gallons or more. This precious oil would then be stored aboard the ship until they reached port, at which time the ship's captain would present their costly liquid to the owners of the ship. Then the whale oil would be sold. Whaling was thereby a profitable venture for the owners of the ships, and also for the seamen who manned the ships.

The availability of whale oil, as near as I can determine, is what generally got people in the habit of burning oil to produce heat. But in the mid 1800s, the development of kerosene from coal, and petroleum oil, eventually rendered the difficult capture and extraction of whale oil obsolete and cost-ineffective.

Herman Melville explained (1851), in chapters 77 and 78 of Moby Dick, the strange process by which whale men would harvest, from the head of a sperm whale, this unctuous resource, beginning with this description:

"…so the tun of the whale contains by far the most precious of all his oily vintages; namely, the highly-prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure, limpid, and odoriferous state." The "tun", as Melville calls it, is a very large natural cask inside the whale's head wherein the oil is contained. He compares the huge chamber to a famous wine vat in Germany, known as the Heidelburgh Tun.

But at the conclusion of his two-chapter discourse about this unique resource recovery, he refers to the secret inner oil-chamber as the "sanctum sanctorum" of the whale. Sanctum Sanctorum is Latin for Holy of Holies.

To an ancient Israelite, that phrase, when translated to Hebrew, meant the most sacred place in their Tabernacle, and later in the Temple.

To me, "sanctum sanctorum" means the womb of my wife, where our three unique children began their very special lives, when I delivered my very own 23-chromosome spermaceti to be united with the 23 chromosomes in Pat's oocyte.

I bet you didn't think I would end this blog about the sanctum sanctorum of a whale with such a statement so personal, and seemingly irrelevant to the subject, mentioned above, of whale oil.

But I want you to understand that raising children in this world is a whale of a job, and a very precious one, certainly the holiest of all holy projects that any couple could take on.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

The wreck of '97

2012-02-07T19:29:00.000-08:00

Scene 1, Tuesday, Feb 5 2012: I'm listening to DRshow radio discussion about the foreclosures debacle, and being informed, to whit...

Back in '07, the decades-long housing boom starting turning to bust. In the retractive credit emergencies of '08, a plethora of foreclosures broke out rather suddenly, like mushrooms on neglected suburban lawns. Since the big banks had been set up for many years to mostly just dish out loans, the sudden onslaught of foreclosures caught them bureaucratically unprepared.

Swamped with overwhelming unprofitable paperwork, the banks sought to simplify their numerous foreclosure processes. They cut corners and got sloppy in documentation. The big banks got together and devised a way to cut costs, most notably those expenses incurred through courthouse fees and title registrations; they instituted the Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS). Unfortunately, this newly-improvised MERS greatly complicated the later questions surrounding actual ownership of each home. According to Arly in Vermont, a caller on yesterday's (Tuesday, Feb 7) Diane Rehm show, the MERS "broke the chain of title." This later gave rise to mucho confusion. The banks had put MERS together in--remember this--1997.

About ten years later, as the sheer volume of mortgaged-backed-securities slicing and dicing jammed up our banking system, the loss of an easily identifiable thread of ownership for each foreclosed house became, cumulatively, a huge problem, a can of worms, as it were.

But Kathleen Day, of the Center for Responsible Lending, used a better metaphor to describe the situation. During Diane Rehm's discussion, Kathleen referred to the foreclosure mess as a "train wreck." A few minutes later on the radio program Ed Pinto, of the American Enterprise Institute, also used the "train wreck" analogy in his description.

Scene 2, blast from the past...

All of which solved a problem about a phrase--the "wreck of '97-- I had written into a song a few years ago. In composing Boomer's Choice, I included a verse about each decade of our collective American experience, beginning with the 1950's, then covering the '60s, '70s, '80s. After the turn of the century, I was having motivation problems in the writing of a verse for the 90s. In fact, I dilly-dallied around and didn't get to the 1990s verse until the mid-'00s. And when I finally did write that last verse, I combined that decade with those first years of the '00s. I don't know why. But I tossed the phrase "wreck of '97" into that last verse, perhaps flippantly, because I didn't know why the image of a wreck in 1997 arrested my imagination. In fact, I have often wished that I had sung the metaphor as "wreck of '07' because 2007 is when the housing boom really jumped the tracks and ran off the rails.

But now I understand. The wreck of '97 was the MERS contortion of ownership tracks that later provoked a jumping off the financial rails-- the wreck of '07!

So this is what it's come to

2012-02-06T01:31:00.000-08:00

As a working citizen of these United States, I am struggling with this notion of personal responsibility.

Many leaders, most notably our President, speak publicly about the idea that everyone is duty-bound to "do their fair share." This is certainly true.

How do we construct a society in which everybody can be incentivized to "pull their own weight?"

Almost everybody seems to be running out of money. The government is gone hog-wild with uncontrollable spending. Its as if we've got a monster perpetual motion societal machine that grinds up resources and assets and then extrudes them as public benefits--"benefits" if you're poor, "profits" if you're rich.

Some people game the system and do really well at it; they come out smelling like a rose, and richer. The liberals call these "the rich," or the "1%." The Dems and the Occupyers want to up the ante on these opulent types by raising their tax rates, so that there is more for the rest of us. I'm not so sure the system actually works that way. Once assets get ground-up in that perpetual motion spending machine, maybe they're lost forever. Maybe they come out in a black hole somewhere out in space beyond the demoted Pluto.

Other Americans, on the low-income end, barely get by. They wander around looking for employment, and get public assistance--welfare, subsidies, disability, and whatnot. But there seems to be a dropping point, a precipice, at the end of a slippery slope of public assistance. If po' folks have been on the dole long enough they forget (or do they?) how to really look for work. Do they forget how to think like a person who needs a job and must go out and just dam-well find one? Like, the next-one-that-comes along! What if it IS McD's? What if they DO have a diploma that is irrelevant to our present situation? Do they, instead of taking that minimum-wage insult, then choose to ease on into the public fix? Will they drift into our 12-step welfare enablements until they have at last lapsed into a prison of their own making?--a hazy cubicle smoked-up with cigarettes, beer, narcotizing tv, maybe little pops of legally-acquired or not-so-legally-obtained pills? These are the ones that the Repubs and the Tea Partiers want to cut off, because they are not pulling their weight.

In my helpless opinion, we've got dead weight on both ends--the rich skaters and the poor slackers--and there's very little we can do about it. The Dems and the President cannot fix it; the The Repubs and Romney cannot fix it, although they claim that they can. Ha! We'll see about that round about this time 2013. Furthermore, Congressional supercommittees, God help 'em, have passed the buck as business as usual.

I certainly don't know what to do about it, so I guess I'll just go to work this Monday morning--thankful that I have a job-- and hope for the best, and pray: May God help us work this dam mess out in some kind of way that every citizen will somehow find cause to somehow "do their fair share."

So you see I'm praying for a miracle here. But I have faith in God.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Son delivers father, Utah 2007

2012-02-04T05:50:00.000-08:00

Wide. That's what Utah is. And bright. Bright as a sandstone mesa under noonday sun. Dry, as a bone.

That's where we were, two men walking on hot, dusty trail in the middle of Nowhere, Utah. With a pack on the back, an old fifty-something like me couldn't hear the unexpected as it lurked somewhere in the distance.

The near distance, on the middle of the trail, and the same color as the sand itself: death.

Potential, death.
So the old guy, father, couldn't hear death wait for him, just a pebble-toss ahead. The rustle of the pack, the shuffle of feet, the heat of the day. Dad's old ears render him clueless sometimes.
But the son heard, and he responded.

Quickly.
Old dad shuffling right along on the trail, heading directly for death. Suddenly, he is pulled backward rudely, violently.
"Dad!" shouted the son to the father who had given life to him.
Dad got stopped in his tracks, son's hand firmly jerking him back by grab of his pack.

The snake was coiled in the middle of the trail, coiled, rattles just a-hissin' through the desert heat.

Son who had been given life through the father gave life back again. Thanks, son.
(This really happened.)

Glass half-Full

Inevitable forces in history

2012-02-01T03:50:00.000-08:00

There's only so much that a man can do. There's only so that any nation can do, to put a stop to inevitable forces of destruction during their lifetime.

That's not to say they shouldn't try. We've got to somehow oppose the evils in this life, in this time.

This is what I'm thinking about as I research my current writing project, a novel about inevitabilities in the year 1937. Fascism, was a damn near unstoppable force during that time, although the Allies were later able to pull it off when they had defeated the Nazis of Germany, Italy, and Japan by 1945. But there were eight years of pure hell before the beast was put back in his cage.

However, there was another rising tide during those turbulent times of the late 1930s and '40s-- communism. It was in the background. Over yonder in Russia, eastern Europe and China, the ideology of Marx and Lenin was a slumbering giant.

Consider the plights of two military leaders (later political leaders) of that time: Tomas Masaryk of Czechoslovakia and Chiang Kai-shek of China. These two men and their armies were contending against the terrible fascist war machines of their era.

But life is never simple, and the perils of war are never predictable. In Czechoslovakia, Tomas Masaryk was trying to lead his fledgling democratic nation into an alliance with the Allies of the west, most specifically France. However, Vladimir Lenin's revolutionary mustering of the Comintern would inevitably blind-side the Czechs and overtake their democratic impulses, but that didn't happen until the late 1940s, after a whole damn world war, the Second! one, had been fought and driven into the dust of tragic history.

In the 1920s and '30s. the Czech leader, Masaryk, had his hands full trying to deal with the after-effects of German-Austrian militarism (left-over from WWI) even as the fascist beast began to raise its ugly head again as Hitler's zombified nazi war machine.

So it was quite sensible, quite understandable, that Masaryk did not want to take sides in the Russian civil war--communist Reds against nationalist Whites. Masaryk didn't want to involve his people in a bloody Bolshevik struggle when there was still so much to be dealt with on the German side of his problems.

While developing an alliance with the French in the aftermath of WWI, Masaryk and his Czechs neglected the Russian bolshevik threat from the east. But that same Russian bear later reared up in the late '40s and overtook the Czechs anyway.

How could Tomas Masaryk have known? It was all he could do to handle the snake-pit of military and political evils on his western front.

There's only so much a man, or the nation that he is leading, can do.

Chiang Kai-Shek had the same problem in China. His nationalist armies were fighting Mao Tse-tung's communist Reds in the 1930s. Meanwhile, just across the sea, the fascist imperial Japanese were about to devour half of China (and all of China if it could have). The Japs took advantage of the Chinese infighting between Chiang and Mao's opposing forces, until the Japanese threat became so undeniably serious. Both Chinese factions had to lay low against each, even in some cases work together, to run the damn Japs back to their island.

But then after all that had blown over--after the World War in which millions had died--in the late 40s, Mao's unstoppable communists ran Chiang Kai-Shek and his Kuomintang army off the mainland to Taiwan.

There's only so much a man can do. Communism, during the 1940s, was a slumbering, though inevitable, giant in both Europe and Asia. Now, alas, seventy years later, the whole idea of communism--the whole Marx/Leninism platform-- has kind of ground itself into a post-1989 skid; it lingers confusedly with its finger occupying its nose as the world arranges itself into a new set of slings and arrows and inevitable evils and the heroics that oppose them.

Go figure.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

PGD: a stem cell reconciliation?

2012-01-28T08:02:00.000-08:00

When a man and a woman make love and give life together to a new person, this is a beautiful event. The love act is creative in every sense of the word, but most especially because of this: the two lovers have contributed to an eternally procreative art project that has been blooming on our planet for a very long time.

Whoever or whatever the Creator of this life process is, or is up to, is not my question to explore just now, although I have made some decisions in my belief about that question. I merely want to point out a fact or two about the process through which we humans have come to have our individual existences.

Fact #1 is this: you, as a human person, have 46 chromosomes.

2.) 23 of your chromosomes were passed to you from your father; the other 23 came from your mother.

3.) These chromosomes, or coded genetic programs, establish a biological framework for your physical existence and life-long development.

4.) Since the unique man who is your father paired his 23 with the 23 chromosomes within that unique woman who is your mother, then you yourself are unique. You--your particular combination of 46 chromosomes-- had never existed before. So you are a unique creation. Congratulations. There has never been another "you"; nor will there ever be.

These days, microbiologists can husband this human-making process in a laboratory. Believe it or not. It is not as much fun--not nearly as satisfying-- as making babies the time-tested Adam and Eve hubba hubba way. But hey, this test-tube thing is happening. This is what humans, in their quest for improvement, do. The scientific rationale for in vitro fertilization is this: some couples have not been able to conceive a child naturally, and so they can get clinical help to bridge that fertility gap. After obtaining sperm from a man, and an egg from a woman, the microbiologist combines them (in the famous "test tube"), and a new human is begun.

Here's where the scientific work, and the ethical discussion surrounding it, becomes a breeding ground for controversy. My opinion is: Since a unique, never-before-existing 46-chromosome arrangement is manifested in space and time, soon to be flesh and blood--no matter how the conception was facilitated-- we have a new human being our hands. This is creation, by which we men and women participate with the original Creator. And it is serious business, because a person's life--and entire lifetime development--is at stake. There are great--dare I say "sacred" responsibilities present here.

Well, simple enough, really. Not. The further you climb on the tree of knowledge (or the double-helix of DNA), the more complex do your choices become. This is part of what Moses was getting at when he wrote Genesis. But I'll not go there now, as if I could. Anyway, as it turns out, there is another reason that scientists have for working with in vitro embryos. Some of them are leftovers.

Yes, Virginia, the outcome of the test-tube baby boom is that we have thousands, possibly millions, of little embryos suspended in cold-storage, probably at about -196º C. Most of them will never be implanted in a mother's womb. Some of them will be, but not all. So guess what--another thing that's happening is this: the key to medical progress is contained deep within the very life process itself, beginning with its earliest stage, the embryo. These frozen embryos. So the scientific community wants to call these microscopic potentialities into the service of mankind--involuntarily, of course--by harvesting their totipotent genetic characteristics to improve the health of living persons.These little ones are the source for the famous "embryonic stem cell" lines that are cultured in petri dishes in laboratories all over the world.

So then the question becomes, quite infamously: Are we, as a human race of civilized persons, going to allow these suspended potential kids to be sacrificed, for the sake of medical progress, so that already-living persons can have qualitatively better lives?

We don't want to kill those 46-chromosome-bearing new creations just for the sake of heartlessly improving our own already-established lives. That would be, in the biblical sense, not unlike child sacrifice. Civilized people don't do that, do we?

Well guess what. I heard on the radio yesterday that microbiologists have developed a technique for obtaining individual embryonic stem cells from a 3-day embryo (in what's called the "cleavage" stage of fetal development) without killing the embryo. The procedure is called PGD, which stands for pre-implantation diagnosis. In it, the microbiologist extracts a single cell from the 8-cell embryo, leaving the embryo virtually intact for further development and life.

The PGD single-cell extraction procedure has been widely used all over the world. According Dr. Robert Lanza, in his statement during an interview with Ira Flatow on ScienceFriday (NPR), its use is dependable. http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201201275 Dr. Lanza's research pertains to stem cell therapy for improved eyesight in patients who have suffered macular degeneration. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2812%2960028-2/abstract

But what caught my pro-life ear was Dr. Lanza's mention of this technique for obtaining totipotent embryonic stem cells without killing the fetus. The little guy gives up a single cell, then moves on to further development. Assuming the best, maybe its a little like giving blood.

A little further reading brought me to:

http://www.pennmedicine.org/fertility/patient/clinical-services/pgd-preimplantation-genetic-diagnosis/#step-by-step-process and this explanation: "After three days in culture, the embryos typically reach the eight–cell stage. One to two cells are removed from each embryo on day three and analyzed..."

The extracted cell ia generally used for a genetic assessment of the embryo, so that parents, assisted by the scientists and doctors, can make choices about which of the embryos to choose for implantation in the mother's womb. This is another controversial development in the can-of-DNA-worms that constitutes genetic research and practices--"designer babies," and so and so on…

But my interest in this procedure revolves around its potential as a reconciliation between the value that we pro-lifers place on embryonic sanctity, and scientific use of surplus embryos without wholesale killing of them. A little more googling brought me to more info, from a fertility clinic in Houston, where I found this (emphasis mine):

http://www.houstonivf.net/Services/PreimplantationGeneticDiagnosis.aspx

"Preimplantation genetics can be performed in vitro at any of the following developmental stages, the zygote (day 1), cleavage stage (day 3) or blastocyst (day 5). At each of these stages, cell(s) are removed from the embryo for genetic testing in special laboratories. This does not appear to harm the ongoing development of the embryo with over 1000 healthy babies born worldwide after preimplantation genetic screening. However, an insufficient number of babies have been born to confirm that the procedure is completely without risk.

So now I'm wondering: Does this change, at all, the debate between pro-life opponents of embryonic stem-cell research, and the researchers whose microscope sights are trained on all those frozen surplus embryos?

Glass Chimera

Redquity, Whitequity, and Bluequity

2012-01-25T18:04:00.000-08:00

From the moment of our bloody birth

this equality thread's sewn a sturdy seam;

it flaps red dream stripes across our flagg-ed earth,

as justice in a dream.

That sanguine color was borrowed from French egalit'e;

yet runs red on American soil,

so every man and woman's own unique regalit'e

might flourish bright in blood, and sweat, and toil.

Now the extremities of our ruptured economic wounds

draw social sympathy for Occupy Red Square,

while our banner stripes flap o'er flagging glooms.

Does anybody care?

'cause t'was like a row of stony marble whites

set upon each soldier's devotion given wholly,

we laid our solemn hopes and fights

on Arlington ground made holy,

while all across this manifest destiny quest

sprang picket-white fence, and courtly documents

to assure each citizen's effort best

to prosper and to thrive, in enterprising sacraments,

as white stripes snap o'er our flaggy threadbare cares;

they're new as the driven snow,

and prosperity blooms bright on our equity shares

with wealth and health to grow.

We always held high that true blue hope

from mom and pop, of limitless expanding sky,

of deep blue ocean, and work, and cleansing soap,

purple mountain majesty and blueberry pie.

Oh, mister bluebird on my shoulder,

do you still sing with America singing?

Can we whistle and rhyme and yet grow bolder

with our cracked bell of Liberty still ringing?

Hey Bo, can you thump us that delta thang?

But don't tread on my blue ragtime shoes.

Go set yo'self down on the front-porch swang.

Flap us your red, your white, your field of starry blues.

O, say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave?

Does it fly high o'er the level playing field,

while our anthem's strains cry out to save

opportunities to knock and profits to yield?

We're not making equality here,

'cause Nature's God done created that;

we're merely holding these principles dear--

of freedom to blog and liberty to chat!

To gather on the public square,

to prosper, to invest, to build on equity that grew,

to pray and to love and forever to care,

to flow red, flap white, and shine like the starry blue.

Glass half-Full

The one thing that stops politics

2012-01-22T06:13:00.000-08:00

A politician was talking about the unfortunate condition of his government:

Since the economic had begun…

…growing numbers of Agrarians maintained that the state was ungovernable without their participation, and that their party was the only one capable of managing the state…In the summer of 1933, Beran himself was of the opinion that the rising root of aggravation was an exaggerated school education, and (that), for a child subjected to education, a country person 'began to stink of horse piss.'

'We have the most educated proletariat…the government has to perform miracles, so as to be able to maintain an army of tramps who mainly despise work…so that an unemployed worker would not have to leave town for the countryside and ask a farmer for a job.'

The state would never get out of its difficulties without reducing lavish unemployment benefits, 'this social monster which the socialists have created…'

The politician who presented this position was Rudolph Beran, a leader in the Agrarian party of Czechoslovakia during the 1930s. His assessment was supported largely by rural folks who populated a region known as Sudetenland. Many of the these Agrarians were ethnic Germans whose loyalties were gravitating, during the '30s, toward support for German occupation of their region of the Czech lands. The passage above was quoted from The Life of Edvard Benes, 1884-1948, by Zbynek Zemen with Antonin Klimek (Oxford, 1997)

However, after a while the extremist rhetoric didn't really produce much benefit to anyone. In 1939, all the polarizing politics that had been cranked out between fascist and communist extremes in eastern Europe went up in smoke, because Hitler's war blew all the manipulative politics to smithereens.

Europe in the 1930s was a festering boil of political infection and belligerence that eventually erupted as World War II. At the core of the contagion was a warm-up war of opposing ideologies: fascism and communism. Fascism was being force-fed by Germany and Italy. Communism was perpetrating through the nascent Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, led by Russia.

Pretty much the whole developed world was suffering through an economic depression. The democratic nations, primarily France, Great Britain, and their smaller allies, were grasping at security straws. In their faltering attempts to preserve peace and what was left of prosperity, the liberal democracies were attempting to follow a political course between the two extremes of fascism and communism. This was no easy agenda, given the extremities with which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Russia were polarizing their own internally bloody pathologies along with the other nations under their influence.

The most fervent expression of these death-wish ideologies was being hammered out in eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia and Poland, two regions or "nations" that had long been areas of exploitative manipulations between the larger powers, were destined to become the flash points of the world's next "great war"--the one that the last "great war" (1912-1918) had purported to avoid.

Czechoslovakia was a fledgling democratic republic during the '20s and '30s, having been established in the remnants of the Austria-Hungary empire that had dissipated after 1918 and the end of World War I. But this new Czech nation was a fragmented check-list of ethnic groups: Czechs, Sudetan Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians, and a few others.

A multiplicity of political identities in 1930s Czechoslovakia generated a swirling frenzy of discontents. The most intense Czechoslovakian rivalries were in the western border districts, the Sudetenland, where a plurality of ethnic Germans held to Deutschland traditions and loyalties. This hotbed of opposing discontents is where World War II found its first militarized eruptions.

During 1938, Hitler's impudently pagan will-to-power intimidated British and French politicians into submissive strategies of appeasement. The Munich Pact conceded Sudetenland to the third reich, and assigned the Czechs to an impotent role as pawns in the game. Czech leaders had not even been consulted; nor were they present when the sellout deal with the devil was signed in Munich in September. The Nazi wehrmacht's ensuing occupation of Sudeten Czech lands set the terrible stage for Hitler's invasion of the Czech lands in March 1939.

But Czechoslovakia was just a wehrmacht warmup for the full-scale blitzkrieg of Poland that came in September of '39. That's when the Allies finally woke up to smell the smoke of hitlerian deception and destruction. Then they began to mobilize the Allied resistance that ultimately became successful by 1945. But World War II was no walk in the park.

A lot has changed in our world since then. Today our politics and war rationalizations display a few discernible parallels with those turbulent times past. Now the players on the stage are the same, but different. European ideological extremities have synthesized somewhat, a la Hegelian dialectics, morphing to "the West." Meanwhile in Eurasia the old kid on the world block--Islam--rises as a newly energized force-field. It will exert polarizing effects to religiously neuterize our old ideologies into kaffirific irrelevance. Could be a volatile situation, especially if you factor in the spark-breathing dragon in the far East.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Dr. King and me

2012-01-16T04:13:00.000-08:00

In my sixty years, I remember no fellow-American whose courage and true patriotism surpasses that of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I grew up in Mississippi and Louisiana, two states of the deep south, where the legacy of Dr. King's work--his love of mankind, his tireless work for freedom, and his ultimate sacrifice--made its most enduring impact.

In the constant struggle for human justice in this nation and in our world, he was a vigilant prophet and laborer. As a fallen soldier in that cause, Dr. King was one of those whom Lincoln had presciently memorialized at Gettysburg a hundred years prior, with this assessment: he paid the "last full measure of devotion," by giving his life so that others could live free from slavery and oppression.

I will never forget the effect of his prophetic life on me and the generation I grew up with. The people of our United States should not forget.

In 1978, the year that I joined the ranks of Christian faith, a faith that Dr. King openly proclaimed and by which he was forever inspired, I wrote this song about him and Moses, after climbing Mt. Pisgah near my home in North Carolina. Perhaps you will be inspired by this great legacy, as I was:
http://www.micahrowland.com/carey/Mountaintop.mp3
Mountaintop

Something from Nothing

2012-01-14T07:49:00.000-08:00

Today, I am going to expose to you my ignorance of quantum mechanics in the study of physics. Furthermore, you will plainly see that my childish grasp of the physicists' exposition of this phenomenon is woefully inadequate, even naive. But it doesn't matter if you can detect right off the bat how blatantly dense is my take on the matter. You see, I am one of those who short circuits the rational pursuit of truth by inserting faith in a Creator where there should by all hypothetical propositions be an equation, or some hard-earned experimental data.

It all started with this: http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201201132, wherein Lawrence Krauss is discussing the contents of his new book, A Universe From Nothing, with Ira Flatow, and Lawrence makes such potentially gravitational statements as "Nothing is unstable," meaning that nothingness itself is unstable, insofar as that it has a habit of generating stuff out of itself (nothing) out in space.

"Empty space is a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time scale so short that you can't even measure them."

Spontaneous generation, we used to call it, and thinking about it is, as Lawrence points out, a little bit "like counting angels on the head of a pin."

But somewhere in the half-life of Lawrence's broadcast/webcast explanations, what really set my neurons hurdling into photonic frenzies is this idea that an electron, which is whirring somewhat orbitally around a proton, cannot be adequately assessed in terms of its position in relation to the proton, or in relation to, for that matter (haha) anything else. This is because, as soon as the analyst, or scientist, casts light on the subject particle(wave) in question, in order to view the electron and make some kind of determinating statement about it, the light (the energetic effect of the light) itself alters the quarky little rascal, rendering its position indeterminable! Imagine that! Like trying to herd cats.

And Lawrence also mentioned:

"Whole universes can pop out of nothing, by the laws of quantum mechanics."

Ha! I was stumped.

I tried, well into the evening and the nighttime, to wrap my warpish mind around all this, which must resemble a light beam trying to keep up with a neutrino, as the French say in Switzerland. I was getting a little short on the fourth dimension while trying to capture the essence of those quarks in question and fathom their unquantifiable fidgettance. And then, as if that weren't enough produndity to drag my faltering comprehension into a blackhole, Paul Krugman's recent comparison between Austrian economics and the 18th-century theory of phlogiston in chemistry popped out of nowhere, not to mention Higgs-Boson confusion on top of that, and...

while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping. . . and the faith-based short circuit suddenly presented itself, when my friend Dave sent out his daily ditty, http://outdeep.com/2012/01/13/light-in-our-heart , which started with this conveniently accessible concept:

For God, who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” (2 Corinthians 4:6)

to which my friend had also added:

"The sovereign creativity of God to bring forth what to us would have been unthinkable is staggering. This artistic endeavor of the Divine is used to illustrate the similar work of enlightening my heart."

Wherefore, I in my lay-like confusion decided to just go with that, call it a day, and hit the hay, where my wife was so peacefully sleeping in preparation for today's nursing duties. I had found a universal incarnation that I could wrap my weary mind around. Now this morning, the sun shines brightly on snow out in the back .40. Thank God for a beautiful winter day here in the inexplicable universe. Ignorance is, as they say, bliss. Grits is good too, for breakfast, with cheese.

Glass half-Full

Severity

2012-01-10T04:08:00.000-08:00

Just because I grew up with you

doesn't mean

I have to condone your way of doing things,

your slackery get down party hard irrelevance,

because your slatherin relativity

will wither

in the hot wind of rigid sharia shakedown.

Just because I hunker down

at the onslaught of your slitherin sitcom triviality

doesn't mean

I have to concede to your casting spells,

because your broadcast of splinterin smithereens

will splatter

on the heartless blade of swaggerin sword.

Just because we part ways,

you to broad and me to narrow,

doesn't mean

I don't love you,

'though your stumble on slippery slope

will sever

our simple serfish slavery.

But when you strive to crucify

the likes of me

then don't be surprised at what's to come thereafter.

Selah.

Glass Chimera

Foundation for Debt Ceiling Research

2012-01-08T05:49:00.000-08:00

Now is the time for all top dawgs to come to the aid of their country, y'all.

I'm talking about heavy hitters like Warren Buffett and Donald Trump, people whose impact can really make a difference. If Donald and Warren want to contribute their money-gathering expertise to our national improvement, I propose they should organize three great charitable fundraising events. I'm suggesting that these guys do it because I'm just, like, one little guy with a big idea. But these two have the real wherewithal to get something done in the interests of balanced fiscality.

So, the first fundraiser would be a prize-fight in Atlantic City featuring George Soros v. David Koch.

The second would be a fight in Las Vegas between Bill Ayers and Charles Koch.

The third would be a tag-team wrestling match with the four heavyweights in Chicago.

Referees would be Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid.

Rush Limbaugh and Chris Matthews would serve as the official voices of USA Spurts.

All proceeds would go to the brand-new Foundation for Debt Ceiling Research, to be fiduciarially managed jointly by Goldman Sachs and ACORN.

So Warren and Donald, when you get a minute, give me a call and we'll get going on this thing.

Glass Chimera

a little Czech wisdom

2012-01-07T20:22:00.000-08:00

"The real test of a man is not how well he plays the role he has invented for himself, but how well he plays the role that destiny assigned to him."

Jan Patocka, spoken to Vaclav Havel, both of whom were spokesmen for

Charter '77, in Czechoslovakia

Glass half-Full

a little Vaclav Havel family history

2012-01-05T03:19:00.000-08:00

Almost 23 years ago, Vaclav Havel led the people of Czechoslovakia in a revolution that ousted four decades of Soviet communist rule. Early in his life, Vaclav had been a dissident playwright; When the Soviet was rejected in 1989, he became, despite persecution and imprisonment, President of liberated Czechoslovakia, and in 1993 President of the Czech Republic.
Vaclav Havel died a few weeks ago, on Dec. 18.

Vaclev had come from a good family. His grandfather, Vacslav Havel, had held a venerable role as a civic leader in Prague during the the first decade of the 20th century. A notable component of Vacslav's (with an "s" in the middle) legacy, and the legacy of his family, was a grandiose Prague landmark, called the Lucerna Palace, the construction of which was begun in 1907.
Consider this historical account of what happened to the Havel family's creatively constructed heritage, before and after a communist government nationalized it in 1949.

From page 37 of Eda Kriseova's biography of Vaclav Havel:
http://www.amazon.com/Vaclav-Havel-Authorized-Eda-Kriseova/dp/0312103174

"Vacslav Havel, Vaclav's grandfather, built Prague's Lucerna Palace, an arts and entertainment center that was on a par with that of any great European city. It was his life's work. He loved Prague and wanted to do something that would promote Prague from an Austro-Hungarian provincial town to a great city…
"…and from time to time, he consulted his wife, Emilie. In his memoirs, Vaclav's father writes: 'When his (Vacslav's) project was finished, he showed my mother his suggestion for the facade on Vodickova Street. As soon as she saw it, she exclaimed that it was like a great big lucerna, or lantern. May father jumped at her remark, saying: That's a good name for the whole building, Lucerna, It is a Czech word that even a foreigner could pronounce well.' "
"During the first stage of development from 1907 to 1908, they built the building on Vodickova Street and its courtyard wing. Grandfather Havel built Lucerna in three stages at his own expense with the help of bonds and mortgages. He and his wife, Emilie, guaranteed the repayment of the loans with all their property as collateral."

Continuing, from page 38 of Eda Kriseova's biography of Vaclav Havel:

"The ambitious concept of a single enterprise for entertainment, haute cuisine, and culture was crowned by the construction and inauguration of the Great Hall in 1920. The hall was submerged three stories below ground; above it stood a seven-story building. It was the largest underground concert hall in Prague. For the construction of the hall, Vacslav Havel innovated the use of steel-reinforced concrete for the pillars and ceilings, designed and engineered by Stanislav Bechyne, later a member of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. The construction was a worldwide rarity.
"…after the war (World War II), the Communists nationalized the Lucerna Palace."

But 18 years before World War II, When Vacslav had died in 1921, ownership of the Lucerna had passed to his son Vaclav (senior, father of the late President Vaclav), from whose possession it was later taken when the communists took over in 1949. From page 84 of Kriseova's biography of Vaclav Havel:

"According to Vaclav's father's memoirs, 1952 was the family's most difficult year. Mr Havel had to leave the Lucerna. It had not belonged to him for three years, but they had allowed him to work there. He worked well and his employers liked him. The final parting was hard for him, because he was attached to the business by countless emotional ties, by his family tradition, by his whole life."

Something tells me that this is not the way things should happen. A family was robbed of its legacy by a communist government. The government later allowed the former owner to work as an employee.

If you care to know more about this Lucerna Palace of Prague and the Havel family who built and managed it until it was taken from them, then look it up, or google it. My point here is that there have been times in human history when the hard-earned legacy of an enterprising family was absconded by a redistributive totalitarian government. Among the many forms of injustice in history, this misappropriation is one of them. It happens when a meddlesome State steals property from the so-called bourgoisie (merchant class), or when a statist government, for purposes of leveling income inequality, occupies the assets of "the rich."

Here in America, we value and constitutionally protect the rights of individual citizens and families to own private property and manage it as they deem necessary. Let's keep it that way.

Glass half-Full

We have some choices.

2012-01-02T08:38:00.000-08:00

So what we have here in a finite world of limited resources but unlimited potential is a set of questions about who gets what, how they get it, what they do with it, and how others are then affected by it and what happens as a result.

Not to mention that old bugaboo colonialism and its modernized morphosis, imperialism, which leads to the questions of corporatism vs. statism, exploitation, nationalization, banana republic, democratic republic, wealth generation, wall street and main street, city and country, urb and suburb, resource distribution, income redistribution, socialism capitalism communism fascism naziism islamism theism atheism existentialism nihilism modern- and postmodernism, vassal and free, serf and freedman, indentured or not, enslaved or liberated, liberal or conservative, liberal and neoliberal, conservative and neocon, collectivist or free marketeer, giver or taker, regulator or regulated, revolutionary or reactionary, propheteer or pamphleteer, opportunist or freeloader, work or disability, employment or un-, welfare or entrepreneurware… shades of gray, white, black, good and bad, sheep and shearer, lambs and wolves, law-abiders and anarchists, law-enforcers and criminals, guards and prisoners, cops and robbers, good cop bad cop, preppies and greasers, achievers and slackers. movers, shakers, slouches, pacifists, soldiers, warlords or house of lords, life and death situations, to be or not-to-be, and everything in between, fish or cut bait.

And whether property will be private or public, and what you can do with it, and whether the government will take on all responsibilities for everybody's welfare, or whether individuals will hold themselves responsible, or some blend thereof.

These are the choices that challenge us in 2012. Good luck with that. Be warm and prosper, and whatever you choose to do, vaya con Dios.

Glass half-Full

Blogenomics and The Economist

2012-01-01T06:22:00.000-08:00

What's amusing is that The Economist employs a lyrical framework from John Lennon's Revolution song, to contextualize their current analysis of blogo-economics. While the late Mr. Lennon fancied himself a working-class hero, the clever writers at The Economist fancy themselves as pop-culture revisionists, capable of synthesizing Liverpoodlian sardonics with marginal economics.

The Economist, that notable London rag conceived in the fervor of British mercantilism 170 years ago, has scored quite a smashing insight with its treatment of Marginal Revolutionaries, on page 51 of the current print edition, the last of 2011. While minting out differences between the the three currently relevent blogecons--Neochartalists, Market monetarists and Austrians--this magazine has also managed to expose its own most fundamental blind-spot.

After a page or two of expostulating on the nuanced difference between the two Keynesian perspectives--the Neochartalists and the Market monetarists, the Economist's exploratory prose finally hovers about the Austrian school. Those frugal, post-von Mises thinkers, harboring such "pre-Freudian inhibitions" as they do, argue that central banks distort the business cycle with "malinvestment." The long and short of it is that such overblown, centralized malinvestment distortion diverts precious capital-- which should be opportunized for "long-gestation investment projects"-- to "more immediate gratifications", or short-term stuff. Such as, I presume, the meandering shopping notions of a fickle consumer public.

But what really got my goat--cluelessly intuitive Austrian neophyte that I am--is this statement, which occurred at the conclusion of The Economist's Austrian exposition on page 54 or the article:

"But this malinvestment cannot explain why 21.8 Americans remain unemployed or underemployed five years after the housing boom peaked."

To which I was, like, lol, and like, duh!: Outsourcing!

What's America going to do? What's America going to do now that developing nations are producing, at a third the cost, all those durables that we were cranking out so prodigiously a hundred years ago?

The grand ole days of American industrifest destiny are gone forever! Gone, for the most part, are the washing machine assembly lines. Flownaway are the Maytags and the Whirlpools! Where are the great teeming steam-belching factories of days gone by? Cranking out microwaves and cars and blenders and suspenders and goodness-knows-what-all? Gone to BRICs, almost every one. When will they ever learn? Your unabashedly globalist predisposition doth bare naked your naivete, Mr. Economist.

Back in the day, we used to dig gargantuan tonnages of raw stuff out of the ground and expend vast amounts of capital, labor, energy, and toil and sweat to produce copious goods that were shipped off to Sears and Wards and then Kmart and what not, so that the huddling masses yearning to be free of discomfort and liberated from their meager immigrant existence could graduate to becoming middle class Americans with picket fences double garages dogs in the yard microwaves not to mention tvs and radios and then vcrs, personal computers, xboxes, pet rocks and laptops.

But now? What do we yankess make from nothing now? Carbon emissions? Ha!

Nowadays, about the only thing that Americans produce from raw resources is food: grains and meat, vegetables. The only true wealth that we generate comes from our vast breadbasket of food production, farming and ranching. The third world hath undercut us with their burgeoning new economies, and left us first-worldians in the dust!

Think about that. Its time for us couch potatoes to get back to the earth. Maybe the woodstockian children of God walking along the road (as Joni called them) were on to something: Gotta get back to the land and set my soul (my economy) free. We are stardust, baby! because you see, as Ringo once explained in a car commercial: "This is not your father's Oldsmobile."

Now there's your Revolution, Mr. Lenin! or excuse me, Mr. Lennon. And there, Mr. Economist, is your fourth estate of the emerging blogosphere econs: the fundamentalist school of economics. To whit: People have to eat. And although they may "consume" manufactured goods and services, they do not eat most of them. We cannot digest iPads, nor iPods, nor drycleaners nor hairstylists, nor federal reserve notes, no matter how easily our banks and bigboxes have quanitatively acquired them.

Oh ye media-lobotomized Americans! Food is where its at. Do your due diligence now; prepare to invest in it. Dig into the back .40. Get your hands soily. There's the "real" growth potential with which those NGDP (nominal gross domestic product)-touting market monetarist free-spenders will someday eat their theoretical words.

Glass half-Full

Proofrock twits and tires that roll

2011-12-31T09:42:00.000-08:00

(with tentative apologies to T.S. Eliot)

Let us drive, then, you and I
when the morning spills out from suburban sky,
let us drive and let us now commute
from suburban grass to urban loot.
Let us crawl on shrubbish cul-de-sacs
where networked souls run tribal tracks
to lead us to an underwhelming question:
Just don't ask us why it is
that engines purr and tired wheels whiz
while red lights come and green lights go
twitting tweets of decaprio.

The gray exhaust that rubs its back
upon our concrete ribbon track
slithers down and wanders up
through traffic jam with coffee cup;
we measure out our days in pixel spoons
with idling fumes and idol tunes,
while texting out the urgent news
that paris is yearning, wall street has a short fuse.
On the cells girls come, and women go
tweeting of bieber and decaprio.

And indeed there is time at the traffic light
before red turns green and tweet turns trite,
to wonder "Do I dare?" and "How's my hair?"
To think of debts but not to care--
and would it have been worth it after all
to call my prince, so cute, so tall?
while johny boy in the middle lane
dreams of bustin out and raisin cane.
But they all grow old, and faces fold;
they shall eat their pastries rolled.

We have lingered in the intersections of the game,
with idling pipes and spirits lame;
we wait to crawl, mutating paws
o'er ancient seas with neo-claws.
Throughout our sprawl and tyrannies of the urgent
lurk restless souls that stir, insurgent.
But we do grow old, we grow less bold;
we shall wear our courage rolled,
while on the freeways we come and go
dreaming of Jeanie and Michelangelo.

Glass Chimera

The Two Trees

2011-12-24T06:33:00.000-08:00

I took just a few bites of it--
a few chapters--
and already I knew too much,
more than I can handle now.
To know the truth
if it is the truth
(for who can you believe?)
To know that terrible truth,
to hear the dark pinochet ricochet
even now
thirty years later--
that the so-called chicago boys
put those chile storm troopers up to it?
This knowledge is to terrible for me,
if it is knowledge,
And that sinister suharto shock
heard round the world
Am I supposed to feel
like responsible for this mess?
like I can do somethin about it?
Am I supposed to go out
and clean up all that shit
thats going down?
still going down?
Take up the jacobin club?
--start down that lenin road
that leads to the stalin road
the mao path--
cultural revolution, because of classified wikileaks
because of class-war hijinks
what kinda revolution do they have in mind
when the mob turns impatient
starts to turn
to occupy what? the human condition!
schmoccupy!
a fruit stand in Tunis?
a flaming vision of hell on utube.
There's no end to that burning.

A plague upon your houses!
There must be a better way
than pissin in the ocean
or in the park.
There must be a better way
than jerkin' cia strings
and coup d'etat blings.

I can eat no more from this tree now.

I just need to find something else
now,
because all my yankee hope
was sunk into that american dream
and if that dream of hard work bootstraps and get ahead of the game
turns nightmare behind the ugly scenes
with shock doctrine and torture,
i just cant...

I know now why the other tree
satisfies.
Its not too late for the other tree
the one that brings life
not guilt.
I'm not responsible for this stuff.

Come out of it my people.
Because of what Jesus did
I will eat from the other tree.
That's a better choice than Abraham had,
and sure the hell better than Mohamet
or Mao.
That's my story and I'm stickin to it.
Merry Christmas from the Garden,
Gethsemane, that is.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Equality, divinely inspired

2011-12-18T16:55:00.000-08:00

About 27 centuries ago, a prophet named Isaiah lived in the Jewish home-city, Jerusalem. He spoke presciently to his countrymen about the dire condition and future direction of their waning theocracy. Among the many figurative utterances that Isaiah spoke to his people during those turbulent times was this cataclysmic declaration:

"Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain."

Two and a half millenia later, the composer George Frideric Handel appropriated this mountainous prophecy for the the introductory elements of his classic musical oratorio, The Messiah.

In any venue where the piece is performed, Handel's masterpiece of Messianic fervor begins with a dynamic, stringed baroque overture. Then, in clear, declarative recitative, the bold tenor voice announces that Jerusalem's warfare is done, divine absolution is on the way, and now is the time to "make straight in the desert a highway for our God."

Since a highway requires some earth-moving preparatory work, the tenor's exposition continues with Isaiah's earth-shaking analogy that I mentioned above:

"Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain."

But there is much more going on here in the scriptural proclamation than a proposal for highway construction. Isaiah was enunciating a foundational principle of Jewish identity, and later Christian hope: Justice. And not just any old legal notion of justice, but a divinely-appointed equality among God's people that is achieved when their societal field is providentially leveled and everyone has opportunity to live bountifully.

Now, what I'm wondering is: Will this God-sanctioned hope for justice on earth be accomplished through the Almighty's sovereign mandate upon his people, or do we, as God's people (if you count yourself among that group as I do) need to get busy and make the righteous vision happen?

If Isaiah's echoing, metaphorical call to level the playing field resonates in your soul-- if you can glean from his prophetic vision a possibility that someday the lowly will be raised up, and the high and mighty humbled--if you can catch a glimpse of a coming kingdom in which mercy and grace obliterates oppression and injustice--then you may someday be singing that Hallelujah chorus with Isaiah and Handel in the Messiah's grand finale.

I Hope to see you there.

Spirit in the Wild Wood: Part Two of Witnesses

2011-12-17T06:10:00.000-08:00

Spirit in the Wild Wood: Part Two of Witnesses

Trouble

2011-12-17T00:46:00.000-08:00

Trouble I'm scared
of what gonna happen
Just give me democracy
I want it now
not aristocracy
cant handle no meritocracy
gotta slide to mediocrity
gotta save my middle classity
keep my couch potata rutabaga raava
dis the inequality
cant balance the frugality
cant handle no fragility
cant locate my ability
dam the ram idolotry
I'm crying for veracity
but findin volatility
Just give me liberty
or give me debt--
debtitudinal longitudinal polarizational globalizational hesitational
notional value unfathomable oceanal
debt!
need seratonin give me oxytocin
with comfort lotion potion notion ocean
no emphatic static
no radical shmadicals
to hell with chaos pathos loss and dross.
I see a cross.
Forgive them.

The Nature of the Beast

2011-12-12T15:42:00.000-08:00

Since I am a 1973 grad of Louisiana State University, which has a football team presently destined to, once again, soon earn the title of National Champion, I'm thinking about the LSU Tigers.

That legendary squad of coonass athletes, for as long as my sixty years will allow me to remember, has been a hallowed institution in my original hometown, Baton Rouge. The great gridiron squad, and the venerable institution of higher learning from which it had sprung, represented for my daddy, my mama, me, my brother, nieces, nephews and sisters (all alumni), and every other crawfish-chompin citoyen in the bayou state, the paragon of football excellence. And the team carried that elevated status even before the rest of football nation ever acknowledged our unique mastery of the game by bowing to tigerly domination that had manifested in ages past, such as in 1958, along with contemporary victories as exhibited in this present season and, and no doubt, the striped future.

And since I was thinking about them thar tigers (as we say in the Appalachian mountains where I now live), I decided to open up your awareness to a plotly development from my second novel, Glass Chimera, because the scene involves a Tiger, which is the mascot at LSU.

Remembering that I spent freshman year in North Stadium dormitory, right there in the Death Valley stadium of old, and across an oak-lined street from Mike the Tiger's cage, I post herewith this uncommon incident from chapter 6 of Glass Chimera. It depicts, long story short, a tiger who is hanging out in the untigerly environment of a New Orleans boulevard (don't ask), and feeling a little bit out of place:...

“Ha. She’s having second thoughts about the escape, wondering if it was the right decision.” They chuckled.

“She’s definitely out of her comfort zone,” said Nao.

“And yet she seems so utterly comfortable,” Robby observed. “What’s strange is. . .she could make one hell of a ruckus if she wanted to. She could turn this place upside down with confusion if she chose to.” He thought for a moment. “I wonder what her genetic inclinations are. I wonder if the years of captivity have conditioned her beyond her wild, natural response to what could be a dangerous setting.”

“The human world, a dangerous setting,” said Rosa, with a hint of irony.

“Definitely dangerous for her, if she’s not in a cage.”

Case in point.

The sedated, somewhat surreal stillness of Napolean Avenue at that moment was interrupted by the sudden, though stealthy, approach of a stalker, skilled in this sort of thing. Gray/white/black camouflage occluded his purposed arrival upon the scene. He had a rifle in his arms, and it was poised in the ready position. Not yet aiming, but ready. The hunter, whoever he was, was looking steadily at the cat. He was speaking to her in his mind. He knew her mind. He had hunted her in the far reaches of the savannah, in Africa. Not her, however. But one like her. He knew about wild animals. He knew what they were capable of.

He knew about wild animals.

Calcutta took notice of her stalker’s arrival by rising from the position of rest that she had assumed, rousing from her uninvited survey of the boulevard below, with its manufactured menagerie of streetlight-streaked mechanical beasts having paws of rubber and snouts of chrome.

She growled. She is, after all, a tiger. And she didn’t like this one bit. Her instinct was demanding a response. She howled. She’s savage, not tech-savvy, not aware of the power of projectiles and triggers.

She leaped.

If this encounter bites into your curiosity at all, you'll have to read the book to find out what happens before and after it. Otherwise, I'll leave you with this declaration:

Go Tigers!

Schumpeter's "creative destruction"!

2011-12-05T19:58:00.000-08:00

Several centuries ago, capitalism germinated out of the decomposing European feudalism that preceded it.
Because capitalism became so prolific in its unprecedented capacity for creating wealth, it was simultaneously destructive of the pokey old way of doing things in the feudal world.
.
Creative destruction is not just an operative dynamism of capitalism's beginnings; it is a working principle by which wealth-generating capitalist enterprises compete with each other. Just as any team on an athletic field strives to build up its own score while destroying the opponent's defenses, so does the successful capitalist enterprise hone its productivity and efficiency in order to build its own market share, while at the same time destroying its competitors' efforts to do the same thing...

while expanding more, more, and more, until what began as free-market entrepreneurial wealth creation has morphed into monopolistic constriction that stifles new enterprise.

Ironically, the creative dynamism of capitalism's modus operandi is the very same thing that ultimately sets the stage for its own obsolescence and...demise.
Will Capitalism, in the long run, work itself out of a job, and gobble up fledgling entrepreneurs to the point of snuffing out the very entrepreneurial spirit that give birth to it? Might capitalism shoot itself in the foot, and maybe even, by its own "creative destruction," someday destroys itself?

Suffocate itself with layers and layers of derivatives and credit default swaps? Maybe, or maybe not. We shall see, perhaps in our generation.

Joseph A. Schumpeter, a Moravian/American economist of the 20th century, very cleverly coined a phrase, "creative destruction," to identify this fatalistic tendency of capitalism. Here are a few quotes that I pondered from his 1942 book, Can Capitalism Survive?, which is part of a larger treatise, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.

~"It is true that the facts of industrial concentration do not quite live up to the ideas the public is being taught to entertain about it."

~"The capitalist process pushes into the background all those institutions, the institutions of property and free contracting in particular, that expressed the needs and ways of the truly 'private' economic activity."

~"The capitalist process, by substituting a mere parcel of shares for the walls of and the machines of a factory, takes the life out of the idea of property. It loosens the grip that once was so strong--the grip in the sense of the legal right and the actual ability to do as one pleases with one's own."

~"Unlike any othe type of society, capitalism inevitably, and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization, creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest."

Tonight, Monday night, I was considering these points from Joseph Schumpeter's seventy-years-ago observation, and how he thought that capitalism's ruthless opportunism might ultimately become its demise. Then the ravenic trepidations of another writer, one who had lived a century before Joseph Schumpeter, crossed my mind, and...

"while I nodded, nearly napping,
suddenly there came a tapping,
as of someone gently rapping,
rapping at my chamber door..."

quoth the Capital, More, more, more!

How much more is there?

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Shades of things to come

2011-12-04T05:03:00.000-08:00

"It might have been seventy million years ago that a large asteroid hit the earth somewhere near Cancun. And it might have been that the big space-tossed boulder would have thrown such a cloud of dust and disturbance into the earth’s atmosphere that it probably altered the pecking order of biological kingdoms for thousands or even millions of years thereafter.

Earth shaking events. They happen.

It might have been that the severe rearrangement of earth’s biomes had put a major crimp on the old dinosaurs. Maybe they became like DOS after Microsoft, just slipping down into the dark hidden recesses of the new program, relegated to subterranean, hydrocarbon pools of potential energy, their giant-generating introns and exons having been unraveled and liquefied like the assets of international corpuses and cartels that would later profit from their demise. It might have been that the superbad, supermad totally-rad reptile kings and queens of the jungle could no longer compete with the smaller, sleeker, smarter, uppity mammals who were in the ascendancy and currently favored by the committee for Natural Selection. It might have happened that way. And maybe the superbad supermad totally rad reptile kings and queens of the jungle found themselves faltering, over the next few eons, losing their command of the playing field, becoming more and more baffled at their waning ability to throw their weight around any more, until finally they just, maybe, gave up the ghost and conceded their diminished reptile role to those miniscule, dust-lickin’ mutated cousins who would later distill all that serpentine angst and alienation into a venomous infusion of death—inflictible on those new-kid-on-the-block mammals who were ruining the neighborhood. Equipped with the ugliest, hissingest triangulated head that God ever allowed on a breathin’ creature, these slitherin’ peabrains could nevertheless still proudly carry on, simply by opening their mouths, the dominance and intimidation of their ancestors. Speak of the devil……

“Watch out for the damn snake!” yelled Simon."

from chapter 19 of Glass Chimera

And this just in, Cen0zoically speaking...from Ezekiel, at the River Chebar, among the diasporas:

" Thus says the Lord God, 'Behold, I am against you, O Gog, prince of Rosh, Meshech, and Tubal. I will turn you about, and put hooks into your jaws, and I will bring you out, and all your army, horses and horsemen, all of them splendidly attired, a great company with buckler and shield, all of them wielding swords--"

"...Persia, Ethiopia, and Put with them, all of them with shield and helmet, Gomer with all its troops..."

Stay tuned for more planetary updates on the continuing crisis of Darwinian survival of the fittest on the third rock from the sun.
CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Michael's trouble and Naomi's hope

2011-11-26T10:08:00.000-08:00

This is an eye-opener, although parts of it may disturb you. But Americans can not operate a democratic republic with heads in the sand.
Whether you''re with them or against them, the Occupyers are now fanning out a spectrum of ideological strategies, and our nation will be changed as a result. The societal inequalities they protest will not be easily disposed of. We must consider and analyze their complaints if our nation is to get over the polarizing hurdles that now obstruct our governing urgencies.

Although law enforcement agencies in cities throughout our nation have undertaken, for the most part appropriately, some restrictive measures to contain the Occupy campers, these people are not going away. They live among us, as does the Tea Party whose signs were raised before them.
To glean some understanding of where this thing is headed, I recommend a listen to this one-hour panel discussion:

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/25/occupy_everywhere_michael_moore_naomi_klein

The New School/New York City meeting of minds was sponsored by The Nation magazine, and recorded at the above link for Democracy Now!. Michael Moore and Naomi Klein are positioned, as it were, at the two bookends of the discussion, with three other well-spoken panelists between them. The troublesome film-maker's controversial presence is appropriately seated on the left. Naomi's seasoned optimism later provides a constructive balance on the other end of the table.

Compare Michael's grudge to Naomi's hope.
On one end of unfolding Occupy Wherever drama, Michael Moore says, with an odd excitement in his voice, he'd like to overhear the fearful trepidations now being uttered nightly in the bedrooms of the 1%.
On the other end, Naomi Klein admonishes the Occupyers to move beyond the "outrage phase" to a new phase of hope.
Which way will the Occupy movement move?
The way of the American revolution, or the way of the French revolution?
The way of constructive democracy, or the way of a vindictive reign of terror?

Michael Moore is a genius of video programming, and he certainly expresses in his work a powerful advocacy for underpriveleged people, but he does have some problems, mostly that he presents everything in good vs evil terms. But ourmaterial world, including capitalism, is constituted in shades of gray everywhere you look, whether you're facing left or facing right. Here are just a few of the key phrases that indicate his judgemental attitude:

~ the "beginning of the end of an evil system"
~ deficit/debt ceiling as a "distraction", as if fiscal responsibility were not a real issue
~ "they (the 1%) created this...all the pain and suffering," as if pain and suffering had not existed before corporatocracy
.
Michael Moore prefaces his caustic assessments somewhat with a hopeful observation that the Occupy movement has "aleviated despair in this country" and "killed apathy." This is true. But here is what's worrisome about Michael Moore:

Toward the end of the program, he mentions the inspiration that he imbibes when contemplating that a mere two people, Marx and Engels, occupied unbroken ideological ground over a century ago. Unfortunately for the world at large, what Marx and Engels could not foresee was the onslaught of oppressive state power, through the cruel manipulations of Stalin, Mao and others, that would later be perpetrated in the name of their theoretical wealth and power redistributions. Someone should remind Michael Moore and his comrades just how the Stalin and Mao movements turned out after their early revolutionary phases. Contemporary protesters would do well to remember the words of one of their patron saints, John Lennon, who sang, "...but if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow." While that Beatlish warning may be politically incorrect in China, it surely applies here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

In contrast to Michael Moore's hyper-critical inputs, Naomi Klein got her turn, later, at the other end of the 5-member panel. Her well-prepared spiel included a listing of positive changes, "a track record of developing alternatives" that have manifested in practical applications since the Seattle WTO protests in 1999:

~ solutions to the ecological crisis becoming solutions to the economic crisis
~ green co-ops, as in Cleveland
~ farmers' markets
~ community-supported agriculture
~ community renewable energy
~ localizing economies
~ devolving power to community levels, decentralization

These last two or three are the ironically dubious components of an evolving Occupy agenda, insofar as this: the federal/statist interventions required for implementing egalitarian measures are inherently contrary to decentralizing reforms, unless the federal actions are at some point withdrawn or minimized. How likely is that?

The happiest item on Naomi Klein's constructive list was her mention of the 14 bicycle-powered generators being used to fulfill electrical needs at Occupy Wall Street. This happened after the police had removed their gas-powered generators, which was a blessing in disguise since the campers needed some incentives to overcome their own fossil-fuel dependencies. I'll commend them for investing some innovative sweat equity to capitalize their dream of green energy.

At moderator Richard Kim's direction, Naomi Klein addressed directly the issue of federal/state involvement. (I know for a fact, this is the biggest objection that arises from our conservative factions, especially since government programs are funded by taxes.) Naomi tempers the session's wonky explorations with an appropriate admonition: "State power can be just as alienating, as corrupt as corporate power."

And there's the rub, America. As a wise creature of the forest once said, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Glass half-Full

Papa gave us a shovel

2011-11-24T09:11:00.000-08:00

Papa,
you gave us a shovel so we could dig a well.
Mama,
you gave us seeds to plant, and hands to excel.
Uncle,
you gave us some tools so we that can build.
Auntie,
you gave us a bowl and a cup that's filled.
Grampa,
you gave us a deed on an acre or two.
Grannie,
you gave us a smile and a list whats to do.
Oh Daughter,
we help you and give you our love.
Oh Son,
we give you our life from above.

Oh Land of the free,
you gave us opportunity.
Oh Home of the brave,
you gave us freedom to save.
Oh friends and ye neighbors,
thanks for this and for that.
O almighty God,
thanks for this turkey so fat.

Glass half-Full

Rascals, Scoundrels, and Settlers

2011-11-19T14:08:00.000-08:00

Rascals rock the boat. Scoundrels would sink it, but Settlers stabilize it.

The boat, in this case, is the USS America.

The Rascals have sensed that something is rotten in Denver, or in Dallas or Detroit, or in anyTown USA. This is certainly true. But hey….they don't know what to do about it. And since their unemployed, or underemployed, or uneducated or unsettled condition renders the rascals relatively impotent to reshape the world according their tender sense of injustice, they take to the streets in protest. I can relate to it. I was out in the streets when we were in VietNam. Getting out there to make a stand seems like a cathartic something to do; it is exciting, with all the comraderie and the shared suffering-- until the nearby residents, shopkeepers, and civic leaders start upping the ante on the physical consequences of Occupation. Then the cops hype their heretofore patient vigilance into riot-gear insensibility.

Behind the scenes, chronic malcontents would manipulate the wandering rascals, maneuvering their newfound funk toward some kind of revolution, as yet unfocused. Maybe its Lennon's revolution, or Lenin's, or Marx's, or Stephen Lerner's, Naomi’s, or David’s, who knows.

There is a lot to be upset about, for sure. The rascals are enraged about the greedy corporations, mad at the mediocre politicians, intimidated by the police, yeah yeah. They screw you, yeah yeah yeah. A witch's brew of issues boil up here: the destabilizing consequences of competing globalized economies, inequality, outsourcing, bailouts for the 1%, outlandish executive bonuses, unpayable student loans, epidemic foreclosures, environmental degradation, polluted groundwaters, obsessive plastic lifestyles, plastic garbage in the Pacific, filthy pipelines, fracking, fricking...

It is true that we Americans need to be roused, before it is too late, out of our hydrocarbon/carbohydrate stupor, part of which is our self-immolating oil addiction. Our petrochemical habit is a dependency that has economically castrated this formerly-great nation's independence, and greased us down into a red-light slow-idle energy complacency, comfortably numbed by an obsessive compulsion for visual and audial stimulation.

Up on Capitol Hill-- where the WallStreet lobbying 1% conduct their dissonant orchestrations of unfunded mediocrity, the politicians pontificate about a lot of smokescreen issues. For instance, the so-called Solyndra-gate.

This is political grandstanding is dangerous. Their disengenuous inquisitions distract us from some imminent good news: New American job-creating possibilities are actually being worked on, even as we speak, if the government does not obstruct.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, somewhere in America a few enterprising business people have, believe it or not, quietly settled into the tasks of doing what needs to be done.

… like, heating up technologies to elevate us out self-destructive oil addiction.

Yesterday, while up on a roof clearing gutters, I heard on the radio about two trailblazing west coast solar-tech producers. Although Solar World and Solaria are not the the only two companies breaking new industrial ground, they are quietly settling us into a homesteading path that leads to real solar-tech cost-reduction productivity. Very soon (if not already), these manufacturers will, with a little help from their many power-hungry friends (US consumers), mass-produce photovoltaic roof- panels on an unprecedented scale. Affordability for John and Jane Doe will be the outcome.

I tuned into the ear-opening update about Solar World and Solaria yesterday while listening to NPR's ScienceFriday. As it happened, Ira Flatow's enquiry to the companies' respective spokesmen, Gordon Binser and Dan Shugar, focused largely on a side issue; the issue was what Gordon Binser calls "illegally subsidized" Chinese dumping of artificially cheapened solar panels. But the entirety of thieir podcast discussion reveals far more than a cordial dispute between two industry leaders about trade strategies. A half-hour listen draws us into a persuasive force field of updated solar capabilities. For instance, according to Dan Shugar and Gordon Binser:

~100,000 people are employed in US solar industry today. That's more folks than are working in coal mines, and more than in steel mills.

~The industry grew by 69% last year.

~5000 companies are involved in solar technology here today.

~Labor expense is only 10% of the cost of solar panels. So the issue of Chinese (or developing nations) competition is not as difficult as we might at first think.

~The relative fragility of glass panels reinforces the logic of domestic production and distribution.

~Actual production levels of rooftop electricity are approaching (or already at) a scale that is competitive with other power-generating sources such as nuclear and coal.

~Last year, the solar industry in USA installed, operated and delivered 17 Gigawatts of electricity, the equivalent of 17 nuclear power plants in the middle of a day.

~In the summertime, there is a direct, favorable correlation between solar energy supply and the peak power demand occasioned by widespread air-conditioning.

~When smartly integrated, individual home installations (or institutional ones) can be connected to our existing power infrastructure (with modifications) to inject electricity into the cumulative power grid. Thus, consumers can become net PRODUCERS of electrical power at certain times of the day, thus lowering their electric bills.

~As demand for solar installations has grown, the cost-reduction curve has followed the same pattern of cell phones, computers, and dvd players. Bet you didn't know that, huh?

~Solar World has over 1000 employees in Oregon, and has been making photovoltaic panels for over 35 years.

~In Germany, there are some peak-demand times when 40% of contributed electrical input is being generated by solar panels.

I was quite impressed with all these statistics, both yesterday as I heard Dan and Gordon list them for Ira on the radio, and this morning when I replayed the ScienceFriday podcast.

So hey! In the turbidity of all this stir-crazy Occupy controversy, and right in the middle of the bad banking news and European woes, here we find some very real, very timely good news about newfound American industrial innovation, and developing job opportunities on the dark-cloud horizon, maybe even on your community’s own rooftops.

What Dan and Gordon communicated to Ira really comes down to this: the time for cost-effective solar design and application is no longer future. It is now. This is one sector of manufacturing that the Chinese will not be able to dominate, because our automated capabilities can effectively competetive with developing-world low-wage production expense (which is only 10% of a solar panels cost).

And everybody needs a little sustainable wattage.

So, all you angst-ridden discontented shivering souls out there--

Before you Occupy the frigid streets and possibly get thereby injured, infected or arrested, think about a productive alternative:

Occupy, for an hour or two while you fill out the application, the human resources foyer of your local appropriate technology producer. If you don't find one locally, maybe you'd become the entrepreneur-installer to heat up this movement in your community. Perhaps you'd be the first one in your community to capitalize on this work--work that really needs to be done if America is going to continue to Occupy its Can-do legacy. The time to Occupy energy independence is now.

Think about it. Like Ira mused yesterday: we Americans invented the light bulb; we invented the energy-generating solar roof panel.

What’s the next thing (or process, or service) we need to invent to light our way out of this oil-pit we’ve dug ourselves into?

Glass half-Full

Why I am a Republocrat

2011-11-17T16:07:00.000-08:00

The other night Pat and I were enjoying a meal in our home with a couple of dear friends. Our after-dinner conversation turned to heartfelt expressions about past, present and future. In the midst of some shared recollections about previous phases of our life, I wondered aloud about how this idealistic young McGovernite college kid could now find myself, at age sixty, running with a bunch of Republicans.
Then last night, Pat asked me why I am uncomfortable being a Republican. I found myself unable to offer an answer. But today, after some mulling the question over, I collected a few thoughts.

I am in fact not a Republican at heart, although I am registered to vote that way. But that’s because I’m not a dam Democrat either, and wouldn’t want to be caught dead anywhere near their gov’ment-take-all way of doing things.

Here is why:
I believe in the power, proven in our American history, of a free people to do great works. I believe in the limitless possibilities of a free people who, with their individual liberties constitutionally assured, can do what needs to be done, and prosper while performing it, both individually and collectively.
I believe in free enterprise, free markets, free trade, the invisible hand, Main Street, and God.
I believe human life, from its earliest inception , is worthy to receive the protection of the law.

These days, although I empathize with the opportunity-challenged. underemployed Occupy wall street 99% crowd, I also have no complaint with the so-called 1% gathering as much wealth as they can accumulate. The rich cats can only squander so much of the gravy before spreading some of that prosperity around as expenditures and investments, whereby the rest of us 99% can catch a little of the action.
Philosophically, I do not favor the practice of governmental income redistribution, and I surely do not want to see government take over everything-- not health care, not business, not philanthropy, not any of that stuff that good citizens ought to be doing from the abundance of their own hard-earned resources.

Now perhaps you can see why I am not a Democrat, and here’s why I am not really a Republican either.
Beginning about 200 years ago our pioneering American spirit began to focus on settling and developing the north American continent. Figuratively speaking, yankee industry, southern agronomy, widespread entrepreneurship and nascent capitalism took on the challenges of capitalizing and developing this exceptional experiment in democratic/republican nationhood that we call the United States of America.
Led by wealth-seeking industrialists and prosperity-seeking workers, we built in short order an amazing infrastructure of railroads, electricity grids, highways, airways and communication networks. Thousands, yea I say unto thee millions, of folks got in on the action and got a slice of the copious wealth. We were in high cotton for 150 years or so, in spite of a depression or recession or two.
But now we’ve gotten lazy. And I’m not just talking about couch-potato consumers. Now, American business, unwilling to take on the risks—and the sweat and the toil and the uncertainty—of capitalizing the upgraded prerequisite infrastructure for 21st-century prosperity, dithers with profit-obsessive derivatives and credit default swap schemes, instead of venturing out into the new frontiers of what really needs to be done.
The infamous, phantasmic Wall Street, whatever that is, refuses to capitalize for us a way out of the self-destructive oil addiction rut in which we find ourselves cluelessly bogged down. I can’t blame the Dems for taking a stab at these dependencies when our famous free enterprise entities won’t, or can't, take a chance on it. So the self-appointed prophets and the planners and the socialists and the gov’ment do-gooders and the democrats and the intellectual elites want to take on the burdens of what unbridled industry used to do. Maybe they’ve overregulated the captains of industry into neutralized industrial impotence, I don’t know, but now it seems that the Dems want the government to initiate everything. Meanwhile, the Repubs are still dreaming in lala land about bonuses, unfettered capitalism and tax shelters.

If I could, I would cast out both the demonDemo bureaucrats and the corporatublican devils.
What has happened to our business leadership in this country? Have they abdicated the wealth-generating mantle of industrial innovation?
President Reagan, patron saint of the Repubs, said that government IS the problem. But now, thirty years later, that’s only half the picture. We’ve got a new problem: business.
Business is the problem—not enough of it. Why has business shrunk from the profit-possibility challenges of the 21st century? Why have the capitalists conceded the venture-risking function to government? Why? Because there’s not enough money to be made, and too much risk and expense required to do the work that needs to be done. Call uncle Sam, even if he’s broke busted and his mother can’t be trusted. He''ll take the risk; he's got a pump-priming Fed to back him up.
Where are the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Edisons, Fords, Morgans and Watsons of our era? For that matter, where is the Gates, or Jobs, of the next generation?

In Congressional hearings today... Solyndra? Hey, I don’t care about the rhetorical politicized blameshifting and fault-finding. Solyndra was attempting to do the work that needs to be done, before wily Chinese competition cut them out of the emerging solar collector market. Where’s the company that will, Henry Ford-like, put a solar collector on every roof by capitalizing mass-produced affordability in that sector? Where’s the UAW that’s willing to cut a deal so that every half-prosperous American can afford to put an electric vehicle in their garage? Where's the bold corporation that will take a chance on new-tech American bullet trains?
It almost appears that American business, labor and industry has outlived its usefulness. How can that great trail-blazing entrepreneurial thrust of ages gone by be recovered, and recycled?
Don’t get me started; I’m a Republocrat, and dam proud of it.

Glass Chimera

Dam infidels at it again

2011-11-12T07:40:00.000-08:00

Wouldn't you know it. The people of ancient Israel had a great little kingdom going, with the legendary King David establishing for them an impressive niche among the kingdoms of the earth, and then his venerable son Solomon consolidating their collective labor and wisdom into a golden age of excellence. But then Solomon died, and his sons Rehoboam and Jeroboam couldn't work together, so Jeroboam took some rebels and they struck out on their own to establish a renegade kingdom of Israel at Samaria.
Those dam infidels.
Solomon's golden age kingdom was eventually ground into dust by Assyrian and Babylonian conquerors. Jewish kingdom was extinguished, but their worship of Y_h, and identity as a people chosen to document God's work, survived. After their banishment from Jerusalem, captivity in Bablyon, and eventual return of some Hebrew exiles to Jerusalem, the Jewish people managed to maintain a unique culture and precious heritage, in spite of later Greek hegemony and Roman domination. Almost a thousand years after Solomon, Messiah finally came, suffered Roman crucifixion, but then triumphed by rising from the dead. Jesus' disciples, most notably the upstarts Peter and Paul, forsook Jewish tradition to start a new spiritual work on earth, which became Christianity and spread like wildfire through the Mediterranean world.
Those dam infidels.
After centuries of steady growth, suffering bloody persecutions from heathen Roman emperors, Christianity proliferated in spite of the bloody business of feeding them to the lions and such. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, so we Christians like to say, although I'm not necessarily volunteering for that role. But then 300 years after Christ, one noble emperor Constantine finally got the light bulb turned on his head and became a Christian. If you can't kill them, join them, I guess. As lucid as he was, Constantine got the bright idea to require all Roman citizens to be Christians, thus merging the public function of governance with the private practice of worshipping a risen Saviour. It was an idea that looked good on tablets (not ipads though), but it later turned out to be a mistake, although the organizing strategy worked tolerably well for a millenium or so, until Europe-based Christendom ended up splitting in two--Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox.
Those dam infidels again.
Meanwhile back in the mother lands, in 7th-century AD Palestine and Arabia, Mohammed got to looking around and realizing that mankind had a real problem. Even so-called righteous people such as Christians and Jews couldn't seem to be good and properly serve God, and they had irrepressible reprehensible tendencies toward idolotry and debauchery. So Mohammed took it upon himself a la Allah to straighten the human race out by starting a new religion, which would prove to be more forceful and therefore more effective in its conquest of us unruly humans. So Mohammed and his subsequent imams set out to conquer the world for Allah.
Those dam infidels.
Mohammed and his band of believers did manage to compel a lot of people to their way of worshipping. However, after he died, the surviving leaders of Islam could not agree on who would be the successor, so there were bloody disagreements among them. After a few years, one faction's acknowledged spiritual leader was recognized as legitimate imam to take up Mohammed's authority. But by the time some Muslim agreement was reached, the other faction had already recognized three imams. Thus did the first Caliph of the Shi'a become known also as the fourth Caliph of the Sunni. These inceptive infightings resulted eventually in two major branches of Islam. Since the split happened quite early in Islamic history (about 656 AD, just 24 years after Mohammed's death), the results produced two major branches of Islam--Sunni and Shi'a. This is not unlike the Christian Catholic/Orthodox legacy of two major dogmatic strains.
Those dam infidels again.
Fast forward a thousand years or so, and pan back to Europe, where we've got a a Protestant reformation brewing in the northern regions. Eventually Christendom manifests its inability to achieve consensus by morphing to a religion with hundreds, or thousands, of denominations.
Those dam infidels again, and again.
By and by, our perpetual trail of tears and blood gets dammed up into a global reservoir of apostate tragedy. Those dam infidels have been at each other's throats for millenia. It gets discouraging, not to mention all the oriental religions--Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, Zoroastrian, and God only knows how many.
An overview of history makes it appear that we humans will never agree on religion. We'll be disputing about who God is and what he's up to, or if he even exists, until such time as we just blow ourselves to kingdom come.
I believe if God were really among us, he would take a real beating for this refusal to whip us into submission.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Reinstate Glass-Steagall Act

2011-11-06T12:41:00.000-08:00

If Republicans want to see some electoral success next year, they should be willing to accept some moderately appropriate accountability for the disgraced financial industry. A good start would be to muster Republican support for reinstatement of the the Glass-Steagall Act.

Not only does this proprietary wall between commercial banking and investment banking need to be rebuilt, but it also makes good political sense. This concession would politically neutralize the mutinous Occupy crowd and the Dems such as Elizabeth Warren who are slowly gathering poliical strength from that grassroots movement.

Make reinstatement of Glass-Steagall a plank in the Republican platform before next summer's convention.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Elements of Life, simplified

2011-11-05T12:58:00.000-07:00

Hydrogen initiates life; oxygen proliferates it; carbon gives life something to hold onto.
While helium laughs at the universe, nitrogen fertilizes it.

Sodium makes living things interact; calcium lends them some structure.
Neon, colorful and spritely, excites life, while cousin chlorine cleans up the messes.

Iron puts life to work; silicon makes it smart.
Nickel enables commerce; silver makes the life shine; gold makes it rich.

Uranium steps up the power exponentially, but then it requires maintenance in perpetuity.

Heat it up, and the whole life experiment becomes volatile; anything can happen, and probably will.
Drop in a little arsenic, and life bites the dust. Pay attention.

The Working Principle of Jubilee

2011-10-30T04:09:00.000-07:00

In ancient Israel, the land was understood to be a posession of God, with its owners being stewards, or caretakers. When a parcel was sold by one Israelite to another, its transferrence was considered a lease of the land's use--that is to say, a sale of future crops therein--not an absolute ownership, since that domain was reserved to the Creator alone.

In order that the people of God might establish a manageable economy, their Creator mandated a fifty year cycle--a system of seven revolving seven-year periods, plus one extra year, later called the (50th) year of "jubilee." By this revolving arrangement the natural inclination of human productivity toward inflation would be neutralized with a built-in systematic deflation. A sale of land in year 1 of the cycle would obstensibly be worth 49 times its value in year 49, since 49 prospective crops were understood to be the virtual substance of the transaction.

Furthermore, the working out of this economy also required that existing debts among Israelites be cancelled every seven years, and also that indentured servants or slaves be freed in that same seventh (sabbath) year. In the 50th year, at the end of the cycle, the land itself was returned to its original family of ownership of fifty years ago.

By this means, incentives for upward mobility of productive people were woven into the economy, and periodic debt forgiveness eliminated accruals of huge, unsurmountable debt among the working people. Accumulations of vast landed estates and monopolistic entities were also prevented, if the system was working as the Creator had designed it.

In this way, the followers of God were set up to prosper, both individually, familially, and collectively, according to the respective levels of their own chosen productivity and stewardship. And a constant deliverance of the poverty-stricken (unemployed) persons from a poorhouse fate would preclude a permanant underclass.

In real time, it didn't exactly work out that way, but the theoretical principles of Sabbaths, Jubilee, systematic deflation (not as bad as it sounds), and debt forgiveness might be worth considering in light of our presently hyper-leveraged circumstances.

The principle of regular sabbath renewals goes back to God's original creative work as it is figuratively documented in Genesis. God revealed himself to humans as a Creator. A definitive part of that creative process included rest and introspective recovery for the sake of developmentally corrective alignment.

If you care to learn more about this divine economy, and perhaps to consider its applications to modern existence, read Leviticus 25 and Deutoronomy 15, in the Bible.

Glass half-Full

The Ghost

2011-10-29T09:02:00.000-07:00

That Occupying spirit face, it hauntifies my mind--
a smirky mask with painted smile upon its face of ghastly white.
Oh! what a ghostly site.
With black-lined clownish bizarrity
it mocks authority,
and conjures up signs of somethin happnin here;
what it is aint exactly clear.
Now the windmills of my mind crank out shadowy spectres from long ago:
the port huron statement and
four dead in ohio.
I see the ghost of My Lai massacre;
it stalks my g-generation like a smear--
blood on our hands from the tip of an agent-orange-spiked spear.
Out damned spot!
Have you come to splotch us again?
Out, I say, with the dire trespass of dow jones culpability
and exploding napalm fire like some howling banshee.
As puff the magic dragon who used to frolic in autumn mists
so our innocence has spiraled up in smoky days,
with unwelcome images from a Gulf of Tonkin haze.
Deja vu
I feel this wallstreet visitation is a spectre of impending trouble:
calling into question all the blood guilt ever known by man, double
and all the carnage ever splattered on to span
upon a waste and wanton land;
Who's responsible for this?
And my mind misgives some consequence yet hanging in the stars
shall bitterly begin
with these Occupying rebels
whose consensual zeal would snuff out the wallstreet conniption fit
of capitalism's big collateralized debt obligation zit,
as if the heart of depraved man could be improved upon a bit.
Oh shit!
This protest, in its collective sensibility,
is presumed more pristine
than corporate culpability,
with its globalized guile and leveraged guilt.
Does their urgent cry for egalité
cloak some fateful guillotine strategé?
A reign of terror from the tyrrany of the ninety-nine
to thrash out the fattened one-percent piggy kine?
Will this produce a future gulag or a forced labor camp,
a cultural revolution led by a raging tramp?
Who's responsible for this?
this fermenting mobbish contagion
transgression upon our convulsing nation.
It renders ashen white our neo-wallstreet mask
and calls us to blot out the bloody task
of human business.
Out! damned spot, we cry unto the whispering wind.
lay on us no more collateral damage to offend.
And ask not for whom that damned bell tolls;
now it peels again and again unto our restless souls.

Our ancestral refugees left ghoulish tales from long ago and far away
of the dachau and the auschwitz and the hitlerian birkenau.
And we hear ghastly tales from the so-called other side
of how they perished in stalin's gulag, and in the mao's "cultural revolution" millions died.
By their calculated rearrangements of the classified human chain,
they bound our bloody attempts to declassify into some ghoulish arbitrary game,
where the shedding of guilty blood, for the intent to make everything right
became an instant reply of human cruelty, sprinkled with bloody fright.

Now we the piggy capitalists, have we crossed that same damned line?
Have our reckless swapping one-percent cast unbearable load upon the ninety-nine?
Do you Occupyers now propose to judge their fatcat games
with social restructurings to expunge their selfish shames?
Good luck with that;
it'll be a cold day in hell
when we know for whom that bell
tolls.
Our capitalist souls?

Glass Chimera

Gift of Soul, and so on...

2011-10-23T11:28:00.000-07:00

If you think people evolved from lower life forms, then please understand that this creative work was revealed long ago--before science was invented-- when it was written very simply that "the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground."

And if you think that hominids such as Neanderthals or Cro-magnons lived on earth before Adam and Eve, then please wrap your mind around the fact that at a certain selected point in time, the Creator-- the One who had written the double-helixed codes of life itself--touched a man and gave him an essential gift--something very new and unprecedented. God placed within the man, Adam, a gift that would forever define the quality and direction of human life.

We call it soul. From that point on, men and women became less like the animals, more like God.

"God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them."

This gift of soul set men and women apart from other life forms, as its metamorphosing wonder formed within them self-consciousness and God-awareness. This had never been possible in the animal existence.

The soul-enabled path of higher development now available to us through God's shared creative work led ultimately to a new requirement--the need for law.
Through Moses, Law was given, so that we might civilize the world and live peaceably and productively within it.

The subsequent progress that sprung up through law-enabled civilization-- and its incessant entropy toward downfall-- led ultimately to a new epiphany--the need for Spirit, and not just any spirit, but a holy and righteous Spirit.

Through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the holy Spirit was given. Are you ready for this?

Judah and Israel

2011-10-22T15:48:00.000-07:00

Settling back into the Appalachian homing crib now, after a west coast week turnaround, I'm puzzling about the few days I spent observing the Occupyers at Seattle and Vancouver.

Yesterday I get an RSS email from Phyllis Chesler pronouncing the Occupy movement antisemitic.Whoa!

She presents some convincing evidence in her 5-page posting, with video quips of two Occupy LA protesters whose statements about bankers reveal some authentically deliberate Jew-bashing, and there's a lengthy, detailed sign about the old bogey Illuminati/Freemason conspiracy, whch was a dark strain of allegedly hidden connections that I had investigated briefly about 33 years ago.

So I get to hypertexting around on the net, and sure'nuff, there's more to this Occupy movement than meets the all-seeing eye. More evidence shows up on Jeff Dunetz' yidwithlid blog:
Yid with Lid wrote:
"The MSM (mainstream media) worked very hard to brand the Tea Party Movement as Racist, but it wasn't. They are working just as hard to ignore the blatant Antisemitism and libelous demonization of Israel coming out of the Occupy Wall Street protests, and they are. It is not just a few nuts within the Occupy Wall Street Movement who are bashing Israel and Jews, it is the leadership and founders."

A few more clicks mouses us around to a different point of view, the other side of the shekel, from Dave Weigel at Slate:
Weigel wrote:
"There is a problem: The movement isn't anti-Semitic. It started in New York. Its ideological hero is Naomi Klein. This is a movement studded with liberal Jews! Here's one video that's gotten less play than the one of the irate anti-Semitic dipshit with the "Nazi bankers" sign: The Kol Nidre in New York, at the Occupy camp."

If Naomi Klein is such a formidable player in this Occupying wave, and she is Jewish, then how can the movement itself be antisemitic? Furthermore, If you view the 3-minute video (Kol Nidre, above) that Weigel posted, in which a large group of obviously Jewish dancers joyously stepped into Yom Kippur, it is obvious that the Hebraic delegation is unitimidated about putting their best feet forward in the Occupy WallStreet festivities.

So we see one group of Jews who are out to change the world with their involvement in, among many other leftist movements, Occupy WallStreet etc; its the J-Street apologist contingent, the old socialist/labor cadre, the Yid liberal strain whose purpose is to confront the slings and arrows of world injustice and equality, and by opposing end those evils.

And we see another group of Jewish people, including the grand old man of anti-defamation exposé Elie Wiesel, who have detected (accurately) within that same broad Occupy movement, an insidious strain of nascent nazis nestled nefariously in the shadows of the sign-wielding rabble. Yes, the Jew-haters are in there; they lurk among thousands of protesters.

So is the Occupy WallStreet movement antisemitic? Yes and no.That makes it like just about any other political movement in this melting-pot that we call America.
The Judah-apologist school of Judaism and the Israel-defensive school are strange bedfellows nestled within the same religious/ethnic heritage; one is reformative and communitarian, the other is orthodox and conservative. Oy vey. What else is new? It's been this way since Rehoboam and Jeroboam.

The tension that exists between these two camps of Judaism, as represented by the activist Golda Meir strain and the prosperous Alan Greenspan strain, is as old as the Judean hills, and they have lived with it long enough to convince the world that they are here to stay. Either way, they're not going away. Thank G_d.

The contemporary quarrel between liberal and conservative branches of political Judaism is reconcilable when surveyed through this proverbial wisdom from Yid with Lid:

"Jewish tradition respects economic success, so long as it is obtained honestly, and proper respect is shown for the social responsibility that comes with it. That social responsibility is a personal duty and a job for the community led by its religious leaders, but not for the government."

Last link. Over two millenia ago, the prophet Zechariah posted this on his website:

"...I took for myself two staffs, the one I called Favor and the other I called Union...I took my staff Favor and cut it in pieces, to break my covenant which I had made with all the peoples...then I cut in pieces my second staff Union, to break the brotherhood between Judah and Israel."

And its been that way ever since. But hey! Mazel tov and L’chaim!.
But if you want to see what occupation really looks like in the here and now, look at this pic I snapped at Occupy Jerusalem six years ago:

Glass half-Full

Organizing the 9%

2011-10-18T08:22:00.000-07:00

As much as the Occupy movement would aspire to represent 99% of the people, they can claim to persuasively echo the opinions and active strategies of...maybe 9%.

Although far more than nine percent of people have become disgruntled because Congress bails out the corporate cronies, and although far more than nine percent of folks are frustrated with ecological disasters and abuses that have been mismanaged through gov/corp collusion, and although far more than 9.1% of the people feel as if their labor and resources are being jerked around by the soulless machinations of greedy, outsourcing corporations, there are really only about nine percent of We the People who are willing to be associated with and directed by Occupation activists.

However, if the Occupyers could manage somehow to effectively represent, say, a mere 9% of the people, that is nine times as many as the 1% whose bank accounts they are trying to siphon. But their first major hurdle in that wealth redistribution quasi-socialist quest would be to get organized. That is no simple task, as I recently witnessed firsthand. In fact this whole movement will be a marathon of dedicated organizing if it is ever going to amount to anything besides a series of sign-wielding collective walks in the park.

At the stone staircase of the Vancouver Art Museum on Saturday and Sunday, I watched as a core group of intense activists initiated in their city what has become the Occupy movement's "achieving consensus" process. It is a tedious sequence of speaker/crowd interactivity that appears, from my observer perspective, laboious and perhaps somewhat self-defeating.

Nevertheless, the agenda-writing nucleus of organizers seemed quite intent on building consensus from their small activist cadre outward amongst the gathering legion of discontents. They wanted it done a certain way, at the risk of appearing, to an instant-breakfast world, disorganized.

The use of amplified sound through use of a microphone was a point of subtle contention among two factions of the the leader group. It took a few hours on Saturday morning as well as Sunday to work out the kinks. A speaker-call / crowd-repeat procedure that must have originated with the wallstreet cadre had already become dogma for some of the agenda-setting core, while other initiators among them obviously preferred the pragmatically loud use of the microphone. Technological enhancement uncovers undesirable bourgeois luxuries. Such subtle concessions to capitalist convenience can easily lead to domination of the gathered crowd by gifted orators, or "showboaters" as one humble speaker referred to them. Amplified rhetoric can enable, theoretically, opportunitstic demogogs to manipulate the assembled masses. Thus can the ideal of egalitarian democracy be undermined by silver-tongued soapboxers. Not good.

I observed with interest as a purist group within the agenda-setting core labored tediously to lay a foundation of simple unamplified call/response democratic consensus building. It was, let's face it, primitive, although I could surmise the solid ideologic basis for it. Over the course of two disjointed hours, however, the pragmatic faction was able to procedurally insert selective use of the microphone into the nascent consensus process. This distant listener thought the microphone use lent a definite improvement to their presentations.

By and by, the Vancouver Occupy agenda-setters were able to establish a sequence of procedures by which their two-hundred-or-so core of gathered faithful (while hundreds more of curious bystanders watched) could voice some procedural decisions about where this thing was headed. Past mid-afternoon on Sunday, I don't know what Occupy Vancouver did, but their inception was fascination for this detached observer.

I departed the scene several hours later, thinking it would be a long time before this movement accomplishes anything substantial. Leaderless democracy, which appears to be the gold standard among this movement's initiators, initially produces apparent chaos. At least that's the way it seemed to me as I witnessed the Occupy Vancouver public inception. What fundamental organization may have been established beneath that irresolute exterior, only time will tell.

After a dusky train ride with wife and son back to Seattle, I returned on nippy Monday morning, with journalistic curiosity, to the Occupy site in Westlake Park, downtown. Previously, I had witnessed parts of the Wednesday and Thursday daytime sessions there. The Seattle crowd seemed, to me, much scruffier and streetish than the intense Vancouverites. A rag-tag band of pierced, tattood occupyers hung out where the podium had been last week. They were meagerly holding on to this public square, insofar as it was possible amidst the gently ominous peripheral police presence. While most lingerers were milling around in apparent aimless expectation, an ameobic bundle of them languished near the low stone platform that had been the focal site of last week's rallying excitement. A pervasive attitude of don't let this magic moment slip away hung in the air like contraband smoke.

A plethora of handmade signs was constant, hundreds of them, in both Vancouver and Seattle, many of them quite clever. By mid-afternoon on Monday, I saw from my Starbucks perch a bearded Seattle protester with a large, neatly lettered green on white that read: PROSECUTE BANKSTERS. It was a distilled message that indicated what might become an actual judgemental plank of the emerging Occupy platform. This was the goal that I had heard a week or two ago, spoken by Michael Moore in an NPR interview.

Such an indictment would materialize only through a very long, drawn out campaign by the Occupyers.

Canadian columnist Conrad Black wrote insightfully in last Saturday's National Post:
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/10/15/conrad-black-why-theyre-occupying-wall-street/
"Assessing blame is complicated. This (the wallstreet meltdown of '08 and its economic fallout) was not a case where an easily identifiable group committed monstrously illegal acts in the manner of Bernard Madoff....financiers cannot be prosecuted for mere acts of stupidity. There have been prosecutions, most of them unsuccessful, and the whole retrubitive effort has been mired in the name-calling between the financial and political communities."

My present uptake from all this observation is that the derivatives-wielding wallstreet 1% better clean up their act before the radical rabble 9%, claiming to speak for the 99, decides to ditch the consensus process and take matters into their own revolutionary hands.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Wealth Distribution

2011-10-16T09:37:00.000-07:00

Karl Marx said religion is the opiate of the people. He must have noticed that its believers were generally more prone to forgive the wicked than to overthrow them. But Marx had formed his theories long before the narcoticizing power of the televesion age, which neutralizes the masses with affordable luxury and meaningless pop culture . You can't organize a dictatorship of the proletariat among a herd of virtual contented cows.

What the revolutionaries really need to redistribute bourgeois wealth is a herd of boshevik bulls who can throw their weight around in the delicately stratified china shop of societal order. But the problem for revolutionaries in north America has always been that the bulls--the real movers and shakers-- sided early on with the capitalists, and they all ended up on wallstreet building productive companies and prosperous portfolios, instead of revolutions.

Although the revolutionaries are loath to admit it, the capitalist system has actually distributed wealth quite broadly and plentifully during the last hundred and twenty years or so.

That wave of growing prosperity, unprecedented in world history, has not been distributed equally. Broadly and plentifully, yes, but not equally. This is nothing new; wealth accumulation has never in human history been egalitarian. And it never will be, no matter what the professor says, no matter what the Occupy speaker in the public square says.

While the bulls have been kicking up gold dust on wall street for a couple of centuries, mom and pop were setting up shop down on main street catching a piece of the action. That's how it has been in north America.

The fact that the system now fails to deliver goods and services at levels previously enjoyed is undeniable. Suddenly, in the space of a few years, there doesn't seem to be enough wealth to go around. But we the people are not powerless. I prefer to believe we can act, individually and collectively, in love and kindness, and yes--in peace and self-control-- toward every person, and every group of persons we meet.

Many millenia ago, a fearless speaker spoke about a coming Messiah. Isaiah prophecied that the promised one would "judge the needy with righteousness. With justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his mouth he will slay the wicked."

I, a Christian believer, am willing to await Messiah's decision on these matters of justice, instead of taking matters into my own sinfully selfish hands. That position renders me as "religious" in the eyes of a secularly evolving world.

Now I've keyed up enough here for one Sunday morning session at Starbucks. I'll take a walk, one block along Georgia Street to the art museum, where the Occupy Vancouver crowd gathers. Let's see what those who claim to speak for the 99 have to say about the one.

Glass Chimera

I am the 50%

2011-10-12T17:35:00.000-07:00

Our hard times polarize us, but I am the 50%.
Pat and I deplaned this afternoon at Sea-Tac airport, caught the rail to downtown Seattle. We ascended the stairs from Westlake Station up to street level, and walked, as chance would have it, into Occupy Seattle. Imagine that. I saw a crowd of people there and heard some speeches.

America used to be a young democratic republic, starting 235 years ago when those upstart colonials convened in Philadelphia and cut the tether that George III had used to keep us bound in unrepresented taxation.
But now we are aging, becoming every day more and more like our European forebears, taking upon ourselves those classic ideological divisions of left and right. With hard times upon us, its not really about democrats and republicans any more. Its about socialists and libertarians, and everything in between. Just let me say: I am the 50%(ile).

Being a baby boomer, happenstancing today upon the Occupy crowd at Seattle, I caught a whiff of, and recognized, the old 60s counterculture zeitgeist. I remember it from back in college days, but of course it is different now. The spirit of anti-war anti-establishment discontent is the same, but the issues are different; the costumes are different. Whereas we were flower children back in the day, all about peace and love, these days the mood is edgy and punky, and definitely socialist. A little more threatening, or maybe thats because I'm older, and more comfortable, and Christian.

The first speaker was actually a rather pleasant surprise. A young fellow named Michael started out his message speaking of Moses and delivering his people from slavery in Egypt. I can relate. I do not want want to diminish the passionately eloquent appeal about very real economic issues that he made to the hundreds of mostly young occupiers gathered there. He was encouraging the people to get involved with the movement.

But what this old guy (me) appreciated at the end of Michael's speech was his exhortation to keep it peaceful. I appreciated that, although Michael said much more about what's happening now than just work in the system and be non-violent.

Not all the speakers were as peacefully oriented.

I am, btw, a person whose worldview is defined by the original non-violent resister, Jesus. Athough Y'shu haMeshciach was much more than that, since he was also the redeemer of all mankind, or the redeemer of, all those mankind who are inclined to receive his redemptive, resurrected grace.

Anyway, once the Occupy rally got cranked up, and they got the microphone going, I'm just old-fashioned enough to appreciate speakers who can be heard and have something to say, which is better than the un-amplified call and response drill that I had earlier seen on the news of Occupy Wherever a few days ago.
Bottom line about the speakers: We are definitely dealing with a brave new paradigm here, of socialism vs. conservatism in America. And so I say it again: I am the (of) the 50th percentile. I'll walk the middle road as long as I can, even though after every speaker a young very attractive Latina got on the mic, and she would lead, exuberatly, the crowd, in chants about the gathered ones being the "99%.

In spite of the anti-establishment mood, one young man encouraged the gathered protesters to work toward passage of a new Glass-Steagall Act in Congress. I was impressed with the constructivity of that. I think the basic message there is let the bankers and the wall street crowd eat their own losses, instead of hitting up the taxpayers for the bill, based on the "too big to fail" bluster. Yeah, right. I never did appreciate that midnight deal that Hank Paulsen talked the Congress into bailing out the banks back in '08. I would think even some Tea Partiers out there would find common ground on that.
In a way, I guess that's what got this whole thing going, that bank bailout in '08. Its what the Republicans call crony capitalism, as opposed to true capitalism, which is what mom and pop used to do on main street, not wall street, back in the day, before Disney co-opted Main Street as a theme park in Orlando and Anaheim.

Next, and olf guy, Joe, older than me, went up to the mic and spoke of his dad and mom raising him in the socialist movement in New York City back in the 30s. This fellow had later gone on to a career in the movies. He worked with Ronald Reagan in the movies, in the movie Hellcats of the Navy. He spoke glowingly of Reagan , and how friendly and charismatic Reagan was (surprise! at Occupy Seattle) but said that Reagan had changed and gone over to the other side, to follow "the money" instead of his heart.
Joe also spoke about F.D. Roosevelt--who has taken on a kind of sainthood in this retro-new-deal environment in which we are now finding ourselves. According to Joe, Franklin sent his wife Eleanor out to scope out the country, shortly after he was elected. She went all over the country and talked to a lot of folks, came back and, according to Joe, reported to her husband FDR that the communists would be taking on a bunch of support among workers during those hard times if something wasn't done to relieve the desperation and unemployment and poverty that was so rampant during that time, the "Great" Depression. And that's where the New Deal came from.

Sounds familiar doesn't it. Our present President is in the same predicament, and that's why this whole Occupy thing is going down now.
And I'm thinking of John Lennon, the working class hero who's dead, but really it reminds me of Ringo, in his post-Beatle role. He did a commercial in which he told some young lady "this is not your father's Oldsmobile."
This is not your father's politics either. This is something new and different. America, get ready. The times they are a polarizin'. And I'm just praying there's no Kent State thing that's gonna happen.
These Occupiers may the 99%, and the Republicans may be the 1%.
As for me and my house, we are the 50%ile, and proud of it. As we southerners used to say: Well, shut my mouth.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Turkey

2011-10-08T13:38:00.000-07:00

Turkey is, as Mr. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan says, "in the middle of everything."
It truly is--geographically, religionally, and culturally--at the crossroads of the world, where every thing meets, at some time or another, every other thing. These days it seems that mediating position encompasses, more relevantly than ever, the political realm.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald's Oct 8 article on Prime Minister Erdogan, when the Turkish leader was in Cairo last month he challenged his Muslim neighbors: "''The Turkish state is in its core, a state of freedoms and secularism. The world is changing to a system where the will of the people will rule - why should the Europeans and the Americans be the only ones to live with dignity? Aren't Egyptians and Somalians also entitled to a life of dignity?''

This unique approach to governance is not new in today's Muslim world. It arises predictably from the heart of modern Turkey, which had been established as a purposefully secular government when the "Young Turks" took over in 1908. Their revolution overturned the authority of Abdulhamid II; the Sultan's removal from power precipitated a final demise of the withering Ottoman empire. From that political takeover, and then through the trauma of World War I which followed a few years later, restive nationalists emerged in a surge of Turkish military confidence. But they were called immediately to another struggle--to extricate their fledgling state from postwar Allied ethnic partitioning. The Young Turks managed to focus their movement in a strong way that united a diversity of ethnic groups. By the time the Republic was established in 1924, one unmistakably popular soldier arose as the definitive leader of the Turkish people: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

His story, which had begun in 1880 at Salonica, across the Aegean on the Macedonian coast, is a fascinating one. I have been reading about it in M.Sukru Hanioglu's biographical book, Ataturk.

Kemal Ataturk, more than any other person, steered the young-old nation's identity, during the 1920s and '30s, toward democracy and secular objectivity; it is a favorable precedent that survives to this day. Perhaps in our time the Turks will, from this perspective, guide the Muslim world to a position of moderate exchange with the democratic world, instead of taking a jihadist anti-Israel turn.

So very rich is the history of their homeland, which is known also by the name of its central plateau, Anatolia. To begin with, Noah's Ark settled on Turkish earth as the flood waters receded several millenia ago. Its pitch-covered frame is said to be nestled somewhere in the crags of antiquity up on Mt. Ararat.

More recently I am informed, through enquiries into my Christian heritage, that Turkey ("Asia" of the New Testament writers) was the birthplace of apostle Paul (of Tarsus, on the east Mediterranean coast). It's no wonder that the dyed-in-the-wool Phariseic Jew had such a burden to proclaim the good news of Jesus' resurrection among the Gentiles. He had grown up among them. In Antioch (now Antakya), across the Iskenderun Corfezi bay from Tarsus, "Christians" were first called by that name.

Over to the west, in the Lydia region which slopes down to the Aegean, the sites of nascent Christian identity are found. This is the area where believers in Jesus took their earliest solo flights from the Judaic runway back in Jerusalem. The "seven churches" to whom Jesus addresses his salutory letters in Revelation are here in Turkey. They are the churches that Paul and others had established in Ephesus, Smyrna (Izmir), Pergamum (Bergama), Thyatira (now Akhisar), Sardis, Philadelphia (now Alasehir), and Laodicea (now Denizli).

Since that churchly inception nineteen hundred years ago, the dizzying experience of peoples of Anatolia has included administration by four military empires: Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman. This last empire originated in Turkey itself, in the central plateau, Anatolia. The Ottoman empire began in the thirteenth century C.E. and spanned six centuries of time until its end after World War I. The Armistice of Mudros 1918 Oct 30 "marked the end not only of the Ottoman participation in the Great War, but effectively also (the end) of one of the longest-lasting empires in history."(M. Sukru Hanioglu, p.86)

Here are a few more notable facts about Turkey:
~ Troy, the ancient fortress city besieged by the Greeks and conquered under the shadow of the infamously deceptive "Trojan horse," (See Homer's Iliad) is on the northwestern Aegean coast.
~ When Emperor Constantine left Rome in 330 C.E., he relocated the empire in what is now Turkey, on the Bosporus strait waterway between Black Sea and Mediteranean; The ancient city there--Byzantium--he renamed Constantinople, after himself. From 395-1453, it was the seat of the Byzantine empire, and was ecclesiastical center of the Orthodox Christian Church.
~ The Ottoman Turks took Constantinople in 1453, and it became known as Istanbul, which was the seat of the Ottoman empire until after WWI, when the capital of the new Republic of Turkey was moved to Ankara, in the Anatolian heartland.
~ The six-century-long Ottoman empire encompassed the Arab world and beyond, with its zenith during the 16th-century under Suleiman II, after assuming the Moslem caliphate in 1517. The northward thrust of the empire extended as far as Austria, but was defeated by the rising Hapsburg dynasty near Vienna in 1683. This European repulsion is considered by many to have been the deliverance of European Christendom from Moslem dominance, and thus a turning point in history.

I'm glad the Austro-Hungarians were able to turn the Moslems around before they got to Vienna, so that Europe, and my ancestors, retained a Christian heritage. Over on the other end of the Continent, my Francish namesake Roland had been instrumental in turning the Mohammedans back from Spain about six hundred years earlier.

Here and now, in the 21st-century, I wish the Turkish people and their Prime Minister well. May God's blessings be upon them. And I hope they can convince the rest of the Muslim world not to force Israel, whom Mr. Erdogan calls "the West's spoiled child" from their ancient Jewish homeland.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Pandemic bailout blues

2011-10-06T17:01:00.000-07:00

Michael Shulman posted some seriously insightful analysis on Seeking Alpha today, and it set me to thinking. But before I tell you about my molehill thoughts, I'll tell you about his mountainous observations. He wrote:

"If Greece defaults – they will, next year – most European banks, including the Germans, will take a huge hit on their balance sheets and will need to raise capital, which will not be available from private investors so they will need to be bailed out. This will anger taxpayers more than bailing out those wayward Greeks. So, to date, the politicians have put off the inevitable, more money for the banks."

Sound familiar?
This is just the sort of bailout with which our government set its regrettable precedent back in 2008, after the Lehman/BearStearns/AIG et al collapse and/or we'll-never-know-how near collapse. Although our present Treasury Secretary, Mr. Geithner, implies this week that European debt problems could lead to negative repercussions here in the good ole USA , in fact we are merely facing the boomeranged consequences that we ourselves set in motion (haha) with our frantic escape from shredded red-ink bank balance sheets, through taxpayer-fueled faux liquidity, three years ago.

Today in the USA, all those angst-ridden "occupy wall street" people out in the streets, along with their democratic sympathisizers and labor union manipulators--they're clueless about the fundamental issues here--the long-wave cycle of economic expansion/contraction and the inevitable conflicts of wage differentiation between developED and developING naions. They're failing to appreciate their own heretofore high-flying lifestyles , which have been enabled by fat-n-happy debt-fueled free-lunch bubblebath corporate-couched, union-padded opulent prosperity.

And so, now that the party's over and the punch bowl has run dry, they're out in the streets, pawns in the game instead of being free-will mainstreet initiators, wanting to pull down the "greedy capitalist" powers that be, mainly because they have nothing else to do since they're unemployed, or horror of horrors, underemployed. They've had all they can take of the Would you like the combo with that BigMac, sir? blahblah.

This month, the Occupiers will be be further empowered by news from across the pond, angsty tidings from their wobbly European comrades who are now being given an excuse to take to the streets. After all, the Europeans, especially les Francais, are old hands at this. The Germans and French doppelganging crowd will be charged up because their resources are being diverted to bail out the too-big-to-fail bourgeois financiers who have carried the Greeks, who've been retiring early and consuming ambrosia and soaking up euro-drachmas in their Mediterranean sunshine.

What's lamentable is that in the midst of all this, Steve Jobs passes on to that great apple grotto in the sky. Now, due to the thick veil of media mourning and igadget reminiscing, we'll be caught up into the cloud and never know what kind of deal really will have gone down this coming weekend. Since the neutrinos in Cern have been clocked at a speed faster than the speed of light, Steve's visionary past will eclipse our hyper-leveraged future, even as his foresight had earlier overshadowed Microsoft's (and everybody else's) present debt-fogged windows on the world.

Soon we'll have another Western ideology identity struggle on our hands. But this time it won't be between Apple and Microsoft; it won't pit Ford against Chevy. This time, the battle will be waged between the liberté egalité fraternité mob and the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness militia.

I'm headin'for the hills; actually, I'm already there.

Glass Chimera

Uganda has come a long way since Idi Amin.

2011-10-05T17:27:00.000-07:00

The nation of Uganda has come a long way on the path to civilization since the dark days of Idi Amin's regime. Although that dictator had attempted, back in the '70s, to impose his blood-shedding will upon his fellow Ugandans, his murderous manipulations were foiled by the neighboring Tanzanians. They ran Idi and his gang of thugs out of Africa when he tried to export his cruel program across their border in 1979. Thank God they put a stop to his campaigns of killing.

This is the first thing I think about when Uganda is mentioned, because I'm a sixtyish baby-boomer who has kept, through the years, an eye on world news, and I remember this about Uganda: the murderous dictator, Idi Amin, who had been assisted by the Libya dictator, Qadhafi, and how he killed hundreds of thousands of his people just for the sake of...for the sake of ...whatever it is that tyrants are trying to do when they set their killing machines into motion.

But these days, Uganda is, thank God, a very different place. Just a month or two ago, my daughter Kim visited that nation and its capital city, Kampala. She was working there--assisting in, and reporting on, the Operation Christmas Child gift distribution. Kim, trained at UNC School of Journalism, was able to utilize some of her documentary skills, as you will see from these photos, which are accompanied by her report upon the Samaritan's Purse work there.

Yes, Kim's facebook update about this situation in a formerly war-torn Uganda brings good news. And I received that news with a kind of deja vu, because it reminded me of when my other journalist daughter, Katie, had sent similarly upbeat reports from Vietnam a few years ago. Katie and her team of world-tromping Christian companions had been welcomed with open arms, in that country of Vietnam, which had been torn to bloody hell during the civil war of the '60s and '70s in which we had a dismal role.

Now these days...well, we live in dark days--hard times--in which the ominous clouds of depression and unrest seem to grow heavier every day upon our lowering prospects for peace and prosperity. But somewhere in the world today, children are joyful because the love of Christ is being extended to them. Uganda is such a place (who'd have thought it?), thanks to the persistently beneficial work of Samaraitan's Purse, and other Christian outfits who reach out to underpriveleged folks everywhere.

I'm so happy that my Kim is an integral link in that worldwide network of mercy and provision. God bless 'em.

Glass half-Full

An amicable encounter of worldviews

2011-10-03T15:48:00.000-07:00

Every weekday at noon I take an hour break from work to eat a sandwich and some little carrots. During that time, the availability of two NPR-affiliate stations affords me a radio choice between two excellent news analysis programs: Boston WBUR's Robin Young, who hosts Here & Now, or Philly's WHYY presentation of Fresh Air, hosted by Terry Gross.

Today I chose to listen to Terry's interview with evangelical Christian leader C. Peter Wagner, and I'm glad I did.

I am a Christian who happens to live in the USA, which is a nation that cherishes freedom of speech, and respects a multiplicity of opinions. Although I frequently discern a gulf of difference between Terry Gross' worldview and mine, I have often admired the sensitivity and skill with which she conducts interviews. Terry chooses her interviewees from a wide array of philosophically diverse personalities. including some persons who are markedly different from herself. This was one of them.

At no time has Terry's respectful sensitivity been better demonstrated than it was today in her conversation with Peter Wagner.
Mr. Wagner represents a charismatic Christian subculture with which I have some common history and familiarity. Terry Gross represents a free-thinking secularist intellectual culture that is, in many ways, antithetical to Peter Wagner's.
The inquistive exchange between their two gentle souls today was an example of civility that is sorely lacking in today's cacophany of combative discourse.
I'll not say much more about their discussion. You can listen on the link above. I will, however, quote from Mr. Wagner's final comment to Terry, which was "I really congratulate you for the good research you've done."
In other words, Terry took the time to explore what fundamentalist preacher Wagner really stood for, instead of forming her interview strategy on caricaturized stereotypes or political exaggerations. The result was exquisitely instructive, and an example of the exploratory enquiry that public media should aspire to.

As for Mr. Wagner, this apostle, who was chosen to represent the so-called dominion theology movement of contemporary Christendom... I commend his unique optimism, founded upon a love-centered faith that is rarely seen these days. At one point he said to Terry: "I think the world is going to get better and better...He (Jesus) will return to a very strong world...reflecting the kingdom of God-- not the miserable world we live in today."
Amen, brother.

Glass half-Full

Turning the religious world upside down

2011-10-02T04:58:00.000-07:00

A young, whippersnappin' religious zealot thought he was doing his people a favor by ridding their religion of heretics. But then a strange thing happened while he was on the way to Damascus. Under the influence of a direct encounter with God, Saul was blinded by the light, fell off his horse, and ended up doing a complete dogmatic turnaround. Ultimately he became a masterful defender of the fledgling Christian faith that he had previously persecuted with such ferocity.

God soon directed Saul--not back to Jerusalem, the center of the Judaic universe--but to the unlikely city of Damascus, and to untamed Arabia, of all places, to receive direct instruction about what really needed to be done in the world of human religion. God, after commanding the impetuous disciple to change his name name to Paul, imparted to him over the next three years a vision of the new spiritual movement that would change the world.

Paul's revolutionary message pertained to a once-and-and-for-all atonement for human sin, which had recently been accomplished through the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ. This tomb-breaking work of Jesus was a veil-ripping feat, and its spiritually revolutionary power had rendered obsolete the ancient Abrahamic practice of animal sacrifice.

Proclaiming such news would prove to be no easy task, as Paul's subsequent life later demonstrated; he suffered dearly for having accepted the assignment. As have many spiritual reformers before and since, he paid a heavy price for having taken on his mission to turn upside down the religious establishment of his day. Even his comrade-in-alms, Peter, had to be lead kicking and screaming down the newly-blazed path of spiritual liberty, away from dogmatic bondage.

Amos, Jeremiah, Zechariah, and other prophets of old had trod the same difficult way. Paul's work was not the first of such tribulative, misunderstood reform labors; nor would his job be the last, by any means. After he had midwifed the birth of Christian belief from inside the bloody womb of Mosaic tradition, many other persecuted reformers would follow historically in his footsteps--Waldo in 12th-century Italy, Hus in 14th-century Czechoslavakia , Luther in 16th-century Germany, Wilberforce in 19th-century England with abolitionists in enslaved America, Nee in 20th-century China, Bonheoffer in Nazi-occupied Germany, and God only knows those prophetic reformers yet to come.

Christians, like any other sincerely religious people, are perpetually confronted with the necessity of casting off the bondage of unproductive legalism, and destructive error.

Back at the inception of Christianity, Paul's world-shattering message had been to propel the way of holiness beyond Judaism. Take it to the gentiles, said he, and onward to the the world at large. As later history unfolded, his earthshaking opus panned out quite successfully. Faith in Jesus has traveled around the world, transcending a multiplicity of religious mountains. Perhaps the next Paul-type reformer will be that persuasive one whose voice who can penetrate the hardest mosqueleum of today's grave world. His prophetic call to eternal life in Christ will speak softly into the ears of millions of souls who daily prostrate themselves beneath the heavy shari'a pillars of Islam.

More potent than twitter, more pervasive than facebook, and fresher than any Arab spring, is the peace of Jesus. His power is discovered in a message of freedom, proclaimed originally by a Jew, formerly dogma-driven, whose first assignment from Messiah was to go to Damascus, and then to the Arabian desert for three years to get his life straightened out.

Maybe he will go there again, in some way or another. Selah.

The American

2011-09-24T09:20:00.000-07:00

The American invents things, develops new technologies, seeks efficiency, strives for productivity, turns a profit, pays taxes, lives and dies.

The American wants to be self-reliant, but expects there are times when seeking the help of others is necessary. Independence is a state to be sought after, but when in the course of human events in becomes necessary to link with others in order to get the job done, then so be it. He doesn’'t want to ask what others can do for him, preferring instead to ask, "How can we help you today?"

The American takes personal responsibility seriously. She works hard, but takes some time off now and then. He generally knows what he wants, but realizes you get what you can until what you want is within reach.

The American collaborates with others to build bridges. Sometimes she discovers deep down inside a destructive impulse to burn those bridges. Maybe she herself has been burned, with injustice or abuse. But what good can come of being vindictive? To forgive is divine. To move on is necessary.

An American gets a transfer, or switches jobs when it just ain't happenin'

He plans ahead, but expects the unexpected. If something can go wrong, it will. He'll cross that bridge when he comes to it. She sees obstacles ahead, but doesn't obsess about them; they are understood to be part of the landscape. Trouble comes with the territory.

Yet is he faithful, and knows when to persist, and when enduring humiliation is a chasm that must be crossed. She perseveres through thick and thin.

The American may occasionally use objectionable language, but he learns that inserting the f-word, the n-word, and a few other ill-advised utterances can prove self-defeating. A tactful propriety may prove more productive, and even political correctness has some value now and then. Euphemism can be fun, but speaking truth plainly when others are occupied with beating around the bush can prove quite expedient. Cut to the chase.

The American speaks correction to a bully, a thief, or a drunk.

Most of the time, he is kind, but every now and then a little means streak comes out, and must be checked.

She’ll cut you some slack, but understands there comes a time to take it back, for your own good, of course.

The American is neighborly, but he doesn't pry into other people's business.

She is tolerant, peace-loving. He defends the weak instead of exploiting them.

She minds her own business, but persists in making appropriate inquiries; he sees that some folks want to be left alone.

The American wants to discern the difference between a means to an end, and an end itself.

She tries to save money, like grandma used to do. He wants to work hard for everything he has, but sometimes just an afternoon of NCAA basketball will contribute miles of inspiration that neutralizes exhaustion. With potato chips and a beer or two.

He doesn't do pie in sky, nevertheless understands the power of dreams.

She appreciates the liberty of being casual, but enjoys spiffing up when it is time for cuttin' a shine.

He takes a shower every Saturday evening whether he needs it or not.

The American turns on his hot water spigot, his car ignition, her electric light, but takes it for granted. It may not always be so easy.

Playing by the rules is a prerequisite for order and for decency, but there are some times when practicality, or fair play, requires that the rules to be set aside. Wisdom is knowing the difference.

The American respects law, but has been known to occasionally scoot under the changing red, on a bad day.

On a good day, which is most of them, he’ll wait his turn.

The American avoids talking about religion or politics. If you believe that, I've got some swamp land in Arizona I'll sell ya. De Tocqueville can tell you more about that.

The American is a democrat, or a republican, but that third-party possibility is always in the back of his mind; it could happen, although when's the last time it did? 1840? Who knows? Wikipedia?

The American is liberal, maybe even a socialist, but possibly a conservative, perhaps a libertarian, but not a communist, although those who wish to stand beneath that banner have liberty to do so. But they are barking up the wrong tree, or spinning their muddy wheels.

It's a free country.

The American votes, and likes to keep up with what's going on in the world, and to form an opinion of her own, although it is not so different from everybody else’s as she might think. Hey, everybody has an opinion, but what’s it worth?

What’s it to ya?

Through each American--through her, through him--government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth, if that citizen is willing to do her part, and pull his weight. The American says keep up the good work, and keep on keepin' on.

Last one out, turn off the lights.

Btw, Are you an American?

Glass half-Full

The descent of man

2011-09-18T04:27:00.000-07:00

This is an ironic coincidence, that we Christians build our dogma around the fall of man, while evolutionists theorize about the so-called descent of man, from pondscum or some ameobic thing like it (just kidding). Either way you look at it, the direction is downhill. I suppose downhill is easier than trudging upward, but then downhill doesn't descend forever; there is an end to it eventually, a leveling out.

Maybe that stopping at the bottom is hell, if you view life and its end in religious terms. Or maybe it is poverty, if you've got a humanist worldview.

Although we Christians emphasize the point that man is fallen--depraved--at least our revelation offers a hope of eventual ascent to heaven. These days, our hope--considered naíve by many-- is, I think, more convincing than the humanist alternative. Stalin and Mao proved that communism is hell. Nowadays we're proving that even capitalism is hell. Hitler proved that (national) socialism, which is the commie's evil twin, is also hell. Hell on earth. Watch out; it could happen again.

But the hope of Christ is based not on our faltering efforts (individually and collectively) to save ourselves, but rather, on the finished work of the crucified/resurrected one--his atonement for our shitty sin, and then overcoming death to prove the point that he knows what he's talking about.

If I could write a play to change the world--to wow the Tony people and then garner oscars for the movie version--could it have a more spectacular plot device than some guy resurrecting from the dead? I don't think so. Not even Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise could perform such a feat, much less endure the agony that preceded it. Not even Mel Gibson could endure that.

I mean what could be more convincing than raising up from the dead? But then you gotta believe it, or it doesn't work. Faith is the thing that makes resurrection work for you. That's your part of the story; God's already done his.

God, the Creator, did write such a story, an epic, and he set it in actual history, beginning with Adam and Eve and so forth, and Abraham and Moses and all that, right up through Jesus, Paul and John. Then he had the book published. You've probably heard of it, if you're a bibliophile.

But back to the descent thing (it never fails to happen): While Adam and Eve were falling from God's grace through their sin, outside of Eden the cro-magnon hominids were, perhaps, descending by successive mutations to full homo sapiens descentive glory.

There is a lot we still don't know about the human race, but one conclusion we can make is this: our species has perfected the art of screwing up. Marx thought otherwise; he posited a steady progression through capitalism, dictatorship of the proletariat, and eventually evolved communism. But look what Stalin and Mao did with his doctrine. You can't figure how to make the human society thing work. It always descends, after a pyrric flash in the pan, to dystopia.

I mean, for instance: It makes perfect sense, from a rational standpoint (although not yet a practical one), that we should develop energy generation through solar power technology. We've been talking about it since the 70s for good reason; but no American company has really made the breakthrough that would propel solar roof-collectors to mass market efficiency and low-cost affordability. The wallstreet crowd doesn't seem to be interested in taking a chance on the prospect; they're too busy playing poker with derivatives and credit default swaps. So our gov. finds what seems to be a good solar-developing company in California, and sinks a half bill into it, thinking that Solyndra might be the group to make the difference. But then the enterprise fails, goes bankrupt. Damn.

Why? Because they couldn't compete with the Chinese! The commies! who are doing everything faster and cheaper than we can because so many low wagers work there, while all our people have gotten rich, fat&happy, and comfortably numb, and so we can no longer compete. I mean, these Deng-reformed Maoists are overtaking us with their hybrid Hegelian-synthesis neo-communo/capitalism!

A hundred or so years ago we were going great guns with full steam power, pulling stuff out of the ground and making cool stuff out of it and selling it to each other, making money hand over fist and then selling it all over the world. Now everybody else in the world, except the Europeans, are doing all that wildwest development faster and cheaper. Shanghai, Singapore, Bangalore, Sao Paulo are doing now what New York and Chicago were doing a hundred years ago. What are New York and Chicago doing now? Crying the blues and watching reruns of sex in the city.

We, the Brits and those other European post-colonialists, taught the "third" world pretty well. Those developing nations have learned their capitalism lessons thoroughly. They learned it, like all children do, by example. Their mutant version of capitalist development will survive our fittest attempts to catch up.

And the trains, in China. Don't get me started. I've ridden on a couple of them. Let me tell you they are fast, and they are impressive. Our Prez points out, correctly, that we were building vast infrastructure and railways across America, back in the day. And why we can't we do it again?

It's the descent thing. Our trains have run out of yankee ingenuity somewhere between stations. While the Chinese maglevs whiz along at 200 mph, although they do sometimes run into each other. Watch out, sloppy safety regs ahead.

Our whole damned nation, and sooner or later the world itself, is running out of steam, or out of oil despite the frickin fracking. And runnin out of money, though there's plenty of the printed stuff floating around. Our mph and our gdp is in a long, decelerating descent.

But there is an ascent from the devolving madness. A sufficient tranche of preferred stock has been purchased for me, and for you, if you choose to invest your time. It is a company not of this world, although it is in this world. I will be ascending on its prospectus soon, with a little help from my resurrected friend. I hope to see you there, if not before.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

From baroque Bach to funky Browne

2011-09-17T08:25:00.000-07:00

My friend David Browne just consummated his latest musical project with a loving embrace of grace.

Beneath a canopy of powerfully eternal security, he and Patty had established a home base in our promised land many years ago. From that sacred place of intmacy, they were able to raise up a crop of fine young'uns, even as David persevered in the development of his God-ordained musical gifts. Together, the musician and his proverbs 31 bride smashed the glasses of postmodern musical conventionality, which dictates that musicians must confound their lives with exhaustive tours and frantic pursuits of musical success.

But not David. From a quiet place of intimacy with our Creator, D. Browne has been enabled, over the years, to fulfill multiple responsibilities as husband, father, businessman and good citizen; but he managed this legacy of faithful works while composing and recording a prodigious collection of original music.

Reminds me of J.S. Bach.
David Browne's life does parallel Bach; both have that sort of German knack for exquisite musical precision, although David displays his percussionist heart in a decidedly Abrahamic framework. You may even detect a mezuzah hung somewhere in his mezzo-tenored doorway. But as I was saying, the grand master Bach had managed, about three centuries ago, to glorify God in an intricately constructive way without losing sight of what is truly precious in this life.

As Johann had labored long ago at his clanky harpsichord or on some cloistered organ, so David, in our times, caresses and thumps out a toccata of masterful sound in his garage-top studio near the Atlantic Ocean in North Carolina. Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring gets a funky new rendering a few hundred years after the original.

Listening to the new cd, A Place I Go, is for me a little like opening some hobbit hole of contemporary Christian musical passion. Then this awesomely productive audio entity comes leaping out at you in a sound that's thick with warm, furry layers of complex virtuosity. I think the den of unique creativity in which David's labor of love began must have been hallowed out, originally, somewhere near that mountaintop lane--the one pictured in his cover photo. A swaddled child--one of the Browne kids--is seen in the pic going to that place where David goes, a place where he has wisely taken his wife and children. He will take you there too, if you'll give him a listen.

That place is a place of holy intimacy with the God who created us-- the Yahweh of Abraham, Elohim of Isaac, the El Shaddai of Jacob, whose Son was given as the Word made flesh, nailed to a cross and then resurrected, although David never actually mentions, in his tender dynamism, the name of Jesus. But you get the message. You know who he's singin' about--the One who walks with us closer than a brother.

A Place I Go is a sacrificial offering sent forth from the most holy place of profound grace. From his abode of redemption, the artist sends up a smoky thickness of rock-driven conviction, punctuated with delicate piano and smooth acoustic interludes. He even tosses in a dash of rap on "A Better Way," and a smattering of scatty electro-phased vocal, propelled by retrofuture cultural relativity funk on "When I think of you." My favorite is "Promised Land," which sojourns on the "ancient steps" upon which our great faith is founded.

Check out David's new labor of love; he is a unique composer with an expressive gift, and an intense love for our Creator. He is, however, meshugginah.

Glass half-Full

Let them come to New York!

2011-09-10T15:44:00.000-07:00

In 1944, as the combatants of World War II crept wearily toward their blood-bought peace, economist Friedrich A. Hayek wrote:

"Contemporary events differ from history in that we do not know the results they will produce. Looking back, we can assess the significance of past occurrences and trace the consequences thay have brought in their train. But while history runs its course, it is not history to us. It leads us into an unknown land..."

Three years earlier...

It had been the unprecedented wilderland of World War II that provoked, in 1941, Dr. Hayek to wrestle his incisive thoughts down onto some kind of intelligible mat. He began to jot some observations about that death struggle embroiling Europeans in ferociously destructive warfare at that time. What emerged from his typewriter three years later was an historical opus which he named The Road to Serfdom.

But back in '41 on this side of the Atlantic, you (or your grandparents) may remember...

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, we Americans joined the Allies in their war to defeat Germany, Italy, and Japan. Together with the British, Russians, the resisting French, and a few other courageous nations, our brave soldiers collectively ran the Nazis into the European ground, and then chased the defeated Japanese back onto their island.

From 1945 onward after that terrible war, a widening political rift developed between us Americans and our former comrades-in-war, the Russians. We are a freedom-loving, constitutional democratic republic. The USSR was at that time a communist state. We wanted to make the world safe for democracy. They wanted to foment a worldwide revolution in order to overthrow what they considered to be our corrupt capitalist system, and replace it with a dictatorship of the proletariat, the working classes.

For several decades the defeated Germans were thereby divided into two countries, one on each side of this politico/philosophical struggle. The dispute was known euphemistically as the Cold War. West Germany was being rehabilitated according to our democratic traditions, beginning with our American leadership as provided through Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. East Germany was being ruled by the communist Russians, led by Josef Stalin and then Nikita Kruschev. Those Germans in the western half of their country joined us western Allies as advocates of free democratic-republican government. Their countrymen in the east part of Germany were stuck with being occupied by the USSR communists.

The strange treaty arrangements that had followed negotiations after WWII divided not only the German nation, but also its capital, Berlin. This bizarre situation was further complicated by the fact that Berlin is located geographically in eastern Germany. Since the Allies insisted that the German capital not be yielded totally to the Russians, Berlin became a divided city of east/west, even though it was located in the midst of eastern Germany. West Berlin, or the western half of Berlin, became a (literally) isolated enclave city-state of western political freedom in the midst of communist East Germany. The freedom-seeking citizens of West Berlin were totally surround by communist, Russian-dominated East Germany.

But many Germans of the east were not content to stay on the totalitarian side. So many fled to West Germany, and many escaped to West Berlin. But the Russian overlords didn't like this, so they built a wall in 1961 to keep the imprisoned east Germans from getting over to the free side.
But then along came, also in 1961, John F. Kennedy. Formerly a naval officer in the Pacific part of WWII, he had since been elected our American President. He took the mantle from President ( and former Commander of the Allied troops) Eisenhower. Jack Kennedy had kept his eye on Germany; he had been in the Oval Office less than a year when he decided to visit the Germans and give them some much-needed encouragement.

Those wall-ensconced west Berliners extended an enthusiastically fond welcome to President Kenndy. Standing at the Brandenburg Gate, in the very shadow, as it were, of the odious Wall, he told the eager Berliners:

"There are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future... Lass' sie nach Berlin kommen. Let them come to Berlin. Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us."

A very good point, that, Mr. President.

He also told them:

"When all are free, then we can look forward to that day when this city will be joined as one and this country and this great continent of Europe in a peaceful and hopeful globe. When that day finally comes, as it will, the people of West Berlin can take sober satisfaction in the fact that they were in the front lines for almost two decades."

That day of liberation did come for the Germany people, and for all the citizens of Berlin. Twenty four years later in 1987, another American president, Ronald Reagan, stood in the same Brandenburg Gate location and spoke boldly to the Germans gathered there. He used the occasion to challenge the top-dog Russian wall-keeper:

"Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

In 1989, the Russians did tear down the Berlin wall, and the divided Germans were united once again--this time not in a nazified third reich-- but in a democratic nation.

The great tide of freedom as expressed in democratic, constitutioanl government, and led by our American republic, achieved at that time, along with our freedom-generating allies, another landmark victory. The USSR gave up the abusive Stalinist ghost and decided to join the free world. I'm hoping the Chinese government will one day permit, or be required to enable, such political liberty.

However, as Friedrich Hayek had been trying to express back in the '40s, history and its struggles are never as clearcut as we would like to think.

The 9/11 attack on World Trade Center and its ensuing terrorism may be a harbinger of a new death-struggle between ancient worldviews on the global horizon. While its true that developed nations have conducted a century of economic debates and political wars--both hot and cold--over freedom vs.totalitarianism, now that old ideological kamph is synthesizing. Communism (and fascism, as two peas in a rotten statist pod, whether they admit it or not.) are reconciling with "democracy"as strange bedfollows into a dialectical tension of constitutionally-arbitrated political battles: socialists vs. libertarians, democrats vs. republicans.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, or back at the caliphate, the real death-struggle among humans has reverted to guess what?--religion!

Go to New York City and see the hole in the ground. It was not dug there by communist workers, nor was it blasted by fascist fanatics. That rapacious gap was inflicted as an airborn, calculated casualty careening waywardly on a fateful collision course--a path plotted between Islamic hegira and liberty-hugging westerners. Let the world come and see. Let them come to New York! Let them come and see the hole in the ground.

We've got a new brave-new-world morphing here. The once-new brave-new-world is devolving back into an old brave-new-world. Its a different kind of beast we're dealing with, much more vindictive than the animal spirits on Wall Street. And its zealous vehemence is much older than either communism or democracy. Now is the time for citizens in this land of the free and home of the brave to reach deeper into our spiritual heritage than politics or youtube will propel us.

Turn or burn.

Glass half-Full

Go and Do.

2011-09-03T06:22:00.000-07:00


Say, oh

say that star-spangled banner 

      does yet wave. The brave doctor King did

raise his voice and he did

call out to a people from amongst the fields and forges 

       of this imperfect nation. Yes, he did

challenge us from atop the steps of blood-bought 

       liberty to

gather, and to

carve from the mountain of despair a stone of hope; 

       thus did the

       oppression of a former age

become the foundation of a new work of freedom upon the 

       earth.

Be free.

Pull that barge, and

tote that bale became, no longer,  some strawboss command, 

       but instead, a new summons to

do the work of living free. No free lunch, you

know.

Watch the sun rise and set as ye

stand upon that old mountain of despair, to

conquer it, and to

wield a chisel upon its craggy immensity..

Listen to  the whistling of the wind across our prairie 

      land.

Hear the cry of the hoot owl in the forest.

Sleep.

Rise up.

Gather the seed, and

plant it.

Grow.

Dig out the iron, and

smelt it for steel.

Find the copper, and

collect the sun.

Drill.

Seek the gold.

Give it to your wife, to your children.

Multiply what your fathers and mothers have sewn into your world. 

       Though it be small, it

be much, enough to

work with.

Extract the resources of a new age from the cracks of 

       the old.

Lift up from the fissures of failing institutions the 

       cornerstones of the next.

Pull that wire.

Draw that dream.

Sing.

Key that message to your people.

Build future. It aint what it used to

be. Your welfare rests not upon an SS check;  

      yeah, it doth

kindle behind your eyes. It doth

smolder between your shoulders.

Go, and

do.

Labor,

Love.

Wait no longer, but do

wait upon the Lord.

Selah.

Glass half-Full

Quantum creation, by design mechanics

2011-08-28T14:35:00.000-07:00

"He doesn't believe in evolution," spoken about a political candidate.

How about baseball--does he believe in baseball?
"Well, yes. I think he likes the Cowboys, er, I mean the Rangers. And he likes the Yankees. I mean...Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, ya gotta love 'em, and Yogi Berra, who said 'the future ain't what it used to be.'"
Probably not the Red Sox then. He probably doesn't like the Red Sox, if he likes the Yankees?
"Uh, no, he'd say anybody but the Red Sox.But maybe the White Sox. I think he likes them."

What about apple pie? Does he believe in apple pie?
"Well, yes, probably. I mean...this is America, for God's sake."

The flag--does he believe in the flag?
"Absolutely."
What about Chevrolet? Would he drive a chevy to the levee?
"Actually, he drives a Ford. Have you driven one lately? Besides, I don't think he can afford a Volt."

How 'bout mom? Does he believe in motherhood?
"Oh, yes. Surely he does. I mean, who doesn't? How else would we have gotten here? Everybody has a mama."

But not by evolution.
"No."
What about Natural Selection?
"Oh...sure. Naturally. I'm pretty sure he believes in that. And he may even acknowledge natural selection and evolution as two of the plethora of natural processes that contribute to biological development, within creation."
So he believes in Creation?
"Sure. How can you not? I mean, its all around us."

Then you believe in Intelligent Design?
"Oh yeah, I've always had a Mac. I use it for everything."
You're not into Windows, then?
"Nah. Any Windows-based system can't hold a candle to a Mac. But I will say this about windows: Whenever God closes a door, he opens a window. I'm thankful for that."

Well ok then. I'm glad to hear it. Thanks for sharin'.
"Da nada, man. Its a free country."

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

The long slide to statism

2011-08-27T04:22:00.000-07:00

Our long, slow slide into statism is inevitable and irreversible. The best that the old-style mom&pop mainstreet entrepreneurial capitalists can hope for in today's world is that they may be able to carve out a niche somewhere in the recesses of the behomoth state to practice their craft.

I hope we can. The rest of society should make room somewhere for the entrepreneurs. Those free-thinking innovations are an essential component of human welfare.

The labor movements and progressive governmental structures that began taking shape over a century ago have dulled the sharp edge of capitalist expansion forever. Upton Sinclair-style whistleblowing regulations of a century ago, assisted later by Rooseveltian New Deal, Johnsonian Great Society, Medicare, and the tangled web of governmental subsidies that have been contrived for just about everything--these statist programs have put the nails in the old freemarket capitalism that entrepreneurs, libertarians, and some conservatives still dream about. Let us hope that the wonks and bureacrats of the burgeoning socialist state will allow, or overlook, some commercial space--at least a few cubicles here and there, every block or so--somewhere! for the true capitalist innovators to do their thing. They should. The world needs true job creators, and governments are not it.

Most of mankind hath not the energy, the stoic motivation, nor the honed intuition to practice and maintain true capitalism. This is the problem.

When I say capitalism, I'm not speaking of this modern chimeric version, which is largely devoted to speculative traders who manipulate the corporatist money-machine yoyo back and forth to generate high-frequency profits. I'm talking about the capitalism of days gone by--the legendary enterprising spirit of our American ancestors, which was wrought, blacksmith-like, into existence by innovative captains--Eli Whitney, Cyrus McCormick, Robert Fulton, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Watson.

Those enterprising business leaders, and their heady days of capital expansion, are gone forever. They were the sparks and pistons of a great wealth engine that had been forged and built out of raw earth and oil, and iron and corn and wheat, of a virgin continent that has since been, for the most part, depleted. What the talking heads these days call the "low-hanging fruit."

Oh, we do have our modern-day Sam Walton whizzes and Bill Gates generators. We still have Steve Jobs genii, Mark Zuckerberg wonderkinds and Howard Schultz phenoms. But even they, in their mature stages gravitate to philanthropy and foundation-style largesse. They make peace with the all-consuming tide of ubiquitous governmental meddlings. Warren Buffett, capitalist par excellence of the early-21st-century American business stage, wants to pay more taxes, bless his heart; and he wants to ask his fellow richlings to benificently follow his lead. Its too bad Ruppert Murdoch didn't figure this out before he got mired down in electronic muck.

What contrarian economist Moses Von Mises identified, ninety years ago, as socialist destructionism has wrecked capitalism as we know it. Capitalism's demise has been hastened geometrically, alas, during this last decade. The horrific destruction was inflicted when a so-called perfect storm blew in from the depths of human nature. Hockey-stick-graph greed of capitalist traders contrived unwittingly with governmental do-good fanniemae road-to-hell-paved-with-good-intentions progressive meddling. That led to the bubble meltdown that everybody bemoans and autopsifies so animatedly these days.

Those "capitalists" who were pushing the MBS and CDOs of the last great bull market blowdown were not cut from the same cloth as their imaginative progenitors. They are different animals altogether. We hope their high-freq speculative card-shark manipulations do not give capitalism a bad name forever.

Those of us who mourn the feisty capitalist thrusts of yesteryear are like the Jews of old, whose temple-tending righteous theocracy was beaten, under the iron rod of Roman hegemony, into a diasporic Talmud-toting evolution of its former self. Think about it--what were the ancient Romans known for? Their laws and their roads. What does that really spell? Government. Statism, in its earliest mutation. Its the inevitable tide of human history, now building, millenia later, into a tidal wave of brave new world state-sanctioned determinism. To catch a glimpse of the final outcome, check out Daniel's interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar's dream back in old Babylon. That's Bible stuff.

We might as well find our way through the detritus of passé free-enterprise glory. By the rivers of Babylon do we remember Zion. We may as well seek out new paths among the fallen stones of our rubble-strewn toppled capitalist edifices. New paths of prosperous expression and excellence are hidden in there somewhere, like golden glints in the old prospectors' pan.

Look out on the horizon, beyond the blue Pacific. What do you see? China, the overwhelming financiers of our present and future. Their hybrid version (a la dialectic synthesis) of communo-capitalism is unlike anything we have ever experienced. Well, maybe the New Deal et al. Statism, micromanaged by Democrat--excuse me--mandarin, bureacrats. Better get used to it, all ye pining libertarian dreamers. Its a brave new world out there.
Its all good, or all bad. It is what it is. Make the best of it.

Good luck with your project, Rick. How's that workin out for ya, Sarah?

Glass Chimera

The dominion theology movement

2011-08-24T14:48:00.000-07:00

Terry Gross'interview with Rachel Tabachnick is educational for anyone interested in issues of the spirit. I was surprised at the accuracy with which Ms. Tabachnick described the dominion theology movement.

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=3&islist=true&id=13&d=08-24-2011

In other news, see Mt. 24:7.

Glass half-Full

There's funny money in them thar hills

2011-08-20T08:43:00.000-07:00

What's funny is that, every now and then in history, gold re-establishes itself as the de facto invisiblo reserve currency, in spite of what the central bankers and talking-head journalists of the world try to do otherwise.

We know that democrats, socialists and populists do not like this trend, but the sequestered "rich", who lurk acquisitively in the holds of their yachts and in the shadows of their McMansions, do like it. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. So what else is new.

All this talk about dividing folk into classes and then setting them against each other is Marxian boilerplate hot air to inflate riotous passions and fiat currencies. And although there is certainly some truth to it, all this class-identity disruptive rhetoric is no excuse for rabble ruffians to be running roughshod over small mainstreet business establishments in Wisconsin or Philadelphia or London or wherever the discontented are roused from their couches. Nor is it defensible moral fodder for severing privately-owned, publicly-utilized fiberoptic communication lines.

Back in 1896, William Jennings Bryan pointed out to his grassroot-gathered supporters that there are two types of government:

There is the (paraphrasing) Republican trickle-down type, who legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous. Then the wealth ostensibly drips down to everybody else. You've heard of this; the analogy became widespread during the Reagan years. I would point out that Marie Antoinette had, back in 18th-century France, infamously embodied the upper end caricature of this economic arrangement when she had heartlessly uttered the slogan of the Bourbonites, Let them eat cake.

But here in America, a hundred or more years later, William Jennings Bryan described his second category of government as the (paraphrasing) Democratic percolate-up type. They legislate to make the masses prosperous. The wealth then percolates up from the laboring, resource-driven productivity of the people, and thus nourishes the upper social regions as it passes through industrially.

And the esteemed Mr. Bryan said, famously, at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1896, that the rich Republican crowd were trying to nail the working folks to a cross of gold by insisting on the rigid gold standard instead of the more malleable, accessible silver standard.

Though he was an fiery orator and a charismatic leader without parallel, William Jennings Bryan lost that 1896 Presidential election to the Republican, William McKinley. And then they had, amazingly, an uninstant replay four years later when McKinley was re-elected in 1900.

That 1900 election was a kind of sitcom pilot for the cyclical reruns that would characterize much of 20th century American politics, especially the Bush-Gore contention that came exactly a hundred years later in 2000.

Dems and Repubs are always at each other throats, some times more than others. Just now though, the fireworks, rhetoric and bluster seem to be intensifying. The Dems see their liquidity-easing policies as justified, beginning a third of the way through the 20th century, by their anointed prophet, Maynard G. Keynes--or excuse me, that's John Maynard Keynes. Now Krugman and Reich and that stimulus-addicted crowd want to liquify the rigid constraints of the bogeyman Corporate "rich" so that the greenbacks will percolate, William Jennings Bryan style, up through the fissures of job-generating governmental largesse. Those fissures should be facilitated and regulated by community organizers and unionbosses and government employees instead of, say, corporate directors, "rich" investors, and Texans.

While everybody is arguing about politics and money, as if there were a difference between them, the smartest guys in the room (or so they think themselves to be and they may be correct in their assessment) are buying gold like crazy.

Those gold-acquirers are looking for some incorruptible way to consolidate their wealth into a specie that escapes devaluation. They are buying the precious metal now because, well...

Who you gonna call when you need some reál value?, amidst debt crisis in America, sovereign debt precipice in Euroland, and the Chinese, who are bellyaching because all their meticulously-gathered dollars are being devalued, and their renminbi is still yuaning like an adolescent who just got up at noon and stumbles onto the world monetary stage. Who you gonna call? Ben Bernanke? Ron Paul? Angela Merkel? Who's the grownup in the room? Harry Reid? Pat Toomey?

So I think it inevitable that the gold standard in some form or another is probably going to re-emerge, as has happened cyclically in the histories of human commerce, in spite of all the special drawing rights and myriad currencies that float flotsam-like upon the oceans of global liquidity. And I suppose that all those day-trading smartest guys, riding high on their speculative see-saws of keyboard frenzy, in bubblesome combo with the methish high-freq hedgehogs, will emerge as the new kings of the western-hemisphere hill when th detritus of international wealth settles into a pile, two or ten years from now.

Or maybe all of commerce, accounting, and wealth will go electronic, and those elusive gold reserves will be soldered as conductors into smart circuitboards that will determine every person's caste, class and purchasing power when they're standing in the checkout at World Mart.

... while Horatio Alger hides in an ally somewhere near MainStreet. Or, if you're a Brit, HighStreet.

I'm not saying we should get back to the gold standard as a means to establish predictable value in the world marketplace. God knows I don't have any of the stuff, except for the little ring that's been on my finger for thirty-one years (which is the true wealth in this life.) But I do know that numerous entities and persons with assets are buying gold like its goin out of style, as it has done numerous unsustainable times before. This feverish demand for the precious yellow stuff is driving up the price up to boot, in anticipation of fiat paper descending to its authentic, incendiary value.

Somewhere, somehow, when you least expect it, the battle between real wealth and perceived wealth will be settled in a showdown, maybe at high noon in the OK corral, or maybe in your own backyard.

Got heirloom seeds?

Glass Chimera

The help in Jackson, 1963

2011-08-14T14:24:00.000-07:00

We left Jackson, Mississippi in 1963, and went back to Louisiana. Maybe it was 1962. Mama and daddy moved me, my two sisters and my brother to Shreveport, where daddy would be starting his business. But after about six months or so, they decided we should go back to the place where we had all started out this life, Baton Rouge. I had been born there in 1951, at Our Lady of the Lake hospital. The reason I remember we moved back to Baton Rouge in '63 is that I remember Sister Georgia, the principal of our Catholic junior high school coming in one afternoon to tell us that President Kennedy had been shot, and I remember riding my bicycle home in the rain that day. It was just a few months into my seventh grade, which had been my first school year in Baton Rouge, when Kennedy got shot in Dallas.

Mama and daddy had deep roots in Baton Rouge. For instance, my granpa on mama's side had been assistant Sec. of State under four Louisiana governors, including Huey Long. My other granpa had come out of the piney woods of Mississippi to Baton Rouge to work at the Esso refinery, which was at that time the third largest oil refinery in the world, or so my daddy used to say. My daddy had married up, if you know what I mean, insofar as he found a Baton Rouge society girl, my soon-to-be mama, and convinced her to marry him, even though he was a Scots-Irish redneck from out in the mossy sticks somewhere out in the parish. Mama and her people were from that ole French strain from across the River, they said Parisian, but I think mostly coonass.

When we got to back Louisiana, we were on penny-pinchin' times, with dad trying to get a forestry-supply business started. We didn't have a maid. But we had had one back in Jackson. Her name was Aleen.

But I'm here today to tell you about the city of Jackson, since my childhood memories of the place have been freshly awakened by seeing The Help movie just about an hour ago, this Sunday afternoon, August 14, 2011. I don't usually go to movies in the daytime, but I made an exception this time since I had heard the story took place in Jackson at about the same time that I was growing up there, or about the time that we left there. We moved back to Louisiana just a few months, I suppose, before Medger Evers was shot in Jackson in '63.

We had lived in Jackson for about nine years. Mama and daddy had moved there in 1953, or maybe it was '54. I don't really know which, since I was only about three years old at the time, and mama and daddy, God rest their souls, are no longer on this earth to confirm the date. It don't matter anyway.

Mama, having been raised in Baton Rouge, had to have a maid, you know, when she and daddy were starting a new household in Jackson, even though we lived in a rather small GI-bill house out in the suburbs of Jackson. Our maid's name was Aleen.

Our phone number was EMerson 6-6852. Mama shopped at Jitney Jungle, where she would buy, I guess, all the foodthat she and Aleen would cook for our dinners and suppers, and for barbecues in the backyard, and for goodies that the ladies would snack on while mama was hosting bridge club.

One of my earliest memories was mama putting us kids in the car on a regular basis to take Aleen back to her house at the end of a working day. Aleen's house was so different from our home; it was a shotgun shack on a dusty road out by the lake levee somewhere; it looked a lot like those small houses that Abilene and Minny lived in in that movie, The Help.

Now that I've seen the movie, I understand a lot more about what was going on on the other side of Jackson's tracks, in the area where Aleen and her people lived, when I was a clueless white kid in Jackson in the early 1960s. Thank you, Kathryn Stockett and Tate Taylor, for expanding my horizons. The amazing story you told has been helpful to me.

Glass half-Full

S&P wake-up call

2011-08-08T15:18:00.000-07:00

Numerous talking heads have been pontificating so plentifully today and yesterday about that despicable ratings agency--the one that dropped the ball back in '08-- Standard & Poor's.

So many opinionators were covering the wide palette of artful euphemism, expressing their studied opinions-- from the subtlest nuance of implicit complaint, to damn-near explicit accusation--that poor S&P is responsible for this raveling mess we're in.

What the wise commentators should have been saying is: Thank you, S&P for the wake-up call.

'Tis not the despised downgrade that investors truly fear; 'tis not the dreaded double-dip. What investors are desperately trying to sidestep with their frantic sell-off is nothing so trivially symptomatic as all that statistical stuff.

They simply want to lose as little "money" as possible. Can't blame them for that. They're investors, for crying out loud, not talking heads.

I will utter what the President and so many others were unwilling to express today: Thank you, Standard & Poor's, for the wake-up call. Its about time someboday called a spade a spade.

America, wake up! It's time to get busy, and pull ourselves out of this debt hole we've dug ourselves into. It is obvious that Congress can't pull us out out, and the President's comments are helpful, but. . .

Its up to us, individually and collectively. What have YOU done today to improve this life for yourself, your family, your community, your country?

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress, which begins on Tottenham Court Road in London

Shovel-ready? Hammer down

2011-08-06T06:40:00.000-07:00

In the early 1980s, I worked with a large crew of men to construct the Linn Cove Viaduct. This massively intricate bridge project was a missing link to connect the two halves of the formerly uncompleted Blue Ridge Parkway. It was a long roadway which had begun during the Roosevelt New Deal jobs program in the 1930s; we finally finished the job in the 1980s during the Reagan years. The parkway wound through the Appalachians in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia.

This is funny, in an ironic way. The bridge's construction had been initiated by the granddaddy of American Democratic Keynesian Liberal Make-work Jobs programs, Franklin Delano Roosevelt; but its completion almost fifty years later was achieved during the administration of that great uncle of American Conservative Republican Trickle-down FreeMarket productivity, Ronald Reagan. I see some common ground there.

It must have been the presence of a rugged mile-high mountain (called Grandfather) in North Carolina, and a world war, that had prevented completion of the Parkway under the New Deal. But that was ok with me and the several hundred other guys who finished the job back in '85 or so. We were fortunate to have had the opportunity to do the work, and thus provide meat and bread, homes, paid light bills and so forth for our families during those years.

After that job, boy, was I in for a long string of years learning lessons in the school of had knocks. But Pat and I, managed, by God's grace and all that sweat equity, along with her embarkation on a nursing career, to get the three young'uns raised and off to Duke and Carolina. 'T'weren't easy, though.

But I was thinking, this morning, August 6, 2011, about that great public works project in which I played a part back in the day. Although I had been a student of English Literature, Political Science, and cannabis at LSU about a decade earlier, and although I had spent a few years after that selling debit insurance, newspaper classified advertising, and printing, I had drifted into the construction trades because--long story short--I was tired of using my mind instead of my hands. But of course I was yet to learn what "tired" is really all about.

All the current discussion about JobsJobsJobs! got me thinking about this. After hearing Democrats theorize these last few months about the FedFix making jobs, and shovel-ready jobs and infrastructure and why-cant-we-do-it-in-the-road projects like the WPA and like Interstate Highway constructions beginning with Eisenhower and so forth, and after hearing the Republicans wax eloquent about Main Street and balanced budgets and job-creators and free markets and efficiency and productivity and so forth, I woke up this morning thinking about that amazing work we did on Grandfather Mountain to finish the Blue Ridge Parkway, back in the day.

Believe me, it was no "shovel-ready" project. In fact, I'm wondering about this whole idea of shovel-ready, and make-work for the sake of keeping unemployment levels down.

The Linn Cove Viaduct on Grandfather Mountain, about twenty miles from where I live, was an astounding feat of engineering expertise. The design and calculations for that bridge had required, I am quite sure, years of preparation. As a novice steel worker--what they call a "rodbuster" who ties rebars together with steel wire--I had nothing to do with the brains part of the work. And I had nothing to do with the "shovel" part of the work either. I just did my job tieing steel, 40 hours a week, until all 53 segments of the 1/4 mile structure had been assembled and passed along to the concrete crew.

After each of those multi-ton segments had been intricately constructed in steel and concrete, with varying specifications in each segment determined according to each segment's unique position in the 1/4 mile S-curve--after all that--the huge pieces were taken on even huger trucks out to the bridge site on the side of the rocky mountain. And since there were, in the 1/4-mile length of the bridge, only seven direct-support points, an elaborate system of high-tension cables was strewn through the entire structure as it was being built to keep the thing up in the air.

And a multi-ton crane was driven out onto the cantilevered, epoxy-glued, cable-held roadway-in-mid-air with support at only one end, until seven segments had been erected and the next support structure was reached.

Maybe you didn't follow all that, but perhaps you will believe me when I say this: what men and women have figured out how to do on the face of this God's green earth--and what they subsequently do--is amazing, and seems miraculous. Furthermore, as this bridge project was an example of what humans can do in massively intricate works of concrete and steel, consider this:

The nano-projects we undertake beneath the world of electron microscopes and DNA and gene-snipping, and laboring viruses, amino acids, and polymers among the electrons with quarks and neutrinos and so forth is perhaps even more amazing. But I'll not go there, as if I could.

For general improvement of the human condition, we have a lot of work out there that needs to be done. Its good work, if you can get it. But so much of it, especially these days, is for smart people, skilled people, in this age of pioneering technology. If we can find ways--whether by FedFix make-work infrastructure projects or by MainStreet SmallBusiness, or by some combination thereof, I know not--we can make the employment happen. Perhaps we can make connections between the work that truly needs to be done and those skilled workers who are properly trained to design the work, engineer it, and then do the work, and thus keep unemployment numbers down to reasonable levels.

As for the unskilled folks, I'm not so sure how we'll keep so many of them busy. We make wisecracks about MickeyD's and the everybody's-favorite-store-to-hate-even-as-we-shop-there. But I do know this. Everybody has to eat. And I'm not convinced that it is FedFix's constitutionally-mandated responsibility to feed all these people, and pay their mortgages and light bills and flat-screen tvs and cellphones and whatnot. Such a massive undertaking is, as they say, unsustainable. Not only that, but its downright socialistic, and counterproductive in terms of inspiring the much-needed innovation and creative systemic improvements.

I suggest its time for unskilled folks to get back to the land. Grow food for yourself, your family, your community, instead of buying it all from bigbox stores that have been supplied by fleets of petroleum-spewing trucks that may be carrying suspect salmonella in their highly-processed payloads. This is advisable for skilled workers and educated people as well, if you have time. You might need to cut down on the tv time.

And while you're tending the garden, take some time out of the hot sun to do courses at your local community college or university. Therby, you may learn how to make this nation, and this world, a better place.

Glass Chimera

Is this not exactly what the founders had in mind?

2011-08-01T19:17:00.000-07:00

Uncle Sam got his hundred-year check-up. The doc's diagnosis was obesity.

Big brother Senate, being himself a little pudgy with too much of the good life, hadn't really noticed Uncle's steadily spreading overfed condition. But lean-and-mean little brother House had seen what was happening, and demanded that the old guy be taken in for the checkup.

Sure enough, the examination revealed a debilitating sclerosis and some alarming diabetic tendencies. The doc called for a low-fat diet and a high-exercise regimen.

It is a good thing that lean and mean little brother House was paying attention, and pressed the issue of old Uncle Sam's widening girth and indolent lfestyle. Is this not exactly what the founders had in mind when they prescribed one half of the Congress to arise directly from the districts of the people?

Thus does the restlessly critical little brother assure that big brother and their rich Uncle do not lapse into a fattened lethargy, and ultimate demise. The process is, yes, a little messy, a little scary, but that's a healthy democracy for you.

Glass half-Full

The Nine Pound Hammer: a portrait

2011-07-30T08:24:00.000-07:00

From a foundry in Manchester a nine-pound hammer came; John Bull flung it onto a ship at the Liverpool docks.

Jimmy-boy picked up the tool at a warehouse in Baltimore, and he wielded it all the way up to West Virginia.

John Henry grabbed the thing and beat out nine tons of number nine coal, nine thousand times.

Nine million times, Johnny drove a spike in the ground, knockin out a railroad with his nine-pounder to Chicago all the from Baltimore.

Then along came nine thousand navvies swingin their way from St. Louis to Seattle; they went a-beatin out a double ribbon of blue steel to carry America from across its heartland to Pacific shore, all the way from Baltimore.

Jackie tossed the nine-pound hammer onto a freighter that sailed out beneath the golden gate. It landed on a Shanghai dock, went from there to Singapore, and on and on to Bangalore, all the way from Baltimore.

But choppin' out between sea and sea,
rang a blue new tune from somewhere in Kentucky;
them good ole boys came pickin out a tune
from Paducah to Prague and and on to Pashtun:
a sound the world had never heard before
all the way in silvered steel, strung out through Baltimore.

Nine Pound Hammer

Oh, how they do kick the can down the road, sir.

2011-07-24T13:52:00.000-07:00

Kickest thou the can
down the road, sir?
That I do, sir.

Doest thou continually kick the can
down the road, sir?
That I do, sir!

Why kickest thou the can so obsessively
down the road, sir?
That I do, but, but

Everybody said:
kick the can
down the road, sir.
Everybody complained
somebody keeps kicking the can
down the road, sir.
Everybody opined
those guys shouldn't be kicking that dam can
down the road.
Everybody asked
why do they continue to kick that can
down the road?

Then one day the road
ended at a cliff, sir.

Everybody said:
don't kick the can
over the cliff, sir.
Everybody complained
somebody wants to kick the can
over the cliff, sir.
Everybody opined
Nobody should kick that dam can
over the cliff.
Everybody asked
why do they--

There it goes!

Who?! What?!Whoa!
It landed on the road below!
But then everybody saw
some fool, what a toad!
still kicking the can
down the road!

Everybody asked
how doeth he still kick that can
down yonder road, sir?
I kid you not; 'tis true,
and Life goes on down the road, sir, down the road.
Can you?

Volcanic legacy

2011-07-16T14:13:00.000-07:00

‘T’was many and many an eon ago beneath Pacific deep

the fiery earth spewed out a plume of magma lava creep.

The hot stuff came pouring out so fast from cracks in the ocean floor,

it flowed and popped and fizzled and then it spewed some more.

It piled up so high it reached the top of Pacific ocean waves

with mounds and mounds of lava rock and lumps and holes and caves.

Two miles high the molten stuff came puffing above watery swells;

It sizzled in a burning lump , and looked like a thousand hells.

When at last it settled upon a large and lumpy, bumpy, volcanic shape,

the wind and rain came to do their thing to form Hawaiian landscape.

But that reshaping job would take ages of geologic work,

through which the cone was slowly worn down and lava often would perk.

Then one day a little seed came upon a storm-tossed birdy wing

and nestled itself into the barren rocky dusty sandy eroding volcanic thing.

And so from lifeless lava rock and sterile stony crater dirt

there sprouted up a sprig of grass or lichen or some other rooted wort.

The little plant popped up a flower and then it dropped a seed;

Yes, there began the slowly spreading plant kingdom proliferating deed.

God only knows what the newly established plant may have looked like,

‘though here’s a fellow who suggests the scene while on a crater hike:

As time went by more birds and seeds managed to hitchhike ocean winds,

to extend the nascent colony ‘s wispy, leafy, seedy trends.

It may have been a scene like this, with another plant or two,

though disregard the guy who’s standing there to show it all to you:

Meanwhile, in the midst of all the crater’s lava dusty stone,

Now and then the volcano thing would erupt and do a cone:

Eventually, God’s creative work of greening, growing life

established a thriving , spreading colony to break up the rocky strife.

Now here’s a lovely lady who views the crater in today’s volcanic scene,

while hubby snapped the pic; he’s the one in shirt of plaidy green.

But near the ocean shore below volcanic magma geology

A big tree grows that surely shows God’s artistic biology.

Now here we depict a God-grown tree, and standing there a fool there be,

to celebrate exquisite biology, that thrives on ancient geology.

Yes, Hawaii is amazing with its volcano, its flora, fauna, and deep blue sea,

simply astounding , overwhelming, mystifying this birdbrain—me .

Glass half-Full

Who are the true job-creators? Decide.

2011-07-15T04:39:00.000-07:00

Now America is at the crossroads. This month we decide if we will continue to be a nations whose creative impulse is prompted continually by free enterprising citizens, or by a bureaucratic government.

We should not be intimidated by the financial bullies of our age, the Treasurer, the Fed Chairman, the President, or anyone else. In 2008, we allowed ourselves to be duped by the financial powers, and look where it got us--deeper in debt.

Somewhere, some time, the music has to stop and everyone take their positions. Now is the time for the American people to occupy their own economy again, instead of turning all decisions over to the government and wallstreet.

Glass Chimera

Hey man, carry the sacred flame

2011-07-11T10:45:00.000-07:00

There is a sacred flame that passes from generation to generation, and this is how it happens:

Every man carries deep within himself a volatile liquid; it is an essence of who he is and who is destined to be.
That volatilte essence can be ignited into a passionate flame when a spark of desire flies between him and a woman.

Something mysteriously exquisite about the shape and presence of a woman produces the spark.

The man does not understand the chromosomal power of his desire, but he feels it. The sight of the woman--just about any woman--sets the spark flying. But that does not mean that the potency of his essence can find its best fulfillment in just any woman he lays desiring eyes on.

Herein is the difference between civilization and savagery:

The sacred flame is passed from generation to generation when a man and women unite for the purpose of protecting that flame, and tending it with love and purpose. She is the temple in which his holy fire burns continually, if he trims the wick faithfully.

But if a man seeks self-fulfillment by setting fires any old where at any old time with just any person, he becomes a sexual anarchist, tossing out firebombs that ignite jealosies and confusions and untended children wherever he goes.

DNA, and the One who wrote the DNA code, has designed all this, and ordained it. But its powerful built-in yearnings can operate in one of two very different ways. The One who wrote the code programmed in choices for us, and this is what makes true love possible. The way of holy fire establishes a warm, bright environment for the good life to flourish; the other way lays IEDs of trouble and mayhem that maim this generation and the next.

So, hey man, don't wander around tossing out firebombs. Find a safe haven for your sacred fire; then tend the flame with love and care.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

The power of the universe

2011-07-08T10:02:00.000-07:00

With impressive regularity, the moon orbits the earth every 28 days or so. This arrangement produces some very real effects on what happens to us and to our planetary home.

Long ago when I was in school, I learned that the mysterious white orb up in the night sky has a gravity of its own. Like every object that exists anywhere, it has a power to compel other objects in its direction. This gravity attribute of matter, which is proportional to its mass, is an important part of the mechanics of the universe. An intricate clockwork of physical events is constructed around it. Thanks to Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton, among many other wise men who lived long ago, for figuring this out.

I suppose heavenly objects are a little like people in this respect--possessing a kind of magnetism that produces a sphere of influence. But among humans the attractive forces are relatable more to personality, leadership, status, charm, and such immeasurable factors, rather than a person's size, or what the physicists call 'mass'.

But I was thinking about the moon because of what happened two days ago when Pat and I were at the beach; it was a scary event that is indirectly related to the moon's orbit around us. Now as I write this the moon's glory is fading, as its master the sun renders it invisible while I watch the sun come up over the island of Maui, Hawaii. Being awake so early, I must still be on east coast time, even though its been a week ago since I was there.

But about the moon...Mostly we tend to think of gravitational forces between earth and moon in terms of the earth's greater gravity (due to its larger mass.) We see in the night sky the moon doing its thing, sort of hanging there night after night, seeming to travel an arc across the nocturnal sky as dusk pulls its curtain of darkness across the heavens, until dawn comes blasting all that blackness away, with sunny brightness and life-giving warmth.
We are forever accustomed to the fact that our earth powerfully determines the moon's behavior. But their cosmological connectedness works both ways. That little white sphere, so hopelessly tethered by gravity to its giant companion, exerts an unyielding, and quite predictable, effect over our worldy substance.

This dynamic is most easily observed in our oceans. Collectively, they are an immense resource that no one can measure. But the little old moon, even as small as it seems to us, pushes our oceans around like plasmic silly putty all the time, every day and night. That precocious dimpled satellite grabs, for instance, our largest planetary mass, the Pacific ocean, at one end, so to speak. As earth revolves, the moon fluffs its massive surface waters like a great oceanic blanket, wrinkling it all the way from Canada to Australia, crumpling it from Japan to Chile, and everywhere in between and beyond.

Tremendous physical forces of nature are set in motion through thousands of miles of water, producing the tides, the ocean swells, waves on the beach.

Right in the middle of all that lunar-induced force field of liquid dynamism is a string of islands we call Hawaii, which is where I now write this. Down there on the beach, which I am beginning to see again in the widening light of dawn, a wave crashes in the sand. It crashes because all that lunar-inflicted energy, which has passed in wave form across thousands of sea-miles, is suddenly resisted, and stopped, by a physical object--the beach. The mixture of energy in the wave--it may have been (guessing) 70% potential energy and 30% kinetic--is uproariously transformed into 100% (?) kinetic energy as it strikes the shore and dissipates.

A couple of days ago, Pat and I, fools that we are, happened to be standing in that Maui surf, when the awesome power of the universe, having been channeled by our feisty little tide-jerking earth-moon through the oceanic medium, came crashing against us with a force we had never heretofore experienced. The big wave came as the first among a set of whoppers; it whipped Pat and me around like rag dolls for a few fearful seconds. Having been caught clueless in a tenacious explosion of kinetic water energy, we were lucky to recover and walk away from its ferocity, back to our little beach blanket island of sun-screen and security.

Well, not lucky--actually, more like "saved." Saved by God, who is greater, and more benevolent, than all the jerky universe that stirs us around like fruity chunks in a beach-blender.
Do you think me naive to assume such a thing as God's protection in the midst of a terrible wave? It's okay. You may say that I'm a naive believer, but I'm not the only one. Another believer, one from ages long ago, wrote this about that same power of the universe, (from Psalm 93):

"The seas have lifted up, O Lord,
the seas have lifted up their voice;
the seas have lifted up their pounding waves,
mightier than the thunder of the great waters,
mightier than the breakers of the sea--
the Lord on high is mighty."

Glass half-Full

Our feet of clay

2011-07-06T18:34:00.000-07:00

Men have felt compelled to explore this vast planet ever since they first set one foot in front of the other. Legends and histories of humankind are full of adventurers whose travels and expeditions opened up new territories and opportunities for human development.
In the annals of exploratory expeditions by so-called civilized nations, it would be difficult to find a leader whose accomplishments are more impressive than Captain James Cook.
As an English sea-captain, he lead three voyages of discovery around the world during the 1700s, in wooden sailing ships.
In 1776, after he had already conducted two global circumnavigations, the energetic Captain Cook was ready to embark upon another. Some men can never get enough of adventure; he was one of them.

Captain Cook's exploits probably have little to do with our American struggle for independence from George III's reign. But (I notice, coincidentally) it was eight days after our famous Declaration, that on July 12, 1776, the vigorous expedition leader lifted anchor to depart from Plymouth, England and sail around the world yet again. This came during a restless age of brave expansions for human enterprise, while at the same time an era of bold political experiments.

Long story short. After Captain Cook had guided his two ships, the Resolution and the Discovery, all the way southward through the Atlantic, around the treacherous currents of South America's contenental tip, and then northward in the Pacific, he arrived at the Hawiian Islands, which is where I am now writing this 233 years later.

Captain Cook did not linger long there. After touching upon the westernmost island, Kauai, his two crews continued northward. They explored the North American coast in the areas of present day Seattle and Vancouver, then proceeded along the (now) Canadian coast toward Alaska, upward through the Bering Strait. Their attempts to make northern progress and discover the long-sought-after Nothwest Passage back to England were stopped cold by Arctic ice. So they turned around, followed the Russian coast southwestward along Kamchatka, then southward back into the Pacific. Eventually they hit upon, again, the Hawaiian archipelago, which were called by the English at that time the Sandwich Islands.

What a long, rigorous voyage that was, a very impressive accomplishment for a bunch of men in two rickety sailing ships propelled only by the wind and their own fortitude. Their southward return brought the ships Resolution and Discovery back to Hawaiian shores.

Here is curious a characteristic of human nature. In initial encounters between civilized and uncivilized people groups, it has been oftern reported that the so-called savages greet the civilized men with respectful awe that borders on veneration, and leads in some cases to a kind of worship. This is what Captain Cook eperienced in Hawaii. He and his men were greeted as gods.
Dumbstruck by the glitters of European gold, the strength of forged steel swords, the wonders of sailing ships and billowing sails, and the authoritative behaviour of the swaggering English sailors, the Hawaiian primitives responded with reverence. On many occasions, they prostrated themselves before the strutting sailors who had traveled from a technologically advanced society.

When residents of the big island, Hawaii, first encountered Cook's entourage at Kealakekua Bay, they prostrated themselves before the newcomers, then showered the hapless explorers with copious gifts of meat and fruit. All was well for a few weeks, and the strutting sailors from afar basked in the glow of their newfound divinity. But it wasn't long before the lustre of their godhood began to tarnish around the edges, and the Hawaiian King, Kalani'opu'u, suggested to the good Captain that maybe his band of merry men should be moving along.

So the English drew up their anchor and sailed away. But very soon, the foremast of Captain Cook's Resolution broke. They had no choice but to turn back and repair the damage. So they returned to Kealakekua Bay on the big island of Hawaii to repair it.

This time, however, the natives' reception was less obsequious. In fact, the Hawaiians were by this time a little weary of their new alien supermen. Their was tension in the air. A few of the Hawaiians had begun to view the amazing white man wondermnts more as potentially useful implements instead of objects of mysterious power. Some of the natives managed to abscond a small boat (called the pinnace.) The English, men of military inclinations, became quite alarmed.. A confrontation occurred. Men stared; tempers flared. One irreverent Hawaiian spotted a chink, as it were, in the superior English armored facade. He might have even discerned, beneath the techno-civilized countenance of Captain Cook, a mere man, like unto himself.

As events are commonly wont to do in human skirmish, a minor altercation suddenly and unexpectedly became the impetus for a lethal act. A knife--a knife wrought of English craftsmanship, but now wielded without warning in the hand of an Hawaiian protective of his King--put an end to the life of the legendary Captain James Cook. The great explorer's powerful implements of wood and iron, his golden mantle of authority, were not sufficient to ensure his power over men, nor to extend his life beyond a sudden disagreement's violent outcome.

Among the race of men, these things happen. Great forgers of human progress die; explorations falter; institutions crumble; empires fall, in spite of the reverence and awe lavished upon them. Ultimately all men are vulnerable in some way or another. Though the mighty and the great among us are given golden opportunities, silver adornments and iron-like authority, they are struck down by the great equalizer of death, and exposed as unsustainable, mortal men. Their inherent feet of clay will topple their lives, their institutions, their empires of gold, silver and iron.

In the ancient empire of Babylon, King Nebuchadnezzar was a man not unlike like Captain Cook. Though not a great explorer, he performed that role which is among men the most revered--conquering king, But one strange night he had a dream that he didn't understand, and it worried him. He summoned an aide, a captive prophet, who interpreted the dream. Daniel explained to Nebuchadnezzar that his great empire, with him as the golden head of it, would one day crumble and fall, because of those vulnerable feet of clay, which are the fallen nature, the fallible genetic heritage, of every homo sapiens who has ever stood on God's earth.

Whether you are a conqueror of nations, or an explorer who has sailed around the world three times,or a pretty nice guy, or a drunk who sleeps in a storefront, your feet of clay infallibility will topple you someday. It may be that another savage like yourself will cross your path in a barfight or on a freeway and put an end to your deal.

Little had Captain Cook known, when he made that landfall at Hawaii, it was his last one.

Glass half-Full

Ich bin ein Americano

2011-07-02T07:56:00.000-07:00

Classical music--the Eurocentric, orchestral kind, with Bach and Beethoven and so forth--had reached a dead end by the time the 20th century rolled around. The great masters had done their thing, had flung their genius tapestries of sound into the expanding universe of human culture. Bach and Vivaldi had long ago established a foundation of finely-tuned complexity and passionate virtuosity.Mozart and Beethoven then erected upon their base an intricate structure of technical perfection and artistic reverie.
In the 1800s, impressionists, Ravel and Chopin and others, flung the masters' exquisite orchestral constructs onto a canvas of blended colors and introspective wanderings among the forests of a disappearing natural world.

When the 20th century came roaring in with wheels of steel, endless hours of numbingly repetitive work, and dark forebodings of mechanized war, the old impulses of harmony and order in music had been lost. Massively organized concerts of deathly destruction had ground themselves into a muddy halt on European battlefields. A bewildering wasteland of alienation was spread out upon what had been a world of high culture.
Orchestral musicians sank into an abyss of academic irrelevance and bizarre experimentation.

Then along came an African bound in merciless servitude to a sweaty cotton dock down in New Orleans, and that formerly-enslaved black man restored to the fallen world of Western music what it had lost: rhythm.
And the rest is history. Well, it all was, but...
That ole man rhythm shuffled his feet, walked up a worn-out gangplank onto a Mississippi riverboat queen where he wafted up to Memphis, planted a few cotton-eyed blues shoots. Then he churned on up to St.Louis where he laid down some soon-to-be-classic 12-bar roots, and then beat out a trail on up to Chicago and got some uptown soul goin'on. By the time ole white on rice had laid his badself down and he be ready to do a little receivin' from de black folk he done brought hisself clear on up to New Yawk where he stopped and did some serious orchestratin' and western music was reborn in cradle of slavish trouble like nobody ever known in the history of the world.

And then came Gershwin.
Then the hopelessly stricken world of organized western music could get back on the boat in New Yawk harbor with some desperately needed pizzazz and a shine on his shoes, and transport his bad self around the world. And I told him dat.
And this is what I thought about when I heard, all on the same day, three awesomely talented clarinetists from totally different musical strains yesterday at the waterfront in Seattle.

1.) First there was Doreen Ketchens playing along with her tuba-totin' hubby and (probably 9-year-old) daughter cuttin' a shine on the drums while Doreen flung out that ole dixieland licorice stick magic right in the middle of all them white folk at Steinbrueck park overlooking Puget Sound. Doreen told me, while I was buying their CD, they had just arrived from New Orleans three days before.
2.) Then there was three talented fellers thumpin out a kind of retro ragtime klezmer thing goin' on right in front of the original Starbucks at Pike Place. They called themselves the Millionaires' Club, and I laid down some jack for their CD too.
3.) Leaving the Pike Place tourist mecca area, back up on 1st Ave, was yet another clarinet virtuoso. He was doin the solo thing, a la Joni Mitchell's For Free scenario, blowin' out those groundbreakin' clarinet strains from Gershwin's soulful Rhapsody in Blue.
Sorry I didn't buy his CD, but I did come back here to our son's place and start writing these thoughts.

And I remember thinking, in the midst of all that clarinetish genius in the middle of a gorgeous sunny Seattle day, and recalling the old Blood Sweat and Tears Tune, or maybe it was Chicago who sang that "I think it was the fourth of July" song about being in the park with all that native energy goin' on and all them happy folks and ice cream cones and red white and blue what not, and I thought, for some reason, of President Kennedy telling the Germans back in '61 that there is some help and some hope for a world that has fallen into destruction.

And he told those Germans that there was hope, and he said that when the world wants to get you donn, that old bad honkin' world should just come to Berlin "Let them come to Berlin..." said Kennedy to the Berlinners in 1961. Let them come and see how you've rebuilt yourselves in freedom that has overcome the ashes of tragic world war.
"Ich bin ein Berliner," he told them, figuratively. I'm a Berliner. We're all Berliners on this bus. We can all rebuild from the ashes of history. We can all overcome the sinful tragedy of an African bound to a cotton bale on the docks back in New Orleans back in the bad old days. And I thought...Let them come to America and see.
Ich bin ein Americano, and proud of it.

Glass half-Full

The Horizon of Deepwater (a prose gusher)

2011-06-28T02:13:00.000-07:00

In the fall of 2008, the Treasurer of the United States, Henry Paulson, convinced the President and the Congress to bail out the financial industry so that the whole damn system of passing money and electrons around would not fall apart.
So Mr. Bush, with legislative help from the Reps and the Senators, injected seven or eight hundred billion of public money into the big banks and the big crap-shooting insurer that backed up those banks, along with the two huge quasi-public mortgage underwriters. At least that's the way this taxpayer remembers it. Help me out here if my facts are a little amiss.
At the time, those powers that be had convinced us, in the frenzied imminent panic of falling markets and a deflating housing industry, that the entire structure of the way we do business in America and even beyond America would fall apart at the seams if we didn't meet Mr. Paulson's recommendations.
Of course we'll never know if that universal implosion of American business and international commerce would have happened or not. The banks got their money, and we are still in a big mess, although not a catostrophic one as big as it might have otherwise been haha. We'll never know. Instead of the sky falling on us with incalculable damage, we have been able to creep through a couple of lean years in which the ever-present spectre hound of the double-dip has been constantly at our heels, baying for blood or possibly just for red ink, which looks like blood. These days, who knows the difference between any real thing and its hyped-up digitized alter-ego.
Now we've come full circle, and have got the same situation over again, except this time its not Hank having fits, but the chicken-littles who warn us of that debt ceiling bogey beast that will devour our already-suspect financial stability and digest it, and then egest our fiscal credibility with overly-copious liquidity in turds not easily disposed of.

A little greece carefully applied will move things along nicely.

Meanwhile, the ratings agencies, the Moody, S&P and the Fitch, are making their obligatory noises of warning, walking their own wire of credibility while keeping fingers in the air to see which way the wind will blow.
Where were those rating agencies in 2008? What were they doing when they should have been sounding the alarms about derivatives and CDS and MBS and CDOs? Same as what they're doing now--waiting to see which way the wind will blow to tip or not tip over our unwieldy bowl of cards, 2011 version.
So now, if those stubborn, ole fashion Repubs in Congress relent and allow the Dems and themselves to keep flushing paper and electronic dollars while running both the deficit and the debt ceiling into deepwater default--what will happen then, huh?
We'll never know. When they've made their deal and then the Fed and Treasury have a new batch of paper and electrons to swish around in the bowl of toil, we'll never know what torrent of troublesome irresponsibility has been flushed down into that great poseidon-adventure pipeline that dumps its dootee out who knows where, the ocean or somewhere, probably some unstoppable severed pipeline a hundred miles off the gulf coast. We'll never know. But at least we'll still have money to play with, just like in 2008, and we can stay in the game with the blessings of the bondholders. Flush on!

Glass Chimera

Let the chips fall as they may.

2011-06-24T04:31:00.000-07:00

So now Congressman Cantor has withdrawn from the fiscal peacemaking committee, so-called gang of six. And I hear also that Senator Kyl is withdrawing as well. I also remember, it seems, that a few weeks ago Senator Coburn withdrew from those negotiations.

It appears that the Mr. Vice President Biden's noble efforts to retrieve Congressional responsibility have smashed upon the rocks of stubborn politics and a hard place of arithmetical reality.

The Dems say that the Repubs are protecting their precious millionaires and billionaires. The Repubs say the buck has to stop somewhere.

There is no easy way out of this mess. We might as well default, and let the blue chips fall as they may. The red and the white chips too.Then we can pick up the pieces and start over.

Glass Chimera

The two types of stem cells

2011-06-18T07:51:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago, I delved into a personal research project, in order to write my second novel, Glass Chimera. From a layman’s perspective, I was learning about genes, DNA, cloning, and other areas of scientific endeavor that pertain to the science of genetics. I learned a lot about the human genome, more than I can ever understand or explain.

One particular area of genetics that is often discussed in our era is the use of stem cells. My limited investigation into the subject has brought me to this observation about stem cells: there are basically two types of them.

Embryonic stem cells are those found in the fertilized egg, or the embryo, of a newly-conceived fetus in a female’s uterus. These are the controversial stem cells, because the harvesting of them for medical use will most likely alter or terminate the embryo’s fetal development. Embryonic stems cells are pluripotent, insofar as they have potential to differentiate into many types of cells that are necessary for a fully developed body to, after birth, sustain life. These cells can be directed by the DNA genetic code to become, for instance, blood cells, skin cells, muscle, nerve, or whatever cells. My limited studies have indicated that the main value of embryonic stem cells is found in their use for medical research.

In the novel that I wrote while studying this, I include a hypothetical conversation between two graduate students in microbiology. In chapter 24, Erik is explaining stem cells to his friend Sam:

“. . .these guys that are doing this type of work, they remove the stem cells from the ICM (inner cell mass) that has congregated inside the 5-or-6-day old blastocyst—“

“So they’re sacrificing the embryo?” Sam wondered.

“I guess you could call it that,”

“What do they do with the outer part?”

“Oh, the trophoblast, God only knows. I suppose they use it for something or other in the lab, or maybe they culture those cells for some other developmental purpose. I don’t know. Anyway, they place the totipotent stem cells into culture and propogate them.”

“That’s what we call a stem cell line,” observed Sam.

“Uhhuh, but it’s tricky. Those cells have a built-in tendency toward differentiation. If they’re kept alive unto themselves, without chemical restraints, they’ll start to organize themselves into an embryo again.”

This “differentiation” potential of stem cells is their most useful attribute. At the same time, it is the very thing that makes them somewhat dangerous.

I mentioned above that there is another type of stem cells: adult stem cell. Their differentiation potential is quite limited, as compared to the embryonic type, but they are much safer for medical applications, mainly because they are obtained from a patient’s body, and then injected back into that same patient. So there’s no conflict between the genetic info in the medically modified stem cells and the genetic data resident in that patient’s other billions of cells. This second type of stem cell, the “adult” type, exists in the body of every child and adult. They enable the growth of new bodily tissue, and they exist in every part of the body.

Yesterday, June 17 2011, I was fascinated as I listened to a very informative discussion on the radio about new medical treatments utilizing these adult stem cells to repair damaged tissue.

Ira Flatow was again demonstrating his customary excellence in science journalism. The depth and scope of his NPR reporting keeps his show, Science Friday, on the cutting edge of popular science education. I always obtain galactical levels of new information and insight when I can listen to his Friday program, or catch it later online.

The spot I heard yesterday was SciFri 061711 Hour 1: Black Holes, Untested Cell Therapies, Solar Update, which I had clicked on at

http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/listen.

Ira was speaking to two medical doctors about Bartolo Colon, the great NY Yankees pitcher whose injured pitching arm required medical treatment. Ira explained that since the pitcher was in the latter years of his baseball career, surgery to correct his elbow problem might be too risky. So Bartolo had elected to have this relatively untested therapy performed on his arm by doctors in Dominican Republic. And guess what, it worked! Bartholo has made an impressive comeback in his pitching career, at the age of 37.

Dr. Rick Lehman, an orthopedic surgeon at the US Center for Sports Medicine (in St. Louis), described how cells taken from Bartolo’s own body had been medically treated and then injected back into his injured shoulder and elbow. The immature stem cells, as the doc explained, act to recruit blood supply, enhance healing of ligaments, and improve the natural healing mechanics inside the patient’s body.

Dr. Scott Rodeo, orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery (in New York City) contributed to their fleshing out of the subject with specific comments about Bartolo Colon’s surgery, but also with some interesting facts about the different kinds of stem cells. For instance, risk of cancer is far lower with the use of these adult stem cells than the risk from using more primitive stem cells, such as those pluripotent ones found in embryos.

As a writer whose research had skirted these areas pioneering medicine, I was fortunate to have heard their productive talk on NPR about the minimally surgical restoration of a great pitcher’s arm.

And congratulations to Bartolo Colon, whose baseball career has been renewed.

Glass Chimera

4000 Holes in Blackburn, Lancashire

2011-06-13T09:39:00.000-07:00

I was a high school student when the Beatles mystified the pop music world with their very unusual Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. The collaborative musical opus therein was an exquisitely woven fabric of bizarre imagery and lyrical enigmas, along with some groundbreaking rock n' roll.

Since those late 1960s days, I have often wondered about the meanings of so many of the band's odd vocal references. One phrase in particular, sung by the master of modern musical mystery himself, John Lennon, hollowed out a little question mark in my mind that has been unfilled all these years.

Until yesterday. Yesterday I picked up a clue about the possible meaning of the "four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire" about which John Lennon sang in the ablbum's finale song, A Day In The Life.

While reading English Journey, a travel journal published in 1934 by J.B. Priestley, I was quite moved by his reported impression of Blackburn, Lancashire, UK. The city had been for many years the very heart of British textile industry, most especially the enormous output of cotton fabrics and clothing. But in the 1920s and thirties, as new producers of cotton goods in India began to supply their own markets, the volume of exports from England's textile belt (Lancashire) slipped into a period of serious decline, from which they never truly recovered. By the early 1930s, employmnet in Blackburn and other cities had decreased to "depression" levels.

Sound familiar? This economic scenario is quite similar to what has happened here in North Carolina about a half-century later, and in New England USA shortly before that.

Mr. Priestley's poignant account of the Lancashire situation in 1934 includes his describing (page 214) a visit to a place called "Community House," which was set up by local volunteers as a resource for unemployed folks to occupy themselves with productive projects. The volunteers had recovered a condemned school building, where people were cobbling--repairing and making shoes--and doing other helpful works. Most notable among the activities, as far as Mr. Priestley wrote, were woodworks being cranked out by the men there.

It was a great work happening in the decrepit old schoolhouse, built upon a good idea and the willingness of local folks to get busy and make good things happen in spite of the hard times that had shut down their factories and their prosperity.

Priestley described the goings-on at Community House:

"This instructor, paid by the volunteer society, was busy all day giving out wood and tools and showing his men what to do. The wood is supplied without charge to the men, and one of the instructor's duties is to find quantities of it at the lowest possible price or at no price at all....He said that the men were not very good craftsmen, and tended to be imitative and careless, but that many of them were very keen and did their best."

And Priestley wrote: "In the next and largest room of all, a public assistance class in woodwork was being held. The young men came here instead of breaking stones in the workhouse. At first, the instructor told me, they resented any attempt at discipline and tuition. They felt they had been dragooned into messing about with bits of wood in this ex-schoolroom. They would not do what they were told...and they were not going to be treated like kids by any bloody instructor. That was their attitude during the first weeks. But after that, almost in spite of themselves, they gradually acquired an interest in their jobs at the benches; they began asking one another the best way to do this and that; and finally were glad of advice from the qualified instructor. There was something rather touching in this, the emergence of the natural craftsman that is buried somewhere in every man."

These men were gradually filling "holes" in their unemployed days and times, with constructive projects--something to do instead of nothing to do.

But J.B. Priestley's initial impression of the condemned schoolhouse, before witnessing the activity inside, had been this: "It was a dismall hole in a dark back street."

One dismal "hole", perhaps, among four thousand others in Blackburn, Lancashire? But the good folks of Blackburn had undertaken projects to fix the holes.

Now, moving right along...maybe you can help me understand the second part of Lennon's mysterious lyric:

"They had to count them all. Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall."

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Constructive public discourse

2011-06-10T15:41:00.000-07:00

Today I listened to Diane Rehm’s Friday News Roundup on the radio.

At the end of the first hour, Diane apologized for a mildly contentious exchange that had briefly transpired between two of her well-informed guests. But Diane’s apology was unnecessary. The constructive discussion that had just transpired under her insightful leadership was actually a paragon of collaborative journalistic analysis. Her guests were talking about the unemployment versus budget-balancing dilemma that now confounds our nation’s forward fiscal progress.

Compared to the rhetorical traffic jams and indecipherable vocal train wrecks regularly occurring between talking heads on Fox and MSNBC, Diane’s presentation is a consistent example of well-moderated public discourse. I always learn gobs of stuff from listening to her panels.

Thank you, Diane. No apology necessary.

Glass Chimera

The Mistake of 1937 in 2011?

2011-06-05T05:46:00.000-07:00

So Paul Krugman points out, along with many other economists these days, that our nation is in a tight spot. We are suspended, as it were, on a sort of precarious ridge. On one side is a dangerous trough of unemployment into which millions of people are falling. On the other is chasm of fiscal irresponsibility because we're spending more $$ than we gather. Mr. Krugman is of the Keynsian school which says that if we don't put people to work we are in big trouble and will yet be in bigger trouble as more and more folks find themselves without a job.

On the other hand, say the fiscal conservatives, if we don't balance the budget, or at least move in that direction, we slide off into the irrecoverable condition of national default and larger levels of financial collapse than we've already inflicted upon ourselves.
Mr. Krugman, referencing Gauti Eggertsson, adroitly points out that this situation is similar to the dilemma we faced in an earlier era, 74 years ago, and he refers to that unfortunate chain of events as "the mistake of 1937."

And that mistake was, as nearly as I can surmise without taking sufficient time to research the subject (because I don't have the time and because I'm not an economist anyway but I am a citizen taxpayer so I'm qualified to have an opinion and this is it)-- the mistake was that Congress chose to address the fiscal problem instead of the unemployment problem and thereby plunged our national condition into deeper trouble. That's this layman's uninformed, oversimplified statement of an admittedly very complicated problem.

Anyway, as a result of Congress' fiscal budget-cutting back in '37, the dreaded "double-dip" recession followed, says Mr. Krugman, in '38 instead of recovery. The historical lesson is that the same unfortunate outcome will happen now if we don't learn from their 1937 bad decision and, instead, spend some money to get the unemployed working again.
As if that could happen.
As if we could really get this nation working again by passing federal reserve notes around. Yes, maybe we can keep the monthly numbers juggled in mid-air for awhile.
But there is the supposition of Keynsians-- the unsustainable "mistake" of pump-priming deficit-riding economics--that the government can get the people working again.

No, it aint gonna happen, because it is not the government that fundamentally will put people back to work doing things like what they used to do back in the day. And maybe even corporate America can't get the damn thing going again because they're too busy investing in overseas stocks and BRIC 'n mortar industries, and circulating credit default licenses among themselves.

So maybe the Dems are right about the self-absorbed condition of corporate America; and maybe the Repubs are right about gov being the problem. Maybe every contender in this national roller derby has a little chunk of truth somewhere.

But what are people doing?
Back in the day, our ancesters, our forefathers and foremothers, spent entire generations, entire decades, and yea, I say unto thee, entire centuries, extracting stuff from the ground and turning it into finished products and then selling those products to each other. And we did it here in the USA in an exceptional way, with an unprecedented rapidity, because those enterprising European ancestors of ours had embarked on an undeveloped continent just shortly before the industrial revolution was dawning on mama England and her civilized contintental neighbors .

Forthwith, all that industrializing force, enhanced exponentially with cutting-edge mechanical might and hence newfound productivity, was unleashed upon God's green earth, America, in a way that had never happened before and never will again.

There was an awful lot of work to be done, and a lot of folk did it and it was great while it lasted but then we figured out, and I believe correctly, that the extractive demands on our planet were unsustainable at those previous levels of depletion, and so now we're in a kind of shell shock and trying to figure out what direction to take. While meanwhile back at the ranch, and perched precariously on that previously-mentioned precipice, we find ourselves confounded the fallacious decision of with whether to put people to work or to balance the budget.
Remember this, Paul. In the really big picture, people make work, and governments make budgets. Sooner or later we've got to get back to that reality check--which is not an unemployment check , nor is it a paycheck-- or we'll make the mistake of 2011 and 2020.

And guess what. It is a mistake either way! No way around this problem. We've got to take a hit, bite the bullet, take the bull by the horns. Furthermor, Bubby, there will be sacrifices and belt-tightening and defeating of obesity and tossing out of rotten couch potatoes, and there will be folks out of work for a long time and there will be deficits, and one way or another there will be defaults somewhere or perhaps even everywhere.

Bottom line: People have got to find something to do. People, not their governments. Its up to us. Nanny State and Big Brother are hooked up to a federal I-Vee, presently incapacitated or headed toward that medicared condition, and folks will be required to once again, as has happened before in the history of the world, find some work to do to keep themselves alive and functioning.

What are people doing?
What are you doing, you citizen of the United States of America?
Look around your home, your community, and see what needs to be done. Then do it. The unemployment checks cannot roll into your mailbox with a 44-cent stamp forever. Moreover, those weekly/monthly numbers that the gov and the media churn out don't really solve anybody's problems; they just give us something to wring our hands about, and a few excuses every now and then to explain our mounting dysfunction.

People solve problems. Are you a people? Are you hungry? Grow some food, even if its just a tomato or two in your window. Learn what is means to grow something from a seed, or what it means to build something from scratch. Begin something. Get to work, y'all. We're not going to move off this precipice without some blood, sweat and many tears.

Glass half-Full

I am a dinosaur.

2011-05-30T07:16:00.000-07:00

I fear I am a dinosaur. Approaching sixtieth year next month, I was raised in an a text-intense era of reading, writing and 'rithmatic. See Jane run. See Dick run.

But the atmosphere of my 1950s world was being occupied, slowly but surely, with invisible electromagnetic waves. The television networks were programming my airspace with images of Lucy and Desi and Howdy Doody. Electronic images were claiming vast regions of my grey matter. By the time I Dream of Jeanie came along, I was a captive. But I rebelled, like James Dean or Easy Rider, or Dylan. Pat and I got rid of the TV in 1983. But the DVD player has sucked us back in, and the evidence is more abundant every day that I am a text-obsessed dinosaur.

So nowadays, while the grey matter exposes its feeble fragility as greying hair, I can see that the world is being converted from text-driven communications to video impressions.
You've heard of French impressionism; this is 21st century version: video impressionism. What you see as what you get, everywhere you go, all the time.

Ideas are obsolete; it's all about images now. My children thrive in this brave new world, for the next thirty or so years, because it is their native territory, as mine was Ozzie and Harriet. Thirty or so years from now they'll become dinosaurs like me.
As the blue-eyed dinosaur of my parents' generation used to sing: That's life; that's what all the people say--ridin high in the '60s, shot down today.(my revised version)

Meanwhile I write little ditties like this, or even long treatises, while everybody else posts videos on Facebook, until the medicare panels come and take me to the old folks home where I'll dither in TV heaven for a few years; then I fly to the real heaven. That should be an improvement; maybe folks there will be sitting around reading the Bible instead of watching UTube.

with new novel, Smoke, in progress

A Louisiana flood tale

2011-05-18T16:04:00.000-07:00

Maybe you've heard of urban legends; this true story is something like that, except it involves a hurricane and the great state of Louisiana, so it is more appropriately categorized as a "storm legend."

Louisiana has a long history of them, such as Betsy in 1965, which dropped, in the middle of memorably terrible night, a large oak tree on our house in Baton Rouge. I remember waking up in my bed and wondering why there was a large hole in the floor with some alien object thrusting through it in the darkness, and then my father's faint calling, through the howl of wind and rain from the other side of that sudden chasm, But that's, as they say in legend lore, "another story."

What I'm thinking of now is a Katrina tale, but it relates, you see, to what is happening now down on the mighty muddy Mississipp, which is Louisiana's--yeah, I say unto thee, heartland America's-- waterway aorta lifeline of trade, culture and jazz, not to mention crabs, shrimp and oil.

When Hurricane Katrina tore through the Gulf Coast in 2005, the storm's onshore strike point was about as bad as it could possibly be for the rickety ole city of New Orleans. Counter-clockwise furies of wind and rain had worked up a megasurge of water from Lake Ponchartrain that descended upon the Crescent City like a duck on a june bug, blowing right over the Lake levee as if the Corps of Engineers were just an afterthought in Huey Long's mind.

A few weeks later, I accompanied my wife and some other nurses down to the storm-stressed area. We drove down there from our home in North Carolina, on a Red Cross expedition to provide some medical services for storm-tossed folks who were in shelters. I just went along for the ride, and to offer a little help now and then in whatever way seemed appropriate. The expedition also allowed what was to be one of the last visits with my dear mother in Baton Rouge, before she passed to that great River of Life on the other side.

During that two-week tour of duty in Louisiana, Pat and I spent nights at my mother's house, while spending our days at several Red Cross shelters so that the nurses could provide medical services to those displaced persons whose unfortunate circumstances had landed them there. The Red Cross facilities were generally set up in gymnasiums, populated with hundreds of folk and the cots where they slept at night while waiting for an all-clear from FEMA or whomever to return to New Orleans.

One day we worked in Alexandria, a small city in central Louisiana. About nightfall, we left the shelter there, for the hour-and-a-half drive back to Baton Rouge. We had three passengers with us. One was another volunteer nurse. The other two were a mother and her son.

The young mother was a Muslim woman; her boy was quite young, maybe five or six years old, as I recall. She was dressed in hijab. I had begun talking to her earlier in the day, when she explained that she was from Chalmette, a town southeast of New Orleans. Since our evening's journey would take us to Baton Rouge, and hence toward her home, she decided to hitch a ride with us.

I will not forget driving through that misty Louisiana darkness, windshield wipers clappin' time, from Alexandria back to Baton Rouge, that night back in '05 somewhere between the River and the cane fields and the muddy bayous. The young woman told us of a harrowing encounter she and her son had had with Katrina's furious maelstrom. The storm had flooded her hometown, Chalmette.

So now I'm getting to the storm legend part, or it is for me anyway because that night's memory is so vivid. She said that the folk down there in St. Bernard parish had figured that the powers-that-be in New Orleans had made a decision to dynamite a certain levee so that St. Bernhard and Chalmette would catch the worst of the flood instead of N'awlins.

Now, me, I dunno. But this I remember--what she said. And she reinforced her tale of inflicted levee destruction with storm legend hearsay evidence that went all the way back to 1927, when folks down in St. Bernard say the same damn thing had happened, if you can believe it--that the folks in charge of levees in N'awlins would do such a thing.

Now me, I dunno. But I can tell you this. Down on the bayou, levees is serious business. Now I hear tell that they're doing it again, for the flood of 2011. Cuttin' the Mississipp loose through Morganza and 'tchafalaya, cha, so's it won't hit Baton Rouge and N'awlins. But its all above-board now.

'Specially now that they got the federal guv'ment to sort out all the mud and mess, since Huey Long dun put the hurt on Roosevelt back in the day. And I told him that.

Glass Chimera

The Mississippi River flood 1927, beginning of a novel

2011-05-11T16:03:00.000-07:00

‘T’wasn’t a good situation, there in 1927.
To hear the story from ole Wash (Great-Grampa Beau had said) the captain had ordered the boat to be steered too close to a breach in the levee. And so, while the pilot spun the wheel in frantic dismay, the Leda Mae gradually got sucked out of the main channel, and then suddenly found herself sliding on a torrent of river water right through a flood-forced levee crevasse.
“She quivered like a bridesmaid in a Yazoo wedding, then slid on down, twirling and rockin’ like a sycamore leaf through a sluice gate, until Ole Miss finally dropped her on Beau Rivage ridge,” ole Wash had said.
It had happened on this very spot seventy-three years ago.
The “ridge,” by Louisiana standards constituted a mere rise of a few feet in several hundred of distance. And this is where William was now sitting, recalling the story that had been told to him of the demise of the Leda Mae. He was eating a pastrami sandwich, while taking a break from his work in the microbiology lab.
But even before that unfortunate incident, William’s great grandfather, Beauregard Theseus, had quite possibly sat in this same spot back in, oh, 1907 or so, as he took a break from running one of the largest cotton plantations this side of New Orleans.

from page 1 of Glass Chimera

This is Psalm 19:

2011-05-06T04:03:00.000-07:00

(Blatant childlike, anthropomorphic faith, and lovin' it)

The heavens are telling of the glory of God, and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.

Day to day they pour forth the message, and night reveals knowledge. Yet there is no speech; nor are there words. No voice is heard.

The vibrations of the heavens have gone out through all the earth, and their utterances to the end of the world.

In them he has placed a tent for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, who rejoices like a strong man to run his course. The sun's rising is from one end of the heavens, and its circuit to the other end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat.

The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.

The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.

The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever; the judgments of the Lord are true; they are righteous altogether. They are more desirable than gold, yes!, more desirable than fine gold, sweeter than honey and the drippings of the honeycomb.

Moreover, by them your servant is warned; in keeping them there is great reward. What man can discern his own errors? Oh God! Acquit me of my hidden faults, and keep me--your servant--from presumptuous sins. Let them not rule over me.

Then I will be blameless before you, and I shall be acquitted of great transgression.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditaion of my heart be acceptable in your sight, Oh Lord, my rock and my redeemer!

No tulips nor tomatoes here

2011-04-29T04:44:00.000-07:00

I work for a pretty good company; we manage and maintain apartments, a whole lot of them. I am a maintenance guy, and enjoy helping folks solve their little household breakdowns. I fix many toilets, sink drains, holes in the walls, broken doors and such.

Funding comes indirectly through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as that federal agency subsidizes tenants' rental needs.

In front of the apartment buildings where I work, there are mulched ground areas for sparse shrubbery. In past years, some residents have wanted to use small portions of their time and energy to put a few plants in the ground--tulips or lilies in the spring for color and cheer, tomatoes and maybe squash for a few veggies on the table later this summer.

But the tenants are not allowed to plant anything for themselves. Instead they are required to view the sterile, pine-barked grounds outside their windows, and live contentedly appreciating the unproductive, boxy little shrubs spaced three or feet apart along the front edge of the building.

And of course they can amuse themselves watching TV.

This seems a little odd to me, considering that the place is subsidized by the U.S. Department of Agricultural. Folks are prevented from growing a little food of their own?

I suppose it is just a sign of the times--life in the post-productive USA.

Glass Chimera

Egalit'e

2011-04-24T11:09:00.000-07:00

When the noble ideal of egalit'e among men leads to state-enforced egalitarianism it degenerates to tyranny. This historical truth is seen in the bitter collateral damage of the French revolution and the Russian revolution.

The proper function of government in regard to equality is to protect equal opportunity, not to impose an institutional egalitarianism. Where Marxism went wrong, and degenerated utimately to Stalinism, was in force-feeding societal equality to all citizens. Likewise, among the Chinese, the reign of Maoism following their 1949 revolution degenerated to oppressive governmental structures from which the people are still striving to free themselves. The Russians too.

The earlier revolution, the one that happened here in America, presented equality as a God-given attribute of the human race. That has made quite a difference in the playing-out of it. Jefferson, Franklin, and the many leaders who followed them were breaking new ground on an undeveloped contintent. That has also made quite a difference in the flowering of American equal opportunity among men and women.

The French revolutionary model, established soon after the American one, was encumbered from its inception with the weight of millenia of societal baggage, heaped upon the people mostly by the Church in Rome. When French republicans succeeded in freeing themselves from the bondage of the ancien regime, their progress was quite different from the wild and wooly American experience.

About a century later, Marx took a remnant of that French egalite principle and ran with it; it later developed as historical Marxism. Under the brutally communist hands of Josef Stalin, it enslaved and murdered millions of Russians and east Europeans.

Thus the revolutionary ideal in old Europe developed quite differently than the American experiment. Our working out of it emphasized equal opportunity instead of enforced equality. That had a lot to do with our continent-wide abundance of undeveloped land. This is the heart of American exceptionalism; Such swift and wide incubation of democratic conditions will never happen again in the history of this world.

But these days, the old Western debate of democratic republicanism vs. authoritarianism is being rendered irrelevant due to the forceful power of Islam.

What was previously a philosphical debate, then a multi-faceted political division and military wars, has now retrograded to a more fundamental debate among homo sapiens: a religious struggle.

The Protestan Reformation, and the humanistic Enlightenment that accompanied it, eclipsed a millenial Roman Catholic domination of European culture and its institutions. One result was a vast power vacuum. The revolutionary ideals that bloomed as political movements thereaftere drifted further and further from their religious moorings, and back toward archival Greek philosophic underpinnings.

Now western revolutionary zeal, having wrested itself from authoritarian Catholicism, has bankrupted itself of spiritual stamina. Its wantonly amoral end now renders us culturally weak as compared to the heavy legalistic hand of Islamic fundamentalism.

So we in the post-European world will be playing catch-up ball to recover a principled spiritual heritage. This is a situation analagous to that in which Churchill and the British were struggling to prepare their defense against the onslaught of Nazism and Fascism in the late 1930s.

Oh what a dear price the people of Britain and their Allies paid. Never had so few sacrificed so much for so many, said Mr. Churchill, about the hardly-won defeat over authoritarian tyrrany in Europe.

Our generations probably face similar upheavals in the years ahead.

I know not what course others may take. I take my refuge, and my inspiration in the One who, having decided not to participate in the prolonged skirmish, chose instead to spread his arms and allow the powers of this world to crucify his body so that spiritual rebirth could begin for all mankind.

Resurrection is better than insurrection.

On the limitations of humannness

2011-04-23T04:05:00.000-07:00

Law built his kingdom upon a foundation of strength,
hefting beams of order upon discipline length
while
Progress made her society of perfectible members
teaching reason and freedom among liberty timbers.
Then
Love set up a clinic of hope and of healing
upon sacrifice and sweat and their warmfuzzy feeling
till
Truth tore it down, and sent all of them reeling
'neath a sky that is falling and a chicken in every debt ceiling.

Cluck cluck Selah
whadya think about that
Thanks for the doughnut hole, so long.

Glass half-Full

communally or individually

2011-04-17T01:29:00.000-07:00

If man was made to live in community,
with society to be the greater entity,
then help me Lord to do and be
productive one of that totality.

But if each is rugged individual here to be,
and self-expression is ultimate uniquity,
then help me Lord to be that specialty
that you have called me here to be.

It takes all kinds to make a world, you see.
We need to live in peace, not enmity.
Please help me, you, who stand here next to me
to be that one that I was meant to be.

Glass half-Full

Reasonable

2011-04-14T02:39:00.000-07:00

Democrats should be as reasonable as our President; Republicans should be as reasonable as our House Speaker.

Defunding H2 from H20

2011-04-08T15:52:00.000-07:00

I learn a lot about what's on the cutting edge of scientific research by listening to Ira Flatow on ScienceFriday, NPR. The segment I heard today (8 April 2011) was downright inspiring as the program presented some good possibilities for generating energy from sunlight by experimental technology that could separate of hydrogen and oxygen from water.They call it artificial leaf; its something like synthesized photosynthesis. This ScienceFriday edition is worth a listen.

http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201104081

Dr. Daniel Nocera of MIT talks with Ira about this very promising technology of using silicon to function in energy-gathering ways simulating what photosynthesis does in natural leaves, only better. Nocera's rap goes like this:

What does a leaf do? It turns photons into electrical current, stores the solar energy while splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. In this new tech, silicon replaces the leaf. Stored hydrogen produced thereby runs a fuel cell. This silicon system catches the sun as much as a hundred times more efficiently than a leaf.
The real breakthrough is that these researchers are using earth-abundant materials: silicon, cobalt, phosphate and cheap metal. Hence, some practical applications for energy generation are realized; they're building prototypes at MIT, with the experimental apparatus going for days with no drop in productivity. This water-breaking work has propelled progress well beyond the science; now its in the engineering phase.

Ira asks: whats next for commercial viability? Dr. Nocera says they're working toward the apparatus being the workable size of two doors and thus operating effectively. Passing water over silicon and producing energy, but without wires--that's the breakthrough-- making the necessary gases over surface of silicon. Next challenge is engineering a gas collection system, and now they're using regular water instead of something rarer, so that's the real promise of significant improvement.

Dr. Nocera also mentions in the closing comments that people in developing world are less dependent on old technologies than we are; that is something to be aware of. Folks in the developing world are more open to new techs, being less dependent on the old (fossil-fuel) ones.

This is cutting edge; you won't hear about it on fox or hln. That's why I appreciate ScienceFriday, and that's why I appreciate NPR.
Although I do not subscribe to the exclusively materialistic hypotheses through which Ira interprets our cosmological origins, I do appreciate the excellent coverage that he and his staff regularly provide on scientific frontiers.

And my appreciation extends beyond the ScienceFriday crew, to NPR generally, which is an informative aural venue through which we Americans can garner fuller understanding of our life on this finite planet as it exists today. National Public Radio is a place in broadcast space where we can hear, and participate in, real disscussions about relevant, timely issues. A little "liberal" perhaps, but its more productive, I think, than listening to some self-made mouthpiece who pontificates through a microphone and insults callers who disagree.

As a supporter of public radio, I hope to see ScienceFriday and all the other NPR programs continue. If the Repubs, of which I am one, succeed in cutting the funds for public broadcasting, I do not see that as an insurmountable obstacle for its continuance. I plan to continue my financial support. I truly believe that the excellence in journalism and educative programming supplied therein will find adequate means to prosper in the competitive world of commercial media--and without compromising their high journalistic and first-amendment standards.

If our Congress is inclined to consider cutting NPR out of the federal funding trough, I suggest that they defund Planned Parenthood instead, and then appropriate that money that would have otherwise aborted feti to promote growth--growth in public comprehension of the issues that define our existence in 21st-century America.

There's no sense in aborting feti when we will have dire need, in the future, for young working citizens to support our expanding Medicare demands and our waning energies.

Glass Chimera

Faithful Presence

2011-04-04T10:51:00.000-07:00

To change the world-- a noble challenge to which we Christians have always aspired-- now becomes a new call to service issued by James Davison Hunter, in his book by the same name: To Change the World.

Dr. Hunter's clarion call is preceded in the book by an analysis of historical and contemporary manifestations, among the people who call themselves servants of God, of that God-inspired inclination to make the world a better place. Hunter's analysis identifies three strategic camps within American Christianity today:
~Christians whose dominant cultural identity is found in defending themselves and their institutions (especially the family) from encroaching secularism; (the "defensive against" camp, as defined by Prof. Hunter)
~Christians whose motivation for divine fulfillment is centered on working toward justice, and toward institutional and individual benevolence to help poor and oppressed people; (the "relevance to" camp as defined by Prof. Hunter)
~Christians whose purpose is to maintain and advocate a pure manifestation of Christ's work and teachings, with emphasis on peace and non-violence; (the "purity from" camp, as defined by Prof. Hunter)

After a cogent description of each, and consideration of their various impacts upon society as a whole, James David Hunter concludes his book's message with a new (although its as old as the prophet Jeremiah!) paradigm for Christian involvement in our secularized world. "Faithful presence" is the strategy by which we authenticate God's love for all people by adopting societal well-being as our own. This requires us to accept worldly responsibilities for the welfare of the communities and nation in which we live. Rather than despising worldly society we take our places, prepared and enabled by God, within it.

Our biblical example and precedent for this collaboration is found in the exhortation that Jeremiah issued to the Jewish exiles in Babylon, two and a half millenia ago. The prophet told them:

"Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile form Jerusalem to Babylon: build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare." (Jer. 29:4-7)

I emphasize that last sentence because I think it summarizes well the essence of Professor Hunter's point. Even more importantly, though-- it is a biblically sound, potent call to service for our generation of Christians and all those who follow us--"faithful presence" in the community and nation in which we each live. Responsible presence, caring presence, contributing presence, and hey--presents! at Christmas and other appropriate times.

The "welfare" of which Jeremiah speaks above is not the governmental dole system which in some cases enables laziness and lethargy to overtake people who are down and out. Nevertheless, our welfare system--woefully deficient as it is-- is not beyond the capacity of our great God, through his son Jesus, to redeem and sanctify those unfortunate citizens (Christian and otherwise) who partake of it.
So do not judge those who find themselves stuck in that dolish "welfare" predicament. But rather, work as God's productive people, saved by the blood of the Lamb, to lift the levels of living water in God's sea of humanity so that all boats will rise within it.

Glass half-Full

the Wallris note

2011-04-03T16:49:00.000-07:00

A snippet from chapter 2 of the new novel in progress, Smoke:

The policeman asked Nathan if there was anything else he had noticed about the deceased.
"He handed this to me," said Nathan, "even as he was falling to the ground." It was a folded white paper, with this handwritten message largely scrawled in black ink:

Wallris--
John Bull's ransom will smoke out the black shirts tomorrow. If not, your bridge could burn. Chapman

Mr. Baldwin is us.

2011-04-01T08:31:00.000-07:00

In the mid-1930s, when Adolf Hitler began his big push to re-arm Germany, nobody in the world really knew or understand what the mad dictator had in mind. The once-and-future enemies of Germany--England, France, and Russia, were somewhat alarmed at the initial stages of Hitler's expanding wehrmacht.

He got their attention when he sent German soldiers to re-occupy the Rhineland in 1936. Third Reich belligerence became even more apparent when Hitler ordered the anschluss of Austria in 1938 and then the military occupation of the Sudenland in Czechoslavokia in March 1939. But when, on September 1 of 1939, Adolf Hitler cranked up his war machine to invade Poland, the Allies knew that they would surely have to put a stop to German aggression, and so they declared war.

And those Allied nations, especially Britain, were really scrambling to equip their fighting men with military equipment and weapons. They were playing catch-up ball. Nazi aggression was taking them by surprise. But not really, because a few vigilant leaders, most notably Winston Churchill, had recognized the signs of war to come before everyone else did, and had advised their governments accordingly.

So its not like the British didn't see it coming; its more like they didn't want to see it coming, and so they had failed to make adequate preparations. When the necessity for defense of Europe and of Britain itself became woefully obvious, politicians began to accuse each other of dropping the ball on military readiness.

We can never really do enough in this life to prepare ouselves, individually or collectively, for the storms and roadblocks to come. Most times, governments and folk are caught unawares, blindsided, by the catastrophes on planet earth. You know the ones I'm talking about--floods, earthquakes, nuclear accidents, wars, climate change, depressions, etc. And even if people are not totally clueless about the imminent dangers, their institutions are generally underfunded and overextended when the card houses begin to crumble.

Mr. Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister 1935-37, was a primary target of those who, in 1939 and thereafter, were looking for scapegoats. Although he had advocated for military re-armamant during his time of leadership, he had not, it seemed, done enough to get the job of military preparedness done adequately to meet the real needs when push later came to shove.

In his 1975 book The Past Masters, Mr. Harold MacMillan, who later served as Prime Minister 1957-63, wrote this about Stanley Baldwin:

"The truth is that, like many other people, he could not believe that there could be a man in the world so wicked and so lacking in any kind of moral feeling as Hitler. Baldwin's life had been cast on the whole in pleasant places. He had had to deal with a lot of people in varying degrees of good and evil in their character...(but) He had never believed that there could be a living devil. So although the full development of Hitler's career came after his (Baldwin's) resignation, he was unable to attune his mind to the thought that in this century of 'progress' the world might be hurled for a second time into the abyss of destructive war."

Nevertheless, the worst happened anyway. And I think most of us are like Mr. Stanley Baldwin.

Smoke

Demoniac tantrums

2011-03-27T17:07:00.000-07:00

In the USA we have a long tradition, beginning with the Constitution, that separates church from state. Other countries each have their own histories and precedents as pertains to this issue.
In Germany, a union of the Christian church and the State, or Government, was a long collaboration that stretched back into history many centuries, going all the way back in time to what is called the Holy Roman Empire, of the middle ages.
In the secularizing 20th century, this church-state collaboration became a problem.

In Nazi Germany, the union of church and state became a problem for Christians of conscience who detected some decidedly heathen policies that were imposed by the Nazis, long about 1933. It was also an impedement for the Nazis until they clamped down on religious freedom by restricting the activities and freedoms of certain German pastors who were dissenting against the third reich.

In August of 1933, the Nazis rounded up a bunch of submissive church leaders and imposed upon them a new identity that neutralized their espousal of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and replaced it with a Nazi-approved theology that suited the hateful programs of the third reich.

The new Nazified theology was rejected by pastor Martin Niemoeller, who shepherded a chruch in Dahlem, a Berlin suburb. Niemoeller not only spoke publicly from the pulpit in opposition to Nazi restrictions, but he also proceeeded to organize support among Christians to resist the corrupted churchianity that the Nazis were trying to impose on the German church.

The most notable atrocity that the Nazi heathens had sought to force on the church in Germany was the "Aryan paragragh," a reprehensible dictum that banned all persons of "non-Aryan" ethnicity (or having non-Aryan spouses) from holding state office. Since the collaboration between church and state had been a very old arrangement in Germany, this affected the church indirectly.

But even more important than that, it was wrong, and some discerning Christian smelled the Aryan rat.

When the dissent arising among Pastor Niemoeller and others likeminded with him became an inconvenient irritant to the emerging Nazi program of exterminting the Jews (and other groups), Hitler and Goering ordered that the offending churchmen should be rounded up and taught a lesson.
In January, 1934, Hitler devised an end to the Christian clergy problem when, in the presence of those pastors, he threw a tantrum, assaulted them with his yelling tirades, and then left the room before they could object to his sociopathic behaviour and the oppressive policies that would ensue.

Unfortunately, Hitler's bluster worked, as did much of his reprobate assault on civilization until the Allies later defeated his militaristic machine of heathenism.

After that meeting with the resistant pastors in 1933, most of the good German reverends treated Martin Niemoeller coldly, and withdrew their support of his brave resistance to the Nazi tyranny. Martin Niemoeller, although he had been a U-boat hero in WWI, was later imprisoned by the third reich. Thus did the domoniac Hitler neutralize Christian resistance in the Nazi era.

I want to thank Clarissa Start Davidson, whose book God's Man, the history of Pastor Niemoeller, published in 1959 by Ives Washburn, Inc. of New York, informed me in the posting of this blog. Thank your, Clarissa.

If this ever happens again in the world, I hope and pray that Christians, me included, will have the Christ-inspired courage and good sense to not comply with heathen megalomaniacs, their oppressive regimes, or any other worldly power that seeks to wipe us or our Jewish compatriots out. I'd also point out that the vision of apostle John, as recorded in Revelation 12, reveals that when the evil principalities of this world make murderous assault on the Jews, their persecutive pursuit of us Christians is not far behind.

Glass half-Full