Proclamation of the Incarnation

The whole life of Christ
was a continual passion;
      others die martyrs,
          but Christ was born a martyr.
He found a Golgotha
    (where he was crucified)
             even in Bethlehem,
where he was born;
   for, to his tenderness then,
      the straws were almost as sharp
          as the thorns after;
      and the manger as uneasy at first,
                as his cross at last.
His birth and his death
       were but one continual act,
          and his Christmas Day
             and his Good Friday
               are but the evening
                 and morning
                   of one and the same day.














                                                       JOHN DONNE
















.....

intentional cause and effect

“Each nation
that has ‘liberal’ abortion laws
has rapidly become,
 if it was not already, a nation of murderers”.
























                                                Elizabeth Anscombe




















.....

Lemaitre's ontological riddle

As far as I can see,
 such a theory remains
entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question . . .
 It is consonant with Isaiah speaking of the hidden God,
 hidden even in the beginning of the universe.






                                              Fr.  George Lemaitre












.......upon an egg exploding in a microwave
















......

visual poem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bison#mediaviewer/File:Muybridge_Buffalo_galloping.gif














.

facing freezing frost

Winter is not a season, it's an occupation.












                                  —Sinclair Lewis








....

the parameters of government

Voltaire wrote,


 "If you want to know who rules over you
 just ask yourself who cannot be criticized."




















....

most observations reflect some form of truth

There's nothing more desperate than the sound of DJ music playing in an empty bar.
















                               .......overheard while sipping wine in a helena dive


















......

an ontological zinger

God is like Heidegger's notion of the Dasein.
It is being in the abstract with a capital B.
















                           ...a craigism from LS










      .....

a binarial glitch

"Something has consequences
 because of who does it,
and this is Tim Cook and Apple.
This will resonate powerfully."






.....here...take a bite of this apple










.....

some important questions for the A I folks

Should combat drones follow the rule ‘minimum damage for maximum results’?  Who’s to say what constitutes damage, or, for that matter, results?  Should a robot fire on a military target if civilians are nearby?  Should soldiers leave a robot behind to guard captured enemies, and should it fire on prisoners if they try to escape?  How can it tell the difference between an escape attempt and, say, the frenzy of a seizure?  Should a driverless car swerve to avoid pedestrians even if it puts the car into oncoming traffic?  Should robots be programmed to lie to enemies?  What about to lie to civilians to avoid panic?  Which victim should a search and rescue robot first evacuate?






I am optimistic that programs could be developed that are sophisticated enough to make good ‘decisions’ most of the time.  I confess, however, that I’m very worried about who will be chosen to write the programs.




                           Christian Brugger


















...

with an ear to eternity

Yonder sky that has wept tears of compassion
 upon my people for centuries untold,
 and which
          to us
   appears changeless
          and eternal,
    may change.
Today is fair. Tomorrow it may be overcast with clouds.
My words are like the stars that never change.
Whatever Seattle says,
the great chief at Washington can rely upon
with as much certainty as he can
 upon the return of the sun or the seasons.
The white chief says
that Big Chief at Washington sends us greetings        
of friendship and goodwill. This is kind of him
for we know he has little need of our friendship in return.
His people are many.
They are like the grass that covers vast prairies.
My people are few.
They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain.
The great, and I presume — good,
White Chief sends us word
that he wishes to buy our land
          but is willing to allow us
                 enough to live comfortably.
This indeed appears just, even generous,
for the Red Man no longer has rights
that he need respect,
and the offer may be wise, also,
as we are no longer in need of an extensive country.

There was a time when our people covered the land


as the waves
of a wind-ruffled sea
cover its shell-paved floor,




but that time long since passed away
with the greatness of tribes
that are now but a mournful memory.
I will not dwell on, nor mourn over, our untimely decay,
nor reproach my paleface brothers with hastening it,
as we too may have been somewhat to blame.

Youth is impulsive.
When
our young men
grow angry at some real or imaginary wrong,
and disfigure their faces with black paint,
it denotes that their hearts are black,
and that they are often cruel and relentless,
and our old men and old women
 are unable to restrain them.
Thus it has ever been.
Thus it was when the white man
 began to push our forefathers ever westward.
But let us hope that the hostilities between us
 may never return.
We would have everything to lose and nothing to gain.
Revenge by young men is considered gain,
even at the cost of their own lives,
but old men who stay at home in times of war,
and mothers who have sons to lose, know better.

Our good father in Washington—
for I presume he is now our father as well as yours,
 since King George
         has moved his boundaries further north—
our great and good father, I say,
sends us word that if we do as he desires
 he will protect us.
 His brave warriors will be to us
 a bristling wall of strength,
and his wonderful ships of war will fill our harbors,
so that our ancient enemies far to the northward —
the Haidas and Tsimshians — will cease to frighten
our women, children, and old men.
Then  in reality he will be our father and we his children.
But can that ever be? Your God is not our God!
Your God loves your people and hates mine!
He folds his strong protecting arms
    lovingly about the paleface
and leads him by the hand as a father leads an infant son.
But, He has forsaken His Red children,
if they really are His.
Our God, the Great Spirit,
seems also to have forsaken us.
Your God makes your people wax stronger every day.
Soon they will fill all the land.
Our people are ebbing away
 like a rapidly receding tide that will never return.
The white man’s God cannot love our people or
 He would protect them.
They seem to be orphans who can look nowhere for help.
 How then can we be brothers?
How can your God become our God
and renew our prosperity
and awaken in us dreams of returning greatness?
 If we have a common Heavenly Father
He must be partial, 
        for He came to His paleface children.
We never saw Him.
He gave you laws
 but had no word for His red children
whose teeming multitudes once filled this vast continent
 as stars fill the firmament.


No;
we are two distinct races with separate origins
 and separate destinies.


There is little in common between us.

To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred
and their resting place is hallowed ground.
You wander far from the graves of your ancestors
and seemingly without regret.
Your religion was written upon tablets of stone
 by the iron finger of your God
so that you could not forget.
The Red Man could never comprehend or remember it.
Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors —
the dreams of our old men,
given them in solemn hours of the night
by the Great Spirit;
and the visions of our sachems,
 and is written in the hearts of our people.

Your dead cease to love you and the land of their nativity
 as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb
and wander away beyond the stars.
They are soon forgotten and never return.
Our dead never forget 
        this beautiful world that gave them being.
They still love its verdant valleys, its murmuring rivers,
its magnificent mountains,
sequestered vales and verdant lined lakes and bays,
and ever yearn in tender fond affection
 over the lonely hearted living,
and often return from the happy hunting ground
to visit, guide, console, and comfort them.

Day and night cannot dwell together.
The Red Man has ever fled
the approach of the White Man,


as the morning mist
flees before the morning sun.


 However, your proposition seems fair
and I think that my people will accept it
and will retire to the reservation you offer them.
Then we will dwell apart in peace,
for the words of the Great White Chief        
seem to be the words of nature speaking to my people 
        out of dense darkness.

It matters little where we pass the remnant of our days.
They will not be many.
The Indian’s night promises to be dark.
Not a single star of hope hovers above his horizon.
Sad-voiced winds moan in the distance.
Grim fate seems to be on the Red Man’s trail,
and wherever he will hear the approaching footsteps
of his fell destroyer and prepare stolidly to meet his doom,
as does the wounded doe
that hears the approaching footsteps of the hunter.

A few more moons,
a few more winters,
and not one of the descendants of the mighty hosts
that once moved over this broad land
    or lived in happy homes,        
protected by the Great Spirit,
will remain to mourn over the graves
 of a people 
       once more powerful and hopeful than yours.


But why should I mourn at the untimely fate of my people?
Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation,
like the waves of the sea.
It is the order of nature, and regret is useless.
Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come,
for even the White Man
whose God walked and talked with him as friend to friend,
cannot be exempt from the common destiny.
We may be brothers after all.


We will see.

We will ponder your proposition
and when we decide we will let you know.
But should we accept it,
I here and now make this condition
that we will not be denied the privilege
     without molestation of visiting        
at any time
the tombs of our ancestors, friends, and children.
Ever part of this soil
 is sacred in the estimation of my people.
Every hillside,
    every valley,
         every plain and grove,
has been hallowed by some sad or happy event
    in days long vanished.
Even the rocks,
which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun
along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring
events connected with the lives of my people,
and the very dust upon which you now stand
responds more lovingly
to their footsteps than yours,
 because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors,
and our bare feet
are conscious of the sympathetic touch.
Our departed braves, fond mothers, glad,
happy hearted maidens,
and even the little children who lived here
 and rejoiced here for a brief season,
will love these somber solitudes
 and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits.        
And when the last Red Man shall have perished,
and the memory of my tribe
shall have become a myth among the White Men,
these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe,
 and when your children’s children
 think themselves alone in the field,
the store, the shop, upon the highway,
or in the silence of the pathless woods,
 they will not be alone.
In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude.
At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent
and you think them deserted,
they will throng with the returning hosts
         that once filled them and still love this beautiful land.
The White Man will never be alone.

Let him be just and deal kindly with my people,
for the dead are not altogether powerless.
















                                                   Chief Seattle


























......

of tumult in the gut

"The first need is therefore to transcend the old order.
 Before any new order can be defined,
the absolute power of the established,
 the hold upon us of what we know and are,
must be broken.
 New life comes always from outside our world,
as we commonly conceive that world.
This is the reason why in order to invent,
one must yield to the indeterminate within him,
or, more precisely,
to certain ill-defined impulses
which seem to be of the very texture
 of the ungoverned fullness
which John Livingston Lowes calls:
   'the surging chaos of the unexpressed. '
Chaos and disorder are perhaps the wrong terms
for that indeterminate fullness and activity of the inner life.
 For it is organic, dynamic, full of tension and tendency.
 What is absent from it,
except in the decisive act of creation,
is determination, fixity,
any commitment to one resolution or another
of the whole complex of its tensions.
 It is a working sea of indecision. . . .
 But if it were without order of some kind
 it would be without life."








                                                         Brewster Ghiselin

found political poem

The government must awaken
that this is the Hong Kong people.
 These are not their enemies,
these are the people.






                  Kevin Chan...part of the hong kong police reform movement
                                           (  chase them into common sense...)
















....

those damned irish

Irish musical culture seems to excel in exploiting music’s power as a social oil,
and it sees no point in waiting until we are inside a music venue.
It sees it as a power that can be deployed anywhere, anytime, anyhow.


Secondly, the concept of transmission or ‘passing on’ is valued:
at traditional music sessions, I am regularly struck by the status that a child playing music can have. An eight-year-old playing the simple ‘Kerry Polka’ on the tin whistle will command rapt attention from both musicians and audiences. The standard is not important;
the fact that they are expressing themselves is.
Musicians do not hesitate to share their knowledge or skills with someone younger,
regardless of whether they are their ‘teacher’ or not; it
is the way they learned and they instinctively realise the importance of continuing on this act.
 Many Irish traditional musicians describe themselves as ‘self-taught’,
but it is only in a musical culture in which everyone is your teacher that this could happen.












....
-












___________________________  Toner Quinn


































.

autumn paints herself in russet and gold


her perfume the sweet intoxicants of earth

let's get real

      HOMO     EVEHO
































      

ushering the snakes back into ireland

"It's about time.
Discrimination has no place on America's streets,
least of all on Fifth Avenue."


                          sarah kate ellis  -    green goes gay









......








.

well here's something new you don't read every day

"  Let woman assert herself in all her native purity, dignity, and strength, and end this wholesale suffering and murder of helpless children. With centuries of degradation, we have so little of true womanhood, that the world has but the faintest glimmering of what a woman is or should be.  "






Elizabeth Cady Stanton  -  in response to real degradation

the death of a blog

a certain lethargy
an ennui has set in in regards to blogging
all the initial excitement about
communicaton via the blog world has subsided
now i look over the effort of a few years
and see a theme of intellectual idleness

this particular blog has been a bit parasitic
i've yanked texts from hither thither and yon
and strung them together for no great purpose

nothing in the world would change
if this were to end
the effort was completely superfluous
to everything else in the world....except for the rare human exchange that
did in fact occur

time to think of other possibilities

the light and lively breeze of original thought
settles into a cognitive doldrum

ah well
nothing is changed once more








...

such is our discipline

   In love, no certainty is ultimate...
        That elementary thing -
             the feeling that you are loved -
                 must be certified again and again,
                    because one doubt,   one mistake
                       razes everything to madness and ecstasy.






                                Mircea Eliade







 

the medium the message

                      "Neither rain, nor snow,
                                 nor sleet, nor hail
                                     shall keep the postmen
                                           from their appointed rounds."











........

the real object

“The object of education
is to teach us
to love
       what is beautiful.” 






                                                    Plato













......

pathos

my heart is turning to ashes




   chung hae-sook












                - he lost his son when a boat sank off the coast of korea











........

eloquence in strange places

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjR0aPpepig










.....more poignant with the full screen


....






this youtube was wrenched from cyberspace
don't know why
to some extent
it's the nature of the beast


....now it appears that the youtube is viewable
if one is invited to login

food for a new evangelization

Our faith is challenged to discern
 how wine
     can come from water
      and how wheat
can grow
        in the midst of weeds






                                 Francis I









..

fat tuesday

i take it all along
take it to the counter
charge it on the card
put it in the bag

the weight of goods
at the human infraction shop
requires double bagging

can i take it all home

will 40 days suffice

there's more here than i need
what's the use?

i trudge out the door

a cross imprinted in snow

 toss the bag

and know i will retrieve it

i take it all along
i hope to take it home
i bought it with a price
i know not the worth

my piece of the better world
has not appeared

i stock my shelves
clutter the cupboard

40 days to sit
to let the world refract around me
 40 days
to barely make things right






.....

all the more reason to be very careful

People that are really very weird
can get into sensitive positions
 and have a tremendous impact
           on history.







                                   Dan Quayle  (R- Indiana)








.....

muse inspired pressure release

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykrkz__sLnU








.

yet another anonymous christian

"The feminist notion that the whole of human history
has been nothing but a vast intricate conspiracy by men
to enslave their wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters
presents us with an intellectual neurosis
 for which we do not yet have a name."




                                        -- Edward Abbey

qoute of the day NYT

you walk the mall

and consumers look like zombies

they're there in person

but not in spirit

it's the living horror movie

of america

zombies wandering the halls

of the shopping malls

somehow this was bound to happen





.

so then i was thinkin'

all things being equal

......and why not?








.....

vitruvian man



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

:::::  the guy could use a girlfriend  ;;;;

day is brief

it is winter
i must force myself to walk
in the bright winter sun
in the cold
my survival depends on it

not even thoughts of love can distract me

such is :  la disciplina inviernal






..