Thanks, Obama!

There is, here, a valuable reminder of just how stupid our Governor is (in that he stands in a long line of Texas Governors, let's be fair):

Fears about the upcoming, multiple-state “Jade Helm 15″ war simulation being a preamble to martial law have circulated on social media and conservative websites for months. After a packed town hall meeting last week about the training exercise in rural Bastrop County, Abbott wrote to the State Guard and said measures would be in place to make sure civil liberties are not infringed upon.


“Frankly, I gotta tell you, I think the cause of the underlying concerns is that we see instances, like a shooting in Fort Hood by a terrorist, that the president labels workplace violence. We see the president come to the border in Texas and say it’s safer than it’s ever been,” said [Texas Governor Greg]Abbott. “And so I think it was a misplaced perception by people in Texas who have problems with the Obama administration and connected that trust with the Obama administration to the military.”  (emphasis added)

That preamble to the quote is the key.  This "outcry" didn't come from the whole state of Texas; it came from a handful of cranks in Bastrop County, which used to be rural and is now the outskirts of Austin's city limits.  Between a Black President and the push of "too cool for the room" Austinites, it's small wonder some in Bastrop are feeling like an invasion is underway.  Of course, there were people at that now infamous meeting who thanked the military for explaining Jade Helm 15" to them.

“I’m thrilled. I was glad to hear the presentation today,” said Don Nichols, a Bastrop resident and Vietnam resident. “We’re training the military and specials operations people specifically to go out and defend our country so we can have that right.”

Nichols and his wife Barbara sat through the entire two-hour long meeting. They said they believe no matter what, people will believe what they want.

“For me, today was kind of painful to watch the disrespect I saw to the lieutenant colonel during the presentation and I personally went up to him and apologized to him for other people and their
rudeness,” said Nichols.

 But sane voices get lost in the hysteria, hysteria Gov. Abbott (who is already on his way to a special wing of the Texas Governor's Hall of Shame) poured kerosene on, again and again.  So now "all of Texas" is upset by "Jade Helm."

And that's Obama's fault.

After all this, what's the impact on Bastrop County?  Less than the traffic going down 290 into Austin:

Sixty. That’s the number of troops Lastoria said would take part in Jade Helm 15 in Bastrop. When it comes to the town and impacting people, Lastoria said there will be two Humvees and water buffalo, a tank used to carry water, that people may see around the city.

Thanks, Obama.  Or, rather, thanks Gov. Abbott, for making everyone in Texas look like fools.  I think you're going to find that's not a winning political strategy.  Just ask Rick Perry.

Out on the Weekend

So I went here over the weekend, among other places.  This is San Miguel de Socorro, in New Mexico.  The stained glass you see above the door there is St. Michael the archangel.  There is a legend connected with the church being protected (and protecting those inside) from an Apache raid by a vision of St. Michael defending the church.  Make of it what you will, but that's the reason for the name.

The Catholic church recognizes a mission/church has been on this site for 400 years (they have a lovely document issued by Pope Francis honoring their anniversary this year).  This building is about 200 years old, which shows more on the interior than the outside.  There is a balcony just above the entrance; the heavy beams of its floor show the marks of being hand-hewn, and are easily eight inches on a side (and if somebody looks up the details and tells me I'm wrong, this being the internet and all, I'll gladly accept the correction; I'm going from memory here).

We arrived after closing time, but a lovely person was there who opened the place for us (five minutes later and she'd have been gone).  It reminded me of my church in Hecker, Illinois, with ropes for the two bells (one in each steeple, in this case), and a sense of both age, and reverence, and purpose about it.  People had been coming to this place for centuries (and to this site before that) for worship and fellowship.

That leaves impressions on a place, and on those who go there.

A pleasant time was had by all.

Thinkin' Geekin' Out

Yeah, it's a gimmick.  But I have a 3-D chess set, a Staunton set I've had since pre-teenagehood, a set made out of nuts and bolts glued together according to directions I got (IIRC) from "Boy's Life" (and if you even remember that publication, you are old!), as well as some figurative sets from Europe and China.

So I think I need this,  Besides, I gotta know how the pieces move when they get to that circular center.....

Robert Browning: 7 May 1812

Grow old along with me! 

The best is yet to be, 

The last of life, for which the first was made: 

Our times are in His hand 

Who saith "A whole I planned, 

Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!'' 

Not that, amassing flowers, 

Youth sighed "Which rose make ours, 

Which lily leave and then as best recall?" 

Not that, admiring stars, 

It yearned "Nor Jove, nor Mars; 

Mine be some figured flame which blends, transcends them all!" 

Not for such hopes and fears 

Annulling youth's brief years, 

Do I remonstrate: folly wide the mark! 

Rather I prize the doubt 

Low kinds exist without, 

Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark. 

Poor vaunt of life indeed, 

Were man but formed to feed 

On joy, to solely seek and find and feast: 

Such feasting ended, then 

As sure an end to men; 

Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast? 

Rejoice we are allied 

To That which doth provide 

And not partake, effect and not receive! 

A spark disturbs our clod; 

Nearer we hold of God 

Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe. 

Then, welcome each rebuff 

That turns earth's smoothness rough, 

Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! 

Be our joys three-parts pain! 

Strive, and hold cheap the strain; 

Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe! 

For thence,—a paradox 

Which comforts while it mocks,— 

Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: 

What I aspired to be, 

And was not, comforts me: 

A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale. 

What is he but a brute 

Whose flesh has soul to suit, 

Whose spirit works lest arms and legs want play? 

To man, propose this test— 

Thy body at its best, 

How far can that project thy soul on its lone way? 

Yet gifts should prove their use: 

I own the Past profuse 

Of power each side, perfection every turn: 

Eyes, ears took in their dole, 

Brain treasured up the whole; 

Should not the heart beat once "How good to live and learn?" 

Not once beat "Praise be Thine! 

I see the whole design, 

I, who saw power, see now love perfect too: 

Perfect I call Thy plan: 

Thanks that I was a man! 

   Maker, remake, complete,—I trust what Thou shalt do!" 

For pleasant is this flesh; 

Our soul, in its rose-mesh 

Pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest; 

Would we some prize might hold 

To match those manifold 

Possessions of the brute,—gain most, as we did best! 

Let us not always say, 

"Spite of this flesh to-day 

I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!" 

As the bird wings and sings, 

Let us cry "All good things 

Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!" 

Therefore I summon age 

To grant youth's heritage, 

Life's struggle having so far reached its term: 

Thence shall I pass, approved 

A man, for aye removed 

From the developed brute; a god though in the germ. 

And I shall thereupon 

Take rest, ere I be gone 

Once more on my adventure brave and new: 

Fearless and unperplexed, 

When I wage battle next, 

What weapons to select, what armour to indue. 

Youth ended, I shall try 

My gain or loss thereby; 

Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold: 

And I shall weigh the same, 

Give life its praise or blame: 

Young, all lay in dispute; I shall know, being old. 

For note, when evening shuts, 

A certain moment cuts 

The deed off, calls the glory from the grey: 

A whisper from the west 

Shoots—"Add this to the rest, 

Take it and try its worth: here dies another day." 

So, still within this life, 

Though lifted o'er its strife, 

Let me discern, compare, pronounce at last, 

This rage was right i' the main, 

That acquiescence vain: 

The Future I may face now I have proved the Past." 

For more is not reserved 

To man, with soul just nerved 

To act to-morrow what he learns to-day: 

Here, work enough to watch 

The Master work, and catch 

Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's true play. 

As it was better, youth 

Should strive, through acts uncouth, 

Toward making, than repose on aught found made: 

So, better, age, exempt 

From strife, should know, than tempt 

Further. Thou waitedst age: wait death nor be afraid! 

Enough now, if the Right 

And Good and Infinite 

Be named here, as thou callest thy hand thine own 

With knowledge absolute, 

Subject to no dispute 

From fools that crowded youth, nor let thee feel alone. 

Be there, for once and all, 

Severed great minds from small, 

Announced to each his station in the Past! 

Was I, the world arraigned, 

Were they, my soul disdained, 

Right? Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last! 

Now, who shall arbitrate? 

Ten men love what I hate, 

Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; 

Ten, who in ears and eyes 

Match me: we all surmise, 

They this thing, and I that: whom shall my soul believe? 

Not on the vulgar mass 

Called "work," must sentence pass, 

Things done, that took the eye and had the price; 

O'er which, from level stand, 

The low world laid its hand, 

Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: 

But all, the world's coarse thumb 

And finger failed to plumb, 

So passed in making up the main account; 

All instincts immature, 

All purposes unsure, 

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount: 

Thoughts hardly to be packed 

Into a narrow act, 

Fancies that broke through language and escaped; 

All I could never be, 

All, men ignored in me, 

This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. 

Ay, note that Potter's wheel, 

That metaphor! and feel 

Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,— 

Thou, to whom fools propound, 

When the wine makes its round, 

"Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, seize to-day!" 

Fool! All that is, at all, 

Lasts ever, past recall; 

Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: 

What entered into thee, 

That was, is, and shall be: 

Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure. 

He fixed thee mid this dance 

Of plastic circumstance, 

This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: 

Machinery just meant 

To give thy soul its bent, 

Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed. 

What though the earlier grooves, 

Which ran the laughing loves 

Around thy base, no longer pause and press? 

What though, about thy rim, 

Skull-things in order grim 

Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress? 

Look not thou down but up! 

To uses of a cup, 

The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal, 

The new wine's foaming flow, 

The Master's lips a-glow! 

Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with earth's wheel? 

But I need, now as then, 

Thee, God, who mouldest men; 

And since, not even while the whirl was worst, 

Did I,—to the wheel of life 

With shapes and colours rife, 

Bound dizzily,—mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst: 

So, take and use Thy work: 

Amend what flaws may lurk, 

What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim! 

My times be in Thy hand! 

Perfect the cup as planned! 

Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same! 

Advancing age makes me appreciate these lines more and more.

Keep your religion outta mah gummint!

Oh, er:

"Everything that God made is good, even marijuana" said state Rep. David Simpson, R-Longview, who filed the bill. "The conservative thought is that government doesn't need to fix something that God made good."

The 24-page bill begins: "The following provisions are repealed," then lists dozens of Texas statutes related to marijuana. If the Legislature were to approve the bill, pot in Texas would be regulated like any common crop.

In a press release, Simpson said he supported regulating marijuana like the state regulates "tomatoes, jalapeños or coffee."

This probably doesn't have a chance in hell (!) of becoming law, but it passed out of committee yesterday.

Damned religious fanatics!

Without Feuerbach or Derrida

Daniel Dennett is loose; and boy, is he stupid:

Protecting your inner workings is becoming very difficult; it’s very hard to keep secrets. Religions have thrived in part because they were able to keep secrets. They were able to keep secrets about other religions from their parishioners, who were largely ignorant of what other people in the world believed, and also keep secrets about their own inner workings and their own histories, so that it was easy to have a sort of controlled message that went out to people. Those days are over. You can go on the Internet and access to all kinds of information. This is going to change everything.

I don't even know what this means.  Does he imagine the Catholic Mass is still chanted in Latin, and believers can only read that which is "nihil obstat" and under the imprimatur?  Has he not heard of the printing press, the German Biblical scholars of the 19th century, Soren Kierkegaard or Rudolf Bultmann, the death of God movement or the contemporary work of Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, or John Caputo?

No, probably not.  But he seems to imagine the internet will do what Gutenberg and Franklin and Carnegie (both responsible of the American library system) failed to do.  Oh, and the Enlightenment, and widespread college educations in America and Europe.

I mean, seriously, is this guy for real?  If the internet is going to enlighten us all, can it start to work on him first?

And if you think the internet is going to lead to unity and oneness as we all learn to think like Dennett, please to read the comments at RD.  I gave up.  The comments were pretty much as clueless as Dennett.  I know, I know, same song, second verse.  But Vattimo makes more sense than Dennett; for Vattimo "the postmodern is post metaphysical, wherein freedom 'does not lie in having a perfect knowledge of the necessary structure of reality and conforming to it,' but instead is conceived as disorientation by virtue of the dissolution of reality."

If, for example, Dennett can tell me he understands quantum mechanics and doesn't just take it on faith, i.e., reliance on the expertise of physicists, that the universe includes quarks and mesons and dark matter, I'll eat my hat.  Because while those things are predicted by the mathematics, few of them have been proven to actually exist.  Yet still physicists tell us they do, and we accept that claim; pretty much the way the people in the pews in Dennett's imagined past accepted the claims that God exists, though they could no more understand that existence than most people on the globe can understand the Higg's Boson (which we are told was discovered; we have to take someone's word for it that what the data shows is what they were looking for.  I can't analyze it; can you?)

You can, of course, hide all manner of information in plain sight.  A physicist could work for days to reassure me the Higgs Boson was found (if it was; I can't remember if that was declared confirmed, or not), or that quantum mechanics determines how my computer works (the theory is followed and the result seems to be engineered to function; but that doesn't mean the propositions of quantum mechanics have all been established empirically; if, indeed, they can be).  As I say, the hypothetical physicist could work for days to educate me, but in the end I wouldn't be able to follow the math, I'd just have to accept that it made sense and that what I was being told was at least being presented sincerely as truth.  The perfect knowledge of the world that Newton imagined he could obtain has been proven unobtainable.  That's the whole purpose of Schrodinger's unfortunate cat.

And yet here is Dennett, once again proclaiming the millennium and the year of Jubilee because with the internet we will finally once and for all dial "F" and get, not Frankenstein, but fundamental functionalism.  And all will be discovered, and all will be known, and no one will live in ignorance again.

Except all the commenters on the internet who already know what they know and just want to defend it as fiercely and blindly as ever any knight defended his master.

There is a great deal more I could add, including a lot of information from Armstrong about the rise  (and fall) of atheism and, especially, the ignorance of the New Atheists.   Dennett's definition of religion, of what "belief" and "faith" are, of what religious faith consists of, and what religious belief is:  all false and unfounded and already falling away.  It may be that religion eventually breaks into two camps: fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists; but then we're there already, aren't we?  And what Dennett imagines people will no longer be able to believe means they will either have to think like him (highly unlikely) or that their thinking will forever be a mystery to him, an inner working he'll think they are keeping stubbornly secret (ironic!).  There is much in Vattimo's idea of the return of religiosity to consider, or in Wittgenstein's respect for religious belief.  But I've talked too long already, and Dennett isn't worth the candle, and besides, he's as incapable of understanding. It is as if he were deaf and I was trying to explain Beethoven's music.

However, when I read about how the internet is going to bring the new Enlightenment and make it stick this time, and I think of the number of people who now think "research" is synonymous with "Key word search," and that reasoning matters far less than "facts" ("IS TOO!"  "IS NOT!!!!"), I don't even chuckle mordantly.

I just think how I'm ready to give up; that the dike's gonna burst, and I'm kidding myself that I've even got a thumb in the hole in it.

"Freedom is a worship word!"

It's more than a bit illegitimate to take a quote out of context and then engage a critique of it, but better explication will have to come.  The words are those of Gianno Vattimo, an Italian philosopher of religion of whom I will have more to say, including the bibliographic information for the source of these quotes.  I will provide better context, later.

I have my freedom, after all.

If, in the multicultural world, I set out my system of religious, aesthetic, political, and ethnic values, I shall be acutely conscious of the historicity, contingency and finiteness of these systems, starting with my own.

I'm going to connect that to the internet, but to do so, I need this quote, too:

What I am proposing is:  (a) that the mass media plays a decisive role in the birth of a postmodern society; (b) that they do not make this postmodern society more transparent, but more complex, even chaotic; and finally (c) that it is in precisely this relative "chaos" that our hopes for emancipation lie.

The complexity and the chaos emphasize the individual burden, where I must "be acutely conscious of the historicity, contingency and finiteness of these systems, starting with my own."

Find me a place on the internet where that happens.

Take, for example, the 1400+ comments on the e-mail exchange between Noam Chomsky and Sam Harris.  Pretty much they divide along "partisan" lines:  one sides with Chomsky, or one sides with Harris, and then one throws metaphorical rocks at the other side.  What precisely does not happen is an acute consciousness of historicity, contingency, or finiteness of especially one's own, preferred system.  That system is the given; all others are enemies to be repelled.

Which is the internet making postmodern society not more transparent but more complex, even chaotic.  Not sure this is where the hopes for our emancipation lie, because we seem almost pre-programmed to seek a savior, in the old Roman sense of the word:  a figure we can rally round whose efforts, whatever they may be, will shield us from chaos and provide for us the "civilization" (nee Pax Romana) that makes us comfortable and feel safe.

The cost of that Pax Romana being, according to modern interpretations of scripture which understand the crucifixion as humanity's plan, not God's, one of the major critiques of Jesus of Nazareth.

Hmmmmm.......

Make one mistake....

Rick Perry could have run for Governor again.  As the GOP candidate, he would have been a shoo-in.

"Oops."

That one word ended it for him.  He made a fool of himself on the national stage.  He did it while being Governor of Texas.  That, coupled with the fact he "retired" while still in office, meaning he drew his retirement pay as well as his salary while still Governor, and while running around the country raising money so he could run for President, until:  "Oops."

I mention the latter because there is a bill in the Legislature, which will surely pass, which will prevent any other Texas government employee from "retiring" while still drawing a salary as a government employee.  That one stung more than a little bit.

But no worse than Perry making Texas look stupid.  We wear our state heart on our sleeve, down here.  We swagger and brag and laugh at the "Yankees" who don't realize "Don't Mess With Texas" is an anti-litter campaign, not a warning.  Sure, it makes us look arrogant to keep that motto around (it's older than my daughter, who is into the third year of her second decade), but we know what it means and we like having the joke on the rest of you, even if it seems to be at our expense.  In fact, it's one of the best characteristics of Texans:  to laugh at our own expense.

But we don't like our Governors to make us look stupid.

Which brings us to Gov. Greg Abbott.  Nobody in the Dallas-Fort Worth area is stoking fears of ISIS and terrorists after the shooting in Garland.  Public officials there are rightly putting the blame on the shooters and Pam Geller, and the Muslim community in the Metroplex (D-FW's name for itself; two big cities and lots of "suburbs" around it; probably the most populated area in Texas, but not the largest city because there are so many cities in the area) is supporting, and supported by, the community.  No one in Garland or environs is cheering the idiots who armed themselves and died hoping to kill others first.

But a handful of yahoos in Bastrop, a city just outside Austin (practically a suburb now, though it wasn't even a bedroom community when I moved away from Austin 20+ years ago), have so terrified the Governor that he's made us the laughing stock of the country.  Sen. Joe Manchin is openly inviting the U.S. military to come to West Virginia.  The Governor of Utah has, quite sensibly, poured ice water on the whole conspiracy notion.  And Gov. Abbott has put himself in the company of Alex Jones and Chuck Norris.  Yes, Norris campaigned for Abbott, but you're supposed to put people like that aside when you assume office.

Oops.

It may be too soon to say that for Abbott; this may not be his "oops" moment.  But he hasn't acknowledged that he screwed up, and every day brings more news reports about how paranoid Texas is.  Texas doesn't like to see itself as paranoid.  It doesn't like to see itself as stupid.  If this doesn't go away soon, Gov. Abbott may find himself a one-term governor, with diminishing influence in the Legislature.

The legislative session ends the first of June.  Barring special sessions (which the Governor has to be careful to call; legislators have jobs, Texas doesn't pay them to be full-time solons), they will meet only one more time in Abbot's first term.  If he is a lame duck by then, he won't likely be around for two more legislative sessions.

Oops.

Thanks, Gov. Abbott

You wanna tell the Pentagon they misunderstood your letter?

"Operation Jade Helm poses no threat to any American’s civil liberties," Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren told McClatchy. "Operation Jade Helm is being conducted by Americans – by, specifically, American special forces personnel."

As Jon Stewart said, you've practically achieved the impossible, Governor.  You've made Rick Perry look sensible.

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I Hung My Head

The discussion at Salon about Chomsky v. Harris turns, in part (as does Harris' argument with Chomsky) on the question of intent.

The Sting song, performed by Johnny Cash, describes the problem of intent quite nicely.  The narrator aims his rifle at a figure in the distance.  The gun "goes off," the rider is dead, the narrator ends his tale at the gallows.  He had no intent; but he's still culpable for what he did.

Surely, according to Sam Harris' argument, the young boy should be excused for his actions.  He had no intention of killing anyone.  He just aimed a gun.  Our news today is replete with stories of guns "going off," and no one is to blame; well, when the offender is of the "right" color.

Or maybe Harris would argue this is different, since there's a difference between pointing a gun at a lone figure, and aiming a missile at a point across the globe.

Legally, frankly, the narrator of this tune might not be guilty of a crime leading to his execution.  Morally?  He's as guilty as the song says he is.

The Consolations of Literature

My first reaction to Sam Harris' argument here is that, on the moral question, he makes a curiously legalistic defense of American (i.e., Western) actions.

In law there are degrees of criminal culpability.  If I run you down with my car, it matters whether I saw you in the crosswalk, gripped the steering wheel tightly, and accelerated at you; or if I looked down to change the radio station and looked up too late to avoid you.  Either way, you're dead; but my intent determines the nature of my crime, the severity of my punishment.

But it isn't a moral judgment made by society, much as we say it is.  It's really a determination of what I did; either way, I'm morally responsible for your death.  The state isn't really concerned with my morality; the state is only concerned with my actions, and what it can discern of my intent.

So Sam Harris argues to Noam Chomsky that as long as the West doesn't intend for there to be collateral damage (and just yesterday on BBC World Service I heard some apologist for some attack by Western forces arguing that everything was done to reduce civilian casualties that could be done, so, hey, we're still the "good guys!"), the West isn't as morally culpable as "Islamic terrorists" who, in Harris' example, execute criminals in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan (before the US invasion) on a soccer field at half-time during a soccer game.  These executions were carried out by hand, not by firing squad or lethal injection or gas chamber or electric chair; and somehow this makes the executions both "barbaric" and "wrong."  I'm not a supporter of the death penalty, so it seems to me dead is dead, whether by needle or by machete, and chopping off a thief's hand is as brutal as solitary confinement or sending a child to prison for 20 years.

But Sam Harris says it's all about "intent" so what we do is much better than what they do.

Chomsky eviscerates that argument after his fashion; I have my own response to it.*  Intent is a smokescreen when its a matter of the actions of nations.  As Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out almost a century ago, nations act in the name of self-preservation; it is the only way they can be expected to act.  They cannot be moral:  period.  Terrorists act in reaction to what is done to them; the "West" acts in reaction to what is done to it, by people it labels "terrorists."  Auden's lines from "September 1, 1939" never enter into Harris' calculus:  we are morally superior to them, and that's an end to the discussion.

Intent is not the deciding factor, especially since no court ever sits in judgment over the nations to decide what intent was actually involved.  If I can escape the consequences of my criminal actions by simply declaring "I didn't mean to do it!", what criminal justice would any nation ever effect for its citizens?  We have no court of nations to decide such matters, but neither can we self-justify by declaring our hearts pure, their hearts foul.  The fact that we think we can do it just makes our claims of superiority ring ever more hollow among the other nations of the world.  Just ask George Orwell.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:  Sam Harris is a putz.

*Although this is worth pulling out of the to and fro (if you don't want to plow through the whole thing; it does border on being too long).  The topic is the al-Shafira bombing carried out by Clinton in retaliation for the embassy bombing carried out by Al Qaeda:

Apologists may appeal to undetectable humanitarian intentions, but the fact is that the bombing was taken in exactly the way I described in the earlier publication which dealt the question of intentions in this case, the question that you claimed falsely that I ignored: to repeat, it just didn’t matter if lots of people are killed in a poor African country, just as we don’t care if we kill ants when we walk down the street. On moral grounds, that is arguably even worse than murder, which at least recognizes that the victim is human. That is exactly the situation. 

emphasis added 

Who let the fools out?

So the Gov. of Texas was just worried about the concerns of the good people of Bastrop:

"We are playing a pivotal role of government and that is to provide information to people who have questions," Abbott told reporters Monday following a prayer breakfast in North Austin. "It's clear that people in Bastrop had questions."

Except nothing in his letter to General Betty of the Texas Guard said anything about the concerns of a handful of people in Bastrop.  But, hey, “What the letter did was quite simple and non-inflammatory, and I think that’s the way it should be construed."  Problem with being Governor, Governor:  you don't get to decide how your public pronouncements are understood.

Simple and non-inflammatory?  The letter said "Texans [need to] know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed."  By what?  Military exercises? Or tunnels under a closed Wal-Mart store?  Yeah, Wal-Mart denied it; but then they would, wouldn't they?

Maybe you could have simply told the people of Bastrop that there are 21 military bases in Texas, and they should quit being stupid.  But no, Gov. Abbott is comfortable in the company of Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Ron Paul, and Chuck Norris.  Even the White House had to comment that they had no idea what the Governor was talking about in this "quite simple and non-inflammatory" letter.

Here's a clue, Governor:  you now serve as Chief Executive over the second largest state in the country.   Maybe you should watch your mouth; er, pen.  Speaking of pen, word comes today that Marine Le Pen has forced her father out of his honorary position in the National Front party of France because he was too extreme in his views.  Congratulations, Gov. Abbott:  you've made Marine Le Pen look sensible.

You force me to stand with Todd Smith on this issue:

I am appalled that you would give credence to the nonsense mouthed by who instead make decisions based on internet or radio shock jock driven hysteria.  Is there ANYBODY who is going to stand up to this radical nonsense that is a cancer on our State and Party?  It is alarming that our State Republican leadership is such that we must choose between DEGREES of demagoguery.

I mean, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was elected by the Tea Party, and even he distanced himself from the lunatic fringe proposal the "citizens commission" he appointed came up with, declaring kindergarten a route to atheism and godlessness.

Maybe, Governor, you can at least stop embarrassing us.

Dawn breaks like an egg over my head....

When I was a kid, the joke was to pose menacingly and proclaim:  "I know karate!  And a bunch of other Japanese words."

Now, of course, we know "jihad."  And one or two other "Muslim" (actually Arabic) words.

So this morning the first thing I hear on the news is that two men brought jihad to my fair state of Texas.  Except; not so much.  Two men did open fire in Dallas last night, hitting a security guard in the ankle.  Fortunately he was not seriously injured and is already out of the hospital.  The two gun men were, however; the police shot them to death.

And now Pam Geller is making the most of the situation.  Feh.

First thing on the news this morning that I paid attention to is that Dallas is in the news because of a "contest" to draw Muhammed that drew (sorry!) two gunmen who were shot to death by Dallas police officers.

And then I find out Pam Geller is involved.  Seems she couldn't generate enough response in New York, so she had to come down to Texas.

Great.  Just great.

It ties in, oddly enough, with where I ended my reading in Karen Armstrong's The Case for God (and they say there is no God!  Hah!).  But a moment, please, to reflect on the fact that, in order to prove "the war is here," Pam Geller had to do everything she could to start that war (including flapping $10,000.00 in the public face of Dallas.  "She said in a statement issued Sunday night that the shooting showed how 'needed our event really was.' "

Yeah:  we desperately needed a reason for people to start shooting each other.  So First Amendment and Second Amendment rights come together, and we end up with one security guard shot in the leg (released, thankfully, from the hospital now, so his injury was not severe) and two men gunned down.    In fact, it seems the gunman thought shooting from a vehicle was as easy as it was in the movies.  Fortunately, they were wrong; and thanks to a police officer who must have been a very good shot indeed, even body armor didn't allow them to commit more mayhem.

As for "Why Garland, Texas?", it turns out Ms. Geller didn't just throw a dart at a map:

"In Garland, theres a large Muslim-American community that’s been building an Islamic center," Duss explained. "In Geller and Spencer’s telling, Muslim-Americans simply practicing their faith non-violently is part of this mass plot to eventually take over the institutions of the United States." 

Thanks, Pam.  Stay in New York, will ya?  We don't need your kind down here.

Adding:  I mean, when even Donald Trump thinks you've gone too far....

Blessed are the powerful, for they shall have movies made about them

So, there was this article at Salon, about how non-violence actually needs violence in order to subdue violence, because really the only power in the world is violence.

Which immediately made me think the only true power in the world is death; death isn't necessarily violent, but it is certainly the ultimate power over life; at least on a purely materialist plane.  And then there was this article at Slate, about a telescope on Mauna Kea, and how it is opposed by native Hawaiians who consider Mauna Kea sacred ground.  The article itself was fairly sensitive and thoughtful, focussed as it did on the astronomers amazed that not everybody sees science is good and virtuous and true and that astronomy especially never hurt anybody (hey, it's not like physics and those atomic bombs!).

And then the comments there are about as culturally sensitive and respectful of non-American popular culture as you'd expect Rush Limbaugh to be.

 Well, it's okay, because the internet is going to expose us to different cultures and we'll think different thoughts and everybody will learn from everybody else and then finally the millennia will come and all will live in peace and harmony.

Right?

Does anybody think that way anymore?

All the internet has really done is to confirm us in our prejudices and connect us with more likeminded people so we can all agree on everything and fling poo and screech at anyone who shows up who disagrees with us.  "Us" being the largest number of people typing comments who agree with each other and agree the "outside" must be driven away lest our purity be sullied.

On the internet we are all holier than thou, and we keep our houses holy; by making sure no one who is unfit to enter is allowed to stay.

I had a lovely parable from my morning walk to apply to this.  It was something about Jesus and giving your child a stone when they ask for bread, and an exegesis of that passage to point out that didn't mean what we think it means today.  We read that and think God=Father who will take care of everything for us so we never really have to grow up.  And who among us would think that was a good father?  We are taught that our children should go out into the world and "stand on their own two feet" and "be independent" and that being an adult means being your "own man" (or woman, at least occasionally).  Who would honor a father who was still providing for his child's every need?  Yet we want God to be that way, based in part on passages like that one about the child and the bread, and how much more God will give us if we ask.  But that's in the context of the 21st century and an adolescence that extends almost to the point of life expectancy in 1st century Palestine.  Jesus' audience was the ptochoi, the destitute, those with nothing; and his statement was a challenge to the status quo, the system that told them they were worthless and deserved nothing, that even the labor and sweat of their brow was not enough to feed themselves, then that was their fault and they deserved their suffering and their poverty.  To that Jesus said: No; you are children of God as surely as the rich and powerful are, and God will do what they won't but should: God will provide for you.  God is with you beyond the systems and the powers of this world; beyond even death itself.  Your life matters.

I was going to use it to elaborate on the idea of power and powerlessness, and the illusion of power.  But that kind of analysis is built on self-examination and self-criticism; it is rooted and grounded in humility, not in triumph.  The criticism of non-violence in the Salon article is based on the assumption that power is the only reality, that coercion is the only means to secure justice, and that triumph is all that matters.  But all that means is justice is the golden rule, where the golden rule is:  he who has the gold makes the rules.  Dr. King's direct action was aimed at securing justice, not securing power.  But if you can't understand that, if you think non-violence is just a form of violence, or depends on violence to leverage its type of coercion (because nothing in this world comes to those who do not coerce others), then you can't begin to grasp what Dr. King's program of non-violence was about (or Gandhi's, for that matter).

Just as when you don't understand that someone else may have a "use" for that mountaintop, other than to put an observatory on it, and that science can be as coercive a form of ignorance as superstition.

All of this requires self-examination as the corrective.  As Marilynne Robinson pointed out, that is a central trait of the Hebrew scriptures, and one of their most distinctive marks.  It is the people who cannot see that, who refuse to see that (and their name is legion; why name them again?) who are missing the point.

And at that point I just gave up on the sermon, and wondered if I could catch another showing of the new Avengers movie this afternoon, if only to see the first full length trailer of the Batman v. Superman movie coming (finally!) in 2016.  Which looks interesting if only because a giant, shadowed statute is, in slow reveal, shown to be Superman, across whose chest someone has graffitied:  '"FALSE GOD".

Which might make it an almost interesting story about superheroes in a vein completely different from the MCU effort.*

*It's not getting any attention, but I remember a few scenes in "Age of Ultron" that indicate the Avengers aren't seen as saviors when they engage in their usual acts of violence in foreign countries.  The film opens with an assault on a "fortress" in an Eastern European country, and by the time the fight is over, the people in the city nearby aren't all that pleased with what the Avengers have done (since the villains in the fortress weren't bothering anybody nearby, such as the people in the town).

When Iron Man dons the Hulkbuster armor to take on an enraged Hulk and they smash up a city in Africa, ending with the utter destruction of a skyscraper under construction (but, we are assured, empty of workers), in a follow-up scene Tony makes a quick aside to assure that a Stark charity is already on the scene in Africa to clean up and pay for the damage.  It's a step above James Bond tearing through Paris chasing Grace Jones and leaving mayhem in his unsuccessful wake, all topped off with a fairly casual shrug.  At that point James Bond was no less cartoonish than the Avengers, and apparently no less indestructible; and the violence was clearly meant to be movie violence.

It's not a major shift to note the attitude of this movie, or the next Superman movie; but it will be interesting to see what a turn of the kaleidoscope will bring.

I know you're all waiting breathlessly....

A splendid time was had by all. Damn the criticism! Full CGI ahead!

Texas, Our Texas, all hail the scaredy-cat state

I was going to stay away from this, simply because I'm trying to give up the stupid (it burns!), but this letter to our esteemed Governor deserves wider distribution (not that it will get it here!).

It seems that something called "Jade Helm" is going to be conducted by the U.S. military in states from Texas to California.

Now, you could take this Army Times article and decide there may be much ado about nothing in this, since Gov. Abbott's letter comes off as perfectly reasonable.  As the article says, the Texas Guard has the :

....standard responsibility of acting as a liaison when federal military deploys in Texas for any reason.

 "U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has assured Texas that each location selected for training exercises will pose no risk to residents or property and that they will coordinate with local residents via verbal and written communication," Abbott wrote in his letter to Maj. Gen. Gerald Betty, commander of the Texas State Guard.

Maybe this is much ado about nothing.  But Gov. Abbott said in his letter that "During the training operation, it is important that Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights, and civil liberties will not be infringed."  That was a point Gov. Abbott made sure to underline on Twitter.  How the Texas Guard is going to do this by facilitating "communications between [the Governor's] office and the commanders of the Operation" is still a bit murky.

Which brings us to Todd Smith's letter.  Like Mr. Smith, I am "horrified that I have to choose between the possibility that my Governor actually believes this stuff and the possibility that my Governor doesn’t have the backbone to stand up to those who do."   Because what is the Texas Guard going to protect us from?  Wal-Mart closing any more stores for plumbing repair?  Maybe the General Betty needs to be in communication with Bentonville, too.

There are, by the way, 7 Air Force Bases in Texas, 10 Army bases (ranging from depots to 3 Forts), and 4 Naval bases in Texas  (San Antonio alone has six bases, a mix of Air Force and Army.)  It's no coincidence this kind of noise is coming out of Bastrop, Texas, a small town east of Austin that used to be a sleep rural community, but now is practically an Austin suburb.  Too much change too fast makes people hinkey.

That, and the majority of the reliable GOP vote is in rural Texas, or what used to be rural Texas.  As one Democrat noted, Abbott has yet to stop campaigning for the GOP primary.  Most Texans, indeed, aren't like this.

But our governors continue to embarrass us on the national stage.  Must be something in the water; or maybe that's why Wal-Mart closed those stores.



With all best intentions....

This really isn't what I intended to use when I went looking for a picture,

 but when I found it I couldn't resist it.

Charlie Pierce includes optional musical accompaniments to his posts; I would include an optional blog post to this post.  We're making the same journey on different paths.

I've laughed at on-line atheists who think they are current and daring in their critiques of religion, telling them they are on the cutting edge of the 19th century.  Turns out I was off by a century:

In 1729, Jean Meslier, an exemplary parish priest, died weary of life, leaving his few meager possessions to his parishioners.  Among his papers, they discovered the manuscript of his Memoire in which he declared that Christianity was a hoax.  He had never dared to say this openly during his lifetime, but now he had nothing to fear.  Religion was simply a device to subdue the masses.  The gospels were full of internal contradictions, and their texts were corrupt.  The miracles, visions, and prophecies that were supposed to "prove" divine revelation were themselves incredible, and the doctrines of the church manifestly absurd.  So too were the "proofs" of Descartes and Newton.  Matter did not require a God to set it in motion; it was dynamic and moved by its own momentum, and its existence depended on nothing other than itself.

Armstrong, p. 220.

It seems that, early on in the Enlightenment, Newtonian Christianity began to come apart at the seams.  Taken as the only standard for Christianity possible (although Armstrong points out Newton's "theology" only took hold among the educated and elite, not among the working class; and that Newton's universe soon gave way to what is clearly recognizable as the Great Chain of Being, an orderly universe with everything in its place and not even God can disrupt it), the educated classes soon discarded the central idea Newton held to (that matter is inanimate and cannot be animated except by an outside force, such as God) in favor of matter moving on its own (not quite right, either, but a necessary step away from Aristotle, at least from a scientific point of view).  Newton had insisted the structure of the universe made God necessary.  It wasn't long until reconsideration of that structure meant God was simply no longer necessary.

Newton, it turns out, was a fine scientist but a poor exegete.  I use him here more as symbol than specific target, but it occurred to me overnight that when God appeared to Elijah:

To this the answer came:  'Go stand in the mount before the Lord."  The Lord was passing by:  a great and strong wind came, rending mountains and shattering rocks before him, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a faint murmuring sound.  When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak  and went out and stood at the entrance to the cave.

1 Kings 19:11-14, REB

The Hebrews were careful to identify God as being present in the creation, but in no way being of the creation.  When Moses turned aside to see the burning bush which burned and was not consumed, it was because he was in the presence of God.  God was present in bush, but God was not in the bush nor in the fire that didn't consume the bush.  What Moses saw in the bush was what the prophets would later call "the glory of God."  It was all that humans could possible see of God; perhaps because it was all they could comprehend; perhaps because it was that God was so fully removed from humans as to be incomprehensible in full.  Still later, when the priest (as Zechariah does in Luke) entered the Holy of Holies in the Temple, a rope would be tied to his ankle, lest the God of Abraham turn God's full countenance (anthropomorphic terms are finally the only way to speak here) upon the priest, and kill him (no one else could enter, and the body would have to be dragged out lest it defile the space).

That idea itself comes from Moses on Sinai, when Moses entered the darkness and thunder and lightning on the mountain (a theophany Christian churches recreated with pipe organs a millennia or so later, although their reference was the theophany of Isaiah, in the throne room of God).  Again God was not in the thunder or the lightning or the clouds.   That theophany was so frightening to Israel they told Moses to go talk to God and then tell them what God said; they didn't want to even hear from God directly, much less risk coming face to face (so to speak) with the Creator.

 God, to the Hebrews, could not be described, nor confined by nature, nor be a part of nature.  God was involved in the creation, but God was not in the creation.  It might go too far to say God was wholly Other (and so had no relationship to the Creation, even as Creator), but it went too far toward idolatry to say God could be known through the Creation.  It is no accident that Aquinas, as Armstrong points out, opens his Summa with five "proofs" of the existence of God, and then demolishes all five proofs with a simple observation (I have to rely on Armstrong here, but will stick as closely as possible to direct quotes from Aquinas):

"we cannot know the 'existence' of God any more than we can define him [sic]....God cannot be classified as this or that sort of thing."  God is not the "sort of thing that can exist independently" of an individual instance of it.  We cannot ask whether there is a God, as if God were simply one example of a species; God is not and cannot be a "sort of thing."

Armstrong. pp. 144-145.

Newton's "proof" reduces God to the "sort of thing" convenient to polish off the missing information in his mechanical construct.  Some of Newton's failure at exegesis can only be attributed to anti-Semitism.  The distortions of the Hebrew Scriptures that Marilynne Robinson finds in the world of Shelby Spong predate Newton, and would have been an assumption on his part as to how to understand the "Old Testament."  Newton's other sin, if we can put it that way, was hubris.  He wanted to define God in a way that was immediately and easily apprehensible to human reason.  It may be the universe is an amazing clockwork; and it may even be that clockwork persuades you of the magnificence of God (much as one can see nature praising God, a theme in Celtic prayers from the Carmina Gadelica).  The problem is when you move that inspiration into theology, and make it an explanation about God.  Because at that point your theology is on the way to being idolatry, as God becomes just another subject of human inquiry and discovery.  At which point atheism really does become pretty much inevitable.

And I'm quite sure that wasn't Newton's intention at all.

Who Moved My Exegesis?

Speaking of how long it takes something to "trickle down" to the people:

In 1860, the year after the publication of Origin [of Species, Darwin's famous work], seven Anglican clergymen published "Essays and Reviews," a series of articles that made the German Higher Criticism of the Bible available to the unsuspecting general public, who now learned to their astonishment that Moses had not written the first five books of the Bible, King David was not the author of the Psalms, and biblical miracles were little more than a literary trope.  At this time, German clerics were far better educated than their counterparts in Britain and America, who were ill-equipped either to follow German scholarship themselves or to explain it to their flocks.

Armstrong, p. 247,

I entered seminary in 1993, 133 years after the publication of this book.  According to Armstrong, Essays and Reviews was the influential book on believers in the 19th century, not Darwin's Origin.

It sold twenty two thousand copies in two years (more than Origin in the first twenty years of its publication), went through thirteen editions in five years, and inspired some four hundred books and articles in response. 

Armstrong. p. 248.

And yet everything about the German Higher Criticism was completely new to me.  A year or two before I entered seminary Harold Bloom had collaborated in the publication of the Book of 'J,', a reconstruction of the work of the Jawhist from the Torah.  It was a revelation to most of the public that there was a "Jahwist" portion of the Torah.   I'd certainly never heard of it before then. The Jesus Seminar further stirred the pot with its "red-letter" edition of the Gospels, presenting what they thought were the "true" (or truest, anyway) words of Jesus of Nazareth.  The foundation for their analysis was laid down by the German Biblical scholars more than 100 years earlier; and still their work was controversial.

I studied the German Higher Criticism in studying both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.  It was a given, the foundation, the starting point, of all Biblical exegesis at my seminary.  Yet it was still a wonder and a challenge and a controversy to my congregations when I took it to them.

And people wonder why we can't change culture in a generation.