THE SENSE OF THE SIXTIES
I'm reading a collection of materials from a book about the 60s. Almost all the essays seem to have appeared in the time frame between 1964 and 1966. I came across a couple of enticing comments. The two comments I have in mind came from the pen of Andrew Kopkind, one of which I'll bet he recalled (or not) not too long after he'd made it and wished he'd not made it. What political figure do you think Kopkind's remarks were about?
First and with a lot of spin toward the last resident of the White House: He "continually pressed the Johnson Administration on a Vietnam settlement" and "criticized the President for regarding the war as 'purely a military problem.' "
The next Kopkind comment is a stronger clue to the political identity I have in mind: "He can afford the luxury of the free rein because he has a precious commodity—time. Nothing much is likely to happen to him for five years, maybe more."
Friday, February 20, 2009
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
A ROMANTIC, ONCE I WAS
till birds did ask me leave their nest
and go among the peopled world
there to beat my breast
and leave them curled
in peace and quiet rest.
As I get further into old age and farther from the romanticism that cursed my early and mid life before science took a strong hold on my imagination and my rational brain received more nourishment than my intuitive brain, I can see how the spirit of the poem, "Song", held my senses fast. Reading a little Tennyson today, I was struck by the melancholy and somber tone of this Romantic's work, and I did get a brief glimpse of what it meant to be the romantic that I was. When I say "romantic" I don't mean it as a synonym for romantic love. I mean to imply the entire death-oriented, religion swallowing, grail-questing, hero-worshiping, pie in the sky, good versus evil seeing mental blob that is the romanticism that drives fundamentalism of all brands to go out and beat their enemies bloody, tilt at windmills and bring down towers with airplanes. I subsume religion under the heading of that romanticism.
If you need further proof, look at the picture of Tennyson.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
WHAT ARE THE ODDS things are going to get worse in future rather than better? According to a New York Times article, two satellites have collided and the debris is spewing higher and lower through space:
"For decades, space experts have warned of orbits around the planet growing so crowded that two satellites might one day slam into one another, producing swarms of treacherous debris.
"It happened Tuesday. And the whirling fragments could pose a threat to the International Space Station, orbiting 215 miles up with three astronauts on board, though officials said the risk was now small."
PLEASE SAY IT ISN'T SO, ROMEO!
New research shows—according to an article on CBS news—that love acts like addiction in the brains of those who suffer under the lash of love. I could have told them that. Painful withdrawal symptoms can create craving, but it's wonderful when love works out. Like 20% of the couples in one study, my wife and I still bill and coo, and our VTAs must light up like the Fourth of July:
"In humans, there are four tiny areas of the brain that some researchers say form a circuit of love. Acevedo, who works at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is part of a team that has isolated those regions with the unromantic names of ventral tegmental area (VTA), the nucleus accumbens, the ventral pallidum and raphe nucleus.
"The hot spot is the teardrop-shaped VTA. When people newly in love were put in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and shown pictures of their beloved, the VTA lit up. Same for people still madly in love after 20 years.
"The VTA is part of a key reward system in the brain."
What more should we expect, since emotions are adaptations for the regulation of our animal behavior? Robotics, anyone? Again we can see that feeling love toward an imaginary god in one's head would self-reward the believer for his faith with chemical enhancement. Pity the poor atheist who can only love life which and people who do not always reward him with as much feeling in return. Of course, people of faith, who are truly honest about the reality which their god has given them, must feel terrible most of the time because living is not always a friendly process. Taking that a step further—couldn't we say that Christians and Muslims and Jews are in very destructive (even sadomasochistic relationships) with their gods?
"For decades, space experts have warned of orbits around the planet growing so crowded that two satellites might one day slam into one another, producing swarms of treacherous debris.
"It happened Tuesday. And the whirling fragments could pose a threat to the International Space Station, orbiting 215 miles up with three astronauts on board, though officials said the risk was now small."
PLEASE SAY IT ISN'T SO, ROMEO!
New research shows—according to an article on CBS news—that love acts like addiction in the brains of those who suffer under the lash of love. I could have told them that. Painful withdrawal symptoms can create craving, but it's wonderful when love works out. Like 20% of the couples in one study, my wife and I still bill and coo, and our VTAs must light up like the Fourth of July:
"In humans, there are four tiny areas of the brain that some researchers say form a circuit of love. Acevedo, who works at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is part of a team that has isolated those regions with the unromantic names of ventral tegmental area (VTA), the nucleus accumbens, the ventral pallidum and raphe nucleus.
"The hot spot is the teardrop-shaped VTA. When people newly in love were put in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and shown pictures of their beloved, the VTA lit up. Same for people still madly in love after 20 years.
"The VTA is part of a key reward system in the brain."
What more should we expect, since emotions are adaptations for the regulation of our animal behavior? Robotics, anyone? Again we can see that feeling love toward an imaginary god in one's head would self-reward the believer for his faith with chemical enhancement. Pity the poor atheist who can only love life which and people who do not always reward him with as much feeling in return. Of course, people of faith, who are truly honest about the reality which their god has given them, must feel terrible most of the time because living is not always a friendly process. Taking that a step further—couldn't we say that Christians and Muslims and Jews are in very destructive (even sadomasochistic relationships) with their gods?
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
FAUX NEWS IS A REPUBLICAN GROUPY OUTFIT
From a blogger at Huffington Post comes the following. Read it and weep with laughter at the totally biased Faux (Fox) News people:
"Critics of the Fox News Channel intimate all the time that they take their marching orders and construct their dizzy little metanarratives from concise memoranda from straight out of the Republican messaging machine. But if you were to accuse the network of doing so, they'd typically respond, "Zounds! Thou wound mine honour, goode fellowe, verily!" Or, they'd have chief flack-and-Sith Lady Irina Briganti cut you, with dirty knives. But Media Matters has caught the foxy newsies in flagrante delicto passing off a press release from the Senate Republican Communications Center as their own enterprise reporting."
From a blogger at Huffington Post comes the following. Read it and weep with laughter at the totally biased Faux (Fox) News people:
"Critics of the Fox News Channel intimate all the time that they take their marching orders and construct their dizzy little metanarratives from concise memoranda from straight out of the Republican messaging machine. But if you were to accuse the network of doing so, they'd typically respond, "Zounds! Thou wound mine honour, goode fellowe, verily!" Or, they'd have chief flack-and-Sith Lady Irina Briganti cut you, with dirty knives. But Media Matters has caught the foxy newsies in flagrante delicto passing off a press release from the Senate Republican Communications Center as their own enterprise reporting."
Saturday, February 07, 2009
IF YOU THINK FOX NEWS VIEWERS ARE IGNORANT OF FACTS, YOU ARE...
The following excerpt is from The Carpetbagger Report:
"I have naively believed for years that staying informed about current events by getting some news is better than blissful ignorance derived from getting no news. Then Fox News Channel helped demonstrate just how wrong I was.
The Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland conducted a thorough study of public knowledge and attitudes about current events and the war on terrorism. Researchers found that the public’s mistaken impressions of three facets of U.S. foreign policy — discovery of alleged WMD in Iraq, alleged Iraqi involvement in 9/11, and international support for a U.S. invasion of Iraq — helped fuel support for the war.
While the PIPA study concluded that most Americans (over 60%) held at least one of these mistaken impressions, the researchers also concluded that Americans’ opinions were shaped in large part by which news outlet they relied upon to receive their information.
As the researchers explained in their report, “The extent of Americans’ misperceptions vary significantly depending on their source of news. Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions. Those who receive most of their news from NPR or PBS are less likely to have misperceptions. These variations cannot simply be explained as a result of differences in the demographic characteristics of each audience, because these variations can also be found when comparing the demographic subgroups of each audience.”
Almost shocking was the extent to which Fox News viewers were mistaken. Those who relied on the conservative network for news, PIPA reported, were “three times more likely than the next nearest network to hold all three misperceptions. In the audience for NPR/PBS, however, there was an overwhelming majority who did not have any of the three misperceptions, and hardly any had all three.”"...CORRECT!
Read the whole article here.
Friday, February 06, 2009
JUST THE FACTS, MAM
Historical population figures for Hammond, Indiana:
Census Pop. %±
1880 699
1890 5,284= 655.9%
1900 12,376=134.2%
1910 20,925= 69.1%
1920 36,004= 72.1%
1930 65,559= 82.1%
1940 70,18=3 7.1%
1950 87,595 = 24.8%
1960 111,698= 27.5%
1970 107,983= −3.3%
1980 91,985= −14.8%
1990 84,236= −8.4%
2000 83,048= −1.4%
You might ask, "George, what are you doing, posting this list of the rising and falling population of Hammond, Indiana?"
Well... in the first place, I'm crazy.
Actually, since I was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, I feel particularly akin to Hammond folk, and I was doing some research on a man named Jean Shepherd. He wrote "A Christmas Story" which has become a Christmas classic about a kid named Ralphie who wanted a Red Ryder bee bee gun and whose mother was worried he'd shoot his eye out. Jean was born in Hammond and raised there and worked in the steel mills before serving in WWII in the signal corps. He died living on one of the keys in Florida, I believe. I came across the population figures and they reminded me of what happened to Dayton, Ohio. The same rise and fall in population and industry. Dayton took quite a hammering, losing Delco and National Cash Register during those years. We're talking 100,000 or more jobs. Horrible stuff. Hammond's plight is/was Dayton's plight, and they occurred in overlapping historical dates.
Anyhow, I was struck by a bolt of nostalgia, seeing those population figures for Hammond. Sometimes nostalgia takes me for a real trip, recalling my childhood and youth in the Midwestern state of Ohio, southern Ohio. And I just wanted to put that down for whoever might run across it and also have nostalgic memories. Jeez, I hate nostalgia. When I was young, I swore I'd never let nostalgia get me, but it has.
Historical population figures for Hammond, Indiana:
Census Pop. %±
1880 699
1890 5,284= 655.9%
1900 12,376=134.2%
1910 20,925= 69.1%
1920 36,004= 72.1%
1930 65,559= 82.1%
1940 70,18=3 7.1%
1950 87,595 = 24.8%
1960 111,698= 27.5%
1970 107,983= −3.3%
1980 91,985= −14.8%
1990 84,236= −8.4%
2000 83,048= −1.4%
You might ask, "George, what are you doing, posting this list of the rising and falling population of Hammond, Indiana?"
Well... in the first place, I'm crazy.
Actually, since I was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, I feel particularly akin to Hammond folk, and I was doing some research on a man named Jean Shepherd. He wrote "A Christmas Story" which has become a Christmas classic about a kid named Ralphie who wanted a Red Ryder bee bee gun and whose mother was worried he'd shoot his eye out. Jean was born in Hammond and raised there and worked in the steel mills before serving in WWII in the signal corps. He died living on one of the keys in Florida, I believe. I came across the population figures and they reminded me of what happened to Dayton, Ohio. The same rise and fall in population and industry. Dayton took quite a hammering, losing Delco and National Cash Register during those years. We're talking 100,000 or more jobs. Horrible stuff. Hammond's plight is/was Dayton's plight, and they occurred in overlapping historical dates.
Anyhow, I was struck by a bolt of nostalgia, seeing those population figures for Hammond. Sometimes nostalgia takes me for a real trip, recalling my childhood and youth in the Midwestern state of Ohio, southern Ohio. And I just wanted to put that down for whoever might run across it and also have nostalgic memories. Jeez, I hate nostalgia. When I was young, I swore I'd never let nostalgia get me, but it has.
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