WALKING ON WATER

I think the picture below proves that more than a mythical Jesus can walk on water.














THE WILLOW SPRINGS STAFF

A long time ago when I was a youthful 40 or so years old, I was a founding member of a literary magazine called Willow Springs which still exists at Eastern Washington University. This is a photo of a softball game we had in the spring after we had put the second issue to press. By the time we got to this photo, the Willow Springs had a staff and a large group of supporters as you can see. I can recall a few of their names. That's Krystal Partlow standing taller than anyone else in the photo. The guy far left, crouching behind the wheel is Geoff Hayes, a longtime continuous friend. Randy Nord sports the cap in the back row. I should recall more faces to names than that of them, but I'm ashamed to say that I don't.

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My bathroom reading is May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude. She must have been in her sixties when she wrote it. And I get this picture of a crabby, pissed old biddy whose religion has made her narrow, but she has openings too, like when she enjoys the musical in New York with the kids in it. I feel the same way about Walt Whitman as I plow through Reynolds' cultural biography of Whitman—crabby and narrow. Suffering individuals who roll in their suffering to prove their worth or mettle. Or their patience with those of us less cultured than they are. These two were very much like I was in my depressed, drinking years.

Now, on the other hand, there's Hass's book on The Essential Haiku. According to him, three of the basics of life for the Japanese sensibility are impermanence, suffering and contingency. Yes suffering, suffering for all of us as a regular condition of life, but there is a difference, I think, in the emphasis that a Japanese haiku writer and these two Americans (and O so many others) place on suffering. To the American Christian, mired in his lot, suffering is a way of earning his place in letters or, in the church, in God's eye. To the Zen master (and I know very little here), suffering is a condition, not to be employed to one's benefit, but to be observed, and when possible, transcended.

At my own age of 70, I'm moving into this acceptance of suffering as a natural condition, not to be endured to prove one's worth and artistic value, but just to be observed and accepted. Quite a difference between east and west, and, believe it or not, an acceptance that yields quite a bit of tranquility. Below, you'll find a little haiku I've come up with that I think meets the essentials of the haiku.

Garden party —
the slugs getting drunk
in the beer saucers.*

*Putting out saucers of beer is supposed to be an environmentally friendly way to kill the slugs who so love one's hostas. All those years in Spokane, toiling in my flower garden, is paying off in some haiku.

USUALLY MY POSTS ARE ABOUT…

politics, science and literature, but I just happened to come across these photos on the Huffpo site. Even at the ripe old age of 70 and with a little help from Viagra, I can rise to this occasion. My great grandparents from before the days of the Great Depression would not understand it at all… or would they? Or at least my wonderful great grandfather on my grandmother’s side of dad's family might respond and understand. He was a drayman who drove a team of horses for a brewery in Dayton, Ohio. Have men ever been immune to a well-turned ankle? Look at the ankle on that chick! Hey! Where is that ankle.... Never mind!

"Proving she's still an American Beauty, actress Mena Suvari looked a figure of confidence as she showed off her slim physique in a revealing bikini."



NOW FOR SOMETHING
COMPLETELY DIFFERENT:

The following explosive and revealing letter by a serviceman in Iraq, I got via the Huffpo site also which directed me to a website run by a fellow named Spencer Ackerman.

from ’s Ackerman's blog:

"A friend of a friend just received the following email from a junior officer serving in Iraq. It makes for especially powerful reading in the wake of the Second Sadrist Intifada. Reprinted with permission.


"[Name redacted],

"I agree that the war was a great strategic mistake. The way I see it, Saddam Hussein was a secular leader and therefore a huge stumbling block to the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. Yes, he was an evil person and he was our enemy (since Gulf War I) but he was also an enemy of Bin Laden and the Shia extremists etc. If he did have WMDs, he would have used them for regional influence. He never would have given them up to terrorists or risked provoking the US by using them against us. Now, with Saddam gone we have a vaccum that can only be filled by Shia extremists who are more of a terrorist threat than Saddam.

"So I agree that coming here was a big mistake for those reasons and others. As far as things on the ground, the outlook isn't much better. In my opinion, what everyone fails to realize is that this is not a counterinsurgency. If we wanted to stay in Iraq, then it would be a counterinsurgency. But it is clear that our goal is to turn over power and pull out. So, in building our strategic endstate, it's pointless to set goals that relate to our presence in Iraq. If the "insurgency" is a function of our being there, then it is not an insurgency in terms of our endstate. For example, if one of our goals is to stop IED attacks on US forces, that is pointless. When we leave, there will be no more IED attacks on us forces. So our endstate needs to be different. We need to ask "if we left tomorrow, what would happen in Iraq?" and from there, we need to determine which of those anticipated results are unacceptable to us. Then we must aim our efforts on making sure those unacceptable results do not occur.

"When I look at the problem that way, it becomes almost impossible to find a purpose in what we do. Regardless of what we do, the Shia are going to take control. They have completely infiltrated all the security forces. The only kind of leader who could keep them in check was a tyrant like Saddam. And when the Shia take control, as soon as we leave, they are going to be as brutal as they like against the Sunni and there will be little we can do about it. That is what will happen whether we leave tomorrow or in ten years. As far as the foreign fighters, they will leave Iraq when we do. So what are we trying to accomplish here? Train the Iraqi forces? History shows that training forces in the Middle East can backfire. Any training we offer these people will find its way to our terrorist enemies.

"Things are heating up as well. The Shia are getting more aggressive. We lost a man the other day and another was seriously wounded a week or so later. We're facing a high risk with very little potential payoff. We are able to make a difference at the local level. Some of the people are very kind and appreciate our help. That is the only positive thing I can see coming out of this.

"Very Respectfully
"Junior Officer XXXX"

PS: I wonder why we have to hide the soldier's name? His disagreeing with the Bush fiasco should only get him replaced by a soldier who puppets the Bush/McCain plan like Patraeus replaced the general who disagreed with Bush. What the hell was his name? Is he still in the service?

KEEPING UP WITH THE __________________?

What with the trend for people to buy houses way too large for their needs that would put their grand-folk to shame and with these overlarge houses being overpriced and overvalued by as much as 30% in some American neighborhoods, modest and sensible people who want modest and sensible dwellings can no longer keep up with the Joneses; they're forced to keep up with the Dunces.

VAGUENESS: ITS USES IN DIPLOMACY

Steven Pinker always uses humor to illustrate his points and often delves into literature too. Here's an old joke, included in his recent book, The Stuff of Thought (p.396), from a section discussing bribes and how to get away with them by employing the language of implicature, rather than the outright offer itself:

When a lady says “no,” she means “maybe.”
When she says “maybe,” she means “yes.”
If she says “yes,” she's no lady.
When a diplomat says “yes,” he means “maybe.”
When he says “maybe,” he means “no.”
If he says “no,” he's no diplomat.

This prompted a feminist revision:

When a woman says “yes,” she means “yes.”
When a woman says “maybe,” she means “maybe.”
When a woman says “no,” she means “no.”
If the man persists, he's a rapist.

BELIEFS CAN HAVE TERRIBLE CONSEQUENCES

The following passage is taken from this week's Newsweek magazine, page 16. The article is called "The Working-Class Smoker" by Jerry Adler. Thank you, Jerry. It has to do with education and how superstition can affect the way one lives and dies. Being a blue collar machinist myself, but also having a college education and also having toyed with being powerless (i.e. a fatalist) in my drinking daze, I understand the following passage. Of course, another correlation occurs between those who are believers and their lack of education. I interpret both correlations to show that if you are a believer, you are likely to have little education and to also be one who quietly and without noticing it yourself is killing oneself, either by smoking or by failing to wear your seat belt. That doesn't speak too well for religious belief, does it?

PS: While entering this, I've also been watching a piece of superstitious nonsense called, "Constantine" on the FX channel. Of course, it's inspired by a comic book. Just about the level of your average believer's emotional and intellectual life. Notice I don't use the word "intelligence". I do believe that a believer can be intellectual though not intelligent. Intelligence is the realm of reason and rationality, but a believer can be emotionally stunted even while being able to employ massive intellectual sophistication in debate. C.S. Lewis comes to mind, a great intellectual twister but really lost in his faith from reality. I also realize I have been less than generous in my judgments. I try but I fail—somewhat like Paul himself.

[SNIP]
But there's also evidence that attending college by itself encourages healthy behavior; when community colleges open in rural areas, enrolling local youths who otherwise would have gone into the work force, smoking goes down.

Perhaps there's a clue in a bit of unpublished research by Cutler on a related question: why does seat-belt use go up with education? Anyone can understand the danger of flying through the windshield in a collision. But some data suggest that the less education you have, the likelier you are to agree with the statement "It doesn't matter if I wear a seat belt, because if it's my time to die, I'll die."

So for anyone reading this who never got beyond high school, here's a bit of free advice: it does matter. Life is uncertain, but that's no reason to surrender to fate. You don't need a Harvard M.B.A. to understand that.
[PASTE]

READ BELOW AND ASK YOURSELF

The following is an excerpt from an interview. As you read the answer to the question posed, ask yourself who is answering. Answer is below the response. An upside down picture.

Question: You've done more than one life's worth of work. Why go do this at this point?

Well, you're asking a personal question. So I’ll give you an unusual personal answer. I have a very deep well of empathy, and I take my motivation from what I see around the country. And I’ll give it to you just briefly, statistically: 47 million people who make less than $10.50 an hour—six and a half, seven, eight dollars an hour before deductions; 45 million people with out health care, 18,000 of whom die every year, according to the National Academy of Sciences, because they can't afford health care; 13 million children who go to bed hungry every night; 45 million people in dire poverty; 58,000 people who die from workplace-connected diseases and trauma every year, according to [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration]; 65,000 people who can't breathe, and die because of air pollution. I mean, do I have to go on? I mean, just what more evidence is needed that each and every one of us who has an ability to improve his or her country has got to do what they have to do within the confines of the Constitution and rule of law and freedom of speech?




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PDX or PORTLAND INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

Caught this one late morning from across the Columbia on the Vancouver side. I was taking my morning constitutional when what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a miniature roof top but no tiny reindeer. Lovely glittering sight though, eh?

Speaking of reindeer, I came across an old Harry Truman story in a book about language by Steven Pinker called The Stuff Of Thought. Or it should be a Bess Truman story. People asked her if she please couldn't get Harry to use the term fertilizer instead of referring to it as manure. She replied that she didn't know how she could do that. After all, she'd just finally gotten him to call the stuff manure.

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HERE’S MY SCIENCE HAIKU FOR THE DAY

Following, you’ll find a hiaku, seventeen syllables, but broken into the two contrasting thoughts or images. Then comes a quote from a current book I’m reading. It’s my fourth Steven Pinker book and he’s always as interesting as hell:

computational neuroscience:
Tinkertoy chickens cross the road

“The idea that shapes can be cognitively melted down into schematic blobs—skewered on axes originally came from a theory of shape recognition by the computational neuroscientist David Marr. Marr noted how easily people recognize stick figures and animals made from pipe cleaners or twisted balloons, despite their dissimilarity from real objects in their arrangement of pixels. He proposed that we actually represent shapes in the mind in blob-and-axis models rather than in raw images, because such a model is stable as the object moves relative to the viewer, while the pixels in the image are all over the place…. Not only do nouns for shapes (like ribbon, layer, crust, hunk, and groove) get their definitions from this world of pipe cleaners, cutouts, and balloons, but we seem to conceive of the objects around us in these terms. Few people think of a wire as a very very skinny cylinder and of a CD as a very short one, though technically that’s what they are. We conceive of them as having only one or two primary dimensions, respectively. Nor do we ordinarily imagine a lake as a translucent chunk with a flat top, sharp edges, and numerous bulges molded to the shape of the lake bottom. We think of it as a 2-D[imensional] surface.” Steven Pinker, The Stuff Of Thought, (pp. 181-82)

PRAYING NO MORE THAN PREYING ON THE FOOLS

The following passages are from Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (p. 63). After debating with agnostics, I find that they are dead set against accepting that the existence or non-existence of the god hypothesis is capable of proof. So let us just say that the following prayer experiment is an attempt to discover if the Universe contains any wonder-working magic in it that the act of praying can elicit from hiding. If we can design enough real experiments that test if there are wonder working marvels in the Universe, then we may not be able to prove whether or not the hypothesis of god is provable, but we can slowly whittle away at the hypothetical wonder worker's powers. We can limit its reach, whatever it is, so to speak. Anyhow, here's a report that shows the severe limitations of prayer.

[SNIP]
Dr. Benson and his team monitored 1,802 patients at six hospitals, all of whom received coronary bypass surgery. The patients were divided into three groups. Group 1 received prayers and didn't know it. Group 2 (the control group) received no prayers and didn't know it. Group 3 received prayers and did know it. The comparison between Groups 1 and 2 tests for the efficacy of intercessory prayer. Group 3 tests for possible psychosomatic effects of knowing that one is being prayed for.

Prayers were delivered by the congregations of three churches, one in Minnesota, one in Massachusetts and one in Missouri, all distant from the three hospitals. The praying individuals, as explained, were given only the first name and initial letter of the surname of each patient for whom they were to pray. It is good experimental practice to standardize as far as possible, and they were all, accordingly, told to include in their prayers the phrase ‘for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications’.

The results, reported in the American Heart Journal of April 2006, were clear-cut. There was no difference between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not. What a surprise. There was a difference between those who knew they had been prayed for and those who did not know one way or the other; but it went in the wrong direction. Those who knew they had been the beneficiaries of prayer suffered significantly more complications than those who did not. Was God doing a bit of smiting, to show his disapproval of the whole barmy enterprise? It seems more probable that those patients who knew they were being prayed for suffered additional stress in consequence: 'performance anxiety', as the experimenters put it. Dr. Charles Bethea, one of the researchers, said, 'It may have made them uncertain, wondering am I so sick they had to call in their prayer team?' In today's litigious society, is it too much to hope that those patients suffering heart complications, as a consequence of knowing they were receiving experimental prayers, might put together a class action lawsuit against the Templeton Foundation?

It will be no surprise that this study was opposed by theologians….
[PASTIE]

And why do you suppose theologians opposed the experiment? Couldn't be because they know what nonsense their profession preaches and can't bear the thought of suffering loss of status—one of the traits left over from their evolutionary pasts?

YOU CAN KNOW A RELIGION BY ITS PRACTICIONERS

I know very little about Islam so I can only judge the religion by Muslims who I see around me and what kind of people they are. Do they act in a mature manner? Do they treat those around them with kindness and empathy? Would I like to invite them into my home? Would I fear them or be able to love and like them? How do they treat people who are not of their faith? Are they law-abiding citizens and do they respect the laws of their nation and faith? Are they peaceful and decent people? What kind of children do they raise? Do they raise up hoodlums or self-respecting, law-abiding children? One can tell a lot about a religion by the kind of young people it produces. Anyhow, using the yardstick I listed above, with all due respect and praise to Allah, I will not judge. I'll let the children of Allah speak for themselves. Far be it from me to judge them. Let them judge themselves by their actions. Praise be to Allah.










One thing I don't quite understand about the pictures. One of the marcher's signs shows a dislike of freedom. Why, then, do so many of them cover their faces? If they lived in a dictatorship, like they claim they want to live in, then that means they want to be beaten up and imprisoned for rioting in the streets. But they don't seem to want to be identified and maybe arrested or beaten up. How can they live in freedom and protest like free people do when they don't respect the laws and culture which has developed the ideas of freedom of speech and assembly? Something almost insane and irrational about their behavior. Ah, well—Allah be praised, these are His people and they represent His religion. They must judge for themselves what kind of people they are, what kind of people their religion has made them to be. We certainly can't judge them. It would be impolite to do so, eh?