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In 1587 the Florentine Academy invited Galileo Galilei to resolve a literary controversy regarding the interpretation of La Divina Commedia. At issue was a running debate between the Florentine Antonio Manetti & Alessandro Velutello from Lucca over the architectonics of Dante’s Inferno: its shape, location & size. In offering his solution, Two Lectures to the Florentine Academy On the Shape, Location and Size of Dante's Inferno, Galileo also proffered his estimate as to the height of Lucifer.

G. Galilei, Due lezioni all’Accademia Fiorentina circa la figura, sito e grandezza dell’Inferno di Dante, in Le opere di Galileo Galilei, A. Favaro, vol. IX, 29-57, Barbera, Florence 1968. An English translation; Two Lectures to the Florentine Academy On the Shape, Location and Size of Dante's Inferno, translation by Mark A. Peterson, Mount Holyoke College

World Series ala Tony Auth, Phila. Inq.

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The Pascua-Lama project is a gold & silver mining operation which extends to both sides of the Argentine-Chilean border. Barrick Gold, a Toronto-based Canadian transnational company is planning to conduct open-pit exploitation of the gold, silver, & copper deposits located under the three glaciers in this area.
There are estimates that the project will require the removal of several hundred thousand cubic meters of glacial ice. The environmental impact as a result of this widespread disruption will be enormous. Additionally, the project potentially will affect the water supply of more than 70,000 farmers in the Huasco Valley, releasing toxins into the valley's rivers.
Ecologists say the Andean glaciers, one of the world's most important reserves of fresh water, are suffering sharp decline as a result of global warming, and that the removal of 20 hectares of ice as part of the Pascua-Lama project would cause irreversible damage to the ecosystem.

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….In 1720 idealist philosopher & cleric George Berkeley (1685-1753), returned from a four-year tour of the European continent to find an England plunged into debt, torn by stock swindles & dishonesty in high places, & most of all oblivious to the absolute decline in religion & morals. The next year, 1721, Berkeley published An Essay towards preventing the Ruin of Great Britain.

"....instead of blushing for our crimes we are ashamed only of piety & virtue. In short, other nations have been wicked, but we are the first who have been wicked upon principle"

A. A. Luce & T. E. Jessop, Works of George Berkeley (London: Thomas Nelson, 1953), VI, 84.

UNBELIEVABLE! Jimmy Rollins lined a two-run double with two outs in the 9th inning off All-Star closer Jonathan Broxton & the Philadelphia Phillies rallied past the Los Angeles Dodgers 5-4 Monday (10/19/09) night for a 3-1 lead in the NL championship series.

Lauren Weber, In Cheap We Trust: The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue

Listen also to “Please Explain” from WNYC New York Public Radio, The Leonard Lopate Show / September 08, 2009 / interview with Lauren Weber

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"Outside of a dog, a book is probably man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."- Groucho Marx

Well, according to Alexandra Horowitz' new book, Inside of a Dog, it may not be that dark. Subtitled: What Dogs See, Smell, & Know, she observes that “anyone who wants to understand the life of an animal must begin by considering what early-20th century German biologist, Jakob von Uexküll, called their umvelt...: their subjective or ‘self-world’.” However, a dog’s point view (or more correctly, from a dog’s point of nose) is not immediately accessible to us, for we reside within our own umwelt, our own self-world bubble, which clouds our vision.

Horowitz discusses the natural history of dogs, their evolutionary descent from the wolves, but she cautions the reader to pay attention to those wolf traits dogs have discarded along the way. “Dogs do not form true packs,” she writes. “They scavenge or hunt small prey individually or in parallel,” rather than cooperatively, as wolves do. Countering the currently fashionable alpha dog “pack theories” of dog training, Horowitz notes that “in the wild, wolf packs consist almost entirely of related or mated animals. They are families, not groups of peers vying for the top spot.... Behaviors seen as ‘dominant’ or ‘submissive’ are used not in a scramble for power; they are used to maintain social unity.” The idea that a dog owner must become the dominant member by using jerks or harsh words or other kinds of punishment, she writes, “is farther from what we know of the reality of wolf packs and closer to the timeworn fiction of the animal kingdom with humans at the pinnacle, exerting dominion over the rest. Wolves seem to learn from each other not by punishing each other but by observing each other. Dogs, too, are keen observers — of our reactions.”

In one enormously important variation from wolf behavior, dogs will look into our eyes. “Though they have inherited some aversion to staring too long at eyes, dogs seem to be predisposed to inspect our faces for information, for reassurance, for guidance.” They are staring, soulfully, into our umwelts.

cf. NY Times Sunday Book Review

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Dwight "Dike" Beede (1903–72) first head football coach of Youngstown State University (then Youngstown College) from 1937 to 1972; created & introduced the penalty flag on October 17, 1941 in a game against Oklahoma City University at Youngstown's Rayen Stadium. Prior to the introduction of the penalty flag, officials used horns & whistles to signal penalties.

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Single-Payer National Health Insurance

The US is the only major industrialized country that does not provide regular health care to all its citizens, even though we spend twice as much $7,129 per capita. Instead, we are required to provide for ourselves - & 45.7 million people can't afford the insurance & millions more are inadequately covered. As a result, an estimated 600,000 people file for bankruptcy annually because they can't pay their medical expenses, & 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require.

Under a single-payer system, all Americans would be covered for all medically necessary services, including: doctor, hospital, preventive, long-term care, mental health, reproductive health care, dental, vision, prescription drug & medical supply costs. Patients would regain free choice of doctor & hospital, & doctors would regain autonomy over patient care.

Physicians would be paid fee-for-service according to a negotiated formulary or receive salary from a hospital or nonprofit HMO / group practice. Hospitals would receive a global budget for operating expenses. Health facilities & expensive equipment purchases would be managed by regional health planning boards.

Costs would be controlled through negotiated fees, global budgeting & bulk purchasing.

Physicians for a National Health Program

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The Hermits of Ten Thousand Islands, Florida

The National Park Service barred hermits from living in the Everglades park when it was created in 1947, but those hermits already living on park land -mostly on the Ten Thousand Islands - were allowed to remain until they voluntarily moved or died.
Some of the lore of the hermits is preserved in a booklet researched, written & illustrated by students in the 1980 senior class of Everglades City High School, Prop Roots from the Mangrove Country of the Everglades. Two of the hermits were:
Al Seely was a machinist, musician, surveyor, & veteran. One day in 1969, he was diagnosed as having six months to live. He moved to the Ten Thousand Islands to live & was alive and well in 1980 when the student-authors researched their book. Seely was an invaluable source for lore & information, especially about past hermits. Seely originally lived in a fishing hut on Panther Key, then in a tent on Brush Key, before coming to Dismal Key & inhabiting the two-room house of a former resident & hermit, Foster Atkinson. Seely confounds the anti-social view of the recluse, even maintaining a guest book for visitors & writing an autobiography. He lives from a veterans' pension & sells paintings. He reads widely (with a full shelf of books), works the grounds of his 65 acres, and boats to the coastal villages part of the year.
Foster Atkinson had resided on Dismal Key during the time Seely was on Panther Key; Seely moved to Atkinson's house on Dismal Key after Atkinson's death. Seely reports that Atkinson was the sort of person "doomed to fail" at anything he tried. He had traveled the rails as a hobo, quarreled with every employer he had, lived "from hand to bowl," and was an alcoholic. Atkinson was selling sea shells for money while living in a tent on a mainland beach when he was approached about becoming caretaker of the Dismal Key house, which he thereafter inherited. Seely relates other anecdotes about the Atkinson, who died at seventy-two.

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On the Philadelphia Eagles signing of Michael Vick:

Bill Smith, founder of Main Line Animal Rescue in Chester Springs. "In a city where thousands of pit bulls are destroyed every year because we don't have the resources to rehabilitate them, it's shameful that we are willing to rehabilitate Michael Vick."

John Wesley, founder of Methodism, preached in favor of an afterlife for animals on the grounds that God’s justice required recompense for all suffering which creatures had to undergo. “It may enlarge our hearts towards these poor creatures, to reflect that... not one of them is forgotten in the sight of our Father which is in heaven. Through all the vanity to which they are now subjected, let us look to what God hath prepared for them. Yea, let us habituate ourselves to look forward, beyond this present state of bondage, to the happy time when they will be delivered therefrom, into the liberty of the children of God!” “The General Deliverance,” (1781) Sermons. Vol.II, LX.p.285

With Kant, at least we need admit: "Any action whereby we may torment animals, or let them suffer distress, or otherwise treat them without love, is demeaning to ourselves" (Lectures on Ethics 27:710, CUP, 1997, p. 434).

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Boycott Whole Foods
John Mackey, co-founder & CEO of Whole Foods is a right wing libertarian & he has just launched a Republicanesque campaign to defeat a single payer national health insurance system.
Mackey prefaces a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed article against national health insurance with a quote from one of his heroines – Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” The problem with Mackey’s campaign is that it results in the deaths of 60 Americans every day due to lack of health insurance.

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Stop Predatory Gambling

In 2004, Pennsylvania’s Gov. Rendell’s administration was able to pass a bill which allowed the commonwealth to create slot machine casinos because its stated purpose was to use the proceeds to reduce property taxes. Currently, PA House Bill 1317 would allow video poker & similar forms of gambling in thousands of restaurants & taverns across the state under the presumption of providing scholarships to its residents to attend state-owned universities & community colleges. This kind of legalized gambling is as transparent as it is bankrupt for it offers a false choice to government - easy money without raising taxes. In addition, gambling serves as a regressive tax on those with lower incomes.

Gambling brings addiction: When gambling appears in a community, it brings a wave of addiction. In a mature gambling market, compulsive gambling typically seizes the lives of 1.5% to 2.5% of the adult population. That amounts to 3 to 5 times the number of people suffering from cancer.
“Gambling is an addictive behavior. . . Gambling has all the properties of a psychoactive substance, and again, the reason is that it changes the neurochemistry of the brain.”
The American Psychiatric Association says between 1% & 3% of the U.S. population is addicted to gambling, depending on location & demographics. Youth have even higher addiction rates, between 4 an 8%.
Proximity & poverty matter: Addiction rates double within 50 miles of a casino. A casino within 10 miles of a home yields a 90% increased risk of its occupants becoming pathological or problem gamblers. Slots & other gambling machines push susceptible players to the pathological level in an average of 1.08 years, vs. 3.58 years with more “conventional” forms of table & racetrack gambling.

June 23, Phila., PA - As Pennsylvania debates further expanding legalized gambling to include tables games in casinos, & possibly video poker machines in bars & clubs, Common Cause released a study [PDF] showing that the gaming industry gave $4.4 million in campaign contributions to political candidates & committees in the state from 2001-08.

Stop Predatory Gambling (formerly The National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling (NCALG) a 501.c3 not-for-profit educational organization

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Leszek Kolakowski (Oct. 23, 1927 – July 17, 2009), Polish philosopher, Communist-turned-adversary, scholar & historian of ideas. During his long career, he published more than 30 books. His lecture, "The Idolatry of Politics," includes the much quoted aphorism, "We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are" [in Modernity on Endless Trial (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990, paperback edition 1997), p. 158].
Among other academic positions, Kolakowski was a member of the University of Chicago faculty from 1981 until his retirement in 1994. The opening line of his acceptance speech at the ceremony at which his book, Modernity on Endless Trial, was awarded the University of Chicago Press's Laing Prize for 1991: "I wish to express my deep gratitude... for being given this prestigious award. Of course I don't deserve it, but I would never turn it down for such a flimsy reason."

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October 22, 1895 The Granville-Paris Express that overran the buffer stop. The engine careened across almost 100 feet of the station concourse, crashed through a 2 foot thick wall, shot across a terrace and sailed out of the station, plummeting onto the Place de Rennes 33 ft below. All 131 passengers on board the train survived, five sustaining injuries, however, one woman on the street below was killed by falling masonry. The accident was caused by a faulty brake & the engineer, Guillaume Marie Pellerin, who was trying to make up for lost time, and not, contrary to popular opinion, text-messaging.

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On July 3, 1966, in a Braves 17-3 victory against the Giants at Candlestick Park, Braves Tony Lee Cloninger (born August 13, 1940) became the first player in the National League & the first pitcher ever to hit two grand slams in the same game (the second coming in the 4th inning went over Giants' center fielder Willie Mays). Cloninger drove in nine runs, also setting a major league record for pitchers.

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Statue of a Woman, Egyptian, New Kingdom, ca. 1550-1070 BCE, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago or is it Michael Jackson?

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Because of war, drought, political instability, high food prices, & poverty, hunger now affects one in six people, by the United Nations' estimate. The number of hungry people (meaning they consume fewer than 1,800 calories a day) is estimated to have reached 1.02 billion – up, 11% from last year's 915 million U.N. Food & Agricultural Organization.

Josette Sheeran of the World Food Program, another U.N. food agency based in Rome, said hungry people rioted in at least 30 countries last year. "A hungry world is a dangerous world," Sheeran said. "Without food, people have only three options: They riot, they emigrate, or they die. None of these are acceptable options." (AP)
Meat production depends on feeding nearly 40% of the world's grain to animals, creating competition for grain between affluent meat eaters & the world's poor. Seven kilograms of grain are required to produce 1 kilogram of beef; the conversion is 4-to-1 for pork & 2-to-1 for poultry. Each kilogram of meat represents several kilograms of grain that could be consumed directly by humans, not to mention the water & farm land required to grow the grain. To put this in concrete terms, the beef in a Big Mac represents enough wheat to produce five loaves of bread.
If each American reduced his or her meat consumption by just 5%, roughly equivalent to eating one less dish of meat each week, enough grain would be saved to feed 25 million people — the number estimated to go hungry in the United States each day.

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"What in the World?"
The Univ of Penn Museum's Peabody Award-winning weekly half-hour television program which first aired in 1951 & ran for 14 years. On each "What in the World?" program, four or five unidentified objects were presented to a panel of experts who were asked to guess what each piece was, where it came from, how old it was, and how it was used. Objects were selected from storerooms and had never before been seen by the panel. Before the experts guessed, the audience was told what the object was, and, during the course of the program, could watch the thought processes of real -- and often fallible! -- anthropologists & archaeologists. After they had completed their identification, the moderator, Froelich Rainey, Director of the Museum, told them whether they were right & if not, gave the correct identification. Only four episodes of the show survive. Precursor of "Antiques Road Show".

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The Economics of Oz
L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz was published in 1900 at a time when American society was consumed by the debate over the 'financial question,' that is, the creation & circulation of money. The burning issue during the latter half of the 1800s was the abandonment of bimetalism, with silver being de-moneyed & gold established as the official legal tender. The characters of Oz represented those deeply involved in the debate: the Scarecrow as the farmers, the Tin Woodman as the industrial workers, the Lion as silver advocate William Jennings Bryan & Dorothy as the archetypal American girl. They make economic progress down a street backed by the gold standard, to reach the city of Ounce (OZ.) which is green like money, wherein they find & then expose the fraudulent myths of Religion (The Great Oz).

Parker, David B. "The Rise and Fall of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a 'Parable on Populism'," Journal of the Ga. Assoc. of Historians 15 (1994) 49-63
Taylor, Quentin P. “Money & Politics in the Land of Oz,” The Independent Review 9 (Winter 2005) 3
Ziaukas, Tim "100 Years of Oz: Baum's 'Wizard of Oz' as Gilded Age Public Relations" Public Relations Quarterly (Fall 1998)

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John Winthrop (1588-1649), the first (and frequently reelected) governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony; his 1630 sermon 'A New Model of Christian Charity,' provided the defining & enduring oft-quoted metaphor of America as the 'City Set on A Hill.'

In 1645, when Ann Yale Hopkins, the wife of Governor Edward Hopkins of Hartford, suffered a mental breakdown, Winthrop blamed her for “giving herself wholly to reading and writing,” rather than to the rigors of colonial life. “If she had attended to her household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger... she had kept her wits.” (Maybe Anne Hutchinson left on her own volition).

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With his win over Philadelphia on the last day of August, Babe Ruth helped the 1918 Red Sox clinch the AL pennant. (Boston will not win another pennant until 1946). That year as a pitcher, he went 13-7; his ERA was 2.22 & he pitched one shutout. He also started 59 games in left & 13 at first. As a batter that season, Ruth compiled 317 at-bats (his previous high was 136); hit 11 home runs in a year when home runs in the American League had totaled 98, & drove in 66 runs & hit for a .300 average.

In the World Series against the Chicago Cubs, Ruth was used as a pitcher (he had only 5 at-bats). He won the first game 1-0, pitching a complete game. During the 7th inning stretch of that game, which was played at Comiskey Park, a military band played “The Star Spangled Banner” although it had not yet been adopted as the national anthem. The custom of playing it before every game won’t begin until WW II. Ruth then pitched in the fourth game (the Red Sox held a 2-1 Series lead) & shutout the Cubs for 7 innings before being relieved in the 9th. The Red Sox won the game 3-2. The seven shutout innings, combined with the 9 he had pitched in the Series opener & the 13 he had pitched in the 1916 Series, gave him 29 consecutive scoreless World Series innings, which broke Christy Mathewson’s previous record of 28 in 1905. It was a record that would stand for 42 years. The Red Sox won the World Series in game six at Fenway Park. It would be the team’s third title in 4 years & fifth overall (five of the first 15 World Series).

Ruth, who never really got along with manager Ed Barrow, even threatened to leave the Red Sox to play for the Chester Shipyard League, a semiprofessional team in Chester, Pennsylvania. But Harry Frazee, the Red Sox owner, threatened a lawsuit & put an end to Ruth’s proposed mutiny.

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At the April 17, 2009, opening session of the 5th Summit of the Americas held in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave a copy of Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America to U.S. President Barack Obama, who was making his first diplomatic visit to the region. This made the English language edition of the book go from being ranked 54,295 on Saturday, April 18, 2009, as reported by the Washington Post, to #2 on Amazon's Top 100 book list on Sunday, April 19.

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Clark, David L. “Botticelli's Venus & Mars & Other Apotropaic Art for Tuscan Bedrooms,” Aurora, Journal of the History of Art (2006) - Botticelli's Venus & Mars exemplifies apotropaic (intended to ward off evil; including demonic spirits that hindered fertility & caused nightmares) art produced for Quattrocento Tuscan bedrooms. Venus & Mars served as a headboard for a bed belonging to Lucrezia de' Medici, the oldest daughter of Lorenzo de' Medici & Jacopo di Giovanni Salviati [(1490-1553) an Italian Cardinal & diplomat. He was papal legate in France, & conducted negotiations with the Emperor Charles V.] Since they were married in 1487/88, Venus & Mars now should be dated then, rather than in 1483, as previously proposed.

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Taxation with Representation
"Retrospect of the Boston Tea Party with a Memoir of George R.T. Hewes, a Survivor of the Little Band of Patriots Who Drowned the Tea in Boston Harbor in 1773," the only first-person account of the event by a participant that exists. The Boston Tea Party resembled in many ways modern-day protests against transnational corporations & small-town efforts to protect themselves from big-box Wal-Mart retailers. The real Boston Tea Party was a protest against corporate welfare allowing the British East India Company, the largest trans-national corporation then in existence, to ship duty-free, which threatened to undercut small Colonial entrepreneurial tea shops. (Thom Hartmann)

So what does this have to do with the most recent "Tea Party" tax protest, especially when, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the current effective federal tax rate that households across the income spectrum pay is lower now than it was 30 years ago? The effective rate (all federal taxes, including excise & payroll taxes) is now lower than it was during Ronald Reagan’s second term, lower than during George H.W. Bush’s term, & lower than it was during Bill Clinton’s tenure when the national debt was replaced with a surplus!

In analyzing why middle-income people, who pay big chunks of their earnings in payroll & sales taxes, support tax cuts for millionaires (abolishing the estate tax lowering capital gains rates, etc.), which not only threaten the funding for the services on which they depend, but may even increase their taxes, Robin L. Einhorn in her book American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago, 2006) makes the connection between tax aversion & the legacy of slavery. Slaveholders worried that non-slaveholders would try to abolish the institution of slavery by imposing prohibitive taxes on slaves. They sought to persuade the non-slaveholding majorities that a weak government & restrained tax power actually were in the interests of the non-slaveholders themselves.

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Spatz, Nancy Katherine “Principia: A Study & Edition of Inception Speeches Delivered before the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris ca. 1180-1286,” PhD Diss. Cornell Univ., 1992 Photocopy. Ann Arbor, MI: U.M.I. Dissertation Services, 1992

A study of inception speeches delivered ca. 1180-1286 by eleven students as part of the requirements for the master's degree in theology. These short works, called principia, are commendations of theology or Sacred Scripture that students delivered when they were inducted into the guild of the masters of theology.
This study begins with a description of the inception ceremonies of the four faculties of the medieval university, i.e., arts, medicine, civil and canon law, & theology, in their most highly developed 14th century form, based on evidence from university statutes of the period. Chapter 3 describes the inception and inaugural ceremonies of the theology faculty of Paris in the thirteenth century, based on evidence drawn from early statutes & from the inceptions of certain masters. Chapter 4 establishes a list of eleven authors for whom inception principia have been identified, & gives brief descriptions of their careers & their principia. These authors are Stephen Langton, Odo of Chateauroux, John of La Rochelle, Albertus Magnus, Guy of Aumone, Thomas Aquinas, Galdaricus, Nicholas of Pressoir, Henry of Ghent, Matthew of Aquasparta, & Stephen of Besancon. Chapter 5 analyzes the common characteristics of these speeches & their stylistic development. Based on the views expressed in the principia, Chapters 6 & 7 discuss how the masters conceived of their profession.
This study is the first to establish the dates at which masters & bachelors in the faculty of theology at Paris began delivering principia. It also demonstrates that certain lectures previously thought to be by bachelors were actually delivered by masters at their inception ceremonies. The persistence of this genre shows that although concepts of theology change over time due to the influx of Aristotelian learning, the principium is flexible enough to be transformed to accommodate these new views. Finally, the detailed description of the characteristics of this genre will be a useful aid for scholars attempting to identify other principia.

• graphic: Aristotle’s Metaphysics with commentary by Averroes, Ibn Rushd

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• In 1797, Thomas Cadell made one of the greatest mistakes in publishing history. A Hampshire clergyman had written to him, offering a 3-volume novel for publication by a first-time author. Cadell declined the book, manuscript unseen. Unfortunately for Cadell, the clergyman was the Revd George Austen, soliciting publication on his daughter Jane's behalf, & the novel in question was an early version of Pride & Prejudice. Claire Harman's Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World

• In 1950, Alfred A. Knopf Inc., the gold standard in the book trade, publishing the works of 17 Nobel Prize winning authors & 47 Pulitzer Prize winning volumes, turned down the English language rights to a Dutch manuscript. Knopf wasn’t alone. The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank, would be rejected by 15 others before Doubleday published it in 1952. More than 30 million copies are currently in print, making it one of the best-selling books in history. David Oshinsky, history prof at the Univ of Texas, Austin. “No Thanks, Mr. Nabokov,” NYT Sunday Book Rev. 9/9/2007

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• Freidberg, Susanne Fresh: A Perishable History. Harvard Belknap, 2009 - Refrigeration delivered a paradigm shift by removing the site of production from the sight of consumers (also, "Not So Fresh Eggs," NY Times Freakonomics - history of egg production, consumption & speculation)
• Peeps - marshmallow chicks & bunnies that are an inescapable fixture of Easter baskets. But not all Peeps get eaten - some are used in decorations, dioramas, & pop-art sculpture. They have been produced by Just Born Inc. in Bethlehem, Pa., since 1954. Today, the company churns out about 1.5 billion Peeps annually. They are made from marshmallow, sugar, gelatin (caution vegans), & carnauba wax (caution: not to be use in polishing your car, or as a hair conditioner). With little taste, no nutritional value, but with a shelf life of 2 years, they hover somewhere between foodstuff & an inert carbon-based material object.
  

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30 million trees are cut down annually for the virgin paper to produce books sold in the U.S. alone.

The mission of Eco-Libris is to offset that impact by easily & affordably empowering readers to plant a tree for every book they read. Readers, in turn, receive an Eco-Libris sticker to put on the book jacket www.ecolibris.net.

What it is costing US

American (Foreclosed) Gothic

I'm still here

friendship

What does friendship mean when you have 478 "friends" on Facebook?

Meanwhile, at home: politics as usual

Good News / Bad News: Sales of existing homes posted an unexpected increase in December, as consumers snapped up foreclosures in California & Florida. Sales of existing homes rose 6.5% from November's pace. However, new home sales fell 14.7% in December & prices plunged by more than 9% from a year ago.

In the meantime, Republican Senators, trying to regain a mantle of fiscal responsibility, continue to posture for future political 'I told you so's,' rejecting the Administration's stimulus plan (when the sabotaged bill fails to help the economy, they'll blame the president). They accuse the Democrats of trying to have their 'liberal' ideological agenda underwritten by the plan by including such things as extending Medicaid & COBRA eligibility to unemployed workers, health care provisions that affect the poor, & education assistance. That no Senate Republican voted for the stimulus package belies the fact that it is a political issue & not a matter of policy. The Republicans still don't get it.

President Obama's attempt at bipartisanship was not an acquiescence of compromise, but an avoidance of the gamesmanship of politics as usual, in order to raise the civility of political discourse. But the Republicans still don't get it. House Minority Leader John Boehner & his ilk are coming up small - this is not the environment for the return of the party of Hoover. They just don't get it.

Whatever the outcome - Republican tax cuts or Democratic increased spending - until someone does something to fix the housing problem nothing else (job creation, credit freeze, undercapitalization, toxic bank assets, etc.) matters. And if home values continue to sink, the game's over. Somebody better get it.

Stimulate this

More than 2.3 million American homeowners faced foreclosure proceedings last year, an 81% increase from 2007, with the worst yet to come given increasing unemployment, shrinking investment portfolios & falling home prices.

Nationwide, more than 860,000 properties were actually repossessed by lenders, more than double the 2007 level. In December, more than 303,000 properties nationwide received at least one foreclosure notice, up more than 40% from a year earlier & up 17% from November. Nearly 79,000 properties were repossessed by lenders in December, a 61% increase over a year ago.

Moody's Economy.com, a research firm, predicts the number of homes lost to foreclosure is likely to rise by another 18% this year before tapering off slightly through 2011.

More than 1.1 million properties in Nevada, Florida, Arizona & California - states with the highest foreclosure rates - received a foreclosure notice, almost half the national total. And more than one in five of those households were in Calif. Foreclosures would have been about 10% higher in Calif. last year if it were not for a law requiring lenders to give borrowers a 30-day warning before starting the foreclosure process. Calif. foreclosures have increased 100% since last year & almost 500% since 2006.

One cannot begin to imagine what the rate would be if certain local municipalities, Fanny, Freddie & Countrywide hadn't adopted a moratorium on processing foreclosures.

Major General Antonio Taguba, the Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison has stated:

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

You may want to read & sign the "Formal Petition to Attorney General-Designate Eric Holder to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute any and all government officials who have participated in War Crimes" posted near the bottom of this site.

On March 4, 2008, the citizens of Brattleboro, Vermont went to the polls and voted by a count of 2,012 to 1,795 to endorse the recommendation that if President Bush or Vice President Cheney came to that town, they should be “arrested and detained” for “crimes against our Constitution.”

Elaine Scarry, "Presidential Crimes," Boston Review (9-10/2008)

National Debt: Prescriptio in manibus tabellariorium est (The check is in the mail)

The US Outstanding Public Debt as of Dec 16 was $10.6 Trillion & change; since the estimated population of the United States was 305,281,762 at that time, we each owe $34,749.55.
check National Debt widget at the bottom of this site for update

English as a first language in the White House

It hasn’t escaped notice that President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his use of complete, grammatically correct sentences. During the bevy of recently televised press conferences announcing cabinet positions, I found myself not scrambling for the remote for a change. However, having a president who speaks English as if it were his first language may be disconcerting for many of those who want English to be the official language of the United States, since they have a tendency to be uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it.

S&P Bell Curve

Each block in this histogram represents one year of stock returns, using data since 1825. The most recent observation, based on 2008 returns to date, is the dark block in the far left tail. The figure gives a good sense of how historically extraordinary this year's bad news has been. - Greg Mankiw

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12/6 Roy Orbison died 20 years ago today

(April 23, 1936 – Dec. 6, 1988)
Of all his works, my favorites: "In Dreams" (1963); "Oh, Pretty Woman" (1964); "Crying" as a duet with k.d. lang (1987).

This clip, is from the Sept.,1987, “Roy Orbison & Friends, A Black & White Night," HBO television special recorded at the Coconut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)

Depress ing / ion

For the week of Nov. 17th, the S&P 500 Index fell 8.4% for a year-to-date total return of –44.4%. The yield of the 10-year U.S. Treasury note dropped 52 basis points to 3.20% (for a year-to-date decrease of 84 basis points). Orders for U.S.-made durable goods fell 6.2% in October.

and, just in time for your holiday shopping:

• Ann Taylor closing 117 stores nationwide
• Bombay closing remaining stores
• Cache closing all stores
• Circuit City (filed Chapter 11)
• Disney closing 98 stores & more after January
• Dillard's to close some stores
• Eddie Bauer to close stores 27 stores & more after January
• Ethan Allen closing 12 stores
• Footlocker closing 140 stores more to close after January
• GAP closing 85 stores
• Home Depot closing 15 stores
• JC Penney closing a number of stores after January
• J. Jill closing all stores (owned by Talbots)
• K B Toys closing 356 stores
• Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug, to close 150 stores nationwide
• Levitz closing down remaining stores
• Linens & Things closing all stores
• Loews to close down some stores
• Macys to close 9 stores after January
• Movie Galley Closing all stores
• Pacific Sunwear (owned by Talbots)
• Pep Boys Closing 33 stores
• Piercing Pagoda closing all stores
• Sharper Image closing all stores
• Sprint/Nextel closing 133 stores
• Talbots closing down specialty stores
  
• Wickes Furniture closing down
• Wilson Leather closing all stores
• Zales closing down 82 stores & 105 after January
  

Kant is no Dr. Phil

For All the Saints Who from Their Labours Rest?

Mary Tudor, aka, Bloody Mary, not only burned Ridley, Latimer, & Cranmer at the stake, but she wouldn’t rest until the body of the reformer from Strasbourg, & Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, Martin Bucer had been exhumed & burnt as well. Under Queen Elizabeth I, the dust where Bucer was burnt was brought to St. Mary’s, Oxford & placed beneath the altar.

In less than four years, between February 1555 & November 1558, 284 Protestants, 56 of them women, were martyred for their faith. Some of those who died – Latimer, Ridley, Cranmer – were high-profile victims, but the vast majority were hardly heard of outside their own parishes. An Essex servant girl, Elizabeth Folkes, aged 20, was asked what she understood about the nature of the Eucharist. Did she believe in a ‘substantial and real presence’ in the host? She answered: ‘It was a substantial lye, and a reall lye.’ And although the judge wept when he sentenced her, she was burned with five other commoners outside the town walls of Colchester.

Thomas Macaulay wrote: ‘Cambridge had the honour of training those glorious Protestant bishops whom Oxford had the honour of burning.’

At the other end of the English Reformation, Oliver Cromwell also suffered a similar relocation when his body was exhumed & posthumously 'executed' (3 years after his death) on 30 Jan., 1661. Although the final resting place of Cromwell's remains is a matter of dispute, a severed head said to be his was bequeathed to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where Cromwell had been a student, & lays interred near the school’s chapel.

Phillies to go to the World Series! (Curses?)

1983 was the last time a pro sports team from Philadelphia won a championship. That team was the Dr. J / Moses Malone 76ers, & they did it by sweeping the LA Lakers in four games. Shorty thereafter, the city announced that a new skyscraper would be built, who's height would top the hat of the William Penn statue atop City Hall by 397 feet. And in 1987 when that 945 foot building, One Liberty Place, opened it ended the “Gentleman's Agreement” in the city to never build a building taller than Penn’s statue.

Times were good for Philadelphia sports teams up until that point - back to back Stanley Cups for the Flyers in 1974 & 1975, an NBA title for the Sixers in 1983, the appearance of all four major sports teams in their respective finals in 1980, concluding in a World Series Title for the Phillies.

Since the topping of William Penn’s statue, no professional Philadelphia sports team in any of the four major sports has won a championship - a combined 100 straight seasons. Hence, "the curse of Billy Penn".

On June 18, 2007, the Comcast ("The Evil Empire") Center became the tallest building in Philadelphia at 975 feet. In an official “topping-out ceremony,” when the final beam in the construction was raised, members of the local ironworkers union attached a small figurine of William Penn to the beam in homage to the statue atop Philadelphia City Hall, in an attempt to break the curse of Billy Penn.

The Curse Of Billy Penn, Ryan Parker

Unfortunately, not only do the Phillies have to contend with "The Curse of William Penn," but they are also under the spell of “The Curse of Ivan DeJesus”. Ivan DeJesus, was the shortstop who’s 7th inning error lead to the Phillies loss in the third World Series game against Baltimore. The Phils would not win another game in that 1983 World Series. DeJesus had earlier replaced Larry Bowa at short the previous year. The Phillies' manager of the 1980 Series winner, Dallas Green, had moved on to become the GM of the Cubs. In 1982 he convinced the Phillies to trade Bowa for DeJesus, a supposed upgrade at the position. The other error the Phillies made was that Green also convinced them to throw in an untested, unheralded minor-league prospect – future Hall of Famer, Ryne Sandberg.Wait! Yet another Philadelphia curse -- the "Curse of Sarah Palin"! Right wing (politically) impresario, Ed Snider, owner of the Philadelphia Flyers (& 76ers) invited the ultimate "hockey mom" Sarah Palin to drop the ceremonial first puck at the Flyers' season opener on October 12. The Flyers dropped the next 6 games, & were on the verge of losing number 7, when over in St. Louis Palin dropped the puck to begin the game between the Blues & the LA Kings. At that very moment the Palin curse was broken - they went on to win! Oh, the Blues, of course they lost. "Tag, you're it".

Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand was right, the atlas has been shrugged - now my street is bailing out Wall Street.

addendum: "It's not based on any particular data point, we just wanted to choose a really large number." — Treasury spokeswoman explaining how the $700 billion number was chosen for the initial bailout, quoted on Forbes.com, Sept. 23, 2008 [selected by Fred R. Shapiro as one of the Most Notable Quotations of 2008, The Yale Book of Quotations]

Bush, having mismanaged the economy for 8 years as well as McCain, champion of deregulation in the Senate, who insists that, “the fundamentals of our economy are strong,” continue to operate under the hegemony of a bankrupt ideology:

The regnant Republican economic philosophy is quite straightforward:

• deregulate (everything from banks to wilderness preserves),
  
• defer taxation,
• pump up money supply,
• disregard deficits,
• export jobs (under the presumptive rubric of Bastianesque ‘free trade’) & export debt (qualification for a mortgage? - speak Mandarin),
• privatize profits, but socialize risk & debt,
• blame "tax & spend" Democrats [isn't that ironic] when they have to repair levees in New Orleans, bridges in Minneapolis, & auto makers in Detroit,
• affirm the policies of any past (e.g., Robert McTeer) or the present (Richard Fisher) president of the Dallas Federal Reserve (except for the more radical libertarians who would abolish the Fed altogether)
  
• all under the auspices of an unfettered Randian laissez-faire capitalism where markets are perceived as always being good & self-correcting, & government is always bad & self-seeking.
  

This ideology has been dominant for 25 of the last 27 years: the Reagan & Bush I administrations, the Gingrich/Gramm congress, & the Shrub.

That anyone would continue to support this kind of bankrupt ideology stretches even a modicum of credulity. Sovereign wealth funds might be able to afford the party of Herbert Hoover, but the American taxpayer cannot!

Kafkaesque

One can almost see British novelist Zadie Smith roll her eyes in quiet Kafkaesque exasperation when she recounts a rather humorous episode, an anecdote which is formulaic for Joseph K:

“I went recently to the American Embassy in London to obtain a visa. I had been given an appointment for 8:15 a.m. There were four hundred people in a line outside the building: they also had an appointment for 8:15. Many years appeared to pass; at last we were allowed inside to be given a slip with a number on it. Mine was 169. But the numbers on the screen came up at random –- 502, 164, 80, 670, 378 –- and with no discernible connection to the number of people in the room. ‘Would it be all right if I popped out?’ I asked the guard. ‘Oh, yes,’ said the guard, cheerily. ‘You can always go out. You’re free to go out. But then of course you’ll miss your number.’...." As critic Michael Hofmann has it – "it is almost always too late in Kafka."

Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980)

Philadelphia

“Make the World Safe for Democracy”

A must read article, “Why this Is a Good Time to Remember Eugene V. Debs” by Ernest Freeberg, history prof. at the Univ. of Tenn or his interview with the Calif. Literary Review. Freeberg is author of Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, & the Right to Dissent, Harvard (2008).

“In June 1918, as American troops were entering the trenches of France, Eugene V. Debs gave a speech in Ohio declaring that rich men profit from wars, while poor men die in them. ‘You need to know,’ he told his followers, ‘that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder.’ Federal agents arrested him for violating the 1917 Espionage Act, a law used to jail hundreds of war critics during Woodrow Wilson’s crusade to ‘make the world safe for democracy’… the president & his attorney general suggested that war critics were disloyal… Some used the public’s fear of radicals to stigmatize immigrants, inspiring a movement to throw up new barriers at our borders. All of this sounds familiar in our own time, as our fears once again threaten to undermine our democratic traditions…”.
graphic supplied by Kirstin Chappell

Economic Good News: Wages up / Economic Bad News: Everything else

About 51,000 jobs disappeared in July, the 7th consecutive month that payrolls have declined - 463,000 since January. That’s a working definition of a recession.

• the housing market is in its worst slump in modern times - from foreclosures to inventory build-up, & collapsing home values
• the banking sector is enduring a credit crisis that’s dried up all but the safest lending, the FDIC is seizing assets of regional banks
• the Federal Reserve has to approve a $30 billion credit line to help JPMorgan Chase acquire investment bank, Bear Stearns, so that it won’t go belly-up, [although every other Federal regulating agency appeared asleep at the sub-prime / hedge fund helm, the Fed doesn't seem adverse to co-opting whatever power it can get]
• the dollar is in free-fall, providing a fire-sale of US corporations to foreign interests
• commodities are in hyper-price inflation mode,
• with a rotating sector recession, the market has dropped into bear market territory, losing trillions in capitalization
• General Motors [good ole Mr. Chas. E. Wilson's ["what was good for the country was good for General Motors, and vice versa"] appears on the verge of bankruptcy,
• Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac which currently own or guarantee over $5 trillion of home loans -roughly half of all the mortgage debt that is outstanding in the U.S. - are so heavily undercapitalized, that they could be placed into a “conservatorship”.
  

Not to worry. Our president has a MBA from Harvard.

The unemployment rate in July, 5.5% represents a 4 year high; It’s especially pronounced for certain demographic groups, most notably African Americans, teens (20.3%), & women who are the sole breadwinners. African Americans experienced a 9.7% unemployment rate in May, unemployment for teens was 18.7%, & for African American teens it was a whopping 32.3%!

The Commerce Department said that while personal incomes edged up 0.1%, the smallest rise since April 2007, workers lost ground to inflation with the Consumer Price Index up more than 4% for the year. Actually, if it weren’t for the stimulus payments, disposable incomes would have shrunk in June.

If you liked the last 8 years - under McCain, you’ll love the next 4. McCain: ”I don’t really understand economics,” ”it’s not my ’strong suit’.”

At the start of this decade, the budget stood in surplus of 2.4% of GDP. Thus, this year’s deficit represents a worsening of more than 7% of GDP, or roughly $1,000 billion since Bush took office. Almost all of this fiscal irresponsibility is due to this administration’s policy: tax cuts, spending increases, & associated debt-service costs.

Cultural Property Rights or Damn, We've Commodified Everything

In the fall of 2006, Thomas Jefferson University, a Philadelphia medical school, said that it would sell Thomas Eakins’ Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (1875) - known as “The Gross Clinic” to the National Gallery of Art in Washington & Alice Walton's (Walmart heiress) Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Iconic of the City of Brotherly Love, & recognized as perhaps the greatest American painting of the 19th century, John Wilmerding, a trustee of the National Gallery & Walton’s art adviser, referred to it as “the holy grail of American painting”. Patrician Director & CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Anne d’Harnoncourt, said, “It’s a painting that really belongs in Philadelphia – his presence still resonates here.”

In 2005 Walton created a similar tempest when she outbid the National Gallery of Art & the Metropolitan Museum of Art to purchased Hudson River School painter Asher B. Durand’s “Kindred Spirits” for a reported $35 million from the New York Public Library, where it had hung for a century.

To prevent the “Walmart sale,” the Philadelphia Museum of Art & the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, according to the agreement of sale, had 45 days to match the selling price of $68 million.

Within weeks local Philadelphians in an overwhelming outpouring of civic pride, along with a major donation from the Annenberg Foundation, raised the necessary money. “The Gross Clinic” currently hangs at the Academy, where Eakins was both student & teacher (he was fired in 1886 for removing a male model’s loincloth during a class with female students), & will share time with the PMA. In the end d’Harnoncourt prevailed. The city’s greater loss, however, came when d’Harnoncourt died of an apparent heart attack on June 1, 2008, at the age of 64.

Concomitant questions arise over the whole concept of cultural versus private property.

What values are operative when someone who can buy art by the truckload (the same way Holiday Inn decorates a new motel), “plunders the Egyptians”? How is this any different than Napoleon's "collecting" art during his campaigns in Egypt & Italy or Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, carrying the Parthenon’s marble (representing approximately half of the surviving works of art from the Parthenon) back to England from Greece? Lord Byron's narrative poem, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which was published almost simultaneous to the British ownership claim:

Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed
By British hands, which it had best behoved
To guard those relics ne'er to be restored.

But, how does one start a new art museum, especially if your name is Walton or Getty?

Would it make a difference if the Crystal Bridges Museum -- which already includes works by Stuart, Homer, Hopper & O’Keeffe -- hadn’t made many of its purchases from “cash strapped” institutions?

Is there a touch of cultural patrimony operative on behalf of the East Coast cultural establishment?

Saltzman, Cynthia Old Masters, New World: America's Raid on Europe's Great Pictures. NY: Penguin, 2008

Salugenic Denominational Humor of Mistaken Identity

In the Ozarks in southern Missouri, not all that long ago, people didn't know much about Catholics. A priest’s car stalled on a back road, & he went up the hill to a small house to find help. The nice couple there said that they never had met anyone with their collar on backwards. "Oh," said the priest, "then how come you have a picture of the pope on your wall?" "Where?" they asked, rather alarmed. "Right there," the priest replied. It was a picture of Pope Pius XII, a former pope who wore glasses. "Who’s that?" they asked rather bewildered. "The pope!" the priest said. "Oh!" the wife exclaimed. "We were told that was Harry Truman in his Masonic outfit!"

The late Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, wrote in his book, Seasons of the Spirit, that he once got on a train in England & discovered that all of the other passengers in the car were patients at a mental institution being taken on an excursion. A hospital attendant was counting the patients to be sure that they were all there. "One, two, three, four, five... " When he came to Runcie, the attendant asked, "Who are you?" "I am the Archbishop of Canterbury," Runcie replied. The attendant smiled, & still pointing to him continued counting, " ...six, seven, eight... "

Why are there only “war heroes” but no “peace heroes” in American civil discourse?

16 out of 24 presidents after the Civil War were Republicans, many of whom ran as war heroes. In the 20th century, Republicans continued to put forth war-hero candidates like Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, George H. W. Bush, & now we have John McCain.

The dilemma is obvious, how can you criticize a war hero without sounding disrespectful, if not unpatriotic?

Unfortunately, when we place this courageous prisoner of war beyond the pale of criticism we also have the tendency to place the absurdity of the Vietnam War beyond the pale as well. We need to distinguish the war hero from the war. In a piece written several months ago in the Christian Science Monitor, authors Charles Derber & Yale Magrass astutely observed: “Brave soldiers in just & unjust wars may be heroes, if we refer purely to personal courage & sacrifice in battle. But it is critical that we recognize that those who oppose dishonorable wars are also heroes”.

“McCain’s Blind Spot on Iraq: Vietnam”

It’s becoming painfully obvious that McCain’s analysis of the current situation in Iraq is being filtered through his personal experience in Vietnam. The Boston Globe’s Ellen Goodman draws the Vietnam comparison by starting her editorial quoting Gary Hart who once said, ‘In a way, John is refighting the Vietnam War.‘ McCain, who was shot down & captured in 1967, spent the worst & most costly years of the war sealed away, both from the rice paddies of Indochina & from the outside world.

“For a long time,” Goodman writes in her piece entitled “McCain’s Blind Spot on Iraq, Vietnam,” “the former prisoner of war has believed that Vietnam should have, could have had a different ending. Americans lost the war because they lost their will.” McCain’s myoptic vision fails to take into consideration what got us into both of those quagmires - he’s only concerned with vindication & victory, regardless as to whether or not the cause was just.

And then “Rambo” McCain questions Senator Obama’s patriotism, as if he were some kind of latter day Jane Fonda, by accusing him of wanting to win an election even if it means losing a war.

No, John, we didn’t pull out of Vietnam because we lost our will; rather we pulled out of Vietnam because we found our will! And the same applies to Iran. The rationalization behind the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was as unjustified & bankrupt as the rationalization of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

We do not need another unrecalcitrant, revisionist ideologue in the White House.

SMUs Library’s Dues & Don’ts

Stephen Payne is president of a lobbying company, Worldwide Strategic Partners, which specializes in connecting business & political interests with the US government. When a “representative” of Askar Akayev, the former incompetent & authoritarian president of the central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan, wanted to tell “his side” to the administration in Washington, he made contact with Payne’s company. A lobbyist from WSP offered access to Dick Cheney & other US leaders in return for a donation to the Bush library. “I think that …[Akayev] should probably look at making a contribution to the Bush library…. It would be like, maybe a couple of hundred thousand dollars, or something like that, not a huge amount but enough to show that they’re serious.” (London Times, 7/13)

The privately funded facility, the George W. Bush Presidential Center, will be built on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where wife Laura is an alumna, & act as the president’s lasting legacy. SMU represents the reddest of campuses in the heart of that reddest of Republican states. Residents of the university’s 75205 zip code donated more to Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign than from any other zip code in the country.

Most of the concern is not necessarily over the proposed library - the library won’t be large, consisting of all the books Bush has read - 6! - or with the museum, but with a so-called “Institute of Democracy”. One can easily imagine an ideological think-tank, headed by Karl Rove, busy in a revisionist history of the Bush years.

There is a group, ProtectSMU, which has been trying to prohibit such a facility from being built at SMU. (They take issue with things like pre-emptive war & torture being incompatible with Methodist doctrine). Although they’ve been rebuffed so far, they have one last hope - to get the South Central Jurisdiction delegates of the United Methodist Church [who act in trust for the property] to reject the SMU/Bush Foundation proposal when they meet in Dallas, July 15-19.

Update: On the afternoon of July 17 the South Central Jurisdiction of The United Methodist Church voted 158-118 to allow the Bush foundation to lease land from SMU to build a partisan institute in conjunction with the Bush presidential library.

"Honk if You're Etruscan"

Had to re-post this from Joan Taber (albeit in abridged form):

"I’m an Etruscan looking for my people... Are we Etruscans the only people who don’t have people?
....What’s with us? Until the Romans reduced our civilization to a few hundred thousand museum pieces — mostly chipped — all the big-name nation states used to steal our ideas about art & writing & architecture. Now, they act as if all that genius sprang from their own loins, so to speak, and we’re all dead. But, I know better.
Sometimes I stand on the side of a busy road & hold up a sign that reads, “HONK IF YOU'RE ETRUSCAN." People just stare. I smile & wave, but they don’t wave back... I don’t take their rejection personally. More than likely, it’s just not fashionable to be Etruscan in this millennium. No matter....".

note: The National Etruscan Museum (Museo Nazionale Etrusco) is a museum of the Etruscan civilization housed in the Villa Giulia in Rome, right outside one of the gates to the Villa Borghese gardens & Galleria. [graphic: Sarcofago degli Sposi]

Flatland

There’s a delightful little story written by the English cleric & head-master Edwin Abbott entitled, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Although it was first published in 1884, its over-whelming popularity has seen it through several editions, including the net.

It’s a work on multi-dimensional geometry, but also a satire in the heritage of Swift, attacking some of the same blindness Gulliver met in the Lilliputians or which Dodgson’s Alice encountered in his allegory of Wonderland. In critiquing the narrow confines of Victorian England, he raises the question of the possibility of a different dimension of reality of which we have not taken into account.

The main character, whose name is A², lives in a place called Flatland, where everything has just two physical dimensions: height & width, but no depth. They lived in flat houses, eating flat food, raising flat children, & having only flat thoughts.

But one day A²’s son has a dream – that there was another dimension of reality called depth - much the way superstring theorists posit a multiverse.

Unfortunately, most people, in spite of how sophisticated or educated they are, think in a flat-world way, a world where the only things that really count are the things they can measure, see and touch – money, houses, career achievements, SAT scores, batting averages, sales figures, voting results, Dow Jones averages. Most people live in Flatland, in a self-contained universe, which has no depth & cannot be transcended.

Banchoff, Thomas F. “The Fourth Dimension & the Theology of Edwin Abbott Abbott”

What's the Question?

"Dear Abby," a young man wrote, "I have been going with a girl for a year. How can I get her to say `Yes'? - Robert."

To which Abby replied, "Dear Robert, what's the question?"

Like all verities, there is a great deal of truth to Ionesco’s observation that “It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question”.
In her I Will Not Die an Unlived Life, Dawna Markova observes: “Have you ever noticed how you tend to ask yourself the same questions every morning when you wake up? – 'Where do I have to take the kids today?' – 'What’s the market doing in Tokyo?' – 'Who do I have to call as soon as I get into the office?'”
We become scripted to ask certain questions. And those very questions shape & reconfirm our identity: "the harried homemaker or the frenzied entrepreneur.”
She suggests that we change the questions which we habitually ask ourselves.
But even if, as Kant warns, we are equipped to ask questions we may not be equipped to answer, Rilke reminds us that we ought to “love the questions themselves...." for "perhaps some day we will live into the answers". But in the meantime, it may not always be that it is "the answer that enlightens, but the question".

Boumediene v. Bush; victory for Magna Carta & civil liberty

In a 5-4 decision drafted by Justice Kennedy, the Supreme Court ruled in Boumediene v. Bush that Guantanamo detainees have a constitutional right to habeas corpus. The ruling is a victory for the Magna Carta, the civil liberties upon which our country was founded, & a broadside against an imperial presidency which has sought - "per speciale Mandatum Domini Regis" [a la Chas I] - to circumvent the Bill of Rights.

Alexander Hamilton (Federalist 84) “the writ of habeas corpus… [is one of the] greater securities to liberty & republicanism [the Constitution] contains… [T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments has been, in all ages, the favorite & most formidable instruments of tyranny…. without accusation or trial, would be so gross & notorious an act of despotism”.

With the Declaration of Independence, among the grievances against a previous King George, the authors objected to the denial of “the benefit of trial by jury” & [without forethought of Guantanamo] the king’s practice of avoiding due process by transporting prisoners “beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses.”

How Senator John McCain, who was a prisoner of war himself, could proclaim that this ruling is “one of the worst decisions in the history of the country,” is beyond credulity.

“the stuff he knows for sure that just ain’t so”

People seem to love the President because he’s “a decider,” even if the facts that purportedly back him up don’t seem to exist. However, just because he feels certain doesn’t make it legitimate or true. As Will Rogers once said [talking about Herbert Hoover?]: “It ain’t the stuff he doesn’t know that scares me. It’s the stuff he knows for sure that just ain’t so”. Just as apropos, Santayana’s remark of someone who has “rigidity without substance“.

Stephen Colbert coined the satirical term “Truthiness” as an Orwellian “Newspeak” for this kind of self-absorbed, subjective certitude. Truthiness is “What I say is right”. In his own mind the President can never be wrong. But if he’s put on the defensive, like Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog, his only strategy is to roll himself up into a ball, spines out, passively defying reality.

Simone Weil & Vital Economic Interests

“What a country calls its vital economic interests,” wrote Simone Weil in 1949, “are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war; petrol is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict. Thus when war is waged it is for the purpose of safeguarding or increasing one’s capacity to make war.” “The Need for Roots,” Selected Essays, (1949) p.224

economic stimulus payment

Got my economic stimulus check today – I’ll either use it:

1. to help fill my gas tank;
2. as venture capital in order to win McCain’s $300 million battery invention prize;
3. as a contribution to Nader’s program to send Obama to ebonics classes;
4. to secure the services of Bush’s Filipino-American cooks at the White House [(06/24) W's inane remarks to the press: “I reminded the President (Filipino President Arroyo) that I am reminded of the great talent of the – of our Philippine-Americans when I eat dinner at the White House”. - ["I reminded...that I am reminded" What?]
5. to help pay for what “optional” a la carte services I want on my next airline trip

Another one in the loss column for our civil liberties - FISA

The House acquiesced & passed, by a 293 to 129 vote, an ‘overhaul’ of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The bill (H.R. 6304):

1. extends the government’s eavesdropping capability,
2. undermines the power of the courts to review the legality of domestic spying programs,
3. grants immunity to telecommunications companies from lawsuits for cooperating with the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. (including suits, presently before appellate courts, challenging their complicity in past illegal wiretapping).

Although a majority of House Democrates opposed the surveillance legislation, 105 Democrats - including Speaker Pelosi - voted in its favor. Such collusion is reprehensible.

The original FISA law was passed in 1978 after a congressional investigation revealed that for decades, intelligence analysts — and the presidents they served — had spied on the letters & phone conversations of union chiefs, civil rights leaders, journalists, antiwar activists, lobbyists, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices — even Eleanor Roosevelt & the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

On the eve of celebrating our Declaration of Independence, perhaps we should remember:

“The fact that British troops, operating on flimsy general warrants handed out by local magistrates, were kicking in the doors of ordinary Americans & rifling through their pantries & papers in search of smuggled, untaxed goods was a prime reason why our ancestors rebelled against their king & went to war…. How can both men who seek to become our next president cast such a vote when both should be… declaring that they would govern by our consent & with our approval, not by wielding the coercive & corrosive & corrupt powers that King George III & his latter-day namesake from Texas thought are theirs by divine right?” [Joseph L. Galloway]

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety”. Benj. Franklin

Robespierre's Iraqi advice

"No one loves armed missionaries"
Personne n'aime les missionnaires armés