We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, "These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation."
She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, "I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her." And it came out that very hour. But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities. When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, "These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe."
The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.
About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. Suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone's chains were unfastened. When the jailer woke up and saw the prison doors wide open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, since he supposed that the prisoners had escaped.
But Paul shouted in a loud voice, "Do not harm yourself, for we are all here." The jailer called for lights, and rushing in, he fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. Then he brought them outside and said, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?"
They answered, "Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household." They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. At the same hour of the night he took them and washed their wounds; then he and his entire family were baptized without delay.
He brought them up into the house and set food before them; and he and his entire household rejoiced that he had become a believer in God.
That was an email late last night from the pupette I mentioned here yesterday, informing me that she just got another call-back for a Hollywood movie role for which she has, unbeknownst to me, been auditioning.
I thought her summer plans sounded perfect, so I do not know what to say except "Break a leg, babe."
Having kids keeps life from getting dull, routine, and inexpensive. There is always something to ponder; good and bad and neutral.
Now, back to the gardens to be an outdoor slave to Mrs. BD. (Perhaps The Wagoner's Lad had it backwards? Well, in the right mood, I will do anything for the Mrs. In the wrong mood, nothing. Doesn't bother me at all to be a difficult person sometimes, and I often feel I need to be more so.)
Thing is, I have always enjoyed manual labor, especially the semi-skilled sort when the tasks are well-defined. Brain-work fatigues me, but physical labor invigorates me.
Next weekend, a big invigorating 2-3 day job at the farm. I sent out a flash email to all sibs, telling all to bring all tools (chain saws, hedge-trimmers, weed-wackers, etc.) and promising to provide beer and water and gas and cigars and lunch. We have a 25-acre field up on the hill to clear, now that the tractor bridge over the trout stream is fixed after the big wash-out two winters ago. The meadow will need a twice-over with the tractor and the brush hog, and the wind-fallen White Pines will need my baby bro with his 3' chain saw and his cutting skills. He won't say much and he is not overly friendly, but he is a youngish retired exec and he likes to work non-stop. Always in motion.
My Mom always tells me "Your Grandpa would use a scythe for that." I say to her "I love my power tools."
The swimming hole needs to be dredged out too. We have a small but adequate dredge that will hook to the tractor with chains, but I am not sure we will have time to get that done next weekend. Not sure where the long chains are either.
I work all day, and get half drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain edges will grow light. Till then I see what's really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. Arid interrogation: yet the dread Of dying, and being dead, Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse - The good not used, the love not given, time Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never: But at the total emptiness forever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, That vast moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die, And specious stuff that says no rational being Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing that this is what we fear - no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision, A small unfocused blur, a standing chill That slows each impulse down to indecision Most things may never happen: this one will, And realisation of it rages out In furnace fear when we are caught without People or drink. Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no-one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape. It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, Have always known, know that we can't escape Yet can't accept. One side will have to go. Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring Intricate rented world begins to rouse. The sky is white as clay, with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
This migratory bird, resembling a miniature Mockingbird in appearance, in habits, and even in song sometimes, summers in the Eastern and Southwestern US. The last one I saw was quite tame, flitting around the top of shrubs along our stream, occasionally uttering his "spee" call.
The BD pupette, finishing her freshman college year in a week or so at her beloved small rural liberal arts college, will be promptly flown down (on the camp's nickel) to her super-most-specialest-favoritest traditional (daily morning flag ceremony with prayers, etc) 100 year-old girl's camp down in the wondrous Smokey Mountains so she can take the NRA shooter training course before camp opens. Her camp counseling duties will include running the shooting ranges and training the gals for competition. I know she is good with a .22. They are paying her surprisingly well, too.
I think they do shotgun and .22. She is no stranger to guns, but has never taken the NRA course for trainers. Wilderness camping and hiking, kayaking, etc. are no problem for her. She can as easily drive a John Deere tractor as she can do the subways of NYC, and brushes off rain and mud on the farm like a true Yankee. Except when she is dressed to do New York...
I thought that this Shakespeare- and drama-intoxicated (and two-time Oxford Shakespeare summer) pup was planning a theater internship in NYC where she could earn some Actors Equity points, but perhaps that is afterwards but before our Danube trip. What do I know? (Nobody ever tells me anything around here - but I am OK with almost anything if it has some vitality and adventure and self-testing in it. Sitting around the house shooting farts into sofas and chairs, as I am wont to put it, is not permitted in the BD household: life is too short for that, and the big world is beckoning, saying "Come on out here and give me your best shot, and take yer chances - and yer punches.")
Well, what I do know is that certainly prospective justice Kagan never took the NRA course. She opposes the Second Amendment, so I doubt she knows how to have fun with guns, or how to defend herself.
Somebody recently opined to me that only governments should be entrusted with the use of force. I just bit my tongue and smiled. Doing a lot of that, lately.
From what I have read, Kagan seems a bit wishy-washy on the First and Second Amendments. Not sure what she thinks about the rest of the Constitution, but I think she is of the "I know better than those dead guys" school of thought.
Now I see Redstate has located her Princeton thesis on Socialism. Of course, she was just a kid then. People grow and learn and evolve...with real world experience.
...to be a secular extremist is to be a fully horizontal man, and thus, to commit not only spiritual, but intellectual, suicide. It is the ultimate cosmic inversion, for it is to elevate our fallen state to the highest virtue. It is "to love only terrestrial life, to the detriment of the ascending and celestial path," to be "exteriorized," and to "love only outer things, to the detriment of moral and spiritual values." Ultimately it is "to sin against transcendence, thus it is to forget God and consequently the meaning of life; and outwardness is to sin against immanence, thus to forget our immortal soul and consequently its vocation" (Schuon)
Read the whole thing, and be tolerant of Gagdad's rambling and his idiosyncracies. I like the parts about Truth, and about intelligence.
We often reflect here on what our secular, pop-culture horizontal gods are today: ideologies, Gaia, science, self, governments, etc., even orgasms. When I consider the things that help me locate myself on a point above the x axis, "to fly like an eagle while being chained to the floor," I come up with poetry, song, prayer, moments of communion with others, and random moments of self-oblivious immersion in some aspect of Creation. My links to the vertical and to the things that cannot be touched. It's the job of preachers to assist that link too, isn't it? Alas for me, much of Scripture tends to speak more to my mind than to my soul, and True Beauty only blinds me. Working on those things, though.
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it."
Via a Washington Reb post on mature vs immature liberty, quoted from History of American Congregationalism:
March, 1603: A great literature had been evoked; an efflorescence of genius made a single reign as nearly immortal as the temporal can be timeless. Milton, a little later, would see England as an eagle flying proudly into the sun, a puissant people superbly self-confident. But the nation was not inwardly at peace. It had still to carry an unfinished religious and ecclesiastical reformation to some accepted issue within the framework of the English love of liberty, respect for authority, concern for established order, reverence for precedent, and militant tenacity of individual convictions and opinions. In a spacious way, the action and interaction of these essentially English qualities had made English history since Magna Charta and determined its splendid and stormy course, politically, socially, and religiously.
I have been through four cords of firewood in ye olde office this season, and fireplace season is not over yet. Chilly mornings, chilly evenings, in the low 30s (F). 38 degrees with a cold rain this morning. I do not live on Cape Cod (where I was a young lad for a while when my Dad was in the service), but one good thing about the Cape is that you can use a fire every night, even in August. Takes the damp chill off, or seems to.
My wood supply is down to fresh green wood felled by the Nor'easter a while ago. I cut and scavenged it. Mostly Maple of various types. I haven't even had time to split it yet. However, I figured out how to burn green wood effectively and pleasantly. All it takes is to throw a handful of charcoal briquettes into your starter fire. They get the heat up so that your green wood dries and burns at the same time. A nice, slow fire with plenty of wood-steam and an enjoyable hiss. You may have to freshen it with a new briquette or two now and then.
It works great. Sort-of. A hot wood stove will burn green wood just fine, but a fireplace is trickier. Once you have enough heat with a good bed of coals in there, green burns well.
Y'all were right. That was an Indigo Bunting, a finch-like inhabitant of brushy edges in rural areas. The males often look black, depending on the light. You can read about them here.
Kagan is wishy-washy on free speech. What the heck does "balanced with the good of society" mean? Only an arrogant, latent-totalitarian elitist jerk would ever say anything like that, in my humble opinion. Americans don't talk like that: we want everybody to say whatever they want, and let us separate the wheat from the chaff.
The Union of Concerned Scientists tackles gardening to save the planet. Good grief. What a bunch of sanctimonious putzes those folks are. They have been like that for years. "Ban the Bomb" and "Better Red than Dead" and the whole Global Cooling scare of the 1970s. A bunch of Viagra-deficient kooks and cranks.
Speaking of santimonious cranks, White House: Stop Marketing Unhealthy Foods to Kids. Hey, Washington: Shut the heck up and leave us alone. You can eat what you want, and we will eat what we like: Philly Cheese Steaks, and barbecued short ribs with corn bread, and stuff like that. Bread Pudding for dessert, with a Port or a single malt on the side. Then a cigar.
"We are building a world in which the wealthiest nations on the planet, from Norway to New Zealand, are all but defenseless, while bankrupt dysfunctional squats go nuclear. Even with inevitable and generous submissions to nuclear blackmail, how long do you think that arrangement will last?"
...Brown's statement appeared to give Clegg's party a viable alternative, and real temptation: join a possibly short-lived alliance, remove the unpopular Brown, and pass electoral reform that could transform their fortunes and even banish the Conservatives to the political wilderness for many years.
Sounds like ACORN. Update: Never mind. Cameron's in, for what it's worth.
“Every decision you can make as a human being has an economic footprint — whether to procreate, whether to marry,” he said. “To say that is enough for your behavior to be regulated transforms the Commerce Clause into an infinitely capacious font of power, whose exercise is only restricted by the Bill of Rights.”
I know nothing, but my impression has been that the intent of the commerce clause was to eliminate and preventobstacles to inter-state trade, not to create obstacles and controls of commerce - much less our daily lives or our deaths.
Kinda makes ya wonder how Ginsberg snuck on there with her sketchy educational resume. My Diversity Meter detects some problems here: Where are the folks from George Mason and Hillsdale, and the folks who say "y'all," and the folks from Montana? It's not as if you have to go to Harvard or to be from New York City to be able to understand the Constitution. It was deliberately written in plain, simple English - instead of legalese - so every citizen of every state could understand what they might decide to sign up for. It's short, and it's not rocket science. The Federalist Papers, however, are more interesting.
The New Deal was a genuine revolution, whose deepest purpose was not simply reform within existing traditions, but a basic change in the social, and, above all, the power relationships within the nation. It was not a revolution by violence. It was a revolution by bookkeeping and lawmaking. In so far as it was successful, the power of politics had replaced the power of business. This is the basic power shift of all the revolutions of our time. This shift was the revolution.
That was an email late last night from the pupette I mentioned here yesterday, informing me that she just got another call-back for a Hollywood movie role for which she has, unbeknownst to me, been auditioning.
Today is Armed Forces Day
Aubade
The BD pupette, finishing her freshman college year in a week or so at her beloved small rural liberal arts college, will be promptly flown down (on the camp's nickel) to her super-most-specialest-favoritest traditional (daily morning flag ceremony with prayers, etc) 100 year-old girl's camp down in the wondrous Smokey Mountains so she can take the NRA shooter training course before camp opens. Her camp counseling duties will include running the shooting ranges and training the gals for competition. I know she is good with a .22. They are paying her surprisingly well, too.
No time to think or write, but I want to clean my tabs up, and get these links out to our corner of the universe:
