cabbage ... very big cabbage

Talk about fart food writ large!

Harrogate, England

Ian Neale with his winning heaviest-in-class cabbage, weighing 30.2kg, at the Harrogate autumn flower show in Yorkshire

Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA

passing fox

No bears as yet, but I did see a scrofulous fox trotting up the street outside my house yesterday. Scruffy, but distinctly a fox, an animal I think of as shy and more nocturnal in its travels. And this small bit of nature whispers at the edges of a feeling that wildlife is growing more common as Donald Trump guides the political ship. Probably just a wisp of thought.

Fox are such handsome creatures, it was bizarre seeing a scruffy one...

On a suburban street...

In daylight.

if it's expensive, it must be worth it

A swimming pool painting by David Hockney could become the most valuable work of art by a living artist sold at auction.
Christie’s in New York announced on Thursday that it was selling Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) with an estimate in the region of $80m (£61m)....Alex Rotter, co-chairman of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, said Hockney’s pool painting was “one of the great masterpieces of the modern era”.

I realize that as the world seems to sink ever deeper into the bourgeois swamp of Donald Trump and the likes (everything has a price) that the expense of a piece of art might occasion a news story. But as I look at this particular offering, all I can think of is American comedian Dan Ackroyd's riff on an auction of "hotel and motel art..." ... art "seen by millions" .... gracing your very own living room

I can't believe I cannot find a clip of Ackroyd's sctick (maybe I am remembering poorly), but I can't.

PS. My mother once told me that she enjoyed the art history classes she once took at Smith College after the professor confided off stage, "it's all bullshit." My mother enjoyed stringing important-sounding adjectives and other encomia together when she wrote her papers and got her A's.

may we paddle your kids?

The Georgia School for Innovation and the Classics is based in the biblically named-town of Hephzibah, and promises to teach students using the Socratic method. But those aren’t the only ways it likes to invoke a sense of antiquity. This week the school sent letters home telling parents they wanted to reintroduce corporal punishment for students, and asking for their consent to have their children struck with a paddle if they misbehave.

the movie "Island"

Nudity is only as sexy as the clothes anyone is wearing. Once you get down to nudity, well, it's all there and all obvious and ... there's nothing extraneous about it. It's not exactly "boring." Rather, nudity is just plain. It's like noting the sky is blue when the sky is blue.

Maybe the same can be said of death. It's only as dramatic and touching as the clothes it wears. Once death arrives, well, isn't that blue sky?

What interested (artist and filmmaker Steven Eastman) about filming in a hospice? “I realised that there weren’t a lot of films about end of life. I just thought: how strange that there are very poor descriptions of something as natural as death, that’s happening on every street. In the history of visual art, there’s so many depictions of deathbeds. Isn’t it interesting that it’s fallen out of the space of art?”...
I tell Eastwood I was expecting something more. He nods. Other people have said the same thing. “What’s interesting is there isn’t an image. You can’t see the dying. I think that’s fascinating, because to talk about how the film shows you the moment of death, I don’t know when that moment is. I’ve watched it over and over. I still find myself thinking: is he going to breathe again?”

"Island" opens in the UK tomorrow.

public research, private profit?

Interesting question: If the taxpayer funds the research which leads to a discovery, isn't there some reason to argue that that breakthrough is already bought and paid for and that (at a minimum) some portion of the results should be free to the one who paid for it?

Guardian columnist George Monbiot poses the question as regards scientific papers: Should the taxpayer pay twice?

Most of the work involved in writing the papers, reviewing and editing them is carried out at public expense by people at universities. Yet this public asset has been captured, packaged and sold back to us for phenomenal fees. Those who pay most are publicly funded libraries. Taxpayers must shell out twice: first for the research, then to see the work they have sponsored. There might be legal justifications for this practice. There are no ethical justifications.

It's thorny, but it is interesting.

murdering Americans

Something more than 2,700 people were killed during the demolition of the World Trade Center towers in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.

A wildly gyrating estimate of those killed in Hurricane Maria after it struck Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, 2017, ranges from 3,000 to 5,000. Either way, it's a hell of a lot of Americans. Either way, there seems to be an untold lack of support for those Americans or those they left behind. So it seems fair for a columnist to relegate the governmental reaction to the "scandal" folder. A year later, these Americans are still struggling for water, electricity and other basic services. It is hard not to imagine that the fact that Puerto Ricans are largely brown had something to do with the clusterfuck of relief ... relief that came swiftly to mainland locations similarly afflicted by Maria.

And why should the demolition of the World Trade Towers be lumped in with the ignoring of Puerto Rican Americans? I am among those who believe that the science does not support a World Trade Center conclusion that "terrorism" -- or at least "terrorism" from the Middle East -- had much to do with the demolition. I really haven't got the energy to collate the evidence that convinces me and I guess I am willing to be tossed into some conveniently located 'conspiracy' trash can, but I'm not interested in convincing someone else. I simply don't believe the sound-bite party line.

There were too many neat assertions that don't wash -- from neatly clipped I-beams to pancaking structures, to an $8 billion insurance payout to ... oh hell, the list goes on and on for me. I realize that the alternative scenario -- the murder of Americans -- is so enormous a crime as to (literally) defy the energies and imagination, but that's not a reason for saying it's not true.

And as a bit of collateral benefit to the neat assertions, the words "terrorism" and "terrorist" got a worldwide springboard from which any number of world leaders have since gleefully jumped.

Murdering Americans.

Is that hyperbole?

I know I wouldn't often use the phrase -- it's to bare and bald and horrific, but....

Don't worry -- no one's got the nerve to look into it. 9/11 is in the rear-view mirror. Transposing it to the microscope, like transposing the tragedy in Puerto Rico, is old news: Donald Trump demands our attention.

the body of my enemy

As an old saying (Chinese? Japanese?) has it more or less: "If you watch the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy float by."

Somehow this dovetails in my mind with, "Do not be too virtuous. Too much virtue makes people crazy." (Provenance likewise uncertain, but nonetheless stuck in my mind.)

How long can the seriously-committed be good before all that's left is what was once dog-tagged as evil or naughty or not-to-be-done? How long can the seriously-committed be evil before all that's left is what was once dog-tagged as good or pure or to-be-done? Yes, I can hear the natterings in the rafters -- purity/clarity/understanding are endless, right? -- but I still think the body of anyone's enemy is bound to float by.

Seems like "square one" is always the only option.

mandatory home ec courses

When I lifted the frying pan out of the drainer where it had been left to dry a day or so ago, what I found was a frying pan with skid marks of the scrambled eggs it had been washed to erase. The major clottings of egg were gone, but the pan still wasn't clean. My younger son's capacity to cook the eggs and eat them was apparently intact. But his ability to wash up was missing.

In an age when everything seems to get "walked back," I wonder if it isn't time to impose on high schools a mandatory "home ec" course in which basic household chores were covered. If you get out of high school without knowing how to wash dishes, something is badly awry from where I sit.

Home economics, as it was once called, would include how to wash dishes. And know how to use a broom. And bake a boxed cake. And run a vacuum cleaner. And rinse off a counter top. And put things back. And fry or boil an egg. And do a load of laundry. And ... well, and do the basic stuff that needs to get done around the house.

Just a hint: Dishes that are washed should be ... d'oh ... clean. I know the objections to having to clean up my own mess. Tough titty ... do it anyway. Do it and do it well.

What the hell, if reading and writing and critical thinking have pretty much been set aside, there should be plenty of time in high school to learn the manly arts of being a maid.

Home ec for all!

what to trust

Mameluca woman under a fruiting cashew tree (1641-1644) by Albert Eckhout. National Museum of Denmark

I have lived through the era whose mantram was "never trust anyone over thirty."
I have lived through the era whose mantram was "never trust anyone over forty."
And for all I know I have lived through unremarked eras whose mantra were "never trust anyone over 50, 60, 70 ..."

None of it ever really stuck with me. Age never struck me as being a capable yardstick when it came either to wisdom or stupidity.

But if no one at any age is either necessarily-credible or necessarily-not-credible, what then shall I trust.

This morning the answer came to me.

Cashews.

I looked "cashews" up the other day because I wasn't really sure whether they fell from trees or spawned below the earth's surface. I also looked them up -- and decided to trust them -- because they were so damned addictively delicious in my mouth ... and like any other human being in good standing, I trust my addictions.

Never mind their distant kinship to poison ivy -- cashews are to die for.

And so, for the moment, there is something to trust ... though the cashews jar is currently empty.

poop like a samurai

Finally, some information that strikes me as worth knowing was passed along in email ... how to take an effective shit ... courtesy of the renowned samurai:

Poop More Effectively by Repositioning One Leg

Adam Dachis3/25/14 7:30pm

You can learn a lot from the samurai way, including how to poop more effectively. As writer Will Black discovered, you just need to reposition your leg.

The samurai would sit squarely on the seat, cross his leg so that his right ankle rested on his left knee (his left foot remained on the ground), place a hand on each knee, then straighten his back. Supposedly this aligns the bowels to help one from having to strain. You may think it seems like a bunch of malarkey, but this one actually works. If you have ever felt like there is a plumbing issue when you sit down, then pay attention. Take your time, have some patience, and you will get the yoga version of Draino on your system that has been passed down from samurai warlords of old. I have literally felt a swirling sensation during the act of evacuation. Try it out to see for yourself.

I didn't want to take his word for it so I tried it myself and this does work. It's not particularly comfortable outright, as toilets weren't designed for anyone to sit this way, but you can adjust yourself for comfort before you begin your business. Once you start pooping, you'll realize your crossed leg almost acts like a frozen yogurt dispenser as it feels like it's helping to push the poop out without the need for any muscle strain. This technique won't replace the need for a balanced diet with sufficient fiber and water, but if you have healthy poop it will help you do your business better.

I haven't yet tried it, but I plan to.

how the wealthier got that way

I want to get back to this article, whose friskiness-cum-substance appeals to me, but whose length is too long at the moment:

Every January, to coincide with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Oxfam tells us how much richer the world’s richest people have got. In 2016, their report showed that the wealthiest 62 individuals owned the same amount as the bottom half of the world’s population. This year, that number had dropped to 42: three-and-half-dozen people with as much stuff as three-and-a-half billion.
This yearly ritual has become part of the news cycle, and the inequality it exposes has ceased to shock us. The very rich getting very much richer is now part of life, like the procession of the seasons. But we should be extremely concerned: their increased wealth gives them ever-greater control of our politics and of our media. Countries that were once democracies are becoming plutocracies; plutocracies are becoming oligarchies; oligarchies are becoming kleptocracies.

forcing the pope to resign

FILE PHOTO: Pope Francis speaks with the media onboard a plane during his flight back from a trip in Dublin, Ireland August 26, 2018. Gregorio Borgia/Pool/File Photo

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Calls by a Roman Catholic archbishop and his conservative backers for Pope Francis to resign could make it difficult, if not impossible, for him to do so, Church experts say.
Canon (Church) Law says a pope can resign but the decision must be taken freely. In 2013, Francis’s predecessor, Benedict, became the first pontiff in six centuries to resign. 

India decriminalizes homosexuality; AG targets dioceses

A landmark judgment by India’s highest court has overturned a colonial-era law that criminalizes consensual gay sex, in a long-fought for victory for the LGBTQ community.
The five-judge bench reached a unanimous decision Thursday in the capital New Delhi. Delivering his decision, Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra said, “The LGBTQ community has the same fundamental rights as citizens. The identity of a person is very important and we have to vanquish prejudice, embrace inclusion and ensure equal rights.”

“Intimacy and privacy is a matter of choice. We have to bid adieu to stereotypes and prejudices,” he said.
The court verdict is a major milestone for LGBTQ-identifying people across the country, where homosexuality remains a social taboo and gay people face endemic discrimination.

And, as an footnote, I would like to add:

The New York attorney general’s office has issued subpoenas to every Catholic diocese in the state, becoming the latest U.S. state to embark on a major investigation of sex crimes committed and covered up by Catholic priests. And New Jersey quickly followed on Thursday, announcing a criminal task force focused on investigating sexual abuse by Catholic clergy.

As someone who has seen homosexuals weep at the stresses associated with their own secret lives, I can only say, "amen!"

Both raise the question in my mind, what is "the church" (in its most generic sense) without all its tut-tutting and down-the-nose statutes and observations?

"black hairy tongue"

You heard right: "black hairy tongue." It may sound like something a not-very-imaginative high school freshman would concoct, but the truth is, it's true. Imagine calling in sick: "I'm coping with a wicked case of black hairy tongue..."

Left: A woman's tongue after she was diagnosed with "black hairy tongue." Right: Her tongue after the condition cleared up. (The New England Journal of Medicine)

 

alone together/together alone

As I stood for the first time in the entry way to the zendo I would later visit for the better part of nine year, I was petrified. It all seemed too daunting.
Before me was a large room, perhaps 60' by 30', with two parallel rows of people, women to the left, men to the right, with empty floor space between them. Each sat on square, black cushions with their backs facing each other. There were perhaps 35 or 40 people in that room and not one of them was making a sound. It scared the crap out of me.

Looking back, I imagine any first-time link-up is spooky. What if I fucked it up? But, looking back on that first-time entry into the zendo, I also wonder if some deeply-ingrained demand/understanding wasn't being challenged.

(Wo)man is a social beast, a mingler, a club member, and yet the people in that room were not buying in to the social interaction my DNA told me was true. Not conferring or arguing or hugging or whispering or smiling or ... or... or. It was the question everyone -- Zen students too -- asks in one way or another: If I am so social, how come I feel so alone? Who am I when I am alone ... even with others? With others, I find my footing and definition by being social. Alone, what happens to the footing and definition?

These are not questions only Zen students ask. Everyone asks them in different ways and in different circumstances. If my footing relies on others, how reliable can that footing be? Sometimes the question comes as a whisper. Sometimes it comes as a cri de coeur.

Alone together.

Together alone.

Gotta straighten that one out. That's what scared me back then. Maybe that was a piece of the fear that gripped me on that first entry into the zendo.

Paraguay pisses Israel off

Paraguay, apparently, figured that French kissing the U.S. decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was a bit too stifling, whatever the cost.

Paraguay has reversed a decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem after just three months, prompting anger from Israel which responded by shuttering its embassy in Asunción and recalling its ambassador....

Diplomats had warned that the December announcement could see a return to violence in the region. On the day Washington’s embassy was opened in Jerusalem – attended by Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner – Israeli forces shot and killed 58 Palestinians protesting against the event.

"In Praise of Nothing"

This Guardian review of "In Praise of Nothing" made me want to see it and perhaps bask or perhaps yowl or perhaps just be irritated.

NYTimes runs Trump-insider critique

It seems to me that the New York Times has taken a leaf from Donald Trump's playbook with its publication today of a piece allegedly written by a White House insider who says that a group within the Trump administration is working to sideline if not outright thwart the chaos that the sitting president has sown.

The Times allows the writer his/her/their space under the byline "anonymous" and footnotes the piece itself with the descriptive, "The writer is a senior official in the Trump administration."

How does this presentation differ from some blog rant or Trump assertion that he alone is credible where his critics are not? Trump wants me to believe his veracity. And the Times, in what seems a desperate sense of frustration, puts its own morality and clear-headedness on the chopping block. "Believe me!" the Times seems to crow. "We wouldn't print this if it weren't enormously important." It's true because, well, we gave it the stamp of approval.

The piece itself is couched in bureaucro-speak criticism. It's not a blanket criticism, but it's critical enough (assuming its author(s)) is/are Republican) to make the Times go WOW. To me, coming within a couple of weeks of newspapers across the country running anti-Trump blowback against Trump's loudmouthed savaging of the press, it has the earmarks of a whining, foot-stamping third-grader like Trump.

How drunk was the editor who OK'd running this piece?

Mind you, I'm all in favor of bringing Trump down. The man turns my nation into a tin-pot ghetto in which everything is for sale and his personal star shines ever brighter. Third-world America. But there is something awry when the Times stoops to "anonymous"

At the risk of doing something bad, here is a copy of the article:

I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration

I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

The Times today is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. We have done so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers. We invite you to submit a question about the essay or our vetting process here.

---

President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.

It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.

The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

I would know. I am one of them.

To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.

But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic. That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright.

In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the “enemy of the people,” President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic.

Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.

But these successes have come despite — not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.

From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.

Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.

“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.

The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.

The result is a two-track presidency.

Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.

Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.

On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.

This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.

Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.

The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.

Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.

We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example — a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.

There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.

The writer is a senior official in the Trump administration.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter

Nike signs Kaepernick

Colin Kaepernick tweeted out an image of the new Nike campaign on Monday. Photograph: Colin Kaepernick/Twitter

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who sparked controversy by kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice, will be the face of a Nike Inc ad campaign for the 30th anniversary of its “Just Do It” motto, according to ESPN on Monday.
Kaepernick was a quarterback with the San Francisco 49ers for six years. He stirred national debate by taking a knee while the anthem was played before games during the National Football League’s 2016 season to draw attention to police killings of black men and other issues.

I don't care much what the backstory is on all of this: My hat is off to both Kaepernick and Nike. Kaepernick's is an America I prefer to vote for. Collateral damage and all ... go Kaepernick!

PS. Here's a little of the knee-jerk negative reaction.

rewriting an Israeli/U.S./etc. story

Where the new order congeals:

The Philippines’ foul-mouthed president, Rodrigo Duterte, who has cursed out everyone from former U.S. President Barack Obama to God, arrived in Israel on Sunday for a four-day visit. It’s the first Philippine presidential visit since the countries established diplomatic relations in 1957. He is expected to lunch with Netanyahu, meet other top officials and visit the country’s Holocaust memorial. He is also expected to sign a major oil deal and view an arms display....
Netanyahu takes great pride that under his leadership Israel has found new friends in Europe, as well as in far-flung countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America that long sided with the Palestinians at the United Nations and other global bodies.

Netanyahu's apartheid policies as regards the Palestinians is strongly supported by a right wing constituency that abhors Palestinians and their "right of return" demand when it comes to Middle East peace. This right-wing bloc has helped cement Netanyahu's leadership and divert attention from his political bribery-probe difficulties in Israel. And the United States is there to help.

On election day 2016, Hillary Clinton won more than 70% of the Jewish vote. But that number tells only part of a story. In some predominately Orthodox Jewish precincts, Donald Trump’s numbers were straight out of the rust belt or the deep south.
As in the rest of the electorate, religious commitment and educational attainment shaped how Jews voted. In the overwhelmingly religious Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, Trump took 68% of the vote. In New Jersey’s Lakewood Township, he won with a 50-point margin. By contrast, the island of Manhattan was a sea of Democratic blue.

More consequentially, the United States' support of Netanyahu's crown gained added luster when Donald Trump acknowledged Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

President Trump’s Dec. 7 announcement, that the United States would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move its embassy here, broke a 70-year diplomatic precedent, kept a campaign promise and provoked worldwide outrage.

Additionally, the United States, under a flag of financial lop-sidededness, withdrew its aid package for Palestinians through "United Nations Relief and Works Agency. The organization uses the funds to run schools and clinics for Palestinian refugees in occupied territories — the West Bank and Gaza — as well as those in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon."

The Palestinians get fucked. Netanyahu can claim involvement. Netanyahu reaps support for his apartheid policy and constituency ... and can hold on to power among the yapping wolves who might otherwise sully his realm or dilute his power. The new Aryans arise.

Donald Trump never saw a parade he would not join or could not congratulate himself for.

Collusion?

Nyet! Nyet! And again, nyet!

apocalypse in the making, apocalypse made

Passed along in email ... a less strident apocalypse that is not waiting to pounce but has already pounced.


Reminded me a bit of the line, "just because you are indispensable to the universe does not mean the universe needs your help."

world of chess readies for high winds

The World Chess Federation’s annual budget is around £2.3 million. Photograph: Steve Prezant/Getty Images/Image Source

Who knew?

I sure as hell didn't.

To me, chess is/was a stately and sometimes megalomaniacally-intense game played by thin-lipped people I would prefer not to be locked in the same a room with. The intensity was something I could credit from afar (hadn't I been absolutely nuts for billiards at one time?), but its world-stage, Borgia-esque trappings and scandal were off any radar I possessed.

Now it appears that "There remain deep reservations over how chess is run today. As one popular joke goes: it’s like Fifa, just lop off a few zeros." Who, in the end, will be president? The politics are confusing to an outsider like me, but the infighting is no joke. The Russians and the Israelis are involved. Who's fucking whom, literally and metaphorically, is part of the mix.

There's money to be made.

I wonder if the Japanese have their own difficulties in the world of Go, a board game I imagine is more complex by half than chess. But as with chess, my understandings are minuscule to say the least.

the honor of the samurai

During my Zen upbringing, much was sometimes made of the samurai's code of honor or "bushido."

One of the tales told to exemplify the steely will of these swordsmen was that of the samurai who had not eaten for multiple days and yet strode down the center of some Main Street, picking his teeth as if he had just finished a fine meal.

Students like me were expected to be wowed.

I was duly wowed.

And yet even then, there was a whisper of doubt. Why did this man have a need to show off?

Which takes more courage -- to pretend you are full when you are understandably hungry or to admit you are hungry and ask for a bit of food?

the wonders of a flat earth

Does it matter what anyone says or even can prove? Isn't it true that there will always be someone to assert that babies come from (biblical?) storks, the earth is flat, and that the Sept. 11 demolition of New York's World Trade Center towers was the plan and execution of foreign "terrorists?"

Sure, there will always be someone to advance such fancies. Get over it. It's fun, it's cozy, it's "logical," and it's more interesting than watching paint dry, a pastime I think many recognize as the lot life has cut out for them unless they spice it up a bit, put a personal stamp on it.

This week past, former Ariz. Senator John McCain died. So did "the Queen of Soul," Aretha Franklin. News outlets, like politicians, joined the feeding frenzy, not least by noting how McCain had specifically not invited current U.S. President Donald Trump to speak at his funeral. Trump, the news outlets were quick and repetitive to report, was sulking at the fact that he was not included among the "A-listers" blowing dolorous smoke.

Sulking? Wounded that he was not on the front burner of the news cycle ... of which he was definitely a focal point in the news cycle????? Is Trump the only idiot who knows that any publicity is good publicity? Was there some reason for him NOT to play golf while so many noticed or gave a shit about his absence? With Congressmen scuttling home for the August congressional recess and a chance to shore up political battlements, Trump has fewer fish to shoot in a barrel. Why not a quick 18 holes?

Why NOT a flat earth or an over-sanitized and over-burdened stork?

Trump has grabbed 'em all "by the pussy" and has them over a barrel.

Make America great (if crass) again.

bend-over economics....again

A small article depicting the trickle-down-you're-fucked economics of the current era includes:

A recent report from the National Employment Law Project calculated that McDonald’s could have paid each of its 1.9 million workers $4,000 more a year if it had used the $21bn it spent between 2015 and 2017 on buybacks to reward its workers instead. Starbucks could have given its workers $7,000.

It's nothing new, of course. And it's mind-numbingly common. But it's so damned tiring when there are so many trying so hard.

a puff of wind from the past

An unexpected email a couple of days back wondered if I would be willing to remember a time when author Peter Mathiessen was a member of the Zen center I then attended. The writer was planning a biographical framework for Mathiessen and, even if I didn't know Mathiessen well (which I hadn't), perhaps a sense of those times would be useful to the writer's efforts.

OK, why not?

But the request (we agreed by email to talk sometime next week) sent me down in the basement or up in the attic of memory, straining to recall times when devotions and efforts were pedal-to-the-metal for me. There was a time when I had the energy and drive to bust my buns. Mathiessen played little or no role, but he was part of the wallpaper of my existence at the time.

At the time....

It did not fall in on me all at once that the walls erected to protect me from the world's claws were two-edged: Yes, protection can protect, but simultaneously anything that protects also hems in with its cloisters. To be safe is to be unsafe, but as I say, that did not occur to me from the get-go.

Likewise it did not occur to me that religion (or spiritual life or whatever you want to call it) was largely a rich-man's sport -- a sport that George Orwell might rightfully point out could hardly take wing without a full stomach/good education/etc. The fact that its expositors can beat the drums for humility and poverty and simplicity and devotion ... well, check it out. No need to be snarky about it -- just check it out. A well-appointed crib and lunch menu is not necessarily a bad thing, but I do think it's worth being honest about.

Everyone, rich or poor, will probably bump a nose against their own protective walls. Death, disease, drugs, and divorce (for example) can make anyone go "ouch" but how anyone greets and copes with the ouches ... well, spiritual life is not the only go-to salvor.

Make it better, please.

But what, precisely, is "it?" The answer to that can lead to some uncomfortable delving and back in the times when I suppose I knew Matthiessen a bit, I was just getting used to the prices I was to pay in search of "it" and the ways in which it might be nourished. I was, at one time, going to the zendo perhaps 40 hours per week. I had not yet flunked out of the monastery I thought I should join, did, and bumped my nose badly....

... Leading me to the generic description of my own practice: "I wouldn't wish my training on my worst enemy and I wouldn't trade it for all the tea in China."

Poor little rich kid.

The man I finally settled on as my "Zen teacher" once shaped my practice simply:

"Take care of your family."

a couple of Reuters photos

Tourists walk past a giant hand structure on the Gold Bridge on Ba Na hill near Danang City, Vietnam, August 1. REUTERS/Kham

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An internally displaced girl plays in the Sudd Swamp near the town of Nyal, South Sudan, August 19. REUTERS/Andreea Campeanu

revolution in the economic shadows

"Nobel laureate James Buchanan is the intellectual

 linchpin of the Koch-funded attack on democratic

 institutions, argues Duke historian Nancy MacLean"

A friend passed along this article. I have no way of knowing how well-grounded it may be, but the portrait it paints leaves knicker-twisting liberal fears about the growth of oligarchy in America in the relatively-easy-going shadows. If even 50% of its assertions are true ... well, whoa, mama!

Duke historian Nancy MacLean contends that his philosophy is so stark that even young libertarian acolytes are only introduced to it after they have accepted the relatively sunny perspective of Ayn Rand. (Yes, you read that correctly). If Americans really knew what Buchanan thought and promoted, and how destructively his vision is manifesting under their noses, it would dawn on them how close the country is to a transformation most would not even want to imagine, much less accept.

"Feudalism" barely scratches the surface.

Trump's "fake news" revisited

I am not entirely sure why, but I find something heartening about the fact that the National Enquirer, a U.S. scandal sheet, has a dwindling circulation. The publication has made no secret of its support for Donald Trump and, in recent revelations, has been accused of short-circuiting the publication of a story about the current president's alleged extra-marital liaisons and payoffs to a porn star and a Playboy focal point.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The National Enquirer has long explained its support for Donald Trump as a business decision based on the president’s popularity among its readers. But private financial documents and circulation figures obtained by The Associated Press show that the tabloid’s business was declining even as it published stories attacking Trump’s political foes and, prosecutors claim, helped suppress stories about his alleged sexual affairs.
The Enquirer’s privately held parent company, American Media Inc., lost $72 million for the year ending in March, the records obtained by the AP show. And despite AMI chairman David Pecker’s claims that the Enquirer’s heavy focus on Trump sells magazines, the documents show that the Enquirer’s average weekly circulation fell by 18 percent to 265,000 in its 2018 fiscal year from the same period the year before — the greatest percentage loss of any AMI-owned publication. The slide follows the Enquirer’s 15 percent circulation loss for the previous 12 months, a span that included the presidential election.

Somewhere, in the midst of this story and the loss of circulation, the question arises in my mind as to whether Trump supporters are really not quite as stupid as the liberal left would like to believe. Is there a limited amount of bullshit even Trump's core constituency is willing to swallow? Maybe, of course, it's just be that no one likes to read much any more and therefore Enquirer readership is bound to tumble ... together with a willingness to consume "Moby Dick" or William Shakespeare. But maybe watching the "fake news" segue into bastions of right-wing support is just too big a pill to swallow and people are voting with the wallets.

J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was once said to have served his 48 years at the helm by being privy to so many of the dirty little secrets that the eight (seven?) presidents he served under did not want made public. Hoover knew where the embarrassing bodies were buried... and he liked his éminence grise job. If he were to spill the beans.... Well, he didn't and he kept his job.

Now the secrets have been transferred from the quasi-august FBI to a safe maintained by the National Enquirer and its family. This may seem poetically consonant with a Donald Trump presidency, but when then entire meaning of a word like "scandal" has lost its ooomph and everyone has his nose up someone else's ass, perhaps even the National Enquirer must take its lumps.

It all reminds me of Abraham Lincoln's observation that "You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time." Maybe even those who have lost their jobs under a president who promised to create more jobs (is that like "fake news" or what?) have their doubts. Is all this possible or am I just whistling past the graveyard again.

Oh well, just looking for a little sunshine on yet another cloudy day.