Trump vs. Time magazine

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump says he’s not playing ball with Time magazine as it decides its Person of the Year. The magazine counters that Trump has it all wrong.

Meanwhile, passed along in email, there was this send-up of yet another journalistic kerfuffle that says nothing or perhaps everything about these political times:

"beauty"

I have always been a sucker for beauty. I 'know' this is true in my heart of hearts, but I have a hard time defining what I am a sucker for -- this "beauty" thing. No, I am not talking about the rice bowl maunderings of what is called "aesthetics." But if not that, then what?

The question crossed my mind when skimming various news stories about the feeding frenzy of shopping that precedes Christmas. Where there is no space, no room, there is likewise no beauty in my book. Beauty requires space and Christmas stuff creates less of it. Stuff is seldom, if ever, beautiful.

What is beauty? To me, it is just what melts me. It is not something I have control over. Music, art, a cocked eyebrow, the touch of a single finger -- it can come from anywhere at any time. Suddenly I am somehow 'gone' and 'home' simultaneously. Whooosh!

If all of this sounds self-centered and piggish, well, so be it. I remain a sucker for beauty both in its particulars and in its spaces. It is not something that requires a philosophy or the agreement of others. Like the Supreme Court observation about pornography, "I may not know what it is, but I know what it is when I see it."

flogging an idea

Like a pinball bouncing from bumper to bumper and yet never seeming to drop, the idea has banged around in my head -- a question of what spiritual life's upshot might be and a hypothesis gaining traction as the answer: The sole purpose of spiritual life is ... to outgrow it.

Having written this down, I cringe even now. Not because I fear it might put me on some fast track to hell or some other writhing punishment, but because postulating an answer has all the earmarks of a proposition that seeks to convince or convert someone else. That is not my intention. My intention is to offer a possibility that may not yet have occurred to others, who, like me, are of an age to look back more than look forward. As any aging person can tell you, the nearness of death has much to do with shedding the snake skins donned during a lifetime of activities. What was once possible is now highly unlikely at best. I am 77 and wonder whether spiritual endeavor was worth the price of admission and what, if anything, might put a relaxing period on that sentence.

Yesterday, the pinball took up its endless cha-ching rambling and I spent quite a lot of time trying to find a publication that might be willing to consider my written meanderings after 45-50 years of spiritual interest and endeavor. I think it's a good topic -- aging, death, religion -- but I can imagine both true believers and true disbelievers preparing to pounce on my sorry ass.

Anyway, I got one nibble. We'll see if it anyone might say, "OK, if you're stupid enough to try, I'm stupid enough to listen."

I don't even know if I could write the thing if I received an invitation, but the careening, ding-dong-ing of the pinball idea was irritating: Put up or shut up.

Strangely, the effort at finding an outsource calmed my mind and I could remember with a smile that spiritual endeavor did teach me one invaluable lesson -- how to eat oatmeal with chop sticks. That makes me smile and smiling is ... well, try it.

"Breaking the [Israeli] Silence"

JERUSALEM (AP) — A former Israeli combat officer turned whistleblower has found himself in the fight of his lifetime, leading a campaign against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and drawing relentless criticism from the country’s leaders who have labeled him a traitor.
For Dean Issacharoff, the battle is even more personal: his father is Israel’s ambassador to Germany, a respected longtime diplomat tasked with defending the same policies his son so adamantly opposes.
Issacharoff is the spokesman of Breaking the Silence, a group of former fighters who served in the West Bank and now collect testimonies about the damaging impact of the occupation. While the group says it’s acting in Israel’s best interests by sparking a public debate, it has become perhaps the most reviled anti-occupation protest group in the country. The nationalist government sees it as foreign-funded subversives seeking to shame Israel by targeting its most hallowed institution, the military.

Who is a better source of information than the people who have actually "been there and done that?" Are they all -- an estimated 1,100 -- liars and provocateurs? Are they all, to use a much-bandied and poorly-defined word, "anti-Semitic?" Is it really conceivable that Israel and its motives and public face are all, so to speak, washed in the blood of the lamb? Is it really conceivable that "Breaking the Silence" is without flaws? Does it make sense for the U.S. to implicitly condone the human rights abuses attested to by those who are and have been there? It all sounds remarkably like the program used to such good effect by the former Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels... tell a lie often enough and people will start to believe it.

Don't discuss it, just believe it ... and devalue the latter-day "Untermenschen."

the wide, wide world of bullshit

I don't know that I need to read a whole book about it, but this Guardian excerpt was pretty enjoyable:

From inboxing to thought showers: how business bullshit took over

Vacuous management-speak is easily laughed off – but is there a real cost to talking rubbish?

the Jewish ... err American... conspiracy

And when it comes to letting a cat out of the bag -- not entirely, mind you, but close enough -- there is the case of and Israeli diplomat who goofed:

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A top Israeli diplomat was rebuked by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday for suggesting that American Jews have a poor commitment to service in the U.S. military....
“Most of the Jews don’t have children serving as soldiers, going to the Marines, going to Afghanistan or to Iraq,” [Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely] said on i24 TV news on Wednesday.
According to a 2009 survey published by the congressionally-mandated Military Leadership Diversity Commission, an estimated 1.09 percent of the members of the U.S. armed forces are Jewish. The Pew Research Center estimated in 2013 that Jews make up about 2 percent of the U.S. adult population.

Naturally, Netanyahu rebuked Hotovely, who is in other times a Netanyahu ally. "Anti-semitism" was shoehorned into the critique. Israel has too much riding on its links with the U.S. to have some upstart rattling the financial apple cart.

But my feeling is that Hotovely's observations do not need to be reined in -- they need to be expanded beyond their Jewish flavorings to include a majority of Americans of whatever religion. Congress -- remember when they represented the country? -- has not mustered the nerve to declare war in the Middle East where it is fighting "wars" if the media are to be believed. Dead American bodies are being shipped home under a decorous and politically-useful anonymity. And the Veterans Administration copes with wounds that may be worse than death. It sure smells like "war" to me. Isn't it time that those who know how to don cuff links commit their spawn or ... get out?

if it doesn't work, do it again

LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan/KABUL (Reuters) - As U.S. and Afghan forces pound Taliban drug factories this week, farmers in the country’s largest opium producing-province and narcotics experts say the strategy just repeats previous failed efforts to stamp out the trade.
U.S. Army General John Nicholson, who heads NATO-led forces in Afghanistan, announced on Monday a new strategy of attacking opium factories, saying he wanted to hit the Taliban “where it hurts, in their narcotics financing”....

“The Taliban will not be affected by this as much as ordinary people,” said Mohammad Nabi, a poppy farmer in Nad Ali district in the southern province of Helmand, the heartland of opium production.

“Farmers are not growing poppies for fun. If factories are closed and businesses are gone, then how will they provide food for their families?"

According to Wikipedia, opium production in the land of America's longest war, Afghanistan, has risen each year since the U.S. invasion of 2001.  "As of 2017, opium production provides about 400,000 jobs in Afghanistan, more than the Afghan National Security Forces."

When the Taliban, a scurvy lot to say the philosophical least, were in charge, such production was banned. And it worked. So it seems that the U.S. in all its wisdom is attacking the only group to have successfully achieved what the U.S. claims it want to achieve. Does that count as "enabling" and supporting the heroin trade?

sex -- the feeding frenzy

In the long ago and faraway, when the Soviet Union was so big that it had 13 time zones, I used to wonder at the muffled coverage accorded to that behemoth by The New York Times, a newspaper whose motto was, "All the News that's Fit to Print." How could so little be accorded to so much? How could nothing of note be happening in so much inhabited space? Was "Moscow" really the alpha and omega of Soviet datelines? The word "arrogance" did not cross my mental lips at the time ... this was The New York Times, after all.

A little of the same awe crosses my mind lately as one sexual allegation after another is laid at the feet of powerful (mostly) men. Every day, there's a new member of the club. Politics, sports, business, medicine, religion ... and I seriously doubt that the no-name women are included or assuaged.

The allegations are decades old, perhaps, but enough disparaging of women appears, for the moment, to be enough... and it makes an easy news story ... the feeding frenzy ... whose facts are probably true, but it's still a feeding frenzy that tends to blunt the very cause it seeks to air. I hope it benefits the women who have come forward and whose courage I applaud.

Day after day.

Here's a truncated laundry list.

And it's hard not to wonder what is happening in the other time zones where news organizations are now assiduously not looking. It's sort of like a blackout: What a great time to rob a bank.

"manipulative cowardice"

"Manipulative cowardice" -- the tart observation came unbidden into my mind after a phone call I received yesterday from a woman seeking information about a woman who used to run a Zen center here in Northampton. It was a cold call: I didn't know the woman calling and was forced to say that I was pretty much out of the Zen loop of teachers and centers and various activities. I did point her towards various sources that might help her.

I might have shut the conversation down sooner, but I spun it out partly because I was interested in my own reactions.

The caller's voice was top-heavy with that treacly and little-disguised self-congratulation of being willing (and by extension able) to help others. She pressed the go-to buzzers of "mindfulness" and "being centered" and "enlightenment" and "we" and ... well, you get the drift. She had practiced for ten years, she said, and had written and lectured and ... well, you get the drift.

It was nothing I hadn't done myself at one time, so I was equipped to recognize the activity. What interested me was the fact that her observations and threads yesterday failed to surprise or even irritate me very much. Who knows what will inspire whom to find out something useful ... or useless: there's not much difference?

I did stop her when she got around to the word "we" and said I wasn't much interested in what "we" did or thought, but I was curious about what "she" did or thought. Yes, I could sympathize with the unwillingness or inability to speak a singular truth or appreciation. But not to give a gentle nudge to the "manipulative cowardice" -- the need to be buttressed by some amorphous and presumptuous group that agreed with you -- seemed unkind. She paid my query little heed. She was neck-deep in her formulae and, well ... sometimes that the way things are... having an answer or explanation or improvement for everything.

OK ... let 'er rip. No one can outflank or sweet talk life into submission. Talk as much as you like. Be as "kind" as you imagine you are. Life is not a place that offers or promises safety. It's just life.

Anyway, I wasn't as irritated as I thought I might be. I listened and I asked if she had ever thought of giving it all up and then listened to the answer "we" might long to hear and she could round up kudos for.

Without disrespect, it was a bit like listening to a drug addict who, despite his or her best efforts, simply cannot put a cork in the self-referential miasma. Calling it "cowardice" is a bit too tart, perhaps, but it's in that neighborhood, I think. And "manipulative?" Well, everyone (did I just say "we?") has to put spaghetti on the table.

I was pleased I wasn't more crabby. Being crabby presupposes that my own lift-off yardstick in spiritual trekking ("I don't want to convince anyone else; I just want to know -- for me -- whether spiritual adventure is bullshit or not") is somehow correct or without confused flaw.

forgotten places photos

The first historic photographer of the year awards showcase the world’s very best historic places and cultural sites from across the globe, capturing everything from the most famous national treasures to obscure and forgotten hidden gems. Here, the photographers tell the stories behind their pictures

All images courtesy of historic photographer of the year

A couple I liked:

Wat Mahathat, Ayutthaya, Thailand

Wat Mahathat is a 14th-century temple reduced to ruins in 1767 when the Burmese army invaded Ayutthaya. Over time, a tree has grown around one of the remaining stone Buddha heads, such that it is now completely enclosed by its roots with only the face peeking out. Mathew Browne

 

 

Just outside Uyuni, Bolivia, trains were abandoned decades ago and left to rot at 3,656 metres (11,995ft). Built by the British, the railway transported minerals to the Pacific coast until the mining industry collapsed in the 1940. Pamela Jones

burned out doctors

That crap blocking your arteries may well be attributed to a waxing "burnout" among physicians.

Some leading healthcare executives now say the way medicine is practiced in the United States is to blame, fueled in part by growing clerical demands that have doctors spending two hours on the computer for every one hour they spend seeing patients....
[R]esearchers have shown that burnout erodes job performance, increases medical errors and leads doctors to leave a profession they once loved....
Experts define burnout as a syndrome marked by emotional exhaustion, cynicism and decreased effectiveness. Many burned out doctors cut back their hours to cope, and a disturbing number commit suicide....
[P]rimary care physicians spend more than half of their 11.4 hour workday performing data entry and other tasks, according to a September AMA/University of Wisconsin study published in the Annals of Family Medicine.
To manage, doctors often finish work at home in the evening, a part of the day known as “pajama time.”  

2nd cataract

... 'procedure' today ... a three hour wait for a 15 minute operation.

sticking up for journalism

I am a fan of The Guardian. On the whole, it is my go-to source of world news not least because it seems to espouse journalistic values I appreciate. Remember "the other side of the story?" The Guardian ain't pitch-perfect, but at least it tries.

Currently, there is a "long read" (and be forewarned, it is long) by The Guardian's editor-in-chief, Katherine Viner: "A Mission for Journalism in a Time of Crisis."

For the newsies who read this site, I recommend her essay as a nice assessment of news in our times ... or perhaps news whose underpinnings I approve of. It made me feel good in a time when feel-good is alternatively too easy to come by or too incredibly difficult to find.

quirky laws in U.S. states

In Alabama, it is illegal to have an ice-cream cone in your back pocket.  [and photos of other odd U.S. illegalities]

          

sticking up for the sacred

An Irish Catholic priest does not appear to be just another whiny Christian.

The Rev. Desmond O’Donnell simply suggests that his flock get with the times and acknowledge the fact that "Christmas" is devoid of sacred meaning. For this reason, O'Donnell has suggested that Christians stop using the word, according to a story in The Guardian.

'We need to let it go, it’s already been hijacked and we just need to recognise and accept that.'

O’Donnell said he is not seeking to disparage non-believers. 'I am simply asking that space be preserved for believers for whom Christmas has nothing to do with Santa and reindeer.'...

O’Donnell said unless Catholicism addressed the reality of what the word Christmas has come to mean, 'secularisation and modern life will continue to launder the church...'

Just because some things aren't sacred doesn't mean all things aren't.

religion as a buttress and bulwark

I think Julia told me her boyfriend's father, who died recently, was a Seventh Day Adventist. As a result, Julia told me in a phone conversation, her boyfriend had, growing up, lived in a lot of different countries as his dad pursued a course of spreading the good word.

But the death was a lingering, languorous one fraught with pain. But worse than the painful indignities that dying visited on the dying man was the fact that his lifelong faith did not sustain and succor him. The family was aghast. The dying man, father to Julia's boyfriend among others, railed against the religion he had followed in lock-step all of his life. It was as if he were saying to his God, "Why are you visiting this pain on me when I have been so faithful to You?!" He ranted and forswore what had once been so dear and his near kin were reduced to trembling: Wasn't religion a means of addressing death in good spirits? Wasn't it a bulwark and a buttress? The old man was adamant in his ire according to Julia. How this affected Julia's boyfriend she didn't say, but it must have been a surprise at a minimum.

Strangely, as one who had spent close to 50 years embracing spiritual life, I found the story consoling.

I had called Julia because, in the distant past, she had been a brick when it came to piecing together my book, "Answer Your Love Letters: Footnotes to a Zen Practice." I knew nothing of internet vagaries and Julia knew the codes. More than that, she was willing to put them at my disposal. The book would never have been published without her hard work.

In the course of collaboration, I learned that Julia was also an artist whose work and mind I liked. It was a recollection of that fondness that prompted my phone call: I thought she might offer some good input on my idea to create a peacenik button saying "If you really want to honor our veterans, stop making them." I thought I might scrape together the money to have the button printed up in bulk and then distributed for free ... maybe at VFW halls.

But it had been a long time since I talked to Julia and in the years gone by she had come to the conclusion that although she hated the man called Donald Trump, she was happy with what he had done in Washington. "I can only watch Fox News now," she told me without rancor as she got around to why she would not help me with the button. She was among the angry who felt disenfranchised and dispossessed by the government that was meant to represent her. Despite all the years gone by, I had expected her to be on my liberal page in the present as she had been on my liberal page in the past. Life has a way of disregarding the fondest of expectations.

And so we segued into other topics as people of our age can. I am 77 and Julia is in her 60's, I think and neither of us is interested in a teen-ager's shouting match. Age softens the edges that righteousness can sharpen. Anyway, we took a slow curve into other realms ... stuff like her boyfriend's father and his cranky demise.

The old man died without a good word for the religion he had folded himself into with gusto. The course correction seemed horrific to those who gathered around his death bed. A sorrow. A betrayal. And yet ....

To me, it seemed a blessing. Or anyway it seemed to bless my waxing sense that the purpose of donning spiritual life in the first place -- the sole nourisher, in fact -- was learning the ability and understanding that comes/came with divestiture. Far from leaning on some staff of reassurance, a believer is best served, especially when confronted by death, when all reassurances are set gently aside.

Think of it: No baby ever slid down the vaginal pipe attended by religion or spiritual preference. The sole capacity of the newborn is the capacity to suck, to nourish itself, and to live. Religion and its precincts were add-ons -- succor for the suckers who already know how to suck. This is not meant as a criticism of spiritual effort, which has many fine attributes, nor of God. It is an acknowledgment of the way in which human life unfolds. Each is born in his or her time and the Post-It's are glued on after the fact -- the habits and capabilities and successes and failures and all the other little notes that shape the person who could use a little reassurance from time to time.

Not for a moment would I disparage another's spiritual leanings. Atheism, like credulity, is pretty simple. I would only suggest that as the child once outgrew boots and clothes as winters passed, so the clothing of spiritual life might face a time when it was appropriate to put all reassurances aside. No need for anger or for joy.

It is simply what happens when the reassurances lose their assurance...

With an assurance that only death can provide.

black-and-white newspaper

The old third-grade puzzler used to ask, "What's black and white and red/read all over?" The answer was "a newspaper" until color was introduced into newsprint and the puzzle lost its zip.

Around here, a three-hour power outage two days ago means that the newspaper has been delivered in throwback black-and-white both yesterday and today. Somehow the lack of electricity messed with the capacity to print color photos and graphics.

The drab results put me in mind of a time when I thought the introduction of color to newspapers was too gaudy and couldn't last. Now, my habit of looking for color reveals itself.

Something to whine about ... thank god.

donations for a bird-flipper

Passed along in email was this today: The woman who flipped Donald Trump's motorcade the bird and was subsequently fired when she admitted her role has rounded up the better part of a $100,000 GoFundMe effort to support her valor.

What I'm waiting for is a dollar amount her former company -- the one which fired her -- is going to have to shell out. Talk about dingbat idiocy. At a minimum, the CEO ought to be fired for lacking the skill and foresight to know the results of a hoo-hah patriotism. Would you want a skill-less dimwit like this running your company?

15 corrupt convictions thrown out

Leonard Gipson, one of 15 convicted men, talks to reporters after a judge in Chicago threw out the convictions Thursday.

CHICAGO (AP) — One by one, the men told the same story: A Chicago police officer would demand money from them. And if they didn’t pay, they would find themselves in handcuffs with drugs stuffed in their pockets.
A Cook County judge on Thursday threw out the felony drug convictions of 15 black men who all say they were locked up for no other reason except that they refused to pay Ronald Watts.
It was the largest mass exoneration in memory in Chicago.

gifts from China

My across-the-street neighbor Joe and his wife Pat returned from China yesterday. I had thought they were to be gone three weeks but it turned out to be two. Joe brought me an unasked-for calligraphy from a monastery known for having sent monks to India who then brought home the first scrolls and texts of Buddhism. Joe said the souvenir calligraphy wished good fortune or some such for "adam." A nice thought ... and he told me he had brought as well a pebble from the Great Wall, which I asked for but was stashed, for the moment, inside Joe's house.

asked to be kept in solitary confinement

The man who asked to be kept in solitary confinement.

the "First Church of Artificial Intelligence"

Passed along in email today came this article about a start-up church of artificial intelligence.

My first snarky reaction was, "Go out and play in the street!"

But then, because someone is bound to buy in and because there may be something to buy into, I responded to my friend who sent it along:

Will it be benevolent, will it be belligerent, can (wo)men shape and control it ... ??? Questions abound and I am suspicious of anyone (including me) who says s/he is capable of seeing the outcome. One yardstick I have started using lately is the question "Does it fold in failure?" AI doesn't seem willing to fail ... which makes it inhuman ... not to mention boring and, from a human standpoint, malevolent.

It is interesting how, in one way or another, articles try and try and try again to get a handle on the whole matter -- as if an explanation were going to explain, and hence control, this brave new world.

Tnx.

escape from exceptionalism

The exceptionalism of the many.
The exceptionalism of the few.
Without what is exceptional,
What would any of us do?

Perhaps the upshot is that pigs have been and will continue to be oink-meisters.

the seal of confession?

In August, a commission investigating child abuse in the Catholic church of Australia recommended that any failure to report suspicions of child sex abuse to the authorities should result in criminal charges – even if the discovery was made within the seal of the confessional. “We are satisfied,” the commissioners wrote, “that confession is a forum where Catholic children have disclosed their sexual abuse and where clergy have disclosed their abusive behaviour in order to deal with their own guilt.” The archbishop of Melbourne’s reply was unequivocal: the seal could not be broken, and if that meant going to jail, well, so be it.

On the one hand, how wondrous to be absolved of child abuse or any other catastrophe.
On the other hand, how horrific the hidden fallout.

Who would not give a lot to feel/believe the weights might be taken or fall away?
Responsibility is a crucifixion and you don't need to be a Roman Catholic to know that.

democracy ... kind of

Report on global democracy:

Globally, progress has been made in nearly all of these measures over the past 40 years, meaning public institutions are more accountable and representative than ever before. But the impartiality of governments remains unchanged.
“This has been the most difficult thing for democracies to tackle since 1975 to today,” said Ebead. “The sophistication with which democratic backsliding [into autocratic systems] occurs within countries has gone up over the past decade. In the past, democratic backsliding in a county would occur in the form of a coup d’etat or classical electoral fraud with the stuffing of ballot boxes.”
Such methods are still used, but governments also have access to new technologies that can allow them to manipulate voting systems.

power outage

From shortly before 9 a.m. to shortly before 12:00 p.m., there was a power outage in the neighborhood ... or, if my neighbor is to be believed, from Worcester to all of western Massachusetts.

What writing I had planned on the oh-so-electrical computer was thrown into a cocked hat.

But there was water (gravity) and gas for the stove.

Things were quieter without the electricity. Strange how something intrinsically silent can make so much noise and ease the clangor by its absence.

so....

Verbal flatulence. Was there ever a time without it?

Joining the old-timers "we" and "one," these days in seemingly every verbal venue, the word "so" has added its smarmy song to the verbal-flatulence chorus. These days, questions asked by interviewers are answered, in preface, by the word "so."

Why did the cat get up on the garage roof?

So, it seems that the prospect was just too irresistible.

What color is the white house?

So, white has always been the preferred color of a majority of houses.

Why is the sky blue?

So, the sky has its devices....

How does it happen that "so" has joined the verbal flatulence realm?

So, if everyone is doing it, it's cozy and social and sounds thoughtful and offers a moment in which to reflect so, I dunno.

So?

So, why not?

So it sounds dumber than a box of rocks.

So?

Just so.

news missing, warmth remains

The warming sense of community once exuded by the local newspaper has faded into barely-veiled advertising and safe-sex press releases about various "boards" and "officials" in this small city's small newspaper.

And yet, with winter in the offing, the Daily Hampshire Gazette still delivers a warmth in its capacity to fire up the wood stove. It's not the same warmth of news reporting, but I do appreciate the wood-warmth even as I miss the news-reporting that the newspaper once provided a bit of.

In an era of safe-sex and dwindling-dwindling-dwindling news -- the capacity to turn over rocks for the benefit of readership -- I guess paying for a little kindling has to be expected.

Merchandizing by merchants -- what the hell else did I expect?

Viva the Donald Trump motif!

Modigliani -- rapscallion and wunderkind

"He was the ‘ravishing villain’ who drank, took drugs and bed-hopped his way around Paris. But Modigliani’s nudes – warm portraits of confident women – caused a revolution in painting"

traveling in China

As I sit here writing, my across-the-street neighbors, Joe and Pat DeBlase, are touring China.

Imagine that.

I'm not sure why it pleases me as much as it does. I don't wish I were there in their stead.

But it does please me.