Thursday, September 11, 2008

Courting the Idiot Vote while Banking on Wimpy White Women

A few preluminaries before we begin. The thing is, not all of my thoughts come into the world fully organized and integrated with the rest. Rather, I have my share of strays, orphans and lone thoughts that deserve to have their little moment in the sun, even if they can't make it into a full post. Open your Coonifesto, page 294, footnote 76:

"Evidently, we play host to about four thousand distinct thoughts in a typical day, one hundred million in an average lifetime. Now we know how many thoughts it takes to fill the average soul (I'd love to turn them off)."

In the case of my thoughts, I actually wish two things for them.

First, I want them to all be internally related, or to cohere into a unified "whole," or seven-dimensional view of the cosmos, both internally and externally. Of course, that is impossible, but one never stops trying. What's the alternative, to live with a hundred million independent thoughts cluttering your mind? No. It's no wonder that people hold so tightly to bogus religions such as Darwinism in order to lend a false coherence to their minds. It's preferable to the anxiety of being persecuted by all those independent thoughts. But this is also what makes leftists, or feminists, or metaphysical Darwinists so transparently silly.

True, the purpose of material science is to reduce multiplicity to unity, but only insofar as it pertains to the horizontal. In the effort to create unity, it a priori reduces the vertical to the horizontal, so that it necessarily ends in a forced pseudo-unity and therefore a false religion -- a graven image.

Now, the second thing I wish for my thoughts -- and it is impossible in the absence of the first thing -- is to "ascend" higher and higher toward their ultimate source, which constitutes the Life Divine, not the Death Material. Our consciousness does not come from "matter," except insofar as consciousness is first involved (as in involution) in the creation.

No, this is not to build a Tower of Babel, which would be analogous to trying to ascend in a mechanistic or linear way, whereas I wish to do so in an organic and organismic way, which is impossible in the absence of the divine telos that meets us halfway. As Susannah pointed out the other day, we till the soil, remove the weeds, plant the seeds, etc., but there is an "x-factor" to all organic growth that is well beyond our pray grade. And spiritual growth is most assuredly organic growth, only on the vertical plane. If it isn't organic, then you will eventually be headed for a fall, back down to your true level of spiritual development, which will have an intrinsic degree of stability and robustness. Which is apparently what happens when you die, i.e., your true level of spiritual growth is revealed.

Wait, I just remembered. There's a third thing I wish for my thoughts, and that is for them to actually be mine. Because I'm sorry to say that the average person never even has an original thought in his entire life. Rather, they simply pick up "atmospheric" thoughts, which are largely mimetic -- meaning that they merely think what others are thinking. (This is one of the reasons the left was so demonically prescient in taking over the educational system, so they could normalize abnormal thoughts and turn them into conventional wisdom enforced by political correctness.)

It is critical to bear in mind that "thoughts" can come from two broad directions. That is, they can emanate from O; or, they can come from the outside. These are what Bion called "thoughts without a thinker." They are like viral memes looking for a human host, where they can settle in, reproduce, and infect other minds. The cultivation of the Silent Mind is our best defense against them, in which we repel them from our center.

Unfortunately, this is what is presently going on with both campaigns. You hear Obama say what a shame it is that we are reduced to talking about lipstick and pigs when we should be talking about global warming and how much we hate President Bush, but he's only saying that because he got the wrong end of the stick this time. He loved it two weeks ago, when it was about John McCain not knowing how many houses his wife owns.

You see, there are people who are even more confused than liberals, and these are called "independents" or "moderates." I mean, if you don't even know whether you are a liberal or a conservative, you are either an ignoramus or a head case. It's like not knowing if you're a boy or a girl. Here's a clue for you, pal: if you don't know whether you're a boy or a girl, you're a liberal.

The point is, there is nothing on earth that could get me to vote for a leftist, as I am opposed to them politically, spiritually, philosophically, scientifically, cosmologically, economically, morally, educationally, psychologically, linguistically, culturally, ontologically, aesthetically, psychohistorically, and in just about every other way. And I hope that, after 1074 posts, you can see how all of these categories are organically related -- which goes back to my own attempt to deeply organize my psyche horizontally and vertically.

So the next fifty days of the campaign are not going to be aimed at you or me. Tactically, that would be a foolish waste of resources, wouldn't it? Rather, the main strategy must involve courting these so called "independents" (who are actually quite dependent upon accident and contingency), the idiots who are responsible for Obama being at 50% one week and 43% the next. What happened in those two weeks? What happened is that a sizable number of independent idiots heard some zinger or some fragment of a meme that was sufficient to influence their weak minds.

So no one should be surprised that political campaigns are largely about stupid and trivial things, because the election will ultimately be decided by stupid and trivial people. But you can never say that, or you will lose the election, for you will have insulted the stupid people, and forever alienated them. Indeed, this is why campaigns are so damn expensive. I'm guessing that the biggest expense is television ads, which are specifically addressed to stupid people who can be influenced to vote for someone based upon a television ad.

Is this an elitist view? No, not at all. That's one of the main points. For example, Sarah Palin doesn't have to pretend that she's a regular person, because she is, as are most real "temperamental" conservatives. But Obama is not a regular person, and doesn't seem to have ever even associated with them. Rather, he seems to attract -- or be attracted to -- notably abnormal people such as Bill Ayers, Rev. Wright, Tony Rezko, etc. Part of the problem with the stupid independents is that they cannot tell the difference between a real person and someone pretending to be real, like Obama. Which is why these effete liberals always look so silly when they try to bowl, or ride a bicycle, or drive a tank, or shoot a gun.

Damn. I forgot my fragment of a thought that I wanted to discuss. Oh yes. It was about this book that I and at least a couple other Raccoons are reading, On Awakening & Remembering: To Know is to Be, by Mark Perry. So far it's a wonderful book, and if it stays that way to the end, it will find a permanent home in my sidebar list of perennial raccoomendations.

But as I mentioned in a comment, the book is extraordinarily dense, with hardly a wasted word. It is a fine example of the Mind of Light, except that the light is almost too pure, so to speak. No, that's not it. Rather, it is as if there is no air; or perhaps as if it is all geometry with no music. In a comment yesterday, Walt wrote that "One of the nice things about OC is that Bob peppers his posts with examples from current events, which gives a sense of immediacy and familiarity to the ideas he's discussing. Since this isn't the case with Perry, and since we're not familiar with his thinking, that book seems much 'denser' than the posts here, even though the thrust of the ideas are very similar."

Precisely. That is what I attempt to do -- to add a little warmth to the light, melody to the harmony, music to the geometry, punchlines to the cosmic joke, etc. I want to convey a sense that these ideas really are woven into my substance, so that whatever comes out of my piehole is in a sense not just "about" them but "of" them. Do you know what I mean?

It's as if I don't just want to speak of these things, but sing of them. And not just in a memorized way, but in a spontaneous way, like a Bird... or a Monk, or a Rollins, or a Coltrane. None of these jazz immortals were great because they memorized what had come before and merely reproduced it. Rather, they internalized what had come before, so they could build upon it -- again, in a harmonious and organic way. When Monk first came on the scene in the 1940s, he was seen as radically novel and "discontinuous" with the past. But in hindsight, we can now hear all sorts of prior traditional influences that went into his conception. It's just that he put them together in a novel way. He takes the old influences and runs them through the Monk-izer.

So that was it. I just wanted to say that I used to fret over my style, and whether I might just be a vulgar blasphemer. Again, I have no doubt that Schuon and the rest of the traditionalists would disapprove of how I handle their ideas. But there were certain composers who hated what jazz artists did to their compositions, just as Burt Bacharach hated what Love did to My Little Red Book.

Moving on. Great piece today at American Thinker on Why Feminists Fear Strong Women. It's no secret, really. It's for the same reason that snivel rights leaders are so frightened and repulsed by strong and non-sniveling blacks, who represent a catastrophe to their downward movement.

And it is a downward movement, in that it forsakes the upward evolutionary movement and sails with the descending current toward darkness and inconscience. I always get a hoot that these leftists flatter themselves about "raising consciousness," when they explicitly do the opposite. They lower consciousness, because if someone actually raises their consciousness, they certainly have no use for a Jesse Jackson or Cornell West or Gloria Steinem. I mean, please. If The Godfather is accurate, then I suppose there was a time when Italian-Americans needed the mafia for protection, but Irish-Americans certainly don't need the Kennedys anymore.

With regard to the ovary tower elites of the feminist vaginocracy, their pitiful weakness is their strength: "For decades we've been told that half the human population -- the female half -- are somehow weak, oppressed victims, who cannot handle the normal challenges of life."

These feminist vampires put the bite on impressionable young women, mainly the educable kind: "All too often modern women have been suckered and bamboozled by a lifetime of Leftist agitprop, which has turned their strengths into weaknesses.... Hillary Clinton has based her whole political career on the Myth of the Victimized Woman. Feminists who run our schools and colleges are always trying to push that story to naive students.... 'Weak' women are a figment of the Left, just like 'weak' black people or 'weak' poor people. Those folks never used to be weaklings, until the media made them think they were. With the unanimous help of mainstream radio and TV you can talk yourself into feeling you're a victim of circumstances, just as under better influences you can talk yourself into feeling strong."

But before you can be convinced that you are weak and helpless, you also have to be kind of stupid and suggestible.... you know, a hysterical female, or one of those people who just pick up their thoughts from the surrounding atmosphere. Which is pretty much what liberal academia has been reduced to, just a great clearing house for pseudo-thoughts riding on the cosmic currents that descend all the way down. The problem isn't a glass ceiling. Rather, it's a non-existent floor.

"So why do Leftist feminists fear Sarah Palin? Because their personal ego-trips and their political power depend upon The Big Lie. Like all Leftists, feminists desperately need to feel superior to the rest of us. That makes them feel good about themselves. Without the Myth, a rage-driven feminist like Heather Mallick would not have a high-paid career with the government-own broadcaster in socialist Canada. All the feminist professors who were hired to create 'gender balance' in our schools and colleges, all the Ms. Magazine writers, all the media ladies, the affirmative action bureaucrats and victimology peddlers would lose the only career they know. A huge amount of money, prestige, snobbery, influence, ego, rage and sexual passion rides on the feminist myth."

Sarah Palin is like a neutron bomb that obliterates their leftist institutions while leaving the mediocrities who inhabit them standing. And you can't even put lipstick on them, because they'll whine that you're objectifying them.

48 comments:

Sal said...

"The problem isn't a glass ceiling. Rather, it's a non-existent floor."

Golden. Thanks, Bob.

Ray Ingles said...

When Monk first came on the scene in the 1940s, he was seen as radically novel and "discontinuous" with the past. But in hindsight, we can now hear all sorts of prior traditional influences that went into his conception. It's just that he put them together in a novel way.

Looked at this way, the distance between man and animals is as discontinuous as the gap between truth and falsehood, since no animal can know truth. Darwinists may insist that apes gradually shade off into humans, but a lie doesn't gradually shade off into the truth, so the distance between man and apes is likewise infinite.

Or, just possibly, evolutionary theory can recognize "prior... influences that went into" humanity, but they are put together "in a novel way." (Without taking away the fact that there are some original features, too, as with Monk.)

As Bob quoted Lewontin, "the properties we ascribe to our object of interest and the questions we ask about it reinforce the original metaphorical image and we miss aspects of the system that do not fit the metaphorical approximation." I rather suspect that Bob misses things about some people because he wants them to fit the 'Darwinist' model he has.

Ephrem Antony Gray said...

As if Gershwin were not a Musician, nor Bach, nor Mozart, nor Pachabel, and Monk was?

Rick said...

“The point is, there is nothing on earth that could get me to vote for a leftist, as I am opposed to them politically, spiritually, philosophically, scientifically, cosmologically, economically, morally, educationally, psychologically, culturally, ontologically, aesthetically, psychohistorically, and in just about every other way.”

Ricky Raccoon
-----------------
Sign here

walt said...

Bob,

A couple of days ago, I mentioned in Comments a passage from MOTT that suggested that "soulful silence" was the basis of being able to experience spiritual things, at all. And today, regarding "thoughts" entering us, you wrote:
"The cultivation of the Silent Mind is our best defense against them, in which we repel them from our center."

There was a "key" mentioned in MOTT to actually being able to have silence in the mind and soul, and that was a silent will.

This is what Unknown Friend wrote:
"It is useless to strive to concentrate oneself if the will is infatuated with something else. The "oscillations of the mental substance" will never be able to be reduced to silence if the will does not infuse them with its silence. It is the silenced will which effects the silence of thought..."

Yesterday I was in a large "Super Store", smaller than Wal-Mart but along those lines. I noticed that as I walked through, I had no reaction to any of the merchandise or displays; simply got the item I went there for, and left. All that stuff, and it was completely lost on me! I realized that, at least at that time, my "will" was silent, and that I was very unattached to the "consumer-consciousness" that such stores depend on. Bad for the economy, but good for me personally, in terms of internal freedom.

Rick said...

“None of these jazz immortals were great because they memorized what had come before and merely reproduced it. Rather, they internalized what had come before, so they could build upon it -- again, in a harmonious and organic way.”

Reminds of this from Hemingway:

“For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.”

Gagdad Bob said...

Walt:

I believe it was Socrates who said that when he was in the marketplace he marveled at the endless array of things for which he had no need.

Gagdad Bob said...

... or maybe that it reminded him of all the things he didn't need. Something like that.

Ray Ingles said...

River - Not the point. The point was about gradations. there are great musicians, occasionally great musicians, competent musicians, mediocre musicians, rap artists, gibbons with their extended mating duets, and tamarins who don't even prefer consonant to dissonant tones.

New things are going on at each higher level, and yet there's a continuity with the old. Even an apparently small difference in one respect can lead to large difference elsewhere. Checkers and chess are both two-player games on 8x8 boards - but the small differences in details lead to vast differences in the games themselves.

The point there being that there doesn't have to be a large difference between humans and animals in some respects to nevertheless imply huge differences exist.

Unknown said...

Bob said :"There's a third thing I wish for my thoughts, and that is for them to actually be mine. Because I'm sorry to say that the average person never even has an original thought in his entire life. Rather, they simply pick up "atmospheric" thoughts, which are largely mimetic -- meaning that they merely think what others are thinking."


This is on the money Bob. Have the time or more I am not sure if I heard the thought or idea in a movie or a tv show or in a "Hardy Boys" novel.

Thanks for expressing it in an understandable way.

Rick said...

You know what they say, Walt: One man’s Ray is the same man’s Wal-Mart. Or something like that. Either way, I scroll right on by…

julie said...

Ray, your dedication to obtuseness is truly commendable. Once again, you demonstrate perfectly what I was just reading last night. Have you ever met Mark Perry?

Bob, is it possible for someone to actually embody both of the pitfalls (to be a fanatical relativist)? And if so, would that be like the diametric inversion of the Raccoon ideal (Balance, in short, both in the sense Perry describes and in the idea of MOTT's Hermit)?

On a completely different note, today's example. (warning - language; I'm sure most raccoons can handle it, but just in case...).

Also, what was it the anonymous commentor said at the end of yesterday's post? Oh, yes:

"Sure its easy to mock those liberals, but its just as easy to mock those red-neck, hick-town, gun-toting, belly-aching, uneducated, ignorant conservatives, but hardly do I see that kind of painting come from liberals."

Bwahaha! Yes, "hardly."

Anonymous said...

You see, there are people who are even more confused than liberals, and these are called "independents" or "moderates." I mean, if you don't even know whether you are a liberal or a conservative, you are either an ignoramus or a head case. It's like not knowing if you're a boy or a girl.

GUFFAW! Classic Bob! I actually did laugh out loud when I read that, thinking of someone really profound like Charlie Johnson.

julie said...

Oh, I just clicked on the original Salon article referenced in my above link. It is absolutely, stupefyingly vile. Brain bleach may actually be required after reading it.

So if you're a sensitive type, you may not want to read more than what JammieWearingFool quoted in his post.

Just saying.

Niggardly Phil said...

"custodian of my rights, my Constitution and my country"

I didn't know that's what we are electing...

robinstarfish said...

Dialing Nine One One

for those who fathom
the sanctity of freedom
here let there be light

Van Harvey said...

"First, I want them to all be internally related, or to cohere into a unified "whole," or seven-dimensional view of the cosmos, both internally and externally. Of course, that is impossible, but one never stops trying. What's the alternative, to live with a hundred million independent thoughts cluttering your mind?"

Excellent. What is the alternative? Chaos and dissolution.

Van Harvey said...

"There's a third thing I wish for my thoughts, and that is for them to actually be mine. Because I'm sorry to say that the average person never even has an original thought in his entire life. Rather, they simply pick up "atmospheric" thoughts, which are largely mimetic -- meaning that they merely think what others are thinking. "

Yes - not that you need to be 'unique' and 'express your individuality with crazy thoughts", but that you understand them, if you think the matter through, understand them, grasp the truth of them, then you make them yours - and if they are True, they will integrate with all of the rest of you that adheres to what is True, making them far more powerful and personal, than mere disintegrated 'uniqueness' ever could.

"This is one of the reasons the left was so demonically prescient in taking over the educational system, so they could normalize abnormal thoughts and turn them into conventional wisdom enforced by political correctness. "

So tragic, and so true.

Gagdad Bob said...

Julie:

Yes, Perry points out how extremes meet, and how the relativists necessarily become fanatics, since they lack prudence, judgment, wisdom, etc. Or, as Polanyi wrote, with no appeal to truth, the mind is reduced to a drive to dominate and acquire power -- just as the leftist deconstructionists tell us. We should believe them, just as we should believe Ray's constant testimony as to what happens to an otherwise intelligent mind deprived of light and air.

Van Harvey said...

"I'm guessing that the biggest expense is television ads, which are specifically addressed to stupid people who can be influenced to vote for someone based upon a television ad."

Lol! Truly, there is nothing more expensive than stupidity.

Van Harvey said...

"It's for the same reason that snivel rights leaders are so frightened and repulsed by strong and non-sniveling blacks, who represent a catastrophe to their downward movement."

Ooh! That's gonna leave a mark!

Van Harvey said...

"Like all Leftists, feminists desperately need to feel superior to the rest of us"

I can't search for it, but there's a clip out there of Joe Bidden 'responding' (translation "Flying off the frickin' handle") to a questioner who wasn't impressed with what he had to say. He blathers along the lines of how he was first in his class, won a full ride scholarship, was praised by student and faculty & he had NO doubt that his I.Q. was way larger than the questioner.

Turned out it was all 'innaccurate' (Translation:"Lies").

Birds of a feather, flock

Van Harvey said...

Ray said "Checkers and chess are both two-player games on 8x8 boards - but the small differences in details lead to vast differences in the games themselves."

Ray, your problem is you think the difference between them are in the differences in the details of the games, or their rules, but they aren't.

The differences between them are in the players playing them.

Niggardly Phil said...

Van,

Power Line (thanks Ximeze!) had a post on it:


San Diego Union-Tribune blogger Chris Reed recalls Biden's 1988 response in Claremont, New Hampshire to a question about his law school record from a man identified only as ''Frank.'' Biden looked at his questioner and said: ''I think I have a much higher I.Q. than you do.''

Biden of course couldn't leave it at that. He is not known for his concision or care with the facts. He added that he ''went to law school on a full academic scholarship -- the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship.'' He also said that he ''ended up in the top half'' of his class and won a prize in an international moot court competition. Biden still wasn't done. In college, Biden said, he was ''the outstanding student in the political science department'' and ''graduated with three degrees from college.''

Reed then turns to Biden's subsequent statement on this exchange. At Syracuse College of Law, Biden graduated 76th in a class of 85. He acknowledged: ''I did not graduate in the top half of my class at law school and my recollection of this was inacurate.'' Just a slip of memory.

As for receiving three degrees, Biden conceded: ''I graduated from the University of Delaware with a double major in history and political science. My reference to degrees at the Claremont event was intended to refer to these majors -- I said 'three' and should have said 'two.''' His arithmetic was off.

As for his undergraduate preeminence in the political science department -- well, that was somebody else. But one of his professors thought he fit the bill. ''With regard to my being the outstanding student in the political science department,'' the statement went on, "my name was put up for that award by David Ingersoll, who is still at the University of Delaware.'' Professor Ingersoll had it right!

As for his claim that he went to school on full academic scholarship: ''My recollection is -- and I'd have to confirm this -- but I don't recall paying any money to go to law school.'' Reed cites a Newsweek report that Biden had gone to Syracuse ''on half scholarship based on financial need.'' About that moot court competition, however, Biden may have nailed it. Biden said he had won such a competition, with a partner, in Kingston, Ontario, on Dec. 12, 1967. So there.

julie said...

Love the turntable selections today, btw...

Anonymous said...

Biden is nothing but a back-slapping, glad-handing blowhard looking to impress the gullible.
Did you hear the recent clip of him asking the wheelchair bound Chuck Graham to stand up and be acknowledged?
What a maroon.

Niggardly Phil said...

sheesh what's next, will he ask Bob the quadraplegic to go swimming with him?

Anonymous said...

Phil - glad it worked for you

julie said...

Phil, your picture seems oddly apropos today.

Niggardly Phil said...

I know, right? Ray's the best.

Niggardly Phil said...

and by 'best' I mean 'retarded'.

Ephrem Antony Gray said...

Exactly Ray. I don't agree. I know what you're saying already (since you've said it a thousand times) and it's wrong. Plus to top it off the analogy is broken.

Fido said...

Bob,
Ricky just handed this to me. Mumbled something about randumb thoughts or connecting the dolts. I dunno. Anyway, my first reaction was to tear it up, you know, like I always do. But this one I’m not sure. It reminds me of something… on the tip of my tongue you could say. Maybe that’s a threat. Anyway, here it is:

"Love means never having to say I’m sorry I voted for Obama."

Anonymous said...

One of the effects of reading the Bob Blog for a couple of years has been a growing awareness that we are living in a dark age. I would say things look very different than they did BB (Before Bob). Congress is run by fools and knaves, academia is completely corrupt, ditto for MSM. p
Part (a major part) of McCain's appeal for me is that the military seems the only American institution worthy of respect and admiration.

The Hanged Man?

julie said...

For anyone who hasn't seen it, today's Opinion Journal (first article) is well worth your time.

mushroom said...

Julie says: Bob, is it possible for someone to actually embody both of the pitfalls (to be a fanatical relativist)?

To take it another direction from Dear Leader's eloquent answer, and pick up a little of the refrain from the last couple of days, C.S. Lewis talked about the creation of a "materialist magician".

This is what the "Darwin of the Gaps" is all about. A fanatical relativist is a believer in the magical materialist religion.

Anonymous said...

Gagster,

On the subject of postmodern relativism, I just read an excellent article about the dismal legacy of pseudo-anthropologist and hoaxer Carlos Castaneda, and the Heaven's-Gate-esque inner circle around him, many of whose members disappeared and/or committed suicide after his death.

Money quote:

"No one contributed more to Castaneda's debunking than Richard de Mille. De Mille, who held a Ph.D. in psychology from USC, was something of a freelance intellectual. In a recent interview, he remarked that because he wasn't associated with a university, he could tell the story straight. 'People in the academy wouldn't do it,' he remarked. "They'd be embarrassing the establishment." Specifically the UCLA professors who, according to de Mille, knew it was a hoax from the start. But a hoax that, he said, supported their theories, which de Mille summed up succinctly: 'Reality doesn't exist. It's all what people say to each other.'"

julie said...

Wow. this... no words.

Anonymous said...

"All geometry with no music."

BACH!

Anonymous said...

Chandler, tell me you're not dissing Bach


grrrrrrr, where's my Lipstick......

mushroom said...

Aquila, thanks for the Castenada article. What a huge surprise that Deepak was influenced by a fake. Everybody had these Castenada books back in my day. I had three or four myself and read them as kind of cool science fiction. But I had many friends who bought into it and wanted to be 'wizards' via the ingestion of various drugs.

The ease with which Castenada was able to deceive academics brings to mind the old adage "you can't cheat an honest man". This is perhaps why some of us are skeptical, not so much of the findings of science (most of the time) as the conclusions drawn from those finding. Reality-by-consensus is the logical, possibly inevitable destination of Julie's fanatical relativist.

Gagdad Bob said...

Some of today's searches:

how to use your brain
spiritual retarded
raccoon quarterback view
declaring war on raccoons
turn on lights to chase raccoon
political horse's asses
white women for obama
jew running planes dreams
parasites feeling unreal
stark raving sanity
persian marriage counseling in the san fernando valley

Anonymous said...

Bob f.: You are correct sir, we live in the new `Dark Ages` and we are in desperate need of a Saint Benedict.

Isn`t it fitting that our current pope chose the name Benedict?

Any thoughts Bob?

Chandler: o ye of little faith. Bach is perhaps the greatest synthesis of reason and emotion in any art for of any time. Any one fugue contains a vast universe waiting to be explored. But someday, someday, the blind shall see and the deaf shall hear. Until then...

Susannah said...

"Sheep May Safely Graze..."--gets me every time.

Julie, I know (abortion article)--horrific! Complete moral bankruptcy. Grrr! "Safelegal&rare," my eye. It's so transparently evident they don't want Down Syndrome children in the world. Sickos.

The left wing has gone stark raving mad in the past week. It's almost frightening to watch. Dark Ages, indeed.

NoMo said...

I know some may think I'm further off my rocker than usual by this, but...

Given how far this country has sliden from its moorings over the last few years, what if...Sarah Palin is a God-given opportunity that, if we receive with thanks, can actually move us toward genuine reformation of this lost government.

Bob said this day before yesterday and it really stuck with me in a new way:

"The only reason God can be realized is that he is intimately involved in the world."

I am also reminded of what I believe is the best answer to the question about our purpose. That is - to know and do the will of God.

ge said...

Hemingway! One of my 'tantric' gurus along w/ Bukowski [they'd both ably drink the day-long]. His recently released African book was a fresh pleasure, with strangely timely observations re some of Muslim customs embraced by the tribe the Hems hung with: like the way the priest had to check on shot game and use the blade himself with prayers if the animal was alive to make it Hallal, baby!
...otherwise, no meat for the righteous

NoMo said...

What Julie and Susannah said about the Canadian "doctor"'s comments. He would have been right at home in Hitler's crew.

Obama: "Look, I got two daughters -- 9 years old and 6 years old. ... I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby."

Just as sick.

Anonymous said...

"Chandler: o ye of little faith. Bach is perhaps the greatest synthesis of reason and emotion in any art for of any time. Any one fugue contains a vast universe waiting to be explored. But someday, someday, the blind shall see and the deaf shall hear. Until then..."

I AM WILLING TO LEARN, which is why I love One Cosmos. I am open. Thus far I can't find in Bach anything that doesn't sound like an elaborate math formulation.

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