Pictures Since the Fire
Finally got ’em out of the camera.
(in temporary quarters)
How much is that silverfish on the ceiling?
The Director of Sunsets on his birthday
Mom!
Dad!
Sistaz
At the K&W Cafeteria
This Is A Story That Could Send Me Screaming Into Christopher Hitchens’ Arms. [UPDATED]
UPDATE: This is no longer a story.
Trijicon, the company that made the scopes, has proactively decided to stop printing Bible chapter and verse citations on rifle scopes to be sold to the U.S. military and any foreign military that so prefers (as New Zealand, Australia, and Canada evidently do). The company will also make kits available at no cost that can be used to remove existing inscriptions.
That decisiveness and dispatch is free enterprise at its best. Now we’ll see who doesn’t want to let go of this story.
Thanks to reader_iam for the heads up.
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Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.
The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army. […]
Trijicon confirmed to ABCNews.com that it adds the biblical codes to the sights sold to the U.S. military. Tom Munson, director of sales and marketing for Trijicon, which is based in Wixom, Michigan, said the inscriptions “have always been there” and said there was nothing wrong or illegal with adding them. Munson said the issue was being raised by a group that is “not Christian.” […]
That would be the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, “an advocacy group that seeks to preserve the separation of church and state in the military.” headed by one evidently “not Christian” Michael “Mikey” Weinstein.
Weinstein, an attorney and former Air Force officer, said many members of his group who currently serve in the military have complained about the markings on the sights. He also claims they’ve told him that commanders have referred to weapons with the sights as “spiritually transformed firearm[s] of Jesus Christ.”
Let’s note that this is hearsay from an advocacy group with an agenda. Still, the firearms are on the record. Photographs of the cast-metal scripture citations illustrate the post.
If you can swear an oath on the religious text of your choice*, should you be required to shoot a firearm explicitly dedicated to Jesus? Yes, Virginia, it violates the Constitution.
Those Christian soldiers (in and out of uniform) who fervently believe we’re in an apocalyptic theological struggle against Islam — yes, by God, a Crusade — will nonetheless find it thrillingly appropriate. So will their opposite numbers, who’ve thought so all along.
Hat tip: Peter Hoh.
*Does anybody know the restrictions on what texts you can swear an oath on? Could it be, like, Atlas Shrugged?
Who Does This Make You Think Of?
I began to understand that there were certain talkers — certain girls — whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say, but because of the delight they took in saying it. A delight in themselves, a shine on their faces, a conviction that whatever they were telling about was remarkable and that they themselves could not help but give pleasure. There might be other people — people like me — who didn’t concede this, but that was their loss. And people like me would never be the audience these girls were after, anyway.
I’ll put my answer in the comments.
Rant Against (What We Wrongly Call) “Reason”
[I]n this culture of perfect intellectual confidence […] everything is sooner or later penetrated and unmasked—this culture of explanation, in which all the ancient problems are either solved or scorned, and every obscurity of human life, every fog and every cloud, is just a research paper away from satisfactory clarification. There is no riddle of existence that cannot be resolved, or robbed of its sting, in a David Brooks column. We are lucid now, and efficient; we are the quickest studies who ever lived. We throw no shadows. We know how things really work. We have the definite measure of everything. (Happiness, for example, is defined for us by social science; is an objective of public policy). Even as we cozily admit our fallibility, we exempt nothing from our brilliance. We dispel inwardness with our analysis of it. Hurriedly and without any suspicion that precious things are being driven away, we march smartly through all the pains and all the perplexities, and we call this dream of transparency, this aspiration to control, this denial of finitude, reason.
But it’s not, he goes on to say: “Reason is more provisional, more modest, more patient.” Read on. The occasion is the evisceration of late Philip Roth: “All mastery, no mystery.”
What Gets Warm Must Cool Off.
Here’s one of the most persuasive accounts I’ve seen (you can take or leave the political editorializing appended at the very end) of how large a part natural warming and cooling cycles have likely played in the climate changes of the past century.
The authors of this study are not climate-change skeptics, exactly. They just think about 50 percent of the most recently observed warming trend was natural (i.e. not “anthropogenic”), and that we’ve probably now flipped into an equally natural cooling phase that could last a few decades. They’ve received hate mail from both “warm-mongers” (I love that phrase!) and antiwarm agitators, a sure sign that they are doing something right.
Meanwhile, polar bear fans take heart:
The US National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, says that Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007.
If these guys are right, this cold winter we’re having is no fluke, but the new normal for the next 20 to 30 years. Of course, if so, this is going to cause problems of its own (doesn’t everything?): deaths of the poorly housed and homeless, high heating oil demand, crop damage, shifts in tourism patterns (I saw a few hardy souls trying for suntans in South Florida last week; they were getting polka dots from their goosebumps). It will also come as a setback to investors and entrepreneurs who have been betting on a continuing temperature rise.
I’m almost ashamed to admit that the Chicago child in me is excited.
The language of politicians
Lost in the firestorm that has erupted over revelations of Sen. Reid’s comments about then Senator Obama’s election prospects and race is the context of those comments. It explains why African American political leaders were so quick to forgive his “poor word choice.” They knew he was not a racist from his lifetime commitment to civil rights, but I believe they also knew that Sen. Reid was not expressing a racist opinion because the subject he was discussing was how voters might react to an African American candidate.
It is easy to forget that two years ago many Americans wondered whether this country could elect a black man to the Presidency. Early in the Obama campaign, a majority of African American leaders in the Democratic Party still supported Hillary Clinton. Were they racists? Of course not. But, they accepted the conventional political wisdom at that moment, which held that sufficient latent racism probably existed among voters to deny the Presidency to an African American candidate.
To a certain extent, voters need to identify with a candidate to vote for him. In that sense, Sen. Reid was stating a truism: the more Obama was perceived as a “black” candidate, instead of a candidate who happened to be black, the more difficult it would be for some white voters to identify with him. To handicap a political race, politicians and political analysts must assess the possible prejudices of voters, be they racial, regional, religious, or class based. The problem is that a candid discussion of those prejudices is not politically correct, and it can be portrayed as racist or bigoted by those willing to repeat it out of context in our “sound bite” culture.
Winners, Losers . . . And the Rest of Us
A dialogue you might enjoy listening in on. It started with a comment Ron left on the preceding post.
Ron: People don’t have a language for praising/understanding non-winners. They immediately think ‘loser’, and can’t understand people who just won’t play.
Ron: Something that has changed also is that we have given up any notion of a “good try” or “fair play” having any particular virtue. It is somewhat cynically assumed that winners “write the history” so who cares about playing fair!
I wonder how much of this “winnerism” is a backlash to an increased theraputic/egalitarian (hmmm… feminized?) culture?
The virtue of teaching people sports is that it shows you how to lose, and losing occurs a lot in life. But now we just consign losers to gehenna…
Amba: My father once pointed out that for every team that wins a baseball pennant, — ? — I don’t know the correct numbers now — 11? have to lose. He thought about writing a book called “Losing: A Baseball Odyssey.” Never did, though.
Ron: A great Hitter in baseball fails 7 times out of 10! Humbling…
But why do you think they take steroids…because a clean loser would still be thought of as a loser; we beat on winners who take drugs, but ignore clean losers. Being ignored in America is worse than being a villain.
Amba: There’s a big world of non-winners out there. We’re like dark matter.
Only the stars shine, but we’ve got mass, baby.
Ron: and Charm! and odd motion in the Z axis! err…skip that one.
Don’t Blame the Other Side.
Obama is a wimp. Or a Stalinist. Or a wimp giving the store away to Stalinists.
The Republicans are obstructionists and/or racists.
I heard both points of view expressed in Florida and they both set off alarm bells in me. But I’m having a hard time explaining why, even to myself. It’s so easy to get caught up in arguing the foreground, the content of what’s being said, when what’s wrong is so much deeper and more systemic and infects both sides without distinction.
It’s not what either side does or says, it’s the motive that poisons everything they do and say. The motive is winning. American politics has become a huge, toxic Super Bowl in which appearing to advance positions or values or beliefs is only a means to an end. The end is power. And to that end, neither side will hesitate for a moment to distort, malign, and demonize the other, whatever the cost to the country. Not only what the two parties say, but what they do, the legislation they push, the wars they prosecute, is about political calculation and spoils first, principle a distant second. Perhaps in some cases principle is “sincerely” held, but precisely because it is so form-fitted to self-interest.
The voters are far more genuinely sincere in their beliefs, and so the politicians and their media whips manipulate and aggravate those beliefs, flashing trigger symbols, arousing exaggerated fears and hatreds in order to motivate people to vote for them, or at least against the other side. Voters may believe their portrayal of the other side as unAmerican, threatening, and evil, but the primary reason Republicans and Democrats regard each other as evil is that every Democrat elected is a Republican out of power, and vice versa.
You’ll probably tell me it’s no different than it’s ever been, that this is the only game in town and we have no choice but to play it. Not having been alive in 1835 or 1940, I have no idea whether you’re right that nothing has changed. But whether it’s better, worse, or just the same as always, it is so disgusting. It is so disgusting. I don’t ever want to talk, think, or write about politics again.
P.S. Even if it is equally calculated, I’ve been impressed by Newt Gingrich’s persistent civility, fair mix of credit and criticism to his opponents, and focus on ideas. It doesn’t seem to be working for him, though. He is widely despised and dismissed. It’s almost as if people now expect their emotions to be inflamed, and perceive a more civil and cerebral approach as insincere, or bloodless, or cold. or irrelevant. I’ll repeat my observation that much of the public has become addicted to “getting off” emotionally, to that satisfying, stimulating limbic-system workout, even if nothing is accomplished, even if it is downright counterproductive.
Pope Vs. Rabbi: The Great Debate
(Forwarded as a New Year’s greeting by my German teacher, Herr Heggen. I’m in Florida, having a lovely time with a lousy Internet connection.)
The Pope and the Rabbi
Several centuries ago, the Pope decreed that all the Jews had to convert to Catholicism or leave Italy . There was a huge outcry from the Jewish community, so the Pope offered a deal: he’d have a religious debate with the leader of the Jewish community. If the Jews won, they could stay in Italy ; if the Pope won, they’d have to convert or leave.
The Jewish people met and picked an aged and wise rabbi to represent them in the debate. However, as the rabbi spoke no Italian, and the Pope spoke no Yiddish, they agreed that it would be a ‘silent’ debate.
On the chosen day the Pope and rabbi sat opposite each other.
The Pope raised his hand and showed three fingers. The rabbi looked back and raised one finger. Next, the Pope waved his finger around his head. The rabbi pointed to the ground where he sat. The Pope brought out a communion wafer and a chalice of wine. The rabbi pulled out an apple.
With that, the Pope stood up and declared himself beaten and said that the rabbi was too clever. The Jews could stay in Italy .
Later the cardinals met with the Pope and asked him what had happened. The Pope said, “First I held up three fingers to represent the Trinity. He responded by holding up a single finger to remind me there is still only one God common to both our beliefs. Then, I waved my finger around my head to show him that God was all around us. The rabbi responded by pointing to the ground to show that God was also right here with us. I pulled out the wine and wafer to show that God absolves us of all our sins, and the rabbi pulled out an apple to remind me of the original sin. He bested me at every move and I could not continue.”
Meanwhile, the Jewish community gathered to ask the rabbi how he’d won.” I haven’t a clue,” said the rabbi.. “First, he told me that we had three days to get out of Italy , so I gave him the finger.. Then he tells me that the whole country would be cleared of Jews and I told him that we were staying right here. “And then what?” asked a woman. “Who knows?” said the rabbi. “He took out his lunch so I took out mine.”
Ambiance 