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Kickbacks Monday’s New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that New
Orleans Sewerage & Water Board would that day begin trying to respond to the
city’s aging infrastructure by more than doubling by 2016 the rates they
charge the consumers its years of neglect has victimized, that former
professional football player Reggie Williams is the cream of the crop among
finalists to head New Orleans’ recreational program, and that Louisiana is
one of but seven states to have increased its educational spending per
student by 3.3% between 2002 and 2010. Regarding the infrastructure,
we should ask whether the Sewerage & Water Board will spend that money to
improve the infrastructure, and we should note that construction projects
are easy targets for government corruption.
Regarding
putting a professional player in charge of recreational programs, we should
ask how playing football prepares a person to guide youth into anything
other than football, and what kind of role models professional football
players are.
Regarding the increase in spending per
student, we should ask why the New Orleans public school system is still
nearly the worst in the nation, which is to ask where the money went. Maybe all that money has gone
or shall go into renovating the Mercedes Benz Superdome, or maybe it has
gone into the pockets of corrupt politicians, but either way it isn’t likely
to improve the general welfare.
And yes football brings money into the
city, but it also brings people like the Alabama fan who tea-bagged a passed
out LSU fan at the Krystal burger joint on Bourbon Street, winning the
sympathy of someone I know who works for the Las Vegas franchised strip
joint down the street.
The days of Huey Long were pastoral
compared to these.
War and peace I’ve taken recently a
literary tour through the Indian religion Hinduism and plan to take in
August a physical tour of the land of the Buddha.
The scriptures didn’t disappoint my
understanding of the notion of absolute unity to which the words “yoga” and
“karma” refer.
But the introductions to the translations I
read suggested to me that their authors missed the point. They seemed to me to think
that the “is” in the Hindu assertion that the Atman is Brahmin doesn’t mean
identity but similarity.
To my mind, the whole problem with humanity
is that humans seek differences rather than unity, bigotry rather than
coordination.
It’s like football players limiting
teamwork to their own team. NBC’s Nightly News often
closes its shows with a segment its producers call Making a Difference.
We should stop trying to make differences,
further dividing the world into irrational divisions, which Hindus call
Maya.
Karma should be getting along with yoga.
Conscienceless Smart people don’t call
people they don’t understand stupid.
That Newt Gingrich does that habitually
disqualifies him as an intellectual as his saying that eleven million
Palestinians are imaginary disqualifies him as a historian.
And his claim that what he calls the
liberal media picks on him more than it picks on other candidates qualifies
him as paranoid delusional. And there’s that he said that
ABC’s reporting his second wife’s claim and CNN’s asking him about it is
close to unimaginably despicable shows his lack of perspective.
Unimaginably despicable is his trying to
erase his divorces and marital infidelity by joining the Roman Catholic
Church.
And unimaginably stupid is Christian youth
buying into that hypocrisy.
Uneducated white guys vote against Romney
not for Gingrich.
Pseudointellectuals vote for him. People CNN calls expert have
said that CEO’s are more sociopathic than any other class of people and that
Casey Anthony is sociopathic because her behavior aside from the question of
whether she killed her daughter is like that of many U.S. women of her age.
Gingrich, who’s never been a CEO in his 68
years, is sociopathic.
Nancy Grace should manage his campaign.
By reason of
insanity Friday afternoon, I drank a
PBR at Aunt Tiki’s, a French Quarter bar with a reputation for degeneracy.
I ordinarily do that once or twice a week
to see a barmaid I’ve known for years who is raising Aunt Tiki’s customer
base from degeneracy to dereliction.
I met Gracie when she was mother henning
derelicts at the Abbey bar before she got into a row with its degenerate
owner who used to own a bar called the Morgue. An Aunt Tiki’s customer told
me Friday that he’s looking at a plea bargain to reduce to fourteen years
the sentence he expects for whatever he did.
I told him that a Vietnam veteran friend of
mine is stuck in prison perhaps forever for killing his policeman father
when his father pointed a pistol at his head and ordered him to stop living
in a VW Microbus in an abandoned gravel pit.
Mike took the pistol from his father and
shot him with it, and the court decided Mike was guilty but mentally ill and
so must remain in prison until he stops being mentally ill, and he told me
he won’t let mental health professionals work on him because they don’t
believe that the little green demons with long tails who visit him in his
cell are real. The guy facing the fourteen
year sentence replied to that by telling me that the demons only visit him
at home.
The previous week, a woman who’s often at
Aunt Tiki’s replied to my introducing myself to her as Crazy Bill by saying
that she’s related to Wild Bill Cody, and I didn’t point out that she had
Buffalo Bill Cody mixed up with Wild Bill Hickok.
And neither have I ever disagreed with my
friend Mike.
Catch 22 I minored in English at David Letterman’s Muncie alma
mater and minored in psychology. A hobby of mine is hanging
out in French Quarter bars.
I do it on a schedule, about three hours
per afternoon on four afternoons per week, and I do it because bars are pubs
and therefore an opportunity to learn public points of view.
And I introduce myself as Crazy Bill. The reason I introduce myself
as Crazy Bill is that I’ve learned the basic perversity of humanity.
Were I to claim to be sane, patrons would
call my controversial talk crazy, but they generally respond to my calling
myself crazy by saying I’m not.
Recently, Dan Quayle’s brother told me I
risk being killed in a bar by saying in bars how things seem to me, but
Chris apparently doesn’t see the method to my madness that my life in the
murder capital of the United States has proved. I think sports are basically bigotry, and a few days
ago enjoyed a conversation with a crazy woman in one of my favorite bars,
and my sensitive response to her drew from another regular in that bar, the
bar where Coco Robicheaux died, an assertion that I don’t like myself. I also can’t stop thinking that liking oneself
doesn’t require disliking less fortunate people.
Sylvester and
Tweety So Rick Perry is shifting his
support to Newt Gingrich.
Perry claims to be a Protestant while
Gingrich claims to be a Catholic.
Perry washed out in debates while the media
call Gingrich the smart guy in debates. But look at Gingrich on both
counts.
He didn’t claim to be a Catholic until
after two divorces, presumably to increase his credibility by claiming
repentance, but actually indicating hypocrisy.
And he fools no reputable historian into
thinking he’s a historian, and he fools no intelligent person into thinking
he’s smart, but stupid is the new smart. “Smart” has become a buzz
word for persons who agree with the notion that being unable to make an
argument in 140 or fewer characters isn’t clever.
That’s for people too lazy to think or to
learn.
They ignore.
PFC Wikileaks CBS’s New Orleans television
affiliate’s morning news anchor said of the mother, who required her son to
wear a sign labeling him a liar and a thief, that he’s glad she cared about
her child.
If the child is a liar or a thief, his
mother should take some responsibility for that, not exacerbate it.
That child, for the rest of his life,
probably will resent his mother and rebel against guidance. The captain of the Costa
Concordia is a despicable coward.
But, like the mother who refused to take
responsibility for having guided her child, the company owning that cruise
should take responsibility for hiring that captain but is trying to shift
all the blame to him.
The United States military lost a lot of
loyal soldiers when it court-martialed Lieutenant Calley but let Captain
Medina walk away free after ordering the My Lai massacre. Both law and ethics include a
long tradition opposite to such irresponsibility. The legal term is “respondeat
superior,” and the ethical term is “noblesse
oblige,” and both go back to feudalism.
They are the ethical foundation of the
Magna Charta, which is a legal foundation of the United States
Constitution, and the Roman Church still denies responsibility for its
pedophilia.
Professing mental
health Among the many things I enjoy
about New Orleans’ French Quarter is that it’s a breeding ground for people
who live perhaps mindlessly by their hearts.
My favorite, of those I’ve known here, was
Ruthie the Duck Lady who roller-skated the quarter with ducks trailing
behind her.
And she didn’t do that for for money or beg. A barmaid in my second
favorite French Quarter bar says that Ruthie inherited money and sometimes
shortchanged bartenders by two bits when she bought beer and that she wasn’t
a street performer because she didn’t perform for money.
That bartender admires instead some people
who made balloons resemble animals and acquired enough money from doing that
in malls to buy two homes.
And she says all that is reason to hold
Ruthie in contempt.
She says Ruthie had undiagnosed mental health issues. She says
something was wrong with her.
She calls me a curmudgeon and
says that anyone would be stupid not to sell out the Quarter’s ancient
culture for money from sports fans.
And I have learned from many conversations
with her that she doesn’t believe in magic.
The best thing I can say about her is that
she isn’t a sports Fan.
She worships money.
That’s all.
Abstraction The unpresidential campaign
is getting less and less presidential.
Gingrich took it to a new step into the
ditch by advertising against Romney’s speaking French.
And he took it one more step by saying he
was trying to be funny as Cain was with his campaign manager smoking. And Romney has taken his
campaign one more step into the ditch by trying to buy votes for pocket
money.
At a rally, he said he saw a needy woman
he’d seen before, and he gave her all the cash he had in his pocket.
He could be less insulting by giving pocket
change to homeless people begging on the streets and including a Romney
button with it. I have often said that sports
is a model for bigotry, and Romney showed his bigotry against the dignity of
people with monetary wealth less than his, by making that woman’s poverty
public for his gain.
Some people call such bigotry competition.
Spades are not shovels.
This Week Sunday - 18 January 2012 Sports and Ronald Reagan fan
George Will said something’s wrong with anyone who criticizes Tim Tebow.
“When thou prayest, thou shalt not be as
the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in
the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men,” says Jesus in
Matthew 6:5.
Reagan also prayed on television, and
called pacifists “grass-eating know-nothings,” as Tebow is in the business
of beating other people out of fame and fortune. Economist Paul Krugman said
that the current economy is like the Great Depression.
During the Great Depression, people went
door to door begging for food and sent their children into the streets to
beg for money, and men left their families to hop freight trains to other
cities in a desperate search for work.
Now, families with more money than most
families had then can get food stamps, and people are living on welfare
rather than relocate or accept jobs for less pay than they received before
losing their jobs by failing to prove themselves competitive. And pundit without portfolio
Peggy Noonan presented her usual tangential absurdity with her usual
smugness.
Cokey Roberts pointed out that Rick
Santorum is a Roman Catholic, a fact discordant with other media reporters
calling him born again, a phrase more common to Pentecostal Protestants.
But no one pointed out that many South
Carolinians are Pentecostal Protestants while no top tear candidate on their
primary ballot for the Presidency is a protestant.
Intelligence The United States
government’s support of Israel provoked 9/11 by threating Islamic homes.
Now, Mossad’s assinations of Iranian
nuclear scientists has provoked the Iranian government to threaten to close
the Strait of Hormuz, and the United States government is supporting Mossad
by threatening military action against Iran.
Supporting the Israeli theocracy against
the majority population of the region is not in the interest of the United
States and will always provoke jihad. Arizona’s government, while
legislating to treat as drug traffickers workers in the United States
because they can’t support themselves in Mexico or afford to jump through
legal hoops to get here, has legislated not to celebrate the birth of the
Junior Martin Luther King.
And Alabama’s government is still doing
everything it can to reverse the success of its capital’s bus boycott. Yesterday an Alabama drug
addict bragged to me about AU’s football team’s kicking LSU’s ass.
In the sixties and seventies, drug addicts
were pacifist hippies, but now they’re bellicose football fans!
But what can we expect in a nation eating
Advil while calling such bigotry school spirit?
Vectors There she is again, graceless
Nancy Grace, returning like Freddy.
She’s still calling Casey Anthony Top Mom
and saying she was blasted cheerful through her trial.
And her media sponsors remain complicit in
her crap. ABC has another person it
calls a legal expert frowning at graceless Grace and often disagreeing with
her.
But ABC also says Anthony sat stone-faced
throughout her trial while truth is that we could see tears on Anthony’s
face during the trial.
But, anyway, anyone who listens to Grace is
as graceless as she is. She calls mental health
professionals shrinks and says we should look up their jargon on
dictionary.com.
And she calls facts supporting Anthony
perfume on a pig.
A pig is graceless Grace trying to dance
with stars.
Balaam’s ass Jesus said that, if we have
faith no larger than a mustard seed, all things will be possible to us.
Romney says he’s a Christian, but he
engineered Hillamneycare in Massachusetts, showing that his faith isn’t as
large as that of the woman who healed herself by believing that touching
Jesus’ clothes would heal her.
Of course, Hillary doesn’t claim
Christianity, but the issue is separation of church and state. And, of course, supporting
the Israelis against the Palestinians by calling Israel a democracy also
violates that constitutional mandate.
Netanyahu, who as Prime Minister of Israel
ought to know, says that Israel is a Jewish state and accordingly a
theocracy and not a democracy.
And the Palestinians have behaved far less
murderously toward the Israelis than the Israelis have toward the
Palestinians. But people calling themselves
evangelicals in South Carolina campaigned against John McCain by saying
McCain had a black child.
They should note that the Bible says Moses
married an Ethiopian woman and that Moses ordered the massacre of his
in-laws and
blood relatives who took him in after he
fled Egypt before the Exodus.
They should take the Ten Commandments to
heart.
Hillamneycare NBC’s Brian Williams
responded to Romney’s saying we should be able to fire health insurance
companies for not doing their job by calling health insurance companies
consumer companies.
Health insurance companies take money from
consumers and invest it on Wall Street while doing everything they can to
avoid giving the consumers what they pay for.
That makes them investment companies and
not consumer companies and by no means liberal. I’m a veteran of Vietnam and
Afghanistan and rely entirely on the Veterans Administration for my
healthcare.
The Veterans Administration doesn’t gain by
denying me care I need or by selling me care I don’t need or by stilting its
behavior for fear of law suits.
And, because it has its own specialists, I
don’t have to pay for referrals from my PCP. If Democrats wish to promote
healthcare rather than mercenary greed, they should live up to their
socialist reputation, by recommending government healthcare.
But instead they’re doing what they say
Republicans do.
But they always do that.
Low and outside Romney should have said that
he likes to fire people who don’t provide services we pay them to provide.
But the point he nevertheless obviously
tried to make is that people should be fired for not doing their jobs.
And that notion should have applied to the
Wisconsin teachers who by their example taught their students to play hooky
by turning in counterfeit doctor’s slips. MSNBC, the Democratic Party’s
main media propaganda machine, said that more important than the point he
tried to make is was how he tried to make it.
And MSNBC also keeps hitting him for saying
that corporations are people as though chief executive officers and
directors on corporate boards and employees of corporations aren’t the
corporation.
That’s all propaganda. But Romney is wrong anyway,
because few patients choose their insurance companies, but rather accept
whatever their employers subsidize.
And insurance companies always charge
patients more than they pay for their care and use all of that money to
increase corporate income by investing it in the stock market.
Insurance companies compete on Wall Street.
McCainia A symptom of PTSD is
delusions of persecution, and McCain has responded to his time in the Hanoi
Hilton by xenophobia, allying himself with Brewer against Mexicans and
Lieberman against Palestinians and now Romney against China.
The United States accomplished our
legitimate mission in Iraq when the Bush administration ran Saddam Hussein
into a hole in the ground.
Xenophobic paranoia undermines national
security and world peace. The United States should not
have stayed in Iraq to force the Iraqis’ reaction to their new freedom.
Obama let his administration get away with
the lie about killing Osama bin Laden and replace Gates, who surely knew it
was a lie and advised against it, with politician Panetta.
But the policy Panetta and Dempsey
announced this week accords with the United States’ approach to Libya
whether or not they recognized that Gaddafi wasn’t as dangerous as Saddam
Hussein. Except Paul, who hasn’t
indicated that he knows the difference between offense and defense, every
Republican candidate is promoting boots on the ground when drones in the sky
can be more effective at less cost of life or money.
So I’m willing to find out what Obama will
do after relief from needing to depend on Dean/Reid/Pelosi for reelection.
I have a hunch that he’ll break free into
good sense and give all of Earth a breath of fresh air.
The melting pots Iowa is mainly farmland.
It’s hinterland dependent on agriculture
and literally dependent on pork.
So its electorate hardly represents the
others of the United States. New Hampshire is also mostly rural, but it’s within
commuting distance of Boston and was significant in the American Revolution,
and it’s been more libertarian than Boston for decades. South Carolina was also one of the original thirteen
colonies, and it has a rural economy but also has on the edge of its capital
the United States Army’s largest basic training center, and it was a slave
state. Florida is more cosmopolitan
than any of those other early primary states.
It’s full of Cubans and gangsters and drug
traffickers and retired people and college students on spring break. But none of those primaries
represents the general electorate.
And none of the candidates shall win all of
those primaries.
But they usefully draw general attention.
Little Las Vegas In Search of Excellence, the book that popularized
the MBA degree in the 1980’s, says that success in business depends on
knowing what business you’re in. For more than a quarter
century New Orleans has had the highest per capita murder rate in the United
States and a police force famous for murderous corruption and a government
famous for corrupt political dynasties.
The current Landrieu mayor has done nothing
to change any of that besides making the Pillsbury doughboy his police
commissioner and increasing property taxes to drive off investment and
promoting sports to cheapen tourism.
And his lip service is disservice. He recently said that we
should teach children not to hate and that the curfew his City Council has
enacted to keep children at home after 8:00 p.m. until they’re sixteen is to
encourage taking responsibility.
Promoting sports sets the example for
children to behave as adult sports fans do, turning over cars and beating
fans of other teams in parking lots and on public transportation, emulating
and idolizing the violence on the football field.
That is, it encourages idealizing hate, by
setting up such as Michael Vick and O. J. Simpson as role models for
children. The best thing about New
Orleans is its French Quarter, the neighborhood that was all of the city
when Bienville founded it in 1718, the neighborhood that established every
genre of uniquely American music much longer ago than a quarter century.
And for much longer than a quarter century
the Quarter has profited from tourists appreciating the music and cuisine
and architecture unique here.
But Landrieu is turning the Quarter into
one big sports bar with poker machines. Low property taxes attract responsible residents, and
responsible people are not couch potatoes from Metairie or Dearborn, and
they prefer responsible governments.
Frostiness “It doesn’t matter whether it
was your department or another department,” said a police chief to ABC News
about the death of a police officer, “You still feel the loss.”
That defines the sports attitude, the
notion that normal is siding against anyone not with or siding with your own
team, the perversion of bigotry!
Why doesn’t what he said go without saying? “No man is an island,” said
John Donne in his seventeenth meditation, the one in which he also
admonished us to “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for
thee.”
Jesus used his parable of the good
Samaritan to try to make the point that the Samaritan, while Jews had said
for centuries that Samaritans are all bad and enemies of Jews, was more of a
neighbor to the wounded Jew than was the passing Rabbi.
But centuries and millennia pass with
hardly anyone claiming any religion accepting that. Now we have people calling
themselves evangelical running for the Presidency of the United States
claiming that we shouldn’t be neighborly to children of people who came to
the United States from a neighboring nation because they came here
illegally.
And they similarly support how the Israelis
treat the Samaritans.
And no fences make neighbors.
PTSD Post-traumatic stress
disorder come not mainly from what others have done to military personnel
but mainly from what military personnel have done to others.
Freud used the word “repression” to refer
to denying oneself conscious thought of anything one cannot reconcile with
one’s own conscience.
But now most of the repression and denial
is on the part of the government and the mental health professionals and the
media. The media are using the word
“swift-boating” to refer to any negative campaigning, but the veterans who
referred to John Kerry’s cowardice were simply saying what they’d seen,
repressing only denial.
Kerry, on the other hand, denied his
complicity in Vietnam after begging medals for himself to get him out of
their early and before calling himself a war hero.
Kerry, accordingly, confuses and
contributes to the guilt feelings of all veterans. And one Kerry supporter is
Chris Matthews, who calls his show by a sports metaphor and showed this week
how he feels about patriotism, by responding to a presidential candidate’s
quoting the song “America the Beautiful” by mocking the song.
Obama’s administration has demoralized the
SEAL’s by making them complicit in its false claim to killing Osama bin
Laden.
And now it’s quit on the SEAL’s mission.
Mitch Jackson New Orleans’ French Quarter celebrates each New Year
by dropping a statuette of a baby from the top of Jax Brewery as a sadistic
perversion of the tradition to put one in a king cake to symbolize the body
of Christ the king in the Eucharist. And I heard a rumor last week
that the mayor is considering dropping from a fleur de lis instead in future
years, not to symbolize the saint who designed the fleur de lis in fifth
century Reims, but to symbolize the football players calling themselves
saints.
And that mayor recently said his Pillsbury
doughboy police commissioner is trying to stop children from hating.
We need to stop inspiring children to
behave as adult football fans. The corrupt political
dynasties of New Orleans are steadily chopping away at the historical
heritage of the French Quarter.
The Landrieu family could less
sacrilegiously drop a football from that roof.
And they should let it lie as they do.
Jackasses in
elephant suits Virginia, the Old Dominion of Robert E. Lee, has
permitted the Party of Ulysses S. Grant to require signing an oath to vote
for that party’s candidate in the general election for permission to vote in
the primary. And that beltway state’s
weird ballot criteria have kept Newt Gingrich from the ballot.
That means Gingrich, who is a Virginia
resident and presumably will vote in the Virginia primary, won’t be able to
vote for himself in the general election if he wins that party’s nomination.
That’s crazier than voting for Gingrich. And Fox News, the main media
propaganda machine for that party, called people disinclined to sign the
oath riffraff.
But Iowa doesn’t permit soldiers in
Afghanistan to vote by absentee ballot.
That’s crazier. ![]()
Fiddling while
burning Pastors are campaigning from
the pulpit.
Gingrich, presumably to dump the baggage of
having divorced twice, converted to Roman Catholicism.
And, while also calling himself a
historian, he denied the existence of a people whom Egyptians forced into
Canaan from the southwest at about the time that the Israelites invaded it
from the northeast. Romney while calling himself
a Mormon, and Santorum and Perry while calling themselves evangelical,
preach the sectarian violence that Gingrich used that denial of history to
preach.
Bachmann also preaches sectarian violence
and homophobia while Paul preaches for homophobia but against sectarian
violence.
Christian faith has nothing to do with any
of it. Jesus preached against
violence and used the parable of the good Samaritan to try to define
neighborliness.
The evangel John, whether or not Jesus
accepted homosexuality, called himself the disciple whom Jesus loved and
bragged about leaning on Jesus’s breast at the last supper.
Politicians, Christian or not, could learn
from the gospels.
Yoga Judaism is not a monotheistic
religion.
Consider the first of the Ten Commandments:
“Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”
The Tanakh does not say that no other gods
exist but only that we shouldn’t worship them as it says many of the kings
of Israel and Judah did. Hinduism is not only
monotheistic but also monistic.
Translators of Hindu scriptures use the
word “god” to refer to countless entities, but Hindu theologians say that
those entities are not gods but aspects or activities of the one God, which
they call Brahman.
And they say that all selves are one self
and that the one self is Brahman. Christianity, but not
Paulism, is also both monotheistic and monistic.
The Gospels say that Jesus said that he and
our Father are one and that we’ll be as he is if we do as he did and that
the kingdom of God is within us.
But Roman Catholics call that the
pantheistic heresy.
Desperate diction Neither “pro-choice” nor
“pro-life” accurately describes what persons who claim to believe in them
support.
Choosing to have an abortion for no reason
other than convenience denies responsibility for choices and deprives the
fetus of the choice between living and dying.
And, if the choice is between death of the
mother and death of the fetus, denying an abortion deprives the mother of
that choice of life. Similarly, the distinction between “conservative” and
“liberal” is a distinction without a difference, because persons calling
themselves conservatives wish to conserve the ideals of the Declaration of
Independence and the Bill of Rights while persons calling themselves
liberals wish to liberate them. But maybe the craziest misnomer is using “left” and
“right” as though they’re political terms since left and right are
directions that change depending on whether you’re facing or following
someone.
Nonsectarian
hypocrisy Newt Gingrich, with his
denial of the existence of eleven million Palestinians, has complained that
Ron Paul has suggested that the United States motivated 9/11.
Gingrich, while calling himself a
historian, says that Paul is anti-Semitic while most Semitic people are
Arabic.
That the United States government supports
such nonsense certainly partly motivated 9/11. But the United States
government motivated 9/11 more tangibly than by propaganda.
It consistently supports the Israeli effort
to oppress anyone not Jewish living in what three religions call the Holy
Land.
And the Tanakh is far more bellicose than is the
Koran. Consider also the difference between Gingrich’s
insanely denying the lives of eleven million people and Ahmadinejad’s
insanely denying the deaths of six million.
Resolution The United States
Constitution makes freedom of religion and separation of church and state
integral to the law of the land.
Yet for 63 years, while proscribing
Christians’ praying in public schools, the United States government has
supported a Judaic state’s oppression of Islamic people.
What we call the war on terror is a war on
Islamic terrorists trying to defend Islamic people against Judaic terrorism. Yasser Arafat formed Fatah to
retaliate against Menachem Begin’s Irgun’s 1946 bombing of the King David
Hotel.
The United States declared Irgun to be a
terrorist organization, and Irgun gave up its name but in 1948 became the
government of Israel, and Begin became its Prime Minister.
The situation became part of the Cold War
arms race when Israel’s invasion of surrounding Arab countries prompted the
U.S.S.R. to arm Arab countries while the U.S. armed Israel.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union partly
motivated the formation of the Taliban and Al Qaeda and 9/11.
And that motivated the U.S. incursions into
Iraq and Afghanistan. This new year is an election
year, and that gives us a huge opportunity at least to slow that grotesquely
hypocritical cycle of violence, at the polls.
The world’s economy is in a shambles, and
the United States is a huge part of the problem for all of us, partly
because of the financial costs of that war costing us also lives.
We can vote against anyone promoting any
sectarian violence by anyone anywhere.
Such as these CNN ran a story showing
pictures of children with Down syndrome in a psychiatric hospital with other
children.
It said that the Down syndrome children
didn’t belong there but didn’t question whether the other children did.
Down syndrome is more demonstrably
psychiatric than is schizophrenia. So close to Christmas,
another question is what would happen to Jesus, were he doing now what he
did two millennia ago.
A probability is that he would be not
crucified but confined to a psychiatric hospital.
The diagnosis would be schizophrenia. And another weird thing about
the CNN story was that it called the psychiatric hospital a mental hospital.
We don’t call other hospitals body
hospitals.
And the brain is physical.
Juvenile
delinquency Presents we return are gifts
we reject.
It’s a little like adolescents routinely
rejecting their parents.
You don’t get to choose your parents as you
don’t get to choose your Christmas gifts. But you can’t return your
parents as you can many of your Christmas gifts.
But the cause of the wish to do either is
lack of appreciation of friends.
But that’s assuming that your parents are
your friends. And, with all the child abuse
and neglect and abortions, that assumption is questionable.
And it’s questionable because many
adolescents never become adults.
Maybe because of their parents.
Kicking cans The day after Christmas, CNN
presented someone it called a financial expert, offering two pieces of
fiscally unsound advice.
He said that employees should ask their
employers to postpone from December to January payment of their Christmas
bonuses.
And he said that companies should delay
until January billing for their December sales. Postponing the bonuses until
next year will reduce taxes for this year but increase taxes for next year,
and employers aren’t likely to comply with the requests, because that would
increase their taxes this year.
And postponing billing until next year will
decrease this year’s taxes but increase next year’s taxes.
It’s all like the current congressional
behavior. The CNN anchor pertinently
asked what we can do now to decrease our taxes on 15 April 2013, and an
answer is that we should ignore the advice of that so-called financial
expert, but the so-called expert didn’t own up.
And, of course, another consideration is
that tax rates are likely to be higher later.
The recession tax cuts will expire.
Afghanistan without kings or communists or theology:
| Dust, a novel
This is a beautiful book, a song from the spirit of bold-faced truth, selah.
Wrong is Right - a 1982 film Every politician or soldier, every media executive or producer, every news media anchor or reporter, every sexist or racist or nationalist or Republican voter or Democrat voter, every Yankees fan or Red Socks fan and every other bigot picking one side against all other sides, for no reason other than putting his or her interests above all others’, without regard to history or common decency or other facts, should see this presentation and go back to school.![]()
Modern Times – a 1936 Film Suddenly we live in a time long past the political issues of this film. We have risen from all that to a complacency that has us calling communication tweeting and sexual companionship hooking up. Such is how Greece and Rome fell. ![]()
Catch a Fire - a 2006 film This film implies that white communists fronted Nelson Mandela and that he was sexually promiscuous, more than forty years after J. Edgar Hoover used the same approach against the junior Martin Luther King, and less than three years before Dirty Harry implied that a white soccer player saved South Africa.
Moonstruck - a 1987 film These people seemed more Jewish than Italian to me. But one fault in the premise of the film is that it misses the point about why men chase women other than the birds in their hands. The reason is the same as the reason people tend to think that the grass is greener on the other side of the hill. Men chase women to think they’re better than they feel they are by getting anything they don’t already have. It’s the same reason that short guy Napoleon tried to own all of Earth. Most women can better appreciate what they have. But Oprah is an exception.
The Experiment - a 2010 film This freak show suggests that people so desperate from their egos that they think tattoos can improve them, and wish to use sex to usurp the integrity of religious teachers and volunteer for experiments for money rather than make an honest living by being compassionate to people who are physically weaker only because they are older, are higher on the evolutionary ladder than animals smart enough not to be dumb enough not to talk such cheap nonsense.
Nixon - a 1995 film This film begins with the correct caveat that it isn't the whole truth and may wholly misrepresent any truth, and the next screen quotes the evangel Matthew quoting Jesus, implying that Nixon sold his soul. CNN calls Oliver Stone a controversial director, after his wife has turned the American Broadcasting Company's evening news into an all Advil Oprah drugh opera, like Stone's movies. Whether or not Nixon told his mother to think of him as her faithful dog, a fact Stone tries to soap or drug is that Nixon ended Johnson's insane war. History allows no excuse for either Nixon's hubris or stones. Or Hirohito's or Truman's or Kennedy's or Hoover's. History allows no excuse for Hitler or Netanyahu. Democracy needs objective reporting from ABC to Hollywood. Stone is at least as contra-factual as Nixon.
Avatar - a 2009 film The weirdest thing about this film is that nearly every mass media critic said its point was commercial technological superiority. The point fair watchers find from this film is that technology should serve democracy, not superiority or demagoguery, not alienation. Families risk death to flee Mexico to pick fruit for the free and legally republican citizens of the United States. And, instead of welcoming them, the people too lazy to do such work create laws to keep them out. They say that those people who can't afford immigration lawyers should not be allowed to attend their tea party. They call fruit pickers drug dealers to get them out of their faces. America, the land illegal immigrants stole from its natives, allows a population that sucks up to advertizing that it should be all Advil, while calling people not on Face Book degenerate.
Network - a 1976 film Netflix, a generation after this film appeared, bills it as a prediction. What it is is a fact of human life, recognizing that Jewish gold and Arabic black gold are no different in their effect on the ecumenical economy, the power of abstraction to make humans value hubris more than their lives. It sold Archie Bunker and Tide as it sells Oprah Winfrey and Tylenol.
The Devil's Arithmetic - a 1999 film The Israelis should remember the holocaust when they do what they're doing to the Palestinians. Arithmetic is that the Israelis keep building settlements while the United States tells them to stop building but never to dismantle. The "com" in compassion means with, and so compassion is a two way street and not a path of vengeance, and the Palestinians are more Semitic than the Israelis and neither German nor Egyptian. Nothing is more holy than home, and God made the land three religions call holy the homeland of people of many religions, long before crusades or jihads or the unprovoked Jericho slaughter. And the land of the free calls the Israeli theocracy, Irgun terrorizing Fatah, democracy.
The Celestine Prophecy - a 1993 novel and a 2006 film The novel is one of the few books whose promise bore out so poorly from its beginning that I couldn’t finish reading it. And the film was more inane, beginning with someone saying he was a history teacher responding to someone saying he was an archeologist saying that the early church had buried the title prophecy in the 6th century A.D., by suggesting that Franciscans might have done it. Francis began his life in the 12th century A.D. The title prophecy says that the present millennium shall begin with people’s recognizing the violence that has pervaded history and stopping it. Instead, the new millennium has begun with the historical inaccuracy of the Da Vinci Code making it the most selling novel of the first decade of this millennium. But maybe we can take hope from that. The prosperity of the last decade of the second millennium after Christ caused the recession of the first decade of the third millennium after Christ. We hope that that might force teachers and students and everyone else to work for all living for awhile.
The Ten Commandments – a 1966 film This film begins with its producer saying its basis is scripture and historical documents and that Moses’ accomplishment was to free people from slavery Next, the film misquotes the Torah and says Pharaoh’s daughter named him Moses because she drew him from water. “Moses” is from Egyptian for “son”. Dan Brown admits The Da Vinci Code to be fiction and still has nothing on Cecil B. DeMille for hogwash misrepresenting the Bible and history, and so we have to ask why this film raised no Roman Catholic outrage. We’re thinking that maybe it’s sexism, since nearly no female character in it shows any purpose other than to fawn over men to give them sons or suck. But the next question, after how the Motion Picture Association of America ignores its violence to rate it G, is why no Judaic outrage. We’re thinking the Chosen might still be choosing the golden calf over the Ten Commandments, with help called Christian. The Bible says the Israelites did to the Midianites, the people it says took Moses in and gave him their king’s daughter, worse than what Egypt did to them and worse than what the Nazis did to the Jews. Maybe Israel let the film slide because it glosses over that and what Israel keeps trying to do to the Palestinians.
On the Trail of the Assassins - a 1978 book The author, Jim Garrison, Orleans Parish District Attorney, the only person to prosecute anyone for the assassination of J. F. K., is as crazy as Ann Coulter and the persons he accuses, if he wrote the book. The book falls apart in many ways incidental to Garrison's hubris or paranoia. One way is by its inclusion of the terms “false sponsor” and “sheep-dipping”. The people Garrison tracked must have been sheep-dipped false sponsors, as he must have been on the other side of the coin his book flips like dice. The people he accuses range from the CIA to Johnny Carson, as though that huge body of people could have kept such complicity from the huge body of people with whom they associate, and so on to all of Earth. Another way is in its assignment of motive, a factor essential to any prosecution in court. Garrison would have us believe that hundreds of people in a dozen government agencies conspired against Kennedy on the basis of their belief that he was going to prevent the war in Vietnam. Besides the question of why anyone wouldn’t like that, a fact is that Kennedy sent more troops to Vietnam than Eisenhower had. We suspect a more obvious motive for that assassination, far beyond New Orleans. Kennedy killed those people at the Bay of Pigs, by changing the original CIA plan and refusing to accept responsibility. Kennedy changed United States relations with the Soviet Union from checkers to the verge of nuclear destruction of all life. So, a few genuinely concerned persons at top levels of the Soviet and United States governments killed him to prevent that destruction. The false sponsors must have been after the fact. I have no doubt that the assassination was a conspiracy, as we agree that Oswald couldn’t have done all the shooting. But the human resources management of the deed must have been more constrained, leaving the smoke and mirrors the book sells to people as crazy as Garrison.
Idocracy - a 2005 film This film predicts a future when people try to grow crops with Gatorade, where the hero saves the world by watering the crops. In the present, people calling themselves environmentalist are trying to save the world by putting corn into gas tanks, while people around the world are starving. That hero's name is Not Sure, while in this day and age people claiming to be smart say they're not sure, when truth they know is that they simply don't know. Those people are the people who say we should do something for the people of Darfur while saying we shouldn't have done anything for the people of Iraq. They are people like Mitt Romney and John Kerry, like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Those people are the people who put criminals above persons, who haven't had a chance to choose life better than crime and say their choice is compassionate, liberal. As this film indicates, those people are already taking their world into the dust this film predicts.
Rendition – a 2007 film Tolstoy was a communist before Marx and Lenin rationalized a way for Stalin to give Joseph McCarthy an excuse to terrorize as Hitler did. This film says what War and Peace says, that the cause of all war is the first person who obeys the orders of megalomaniacs like Napoleon and Hitler, and that the way to peace is recognizing that all of life is one family. And it says that the problem between Jews and Muslims is that Muhammad retaliated against Joshua’s violation of the Ten Commandments. It says what the fireman at the Children’s march said, when he refused to roll water unjustly.
Across the Universe – a 2006 Film The Beatles are a microcosm. Kids sing about holding hands until they acquire power, and then they let go of their friends’ hands and their own minds, for what Solomon called vanity. Like Greece and Rome, the United States were a world power before they alienated their kids in Birmingham and Vietnam, and those children turned their nation into an escape from everything. The Beatles said they named themselves for the Beatitudes, before they turned to drugs, or after they rode them, to compromise, for fame. Now, Lennon is dead, and McCartney is white bread, and the First World is all Advil. Now, Lenin is dead, while Liverpool and the Irish suffer. Viva Las Vegas, the ways of the world. Irish and Iraqi suffer for no reason beyond the I in their names, as Israel suffers for no reason more than that humans prefer bigotry and drugs to the Ten Commandments, from the diamond minors in South Africa to the diamond merchants in New York, to you inactivists.
The Cotton Club - a 1984 film My favorite lines in that film are from a white couple entering the club. The white man says, “At least they don’t let niggers in here!” The white woman asks, “They don’t let them into their own club?” So Richard Gere gets billing over Gregory Hynes, two decades after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and now two more decades have passed, making more than forty years. Bootleggers like the Kennedy’s owned Harlem in the roaring twenties, and now the Clintons have moved in! How long, O Lord? Now we’re engaged in a great civil war, to see whether Obama can run the Clintons out of Harlem, and the Whitehouse. Cotton is white, while pickers are black, and now black has another fight to pick.
The Order of the Phoenix - a 2007 film Harry Potter answered a question most of us think impossible. The way to world peace is through the understanding that is friendship. Nearly everyone claiming a religion claims it as a superstition, although every founder of every remaining major religion argued mainly one point, the sharing essential to prosperity, loving one’s neighbor. Terror isn’t Islamic, as it isn’t Mosaic or Christian. Terror comes from such as Crusades and Jihads. Terror is in what Joshua did and in what Osama Bin Laden is doing and in what Hitler did and in what Israel is doing. It's in what every bigot does, and it won’t stop until all of us stop trying to blame it on Moses or Muhammad or Jesus, on everyone but ourselves. It won’t stop until we stop making excuses to covet our neighbors’ land, until we stop perverting the teachings of the founders of our religions from the Rishi’s to Muhammad, into ignorance of them. Only then shall we have something worth fighting for, and stop fighting. The essential weapon for peace is not secret. It’s plain.
The Last Hangman – a 2005 film Tolstoi said, in War and Peace, that the cause of the Napoleonic Wars was the first French corporal. This film says the same, that the cause of killing is rationalizing some excuse for it, be it vengeance or following orders, or supporting one’s country, or one’s family, or oneself. This film also says that we’re all in that craziness together, but it does not loudly enough say that, were each of us to refuse, it would all stop. Snail darters would die of their own accord, and they and all else could rest in peace. That Pierrepoint fellow was not the last hangman.
Meditation XVII - a 1623 sermon John Donne, not Jack Kennedy or Ernest Hemingway, said this: "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
The Wind that Shakes the Barley - a 2006 film This film shows that Ireland and Iraq are similar far beyond the fact that the names of both countries begin with "Ir" when written in the Roman alphabet. Ireland means anger land, and anger dominates both countries. And so does greed. When an Irishman told us that the strife between Catholics and Protestants in his country has nothing to do with religion, we didn't understand. This film explains. And neither is the strife between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq religious, and nor is Israel.
Eight Men Out – a 1988 film Consider the operant steps in this plot. A team conspires to throw the World Series because its members think they’re underpaid. Late in the series they decided not to throw the series because the bookies aren’t paying them. None of them considers his family’s welfare until a thug for the bookies threatens to kill one’s wife. A judge a salary offer before accepting responsibility for correcting all that. A kid asks one of the players to say the mess ain’t so about baseball. Joe, it was so in all professional sports then, and it’s so now. ![]()
Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid – a 2006 book Although Mr. Carter writes from the point of view and with the tone of his claim to Christianity, sometimes uses words and phrases particular to popular expression of persons calling themselves Christians, and occasionally points out facts particular to such persons, this book is nearly all factual. That is, rather than expressing opinions, it mostly points out circumstances and events verifiable through public records. Yet, it has a reputation for being controversial. Of course the reason is that few people bother to differentiate between facts and opinions, because most people are as opinionated and biased as some say Jimmy Carter is, and few people bother to research public facts, much less see for themselves, as Mr. Carter has. In fact, if the book has any shortcoming, it’s that Mr. Carter doesn’t succinctly point out the most significant facts defining the situation. Those facts are: that Israelites or Israelis have been oppressing Philistines or Palestinians since the battle of Jericho, an onslaught with no provocation whatsoever; that Israelis have killed far more people and broken far more promises than Palestinians have; and that the 1967 Israeli state was not one nation until 1949. Moreover, if that former head of government of the United States of America were to carry religious metaphors in defense of the United States of America, he might have pointed out how David defeated Goliath’s superior physical size. Now, Israel has nuclear weapons and air superiority through military aid from first world nations, as European nations took superior weapon technology on the Crusades. So, now, Islam is continuing Saladin's jihad, against the world whose trade center is now Wall Street. All a president needs to do to stop the terror is be fair. Smart is truth, beauty.
The Sound of Music - a 1965 film This film, set at the beginning of World War II, screened at the beginning of the United States presidency's escalation of Truman's advisory mission in Vietnam into a full scale war Nixon would would end. Three years earlier, West Side Story screened, asking the same questions. One film is about nations, while the other is about gangs while the only difference is scale, while presidents have ignored the politics of both. Both films, in retrospect, should cause us to ask why they didn't change humanity's prospects. That is, we should ask why we care more now about American Idols than about the ordinary people of Iraq or Darfur. Both films have iconic weaknesses. In one, a poor nun saves a family of aristocrats, and the other's title suggests that west is better than east. But the two share an eminently importantly iconic question. How do you solve a problem like Maria?
Flags of our Fathers - two 2006 films The second of these is Letters from Iwo Jima. The first looks at Iwo Jima from the United States side, and the second looks at that island from the Japanese side, and both show flagging responsibility, of fathers. Anyone seriously considering these films in tandem with the rest of life will ask why so few humans look at the Israeli/Palestinian situation from both sides, and whether Stephen Spielberg does! Maybe he does, but when shall humanity in general learn that compassion is the only salvation?
The Time of Your Life - a 1948 film This film set the theme for the best of Hollywood since. We had a problem with its epitaph, when the bar owner took the sign out of the window inviting folks in to be themselves and tore it in two, saying that enough is enough. But then we remembered that integrity is always exactly enough and shouldn't need a reminder! What's your dream?
Shine – a 1996 film Nothing is more important than music. Nothing is more important than the harmony of inspiration. This film says that. The horror of the holocaust lives on, from the horror of the captivity. This film tries to deliver a lesson to the Germans and the Egyptians, and the Israelis, all of us. The holy land is hardly holy, despite how the sun shines on Karn Hattin. Why don't Christians visit the Mount of Beatitudes? In the sixties, when the great society sent millions of Americans to kill Vietnamese doing nothing but trying to live their lives as best they could, a popular song borrowed a melody from Rachminov s second piano concerto and assigned it the lyrics “When I was young, I never needed anyone. Making love was just for fun. Those days are done.” Rachmaninov’s third piano concert is more difficult to play than his second while his second, played more in the film, is more sweet. And popular music is more sweet now, in the war on terror that has made Bethlehem a combat zone. How is Christ's birthplace in the shadow of death? Astrology, psychology, stars and butterflies, what life comes down to is common sense. This film is quite lovely.
somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond - a 1931 poem A Harvard poet wrote that poem between the two world wars, between his imprisonment in France for driving an ambulance and German imprisonment of France for nothing. Films we find near to that poem are The Painted Veil and The Tiger and the Snow. Both films show what love between two people should be, as they show what love is. Imagine Nero walking the Great Wall, if you wish such as that. We all must remember that our enormous room is a small roe's chest. Otherwise we cannot love.
Paradise Road - a 1997 film "Oh, my dear, that's one to tell your grand children. . . . Don't worry: I love God, even though I sometimes don't know what he's doing. . . . Love is like a flame; it burns and is visible to all. . . . None of us will ever leave Sumatra. . . . Amen."
Bound for Glory – a 1943 autobiography This book is exactly an autobiography. Other works in that genre try to explain the effect of the life in question on others’ lives. This book tells succinctly how Woody Guthrie grew to produce his effect. Woody and his story are works of dynamic integrity. We need to listen, closely. Woody Guthrie was communist, in the sense that we all should share God's bounty. He was not a Marxist or a Leninist or a Stalinist. Nor was he a Washingtonist or a Jeffersonist. Nor was he an Amerigo Vespugian or a Paulist or any other kind of excuse for a name.
Reflections of a Cold Warrior and From the Shadows – two 1996 memoires Both authors were at the top level of the Central Intelligence Agency. One planned the U2 project and the operation Kennedy turned into the debacle at Bay of Pigs. The other, recruited into the agency from college during the Johnson administration, worked his way up to directing the agency during the first Bush administration. But the first declines to blame Kennedy for the mess he made, and the second hardly mentions the former Director of Central Intelligence who appointed him to that position while President, making both books smoke screens for coversion. But any competent CIA analyst could synthesize truth from the details.
Jude the Obscure - an 1895 novel "Because we are too many."
Babel - a 2006 film With great technical and aesthetic prowess, this film shows how cheap and cowardly and stupid humans have become, the abstraction of the word “humanitarian”. Many of its details and time lines don’t work together, but neither do many humans attend much to what’s in their faces, rationalizing private greed against public concern. Journalists and politicians and doctors and lawyers keep trying to take advantage of the weakness of humans trying to be as suicidal, self-destructive, as they are. One of the twelve tasks of Hercules was to kill the Titan Antaeus, the difficulty being that Antaeus regained his strength whenever he was down to Earth. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences keeps proving itself Herculean. But most important are our children. Note the dedication.
The Milagro Beanfield War – a 1988 film This was a Sundance production. It’s set in New Mexico, the state of the united ones whose flag represents the sun. Its theme is the power of the people, and it shows how humans can unite for the best of their life and love, against the power of humans who unite for smaller selves. But it waves a rabbit dead to excuse firing to frighten humans. Beans contain as much protein as animal meat, leaving killing cattle less practical than killing trees for golfing. Humans eat like pigs, but we work harder at it. This film promotes considering the lilies of the field, while it promotes eating sparrows. It does not pass through the eye of the needle. But it helps.
Hollywood Ending – a 2002 film In this film, Woody Allen closes his career by admitting the cause of his success, that he has catered to hypochondriacs, people who seek only pity. Aristotle pointed out the technical difficulties of the staging of his time, and the French called those limitations an ideal and adhered to that absurdity long after Shakespeare freed the rest of us, and long after Eisenstein offered us Shakespeare’s best wishes, and now their pride is in ennui. Cinema, at its best, goes straight to our hearts by opening our eyes, not by giving us more weak excuses. In this film, Allen admits he has nothing on Eastwood. And cinema is still beginning. To show, to move. Just see.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter – a 1940 novel Richard Wright said that Ms. McCullers accepted blacks. More recently, linguists have called the non-white grammar and diction of blacks the “negro non-standard dialect”. African Americans no longer wish to be called Negroes, and Ms. McCullers did not accurately represent their dialect. But she did faithfully represent the lonely hearts of the down and out! Can Mick ever rediscover her music?
The Last Samurai - a 2003 film What’s the difference between a protagonist and an antagonist? This film is a story of redemption, a story of love for the best and worst of us. If one can divorce oneself from merchandising and violence, this film is beautiful. In its beginning, the protagonist is a soldier who failed to die in battle, a person dead of his past and living without future. In the end, his horse’s head is above his, as he bows to “the peace all of us seek and few of us ever find.”
Sister of the Road - a 1937 novel This is another beautiful book. The man who wrote it must have been in love. Maybe a little as Mark Twain must have been to write Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.
The Bible – a book still being edited Its basic story line is belligerent greedy people ignoring peaceful people and lying about them to kill and otherwise rob people preferring a pitch for violence or money. The central human character perfects his tactics early in the story by using his familial affiliation with one faction of his gang to get that faction to try a power play to rule the other factions. And the violence extends to sex when he sends one of his henchmen to die in battle because he has the hots for the guy’s wife. Later in the story, after the power play succeeds, one of the two main peace creeps tries to stop all that stuff, but some lawyers for the succeeding faction trump up some charges against him, and a judge lets them have members of the faction kill him. Next, an especially murderous member of that rebelling faction sells the peaceful guy’s followers a bill of goods that propagandizes the peaceful guy’s preachings into a way to make money by telling people they can live forever, if they believe in the peaceful person. He tells them they’ll die if they don't give him all their money. This book is a perfect story of the dangers of corruption and ignorance. Long before the power play dividing factions of the gang against each other, a leader of the gang tries to sell the gang the same peaceful notions the later peaceful guy tries to sell again, but the original gang does the same thing to that preaching as the faction does to the later preaching. But a sequel called The Koran tells the same story more succinctly while no one has edited any of its critics' comments into it. ![]()
War and Peace – an 1869 novel Tolstoy, while fathering thirteen children with a woman he married when she was half his age, is mostly about his love for her. The last hundred-some pages of the book he wrote while she bore most of them try to justify the book otherwise, as an essay on war regardless of peace. And, maybe so, he died leaving his wife, the mother of his children, to justify his thinking. Many of us live and die that way. We ignore our life.
"Nothing on Earth is worse than bigotry, |
| We must remember Rachel at the well ! Text on this page represents only the views of Billy Lee Harman . |