A Very Nietzschean Christmas

This cartoon from Big Fat Whale has something for all us war-on-Christmas foot soldiers* -- I particularly like the Richard Dawkins snow man, the wreath design, and the Nietzsche sweater, though I think Nietzsche was an agonized sort of atheist rather than the cheerful sort -- I read him to mean something more like 'Oh crap, god is dead, now what?' as distinct from 'Hooray, god is dead, let's party like it's 1899!'

Then again, insanity contains multitudes (as does genius), and no one trash-talked religion with more alacrity and verve than crazy, brilliant old Freddy Nietzsche -- one of his writings is titled The Antichrist, after all. This is from Ecce Homo:

"God", "immortality of the soul", "redemption", "beyond" -- Without exception, concepts to which I have never devoted any attention, or time; not even as a child. Perhaps I have never been childlike enough for them? I do not by any means know atheism as a result; even less as an event: It is a matter of course with me, from instinct. I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand for any gross answer. God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers -- at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!

Zing! And this from The Gay Science:

One form of honesty has always been lacking among founders of religions and their kin: they have never made their experiences a matter of the intellectual conscience. "What did I really experience? What then took place in me and around me? Was my understanding clear enough? Was my will directly opposed to all deception of the senses, and courageous in its defence against fantastic notions?" None of them ever asked these questions, nor to this day do any of the good religious people ask them. They have rather a thirst for things which are contrary to reason, and they don't want to have too much difficulty in satisfying this thirst, so they experience "miracles" and "regenerations," and hear the voices of angels!

Zung! The point is, I am confident that if he were still alive today, Nietzsche would be flattered, amused, and enraged to see one of his most provocative statements stitched into a garish Christmas sweater. He would also be very, very old, and probably crazier than ever.

No, I have re-thought the matter one final time and it turns out there was no point, as "points" are for suckers. Merry Christmas!

(via Domestically Challenged)

---

*As I have explained before, I have nothing against Christmas. Indeed, I celebrate it with good cheer, and insofar as I get testy about it, it's over the tiresome "Jesus is the reason for the season" chatter. Sure, it has something or other to do with Jesus, or had at one time -- he apparently wanted his birthday remembered with a society-wide gift exchange and large-scale disfigurement of pine trees rather than a surprise party and wish-granting candles stuck into a cake -- but I do not concede The True Meaning of Christmas to Jesus's friends or anyone else. Christmas belongs to all by now.

Kangaroos and Gods

Ophelia Benson is not the only one who smells a rat:

The whole set-up really is a cheat, and it can't be seen as anything else. We do have faculties that work, and it is beneficial for us that they work, yet when it comes to God we are supposed to do the opposite of what we do the rest of the time. We are supposed to veto our own cognitive abilities and just believe things for no good reason. That's backward. A decent God shouldn't expect that kind of reversal. It's a cheat and it's also an insult ...

Quite so, and beyond that, such an arrangement -- a god who expects us to believe by means of reversing and suppressing our usual truth-finding capacities -- would be a terrible waste in a sort of Maslow Hierarchy sense. Under the assumption that this god exists as presented, we humans, given the way we're constituted, have to expend vast mental energies just to scratch around deeply enough to believe in it.

Whereas if its existence were as perspicuous and undeniable as the existence of the sun, kangaroos, or the city of Madrid, we could devote those energies to higher-order ends, such as not killing, abusing, or stealing from one another. Behaving ethically would still be as difficult as it is now, but we would not have to waste any calories on theological and existential preliminaries: the necessity of billions of words and countless hours of effort would be wiped away, clearing the space for higher pursuits.

We don't need to believe in kangaroos; we can just check the voluminous documentary record, or go to a zoo, or go to Australia; we can simply accept the existence of kangaroos and move on to understanding and/or giggling at them. A god who was more like kangaroos -- living somewhere we could find, with definite habits and appearance, possibly marsupial -- would make more sense than the gods of ancient lore.

Crap-Wrapping: First Foray of 2009

These are my first Xmas crap-wrappings of the 2009 regular season. I am pleased with these, but I expect better from myself. For starters, I need to branch out from the green masking tape and find new means of adhering the wrappings.

Also: more creepy faces needed.

It's a start.

The Many Loads of Shit

Not that it detracts from my disgust for Senator Lieberman, but Glennzilla lays out a portrait of a rot that runs far deeper:

[T]here is a reasonable debate to be had among reform advocates over whether this bill is a net benefit or a net harm. But the idea that the White House did what it could to ensure the inclusion of progressive provisions -- or that they were powerless to do anything about it -- is absurd on its face. Whatever else is true, the overwhelming evidence points to exactly what Sen. Feingold said yesterday: "This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place."

It's quite a little political system we've produced here in the USA. There are two nominal parties: the one consisting of knuckle-dragging, warmongering, Bible-thumping, lying, shrieking anti-intellectuals who shamelessly promote the shortest-possible-term interests of business, and seem to derive their popular appeal, such as it is, from the same nihilism, paranoia, cruelty, and misanthropy that draws people to dog-fighting and snuff films. Such is the Republican party, and given its ways, the Democrats can do almost anything in the vicinity of public policy and come off as sober, high-minded, and responsible.

Consequently, while one side is drooling and barking insanely, worth observing only periodically to ensure that none of its members is approaching with a sharpened shank or chewing through his own tongue, all the substantive policy-crafting, such as it is, occurs between the least and most wild-eyed, reality-indifferent, and business-subservient wings of the Democratic party.

Thus the Democrats do exactly what they can easily get away with, almost anything -- always, by some crazy coincidence, landing in a spot that's to the liking of big-dollar interests -- and attempt to portray it as adequate. Or they portray it as the best we can hope for given the grim political realities, at which point the camera points at John Boehner, Sarah Palin, or Dick Cheney lunging wildly from behind a bite-mask, then back to the Democrat throwing up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. Q.E.D.

Speaking of which, remember "hope" as a loaded political term circa 2008? What a load of shit.

Entre révolte et dérision: Wednesday Stereolab Apologetics

Over the course of this precious, precious blog, I've done a poor job of concealing my adoration of the music of Stereolab, notwithstanding the odd "so last decade!" cloud into which their reputation seems to have sunk of late -- a situation no doubt helped along by the band's indefinite hiatus, which tends to pare back the publicity efforts.

Call me a hopeless tool -- of the machine, of the past, of Franglo-techno-krautrock post-whatever musical melanges, of lyrics delivered in French -- but I continue to find their music refreshing, challenging, and relevant even after thousands of listens. This is "L'Enfer des Formes," a favorite from Mars Audiac Quintet that, among its many layers, might include the most heartfelt and suggestive use of "la la la" in all of popular music:

Lie is in Right There in the Name

What can I say to this but here, here:

I despise Joe Lieberman. I always have, but every time I hear about him again, I despise him more. Treacherous, self-satisfied, self-aggrandizing, self-admiring - happy to make millions of fellow-citizens worse off than they would otherwise be, just for the sake of his own preening smirking ego. What a sack of shit.

Ophelia Benson is, perhaps, too kind to Joe Lieberman and too harsh to sacks of shit.

Human beings will suffer and die from Joe Lieberman's duplicity and mendacity.

A Good Constitution is Hard to Find

Cecil Bothwell isn't just a name you'd expect for a character in a Flannery O'Connor story, it's the name of a man recently elected councilman in Asheville, North Carolina. Bothwell does not believe in god, and the rest writes itself almost as plainly and grimly as anything in O'Connor. Bothwell's election has

riled conservative advocates, who cite a little-noticed quirk in North Carolina’s Constitution that disqualifies officeholders “who shall deny the being of Almighty God.” The provision was included when the document was drafted in 1868 and was not revised when North Carolina amended its Constitution in 1971.

Apparently this "quirk" is not "little-noticed" enough -- however quirky, actual passages of text in state constitutions tend to get noticed sooner or later.

When things like this happen, it makes me wish that the framers of the US Constitution, good country people all, had possessed the foresight to ensure that religious tests are never permitted as qualifications for public office. On the off-chance I had forgotten or misremembered some or other little-noticed quirk of the US Constitution, I checked, and as if by a stroke of good fortune, I came across Article VI:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Remember your constitutions -- the rights you defend may be your own.

Jennifer Connelly at 39

I want to extend happy birthday wishes to Jennifer Connelly, who turned 39 today, the day on which I was, quite by coincidence, first exposed to the glaring shortcomings and talent-wasting realities of the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, a terrible film that has no reason to exist.

Connelly's IMDB profile includes the following detail that is too deliciously perverse not to include in the annals of this precious, precious blog: the actress

[c]ut a single in Japan, which she sang in phonetic Japanese. She says her agent made up the idea that she is semi-fluent in the language.

Of all the things the parents of Jennifer Connelly pictured for their newborn in the closing days of 1970, was singing in fraudulent Japanese at the behest of her money-grubbing handlers among them? I think I know the answer, but I can't be sure.

Most of us don't have agents pressing us, for pecuniary reasons or other reasons, to pretend we know, or can sing in, a language we don't actually know well enough to sing in. Then again, if it came in trade for being paid monstrous sums of money for appearing in shitty feature films and being one of the most beautiful people on the planet, it might not be so awful. I've heard of uglier fates.

It should be noted (for purposes of this blog post) that the production of The Day the Earth Stood Still made a go at being 'green':

To prevent the wasting of paper, concept art, location stills, and costume tests were posted on a website created by the production for crew members to reference. Costumes were kept for future Fox productions or given to homeless shelters, rather than thrown away. Hybrid vehicles were used and crew members had orders to turn off their car engines if they sat in their vehicles for more than three minutes.

Now, I'm ever more sure I'm vindicated in my offline arguments to the effect that some the costumes seen in the control room scenes of The Day the Earth Stood Still were re-used by Fox in subsequent episodes of American Dad.

Poem of the Day: "It Was Not Death"

This is a poem superficially about death but more about the end beyond which the speaker cannot see. It feels about right on this day when I have lost the last of my grandparents.

Emily Dickinson, "It was not death"

It was not death, for I stood up,
And all the dead lie down.
It was not night, for all the bells
Put out their tongues for noon.

It was not frost, for on my flesh
I felt siroccos crawl,
Nor fire, for just my marble feet
Could keep a chancel cool.

And yet it tasted like them all,
The figures I have seen
Set orderly for burial
Reminded me of mine,

As if my life were shaven
And fitted to a frame
And could not breathe without a key,
And 'twas like midnight, some,

When everything that ticked has stopped
And space stares all around,
Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns,
Repeal the beating ground;

But most like chaos, stopless, cool,
Without a chance, or spar,
Or even a report of land
To justify despair.

Decisionmaking Without Certainty

Greg Craven has what seems impossible -- a promising way to change the way we talk about climate change. Watch and pass it along:



Craven expands on these ideas with DJ Grothe in a recent Point of Inquiry podcast.

Coyotes: Nervous and Numerous

There is now a blog of "The Canyon," which is a geological feature of the campus of Reed College -- or rather a geological featurette, given its diminutive size.

The word from the canyon's blog is that coyotes have been sited there of late, and while noting that coyotes pose no threat to humans, it grimly observes that

[C]oyotes will prey upon free-roaming cats and unleashed small dogs.

Being neither, I was right not to be alarmed upon seeing a nervous-looking coyote last week at the golf course where I run, and now I realize I should not have been surprised (at seeing it, not necessarily at its nervousness), as coyotes are apparently feeding on free-range cats and dogs from one end of east Portland to the other. We are overrun.

The canyon blog goes on to list ways to reduce what it calls "human-coyote conflict," and I have helpfully annotated the list:

* If you see a coyote, shout and make noise, wave your arms.[I would think this would only call attention to the coyote, which is sure to increase its nervousness, if not disrupt its feast of unleashed cat. Rude.]
* Never deliberately feed a coyote or other wild mammal.[Meaning, presumably, always keep your small dogs and cats on leashes. I don't have the small-turd tolerance necessary to keep a small dog, but have you ever tried to keep a cat on a leash? I'd rather cede a few cats to coyotes than subject them to the indignity of the leash, and I think they'd agree.]
* Never deliberately approach a coyote and teach children to respect all wildlife from a distance.[Indeed. Do one of these or the other, but not both. I choose the first, never deliberately approach a coyote, but I will expect the children to learn how to approach wild animals just as I did, by reading the blogs of geological featurettes.]
* Keep house pets indoors and allow only controlled access to the outdoors (fenced yards and leashes).[Now the cats and dogs have to stay indoors, within a fenced yard, and leashed? We might as well just euthanize them all now.]
* Always keep pets in at night when coyotes are most active. (While coyotes are most active between dusk and dawn, they can be seen at any time of the day.)[I don't know about the small dogs and their small turds, but oh, the cats, being nocturnal by nature, are not going to like this one. Their late-night squalling and mad-dashing is going to make us all want to let them out to face the coyotes.]
* Cats and dogs need to be on a leash or indoors at all times in Multnomah County, and in the canyon. [Yea yea, and I need to save all my money for a rainy day, spend all my money to help the economy rebound, convert to the metric system, learn CPR, try not to unnecessarily impregnate the octo-mom, and avoid soy milk if I don't want gigantic man-boobs. Need, need, need. Blah blah.]

For broadly "fifth amendment" reasons, I would prefer not to expand on why I would say this, but no one should be surprised if a middle-aged Amboina Box Turtle is also seen wandering the Reed canyon.

Father Mapple's Sermon

As delivered by Orson Welles as Mapple:



As delivered by Gregory Peck as Mapple:



As written by Herman Melville, chapter 9 of Moby Dick:

Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered the scattered people to condense. "Star board gangway, there! side away to larboard- larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!"

There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a still slighter shuffling of women's shoes, and all was quiet again, and every eye on the preacher.

He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit's bows, folded his large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.

This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog- in such tones he commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy-

The ribs and terrors in the whale, Arched over me a dismal gloom, While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by, And lift me deepening down to doom.

I saw the opening maw of hell, With endless pains and sorrows there; Which none but they that feel can tell- Oh, I was plunging to despair.

In black distress, I called my God, When I could scarce believe him mine, He bowed his ear to my complaints- No more the whale did me confine.

With speed he flew to my relief, As on a radiant dolphin borne; Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone The face of my Deliverer God.

My song for ever shall record That terrible, that joyful hour; I give the glory to my God, His all the mercy and the power.

Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon the proper page, said: "Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah- 'And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.'"

"Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters- four yarns- is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul Jonah's deep sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish's belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us, we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men, it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God- never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed- which he found a hard command. But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do- remember that- and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.

"With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men, will carry him into countries where God does not reign but only the Captains of this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that's bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other city than the modern Cadiz. That's the opinion of learned men. And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea. Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most easterly coast of the Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the westward from that, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee worldwide from God? Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. So disordered, self-condemning in his look, that had there been policemen in those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested ere he touched a deck. How plainly he's a fugitive! no baggage, not a hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag,- no friends accompany him to the wharf with their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he finds the Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo; and as he steps on board to see its Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for the moment desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger's evil eye. Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and confidence; in vain essays his wretched smile. Strong intuitions of the man assure the mariners he can be no innocent. In their gamesome but still serious way, one whispers to the other- "Jack, he's robbed a widow;" or, "Joe, do you mark him; he's a bigamist;" or, "Harry lad, I guess he's the adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or belike, one of the missing murderers from Sodom." Another runs to read the bill that's stuck against the spile upon the wharf to which the ship is moored, offering five hundred gold coins for the apprenhension of a parricide, and containing a description of his person. He reads, and looks from Jonah to the bill; while all his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah, prepared to lay their hands upon him. Frightened Jonah trembles. and summoning all his boldness to his face, only looks so much the more a coward. He will not confess himself suspected; but that itself is strong suspicion. So he makes the best of it; and when the sailors find him not to be the man that is advertised, they let him pass, and he descends into the cabin.

"'Who's there?' cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making out his papers for the Customs- 'Who's there?' Oh! how that harmless question mangles Jonah! For the instant he almost turns to flee again. But he rallies. 'I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish; how soon sail ye, sir?' Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up to Jonah, though the man now stands before him; but no sooner does he hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance. 'We sail with the next coming tide,' at last he slowly answered, still intently eyeing him. 'No sooner, sir?'- 'Soon enough for any honest man that goes a passenger.' Ha! Jonah, that's another stab. But he swiftly calls away the Captain from that scent. 'I'll sail with ye,'- he says,- 'the passage money how much is that?- I'll pay now.' For it is particularly written, shipmates, as if it were a thing not to be overlooked in this history, 'that he paid the fare thereof' ere the craft did sail. And taken with the context, this is full of meaning.

"Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. So Jonah's Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah's purse, ere he judge him openly. He charges him thrice the usual sum; and it's assented to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive; but at the same time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with gold. Yet when Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still molest the Captain. He rings every coin to find a counterfeit. Not a forger, any way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for his passage. 'Point out my state-room, Sir,' says Jonah now, 'I'm travel-weary; I need sleep.' 'Thou lookest like it,' says the Captain, 'there's thy room.' Jonah enters, and would lock the door, but the lock contains no key. Hearing him foolishly fumbling there, the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something about the doors of convicts' cells being never allowed to be locked within. All dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth, and finds the little state-room ceiling almost resting on his forehead. The air is close, and Jonah gasps. Then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship's water-line, Jonah feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale shall hold him in the smallest of his bowels' wards.

"Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in Jonah's room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung. The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far successful fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance. But that contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry. 'Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!' he groans, 'straight upwards, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!'

"Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of the Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags into him; as one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns in giddy anguish, praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed; and at last amid the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over him, as over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestling in his berth, Jonah's prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep.

"And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; and from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all careening, glides to sea. That ship, my friends, was the first of recorded smugglers! the contraband was Jonah. But the sea rebels; he will not bare the wicked burden. A dreadful storm comes on, the ship is like to break. But now when the boatswain calls all hands to lighten her; when boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard; when the wind is shrieking, and the men are yelling, and every plank thunders with trampling feet right over Jonah's head; in all this raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep. He sees no black sky and raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers, and little hears he or heeds he the far rush of the mighty whale, which even now with open mouth is cleaving the seas after him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship- a berth in the cabin as I have taken it, and was fast asleep. But the frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in his dead ear, 'What meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!' Startled from his lethargy by that direful cry, Jonah staggers to his feet, and stumbling to the deck, grasps a shroud, to look out upon the sea. But at that moment he is sprung upon by a panther billow leaping over the bulwarks. Wave after wave thus leaps into the ship, and finding no speedy vent runs roaring fore and aft, till the mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat. And ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast Jonah sees the rearing bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat downward again towards the tormented deep.

"Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his cringing attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known. The sailors mark him; more and more certain grow their suspicions of him, and at last, fully to test the truth, by referring the whole matter to high Heaven, they all-outward to casting lots, to see for whose cause this great tempest was upon them. The lot is Jonah's; that discovered, then how furiously they mob him with their questions. 'What is thine occupation? Whence comest thou? Thy country? What people? But mark now, my shipmates, the behavior of poor Jonah. The eager mariners but ask him who he is, and where from; whereas, they not only receive an answer to those questions, but likewise another answer to a question not put by them, but the unsolicited answer is forced from Jonah by the hard hand of God that is upon him.

"'I am a Hebrew,' he cries- and then- 'I fear the Lord the God of Heaven who hath made the sea and the dry land!' Fear him, O Jonah? Aye, well mightest thou fear the Lord God then! Straightway, he now goes on to make a full confession; whereupon the mariners became more and more appalled, but still are pitiful. For when Jonah, not yet supplicating God for mercy, since he but too well knew the darkness of his deserts,- when wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him and cast him forth into the sea, for he knew that for his sake this great tempest was upon them; they mercifully turn from him, and seek by other means to save the ship. But all in vain; the indignant gale howls louder; then, with one hand raised invokingly to God, with the other they not unreluctantly lay hold of Jonah.

"And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea; when instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east, and the sea is as Jonah carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth water behind. He goes down in the whirling heart of such a masterless commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to all his ivory teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison. Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord out of the fish's belly. But observe his prayer, and learn a weighty lesson. For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before you as a model for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah."

While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking, slanting storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who, when describing Jonah's sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself. His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed the warring elements at work; and the thunders that rolled away from off his swarthy brow, and the light leaping from his eye, made all his simple hearers look on him with a quick fear that was strange to them.

There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the leaves of the Book once more; and, at last, standing motionless, with closed eyes, for the moment, seemed communing with God and himself.

But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head lowly, with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake these words:

"Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press upon me. I have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly would I come down from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads me that other and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to me, as a pilot of the living God. How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him along 'into the midst of the seas,' where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and 'the weeds were wrapped about his head,' and all the watery world of woe bowled over him. Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet- 'out of the belly of hell'- when the whale grounded upon the ocean's utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth; and 'vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;' when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten- his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean- Jonah did the Almighty's bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!

"This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him who as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!

He drooped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a heavenly enthusiasm,- "But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him- a far, far upward, and inward delight- who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,- top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath- O Father!- chiefly known to me by Thy rod- mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world's, or mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?"

He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed, and he was left alone in the place.

It is truly a strange and compelling book.

We Have Good Memes

I like this meme suggested by Greta Christina:

The right to believe what you want is not the same as the right to never have your beliefs questioned. And that's just as true for religious beliefs as anything else. Atheists can respect and passionately defend believers' right to believe what they like, while still claiming the right to question and criticize those beliefs.

Yep, that one needs to propagate far and wide.

Pass it on.

Wine: The Horror

The following, from the thankfully faraway climes of Tennessee, is a small but convenient illustration of why sane adults consider "social conservatives" to be 100% full-of-shit knuckle-dragging cretins:

Opponents of wine-in-grocery stores testify:

In one state, she said, “Street drinkers came and they littered the neighborhood. I had an employee who lived in that area, and he had to literally move bodies of alcoholics who had passed out in his driveway in order to drive his children to work, and these people would be shouting obscenities to him and his children. … You’re just bound to have more problems with street drinking if you radically increase the outlets for this particular product.”

For my one and a half non-USA-based readers, I ask you to believe me when I affirm that, yes, the controversy here is whether wine, if sold in neighborhood grocery stores, will create a scenario in which the streets of the neighborhoods in question will become thickly peopled with drunken, screaming, family-life-obstructing belligerents.

There are people in this country who take the emphatic hell yes side of that controversy -- who do so out loud and in public. They maintain that selling wine in grocery stores will fill our happy streets, our peaceful neighborhoods, and our very homes with besotted louts shouting obscenities, breaking bottles, throwing things, picking fights, sleeping under bushes, and peeing all over the place.

The above is not a repeated typographical error. Yes, wine, the alcoholic beverage made from grapes -- known to "social conservatives" as the gateway drug to countless unspeakable form of mayhem.

... which of course raises of the question of how "social conservatives" have come to know this with such conviction, when the evidence suggests that the production of wine dates at least as far back as 6000 BCE, which in turn suggests an ~8,000-year-long cross-cultural social experiment on whether the availability of wine unravels communities, dissolves families, and soils everything with unwanted pee.

I believe the results are in on the level of reality. In Tennessee and in places like it, however, the controversy endures and the "social conservatives" wail and worry.

A Public Service Announcement for The Road: Never Trust a Trailer

For those still hemming and hawing over whether to watch The Road, and specifically for those who are loath to see another film adaptation crap all over its source material, please know that this trailer (embedding disabled) gives a very misleading idea of the film.

Come to think of it, it gives a few misleading ideas about the film, none of them trivial. All the distortions I have in mind exaggerate the departures between the film and the book.

I withhold specifics on this for reasons of spoiler-avoidance -- I've got to start my half-assed spoiler avoidance if I'm ever going to fail at it -- but I will just say that, in my judgment, the film tracks the book in content, tone, theme, and spirit admirably well, and this is no minor feat given the book in question.

World's Funniest Ex-Gay Liars

Notwithstanding my inability to read minds, I am confident that the person interviewed by Rachel Maddow in this video, Richard Cohen, is exactly as "ex-homosexual" as Tiger Woods and I are "ex-heterosexual," which is to say, none at all. Zero. Zip:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Of course, Richard Cohen's sexual inclinations are intrinsically private, and indeed insignificant, but Cohen himself invites public scrutiny of them since he is an avid promoter of the notion of "curing" homosexuality, and in this video and beyond, he grounds his authority on the subject in his own claimed experience of overcoming same-sex attraction.

This is an empirical question, subject to verification. I would be curious to learn what the available measurement devices say about the actual patterns of Cohen's sexual arousal. Mind you, I would prefer to see theses findings in a high-level 'executive summary' format with as few details and as little video footage as possible.

Above all, I would hope that the likes of Richard Cohen would step back and consider the real-world effects of his fake, bigotry-riddled, self-hating program of (unlicensed) counseling. Right now in Uganda, lawmakers are citing his brand of junk research to justify criminalizing homosexuality, with penalties ranging from life imprisonment to death.

Richard Cohen's denials are laughable; what's happening in Uganda and beyond is not.

A Thought on The Road and Fire

Having finally kicked myself sharply enough to find a way to watch the film adaptation of The Road (thanks, LN, for the spur), I have but a single thought on which I may or may not later expand depending on further reflection and my ever-swerving mood swings.

It would seem Peter Travers missed something pretty fundamental here:

The Road becomes heartening against the odds of what McCarthy called the “dimming” of the world. In this haunting portrait of America as no country for old men or young, Hillcoat — through the artistry of Mortensen and Smit-McPhee — carries the fire of our shared humanity and lets it burn bright and true.

Fire can be seen as the spark of hope, and it can also be seen as the means of destruction, and both are true -- in in the film, in the book, and in real life. In the film, fire is a source of light and warmth that keeps the man and his son moving forward, but is also a danger they must flee more than once, and, in a recollection of the last moments of the pre-destroyed world, the source of an alarming glow on the horizon that signaled the end's beginning. Fire is the source of the ashen air that blots out the sun and stops the cycle of life, and also the site around which the two characters have their last positive human interaction with a fellow traveler. It lights their way into dark places, but it also (more so in the book than in the film) betrays their location by night. It is, in the form of the pistol and the flare gun, a means of defense, a lethal weapon against others, and a suicidal final option.

To carry the fire is to carry hope and woe. For all the wandering and striving, and despite the suggestion of motion in the idea of "the road," it's far from certain that anything has moved by the film's end: fire remains fire, horrors offset possibilities, and everything is as gray as ash.

The book left me so heartsick as to be physically sick for three or four days. I expect the same as I continue processing the film, so I've lined up plenty of soup and blankets. And a flare gun.

Just When You Thought It Was Safe

With sharks on the decline worldwide, and the seas generally being cleansed of life forms in favor of huge whorls of trash, just as you were starting to feel some confidence about diving into the nearest body of seawater, word comes of a tiny jellyfish that can kill you three times before you realize you're in danger:

The jellyfish's sting can lead to "Irukandji syndrome," a set of symptoms that includes shooting pains in the muscles and chest, vomiting, restlessness and anxiety. Some symptoms can last for more than a week, and the syndrome can occasionally lead to a rapid rise in blood pressure and heart failure.

... The most common Irukandji measures just 0.4 inches in length and has tentacles as thin as a strand of hair that can grow up to 3 feet ... There is no antivenom, and people generally do not realise that they have been stung at first. The initial sting causes little pain, and it may be up to half an hour before a victim starts to feel the effects. [emphasis mine]

There is no antivenom, it says, from which it follows that the only escape from the grim fate this creature (the Irukandji jellyfish) inflicts is avoidance. It might be possible to lure one into latching onto a pressurized air tank and then shoot the air tank with your WWII service rifle, causing the creature to explode in dramatic fashion, but that kind of crap almost never works in so-called real life. I'd say you're going to need a bigger boat, but that wouldn't help -- these creatures routinely gang up and overturn entire cruise ships in their ravenous drive to induce heart seizures in primates, or so it would be perversely interesting to believe.

Take a good long look at the image at the top. If you see this creature while you're out dodging trash in the sea, swim the other way, or better yet, get out of the water.

(via Institute of Jurassic Technology)

Of DINOs and WINOs

For the sake of the seven or eight people who were hoodwinked into taking President Obama's July 2011 withdrawal-from-Afghanistan date seriously, Think Progress has helpfully rounded up some of the subsequent confirmation that this will be a withdrawal in name only:

Gen. David Petraeus: “There’s no timeline, no ramp, nothing like that.” [Fox News Sunday]

National Security Adviser James Jones: “It is not a cliff. It is a glide slope. And so certainly, the President has also said we are not leaving Afghanistan.” [CNN State of the Union]

Defense Secretary Robert Gates: “Well, first of all, I don’t consider this an exit strategy. And I try to avoid using that term. I think this is a transition.” [ABC This Week]

... On Meet the Press, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “We’re not talking about an exit strategy or a drop dead deadline.” Gates added, “We will have a significant — we will have 100,000 forces — troops there. And they are not leaving — in July of 2011.”

The symmetries of DINOs (Democrats in name only) announcing WINOs (withdrawals in name only) are more than merely verbal: the latter is a perfect illustration of the former.

To those of us who still retain a sense of identity with the Democratic party -- we the current center-stage suckers of American politics -- Obama's announcement of a withdrawal timeline was one of a few tangibles by which we could favorably distinguish last week's speech from any Bush-era speech on Afghanistan or Iraq. The current administration of DINOs couldn't even be bothered to foster this delusion, small and qualified as it was, for a full week.

Brrrr

In another unambiguous refutation of the very idea anthropocentric global warming, it is suddenly very cold here in fair Puddle-town despite it being several days away from the formal onset of winter.

I need better gloves. Everybody needs a clear understanding of the distinction between climate and weather.