My comment posted before I finished editing it., so here goes the rest.
Why would Fear of Flying be thought of more as a joke than a jewel? I hit my teens in the late 70s, and it seemed, to me, at least, a great time to be alive. Change for the better was in the air (*). An age of great movies, of changing TV, of interesting, challenging books, The ideas that had started to emerge in the 60s were solidifying: equality, freedom, civil rights, environmentalism, you name it.
And then the 80s happened. A counterrevolution of sorts. A revolution of greed, of selfishness. Of FYIGM.
And then the 90s happened, a correction of the 80s great counterrevolutionary excesses. But a correction of excesses only. The dawn of the 70s has not yet turned into a bright new day.
That, or I am just an old geezer yelling at clouds. YMMV.
(*) Gentle reminder that I didn’t grow up in USA, From my (dis)advantaged POV, Carter was a great President facing a challenging situation that no one could have avoided
I am going to say this in the most gently and respectful way I can (alas, the curse of writing instead of talking).
I had never heard before of Ms. DeJong, but this summary and description screams Erica Jong’s (OMG, I just realized they even share that) Fear of Flying. A contemporary novel that sort of makes similar points (or so it seems from your summary), but one that probably hasn’t aged well
Allegedly, Jin Steinman initially wrote Total Eclipse of the Heart for Meat Loaf. I wonder how much more magnificent that song would have been in Meat Loaf’s voice.
Home by Now (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laR3JoyPdm4 )is my favorite Meat Loaf song, by a long shot.
As it happened, early in the month it came out pseudo randomly in my car playlist, and I’ve been playing it over and over like a maniac in the last three weeks. It still comes up a couple of times a day, and then I replay it three or four times until I let something else come up.
In my mind it plays like an Opera overture, where the Chorus and the lead bass/baritone respond to each other. It’s an opera about soldiers bivouacking on the eve of a battle, and reflecting on why are they there, instead of home with their families.
There last weeks, I’ve played a game with myself. If Home by Now is the overture, what other Meat Loaf songs would make it into that opera? Heaven can Wait is sung by the hero going to war. Is Nothing Sacred would then be the hero confronting his beloved, who married another man while he was away. And so on. It would have been a really cool opera.
Ripping off another musical genii, Thank You for the Music, Michael Lee Aday.
Asimov once described, from the POV of someone born in a different start system parsecs away, the Earth-Moon system as a “double planet”, and something he had never witnessed before.
Asimov apparently subscribed to the theory that the rare circumstances of the Earth-Moon system was a likely explanation of the rareness and richness of Earth’s bioma
Not having grown in the USA, I find local property taxes as the basis for funding schools a bizarre concept. My peeve is mostly the opposite of your wife's. I find it extremely unfair that real state rich school districts can afford facilities bigger than many colleges, while rural WI schoolchildren have to do with derelict buildings.
Though @ Michael Cain and I would probably enjoy discussing optimal power regulation and dispatch over beers, and though I am willing to agree with him that the examples he mentions are probably egregious (at least the way he describes them), I do think that proper power regulation should be exclusively a federal competency. If anything, the problem he's signaling probably stems from having several federal agencies with overlapping competencies - ATF, Marshalls, FBI, DEA, you get the gist
I do not believe West Plainlands power producers would be better off with an OR BPA running the show, or with CAISO completely shutting them off the California market.
I think you are right in saying that the western Great Plains states -plus the Pacific NW coastal fringe, form a cohesive and distinct geographical and economic entity that can be integrated into a larger entity. Again, this West Plainland would be a “federated” thing, meaning the West Plainland government ought to regulate issues like water/energy/environment/natural resources and communications. There’s no real justification to a WY being distinct than an ID or a MT in West Plainland though there’s good reason that Missoula should be run differently than Casper.
My issue is not with larger cohesive units. It is with the artificial nature of the states
Far from saying that coastal cities should manage interior lands. Coastal cities should govern their own coastal hinterland, and inland cities their direct hinterland, and whatever rural empty lands there are manage theirs.
Whatever is not directly related to the community, including trade, defense, industrial and environmental standards, criminal and civil law, education standards, etc. should be federal
The point I would made -and have several other times in OT- is that, with the exceptions of Louisiana (civil code), Hawaii (history and ethnicity) and Alaska (weather), the states are not historically, geographically, ethnically, culturally, economically, or juridically different enough to consider them functionally equivalent to separate sovereigns.
All 50 states are definitely much more similar to each other than the European Union countries are. The 13 colonies might have had significant differences between them, in days of yore, when the fastest way to go from one state to the next was days of horse riding. But those differences have been erased when we all watch the same TV, use the same internet, buy the same products, and apply the same standards to them, no matter where we stand with respect to some arbitrary lines on the ground.
What is very different today, more so than in the XVIII century, is the difference between urban and rural areas, and the degrees or urbanization/population density. San Francisco is probably more similar to New York City than to Los Angeles. which is probably more similar to Houston or Phoenix than to Sacramento.
If the objective is to devolve power and government to that level which works better for its population, we should dissolve the states and focus in "metropolitan areas", where the economy, the population, and the culture might be similar. Upstate NY or IL might resent to be run by NYC or Chicago the same way Tampa resents being run from Tallahassee or Laramie being run by even more rural WY.
Honestly, though, I find it strangely easier to learn “physics math” from physics texts rather than math texts. I find the physics texts tend to play to my visual intuition more than pure math texts.
It is the same to me. I studied line and surface integrals in math and, though I passed the course, it made no sense to me. It was like Gauss was bored or something. The following term I studied the same concepts in Electromagnetic Theory and it was bloody obvious what those integrals meant in the real world 😇
I would point out that, in principle, Oscar is [was] expected to exercise his own agency on behalf of [Boeing] and its shareholders, under the general policies that the Boeing Board of Directors and the Boeing C-Suite executives crafted.
And because it is difficult for the elected Boeing Board of Directors and the Boeing C-Suite executives to direct every detail of the organization, they hope that the Boeing employees will get the details right-er. Sometimes they won't (Hello, 737 MAX) and we will all know about it. Most times they will, and we will call that a Wednesday.
I would be surprised if Oscar is arguing that Boeing's agents should have very limited agency, and the Boeing shareholders/board should be very careful about what agency is permitted to them. But I have been surprised by my fellow humans before
Oscar, with [really, for real] all due respect, I think we are talking past each other. Some of it is my fault, not understanding your post, some yours, perhaps not not being clear enough.
This is a post allegedly about the 51% voting itself free stuff. Stuff allegedly paid for by taxing the 49% unfairly. Stuff that the 49% didn't agree to pay for, or not to carry an unfair share of the cost.
We have all heard variations of that claim. It's Libertarianism 101.
My question, again, is, what is free stuff, and what is public services. Services I do not use, like a riot control trucks in Minnesota, , or a jet fighter, or insurance for beach houses in the FL Panhandle, I'd rather not pay for. But apparently I'm not entitled to a refund for those, because those are "public services". Someone voted itself a bunch of goodies on my dime.
On the other side, I'm happy to pay for more renewable energy, or for a bigger budget for NOAA, or for maternity AND paternity leave. But those are deemed "free stuff", and it's very unfair that Americans would have to pay for those.
And i really do not see the difference between my free stuff and someone's public services. It's all things that as Americans we have, through a very convoluted system that I also not fully approve of, have agreed to set up and pay for.
Engaging a bit on the actual original post, I am surprised to see the author trotting out the canards of "the progressive rates of the income tax are unfair".
If Jeff Bezos paid 40% of this income in taxes, it would be an enormous amount, certainly. But, ignoring for a moment that he probably pays no more than 5% of so in real life (a guess), given that, unlike me, Bezos income is not really only what it is in his W2, 60% of what Bezos makes will be more than enough for him to buy a new mansion every day, and a new helicopter every week. At some point, Bezos, or even me, who actually pays over 30% of my gross income in federal income taxes, run out of things to spend money in, and we just save the excess.
On the other hand, the people we are criticizing here, those who are not carrying their fair share, like that Amazon warehouse employee or Prime driver, at the end of the year do not have excess money to save, or even any disposable income to buy a single family helicopter. I mean, these people might want ME, and Bezos, to pay for bus routes so they can go to work. And roads. They want ME and Bezos to pay for roads, roads that neither ME nor Bezos will ever drive on. I, for sure, never consented for those roads to be built.
Further, we hear that -again- "61% of people do not pay [federal income tax]", while the author conveniently elides any mention of state taxes, sales taxes, and payroll taxes.
And yet, for some reason, I only pay payroll taxes on roughly 25% of my gross income. Bezos pays payroll taxes on such a small fraction of his income, that it probably shows as 0.00% in his W2. But that's not a benefit that share croppers, Walmart greeters, port stevedores, or nurse assistants enjoy. I wonder why. A similar thing happens to sales taxes. Since barely 10-15% of my income is used to buy food/clothes/cars/jewelry/60"TVs/yachts, sales taxes are barely an issue to me. I'm sure that's the same for the 61% of the people, those that don't pay income tax, because if those taxes were in any way relevant to those people, the author would have mentioned those.
I'm not sure I can see the difference between public services and free stuff. Perhaps someone would care to enlighten me
Are roads free stuff? What about police? Firefighters? stormwater drainage?
I also do not understand this voluntary thing about being part of/under the government the that Oscar mentions above. For instance, I did not voluntarily agree to fund flood insurance for houses inside the 1,000 year flood plain or in the path of hurricanes. And yet, every day in HGTV I see shows about million dollar beach houses being subsidized by my tax dollars. Let them get their own insurance if they want to live there.
And for sure I did not agree to invade Afghanistan. Where's my refund?
Perhaps what I am missing is the fifty examples, to parse what sounds like an emotional experience from what sounds like a supernatural one, to what sounds like a psychotic one.
Me, I sometimes suffer mild episodes of bipolar disorder (it's a family disease). I'm also a lucid dreamer. In the middle of suicidal thoughts or a manic episode, a voice behind my ears says: "pay no attention. It's only a temporary lithium deficiency". The same voice says: "I'm no longer enjoying this dream" in the middle of a nightmare, and monsters suddenly turn into puppies. I'm afraid if the Archangel Gabriel themselves would appear in front of me, my inner voice would say something about not eating those old leftovers from the fridge again in the future , since they obviously are growing [psychotropic] mold
Unlike the author, based upon his performance in the political arena, I do not believe Powell would have been an effective president. His tenure at State showed that he wasn't willing to stand up for his convictions (unless his convictions were similar to Cheney's, which is actually quite possible)
Though it might have been eight years of boring peace and prosperity, like it actually happened in the original timeline (thanks Bill C.!!), I doubt it would have been because of Powell. I suspect he would have deferred to/been pushed around by whoever ended in the Cabinet and upper echelons of a Powell administration. People that probably saw themselves as Powell's "betters" (in intellect and political savviness, not necessarily in racial terms), and would not have taken a cue from him and pushed him around. And, again like it happened in real life, Powell would probably have let them do it, and accept being used as a prop.
Not different, BTW, to what happened in the first Bush II period, before W finally got to courage to dismiss Rumsfeld, or the first half (the whole??) of the Trump administration, where most actual policies were farmed out to the Paul Ryan/Mitch McConnel wing of the GOP. Being President requires knowing how to control the machinery. Otherwise, the machinery will just do what they want
On Trump's statement, I won't read it. There will be little about Powell, lots about Trump, and almost everything will be lies. Not worth burning electrons on it
I think one of the essay's several first mistakes is that no one defines what is a mystical experience or communing with the divine.
There's a difference between perceiving the image of a burning bush, let's say, and looking onto the Grand Canyon and feeling ecstatic (see: for instance, the Stendhal syndrome). A lot of people that say they felt God in X or Y occasions describe things awfully similar to what new fathers describe when they see their child being born. But the birth of a child is not a mystical experience for purposes of the essay. Is it? In practice, the person having the mystical experience is the one making the call *IF* what he went through was a glimpse of the divine, or a great esthetic or emotional experience, or a deep moment of relaxation, or something else.
We interpret the world around us based on the patters in our minds. Certain people, whose mental map has a God(s) pattern embedded, will interpret what happened to her as an encounter with or an inspiration directly from Allah, or Athena, or the Great Buffalo. Others would interpret it as something else, without any reference to the metaphysical.
A friend of mine manages the food and catering at a large Houston hospital.
He describes what he has been living on for the last several months as a nightmare. He doesn’t know what part of his orders will show up, and when. We had dinner on Saturday: Coke only delivered a third of his order, Pepsi, half (lucky him, my supermarket doesn’t have Pepsi products), Doctor Pepper was a no show. And he has to have six different products in each soda dispensing machine, so he had to creatively distribute his limited soda inventory across the different cafeterias. They are not getting the regular disposable dishes and cutlery they are supposed to use in a CoVid world, and have to improvise. Menus that are supposed to be scheduled months in advance, to lock in prices, are up on the air because they don’t know what food will show up tomorrow morning.
Next time your wife orders puddings, she might have to take beans instead. Beggars can’t be choosers. Asians make great sweet snacks with beans. That is, if she didn’t have to take ketchup instead of sugar, because supply chain issues.
It’s unclear exactly who discovered or found out what and when. Vespucci claimed later in his life that he did understand they were exploring a New World by 1497/98 but many quasi contemporaries writing a couple of decades later believed Vespucci himself forged some documents later in his life to claim the primacy.of the “discovery” of the New World.
But by 1501, when the coast of Brazil all the to Rio de Janeiro was explored it was very clear that this was not the Asia everyone knew about. Besides being in the wrong side of the equator, this land was significantly less inhabited and vastly less developed that what Asia was known to be, with animals and plants that were not what the explorers expected.
Asia was far from Europe, but not unknown. People knew people that knew people that had been there. They had an expectation of what they would find in Asia, and that was nowhere to be seen (finding the Mexican valley and Andean civilizations were still decades in the future) Even Columbus claimed that he had only reached some islands west of Asia, like the Canary or the Azores islands were with respect to Europe, and not Asia itself.
Nope, it didn’t. Basically because there were land masses significantly south of where it was known the Asian land mass ended, they concluded, correctly and very quickly, that this was a totally different place. And they called it America, for the guy that showed this was nothing like Asia, Amerigo Vespucci.
Sailors didn’t have a way to accurately measure longitude until the XVIII Century, but they’ve been measuring latitude very accurately for several centuries by then.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Sunday Morning! “Modern Love” by Constance DeJong”
My comment posted before I finished editing it., so here goes the rest.
Why would Fear of Flying be thought of more as a joke than a jewel? I hit my teens in the late 70s, and it seemed, to me, at least, a great time to be alive. Change for the better was in the air (*). An age of great movies, of changing TV, of interesting, challenging books, The ideas that had started to emerge in the 60s were solidifying: equality, freedom, civil rights, environmentalism, you name it.
And then the 80s happened. A counterrevolution of sorts. A revolution of greed, of selfishness. Of FYIGM.
And then the 90s happened, a correction of the 80s great counterrevolutionary excesses. But a correction of excesses only. The dawn of the 70s has not yet turned into a bright new day.
That, or I am just an old geezer yelling at clouds. YMMV.
(*) Gentle reminder that I didn’t grow up in USA, From my (dis)advantaged POV, Carter was a great President facing a challenging situation that no one could have avoided
"
I am going to say this in the most gently and respectful way I can (alas, the curse of writing instead of talking).
I had never heard before of Ms. DeJong, but this summary and description screams Erica Jong’s (OMG, I just realized they even share that) Fear of Flying. A contemporary novel that sort of makes similar points (or so it seems from your summary), but one that probably hasn’t aged well
On “Thursday Throughput: Distant Star Edition”
I think the name is great
Earendel only now carries the light of the First Years, the light before the light of the Moon and the Sun.
On “Of School Lunch, Farm Bills, Free Riders, and Book Clubs”
Just a nitpick, 75-90% is not “partially fund” except in the most literal sense of the word. It’s basically all of it.
Otherwise, we are cool
On “What A Boring Musical World It Will Be Without Meat Loaf”
Allegedly, Jin Steinman initially wrote Total Eclipse of the Heart for Meat Loaf. I wonder how much more magnificent that song would have been in Meat Loaf’s voice.
We were cheated!! I want my money back
On “The Music of Meat Loaf (1947-2022)”
Home by Now (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laR3JoyPdm4 )is my favorite Meat Loaf song, by a long shot.
As it happened, early in the month it came out pseudo randomly in my car playlist, and I’ve been playing it over and over like a maniac in the last three weeks. It still comes up a couple of times a day, and then I replay it three or four times until I let something else come up.
In my mind it plays like an Opera overture, where the Chorus and the lead bass/baritone respond to each other. It’s an opera about soldiers bivouacking on the eve of a battle, and reflecting on why are they there, instead of home with their families.
There last weeks, I’ve played a game with myself. If Home by Now is the overture, what other Meat Loaf songs would make it into that opera? Heaven can Wait is sung by the hero going to war. Is Nothing Sacred would then be the hero confronting his beloved, who married another man while he was away. And so on. It would have been a really cool opera.
Ripping off another musical genii, Thank You for the Music, Michael Lee Aday.
On “Thursday Throughput: Binary Planet Edition”
Asimov once described, from the POV of someone born in a different start system parsecs away, the Earth-Moon system as a “double planet”, and something he had never witnessed before.
Asimov apparently subscribed to the theory that the rare circumstances of the Earth-Moon system was a likely explanation of the rareness and richness of Earth’s bioma
On “Restating: Rethinking States, Cities, and Redistricting”
Not having grown in the USA, I find local property taxes as the basis for funding schools a bizarre concept. My peeve is mostly the opposite of your wife's. I find it extremely unfair that real state rich school districts can afford facilities bigger than many colleges, while rural WI schoolchildren have to do with derelict buildings.
"
Though @ Michael Cain and I would probably enjoy discussing optimal power regulation and dispatch over beers, and though I am willing to agree with him that the examples he mentions are probably egregious (at least the way he describes them), I do think that proper power regulation should be exclusively a federal competency. If anything, the problem he's signaling probably stems from having several federal agencies with overlapping competencies - ATF, Marshalls, FBI, DEA, you get the gist
I do not believe West Plainlands power producers would be better off with an OR BPA running the show, or with CAISO completely shutting them off the California market.
"
I think you are right in saying that the western Great Plains states -plus the Pacific NW coastal fringe, form a cohesive and distinct geographical and economic entity that can be integrated into a larger entity. Again, this West Plainland would be a “federated” thing, meaning the West Plainland government ought to regulate issues like water/energy/environment/natural resources and communications. There’s no real justification to a WY being distinct than an ID or a MT in West Plainland though there’s good reason that Missoula should be run differently than Casper.
My issue is not with larger cohesive units. It is with the artificial nature of the states
"
Far from saying that coastal cities should manage interior lands. Coastal cities should govern their own coastal hinterland, and inland cities their direct hinterland, and whatever rural empty lands there are manage theirs.
Whatever is not directly related to the community, including trade, defense, industrial and environmental standards, criminal and civil law, education standards, etc. should be federal
"
The point I would made -and have several other times in OT- is that, with the exceptions of Louisiana (civil code), Hawaii (history and ethnicity) and Alaska (weather), the states are not historically, geographically, ethnically, culturally, economically, or juridically different enough to consider them functionally equivalent to separate sovereigns.
All 50 states are definitely much more similar to each other than the European Union countries are. The 13 colonies might have had significant differences between them, in days of yore, when the fastest way to go from one state to the next was days of horse riding. But those differences have been erased when we all watch the same TV, use the same internet, buy the same products, and apply the same standards to them, no matter where we stand with respect to some arbitrary lines on the ground.
What is very different today, more so than in the XVIII century, is the difference between urban and rural areas, and the degrees or urbanization/population density. San Francisco is probably more similar to New York City than to Los Angeles. which is probably more similar to Houston or Phoenix than to Sacramento.
If the objective is to devolve power and government to that level which works better for its population, we should dissolve the states and focus in "metropolitan areas", where the economy, the population, and the culture might be similar. Upstate NY or IL might resent to be run by NYC or Chicago the same way Tampa resents being run from Tallahassee or Laramie being run by even more rural WY.
On “Thursday Throughput: Tensor Calculus Edition”
Honestly, though, I find it strangely easier to learn “physics math” from physics texts rather than math texts. I find the physics texts tend to play to my visual intuition more than pure math texts.
It is the same to me. I studied line and surface integrals in math and, though I passed the course, it made no sense to me. It was like Gauss was bored or something. The following term I studied the same concepts in Electromagnetic Theory and it was bloody obvious what those integrals meant in the real world 😇
On “Get Your Free Stuff Right Over Here!”
I would point out that, in principle, Oscar is [was] expected to exercise his own agency on behalf of [Boeing] and its shareholders, under the general policies that the Boeing Board of Directors and the Boeing C-Suite executives crafted.
And because it is difficult for the elected Boeing Board of Directors and the Boeing C-Suite executives to direct every detail of the organization, they hope that the Boeing employees will get the details right-er. Sometimes they won't (Hello, 737 MAX) and we will all know about it. Most times they will, and we will call that a Wednesday.
I would be surprised if Oscar is arguing that Boeing's agents should have very limited agency, and the Boeing shareholders/board should be very careful about what agency is permitted to them. But I have been surprised by my fellow humans before
"
Oscar, with [really, for real] all due respect, I think we are talking past each other. Some of it is my fault, not understanding your post, some yours, perhaps not not being clear enough.
This is a post allegedly about the 51% voting itself free stuff. Stuff allegedly paid for by taxing the 49% unfairly. Stuff that the 49% didn't agree to pay for, or not to carry an unfair share of the cost.
We have all heard variations of that claim. It's Libertarianism 101.
My question, again, is, what is free stuff, and what is public services. Services I do not use, like a riot control trucks in Minnesota, , or a jet fighter, or insurance for beach houses in the FL Panhandle, I'd rather not pay for. But apparently I'm not entitled to a refund for those, because those are "public services". Someone voted itself a bunch of goodies on my dime.
On the other side, I'm happy to pay for more renewable energy, or for a bigger budget for NOAA, or for maternity AND paternity leave. But those are deemed "free stuff", and it's very unfair that Americans would have to pay for those.
And i really do not see the difference between my free stuff and someone's public services. It's all things that as Americans we have, through a very convoluted system that I also not fully approve of, have agreed to set up and pay for.
"
Engaging a bit on the actual original post, I am surprised to see the author trotting out the canards of "the progressive rates of the income tax are unfair".
If Jeff Bezos paid 40% of this income in taxes, it would be an enormous amount, certainly. But, ignoring for a moment that he probably pays no more than 5% of so in real life (a guess), given that, unlike me, Bezos income is not really only what it is in his W2, 60% of what Bezos makes will be more than enough for him to buy a new mansion every day, and a new helicopter every week. At some point, Bezos, or even me, who actually pays over 30% of my gross income in federal income taxes, run out of things to spend money in, and we just save the excess.
On the other hand, the people we are criticizing here, those who are not carrying their fair share, like that Amazon warehouse employee or Prime driver, at the end of the year do not have excess money to save, or even any disposable income to buy a single family helicopter. I mean, these people might want ME, and Bezos, to pay for bus routes so they can go to work. And roads. They want ME and Bezos to pay for roads, roads that neither ME nor Bezos will ever drive on. I, for sure, never consented for those roads to be built.
Further, we hear that -again- "61% of people do not pay [federal income tax]", while the author conveniently elides any mention of state taxes, sales taxes, and payroll taxes.
And yet, for some reason, I only pay payroll taxes on roughly 25% of my gross income. Bezos pays payroll taxes on such a small fraction of his income, that it probably shows as 0.00% in his W2. But that's not a benefit that share croppers, Walmart greeters, port stevedores, or nurse assistants enjoy. I wonder why. A similar thing happens to sales taxes. Since barely 10-15% of my income is used to buy food/clothes/cars/jewelry/60"TVs/yachts, sales taxes are barely an issue to me. I'm sure that's the same for the 61% of the people, those that don't pay income tax, because if those taxes were in any way relevant to those people, the author would have mentioned those.
"
I'm not sure I can see the difference between public services and free stuff. Perhaps someone would care to enlighten me
Are roads free stuff? What about police? Firefighters? stormwater drainage?
I also do not understand this voluntary thing about being part of/under the government the that Oscar mentions above. For instance, I did not voluntarily agree to fund flood insurance for houses inside the 1,000 year flood plain or in the path of hurricanes. And yet, every day in HGTV I see shows about million dollar beach houses being subsidized by my tax dollars. Let them get their own insurance if they want to live there.
And for sure I did not agree to invade Afghanistan. Where's my refund?
On “Obsolete Philosophy: The Role of Revelation in Religious Epistemology”
Perhaps what I am missing is the fifty examples, to parse what sounds like an emotional experience from what sounds like a supernatural one, to what sounds like a psychotic one.
Me, I sometimes suffer mild episodes of bipolar disorder (it's a family disease). I'm also a lucid dreamer. In the middle of suicidal thoughts or a manic episode, a voice behind my ears says: "pay no attention. It's only a temporary lithium deficiency". The same voice says: "I'm no longer enjoying this dream" in the middle of a nightmare, and monsters suddenly turn into puppies. I'm afraid if the Archangel Gabriel themselves would appear in front of me, my inner voice would say something about not eating those old leftovers from the fridge again in the future , since they obviously are growing [psychotropic] mold
On “Considering The Entire Life of Colin Powell”
Unlike the author, based upon his performance in the political arena, I do not believe Powell would have been an effective president. His tenure at State showed that he wasn't willing to stand up for his convictions (unless his convictions were similar to Cheney's, which is actually quite possible)
Though it might have been eight years of boring peace and prosperity, like it actually happened in the original timeline (thanks Bill C.!!), I doubt it would have been because of Powell. I suspect he would have deferred to/been pushed around by whoever ended in the Cabinet and upper echelons of a Powell administration. People that probably saw themselves as Powell's "betters" (in intellect and political savviness, not necessarily in racial terms), and would not have taken a cue from him and pushed him around. And, again like it happened in real life, Powell would probably have let them do it, and accept being used as a prop.
Not different, BTW, to what happened in the first Bush II period, before W finally got to courage to dismiss Rumsfeld, or the first half (the whole??) of the Trump administration, where most actual policies were farmed out to the Paul Ryan/Mitch McConnel wing of the GOP. Being President requires knowing how to control the machinery. Otherwise, the machinery will just do what they want
On Trump's statement, I won't read it. There will be little about Powell, lots about Trump, and almost everything will be lies. Not worth burning electrons on it
On “Obsolete Philosophy: The Role of Revelation in Religious Epistemology”
I think one of the essay's several first mistakes is that no one defines what is a mystical experience or communing with the divine.
There's a difference between perceiving the image of a burning bush, let's say, and looking onto the Grand Canyon and feeling ecstatic (see: for instance, the Stendhal syndrome). A lot of people that say they felt God in X or Y occasions describe things awfully similar to what new fathers describe when they see their child being born. But the birth of a child is not a mystical experience for purposes of the essay. Is it? In practice, the person having the mystical experience is the one making the call *IF* what he went through was a glimpse of the divine, or a great esthetic or emotional experience, or a deep moment of relaxation, or something else.
We interpret the world around us based on the patters in our minds. Certain people, whose mental map has a God(s) pattern embedded, will interpret what happened to her as an encounter with or an inspiration directly from Allah, or Athena, or the Great Buffalo. Others would interpret it as something else, without any reference to the metaphysical.
We all create the Gods in our image.
On “Parsing Out Pete Buttigieg, Parenting And Otherwise”
A friend of mine manages the food and catering at a large Houston hospital.
He describes what he has been living on for the last several months as a nightmare. He doesn’t know what part of his orders will show up, and when. We had dinner on Saturday: Coke only delivered a third of his order, Pepsi, half (lucky him, my supermarket doesn’t have Pepsi products), Doctor Pepper was a no show. And he has to have six different products in each soda dispensing machine, so he had to creatively distribute his limited soda inventory across the different cafeterias. They are not getting the regular disposable dishes and cutlery they are supposed to use in a CoVid world, and have to improvise. Menus that are supposed to be scheduled months in advance, to lock in prices, are up on the air because they don’t know what food will show up tomorrow morning.
Next time your wife orders puddings, she might have to take beans instead. Beggars can’t be choosers. Asians make great sweet snacks with beans. That is, if she didn’t have to take ketchup instead of sugar, because supply chain issues.
On “I, Tiberius: Robert Graves on Caligula”
Ultimately, he was a victim of the Peter’s Principle, a man perfect for chief of staff work made the number one
Truer words were never said about Tiberius:-)
On “Thursday Throughputs: Captains in Ships Columbus Edition”
It’s unclear exactly who discovered or found out what and when. Vespucci claimed later in his life that he did understand they were exploring a New World by 1497/98 but many quasi contemporaries writing a couple of decades later believed Vespucci himself forged some documents later in his life to claim the primacy.of the “discovery” of the New World.
But by 1501, when the coast of Brazil all the to Rio de Janeiro was explored it was very clear that this was not the Asia everyone knew about. Besides being in the wrong side of the equator, this land was significantly less inhabited and vastly less developed that what Asia was known to be, with animals and plants that were not what the explorers expected.
Asia was far from Europe, but not unknown. People knew people that knew people that had been there. They had an expectation of what they would find in Asia, and that was nowhere to be seen (finding the Mexican valley and Andean civilizations were still decades in the future) Even Columbus claimed that he had only reached some islands west of Asia, like the Canary or the Azores islands were with respect to Europe, and not Asia itself.
On “Parsing Out Pete Buttigieg, Parenting And Otherwise”
Many, many, thanks
On “Thursday Throughputs: Captains in Ships Columbus Edition”
Nope, it didn’t. Basically because there were land masses significantly south of where it was known the Asian land mass ended, they concluded, correctly and very quickly, that this was a totally different place. And they called it America, for the guy that showed this was nothing like Asia, Amerigo Vespucci.
Sailors didn’t have a way to accurately measure longitude until the XVIII Century, but they’ve been measuring latitude very accurately for several centuries by then.
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