Ragamuffin Studies

The Tea Set Has an Heiress

2012-02-09T23:15:00.001-07:00

In my china cabinet, on the top shelf sits an antique Polish tea set. It consists of a small tea pot, a cream pitcher and a sugar bowl. It is very old, and somewhat battered, having been passed from oldest daughter to oldest daughter, down to me—the 7th in my female line.

It does not belong to me, although I am its current keeper. When I used to gaze at it, in the built-in china cabinet of my grandmother’s craftsman home in northern Illinois, it did belong to me, having passed into my ownership on the day of my birth. And it passed on to my firstborn daughter on the day of her birth, even though at that time it resided on my mother’s display case in her home in Central Illinois, far from the duplex where the Chemistry Geek Princess was born.

The CGP became the eighth in the line of oldest daughters to whom the tea set passed. It was brought from the old country, one of the few things of beauty and value to survive the misfortunes of the old country, and the slow building of new lives and fortunes here, in the Golden Land. I can imagine my great-grandmother lovingly and carefully placing it on the shelf behind the square-cut craftsman leaded glass doors of the dark china cabinet in the corner of her dining room. Anna was her name, but I don’t know the name of her mother, the woman who carefully packed it for the journey across the Atlantic in days long ago. Mara, perhaps? I never knew her and I may be getting her name mixed up with the name of my mother’s father’s mother. And before her, three other women, oldest daughter to oldest daughter to oldest daughter, back to the one who acquired it, the circumstances of which are shrouded in the silence of the long past. But from Anna it went to Esther, and from Esther to Madeline, and from Madeline to me. And then it belonged to my daughter for twenty-six years, most of which passed while it stood on my mother’s shelf.

It came to me about seven years ago, when I got a china cabinet and my mother decided to send it back with me, after a visit we made to Illinois.

And now it no longer belongs to my daughter, even though she will one day become its keeper and carefully unwrap it and put it in her own Italian cherry wood china cabinet.

Last week, the tea set got a new owner when the 9th in the line of oldest daughters arrived, although we knew on her mother’s birthday last fall that the tea set was going to have an heiress. She is indeed the Princess Heiress, a tiny little thing compared to her mother, with dark hair and a sweet disposition.

And I gaze at it now in wonder, amazed that somehow the golden-haired little girl in the pink sailor dress got big enough bring a new little girl into the world. There it sits, the Princess Heiress’ tea set, right next to my Bumpa’s Birthday Angel, who bears a bouquet of snowdrops and has a garnet set into her skirt, for she is the January angel. She shows that I share my birth month with the husband of Anna, even though he was gone when I was a little girl. Behind the tea set is a “Welcome, Baby!” card, in the distinctive style that marked the middle of last century, a card from my grandma Esther’s neighbor, one Gal Mignone, who brought it over along with baked goods upon the occasion of my birth.

Generations come and generations go. The tea set is a visible sign of the more mysterious unbroken chain of mitochondrial DNA passed on for at least nine generations, mother to daughter. Nine generations, about 200 years. As as I look at it’s beauty and marvel at its age, I wonder what the life of the new Princess Heiress of the Tea Set will bring. I can expect to see her daughter, the 10th heiress born to the Tea Set sometime around 2035, but it would to take great luck to see that woman’s daughter born to it somewhere around my 100th birthday. And beyond that, I will not have even a glimpse of those girls.

I wonder, though, what perils and wonders will the keepers of the tea set see beyond my lifetime, in the generations of the tea set, the 11th, the 12th and the luck 13th, who will be born somewhere around the turn of the 22nd century.

In the meantime, I am the keeper of the tea set, holding it in trust not only for my daughter, but for my granddaughter, who sleeps contentedly in her mother’s arms, protected under the roof of her doting father’s house. She is such a tiny little girl, but she bears a big name and an even bigger inheritance.

May this little one grow great! May she in her time bequeath life and beauty to the generations who will come after her. And may she in her turn relinquish the tea set to her daughter, and her daughter’s daughter, in the great chain of life.

Ron Paul and His Personality Cultists

2012-01-09T12:25:00.002-07:00

In the past few days, we have seen another go around with the Ron Paul Cultists at a New Mexico FB page for libertarian discussion. On this page as elsewhere, posts and discussions about Ron Paul’s candidacy for the GOP nomination, and the recently rediscovered baggage he has have been topics for discussion. There are those libertarians who have decided to support Ron Paul despite the anti-libertarian claims made by a ghostwriter in his newsletters and reports, because of his libertarian stance on economic issues. Others won’t touch him with a ten-foot pole because they don’t like the moral and character implications of the openly anti-Semitic and racist rhetoric of some of his followers, as well as the weak excuses given for the newsletter debacle.

For the record, I do not and will never support a candidate who tolerates the kind of ubiquitous and open anti-Semitism that can be found on every Ron Paul chat, discussion board and forum that I have seen. The ideology to be found there is profoundly anti-libertarian in its nature, and reveals a darkness that surrounds the Ron Paul Campaign. That Ron Paul has not had the political acumen nor the moral decency to confront the vocal anti-Semites and racists among his followers does not speak well for his leadership ability and makes me wonder about what he really believes. Since he has been recorded saying that “Israel is more trouble than it is worth” and that Gaza is one big “concentration camp”, I have good reason to suspect that Ron Paul agrees with his followers’ anti-Semitic ideology in substance, even if he does not match them in meanness of spirit.

For these reasons, I dropped any support of Ron Paul and any organization—such as Campaign for Liberty—as soon as I became concerned about what I was reading and found the newsletter story and other corroborating evidence both on and off the internet. My letter withdrawing from Campaign for Liberty can be found here. In it, I detail my concern about the anti-Semitism, the fallacies of thinking that it reveals, and the fact that Ron Paul has never meaningfully addressed the issue with his supporters and followers or those of us who had supported him until we found this darkness in the middle of his campaign.

Since that day in 2010 when I formally renounced any connection to Ron Paul and his associates, I have also stated my concerns about his Presidential Campaign, because I don’t think that a man who cannot—at minimum—confront the brownshirts among his followers should be elected President of the United States. That certain of his followers behave like brownshirts is painfully obvious to anyone who frequents Ron Paul Meet-Ups, message boards and chatrooms. For those who do not, the C-PAC 2011 conference was a major wake-up call. Although Ron Paul did not participate in the thuggery that included shouting down scheduled speakers and the anti-Semitic harassment of David Horowitz’s Freedom Center displays, neither did he censure the behavior or admonish those over whom he has a tremendous amount of influence for their behavior.

Yesterday, in response to a post at the libertarian FB site by a conservative who is equally dismayed by the tactics of these Ron Paul followers, I posted a short essay explaining the reasons that I do not think Ron Paul will win the GOP nomination. Those reasons include the way the GOP establishment has worked to disenfranchise the conservatives and tea-party voters, as well as the fact that the largest opposition block to the GOP establishment are conservatives who do not like Ron Paul’s foreign policy stands and his abandonment of Israel. The whole post with comments can be found here, for those who wish to see the whole argument.

Although my post dealt with a political argument, and only mentioned the issue of the newsletters and the rampant anti-Semitism of many Paul followers in that context, I was immediately called a “bigot” by another commenter who is a Ron Paul follower, and has made outright anti-Semitic claims on the same forum. This man, who writes on this public forum as Gene Crouch (which I believe is his real name) has stated that he believes that “the Jews control the media” in the US, and that “the Jews” control the banks. When challenged on this, he maintained his statement, claiming that his “research” had shown this to be true, although he provided no evidence at all. Gene almost immediately altered his comment, taking out the line “bigot” and replacing it with “negative and close-minded (sic)”, which does not substantially change anything.

What I find most interesting about Gene’s approach is that it is similar in both form and substance to the way that a great number of Ron Paul fans respond to any criticism of their hero. Whether on an internet forum or chat, or calling in to a live radio talk show, certain phrases and accusations have become so common as to identify the source as a Ron Paul follower (Listen, for example, to this caller accusing Glenn Beck of being in the pay of Israel). It is almost as if, when they hear or read a certain phrase opposing Ron Paul, they immediately stop thinking and pull out Talking Point No. 3. Or No. 5 or No.7.

Further, few of them know or understand anything about the origin of the ideologies they are espousing, and insist on calling themselves ‘libertarians’ while spouting on cue extremely anti-libertarian positions. To state that “the Jews” control the banks and the media is not only anti-Semitic, but it is deeply anti-Capitalist, indicating that the intellectual fathers of what many have taken to calling the “Paul-bots”, are not particularly libertarian in their thought. Capitalism demands that individuals be treated as individuals, relying as it does on the Enlightenment values of individual rights and personal responsibility.

This ideology that “the Jews” want to control the world is the classic European anti-Semitic trope, straight out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery that was extensively used by the Nazis. (Show me your intellectual roots and I will show you your future). The Nazis were, in turn, the intellectual mentors to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and these libels and their unforgettably anti-Capitalist images spread into and were then fused with a more traditional Islamic Jew-hate taught in the Koran and Hadiths. Further, the use of collective language (esp.'the Jews') by Paul followers like Gene, also demonstrates a collectivist world-view in which individuals are characterized and made responsible for the purported actions of others who happen to share the same religion or race.

Modern anti-Semitism is itself racist, implying that all Jews have certain ethical and moral characteristics that are unique to them as a group, a "taint in the blood" as it were. This predates the Nazis, but not by much, and does come out of a peculiar race theory that has no scientific basis. (The genetic differences among the so-called “races” are miniscule and the phenotypes vary as much, if not more, within each population as they do across them). We are seeing similar attacks on the religion of the Catholic Rick Santorum and the Mormon Mitt Romney. Both are accused of belonging to religious organizations that are claimed to have conspired to achieve world domination. However, there is no racist implication in these religious prejudices. (That anti-Semitism, among all of the hatreds based on religion, is uniquely based on racist ideology may be because there is no central Jewish organization that can be pointed to in the way that the Catholic and Mormon churches have been. So for the tin-foil-hat and black-helicopter set, it’s got to be “them Joos” who aspire to dominate them, because they certainly cannot be responsible for their own predicaments). Regardless, both ideologies— whether race or religious affiliation based—are nefarious, focusing as they do on collectives and prejudging individuals based on the standard creed (and often a twisted version thereof) of their religion and on family histories instead of on their ideas and positions. And religious anti-Catholicism/anti-Mormonism, and racist anti-Semitism are often found espoused by the same people.

What is really indicative that Ron Paul has inspired a personality cult, however, is the knee-jerk response of personal attack against anyone who puts out an argument about the political fortunes and future of their hero. Such an argument is not a personal attack, and in fact, invites a discussion of argument/counter-argument. Such a discussion can result in winning friends and influencing people to vote for one’s chosen candidate. But that does not seem to be the desire of the Ron Paul true-believers: their first response is almost always a personal attack, which will do the opposite, whether that is their calculated intent or not.

In this example, by putting forth a strictly political argument, which is well in the mainstream of normal discourse and was not in any way an attack, I was called a bigot. My guess is that if I had put forth that same argument about one of the other GOP candidates, Paul-bots would not protest, and would in fact pile-on, reviling those candidates beyond what is necessary in a political discussion. In fact, I have seen Ron Paul followers do exactly that. But in any discussion in which someone does indicate a shared true-believer-in-Ron-Paul status, they revel in baseless conspiracy theories used to demonize Ron Paul's political opponents. At the same time, though, they ignore and/or excuse any flaw in Ron Paul himself.

Rational Ron Paul supporters do not act this way. Rather, they indicate by their arguments that they recognize Ron Paul as a human being who is not the perfect answer to their concerns, but who addresses the majority of them or the most important among them. They do notice the areas where they do not agree, but they do not think they are as important as those with which they do agree.

Unfortunately, the number of rational Ron Paul supporters that I know and have experienced is small. In my circles, it appears to be growing smaller as more and more people discover for themselves how ubiquitous and nasty the racist/anti-Semitic rhetoric in the Paul movement has become, and how divorced from reality the conspiracy mongering is. The intellectual bankruptcy of the Ron Paul Cult makes it difficult to have any honest discussion about Ron Paul’s qualifications to be President of the United States, and still come away differing on the issues, but with a sense of perspective and respect. (I find this similar to the rhetoric among certain left-leaning Democrats, but they elevate the whole socialist/collectivist ideology to messiah status, rather than a person).

I think Ron Paul’s unwillingness to address his cultists and their libels is the greatest reason why, in the end, there can be no discussion or dialogue. I cannot respect or tolerate the kind of discourse that is common in the Paul camp, and my respect for those who continue to support him is diminishing rapidly, as I watch them excuse outright racism and anti-Semitism, twisting their own values into pretzels in order to refrain from directly confronting it. I cannot understand it. Rational people ought to be able to disagree, and Americans who want to restore our liberty ought to put values and principles above personalities.

Ron Paul could have chosen to nip this all in the bud without making any excuses, by simply disavowing the ideologies and confronting his personality cultist followers. But he did not.

That Ron Paul has not done so is a massive character flaw. Apparently, he likes the role of "messiah." That he excuses such behavior rather than calling it into account indicates a lack of leadership ability, if not something worse. After four years of a personality-cultist Chief Executive who is long on rhetoric and short on the ability to execute, I think the last thing the United States needs is another of the same from a different party.

Hanukkah: For the Miracles

2011-12-25T00:09:00.001-07:00

“For the miracles, for the times we were saved, for the mighty acts, for the victories, and for the battles you waged, for our ancestors in those days at this season . . .”

Al Ha-Nissim for Hanukkah

This little statement is sung each night of Hanukkah, following the blessings for the lighting of the Hanukkiyah, the eight branched menorah that we use to celebrate the minor Festival of Rededication, the Festival of Lights. At this time each year, we light the lights to advertise the miracle, to remember what it was like when our right to exist was denied us by rulers and powers, and what it was like to fight for our right to our unique identity among all the peoples of the earth.

It is easy on those nights, as we sing the happy childhood songs about latkes and dreidls, to remember the story about the miracle of the oil and it is easy to forget the reason why we light our lights and sing our songs each year at this season. It is every so easy to sing the Al Ha-Nissim in Hebrew while not thinking about the meaning of the words in Hebrew, and what memories they are intended to bring up for us.

Al ha-Nissim— for the miracles—in the Hebrew do not require a willing suspension of disbelief for our modern sensibilities, because they are not suspensions of natural law. Our G-d does not work that way, rather the Eternal renews the Work of Creation each day, which is a lawful work. A miracle is what human beings can accomplish through the illumination of the fire of the soul, entirely within the bounds of the Universe we know. The miracle that we advertise each year as we light the flames in our windows is the miracle of the flame of the Jewish soul, the continued existence of Jews as Jews against the darkness brought by those who would see it extinguished.

. . . v’al ha-purkan—for the times we were saved—the times that a hero or sage came to our aid, bringing to us a fiery reminder of the passion of our spirit; the strong arm brought to our defense by the passionate love of life and of the way we live it. We have been saved time and again, enduring and thriving in the face of certain destruction. The Hebrew understanding of salvation is not some metaphysical redemption, rather it is a very real and sometimes messy saving of flesh and blood from bondage and destruction.

. . . v’al ha-gevurot—for the mighty deeds—the acts of power and courage that come from the absolute conviction that our unique identity is precious and worth risking our lives to preserve for ourselves and for our children. Every time that we have been pushed up against the wall, we are inspired by the Eternal to resist the darkness and protect the light. That inspiration is the flame that burns small and strong against the cold and dark nothing that seeks to consume it.

. . . v’al ha-nifla-ot—for the victories—the wonder of winning over our foes, the wonder of once again being free to light up our lights against the darkness.

v’al ha-milchamot—for the battles that you fought for us . . . Make no mistake, miracles and salvation, mighty deeds and wonders do not come without a price. That price is the willingness to resist evil no matter the cost. It is the price paid by Judah son of Mattiyahu and his brothers, who resisted

. . . when the wicked Hellenic government rose up against your people Israel, to make them forget Torah and violate your law. You waged their battles, defended their rights and avenged the wrongs done to them. . . .

Al ha-Nissim for Hannukah

The price for their freedom to exist was to take up the sword against the oppressor, to wage war against a larger and better equipped professional army, and to win that war against all odds. This price has been paid again and again, by the men and women of the People Israel, from Devorah to Tania Chernova, and from Joshua to Yoni Netanyahu. Some of those who knew they had to fight lived to see the fruit of their courage, and some gave their lives.

Each night, when we light those small and flickering flames that shine against the darkness of winter, we remember them all, the heroes inspired by sages, those who lived and those who died, and those who died only because they were Jews. Against the bright lights of those more numerous and powerful than we, our flames seem small and weak; against those bright lights that last the night, ours waver and go out after a brief time burning. But we light them year after year, because they represent how:

you delivered the mighty into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of the few, and the wicked into the hands of the righteous . . .

Al ha-Nissim for Hanukkah

In our own time, a time I thought would never be seen again, the darkness grows against us once again. We see and hear of innocent Jewish children being attacked while the governments of the world are silent. We hear of our laws and customs forbidden in the lands of Europe, while the Islamists riot in the very same streets to demand their law replace the European enlightenment. We hear of a presidential candidate in the United States who has remained silent in the face of the virulent anti-Semitism among his inner circle and his supporters. We hear the Iranian president preach against us war and death and destruction to the sound of thundering applause. And as in the days of the Maccabees, we watch as some of our own people support our enemies and mouth their accusations against us.

The flame of one small candle flickers against the night, and goes out. But the next night it is two, and then again, three, and up to seven the number of Divine completion of Creation; and beyond to eight, the number of human fulfillment of tikkun olam, the Repair of the World. Year after year, lighting light against the darkness, counting up from a single flickering light to an abundance of light is re-enacted, always using small and single flames. They represent the miracles and redemptions, the mighty acts and victories, the battles that the Spirit of G-d that burns within, won for us in those days at this season. And particularly in this time of growing darkness in this time and season, the flames illumine our souls and ignite our courage and warm our hands and faces, preparing us for the time when the few will once again prevail against the many, and the weak against the strong. Not by might, and not by power, but by spirit alone will this once again be accomplished. Another one in the eternal chain of remembrance for which we sing:

You Shall Live by Them

2011-12-15T18:53:00.001-07:00

וּשְׁמַרְתֶּם אֶת-חֻקֹּתַי וְאֶת-מִשְׁפָּטַי, אֲשֶׁר יַעֲשֶׂה אֹתָם הָאָדָם וָחַי בָּהֶם

“You shall keep them, my commandments and my laws; which if a man does them, he shall live by them.” (my translation)

Va-Yikra (Lev.) 18:5 (The Holiness Code)

“The commandments were given for no other purpose than to help men to live because of them, and not to die.”

Tosefta Shabbat 16-17 (Supplement to the Mishnah in the Babylonian Talmud)

“Judaism alone was primarily preoccupied with life. The Torah is called Torat Chayim, a Torah [teaching] for life, not for “eternal life” but simply for this life . . . the laws of the Torah are a preparation for life—the full life of the affections and senses, as well as of the mind and the spirit—‘which if a man do, he shall live by them’ (Lev. 18:5).”

Abba Hillel Silver, Where Judaism Differed: An Inquiry into the Distinctiveness of Judaism, 1956

Oftentimes I have been brought up short in a discussion or argument by the sudden realization that my partner in the debate and I have a completely different, and often irreconcilable world view. In these cases, much can be learned from continuing the discussion and I can pinpoint the consequences of each world view in the ensuing conclusions, but there can be no fundamental agreement reached.

I have been having some very intense and fruitful discussions with a friend whose world view, I am discovering, differs substantially from my own. This should not be surprising, given this man’s educated Protestant Christian background, but I have found it so because he has rejected Christianity its own-self. However, unlike so many of the adult children of Christianity that I know, he has not given up a primarily mystical world-view, instead replacing the Christian version with something else. Although I tend to think of this as “new age” kind of thinking, that label may in itself be problematic because it is used so glibly by religious and non-religious people in order to put a premature closure on understanding of it, whatever it may be.

In the discussion we had last Sunday evening, two basic ideas over which we differ became stumbling blocks to any resolution between us about what is moral and what is not. One is the idea that this life is a kind of proving ground or antechamber for some form of existence after death. Or not. The other idea is the necessity to resist evil. Or not. Whether one accepts the second idea is actually related to one’s position on the first.

As those who have been reading this blog already surmise, I do not see life on earth as anything other than an end in itself. It is my identity as a Jew—and an educated one, that fundamentally makes this so. During the evolution from the Biblical Israelite religion to modern Rabbinic Judaism, one of the ideas that did not substantially change was the idea that life is for the living, and that physical existence is very good. Although Judaism has been infiltrated at the fringes by ideas about life after death, normative Rabbinic Judaism has rejected them, firmly insisting that it is what we do here and now that matters. If there is something more after death’s finality, then we do not know anything about it, and it is best to keep our feet firmly planted on the ground, because our actions here are what count for our weal and our woe.

The idea that death is not the end, that there is some utopia to be had after death, whether it be quasi-material or wholly spiritual, is related to apocalyptic thinking—the idea that what is, as it is, shall be completely remade into something better by a power that is generally conceived of as wholly good. These ideas (there are two of them, related but distinct) necessarily imply that things as they are now are not good, that human nature is fundamentally flawed, that physical existence and the material world are at least second best, if not downright evil.

Even within its creation stories, the Israelite religion rejected these ideas. The first creation story in Genesis uses words and phrases that, to the eye of those who know the Akkadian creation myth Enumah Elish, sets itself in opposition to it. Enumah Elish is a story of how there is a war in heaven, and the physical universe is created from the killed body of the loser, Tiamat. The implication is that the spiritual gods, disinterested and unpredictable, rule over the physical world, wreaking havoc as they will. The classic Hebrew creation story in Genesis 1:1 –2:1a in contrast posits an ordered universe brought into being through the spoken word, and declared to be “good” at each step. With the introduction of human beings, who have free will, the creation is pronounced “very good.” (The Hebrew word “meod” corresponding to the English “very” is a play on the Hebrew spelling of “Adam”, which means human being).

Throughout Torah (the canonical Five Books of Moses), there is no mention of afterlife or of apocalypse. Rather, law is presented as having real-world consequences: keep Torah and have life and the blessing of your children, discard it and experience death and the curses of those who follow. Life is good, death is evil. Body and spirit are intertwined and inseparable.

Later in Jewish history, even as ideas from Babylon and the Greeks brought into the culture notions of life after death, separation of body and soul (in which the body was presented as inferior) and apocalypse, the same circumstances also created the need to keep them firmly controlled. Particularly during the first war with Rome (60 – 65 CE), apocalyptic thinking influenced both the Sicarii (those sects fomenting rebellion against Rome for religious and political reasons) and the Essenes, a collection of sects that withdrew from an “impure world.” The Rabbis understood that in those circumstances, both rebellion and ascetic withdrawal would result in the destruction of the Jewish people and its loss to the future. They therefore carefully confined any apocalyptic messianic ideation to ritual supplication and focused Jewish law and life upon living in the here and now.

Although stories and ideas about ghosts and demons, judgment of the disembodied soul and life after death have flourished in Jewish superstition , incorporating customs such as lighting a candle for the dead, they are not normative, and tend to take on the flavor of the surrounding dominant culture. Jewish traditions surrounding dying and the dead forbid all of the displays that encourage such thoughts. It is forbidden to pray to the dead, to build them altars, to give them gifts for the journey, to mutilate one’s body or in any other way display excess grief. Life must go on, and as sad and sorry as we are at our loss, our duty is to life and to the living. This is illustrated in the Midrash on a verse in Kohelet (Ecclesiastes):

It was said that when David died, Solomon sent to the Bet Midrash (House of Study) to enquire: ‘My father lies dead before me,and his body is lying in the sun. The dogs of my father’s household are howling for hunger. What shall I do?’ The Sages answered : ‘Feed the dogs first and then attend to the body of your father, for even a living dog takes precedence over a dead king.’ This is the origin of the verse: “For a living dog is better than a dead lion.” (Kohelet 9:4)

As a Jew, therefore, my allegiance is entirely to this life, the only one that I know, and I do not concern myself with “things far beyond it”, as the Psalmist says. When I weigh moral questions, I weigh them against the standard of life, this life. For Jews, there is no moral calculus that places some posited afterlife against life in the here in now. From the writing of the Talmud until now, no Jew can morally justify an action that places spiritual existence against physical life in the here and now. For example, the witch test--binding a woman hand and foot and throwing her in the water and if she drowns her soul is safe and if she does not drown then kill her—would be entirely immoral and forbidden. (Jews, being Jews, were more likely to be the victims of such acts than the perpetrators).

Many decisions are not moral decisions at all in this sense. For example, the decision to light candles on Shabbat is not an ethical consideration, it is a question of ritual, of custom and tradition. The decision to eat chocolate ice cream as opposed to vanilla is not a moral one either, it is one of simple preference. The obligation to preserve human life and to minimize suffering takes precedence over any ritual obligation or simple preference. One may not ignore a danger presented to human life by observation of a ritual or by preference. For example, a Jewish doctor is not only allowed but is obligated to attend emergencies on the Sabbath—when he or she would ordinarily not do any work—in order to save a life and minimize suffering. Any Jew would be obligated even to rescue an animal that has fallen into a well on Sabbath for that matter, in order to minimize its suffering because an animal cannot possibly understand a need to wait until sunset.

This way of thinking is foreign to my friend and debate partner. Because he believes with certitude that there is some preservation of the soul, some better life beyond this universe, questions of morality are informed differently. Since we did not explore these differences at great length, I cannot say with any certainty how they are informed. However, the preservation of one’s own life and the lives of others is apparently not primary to his moral calculus, and I am not sure how much weight it gets at all.

Further, he believes that this after-life or ongoing spiritual life has great influence on the physical world, and that humankind collectively is to make progress toward a “better way.” This points to utopian/apocalyptic ideation that assumes that the way in which human beings make moral decisions in this world is defective. This seems to be tied up with the conception that pacifism is morally superior to self-defense.

However, I have not gotten an answer to the question of whether my friend identifies himself as a pacifist or not, or what that word even means to him. After an hour or so of questioning and answering, mostly in order to clarify the assumptions he had about how I view life and death and heaven and hell, we called it quits. It was late. There was no resolution to agreement in this discussion anyway. There could not be as we start from very different concepts of life and its importance.

I think the conversation was fruitful for me, however, because it got me thinking about how this one basic idea—that of life after death—has consequences that extend to those who do agree with it.

As I said at the beginning of this entry, the idea of a life after death that is more valuable (better)than this life is bound up not only with the idea that human beings are defective in some way, but also with the idea that it is not necessary or even wrong to resist evil. That idea has grave consequences for the world here and now. That will be the topic of another blog entry.

Something for Nothing

2011-12-10T14:13:00.001-07:00

There is something in the human psyche that wants to get something for nothing. It is a desire to cheat reality, to win over entropy, to obviate consequences. In the end, wanting something for nothing is the desire to escape a lawful universe.

The other day I had a long discussion with a friend that involved this desire carefully rationalized as a breakthrough within science. My friend, who is scientifically illiterate, refused to accept the definition of science, that it is limited to the study of the physical universe (aka: material world) by use of the scientific method. Instead, he seemed to want to use the cachet of science to contradict itself, and in the process, to deny its boundaries. That he has profound confusion about what constitutes matter made the whole discussion even more difficult—he thought that gases are not material, but he would not allow me to interrupt to clarify such problems of definition. This rendered the conversation frustratingly meaningless, because no definitions of terms were mutually agreed upon.

The discussion involved the claim that a businessman from Italy had discovered a process and developed technology through which one can expect to get ten times the energy out that was put in. (The claim turned out to involve a “cold fusion” machine, but I did not know that until far into the discussion).

Now such a claim may simply mean that this man has developed a very efficient process using a certain amount of energy input in order to get the use of energy stored in a fuel source of some sort. We do this all the time, at different levels of efficiency, depending on the sophistication of the physical and chemical processes we have discovered. For example, our use of fossil fuels involves input of energy to effect combustion in order to break the energy stored in carbon bonds, freeing it for our use. Of course in all of these processes, the laws of thermodynamics are evident, and we know that we can neither get more energy out that was put into the system in the first place—that is, we cannot create matter and energy out of nothing—nor can we expect to get all of the energy out of the system for our purpose—that is, we cannot have perfect efficiency.

I do not think the above is the claim, because I was being pressed very strongly to “think out of the box” and deny the veracity of the laws of thermodynamics themselves. It was put to me that should this magic process (it was unexplained ergo magic) be true, wouldn’t I have to admit that the laws of thermodynamics are wrong. Einstein’s name was thrown around a good deal, as was the claim that this businessman had made several theoretical “breakthroughs” just in the past six weeks. Breakthroughs, it was implied that obviated our understanding of thermodynamics,and that the discoverer was loath to publish in order to protect his proprietary interest in the process. (In general, publishing theory does not endanger one’s proprietary interest in technology derived thereof, if only because the first is not at all the same as the second, and theory only shows a technology is possible, but not how it would work).

My friend seemed to have no idea that Einstein’s groundbreaking work in special and general relativity, as revolutionary as it was, did not overturn Newtonian mechanics, rather it resolved problems relating to special circumstances and established the speed of light as a constant in the universe, which is still more evidence that the universe is a lawful space/time. Einstein did not replace physics with magic, rather he began a revolution that extended human understanding of how the physical universe operates. (My ex-husband is a theoretical physicist and can undoubtedly explain this better than me, but this is the very, very short of it).

Certainly, if I were shown physical evidence that one can get something for nothing, I would have to rethink the laws of thermodynamics. But they are called physical laws for a reason: they are fundamental to how the physical universe operates. Therefore, I am confident that if I am shown real evidence that appears to contradict them, an explanation can be found that leaves thermodynamics intact. The ongoing evidence that our understanding of thermodynamics is correct means that it more likely that the proverbial hell will freeze over than that the laws of thermodynamics will be overturned. (That hell is exothermic and so will never freeze over is demonstrated in this bit of humorous reasoning in response to a mythical exam question here).

The discussion came to no particular conclusion, and indeed it could not, given that there was no agreement on what the definition of terms was nor on the boundaries and limits that define science itself. As a scientist—and I used this phrase numerous times—I do not transgress the definitions of the physical universe and the method we use to discern them. What my friend did not accept is that science stops when non-physical “forces” are brought into consideration. Whatever one is doing beyond these limits, it is not science, and scientists have no reason to consider it.

I think my friend was a little surprised also that I reacted quite strongly to his insinuation that it was his job to broaden my horizons as it were, that is to get me out the box he thinks I am confining myself to “as a scientist”. I, on the other hand, am quite content with the amount of stuff (literally) that exists for us to learn and discover within the bounds of the universe, and I find that the reality is far more surprising and wonderful than any magic that people can invent. As a libertarian, I don’t see it as my job to broaden anyone’s horizons and I do not take kindly to those who feel it is their mission in life to change my worldview.

What intrigues me, though, is this desire of human beings to get something for nothing. That desire is so great that they will use magical thinking, and insist on all manner of evasions of reality in order to acquire it, leaving themselves open to all kinds of scams, collapses and disasters.

Ever since the Hebrews developed the story of the gate to Eden being barred by a flaming sword, the limitations of existing in a lawful universe have both made human knowledge possible and have caused humans to evade that knowledge using magical thinking. We imagine that there must be a way to get back to the womb. Even in the womb, of course, something is not provided for nothing. The price of order is energy, and that is never free. It may be abundant, but there is always a cost to getting it into the particular form needed to build up complexity and order. And when energy is not obtained, the order disappears.

Those who wish to get something for nothing wish to live outside the bounds of a lawful universe. This is an impossibility, it is a fundamental contradiction. A lawful universe is one that has regularities in its function, that is predictable and knowable. This regularity means that all substance has particular characteristics that establish its identity, and that we can count on each discrete thing to act in a particular way. From particular types of atoms combining in particular ways, we can predict how particular substances will always behave by their nature. This is necessary for something so complex and ordered and wonderful as life to exist.

It is impossible to even imagine what a universe without order, without lawfulness would be like. By definition, cosmos (universe) is the opposite of chaos. It is not by accident that science—the process of discerning the lawful characteristics of the physical universe—arose in a culture that accepted the lawfulness inherent in cosmos, and the goodness of the material world. To deny either is to be profoundly anti-life.

We can see empirically that those who act upon the notion that within human beings, the spiritual* and the physical can be divided end up destroying both. One does not exist without the other, entwined as they are in a fragile, living whole. Therefore, those who act on the notion that something can be had for nothing become vampires, feeding off of the living energy of others. Physically, they must loot or mooch off of the work of others, and spiritually they must enslave others. That is the cost of denying reality.

*I use the word spiritual here to mean the complex of emotions and notions that rise from our understandings of ourselves as living organisms in a material world, not as metaphysical in the religious sense--that is something endowed from outside the cosmos.

Any population of organisms can sustain a certain small number of cheaters, that is those who wish to get somebody else’s something for nothing, and often a population will do so because so long as the number of cheaters is relatively small, the cost of removing them is greater than the cost of giving them a free ride. But when whole societies buy into the notion that something can be had for nothing, and institute it as a matter of policy, they begin to enslave others to produce what they consume, demanding and consuming more and more, until their consumption outstrips production. Insisting that the material needed to sustain their lives and civilization exists without thought or effort, they try to get by fiat what they refuse to make for themselves. This leads to a collapse of biblical proportions, producing great suffering and death, and the civilization may even cease to exist.

History is replete with this same story told in various forms, the details weaving different color into a similar pattern. You can’t get something for nothing. There ain’t any such thing as a free lunch.

The very existence of life depends upon there being a cosmos within which things are what they are, and not what they are not. They can be counted upon to act in certain ways. To suspend this law of nature is to invite not wonder and power, but chaos and death. The wonder of it all is that it is here in the first place, and it all works well enough to sustain life even for a little while. It seems churlish to complain that life requires effort from the living.

If there ever was a snake in the orchard, the one who began whispering into the ear of the human being; human taken from the humus; that snake whispered that nothing is better than something, and that something can be had for nothing.

Late Fall: Home at Freedom Ridge

2011-12-05T22:13:00.001-07:00

Late fall for me has always come with a feeling of melancholy longing as the days grow short, and the light slants more and more from the south, reminding me of the coming of the cold season. It brings also a strong need to gather in the places, the people and the events of the times and seasons, an ingathering of the spirit that completes the ingathering harvest of September and October. The Thanksgiving feast begins this turning inward for me, this diving into the depths of the season that begins with the fullness of the reaper and ends with telling the tale of the harvest and the prospects for the coming winter.

Within the passing years, this season becomes associated in my heart and mind with music—particular songs that seem to evoke the season and the times—for awhile. I first noticed this in the late fall seasons that ended the 20th century, during the late ‘90’s, when the season’s turning was evoked by a song played on the weekly Singing Wire program. I cannot find the song and I cannot remember even a line of the lyrics, but I remember that the song wove together the sense of autumn that I experienced with the traditional native preparations for dying in one of the plains tradition, evoking the peace pipe, the sweat lodge and the buffalo robe. This song became my autumn song that was played in the fall for a few years.

2001 marked a change in my life and in the times and seasons of this country, as the EG and I conducted a courtship that began in the promise of summer and culminated with an engagement diamond purchased on 9/11. That year in particular, the yearly seasonal turning at late autumn seemed to join with the sense of the late autumn coming into winter of the Saeculum’s turn from the Third to the Fourth Turning. That was the year that the then Boychick (now grown into a Cowboy in Training) endlessly played at rebuilding the twin towers in the kindergarten room during High Holy Days, and the EG and I drove back from getting apples at Cochiti while we talked about the coming crisis with Mason Proffit asking: “Will the winds of Black September fall like shrouds upon the world . . . on the tape deck in the Focus. On the day before Thanksgiving, as I drove home through the Bosque, the last of the golden cottonwood leaves blowing in a cold November wind, I heard Leonard Cohen plead: “Sail on, O mighty Ship of State!”, evoking Longfellow: “ . . . in spite of rock and tempest’s roar, in spite of false lights on the shore, Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea, our hearts our hopes are all with thee . . .”. These songs played in my head every autumn through the early years of the new century; years in which we watched our country transformed from the fierce pride and purpose of 9/12 to the soft tyranny of Homeland Security.

And then as the first decade of the century passed its midpoint, in the time of moving and changes, and moving and changes again, my late autumn mood music changed too, and turned inward. As I did. As we did.

In 2008, the year of the market crash and the election of uncertain hope and cynical change, I heard anew the stern warning and the fragile hope of the Yom Kippur service: “ . . . who shall live and who shall die, who by fire and who by water . . . but tshuvah, t’fillah v’ tzedakah temper death’s cruel decree” put to a deeper artistry in Cohen’s Who by Fire? In that time every day brought new revelations and we were hopping between opinions like birds, knowing not what was lost and what was gained and who was next. We, the pampered and entitled children of late 20th century America, began to reckon with uncertainty and risk not known since the time of our grandparents and great grandparents.

As the Obama administration wore on, giving us wars that multiplied, legislation against the express will of the people, government gun running and unsustainable economics, what we had said so glibly at the very first tea parties became frightening reality. We were waking up daily into a different country than the one we had been born in. In 2009 as I heard the first broadsides of anti-Semitism in an American political movement, I could scarcely believe that it would become part of parcel of the administration’s policy, and in the mouths of the supporters of a libertarian-leaning Republican Congressman and presidential candidate. I can still scarce believe that the United States Senate just voted away the ancient and honored right of Habeas Corpus, making a de facto government violation of rights under Homeland Security into the purported law of the land.

Like the rest of us who yearn to restore the Constitution, I made many false starts in trying to figure out where it was that I must stand, with whom and what it was I was given to do. In that time I learned how to make judgments based on principles rather than personalities, construct arguments from those principles and to stand up for individual rights wherever they might be attacked and by whom.

And with my family, some close friends and member of the Tea Party and the local 9/12 group, I began to imagine what might happen when this economic and political house of cards comes crashing down, as it is bound to do. For the laws of thermodynamics are certain, and our lives are governed by them on the basic level of energy. You can’t win, you can’t break even and you can’t even quit the game. That is, you can’t get out more than you put in, you can’t get out what you put in, and these rules order any system that builds on complexity.

So we began to prepare for the worst while hoping for the best. How was I to know in 2009 that those preparations would include leaving behind a beautiful home that I loved in order to go somewhere far away from the city, and move into a community where people live by the values that made this country strong and independent? The idea of removing myself and the products of my labors from the false economy of the looters seemed far fetched as I sat in my office, polished my beautiful floors and carefully planned and prepared holiday meals and ceremonies. And yet I wondered if I would have the ability to leave it all, as my ancestors did, in order to preserve my own values.

And so began one of the most fearfully amazing times I have ever experienced. With each necessary step once taken, we met the right person or found the right place to take the next one, and fraught with risk as each one seemed/seems, everything came together as if we had been guided. And so we were, as we began to take the actions of free men and women. In retrospect, even the missteps and mistakes become providential, bringing us to the teachers and learning that was needful for the next.

But in the time of the most protracted move of my life, I lost my home, the place that I carry with me wherever I am in time and space, my Makom, the place and source of all that true and good and growing in the world. I was living in a world turned upside down. And even if by my own choosing, I was experiencing a revolution in my own being, the revolution that John Adams said came long before the battle for independence. I had thought that the revolution was external, but the battle takes place first within each of us as individuals.

Last Thanksgiving, that first song—the contemporary Indian death song—was weirdly back in my mind, the rhythm and sense of it remembered, but not the words or the tune. I can hear the drum, the voice of the singer, but I still can’t find it, not really. None of the other music that defined late fall, and the transition from unraveling to crisis, spoke to me in the same way. Last Thanksgiving, I was rootless and mourning for my friend turned Cain and the death of his brother, Abel. I had gone east of my own Gan Eyden, not able to go down to the orchard, to taste its sweet fruit. That I was content in the little island of our Thanksgiving at the ranch last year, does not contradict the sense of coming chaos that I knew at that time.

And all the past year, I have been packing and moving, saying good-bye to what was and cannot be much longer, and greeting that which is becoming what is, a very different and darker reality. This sense of exodus has been apparent in my sparse writings for Pesach and the Holy Days, and yet, standing upon the far shore of that deceptively calm sea, I am surprised to find myself home again. Home at Freedom Ridge Ranch.

On the Friday before Thanksgiving this year, on a journey to Sedillo to stay in our house for the last time, I got in the car after opening the gate to leave. And when I turned on the radio to the country music I had come to appreciate, I heard a deep voice singing:

“West—on a plane bound west, I see her stretchin’ out below,
Land—blessed Mother Land, the place where I was born . . .”

It was Dierks Bentley’s new song called Home. And it was like I knew the words though I had never heard the song:

“From the mountains high, to the wave-crashed shore, there’s a way to find better days I know.

It’s been a long hard ride, got a ways to go, but this is still the place that we all call home.”

Home.

That’s the word, the song that evokes the season of the year and the Turning of the Saeculum, the Makom, the sensibility that takes me to my place to stand.

“Scars—yeah, she’s got her scars, sometimes it starts to worry me—,

“Cause lose—I don’t want to lose sight of who we are.”

Since 9/11 and the foreboding that came before, I have been struggling with the sense that we have been losing who we are meant to be: A free and independent people bound together by an idea, and the courage to identify ourselves by it. We are an exceptional country created not by blood and soil, but by the premise that life, liberty and property are rights endowed to every human being.

Home. It is that idea that I was raised with, and that all my friends and schoolmates were raised with, a precious legacy that our children have not been taught and neither do they understand. But it is here still, the foundation to the place on which we are to stand.

Home. At the ingathering of the harvest of our labor and the harvest of our thoughts, these are the words that evoke the late fall for me, in this time and place. And we continue to prepare to bring ourselves and those we love, our friends and neighbors through the gathering storm into the better days we will come to know.

Home.Those that came before us, they were brave enough to leave what was behind them and make for themselves and for us something new. And they fought and died for it. That place we all call home.

“Brave—Gotta call it brave to chase that dream across the sea.

“Names—then they signed their names for something they believed.”

Is Tolerance a Virtue?

2011-11-02T08:41:00.001-06:00

Over the course of my life I have noticed that the quality tolerance has been morphed into a virtue right up there with the cardinal and natural virtues that were taught in my childhood as standards by which to measure behavior. This has created created confusion in those who have not explicitly defined their morality, and it permits people to unconsciously—or even worse, consciously—slip into the error of moral equivalence.

Years ago when my daughter was in her middle childhood, she took part in a model lesson taught by a Jewish master teacher at a National Association of Temple Educators (NATE) conference when it was held here in New Mexico. The master teacher was modeling a Jewish version of the Socratic questioning method on the topic of a particular blessing in the weekday morning Amidah. Although I have forgotten the name of the master teacher, and even though I have little opportunity these days to use the method he modeled, I will never forget the lesson. It was the first time I explicitly understood that tolerance is no virtue.

In recent days and weeks I have thought about that lesson often as I have watched the sloppy thinking that is moral equivalence being deliberately used to confuse people. Moral equivalence is used to excuse every type of lawless and craven behavior from the publication of vicious lies about Sarah Palin to the murder of innocent civilians by Hamas and Hezbollah. In responding to a well-written commentary at Sultan Knish Blog about this problem, the memory of that lesson returned full force and allowed me to identify tolerance as an ersatz virtue that has opened to door to the use of moral equivalence without argument and to silence any opposition to it.

The discussion text for the model lesson selected by the master teacher was about the blessing that includes a supplication for protection against “bad friends and evil companions.” “What,” the master teacher asked his model students, “is a bad friend?” The students gamely came up with all manner of examples.

According to the kids, a bad friend would get you to sneak a cigarette, would sell you drugs, would steal your homework, would talk you into all manner of childishly unrighteous behavior. After each such example, the master teacher would say: “That’s a friend?” His point, which the kids took a while to get, was that in the examples they were giving, the person in question was not really a friend, and therefore the supplication does not apply to such people.

When the kids got it, there was a long silence, which the master teacher—being a master teacher—allowed to stretch out in order to increase the tension of the unresolved question. He then led the kids through a sequence of questioning that began by getting them to define what is a friend, and continued until they determined that a bad friend is someone who’d rather be liked and would rather conform than confront his friends when they depart from the path of virtue. Even a child can recognize someone who is not a friend, someone who deliberately attempts to lead him astray. It is sometimes much harder to recognize the bad friend, the one who tolerates sloppy thinking and bad behavior in order to remain agreeable, the one who would rather be liked in the moment than protect a friend from the path of destruction.

The sloppy thinking that leads to moral equivalence begins with the belief that tolerance is a virtue, although it clearly is not. A virtue is a particular moral standard that, according to Webster’s New Universal Unabridged English Dictionary (2003), allows a person to “conform one’s life to moral and ethical principles; uprightness, rectitude.” On the other hand, tolerance is the amount of variation from a standard that is allowable under certain circumstances. For example, in engineering, tolerance is the range of variation in physical characteristics of a material such as weight or hardness that can be allowed for a particular use. In the sciences, tolerances in measurements are expressed as error bars and must be included in order to be truthful about the precision that a particular instrument allows.

The point here is that tolerance is a measure of allowable variation from a standard, and therefore cannot be the standard itself. Tolerance is not a virtue because it is not an absolute; rather it is an allowable deviation from an absolute. Even the editors of Webster’s do not get this difference entirely, although the contradiction is apparent within the mess of definitions they provide. Their first definition of tolerance is:

"A fair, objective and permissive attitude toward opinions and practices that differ from one’s own.”

Here the words “fair” and “permissive” are operative, and the use of the word “objective” is misleading. If one is being fair and even permissive about an opinion or practice then the differences between one’s own opinions and practices are being tolerated. the objective reality of the standard is unknown,or does not exist, or one allows that it is disputed in particular instances.

For example, preferences in matters of the sense of taste are dependent on variations in physiology and culture and there are few objective standards. I may enjoy chocolate ice cream and you may enjoy vanilla, and as reasonable people we would tolerate that difference as being unimportant. Here, there is no objective standard that requires that we agree that my preference is good and yours is bad or vice versa.

But there are some physiological standards of taste. All human beings who can smell and taste react with disgust to rotten meat, for example. Disgust is an inborn physical and emotional reaction to substances that if ingested or touched are bad for us, and that can make us seriously ill or even kill us. We have little to no tolerance for these things. And because the standard here is the allowance of poison into our systems, little to no tolerance is a good thing.

The same play of tolerance and standards is operative when we deal with other kinds of behavior in our relationships with others. We might tolerate certain annoying behaviors in children that we would not for adults. Children are young and have a lot to learn. In fact, there is so much behavior to teach that one could end up correcting children all the time in everything they do. This is not good pedagogy. The focus on correcting everything leads to lack of confidence in the student and perfectionism in the teacher. Nobody is satisfied and everyone is unhappy. Nobody learns. Much of good parenting and good teaching involves determining what to correct and what to ignore. One can for example, ignore a child’s impulsive blurting out of answers while correcting his impulsive darting out in front of cars. The first can be dealt with more gradually, but the learning curve on the second behavior is entirely too steep. The first behavior is tolerable—at least for a while—while the second leads to such immediate bad consequences that it is intolerable.

The same is true in other relationships. Take for example, a facet of the Webster definition of tolerance. One might indeed have a “permissive attitude” toward certain opinions and practices of another with whom one disagrees, while withholding such permissiveness towards other of their opinions and practices. For example, certain people believe that their religious opinions and practices apply universally to all human beings. (I am not talking about ethics and morality here, but rather specific religious opinions and practices. They are not the same thing and should not be conflated). Although I disagree with such a proposition, I can tolerate that some of my neighbors believe it, and I can even live side-by-side peacefully with them. I am tolerant of their wrong (in my eyes) opinions and practices within limits, however. So long as they want to tell each other than I am going to a mythological “hell” because I disagree, I have no problem tolerating them, although we are unlikely to be friends. However, should one of those neighbors decide that his religious happiness requires me to adopt his opinions and practices by force, then I can no longer tolerate it, because it interferes with my rights. Such behavior is intolerable, and it is no virtue to put up with it. The standard here is respect for each person’s liberty, and tolerance is how much deviation can be allowed, without destroying the standard. Force obviates liberty, and cannot be tolerated in the name of multiculturalism or any other ersatz virtue.

In sum, tolerance is relative to the standards and conditions and consequences of particular ideas and behaviors, it is not an absolute. It is not a virtue. It is simply an estimation of how much one can deviate, if at all, from from a particular virtue or other standard without destroying it.

A bad friend is not one who eggs one on to do wrong—that is not a friend; rather a bad friend is one who tolerates ethical sloppiness and questionable behavior in others and does not expect better. Those who preach tolerance as a virtue and who excuse faulty ideas and bad behavior in those who agree with them politically through moral equivalence are the “bad friends and evil companions” that we need to avoid. Through such tolerance they nurture evil in others and use them as means to their own ends.

Growing Softly Stronger

2011-10-25T07:18:00.001-06:00

A few months ago, I wrote a blog entry entitle No Justice: The Nanny State Becomes the Police State. In it, I mused on the issue of justice, in which I mentioned the ordeal a friend had experienced when he was falsely accused, arrested and jailed.

Today, my friend Matt Cox is releasing a novel that he wrote which follows his experiences, Growing Softly Stronger in the Cracked Places. Much of that novel was written while he was in jail for six weeks for a crime he did not commit. In his writing, Matt touches on many of the themes that I write about here: liberty and tyranny, justice and injustice, and the terrible way in which innocent individuals are treated as if they are guilty from the moment they are placed under arrest.

DISCLAIMER: I had the opportunity to purchase the book at a Preview Signing Party, and I had read some of the proofs prior to its printing. I have received no compensation for the previews, and no “free stuff” for the privilege of reading it early. Nor am I being compensated for reviewing the book here and linking to it. I am reviewing the book as a favor to a friend and I chose to do so because I think the book can make my blog readers think about our world as we have allowed it to become. The views of author are not my views, but his. That this disclaimer is required on a private blog among friends ought to make us all aware of exactly how far down the rabbit hole of tyranny we have gone.]

REVIEW:
This is a first novel, and the power of the work comes not from sophisticated writing, but from the raw experiences Matt had, what he made of them, and how they informed his thinking and changed his worldview. This is the story of a man’s experience when he was forced to take the Red Pill and how that event forever altered how he sees life, the universe and everything.

Each of us has our own unique way of waking up to what has been happening to the world outside of our daily lives. I have written here on this blog about how strange it is to be going about my business in what I call the surface world—the ordinary world of play and work, of bills, doctor visits, classes and meals to be prepared and eaten—and then suddenly recognize the gestalt, and realize how very fragile those experiences, that life is. Matt’s book tells the story of a man who takes the Red Pill in a powerful way.

Today is the official release date for the novel, and Matt is offering sponsored gifts and bonuses to those who choose to purchase it here:

http://www.softlystronger.com

Occupy Wall Street: Fellow Travelers, Useful Idiots and the Wedge

2011-10-21T11:02:00.001-06:00

“Dear Mr. Hammet:
And here I thought that you were a detective and a brilliant one, because The Maltese Falcon is one of my favorite mystery stories. Don’t you know who I am? This is not to say that everyone should, but I think you should. And if you do, you ought to know better than to send me an invitation like this. Well, you’re half right, at that. I do welcome anyone fighting against "Coughlin’s “Social Justice.” But when you give a party to fight both “Social Justice” and “The Daily Worker”, count me in, and I’ll give you $7.00 per ticket, let alone $3.50. Not until then, Comrade, not until then.”

--Ayn Rand, Letter to Dashiell Hammet, August 1, 1940; Letters of Ayn Rand, Google E-book edition.

During the last two weeks I have experienced two or three moments of surprise and dismay in conversation or in reading Facebook posts and comments, because people I thought should know better have excused and supported the Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Wherever (OWS) actions and agenda.

I have heard self-identified conservatives (Chris Christie comes to mind) compare OWS to the Tea Parties, saying that we have the same goals (?) but wish to use different means. I have read comments by purported libertarians who defend OWS, stating that if the protesters want to end the Fed and destroy “Jewish control of the money”, they are all for it. I have had conversations with Jews who excuse the anti-Semitism displayed at OWS gatherings across the nation, saying that because Jews are taking part in the demonstrations, it is meaningless; and anyway “there is anti-Semitism on the right, too.” As if that makes it unnecessary to confront it.

Even the President of the United States and the leaders of the Democratic Party in Congress are saying that the OWS agenda reflects the concern and anger brewing among all Americans due to the stagnant economy. And almost everybody in the MSM seems to be telling everybody else there that this “movement” is broad-based and grass roots, our very own Tahrir Square. I don’t what they’ve been smoking but there is no comparison between people who have been living under an Islamic dictatorship for more than 30 years and going hungry, with entitled individuals decrying the evils of corporations and demanding “free” stuff while texting on their i-Phones and ducking into Starbucks for a Venti Carmel Macchiato.

None of this is true, as even the casual observer can surmise just by identifying the organizers, watching the You Tube, and reading the various signs, manifestos and lists of demands coming from the OWS crowd. It has been known since last Spring, when Stephen Lerner (who is too radical even for the very left-leaning SEIU) was caught on digital stating the plan and purpose for OWS, that this movement is not grassroots. And since the protests started last month, such paragons of collectivism and unreason as the Communist Party USA, the American Nazi Party, the teachers unions and SEIU have provided material and/or moral support for the movement. Oh, and so has the Democratic Party. Now there are hard numbers to back up what the casual observer already knew. On Tuesday, October 18, Pollster Douglas Schoen wrote this in the Wall Street Journal:

. . .the Occupy Wall Street movement reflects values that are dangerously out of touch with the broad mass of the American people . . .

“The protesters have a distinct ideology and are bound by a deep commitment to radical left-wing policies. On Oct. 10 and 11, Arielle Alter Confino, a senior researcher at my polling firm, interviewed nearly 200 protesters in New York's Zuccotti Park. Our findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion.

“Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn't represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence.

Schoen goes on to give numbers. According to his analysis of the data compiled by Ms. Confino, 98% of her sample “support civil disobedience to achieve their goals.” (Since their actions are civil disobedience, and they are using force by “occupying” property, one has to wonder what--if anything--is going on in the minds of the other 2%). Further, 52% of them have protested before, and 31% would use violence to achieve their goals. 65% agree that “the government” is obliged to provide entitlements (free health care, college educations, retirement security) regardless of the bill, and to pay for it all, 77% support taxing the rich, but 58% do not support taxing everybody. Schoen continues:

What binds a large majority of the protesters together—regardless of age, socioeconomic status or education—is a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas. . . .

Thus Occupy Wall Street is a group of engaged progressives who are disillusioned with the capitalist system and have a distinct activist orientation. Among the general public, by contrast, 41% of Americans self-identify as conservative, 36% as moderate, and only 21% as liberal.

What is curious is that if even the casual observer can qualitatively know what the hard data now tells us, then why would Democratic Party leaders, and worse, conservatives and libertarians lend support to this movement, which after all is not large, and is completely out of step with the general public. After all, according to Schoen’s analysis, one quarter of the OWS crowd do not even plan to vote. However, the older and more conservative members of the general public do vote, and the independent registered voters tend to be moving away from supporting the Democrats in any case.

What would cause politically astute people to lend support of any kind to such a movement? And why in the world would libertarians, conservatives, and moderates excuse, defend and even support the OWS crowd? Liberty-minded people support individual rights, economic freedom and personal responsibility, after all; whereas it is clear from Schoen’s analysis that the OWS crowd does not.

Certainly, there are those among the OWS supporters whose ideology is of the same hard-left, activist variety as that of the protesters themselves. They can be expected to proudly stand by them. And then there are those who agree with certain aspects of the OWS agenda, although they are not willing to go as far as joining in the movement itself. Nor do they wish to publically align themselves with socialism, fascism or communism and the overt supporters of these ideologies in the CPUSA, the American Nazi Party, or other variants. These are Fellow Travelers who end up serving a cause even if they do not wish to be seen as doing so, or with which they do not wholly agree. I suspect that most of the MSM are Fellow Travelers with one or another of the various collectivist ideologies.

But what about those who defend or excuse OWS even while claiming values and principles in opposition to those held by the protesters, the organizers and their overt supporters? The ones who claim to be conservatives or libertarians, or even moderates and traditionally “liberal” Democrats?

Some of them, especially the politicians among them, are likely not being totally honest about their most deeply held values and are taking on certain labels in order to woo voters. This dishonesty leads to the kind of corruption among the powerful we have come to almost expect. But I think the majority of these OWS excusers and defenders are confused about the labels they apply to themselves, or they have mixed premises, believing in liberty, but accepting certain anti-liberty premises as “practical” and “necessary.” Or they may be liberty-minded people who have not overtly examined the philosophy of liberty and therefore do not inform their positions on policy from liberty’s values and principles. These are the ones most likely to be duped into lending support to, or excusing movements like OWS, that are based on values and principles in contradiction to their own. In so doing, they become Useful Idiots.

Useful Idiots are people who make common cause with individuals and groups whose values are in opposition to their own out of naiveté, either in an attempt to do good or to oppose some common enemy who is perceived to be more dangerous than the opposition with whom they cooperate. Unlike Fellow Travelers, Useful Idiots are cynically used by ideologues, and are induced to it by a covert strategy called the Wedge.

The Wedge works by introducing a concrete issue or policy into the discussion upon which each of two sides agree, even though each side holds principles contradictory to the other. Duping someone with the Wedge depends upon the individual not noticing that although he agrees with the particular policy or issue as framed by the ideologue, he does so for different reasons and/or may identify different solutions . (For a thorough review of the Wedge Strategy and its uses, see the four part series on Adam Reed’s blog, Born to Identify, beginning here).

For example, both the OWS activists and various liberty-minded groups agree that the Federal Reserve Bank and the banking system it controls is responsible for the housing bubble and the stock market crash and credit crunch of 2008. Therefore, members of both groups may wish to “End the Fed.” However, the OWS activists want to do so in order to increase direct government control over the economy, thus forcing private banks and other businesses to pay for the “free” stuff to which they believe they are entitled. On the other hand, conservative or libertarian individuals see ending the Fed as part of a larger strategy to set the economy free and re-establish Capitalism, an economic system in which all property is private and individuals are free to choose with whom they will do business and what they will do with their money. Ending the Fed is a Wedge that is conducive to the strategy of the statist organizers of OWS, who are far more interested in further collectivizing the United States than they are in ending the Fed. The Fed, after all, is a useful instrument for exerting more control over the economy, and with it, the lives of ordinary Americans.

Ending the Fed is one of several Wedges in play in the political discourse of the Occupy Wall Street movement. They are all useful in refocusing the opposition to their ultimate goal, seeking to make those of us who hold to the principles of liberty believe that we should, as one Useful Idiot puts it, “Unite against the 1% for Liberty and Freedom.” As Adam Reed points out in his blog series (referenced above):

. . . if we agree with them on issue after issue, then there seems to be no contradiction between their ideals and ours. They might even be the good guys, and their ideas may deserve to be heard, and to be included in the national consensus on legislation and public policy.

In using terms like—“unity” and “freedom”--as a hook, the OWS organizers and their fellow travelers seek to conflate the goals and values of OWS with our own and thereby covertly get our cooperation with them. This can lead to them making converts to their cause, or at least confuse us enough to stop us from opposing their agenda, or from pointing out the characteristics that differentiate them from us.

This is why some Jews, for example, make excuses for the overt and unopposed anti-Semitism in evidence at OWS rallies across the nation. They buy the Wedge, even though it is false, and ignore the reality that anti-Semitism is a racist ideology opposed to individual liberty. This characteristic rhetoric ought to demonstrate that our principles and values are different than theirs, and that there can be no compromise, no “popular front” between us.

In order not to be taken in by the Wedge Strategy, liberty-minded individuals must be conscious our values and principles and consistently and deliberately apply them to the goals and strategies expressed by those who wish to make common cause with them. When our values and principles are not aligned with theirs, we can recognize when a Wedge is being used against us. In order not to serve, defend or excuse a cause that violates our principles, we then must not participate in the organizations and activities of those who promoting such a cause.

Further, once the Wedge is in play in the shared political discourse of a community or country, we ought to point it out because sunshine is the best disinfectant. In our own discussions of the issue or policy being used as a wedge, we need to promote our view from the standpoint of our values, and point out the difference between our reason and theirs. In so doing, the consequences of our line of reasoning will differentiate implications to our advocacy of the issue that our opposition will disagree with, making it clear that we do not have common cause or a “popular front.”

In this way, we remain true to our own values, come what may, and we keep our principles ever before us so that we can create the future that we plan to live. One of liberty and respect for each individual’s rights.

Sukkot: The Liberating Insecurity of Freedom

2011-10-17T19:28:00.011-06:00

The most important part of the Sukkah . . . is the s'khakh,
materials of vegetative origin such as evergreen branches
or marsh rushes that form the roof. . . Though completely
covering the top, the s'khakh should be loosely spread so as
to be open to the heavens, with the stars visible through it.
Thus, the s'khakh is the perfect expression of Divine Protection.
G-d is not a mechanical shield that protects from all evil; G-d
is the Presence who gives strength to persevere, to overcome."
--Rabbi Irving Greenberg, The Jewish Way

As surely as the harvest moon waxes from new to first quarter to full, so too does the month of Tishrei grow from celebrating the Birthday of the World on Rosh Hashannah, to returning again from the death of idolatry to life renewed at Yom Kippur, and growing full at Sukkot, the Ingathering Harvest, the Season of our Joy.

Picture: The CIT and friend throw hay from the trailer into the hayloft at Freedom Ridge Ranch, Catron County, NM; October 2011. EHL

At this season, we recount the harvest of the previous spring and summer, gathering the hay into barns, animal feed for the winter; the cans and jars and bottles into the pantry, food for our bodies; and we bask in the sweet and fleeting warmth of Indian Summer, taking rest and pleasure, experiencing joy to fuel our spirits through the dark and cold of winter.

Although the Sukkah--the harvest booth--that we are commanded to dwell in for the seven days of the Festival originated in agricultural practices of the ancient Near East, it has come to mean far more than that. It symbolizes the temporary shelters that our ancestors used on the long and arduous journey in the wilderness that marked their transition from slavery to freedom.

If at Pesach we celebrate the high of the liberating moment, at Sukkot we remember the first uncertain steps made in freedom. At Pesach we remember that our ancestors served idols, and at Sukkot we recognize the shaky sense of vulnerability that accompanies the refusal to worship that which was made by our own hands. The Sukkah itself is designed to be a symbol of that shakiness, of the impermanent nature of much of what we believe or fervently hope is permanent.

This year, thanks to my summer spent unpacking the library, we rediscovered an old friend, Rabbi Irving Greenberg and his book on living the Jewish holidays. In the way that the turning of the Torah year by year causes us to reveal and rediscover new meanings, so, too, does the turning of the seasons of the year, year by year, cause us to recognize and see anew the meanings of the Holy times and seasons, and how they relate to our lives in the world as it turns and changes. During the somnolent warmth of an Indian Summer Shabbat afternoon, as the dogs dozed and insects hummed, we read:

"The move into the sukkah is a movement from the certainty of fixed position toward the liberating insecurity of freedom. [Those who dwell in the sukkah] open up to the world, to the unexpected winds, to the surprise setback as well as the planned gain. The joy of Sukkot is a celebration of the privilege of starting on the road to freedom, knowing that to finish the task is not as decisive as the failure to start is."

At the table in the Sukkah, we looked at each other, and smiled over the sweet Sabbath wine in recognition of the reality of those words; the recognition that this entire year has been exactly that for us: a year of unexpected winds (and rain and mud!) and surprises, a year in which we have made the choice to start out on a new road to freedom in our lives, even as the world turns into the saecular winter, a season of uncertainty and crisis.

Moving into the Sukkah, even to celebrate Ha-chag, THE Holiday, the one in which we celebrate the joy of the harvest, is also to move into the recognition that nothing much in life is permanent, and that to attach our hearts too securely to the idea that what is now is what will always be is dangerous idolatry, bound to fail us. That is why the Sukkah is constructed to shake in the wind--it is to remind us that most of what we believe protects us is in fact, ephemeral. As Rabbi Greenberg writes:

"The sukkah . . . instructs Jews not to become overly rooted, particularly not in the exile. For thousands of years, Jews built homes in the Diaspora. Civilizations of extraordinary richness--culturally, religiously, economically and socially-- we created. But all such Jewish homes and civilizations have proven thus far to be temporary ones, blown away when the turn of the wheel brought new forces to power. Often, self-deception and the desire to claim permanent roots led Jews to deny what was happening until it was too late to escape."

Picture: The Engineering Geek in the Sukkah after Havdalah ended Shabbat Chol-ha Moed Sukkot 5772, Freedom Ridge Ranch, Catron County, NM; October 2011 EHL

Indeed. One need only to think of those Jews who believed that they were too assimilated, too German; that the high civilization of Germany would protect them, and that they had acquired too much to give it up , to flee with nothing, leaving everything, in the middle of the night. I remember wondering--as I studied the early days of the Shoah and the fall European civilization into darkness; as I read Hersey's The Wall, and as I watched Defiance--I remember asking myself, could I do it? Would I be able to leave everything for the sake of my life and those of my children? I would look around at my beautiful home, at the wealth bound up in fine furniture, at the Polish tea set passed down from oldest daughter to oldest daughter, at my mother-in-law's Passover china, and I would know how hard that choice would be.

But during the past year and a half, as we watched the world teeter once again on the brink of financial ruin and moral darkness, as we listened to the rising voices of antisemitism, and heard the voices of collectivism blaming the Jews, and talking of "eating the rich", we made a decision. We recognized that all of the things we value can be built again by those who place the highest value not the things themselves, but on the lives of those who made them. And so we chose to plan prudently, to remove our work from those who believe they own us, to "go Galt" and preserve ourselves and our values for a new turning of the wheel. And I left the home I loved for a new and more rugged place; and we left the retirement we planned for new challenges in self-sufficiency, in order to provide for ourselves and those we value a shelter in case of trouble. We cannot know the whole of what is coming, and we cannot guarantee for ourselves and those we love perfect protection from all evil. But we can find for ourselves and offer to others, a place to stand; one rooted not in a place and possessions, but one rooted in a Presence identified by the spirit of freedom and adventure, that One who gives us the "courage and strength to persevere."

Thinking of all of this, recognizing who we are are and why we are here, we held hands as we made Havdalah in the Sukkah, tasting the sweet wine, smelling the spices, and holding our hands out to the light of the twisted candle, we sang of our longing for redemption and of the sweetness of joy in the coming week, knowing that whatever may come, we will face it as free individuals who have chosen this path. This ability to choose and to act in the face of the uncertainties of life is the very thing by which we find happiness and fulfillment. In this way, freedom and openness to the world of unexpected winds and surprise setbacks still brings joy. At Sukkot we are commanded to enjoy ourselves, to take pleasure in the fruits of our action and in the harvest of our choices.

Picture: Setting the Table for Kiddush in the Sukkah, Freedom Ridge Ranch, Catron County, NM; October 2011 EHL

"One fundamental criterion of a life well lived is love of life. It is terribly important, therefore, to enjoy life as it goes along. Joy cannot be postponed. Life as it is, is of infinite value . . .The joy of Sukkot represents maturity. It is the happiness of a free person who chooses to live this way, who chooses this mission above all alternatives."

The openness of the Sukkah, the frailty of it before strong winds, the beauty of the sun and the stars shining through the s'khakh, all of these things reminded us again this year that the Journey to Freedom that Sukkot commemorates is long and difficult; that our recognition of the temporary nature of most of our experiences is part of the journey; and that the very insecurity of freedom itself fills our lives and choices with meaning. Happiness comes of our choosing freedom over the enslavement of idolatry, and it is in the choosing to love our lives as they are, with all of their challenges and adventures, that we find joy.

This is what we learned anew this year, in the midst of all the adventures here at Freedom Ridge Ranch, during this Harvest Festival, the Season of Our Joy.

Yom Kippur: Worthy of the Covenant

2011-10-11T06:52:00.007-06:00

"The Soul that you have given me is a pure one, O G-d.

You have created it, you have formed it, you have breathed it into me, and within me you sustain it. So long as I have breath, therefore, I will give thanks to you, Adonai my G-d, and G-d of all ages, Master of all creation and Sovereign of every human spirit. Blessed is the Eternal, in whose hands are the souls of all the living, and the spirits of all flesh."
--Birkat ha-Nefesh from Sha'arei Tefillah: The New Union Prayer Book, CCAR

The Day of Atonement 5772 was a different experience for me.
Normally, even on the holiest of days, part of my mind is occupied with the tasks of a Jewish wife and mother, making sure that everything is prepared, that my husband and son have everything that they need so that we all may get to the synagogue on time for Kol Nidrei on Erev Yom Kippur, and Shacharit services in the morning. Even during services, I am usually easily distracted with the needs of my husband and those of my children, especially my son, whose Aspie character creates certain difficulties for him in large gatherings. This is, of course, the Orthodox argument for seating men and women separately for prayer, although it is not the whole of it, because in Orthodoxy women's prayer is not seen as equal or even as necessary as is that of men.

This year, the first Yom Kippur for which we lived at the Ranch, required logistics planned out far in advance, in order that we might travel up to our house in Tijeras, have a good pre-fast meal and then spend the Eve and the Day of Atonement at synagogue. Preparation was even more necessary given the time and distance between us and Congregation Albert. G-d willing, we would all get there. "G-d willing and the creek don't rise," as we used to say in the Midwest.

This year the creek rose. We were bogged in from the Sunday afternoon before Yom Kippur through Wednesday. On Thursday morning, I left for Albuquerque and Tijeras a day ahead in order to keep an appointment and to prepare the pre-fast meal and make everything smooth for the Engineering Geek and the Catron Kid, who were planning to drive up on Friday morning. But it rained Thursday night and Friday morning, and my guys were once again bogged in. They observed the Great White Fast at the ranch, and I observed it at the synagogue.

Being wholly alone with my thoughts is a luxury that I do not often experience. As a wife and mother, I am eminently interruptable, even when I am being a scholar and a writer. It is an experience that I have not had since I became a mother more than 25 years ago. Although I was disappointed that our plans had come to naught, I also relished the the idea of experiencing Yom Kippur as an individual, albeit one amidst the Holy Congregation.

Early on Yom Kippur morning, absolved from the duties that usually attend making a family ready to go the synagogue, I awoke to snow and silence. Since ordinary distractions are forbidden on the Shabbat Shabbaton (the Sabbath of Sabbaths), I opened the Machzor--the High Holy Day Prayer Book--and the pages fell open to a page within the Musaf (additional) Service. I read the following, set apart in the middle of the page:

I know that I am worthy of the Covenant, and that I am able to fulfill the Mitzvot.

The Day of Atonement is not only about the relationship of one human being and another, the breeches in which the Day of Atonement fast does not atone; rather it is also, and perhaps primarily, about the relationship of the Jew to the Covenant, and the moral and ethical demands that Judaism makes upon the individual. All of the Mitzvot (commandments) that are still observed are meant to remind a Jew of the high moral and ethical demands that Judaism makes. For as the daily Birkat ha-Nefesh (The Blessing for the Soul) states so forthrightly, Judaism teaches that the human being is born with the ability to choose between good and evil, between actions that lead to life and those that lead to death.

Jews have never accepted the Christian doctrine of Original Sin--that a human being is born depraved--nor has it accepted the Islamic concept of Submission. Rather Judaism requires that every human being stand up and choose life, not just once and for all time, but in every situation and every action. The presence of the Holy Congregation, and all of the Mitzvot--whether they are ritual or ethical requirements--have the purpose of reminding and guiding the Jew in this all important task, for it is through human choice that holiness is brought into the world.

One of the problems that many Jews today struggle with is the sense that in our generation we are not worthy of Covenant. This sensitivity comes from many sources: the abandonment by G-d and man only because we are Jews that was so recently experienced during the Shoah; the accusations of collective guilt and expectations of collective punishment we experience even now that are the evil heart and soul of modern antisemitism; and more banal, but more pervasive, the evasion of individual responsibility that is part and parcel of the "new age" notions of "cheap grace" and self-indulgence that permeate the secular culture.
When confronted with the stark demands of the Covenant to be Holy--to do justice, to act righteously, to love goodness and hate evil--we/I quail at the thought, and turn away.

Turning away from the awesome power of my own humanity, I feel not the awe that I am endowed with the ability to distinguish between good and evil, but the fear that I am not capable of doing so. Over the last few years I have become convinced a good part of the problem is that we live in a society that worships niceness--that is being weak, compliant, and easily led--over righteousness. The dominant culture worships the ease of moral equivalence over the difficulty of rewarding good and requiting evil that is the virtue of justice. Rather than accepting the difficulty and freedom that come from identifying and judging good and evil, we are being taught to comply with and take our ease in politically correct equivalencies between them, thus giving up our individual liberty and the custody of own lives and thoughts. We accept the lie that we are not individually capable of making judgments between right and wrong physically, emotionally and spiritually. In so doing, we make ourselves slaves to whims of an idol, whether that idol be a charismatic leader, or a construct such as "society" or the "common good."

Human agency and responsibility require freedom. As Jews, our Covenant demands human liberty in order that we stand up every moment of our lives and make choices between right and wrong, good and evil, in matters large and small. For this is what it means to be a mensch--a real human being. On Yom Kippur we stop to remember our own power as free human beings, and reflect that our sins and failings come from evasion of that reality. And we dignify other individuals with similar agency, recognizing that they, too, are human beings capable of recognizing and choosing between good and evil.

Yom Kippur is the Great White Fast--not a day to bow and scrape and pretend our unworthiness--but rather a day in which to come before the Eternal in thanksgiving that we are worthy and capable of transcending our weaknesses and accepting the demand to find the best within us.

On Yom Kippur each individual declares:
“I am worthy of the Covenant and capable of fulfilling the Mitzvot.”

Choose Now, Speak Now: Gematria for 5772

2011-10-04T05:42:00.009-06:00

Ready or not, the Holy Days are upon us. They come right on time in the Jewish Calendar, and the middle of school life and busy family life, sometime during the fall of the year in relationship to the Western Calendar. They come, predictably each year, even when uncertainty reigns and chaos threatens on the stage of world events. This year, even as we try to put our own lives into perspective, hoping for a better year, a good and sweet New Year for ourselves, for family and friends, our hearts and minds turn inexorably to Israel, tiny Israel, threatened with annihilation.

In the early 1990's, when I was pregnant with the child who has grown to be the Catron Kid, (Cowboy in Training) I was serving briefly as Cantorial Soloist for our synagogue when we were between professional cantors. And one late summer Friday morning, when I was sitting in bed sipping my ersatz morning coffee, our rabbi called and with great jubilation said: "We are going to have peace! I want you to sing the Klepper Shalom Rav (the prayer that ends the Amidah) tonight." This was the Camp David Accords, when we really thought that trading land for peace would get us somewhere, and when we really hoped, irrationally, that in Yasser Arafat and Fatah, we really had a partner for talks. Our delusions lasted little longer than my musical career, and for some they have never ended. But by the beginning of the Terror War against Israel, I laid my own delusions to rest.

It was around the time of the High Holy Days 5761 (2000 CE) that the Terror War began in Jerusalem. It was framed by a complicit press as a popular uprising (intifada) against Israeli rule of territories won by the 1967 war. But it was not that, rather it was designed and orchestrated by terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hizbollah, funded by Syria and Iran. I remember crying on the morning of Yom Kippur, as we realized that stories unfolding in real time on the internet, stories intended to make Israel look like the aggressor and to make the IDF look like Nazis, were staged for the world media, and that the media was using them to vilify Israel.

In many ways, the beginning of the Terror War was the beginning of my own political awakening, when I began to understand that my parents had been right, and that the ideals of the left would lead inexorably to misery, poverty and war. I remember a heated exchange with an older, wiser friend which led me to admit to myself that the left is almost always and everywhere antisemitic. And so I cried that morning as I stood up on the bimah to chant the Yom Kippur morning Haftarah, which I began with an uncharacteristic personal whispered prayer: "For the sake of the unification of Avinu Malkenu (Our Father, Our King) and Shechinah Imeinu (The Presence of G-d Who dwells among us)." It was on that day, at that moment, that I understood exactly how tenuous the existence of Medinat Yisrael (the State of Israel) really is.

And over the ensuing years we have watched the systematic murder of Israelis by terrorist suicide bombings, and the creation of a terrorized citizenry by incessant rocket attacks, all accompanied by a propaganda campaign intended to delegitimize Israel in the eyes of the world. We have seen Holocaust denial spoken from the platform of the United Nations, and we have heard Islamicist thugs and terrorists speak in American universities, praying for the coming of the "Khalifa" (Califate) to thunderous applause. And we have come to understand that no amount of land given over will ever be enough to bring peace to Israel, that our enemies wish to destroy the Jewish state completely, and that not content with that, they will not rest until they have killed every last Jew on the planet, and destroyed the United States as well.

Each Jewish year has an accompanying Gematria, a kind of numerology that derives patterns and meaning from the fact that Hebrew letters are also numbers. Usually people use the patterns to derive some theme for the year that will connect their everyday, Western lives to their spiritual needs and aspirations. Often the Gematria is derived from numerical equation of one Hebrew word to another. For example, the Hebrew word for "nut" (the food, not the mental state) is egoz, which has the same numerical value adding up the Hebrew letters as the Hebrew word for "sin", which is chet. Thus Jews avoid putting nuts into their High Holy Days recipes, because one wants to focus on forgiveness of sin during this time.

The Gematria for finding the theme or meaning for the year is a more sophisticated playing with numbers and letters intended to provide an understanding of what the theme for the coming year is not on a personal level, but also for all the House of Israel and all the world. Human beings are meaning-makers, after all, and our brains are organized to find patterns. Where there are none, we look for them anyway, in order to help us understand not only what is happening and how, but the "why" of events in our lives and in our world. In this way Gematria is not fortune-telling, it does not attempt to reveal an unknown future, but rather it allows a human being to impose a pattern on his uncertainty and formulate a theme and a plan for dealing with it.

We are all dealing with uncertainty at some level. This is the way of the Fourth Turning of the Saeculum, when together we enter a Great Gate in History, and experience changes in familiar patterns of our lives at many levels. For the Jewish people, this time is fraught with more fear and uncertainty, because we see that as the crisis nears its turning point, "never again" is an empty promise, and that we are once again standing in the breech.

With all this in mind, though much of it unconsciously, I turned to my custom of finding a theme for the coming Jewish year. Usually, I find some virtue that I want to focus on, some Hebrew word or phrase that will help me put all of my inchoate longings and desires to improve my life, strengthen my weaknesses, into a plan for action. Last year, the Gematria led me to the Hebrew word Emunah, a reliance upon the goodness of G-d and of life in the face of all kinds of changes and challenges. It was small and very personal, and although it did have connections to what was happening in the world at some level, I did not realize it then. I thought that if I could improve to some degree on this for myself, that it would give me more resilience in dealing with certain personal relationships that have challenges that are beyond my control.

Yesterday I began looking at Gematria for the coming year with the same intent: to find a theme for the year that would challenge me to greater strength of spirit, address certain personal weaknesses, and allow me to move forward with as much grace and purpose and I can muster. In short, I was looking for a personal theme for the year that would match the likely challenges I would face inwardly, and within my family and my work.

That is not what I found. Instead I found this Gematria for the year:
וְאַתָּה, תֶּאְזֹר מָתְנֶיךָ וְקַמְתָּ וְדִבַּרְתָּ אֲלֵיהֶם אֵת כָּל-אֲשֶׁר אָנֹכִי אֲצַוֶּךָּ אַל-תֵּחַת, מִפְּנֵיהֶם פֶּן אֲחִתְּךָ לִפְנֵיהֶם
In English: "And you, gird up your loins, and stand, and speak to them everything that I will command you; Do not be broken (scared, dismayed) before them, lest I break (scare, dismay) you before them."

Although this Gematria can have personal implications, it does not really apply to one small person living on the nowhere side of flyover country, for herself. This Gematria cannot be about making small changes to grow virtue where there was none in personal affairs; it seems to be for the Jewish people, here in America and in the rest of the Diaspora, and for those who love liberty throughout the world. It speaks to each of us as individuals, yes, but it requires of us some courage beyond that required to mend our personal breeches in small ways. For this Gematria is from Jeremiah the Prophet, who was called as a young man to speak for the Eternal to Israel on the brink of Crisis, on threshold of one of the Great Gates of History.

The context of this text is the time at which Jeremiah understood that he must speak, he must say what he saw coming, knowing that it was altogether hard and unpleasant words that he had to speak. And he was afraid, knowing that, and knowing the fate of prophets. He was feeling small and young and unworthy of saying what he knew he had to say to the House of Israel. But as Jeremiah well knew, there comes a time in history when all of one's fears and all of one's sense of unworthiness must be disregarded, for the moment of choosing is at hand, and by refusing to choose a side, to lift up one's voice, one has decided anyway.

This is that time. For the past number of years, I have watched and waited, as something awful has been taking shape, and the dreams of those who wish to rule over us have seemed to come to fruition. And when we first raised our voices together, I believed that attending a tea party, holding a sign and banding together a few times a year was all that I had to do. It seemed exciting and yet happy and innocent. Even in 2008 and 2009, at least, I did not believe that raising my voice would become dangerous, that attempts would be made to shut us down--first by ridicule and now, with increasing stridency, by threat of force and chaos.

As I see what is taking shape, and understand that we must raise our voices and take action against it, I have every reason to be afraid. I understand Jeremiah. And yet, in the face of derision and increasing hatred directed against us, it is necessary that I--that we all choose, knowing full well that once we step across the line, there is no turning back. For this we need courage, lev chazach , the strength of heart to do so willingly and with reliance upon the knowledge that for those who are determined, strength will be given.

Through his fear and hesitation, Jeremiah knew that by making a choice, by raising his voice he would be strengthened. For he heard: " This day I have made of you a fortified city, a pillar of iron . . . and they shall fight against you, but they shall not prevail against you, for I am with you." And he understood that once the step is taken, then the strength shall be made straight.

I do not know where this year will take me, and all of us. I know that great and awesome deeds are in the offing. War against Israel, thus far covert, will almost certainly become overt. World economies stand on the brink of destruction. To bring something good out of all of this at the end, to cherish and preserve the value of the individual, the preciousness of liberty and the goodness of life will take all of the courage and strength we can muster. And it seems more and more certain that if we do not choose now, speak now, our silence will rise up and speak against us. As small and weak and unworthy as each one of us may feel, we still are called to stand in breech and raise our voices.

We know that there are no promises that each one of us will come through unharmed, that the stakes are rapidly becoming frighteningly high; but we do have that one small but unwavering flame against the darkness: "I am with you." So long as we are standing on the firm foundation of righteousness, so long as we are unwavering in our commitment to our values and principles, that small flame will warm our hands and guide our heart whatever may come.

Be strong. Be strong. And may we all be strengthened.

Elul 5771: Renewing Our Days at Freedom Ridge Ranch

2011-09-21T06:37:00.006-06:00

The Jewish year 5771 has been a year of changes. This has been reflected in my blog, in my daily life and in our family's approach to Jewish life. Last year, I completely missed writing a post about Elul at all, and the posts about our Jewish holidays have been short or entirely missing. Although we did celebrate them, our celebrations were different--especially in the springtime of the year, when we were caught up in the most protracted move I have ever made, complicated as it was by the Engineering Geek's retirement, surgery and frequent travel. However, this summer--as we got settled here on the ranch--we began some practices for our Jewish life way out here, far from any organized form of communal life.

Change, even good change, even planned change, is hard. It is endings and beginnings. For me, starting a business, investing in that business, buying property, moving out of a house I loved, learning, learning, learning--sometimes the hard way--all of these things create a lot of emotional stress. For the EG, retiring from a career at the National Labs, a work environment that was becoming increasingly bureaucratic and difficult to fit himself into, leaving the work itself--which he loved, learning how to organize his own work, forming his own Engineering firm and dealing with the financial changes this all entailed created stress that matched and exceeded mine. For the CIT, making the decision to move to a new school in mid-year, making that move, meeting new people, adjusting to small-town life, planning for life after high school, and taking a great deal of responsibility for animals and the infrastructure of the ranch, all made for his own adjustments.

The confluence of all of these individual changes definitely put great stress on each set of individual relationships--husband to wife, wife to husband; mother to son, son to mother; step-father to step-son, step-son to stepfather--and there was a great deal of family turmoil as all of these relationships had to be negotiated anew. For not only are the parents transitioning to a new phase of life--retirement, new work and new plans, but so is the boy becoming a man, planning his next moves, working out how to be up and out and yet remaining attached to the ranch, work that he wishes to inherit.

And of course, there is also everything that is happening in the outside world, a world that is becoming increasingly unstable as it approaches a Crisis period, the Fourth Turning of the Saeculum. Increasing financial stress upon our country, and the crash of economies in other countries; the increasingly dire realization that--like it or not--there is an implacable enemy out there that threatens our country and our world; and for us, the rise of the oldest hatred, the virulent antisemitism, expressed this time through a threat to the very existence of Medinat Yisrael--the Jewish State.

As the world labors to enter a new cycle of seasons, as the generations enter new phases of their own lives, and as we make huge changes, we have found the need to establish new ways of reconnection to our heritage and our religion. All these stresses, coming together as they are, require a strong central anchor, a place of coherence, in order for us to generate the faith in life and in ourselves so that we can weather what is coming with strength of spirit.

So as the physical requirements of the move receded into the past, and as spring became summer and the emotional turmoil began to manifest, we knew we had to establish a different kind of Jewish life. At one point in June, when the smoke hung in the air and the rumors of evacuation were upon us, we knew it was going to be divorce, murder or a positive evolution to our marriage. At this time, when it looked like we weren't going to survive ourselves, we happened to unpack our Ketubah--our marriage contract. And we read the contract we had made: to establish a household within the People Israel, and to nurture our lives through the cycles of Sabbaths and Holy Days.

So we began to turn again, a little earlier than Elul, or our Elul began a little before it begins formally. We are not certain which is true. So we each established for ourselves our own person ritual of prayer and study, more of less formal as we each felt we needed. As a family, we have always observed the Sabbath together, but during this past year it had become disorganized and perfunctory. Into this latent framework we breathed new life, making it a point to appreciate each other through the formal ritual of the Friday night Shabbat ritual. To this we added a casual, communal service on Shabbat morning, including Torah Study. As it has been summer, we have been praying this service together on the porch, developing our own minhag (custom) about who leads and who responds during the different prayers.
And then before we eat lunch, we make Shabbat morning Kiddush. And in the evening when three stars appear, we make Havdalah.

As always, I am amazed at the truth of the saying about Torah from Pirke Avot: "Turn it, and turn it, for everything is in it." Each week, the portion says something to us about the things we have been pondering, or about what is happening in the world. Soon we will celebrate Sukkot, our first here at the ranch, and this phenomenon of the eternal relevance of Torah to our lives and the life of the world is stated in the readings from Kohelet (Ecclesiastes): There is nothing new under the sun when it comes to events created out of the relationships of person to person and community to community.

There is nothing set in stone about this routine we are establishing. We still have to travel to Albuquerque to care for our house, to take care of other business, and to fulfill appointments. When we do, our comings and goings do not always go as planned. And so, when we are there instead of here, we reconnect with our now far-away Jewish community by attending Friday night services, and then having a more simple ritual at home.

There can be, we have discovered, Jewish life when one lives 30 miles from nowhere, and 200 miles from the nearest synagogue. The bands of connection to ritual life and community have to become elastic, and the ways that we relate to it must change. At the same time, we are learning that in some ways, those connections become more necessary and more important.

I have learned again that Jewish life changes with the lifecycle, that the cycle of the year and the circle of one's life are wheels within wheels, ever turning, bringing us back always to that stable and necessary center.

Blessed is the One who renews our days as in days of old.

9/11: Remembering Amalek

2011-09-15T16:28:00.004-06:00

Although this past weekend was not as I expected, that is not why it took me until today to write a post about 9/11. It is true that I spent the day itself taking down bookshelves that we bought from the local Borders, and that the transmission on the truck went out, keeping me camping out at Ragamuffin House in Tijeras with no internet.

But the whole truth of the matter is that the delay was about more than those logistics. It was about the unexpected emotions of that day, brought up, whole from the past. I am not sure why this anniversary was different than the nine that preceded it, but it was. I think part of it was the realization that this year there is still no Freedom Tower, that we have not really dealt with an enemy who murders civilians at work, making war that we are told not to acknowledge. That there are people who would have us put the memory of that day away from us, as easily as we discard the column in the Los Angeles Times, as if the lives of the innocent can be so easily dismissed.

But even though the main-stream media has conspired to keep the images and sounds of that day away from us, I do not need to go to You Tube to find them, for they are seared in my mind's eye as if it had happened yesterday: The tower burning, black smoke in the clear blue September sky; the second plane and the people who jumped to their deaths holding hands, to escape the flames; the towers falling first the second, then the first, in a cloud of smoke and ash that pursued fleeing New Yorkers. And later, the candles lit--this one for the first tower and that for the second--at Friday evening services at the end of that terrible week.

This year the Shabbat of September 10 Torah reading, Ki Teitze, included the commandment to blot out the name of Amalek, and was read thus:

"Remember what Amalek did to you on the way when you were coming forth from Egypt; How he happened upon you on the road and attacked you from the rear, killing all of your weak ones (the women and children) while you were faint and exhausted. He did not fear G-d. It shall be that when the Eternal your G-d lets you rest from all your enemies all around you, . . . you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under the heavens. Do not forget." (Devarim 25: 17 - 19)

I could not help but translate it in my own mind as: "Remember what Al Quaida did to you in your own land out of a clear sky; How he came upon you at your work and attacked you without warning, killing your civilians and those of the nations while you were attending to your lives. He did not fear G-d. . . You shall destroy the very memory of Al Quaida from under the heavens. Do not forget."

These verses are found among quite a few miscellaneous laws and commandments, rules and regulations, and early in the same portion and in previous portions there are laws and commandments about how to conduct wars. There are different kinds of wars discussed. Those which are defensive, that is when the land is attacked from without, obligate everyone--even the bride under her chuppah--to take up arms against the enemy. Other wars, called the King's wars, which are wars for territory and booty, allow individuals to refrain from taking up arms altogether for various reasons. (In the Book of Samuel, in the Nevi'im, where the people demand a king, it becomes clear that such wars are not considered altogether kosher by the Prophet Samuel who speaks in the name of the Eternal, telling the people that if they get a king he will take their wealth to fight wars of conquest and make their sons run before his chariots). However, none of the wars discussed elsewhere have a Commandment of Remembrance attached to them. The commandment here is unique.

Amalek is depicted as entirely evil because he does not attack the vanguard of the Israelites where the warriors are, thus conducting an honest war. Rather he attacks the rear, where the women and children and animals walk, those who are not warriors and not prepared to defend themselves. The commandment to remember what Amalek did and to blot out the name of Amalek is the commandment to entirely destroy those such as Amalek, who in his cowardice, attacked civilians going about their lives.

This tenth anniversary of the attacks by Al Quaida on 9/11 has been one of great regret and difficulty for many Americans, as we take stock of where we are in terms of defending ourselves against an act of war conducted by terrorists on our own soil and in a civilian place of commerce in New York, as well as against the Pentagon from where our warriors are commanded. The attack on the World Trade Center is an attack like that of Amalek, an attack on those not prepared to to defend themselves, and who were engaged in the honorable act of trade and commerce.

There are two things we ought to be doing, two things that even people of the Bronze Age understood. And we are being told by the leftist press and their masters that we should do neither.

First, we are commanded to REMEMBER. "Remember what Amalek did to you . . . Don't forget." To maintain that memory is important in order to honor the innocents who died that day, and the importance of each life taken, leaving behind an absence and pain to those living who loved them and counted upon them. To take a life, we are taught, is to destroy an entire world: the worlds of those who must mourn, the worlds of deeds undone, the worlds of children never to be.

There are those who wish us not to remember, like the leftist American shilling for the Islamo-fascists by writing for Al Jazeera who advised that "we get over ourselves." But it is not ourselves that he wants us to get over. It is the sacred memory of those who were attacked, their lives torn from them unfinished that he wants to erase. And there are those, like the New York Times columnist (may his name be erased), who wrote that it is we--and not Amalek--who ought to be ashamed. It is he who ought to be ashamed for giving aid and comfort to an enemy and forgetting what that enemy did to us.

It is also important to not only remember those killed on that day, but what was done to us and by whom. Such memory is necessary in order to respond, to mete out the just due that the enemy has earned by such a cowardly evil. Do not forget--we are told--do not forget to blot out even the memory of the enemy from under the heavens.

In Jewish memory, we connect all tyrants who have tried to destroy the weak, the civilians, the innocent, and the whole Jewish people, to Amalek. From Haman to Hitler to Imadinnerjacket (may their names be erased)--we call them all Amalek. They are to be despised and they are to be destroyed so that their evil does not persist on earth. By their words and their deeds they have shown that do not deserve the respect that memory brings from decent human beings. We, the living, should act so that our lives are free of them.

As civilized people, we no longer think that this means that we ought to wipe out all those related by blood or belief to the Amalek's of the world, but who have refrained from committing such an attack. But the commandment to blot out the name of Amalek does mean the destruction of those who planned and/or financed and/or supported and/or committed this act of war against civilians who were not at war against them. To do so is self-defense, but further it is deterrence. To remember what Amalek did to us and to blot his name out from under the heavens is to demonstrate to anyone who might be an Amalek-wanna-be that this is what will happen.

This applies to bin Laden, who met his death at the hands of soldiers, who were entirely correct in shooting him, for he was at war with them. And it applies to Al Quaida, and to the governments of those places that supported his effort to attack us. By their actions against the innocent, they have given their destinies over into our hands, and it is up to us to determine what it means to utterly blot out the name of Amalek from under the heavens.

This 9/11 was subdued. Our memories are still tinged with loss and anger. Not because we need to get over it, nor because we ought to be ashamed. It is so because we are being told that those who are responsible are not responsible, and that we should not fight against them, because it is we who are somehow guilty: guilty for existing, for taking up space on this earth, for our prosperity and our way of life. It is those who commit this sin of moral equivalence who ought to be ashamed.

As we go into the next years, we can continue to cherish the memory. And we can refuse to submit to unearned guilt. And we can determine what it means to blot out the name of Amalek from under the heavens.

Restoring Courage: Glenn Beck's Moment

2011-08-30T07:07:00.010-06:00

בְּיָדוֹ אַפְקִיד רוּחִי
בְּעֵת אִישָׁן וְאָעִירָה
וְעִם רוּחִי גְוִיָּתִי
אֲדֹנָי לִי וְלֹא אִירָא
Into G-d's hand, I commit my spirit,
When I sleep, and I shall awake;
And with my spirit, my body.
G-d is with me, I shall not fear.
--Adon Olam

Israel is under attack.
The Jewish people are once again threatened by destruction.
Who among the nations will speak up for us?

This is not a novel statement.
In certain circles such a statement would inspire the response:
"Ya think?" It would be said with a certain sarcastic, world-weary tone intended to impress the listener with the speaker's oh, so sophisticated approach to events. No doubt the responder has a different and more self-flattering view of what sophistication is than the actual meaning, derived from the practice of the ancient Greek sophists to teach a rhetoric in which the Socratic rules of logic may be used to argue contradictory sides of an argument one after another. Sophistry was a method of teaching used to inculcate in the young elite the skills needed to be a successful politician in the Athenian democracy. In the right hands, such skills could be useful in order to create a platform from which a politician could discuss ideas, but more often to be sophisticated in the root sense meant using the skills to manipulate voters in order to obtain power over them.

Israel is under attack.
This is not novel, but it is true.
Israel's very right to exist is being questioned and delegitimized. No other country on the face of the earth has had its right to exist challenged this way, no matter how cruel its government is to its own people, no matter how belligerent it is toward other countries, no matter how it was created.

The sophists find reasons why it is good and right and just to allow such talk. The cynics say that Israel is evil and that the West is too mired in its own sin to do anything about it.

And into the breech steps an earnest and idealistic American Christian who is somewhat ignorant of Judaism and even more so about Jews ourselves. Like many American Christians, he does not understand our fears and foibles, our prickly response to those who are not MOT*s and yet who seem to like us anyway. Last week in Jerusalem, the radio host and commentator Glenn Beck held a rally in support of the Jewish people and of Israel. He called it Restoring Courage. He explained that just as the people of a small town in Ohio who had banded together to help one another in the face of the worst unemployment rate in the country had something to teach Americans about self-reliance, so too, does a tiny country surrounded by enemies have something to teach the world about courage.

With some trepidation, I arrived at the JCC in Albuquerque to watch the rally that was streamed from the south steps of the ancient Temple Mount in Jerusalem into a computer and onto a screen in New Mexico. I say 'with some trepidation', because Glenn Beck has made some gaffes about Jews and Judaism in the past that in my estimation were the product of his ignorance about us and his lack of knowledge about our long and trying history in relationship to Christianity.

I believe that these gaffes were the result of the fact that he views Judaism through the prism of his own experience with Christianity--as Christians are wont to do--and thus made these critical errors, not out of hatred, but out of ignorance and a habit of letting his mouth run ahead of his thoughts--as radio talk show hosts are wont to do. I also think that the Jewish leftists who gleefully took those gaffes out of context and ran with them while tolerating outright antisemitism from the men and women surrounding their O-Messiah were more than a little ridiculous, but that's another blog.

As I watched the sun move across the ancient stones of the walls and towers that once compromised the outer defenses of the Temple, and as I listened to the music by the Jerusalem Synagogue Choir (and an Israeli pop star soloist), and as I heard the speech by Jerusalem's Mayor, I was not only reassured, but I was also moved. And there at the JCC in Albuquerque, I was even more moved by the fact that when I reflexively stood for Hatikvah**, the whole roomful of people around me--who were mostly Christians from pro-Israel churches and campus organizations-- hastily, but graciously stood with me. The latter reminded me of the times within the past ten years that I have stood alone, surrounded by Christians (and sometimes even a few Jews), to defend Israel and the Jewish people against lies and calumny.

However, when Glenn Beck took the stage during his narration of the history of the Temple Mount--a place special to three religions--I gripped my chair with anxiety. What would this non-Jew say about Israel, sympathetic as he might be? Thus far the program had been very tasteful, and the historical narration did not peddle an exclusively Christian understanding nor was it condescending. But now, what would he say about Israel? About us?

As Daniel Gordis wrote in his book, Saving Israel, this anxiety stems from the expectation that when we hear about Israel from outsiders, we will hear a horror story designed to show that there is no goodness in Israel; that Israel is the state that has been designated to carry the sins of the world, as a scapegoat sent out into the desert is forced to bear the accusations that most people dare not aim at themselves, in their impossible pursuit of an impossible moral code that demands suicide. Israel, after all, is a country that is hated not for its vices, but for its virtues. So it was that as Mr. Beck began to speak, my anxiety mounted.

Just as the speaker was a different man than most who speak about Israel, so, too, was his speech different. He began by stating his purpose:

"Today, I ask you turn your eyes to Israel and restore courage. I have been asked: What can you teach Israel about Courage? My answer is simple. Nothing.Then they ask: Why are you coming to Israel? Because, I say: In Israel, you see courage." ***

Previously in the program, Beck had demonstrated that the courage of faith, the courage of hope, and the courage of tikkun olam (repairing of the world) through the awarding of three Restoring Courage awards, given to the Fogel family of Itamar (posthumously), Maxim's Restaurant in Haifa, and Rami Levy's Grocery Stores, respectively. When he said these words, his audience had already been given examples upon which to reflect.

As Glenn continued speaking, my hands relaxed, and then went to my eyes to wipe away tears, for I was moved no more by anxiety, but by a combination of pride and relief, and a growing and fierce resolve. For Glenn spoke first about Israel's virtue, the commitment of her people--our people--to be strong and of good courage:

"In Israel, there is more courage in one square mile than in all of Europe. In Israel, there is more courage in one soldier than in the combined and cold hearts of every bureaucrat at the United Nations. In Israel, you can find people who will stand against incredible odds . . . against the entire tide of global opinion, for what is right and good and true."

I felt relief, coming to know that there are people out there who are not Jews, and who can still see-- see through the lies of those cold-hearted bureaucrats at the UN, and the calculated hatred of the NGOs at the Durban Conferences, and through the casual libels of moral equivalency from the left and from the right--that Israel has virtue, that it is committed--as perhaps no other country is--to the protection of something good and precious and true. And I felt pride in the people that I call my own, and in my own willingness--for I am not bold, not really--to stand up, blushing, trembling and afraid--to counter the lies, the hatred and the venality of moral equivalence; to stand for principle even in venues where I am sure to be vilified.

My resolve grew as the speech continued, and Glenn Beck talked about why restoring our courage is so important now. For the world, he said, is once again on the verge of plunging itself into darkness and tyranny and death. And in such a world, the so-called leaders do not have the courage to tell the truth of things, to stand against the darkness, and it is their cowardice that takes us into the shadow. And it is our cowardice that allows it, and teaches our children that there is no remedy except chaos and fear:

"We may think: Oh, how different are today’s youth! But the young merely imitate their parents. They have seen how the world reacts to evil – with indifference. They watch, they learn, they imitate. What one generation tolerates, the next generation will embrace.
When the Fogel family was killed in their sleep the world barely took note. The grand councils of earth condemn Israel. Across the border, Syria slaughters its own citizens. The grand councils are silent. It’s no wonder our children light their streets on fire."

What one generation tolerates, the next will embrace.

This is why Beck would have us look to Israel in order to restore our own courage. For that is what it will take to overcome the silence of the grand councils and the false pomp of those who wish to rule us. And this is where the resolve comes, for courage--as the Cowardly Lion learned--is not something from without, but something that is ignited within:

"In the 40 years of wandering in the desert, the ancient Hebrews were led through the dark of night by a pillar of fire. Courage is the act of walking into the darkness, and knowing that each step would be guided and protected by the pillar of fire, if we follow it. God is with us."

And this is where my resolve meets my doubt. He says what we sing at Purim:
"Plot your plots. Scheme your schemes. They will amount to nothingness. Ki-emmanuel. For with us is G-d."
But sadly, there are so many Hamans plotting our destruction; so many Hamans, but only one Purim.

For on the surface, there seems a vast difference between this naive Christian from America, who has boundless confidence that the Master of the Universe must do justice, must free the captive and must keep the Covenant. Beck stands in Jerusalem restored by human hands, and tells us that standing here--here, as the stones of Jerusalem burn gold in the setting sun--is why we can have courage. He says that the Pillar of Fire did indeed bring us here, after severe and awesome trials. Like the generation the wandered in the wilderness, we have seen the signs and wonders. But we have also seen the death and destruction; the smoke and ash that was once the bodies of those who made up a great civilization in the heart of Europe. To many Jewish ears such words do not come comfortably, with the blessed assurance that the American, the Christian, seems to have. Does the Eternal keep the Covenant? Jews might joke--as we have--that we ought to sue for breech of contract; that perhaps G-d ought to choose a different people. And we are not altogether joking, as the dark evil of antisemitism rises once more in our own time.

But there is more to Beck than meets the eye. He is no stranger to pain and doubt and destruction; not wrought by others, but brought upon himself. And out of despair, he set himself the goal of finding his life's purpose, of restoring his own honor and courage. And standing there, as he did, in Jerusalem rebuilt by human hands, this man of the nations, a stranger in Israel, reminded us of the hope and courage of those who dusted off their hands and rebuilt the city. And my resolve smoulders and catches again as I remember that a nes--a Hebrew miracle--is not the suspension of natural law, it is the tangible result of a stubborn resolve, the pillar of fire that burns in the human heart, demanding that we push back against death and destruction, that we live and live well. If G-d is, then surely G-d is in the small, wavering flame of that resolve.

Jewish tradition teaches there is a moment for which each person was born; a purpose which, if discovered and pursued, will lead to greatness and awesome deeds. Otherwise, life is vanity and chasing after the wind. I believe that Glenn Beck was reaching for his own purpose, which he believes is to be a watchman upon the walls, when he said:

"Let us have the courage to choose life.
No more incitement.
No more threats.
No more terror.
No more talk of genocide.
No more hate.
No fear.
No more lies.

"We can read their signs, listen to their speeches. So we know that they say what they mean and mean what they say.

"Well: SO. DO. WE. . . .

"And so I say that if the world decides it must know who will stand with Israel, who will stand with the Jewish people, so they know exactly who to condemn, who to target, let them know this.

Condemn me. Target me. I will stand with Israel. I will stand with the Jewish people. And if they want to round us up again, I will proudly raise my hand and say 'Take me first.' "

And they call this man a fear-monger, a hater, a chaser after wind. The "ubiquitous they"--those who are oh, so sophisticated, and oh, so cynical--they who cannot accept that others have found what they refuse to look for within themselves, and so they see in others only what they find within: fear and hatred and futility.
But we are all weak vessels, our lives finite, our striving uncertain, and the possibilities for errors and false starts are very real. The cowards never start, and the weak fall by the wayside. And those who believe the rumors of their own evil throw themselves over into emptiness. But those who pick themselves up, and dust themselves off, finding the goodness within themselves and others, those are the ones who come to their moment.

Glenn Beck has found his purpose. He has come to his moment. If he does or says nothing else of meaning or weight in all the years left to him, it will not matter. Neither does it matter what the cynics say of him. He has lived his destiny. He has found his place among the righteous of the nations.

There is more to the speech. Beck outlines the responsibilities that go with the freedom to chart one's own course; the responsibilities that make it possible to create one's destiny. He urges us to take up the challenge, to commit to good purpose. There is more, and it is well worth reading. But he ends on a theme of the last lines of Adon Olam, the creed of Maimonides, saying:

"Evil is counting on us to do nothing. Evil is counting on us to be afraid. But evil has misjudged us. Evil has misjudged us as it has misjudged the Jewish people. The last line of a Jewish prayer is …Adonai li, v’lo ira.
God is with me, I fear not. . .

". . .There are many reasons to hear my words, leave here and do nothing. We all have been trained to believe that we are not strong enough, smart enough or powerful enough. Abraham was old, Moses was slow of speech, Ruth was a widow, David was a little boy, Joseph was in prison, and Lazarus was dead. What is your excuse?

"You were born for a time such as this. Begin by declaring that this is why you were placed on this earth. It doesn’t matter how you’ve spent your years on this planet. What matters is what you do now from here. I cannot promise you safety, prosperity or comfort. But I can promise you this. One day, your children and grandchildren will ask you: 'What did you do when the world was on the edge again? What did you say when the West, Israel and the Jews were blamed again?'

"You will look them in the eye and say: I had courage. And on the 24th of Av, I committed to stand with courage… to walk… to march… arm in arm… behind God’s pillar of fire.

Adonai li v’Lo Ira. God is with me, I fear not. "

Ken yehi ratzon. May it be G-d's will.

*Member of the Tribe
** The Hope--the Israeli National Anthem
*** All quotes from Beck's speech are taken from the full text published at The Blaze

Geology Road Trip Yuma: Part II

2011-08-06T21:24:00.010-06:00

Part II: Salt River Canyon to Globe

On Sunday, August 24, I drove to Yuma to meet a friend. The trip was a wonderful drive across Geological Provinces and through various biozones, as I descended from more than 8000 feet above sea level to about 200 feet above sea level. (Yes, my ears popped, and my shampoo bottle collapsed inward). Because of areas of great geological, anthropological and historical interest, the tale of this trip is broken up into several parts. Part I--the White Mountains and the Mogollon Rim can be found here.

After leaving the Mogollon Rim and following the volcanics along Corduroy Creek, Salt River Canyon opened out shortly before reaching the Becker Butte Lookout on the north side. Traveling down the north side of the canyon is to travel downsection and down through time because the Paleozoic and Mesozoic strata dip northward, with a great deal of missing time. The caprock of Becker Butte is made up of the Devonian Martin formation, composed of the competent cliff-forming layers of limestone , with mudrocks and shales underlying the gentler, slopes on which the trees are growing. The Martin formation rests upon a sill intrusion of Devonian age. The Cambrian, Ordovician and Silurian periods are entirely missing in the canyon.

At the Becker Butte pull-out, two plaques have been erected in honor of Gustav Becker (1856 - 1940), "Pioneer, Merchant, Trailblazer and Roadbuilder--A father of US 60"; and his son, Julius Becker (1886 - 1959), "His life was based on the Principles of his Father". They were both from the first family of Springerville, Arizona, and both made their mark on the Rim Country, and are remembered for their devotion to the place.

Looking down-canyon, from a switchback on the north canyon wall, one can see back to the north rim. The inner canyon at the bottom is composed of pre-Cambrian rocks around a billion years old, that are overlain by the Paleozoic and Mesozoic sedimentary rocks. The heights are composed of the Mesozoic Red Wall Limestone which preserves at its top an ancient karst topography. It is underlain by the Martin, with its limestone cliffs and shale and mudrock slopes that fall steeply to the inner canyon and the Salt River. Upon crossing the river itself, one crosses not only from the Fort Apache--White Mountain Apache Reservation to the San Carlos Apache Reservation, but also from the Paleozoic back in time to the Middle pre-Cambrian age. The south canyon wall is composed entirely of pre-Cambrian sediments, many of them hardened by high temperatures and pressures, and metamorphosed into quartzite and marble.

Looking upstream from Hieroglyphic Point at weathered diabase intrusion, itself intruded by lighter veins of metamorphics (including asbestos), also weathered. The diabase intrudes a middle pre-Cambrian granite, and is therefore younger, upper-middle to lower upper pre=Cambrian.

Beyond the diabase, one can see a ridge of columnar jointed quaternary basalts that are as young as the diabase is old. Beyond the basalts in the background--and across the river--are the Paleozoic and Mesozoic rocks of the north face of the canyon, showing clear stratification.

Hieroglyphic Point's name originates in petroglyphs that were pecked into the canyon wall with sharp rocks. They are the youngest features of all here, hardly varnished by the desert winds, they are a mere 1000 years old, mas or menos.

Climbing out of Salt River Canyon and moving on south toward Globe, Arizona, we enter the Tonto National forest, growing on thin soils resting on pre-Cambrian granites and quartzites also intruded by pre-Cambrian diabase. In a road cut near milepost 272 is exposed the tan and pink granite, which is deeply weathered into square blocks. Down and to the left in the picture, one can see the contact with part of a diabase sill. The sill-penetrated granite steps down southward along a series of faults that keep the highway near its surface for sometime, before the overlying upper pre-Cambrian Apache group makes its appearance in road cuts near Seven Mile Wash. The Apache group is made up of mostly unmetamorphosed sedimentary rocks upon which the road descends into the Gila River drainage and Globe.

Globe, Arizona is a gold and copper mining town that sits on the Gila Conglomerate. Globe and the mining town of Miami sit on the north end of a graben--a downfaulted area-- that extends southeast to Safford. During Pliocene time (roughly 5.2 - 1.25 years before present), the mountains rising around the graben dumped 1500+ vertical feet of their own downwasting on it. During Quaternary time, the Gila River established through drainage here, carving the terraces upon which the town of Globe is built. These terraces give Globe the steep roads that seem to rise straight up out of the Gila River valley along which US 60 runs.

It is lunchtime in Globe, 3400 feet above Sea Level, and at noon, the temperature is much warmer than it was leaving Show Low, 8000 feet at 9:30 AM. This is a good time for a break before heading through Arizona's Copper country and into the desert basins south of Phoenix.
I consider taking fewer pictures in order to get to Yuma close to when my friend's plane will arrive there. She is already landing in Phoenix, I think, which is not far away, although the winding roads in the mountains make the city seem like it must be another world.

On the REAL Name for the Ranch

2011-07-31T21:40:00.004-06:00

Welcome to Freedom Ridge Ranch: Where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the cows are above average.

Alert readers may have noticed that the name of our ranch has finally been decided upon. I have been calling it "Ragamuffin Ranch" here on this blog and in general conversation because, well, I liked it. But there are other people involved in this enterprise besides me. The CIT thought the name was too cutesy, and threatened to pull out of the whole enterprise if it stayed that way. "Mom," he stated, "You don't rope cattle on a place called Ragamuffin Ranch." The EG was in total agreement, the name was too 'girly girl" and had to go. And he pointed out that even our ranching partner hated the name. "She hates that as much as you hate anything with the word 'Pointe' at the end of it!"
It is true. I refused to buy property once in a place with 'Pointe' as part of its name. I hate that pretentious 'e' at the end, and mocking call a place called Primrose Pointe, 'Primrose Pointy.'

We thought of a lot of possible and not so fussy names. We thought of a lot of humorous names, too, but we didn't intend to use them. "City Slickers Ranch" or "Broke Acres" just doesn't have the proper ring, the one that will make certain people want to be part of this adventure. So we looked at names based on local rock formations and local features. I really liked the idea of "Point Lookout Ranch, a name taken from the Point Lookout formation that makes up the caprock of our mesas and ridges . But the name with the most 'ring' to it was "Freedom Ridge Ranch", named after the ridge there behind the cabin the picture. This is the ridge that the old homesteader who took out a claim on this land a hundred years ago looked up at every day while proving up his claim, and the one that rainbows like to visit and mists (and smoke) like to curl around.

Freedom Ridge Ranch.
It brings up connotations of grass fed, grass finished beef raised in freedom right here on the ranch. It brings up the wholesome goodness of free-range chickens pecking in the grass, producing eggs with the yellowest yolks you have ever seen. And for Studley Dooright, our bull, it brings up the run up the ridge and through the fence to check out the pretty cows in season over at the McKinley place--but that's another story.

Most importantly, it reminds the EG of why he invested in the project in the first place. Freedom might have been 'just another word for nothin' left to lose' to Janice Joplin, but for the EG it means self-employment and entrepreneurship--and the time to craft really fine wood products-- after years of being just another engineer at a government lab. Our ranching partner likes all the connotations, but seems particularly taken with the idea of naming the ranch after a local geographical feature. And the CIT likes the freedom he has to swing a rope and to ride his horse daily.

And me? I like the whole concept of freedom. The freedom from the noise and traffic of the city. The freedom to set my own daily schedule, and the freedom of having my husband around all the time . . . (Hmmm. I wouldn't go that far, even out of sheer enthusiasm).
But I especially like the idea that we are free and clear, and can decide how to use this wealth made up of this place at this time using for our own best interest. That's the best part of having one's husband retire. Not to mention that the alarm does not go off at dark o'clock anymore. I never see a cow until after the sun comes up . . . Perhaps that's the greatest freedom. The Freedom from the tyranny of the alarm clock.

Pass that grass fed, grass finished beef, please.
And welcome to Freedom Ridge Ranch.

Geology Road Trip Yuma: Part I

2011-07-28T20:16:00.012-06:00

Part I: The White Mountains and the Mogollon Rim

I have a young Facebook friend who has just completed her MS in Engineering and has been looking for the first job of her career. She got an interview in Yuma, AZ, and wanted to know if there was a way we could meet one another, since the Freedom Ridge Ranch is so close to Arizona. Although we are very close to Arizona, we are pretty far from Yuma, because it is in the far southwest corner of that state, where Arizona, California and the country of Mexico meet. Although it is a long drive, I was anxious to take a road trip, and since my friend offered to share her hotel room with me, I took her up on it.

I had a great time, and we had some really good conversation because we share an interest in Objectivism, and I happen to be partial to engineers and scientists. And I got some really good Geology Road Tripping in, because the drive took me across two Geological provinces, and through several biological regions and ecotones. I drove from the Colorado Plateau where I now live and into the Basin and Range. In the process, I crossed through the short grass prairie of the east Mogollon slope, through the White Mountains of the Datil-Mogollon Volcanic field, and down through the copper and gold mining country of the Superstition mountains, and into the Sonoran Desert province, with its unique biology and weather. Over the trip I took more than 100 pictures. I geeked out so much on the landscapes and underlying geology that it will take several blogs to do the trip justice. That's what happens when I get to drive by myself!

On Sunday morning last, bags packed, I picked up my AAPG geological map, The Roadside Geology of Arizona, and I was off on an adventure. The first part of my journey took me from New Mexico into Arizona, and through the White Mountains from Springerville to Show Low, and on to Salt River Canyon. I crossed the state line on US 60, just before plunging down into Coyote Creek Canyon, the first of several canyons stepping the highway down into Round Valley and Springerville. Here a truck has just climbed up to the Arizona-New Mexico state line as I prepare to go the other way. The White Mountain volcanic field rises on the horizon ahead.

In Springerville, I turned south to stop at Safeway to get provisions, and then I continue on west on AZ 260, which will take me right through the White Mountains. West of Springerville, at South Fork, the burn scars from the wallow fire are still fresh, although the monsoons have turned the burned and blackened pastures of June into the emerald green of late July. Soon, I will leave behind the Little Colorado river valley and climb the mesa to the west, entering the high country around White Mountain Baldy.

After the climb from Round Valley and South Fork, and past the Greer turn-off ("Still Here, Still Green"), AZ 260 enters Fort Apache -White Mountain Apache Reservation, north of the Sunrise Ski area. Here, volcanic cones rise from mountain meadows. The snow fences are silent testimony to the areas of blowing snows that drift across the highway in winter.
The White Mountains consist of Tertiary and Quaternary volcanics that overlie the Colorado Plateau, forming Arizona's east-central highlands. The volcanic field has been eroded by Quaternary glaciers and their outflow, and is deeply dissected by canyons in the south, these cut by streams that are now some of finest for trout fishing in the United States.

Near McNary, 260 begins to drop just a bit, as it takes me towards the resort communities of Pinetop and Lakeside, south of Show Low. The mountain meadows and mixed conifers give way to Aspen and Ponderosa Pine. The ground here is covered in native grasses and ferns. This is a clean woods, kept so by the Fort Apache Indians, and is less susceptible to fire. The US forest service policy of no cutting and no burning, and now no grazing due to the protection of endangered species is not followed on the Res. As is true throughout the mountains, whenever one crosses a boundary between the National Forest and private and/or Indian land, the difference is immediately noticeable. Here on the White Mountain Reservation, as well as on the San Carlos Apache Reservation, we see some of the most beautiful areas in the White Mountains.

Following 260 through Pinetop-Lakeside, and then on into Show Low, where I stopped to gas up and take a short break, I rejoined US 60 and headed west. Still on the Colorado Plateau, here, the rocks in the shallow mountaintop road cuts are composed of the Permian Kaibab Limestone and Coconino Sandstone, which in other areas of the White Mountains are covered by the Tertiary and Quaternary volcanics. Here, on the west side of Carrizo Creek, I stopped to look back upon the White Mountains. In foreground is a layer of the older Supai Group, dating back to Pennsylvanian and early Permian time. Here, I have already descended from the Mogollon Rim, the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau, although the exact location of the contact is obscured by the volcanoes I am about to leave behind me.

The descent from the Mogollon Rim is both a physical descent and a descent through time as US 60 runs down and then up, but always more down than up, through small canyons whose drainage eventually ends up in the Salt River. Here, the road cuts are composed of the Pennsylvanian and Permian rocks of the Supai Group, composed of limestones, mudstones, sandstones and conglomerates, that tell the story of a coastal area on an epicratonic sea, that rose and fell over late Paleozoic time. The descent into the Paleozoic here takes place over a few miles, as the early Pennsylvanian Naco limestone appears in the road cuts, and still further south, the Mississipian Redwall Limestone, its top surface white with the evidence of Karst topography, further down section, the Devonian Martin Formation, banded blue mudrocks between layers of brown limestones. All of these limestones tell of the depths of the sea that once covered this area, a sea teaming with strange and wonderful life.

Although by this point, the Colorado Plateau has been left behind, the descent in elevation and in time has been steady. Soon though, a dramatic plunge in the pre-Cambrian rocks of Arizona's copper and gold country will occur. Stay tuned for Part II of Road Trip Yuma.

No Justice: The Nanny State Becomes the Police State

2011-07-16T13:59:00.005-06:00

I recently finished a book by a friend and business associate that discussed his time in jail. He was arrested based on a false accusation and investigation and before the smoke cleared even a little bit, he spent some time in jail. His book was very interesting and it was also revealing. It gives the reader a look into a world that most of us do not know anything about, and one that we all hope to never experience.

One of the most revealing parts of his experience was the attitude of the jailors toward those confined there, and the attitude of the general public toward those who have been arrested. The assumption is one of guilt, even though most of those confined have not yet been charged or gone to trial. The general public has forgotten that in the United States, a person is to be presumed innocent until he is actually convicted of a crime. He does not have to prove his innocence in court, rather the state must prove that the person is guilty using standards of evidence and judgment. But Americans have forgotten about the presumption of innocence and assume that if a person is hassled by the police--even if he is not arrested--that he must have done something to deserve it. In this way, presumably innocent people are deprived of their liberty and dehumanized even though they are often completely innocent of any crime.

This attitude is one of the core components of our rapidly developing police state: a state in which peace officers who have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the Sovereign State in which they work have, in the time of a generation, morphed into quasi-militarized "law enforcement officers" who ignore the rights of the citizens whose rights they are purportedly hired to protect. And the rights of the accused are not much understood or honored by either the operatives of the police state itself, nor by citizens, who generally do not realize how much danger they are in of being dragged into its tyranny. Lately, even the Constitutional protections that the accused enjoy have been deliberately removed by the courts.

The sheer number of people who have had their liberty removed for weeks or months before ever going to trial is another sure indication that we are rapidly becoming a police state. In the United States now, most of those so confined are accused of "crimes" determined by fiat, "crimes" in which no one's rights were even remotely close to being violated. Many of these are drug law violations, and often a person's rights are removed for long periods of time due to an accusation of possession of a small amount of an "illegal" substance, which now carries sentences that are often greater than those handed out for severe child abuse. In some ways, the possession or use of an "illegal" substance has become a life sentence, creating a permanent underclass, because the penalties have become so severe, and other sanctions meted out by the federal government have become so limiting that the individual cannot overcome them over a lifetime, even if he is a minor child at the time of arrest. More often than not, an individual's probation is indeterminate and full liberty is only restored if and when a social worker determines that the person has been rehabilitated. In such cases, a court is only peripherally involved, and the case is not determined by any rational standards of evidence judged by a jury at all. This indeterminate "sentencing" is a complete violation of any just standard, and plays havoc with the rights of the accused.

All of this stems from the soft tyranny of the Nanny State, and can always be expected to become the hard tyranny of the Police State. It is injustice pure and simple.

Justice requires that each person is treated as equal under the law. Further, the law itself is unjust if the legislation is intended to limit the freedom of an individual for purposes other than the protection of the rights of all individuals.

The very assumptions of the Nanny State--that there are some people wiser and better than the individual, who therefore should be enabled to control the choices and actions of individuals for their own good--are antithetical to the very concepts of liberty that the United States was founded upon, and fly in the face of the Constitution written to create a government whose sole purpose is to protect those rights. It is up to each competent adult to determine what his or her own good is, and the bar to declaring incompetence should necessarily be very high. No matter how much a person who is different in some way might disturb us, and no matter what we think of his or her decisions, we ought to be very wary of removing liberty for light or transient reasons.

The very concept of a "justice system", which is a product of the Nanny State, is a contradiction in terms. There can be no "system", no collective method of determining innocence or guilt, no "system" of mandatory sentencing, or of required rehabilitation standards that is just. The purpose of justice is not to cure social ills or to rehabilitate individuals. It is to make a judgment about the responsibility of an individual for an action that violates the rights of another, and to exact a penalty upon that action in accordance with the severity of the violation.

Justice must be individual or it is not justice at all. Justice must always refer to the law, which must be applied equally to all, or it is not justice at all. Justice requires that the law be knowable and uncomplicated, and that a person must be able to know ahead of time whether a contemplated action is a violation of the law. Justice requires that the individual merits of the case be considered, and that the evidence be weighed by a jury of peers of the accused; that is those who live in the same community, know its standards, and its weaknesses.

We are seeing a great deal of evidence that the Nanny State that has been established in order to impose the ideas of some of us upon us all, applying a soft tyranny of rules and regulations, is rapidly becoming a police state. Those conservatives who were content to remove the rights of those who ingest socially unapproved substances are now dismayed to watch storm troopers from federal agencies raiding Amish dairy farms to stop us all from ingesting unpasteurized milk or locally produced chickens. Those liberals who have been content to remove the property rights of individuals who disagree with them about diversity, are now dismayed to watch police officers cum storm troopers wrestle individuals to the ground and arrest them for the crime of standing on their own property and observing the actions of the police themselves.

Most of us stand idly by now while our friends and neighbors are presumed guilty for fear of contradicting the monster that we have created,and thereby being subject to the meat grinder of the "justice system". Many of us implicitly favor mob rule over the rule of law, calling for the blood of the innocent when a jury rules that the state has not made its case, because the news media has already tried and convicted the defendant in the court of public opinion. We presume to make judgments based on little evidence, and to condemn people because of the emotional impact of the crime itself, rather than on evidence of guilt or innocence of the accused.

Thus we have come to the place where, as a friend posted to my Facebook Wall:

"When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs. When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent. When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun. Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet." - Lyle Myhr

If we treasure our freedom, we need to know our rights, and their basis in the principles of Liberty. We need to understand that the protection afforded to the accused protects us all, and to to remove the rights of accused imperils all of our rights. We need to remember that a little bit of liberty is like being a little bit pregnant--either we act on our rights or we don't have them. And most importantly, we need to understand that justice is a more exacting standard than is goodness, and being "good" in the face of injustice will always turn us to evil.

And After the Fire . . .

2011-07-08T17:15:00.007-06:00

וְאַחַ֤ר הָרַ֙עַשׁ֙ אֵ֔שׁ לֹ֥א בָאֵ֖שׁ יְהוָ֑ה וְאַחַ֣ר הָאֵ֔שׁ קֹ֖ול דְּמָמָ֥ה דַקָּֽה׃
And after the earthquake, a fire--the Eternal
was not in the fire. And after the fire--kol
ramamah dakah--a soft murmuring voice.
-- I Kings 19:12

The past month has been a very fast ride. During the first week of June, the Wallow fire in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest took off, leaping quickly to the northeast, sending its smoke and ash up to our ranch on winds so strong that the fire was spotting up to three miles ahead of the line. That week was surreal here, as we went about with windows closed, peering through windows at a world gone smoky and eerily, translucently orange and red. Even up in Albuquerque and Tijeras, the smoke was seen and smelled, the funeral pyre of thousands upon thousands of trees covering six states.

We lost a lot of time down here on what has now been formally named Freedom Ridge Ranch, the chickens are late arriving, the garden only got half-in, and will have to be stocked with plants started at nurseries in Show Low and Albuquerque. We spent a day moving the horses down to the Middle Rio Grande Valley and another moving them back. But we did get the house in Tijeras on the market (listing here in case you know somebody . . .) and we are pretty close to being done moving in down here at the ranch. Work here is now proceeding apace, and though catching up to what we envisioned for this summer is highly unlikely, we find ourselves grateful for what could have happened but didn't as we greet a timely monsoon season with fresh appreciation.

Over the past week we have had the opportunity to drive roads that were closed a week or two ago, through the Apache-Sitgreaves and in the Rim Country, on Monday, down to Luna and today over to Pinetop-Lakeside. Each time, as we drove across the state line, we saw the shadow on Escudillo Mountain, the burned areas coming down near to Eager itself. We saw the blackened places along US 180 and SR 260, where backfires had been set. But we also saw the damp ground where the monsoon rains had brought out the green of new growth. And near the Fort Apache ski area, we saw the ferns under the jack pines, impossibly green where a month ago there was only brown. Deer crossed the highway, taking their own sweet time, and wild horses were grazing again near the lakes and rivers between the Greer turnoff and McNary.

The fire was terribly hard on some of our friends and neighbors, some losing their homes and everything but what they could take out, but many lost only their refrigerators full of food when the electricity went out while they were evacuated. We discovered this when we went into Lowe's at Show Low today to find a fitting for the ice maker/water line we were installing for our refrigerator. Lowe's was out of refrigerator water line fittings. They were low on refrigerators. They had been selling them off the floor to people who needed them. People from Nutrioso, from Alpine, from Greer and Sunrise. The insurance companies were paying Lowe's to lock and haul off the old refrigerators with spoiled food within, and install new ones. And Lowe's was throwing in the new fittings because although the old ones may have been good, when they install they are liable for any new leaks. The kindness of neighbors and the kindness of strangers, and even of large corporations, is a balm to the spirits of those who are now rebuilding homes and lives. We saw each other through, with a little help from friends and strangers.

The fire was terribly hard on some, and very difficult for most here, but the primary response is gratitude. Where ever we have seen burned ridges and valleys, we have also seen the signs. In Nutrioso, in Alpine, in South Fork, in Luna, in Greer: THANK YOU! God Bless Our Firefighters! Thank You, Our Heroes! GREER, ARIZONA: Still Here, Still Green. In case Obama is wondering, this is the fiercely independent, decidedly can-do spirit of Flyover Country, the real America. We do cling to our God and our guns. Proudly. Gratefully. We lift our small voices to the sky.

And now the monsoon rains have come, on schedule, and they are falling every afternoon over the White Mountains, from the Rim to Escudillo, just as they do most years across the southwest beginning on the 4th of July. Waters are moving over the burned scars, and in the unburned forest still here, still green. The waters trickle, drop upon drop, they beat a steady rhythm on the metal roof at Freedom Ridge Ranch. The winds blow cool air and soft clouds where once it was all fire and smoke and ashes. And we have seen rainbows, double and triple, arching across the mesas and canyons. Promises that life returns with the water.

And after the fire . . . kol rammamah dakah. A soft murmuring voice.

Picture Credits: Top--National Forest Service InciWeb. Middle--Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest Web Page. Bottom: Rain over Escudillo, taken August 2010, Ragamuffin Studies.

Stand with Israel: A Speech Before the Independence Day Rally for the Constitution

2011-07-05T16:40:00.006-06:00

Yesterday, July 4th, 2011, I gave a short speech at the Independence Day Rally for the Constitution in Luna, New Mexico. Here is what I said:

Good Morning. Shalom Aleichem.

I ask for a few minutes of your time to discuss something that goes beyond the important national and Constitutional problems we have been thinking about this morning. We are certainly facing those dangers from within, but we are facing dangers outside of our country as well. As you have heard, the International Left has now joined with the forces of Jihadist Islam in order to work together for one world government. the leftists believe that they are using the Jihadists to attain world domination. The Jihadists know that they will use the leftists to attain one world Caliphate and then destroy them.

For us, this means the loss of our liberty and the Western Culture that produced it, no matter who wins. I am not a betting woman, but I expect that in any struggle between the Left and the Jihadis, the Jihadis will win. They are the most consistent.

But this is not the first time Western Culture has been threatened. In fact, the first time it was at risk, Western Culture had not even been developed. The nascent ideas of the Rule of Law and Individual Responsibility would be given to the world by Judaism, which at the beginning resided within the future of the dynamic people of the Israel more than two thousand years ago.

Imagine with me, if you would, circumstances a long time ago in place very far away. It is the year 701 BCE. Sennacharib King of Ashur ( that is, Assyria) sent his general up from the sack of Lachish to threaten the City of Jerusalem with utter destruction. If you had been an Israelite upon the walls of the old city, you would have heard this general, Rab-Shakech, saying in your own tongue that your city is doomed, that should you fight, you will lose, and you will be flayed alive and beheaded, and that your wife and children will be taken into slavery in Ninevah, that great city, and forced to serve idols. But the general also said, O, he of the honeyed tongue: "Come now, and surrender, and you shall eat of your vine and fig tree until you are taken to serve in Ninevah, that great city, a place not unlike your own."

In these circumstances, what would be your hope? Would you hope that Hezekiah, King of Judah, would listen to the beguiling voice and take you into slavery, to bow down to the gods of death in order that you may live?, Or would you hope to stand and fight, no matter how desperate the situation—to fight to remain faithful to your covenant with the G-d of Israel, to die free rather than live as a slave?

Whatever your wish would have been while standing on that wall, knowing that the hour of trial was soon upon you, this is what happened. The G-d of Israel told his prophet, Isaiah son of Amoz to tell Hezekiah, King of Judah: “Be not afraid”. And the king listened to Isaiah and prepared his people for battle. For he knew that a choice between slavery in defeat and slavery in surrender was really not a choice at all. But by some unaccounted for miracle Sennacherib’s army became desperately ill, and no battle was fought. Rab Shakech and his armies left the field of battle before it began, and were gone by morning light.

And so it was that Western Civilization was saved before it ever began. Historians and scholars recognize this battle that never was as one of the decisive moments that set the future history of the world onto a path recognizable by us today. One of the pillars upon which Western Civilization is built is the Jewish understanding that the universe rests upon order and law, and that the law applies to all equally, that it favors neither the rich nor the poor, neither the kings and priests, nor the choppers of wood and drawers of water. But had Hezekiah King of Judah, chosen to surrender before the battle began, then there would have been no Judah, and no Jews to bring the idea of the Rule of Law forward, to see it in full bloom as a pillar of human freedom in the West.

There are many such moments in human history, times in which if a small group of seemingly unimportant individuals had wavered in the face of seemingly unbeatable foes, human freedom might have been stillborn, and the generations that have now lived free would have never seen liberty’s great light.

I believe we stand at such a moment today. Western values—individual rights, the rule of law, liberty its-own-self—is under attack from within and without, and as in 701 BCE, the tiny land of Israel, is standing in the crosshairs. The enemies of individual rights and human liberty will strike there first, seeking to destroy the West, the keeper of human dignity and freedom.
The Jewish State is the canary in the coal mine: if Israel falls to the bronze-age group-think that is the marriage between Jihadist Islam with the Left, then what is left of the West will not be too far behind.

And now it is we who are called upon to “Be not afraid.” Courage, it is said is found in the most unlikely of places, and its messengers are often the least important of people. We are those people, and what we do matters.

Last summer, the radio host Glenn Beck called for a rally in Washington DC, and he asked us, just ordinary people, to restore our honor by coming to the Lincoln Memorial on 8/28. The number of people who did so, peacefully and with purpose, speaks about how the smallest of persons can make a great difference in the world.

This year, Mr. Beck is holding a Restoring Courage conference in Jerusalem, on the south steps of the remnant of the Temple. He is asking all of us to stand with him, to stand for Israel, for he believes that Israel is once again the place where the battle will be met, and where the resolve of the West will first be tested. And to those of us who cannot travel to Israel, he is asking that we stand here, in our neighborhoods and in our churches and temples and synagogues. He is asking that we participate in the events through the wonder of the internet, and that American Christians find and invite their Jewish neighbors to join them for this event.

I stand before you today as a Jew. I believe that American Christians are the truest and surest friends that Israel has in the world. Despite what many have said, American Christianity shares important bonds with Israel, and Israel recognizes it. In Hebrew, the United States is called ARTZOT ha-BRIT—the Lands of the Covenant. That Covenant is the United States Constitution, born of the longing of those who left their birthplace to become a light to the nations, to advance the cause of Liberty in the world. Imperfect as we are, this is the Covenant that we strive to protect: Justice—characterized by the Rule of Law and not men; and Liberty—characterized by the recognition that individual rights are the divine gift endowed through our very nature and unalienable by any government.

To stand with Israel takes courage in these days. And that is why the rally in Jerusalem is called Restoring Courage. The time is coming, it is said, when we will all have to choose between what is easy and what is right. In the free choices we make, we come to learn who we are. As a Jew, my choice is between standing for who I am or risking certain annihilation, for the enemies of Israel have proclaimed the desire to kill every last Jew on the face of the earth. As Americans, your choices may not seem to be that stark. But they are still choices between being who you are and being enslaved. So I am asking you today to look into Restoring Courage: Stand with Israel. I am asking you to look into how this can be accomplished even here in New Mexico, here in Catron County.

It takes some Chutzpah to stand here and ask you this, but I am inviting myself to join with you to participate in this event on August 24.

I ask you: Will you stand with Israel?

Arizona's Wallow Fire: The Ragamuffin Ranch Experience

2011-06-09T14:26:00.013-06:00

On Sunday, May 29, with all of us present at Ragamuffin Ranch, we ate a nice breakfast, and then moved washers, dryers and refrigerators into the house, and out of the house to the cabin and the barn, in order to get each where we wanted it, since we had inherited the former owners appliances and moved down our own. After that was done, the Engineering Geek left to return the rented utility trailer to U-haul in Albuquerque, and the Cowboy-In-Training and I went to Springerville, Arizona--about 30 miles away--to do some necessary shopping.

It was a clear, cool and very windy day, with a few puffy clouds over the White Mountains. As we walked across the Safeway Parking lot, dodging wind-blown shopping carts bent on catching the cows in the pasture next door, I watched a hard-bitten character in a black cowboy hat flip a smoking cigarette onto the pavement. He started to walk away, but he must have felt my glare, for he came back and ground out the ember, and tipped his hat. "He could have started a fire!" the CIT hissed when he had passed by, and I replied: "And with this wind, he could have burned down the whole town."

We did our shopping, ate our lunch, and began the drive back across the state line into New Mexico. As the CIT drove, I was watching as a white cloud built to the southwest, over the heart of the Rim Country, and then it seemed that the wind began blowing dust from the clouds toward us. By the time I opened the gate at Ragamuffin Ranch, standing aside to let the CIT drive through, I saw a definite haze clinging to the bottom of our washes and along the ridgelines. "Smoke," I said, having closed the gate and jumped into shotgun position for the drive to Ragamuffin Ranch headquarters.

When we had got the groceries inside, the CIT went to feed the horses, and I turned on my computer. Arizona Fires website had no information yet, but New Mexico Fires had a tweet along the right banner of the page. Following the tweet, I was taken to InciWeb for the Southwest Region, and found out that a small fire had been discovered in the Bear Wallow wilderness of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest 18 miles southwest of Alpine, Arizona, which was already a reassuring 50 miles away from us. "No problem," I told the CIT before we sat down to dinner. "It's small, yet, and far away. They'll get it under control before we have to worry about it."

On Wednesday, when I left for Ragamuffin House in Tijeras, the fire was not under control, and we had seen smoke Tuesday evening, but it was still reasonably small and far away. But while I was driving, the Red Flag winds blew that fire up, and overnight that night it grew from 6,000 acres to 40,000 acres. And on Thursday evening, the smoke from the fire blanketed Albuquerque, and was so thick that people wondered if the Bosque was burning again. It was, the radio guy reassured us on the news, the Wallow fire.

I drove back to Ragamuffin Ranch on Sunday, as we watched the fire grow and grow. While I was driving back, they evacuated Alpine and Nutrioso, and dry lighting started fires in Catron County. Fire spotters were stationed along US 60, and one was on the hillside from which I took this picture, looking west through clouds of smoke and thunder toward the fire burning in Arizona. The very small shower I drove through on the Continental Divide fell with ash, making a strange gray mud on the windshield.

The fire grew by the hour and by the day. The the smoke cloud sat above the ridges on the Ragamuffin Ranch road, and it stretched from this western horizon all the way to east, a thick border of smoke dividing the sky, and headed toward the Rio Grande valley. On Monday I discovered all the best websites to get up to date news, as the fire grew into the hundreds of thousands of acres, and towns near Escudilla Mountain on the New Mexico border were evacuated.

The animals got weary of the smoke very quickly, and even the horses, who spend snowy days out under the sky, were reluctant to come out of their stalls. Here, Rafie stands peering out with a look that says it all.

By Monday evening, there were two Type 1 Incident Command Teams in charge of nearly 1000 firefighters, and no containment. We had spent the day in a fog of smoke here at the ranch that got thicker and thicker, so that working outdoors was impossible and the gloom made us turn on the lights at 3 in the afternoon. At the community meeting that night, the residents of Eager and Springerville were told to prepare for possible evacuation, and the residents of Greer were evacuated.

Tuesday, and there was optimism that the firefighters would hold the perimeter between Nelson Reservoir and Greer, and no further evacuations would be necessary. The CIT and I went to Quemado to get a few things at the little Country Store, and buy a cab for the '93 Dodge Ram that he is restoring to its former glory. While I sat over a cup of coffee at the Largo Cafe, talking to a trucker from Tennessee who was stranded for need of a new engine computer, we watched the smoke roll in once again. Then, as I was mopping up the last of my blueberry pie and ice cream, a couple came in and sat down to order. The woman was crying. I gave her a kleenex and she said, "Well, after all, I've never been kicked out town before." They were from Eager, and the southern part of that little Mountain town where I shop at the Merc and at Basha's was being evacuated. We stopped for the outhouse at the log yard on the way in, and ash covered the seat and the paper. The setting sun through the smoke gave the ranch an eerie, Mars-like ambiance.

Still, Tuesday night the meeting--which was streamed--was brave in the face of difficulty. We were told that they were working on holding the line at Eager, but that since Wednesday was predicted to be another Red Flag windy day, other residents of Springerville-Eager ought to be prepared.

Wednesday morning, as the sun rose through the ever-present smoke, we learned that the lines from Eager to Greer had held, but at the morning press briefing, the IC Commander said that another Red Flag windy day meant that it would be a hard day. It was, as the smoke thickened and the Mars landscape returned, we hoped for the best and began preparing for the worst. We had a phone meeting with the EG and with our partner, and the EG began driving down with the horse trailer so that we could move the horses. Thus we spent our 9th anniversary preparing to evacuate if it comes to that.By evening, the fire was now less than 25 miles away.

So Wednesday evening, when the CIT and I finished watching a movie, and just as the EG pulled up with the trailer, we turned on the computer and learned that all of Springerville and Eager were being evacuated. The Community Meeting was cancelled, and we began to plan, as we ate our dairy and fish meal for Shavuot, to evacuate the horses.

They left this morning, after we learned that the fire went through Greer and structures were lost, and that the New Mexico National Guard is at Luna, near the Arizona border and that the Quemado Volunteer Fire Department are in Coyote Canyon, waiting to engage the fire as it nears the state line.

And so I wait, while the EG and CIT drive the horses to the Rio Grande Valley, and I wonder. So far the lines at Eager and Escudilla Mountain, at Luna and at Coyote Creek are holding. Will they hold today? Tonight? Will Luna, under a pre-evacuation notice by the Catron County Sheriff since Monday, will Luna be spared? Will the fire enter New Mexico at Coyote Creek and Bonita? Will it trigger an evacuation for us in a few days? And the big question: Where will it end?

The smoke seems thinner now. Is that a harbinger of good news?

Road Trip Reserve: A Geology Field Trip

2011-06-01T21:09:00.008-06:00

Nearly Wordless Wednesday

Life is getting serious again. There are wars and rumors of wars, the economy is unstable, and some of my readers want a break from "all that." And it just so happens that last week, I took a day trip to the Catron County Seat, the town of Reserve, in order file a deed at the couthouse, on to Luna on the Arizona Border, and back through Reserve to Quemado. I drove from Quemado, and it is a spectacular drive across mountains, mesas, canyons, and two different watersheds. So, it's time for another geology road trip! Because, despite our troubles, the mountains have been standing for more than 40 million years, they are still standing, and will remain long after we--and our troubles--are gone!

Castle Rock as seen in the early morning, along New Mexico State Road 32. Like many of the mesas in the Mogollon-Datil Volcanic fields, it is a remnant of a Tertiary Conglomerate (the O.K. Bar Conglomerate) preserved by a cap of Quaternary Basalts, that has slowed its weathering. The basalts are very young, extruded less than 2 million years ago. Castle Rock is in the Apache National Forest, in the Largo Creek Wash--in the Little Colorado Watershed.

Further south on S.R. 32, the road plunges over the edge of Jewett Mesa, and into the Apache Creek Canyon. A divide had been crossed, and Apache Creek is part of the San Francisco Watershed. The water that falls on the southern reaches of Jewett Mesa flows into the San Francisco River, then into the Gila, and finally to the Colorado and the Gulf of California. The lava rocks in the center, right of the trees is made up of Tertiary Andesites that are much older than the basalts on Castle Rock. They were extruded more than 37 m.y.a.

South, after plunging into Apache Canyon, the road rides upon Tertiary-Quaternary alluvium of the Gila Conglomerates, and winds along Apache Creek into the small town of Apache Creek, at the junction of Route 32 with New Mexico 12. Apache Creek also sits at the confluence of Apache Creek with the Tularosa River, flowing southwest from its source in a small canyon on Tularosa Mountain. The camera here was pointed north across wetlands at the confluence, looking toward Jon South Mountain.

From Apache Creek, S.R. 12 winds southwest along the Tularosa to Cruzville, and then leaving the river, crosses the faults of the San Francisco Mountains, riding now on Tertiary Ash Flow Tuffs, and again on Quaternary Basalts. Here, looking west of the road across the Gila Formation, we see Mess Box Canyon, composed of a gate of Quaternary Basalts, and framed by older Tertiary Rhyolites and Andesitic domes that make up Higgins Peak and Monument Mountain.

The town of Reserve sits on a mesa at the north end of the Saliz Mountains, and in the Valley of the San Francisco River, that winds through the canyons from Arizona into Luna, and on into the Catron County Seat. Just south of Reserve, between Upper and Lower Frisco Plazas, the Tularosa River and Negrito Creek run into the San Francisco, doubling the size of the river.

After leaving Reserve, Route 12 takes a right angle west through the Five Bar Ranch, and joins US 180, which I took northwest to Luna, where I got my rifle a sling at Southwest Shooting authority. To get to Luna Valley, 180 winds across the San Francisco Mountains. Here we see the cross bedding in dune deposit sandstones that lie below the rhyolites and basalts of Prairie Point Peak. The cross-bedding in this sandstone of the Gila Group is spectacular indeed.

Following the visit to Luna, I turned back along US 180, and S.R. 12, through Reserve and back up Apache Creek Canyon, across the divide, and through Jewett Gap toward Quemado.

Noontime in the Largo Creek Wash, the dark green gymnosperms forming the side of Largo Mesa. Here, in the Little Colorado Watershed, the cottonwoods were just beginning to leaf out in a delicate green, only a few weeks past the last frost in this high Mesa and Canyon country. The waters of Largo Creek flow into the Carizzo Wash that flows just south of the Zuni Plateau, and into the Little Colorado River south of Winslow Arizona. The Little Colorado flows into the Colorado at the Grand Canyon, far north of where the Gila waters join it, near Yuma in southern Arizona, on the California border, and just north of Mexico.

Coming into Quemado from the south along S.R. 32, we cross into the more open canyon and mesa country of the Mogollon slope. Here the mesas are high, and one can see for miles. The mesas and peaks here are all part of the Datil-Mogollon volcanic field, composed of Tertiary and Quaternary volcanics, with a Chain of Craters that march north and east, from the Red Hill near the Arizona border to Mount Taylor. The youngest of the lavas are less than 2,000 years old north in the Malpais. The earth is still very active in this part of New Mexico.

Ragamuffin Ranch lies in this open mesa and canyon country, the canyons created by ephemeral washes that lie above shallow aquifers, creating little areas where the grass is good, and the volcanic sediments create a fertile soil watered by wells pumped by windmills.

Pottage: Ron Paul, His Groupies and their Jewish Problem

2011-05-30T20:50:00.007-06:00

One day, when Jacob was cooking pottage,
his brother Esau came in from hunting in the field
and said to Jacob: I am starving, let me eat some
of that red, red stuff! Jacob said: Sell me your birthright here
and now. And Esau said: Here, I am going to die!
What good is my birthright to me now?
--Breshit 25:26-33

Ron Paul became quite a phenomenon during the 2008 election because of the enthusiasm and inventiveness of the young people who seemed hungry for liberty, and who found many unique ways to support his candidacy for the Republican nomination for the Presidency of the United States. Ron Paul, a libertarian at heart, was once a candidate for the same office for the Libertarian Party. That was in 1988, and I voted for him then, as he seemed a solid enough libertarian candidate, and was certainly better than the mainstream choices.

But during the 2008 election, some of Ron Paul's supporters, and supporters of the Ron Paul R3volution began to display a distressing lack of critical thinking skills, and many of them brought a more leftist agenda into Paul's campaign, including a virulent hatred of Israel, and far worse, some of the most classic of the antisemitic cant, charging American Jews with dual loyalty, and complaining that Jews control the banks and the money--with an undertone that money is inherently evil and corrupting--and that Jews control the media. This all seems to be at odds with what ought to be Ron Paul's libertarian values, and with capitalism, which he espouses.

I came late to the R3volution, having put off reading Paul's book by the same title after Obama had sworn an oath to the Constitution and promptly violated it. I thought Paul's book was reasonable enough. He did not advocate a one sided removal of foreign aid to Israel, for example, but instead advocated the classic libertarian idea that no foreign aid is moral. And yet, I had heard odd things about him from other Jews of all political stripes, and particularly from Jewish Libertarians. I heard that Ron Paul was an antisemite, or at least that he tolerated antisemitism among his followers, and that it was rampant among the most fanatical of them, the ones I call groupies.

At about the same time, through a series of acquaintances, I began working on the problematic Retake Congress effort through a company called Common Sense, Inc. (Someday I will tell that story of my naivete and failure, but not now. There are some innocents that still need to be protected). In doing the work, I had reason to frequent many of the social media and blog sites where Ron Paul R3volutionaries gathered, and read their comments. These included the Daily Paul, Liberty Forest, and various local and national Campaign for Liberty (C4L) blogs, message boards and discussion groups. And I began to understand what other Jews had warned me about with respect to Ron Paul's groupies.

They have a Jewish problem.

And it goes far beyond reasonable disagreements about aid to Israel or politics. Rather, it seems to pick up on the old classical antisemitic canards described above. They come right out of the history of Christian and collectivist Europe, and are particular to the antisemitic racism that replaced earlier Christian anti-Judaism with what become classical Nazi dogma and doctrine. It is the same racist antisemitism that the Nazis exported to the Middle East, absurdly claiming that while Jews are an inferior race, the Arabs are "little Aryan brothers." (When one believes absurd racial theories as the Nazis did, one more absurdity does not matter). It seems that some of the leftists who converted to the Ron Paul R3volution brought along with them the same classic antisemitic ideas that the Nazis took to the Arabs.

When it comes to American Jews, it appears that the "love" in the Ron Paul R3volution does not apply. It applies to everyone but us. Last year, I wrote a blog entry about my experience of antisemitism in the local Ron Paul Campaign for Liberty. The cant there was taken lock, stock and barrel from Arab-Islamic antisemitic claims that included the blood libel, and was served up with a side of the dual loyalty charge. In that blog entry, I opined that Ron Paul might very well be ignorant of the kinds of antisemitic cant that was posted on Liberty Tree, in the comments to The Daily Paul, and in other Ron Paul forums and social media on the web.

The antisemitism at these sites is also of the classically European variety, made into American conspiracy theories about Jews and Money. You know the type. They include the word "Jew" linked to one or more of the following: "the FED", "the Rothschilds", or "the Bilderbergers". The "Jews control the media" trope is equally represented, whereas the blood libel claims of the Islamists are usually only present in great abundance when Israel is in the news. Which means that it is present often enough.

Whether he likes it or not, Ron Paul has a Jewish problem.

Although I have been hard pressed to find solid evidence that Ron Paul himself has ever made any of these claims, it would be stretching my credulity and yours to continue to claim that Ron Paul probably does not know about the libels against Jews perpetrated on websites devoted to his cause. That these claims come more often than not from his more devoted but kookie followers, the ones who indulge in believing that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney singlehandedly wired the twin towers for demolition (because, you know, steel does not melt), does not excuse his silence on the matter. If he wants the support of rational people for his presidential run, then Ron Paul must address the Jewish problem in his campaign and clearly differentiate his own ideals from the beliefs of the antisemites among his followers. (Addressing some of the more truly bizarre conspiracy theories wouldn't hurt, either).

It has been suggested to me by some of Ron Paul's followers, as well as by other Jewish Libertarians, that it is likely that this antisemitism within the Ron Paul social media sites are the result of leftist infiltration meant to hurt Ron Paul, and that the perpetrators are therefore not Paul supporters. This is certainly a possibility given what we know about the Alinsky tactics outlined in Rules for Radicals. It would be hard for the casual observer to know that this is what is indeed happening, sans a full investigation of the sites and origins of the offending posts.

However, if this is the case, it is clear that the antisemitism meme is not difficult to spread among Ron Paul's young followers. It is truly frightening to witness their credulity and even eagerness to pick up on it, and spread the notion that Jews are to blame for all that is bad about their world. What we are seeing here is the abject failure of public education to teach the current generation to think critically, to question what they are told intelligently, and to reject the concept of collective responsibility. Sadly, through one hundred years of progressive education, young people in America who are not privileged enough to go to elite schools, or to have parents who can counter the indoctrination of collectivism, have been taught to bargain away their birthright of individual liberty for a pottage of "that red, red stuff."

These young fools may claim to be libertarian, but their propensity to make blanket statements such as "the Jews control the media" and "the Jewish-controlled banks" gives the lie to these claims. Libertarian thought insists on the responsibility of the individual for his actions. Collective responsibility is a collectivist notion, and it is not compatible with the radical individualism that lies at the heart of libertarianism.

And there is a real danger to the acceptance of such notions, for hand-in-hand with the doctrine of collective responsibility comes the concept of collective salvation. Hundreds of thousands of Hitler Youth members marched to certain death when the Wehrmacht was spent at the end of WW II, simply because they did not have the critical faculty to understand that Hitler was no messiah. Hundreds of Islamic young men, and now women, and even children, are induced to blow themselves up, convinced that the murders they commit will be rewarded by Allah. They are encouraged not to think, because their salvation relies on the collective not on responsibility for their own actions. To watch American young people accepting such ideas is terrifying. If they can uncritically accept groundless conspiracy theories and baseless hatred of other human beings, what else will they accept? What will they do?

If our young people who claim libertarianism as their credo are not to be cheated out of the blessings of liberty as a result of selling out their birthright, it is up to all of us to confront racism and any other form of collectivism for the evil that it is, and to refuse to support Ron Paul in any way until he does the same. His silence is shameful, and a man of his years ought to have the wisdom to understand what such ideas will do to the young people who espouse them for his sake.

Israel: In Which I Do Not Know What to Say

2011-05-20T13:57:00.006-06:00

I have been working on a blog entry in my head, and gathering together sundry comments that I have made here and there, but the POTUS announcement inviting Israel to just commit suicide already, and spare the world the need to destroy her, threw me into a sea of emotions that I have not yet traveled through. The situation seems so dire to me that I cannot find the issue I was preparing important. It is, and I know that; but for the nonce, it seems that I must let it go.

And although I have a number of ideas about the O-chamberlain's new version of "peace in our time", I am not at all ready to settle on one, and I find myself obsessively visiting blogs and news stories hoping to find a word of encouragement. I know they are out there, and I just must work through the obsessive moments of early mourning, and come out to a place where I can find some internal balance once again.

One of the very difficult things about being Jewish, loving my people and our homeland, Israel, is that it is impossible to go anywhere on the internet be it You Tube, blogs, news stories, and discussion groups, and not see the blinding hatred for us and for the Jewish state that appears to be everywhere. Even for posts that are supportive of Israel, I have learned to discipline myself against taking a look at the comments, for the vitriol is real and frightening, and so irrational as to be unanswerable. Everybody has an opinion, and most are based on misconceptions and a terrible ignorance of history.

Today, though, I am not prepared to discuss any of the issues, as the shock of what POTUS did is still fresh. And even though I expected it, it was still a shock. All I can say at this moment is this:
The O-dolater--O, he who presented himself as a Greek god at his nomination--does not speak for me. He never really did, and he never really can. I have never had much respect for him, and now all I feel is a sick contempt. By his actions and words, he is--as Craig Biddle of the Objective Standard noted--"giving the green light to a second Holocaust."

So, since I cannot write rationally at the moment, in mourning as I am for the government of my country that has made itself the enemy of my people, I will post a portion of a letter I wrote to Russ Roberts of Cafe Hayek, and some links of people who have a stake in the survival of Israel. The letter to Roberts expresses my thoughts on his second Israel post, one in which he laments the inability of people to discuss the issue without vitriol. I wrote, in part:

I am a frequent reader of Cafe Hayek, and I comment infrequently. I I did read your first post on Israel, and followed the link and found the Harsanyi's post to be thought provoking. I appreciate that you posted it, and I shared your post on my Facebook Wall in order to give it wider coverage.
I support Israel, and I agree with you that foreign aid is a bad thing altogether. I believe that the United States needs to stop supporting wars by providing funds to all sides in all areas of the world. I think that forcing people to support causes they oppose through their tax dollars will always lead to vitriol. But the vitriol and hatred aimed at the tiny state of Israel has a special and extremely nasty quality all of its own, and some of it crosses the boundary into outright antisemitism. Although antisemitism is almost universal on the political left, it does appear on the right. Growing up in a libertarian household, with a parent who helped found my birth state's Libertarian Party, however, I hardly saw it among Libertarians. But since the Ron Paul R3VOLUTION, I have seen it rear its ugly head to a startling degree, especially among those who substitute a good deal of anger and passion for strong and solid libertarian values. I have, for the most part, given up on commenting on any blog, news story or You Tube post about Israel, because the comments become so vicious and irrational that they are unanswerable. For this reason I did not even look at the comments on your first post when I cross-posted the link.
I want you to know that I do not think you have betrayed your principles and values, and it is my suspicion that those who have accused you of this have minimal education in the basics of libertarian thought and the major arguments within thoughtful libertarian circles.

Here are Russ's two posts about which I was writing: Israel and Israel II . "Israel" contains Robert's link to David Harsanyi's comments on the O-amalek's speech.

Here is what the Jerusalem Post columnist and Center for Security Policy member Caroline Glick's column: Obama's Abandonment of America .
Isn't interesting, that even though what is preying on the mind of every Israeli is dismay that the United States has abandoned our treaty with Israel, commingled with the relief that now at least Israel does not need to concern itself with pleasing the United States, this Israeli's realization is that in this speech Obama has made it clear that he is abandoning America and her citizens first and foremost.

Just a few thoughts, while I consider whether I want to pray: "Pour out your wrath, O G-d" or "Extend the wings of your protection over the land of Israel and all of its people". Maybe both.

Who's Out of Touch: Rejecting "Shared" Sacrifice

2011-05-14T15:52:00.018-06:00

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice,
there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings.
Where there's service, there is someone being served.
The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves
and masters, and intends to be the master.
--Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

Congress called oil company executives to a "show" hearing on Friday. The hearing was intended to make it look like Congress is "doing something" about the high price of gasoline at the pump. The show was also intended to assuage the fears of some members of Congress, who are "terrified" of the massive budget cuts that will be required to return the federal budget to fiscal sanity. The new buzz phrase out of the administration and the Democractic Party is "shared sacrifice"; the oil companies should "sacrifice" what is being called 'subsidies" in order to bring down the price of gasoline at the pump.

There are so many things wrong with that last statement that I could easily write several in-depth blog entries about what is happening in Congress and to the oil industry. I could write about the "terror" that certain members of Congress are feeling about the need for fiscal sanity. I could write about economics, and the law of supply and demand, and Gresham's Law. And I could write about the fact that Congress produces nothing (except perhaps excessive CO2) and therefore has no power to do anything to create wealth, create jobs, or lower prices except to get the hell out of the way. And maybe by the time I finish this entry, I will have written about all of the above. However, I am going to focus on two words in the sentence above: subsidies and sacrifices.

Subsidies

I don't know if you have noticed, but the Obama Administration, certain members of Congress, and the press have been very busy redefining words and concepts related to the tax code lately. For example, we have heard a great deal about how they intend to 'reduce spending' though the tax code. In plain English what this means is that they want to take more of your money (and mine) by force in order to continue spending because they are "terrified" of the change in their spending habits that must inevitably come. Conceptually, what this means is that they believe that they own you and your wealth; it is all theirs to dispose of as they see fit, and thus it is "cutting spending" to let you keep less of what is theirs. Politically what this means is that the people they call "taxpayers" are their cash cows. Frankly, in their eyes, we are slaves put on G-d's Green Earth to provide them with the means to continue the fantasy that the piper never need be paid.

In the show hearings of oil executives before Congress, the same redefinition is being accomplished for the word "subsidy." In plain English, a subsidy is money that a government pays out to some favored class in order to support some favored project or end. In this case, a subsidy of the oil companies would mean that a check is drawn on funds in the US treasury and sent to the oil companies in return for some action or restraint of action on the part of the latter. But what Congress is actually talking about is an increase in the taxes that actually paid by the oil companies to the US Treasury. In other words, certain tax deductions--namely those dealing with the depreciation of the value of oil wells as they are drained, and on the equipment used--will be removed, and the oil companies, rather than giving up a check from the government, will be sending a larger check to it. These tax deductions for depreciation are common to all businesses, because much of the capital that must be acquired to begin production depreciates in value with time and must eventually be replaced. Because the oil companies would be singled out with respect to losing these deductions. This is unconstitutional, but since the federal government has sneered at the Constitution with respect to taxes since 1913, this is hardly a concern for them. And it has become depressingly clear that all three branches of the federal government consider themselves to be above the law in any case, as they do not bother to even find out what the Constitution says about any matter that concerns them. Some of them even laugh at the idea that they should consider the duties that Constitution demands of them. Remember Pelosi?

Conceptually, the redefinition of the word subsidy by Congress has the same effect as the redefinition of spending cuts does as explained above. It puts all companies that have been taking depreciation deductions on notice that the United States considers all profits earned to belong to itself. Again, it is Congress claiming that private businesses are slaves to itself and its spendthrift ways. We are all serfs, with respect to our businesses, and with respect to our personal wealth. Congress has, through a clever redefinition of terms, annulled our right to our own property.

Sacrifice

To make a sacrifice means to give up something of greater value for the sake of something of lesser value. It means for example, the total destruction of a food animal in order to appease an angry god, rather than using all of the hours of work and all of the energy put into the animal in order to feed one's family and increase one's health, wealth and well being. By this definition, a sacrifice is never a moral good. With this in mind, consider this exchange between Senator Jay Rockefeller and John Watson, Chairman of the Board and CEO of Chevron Oil:

Rockefeller begins this exchange by telling five oil executives, including Watson, that their companies are "out of touch" and that they must be willing to participate in a "shared sacrifice" in order to reduce the budget deficit.
Watson then says: "I don't think Americans want shared sacrifice. I think they want shared prosperity."
Rockefeller: "Do you understand how out of touch that is? We don't get to shared prosperity until we get to shared sacrifice."

First, notice how adroitly Rockefeller shifts responsibility for the federal deficit from himself and the federal government to the private businesses whose profits he wants to consume in order to continue deficit spending. The oil companies, being private concerns, have no power to reduce government spending, nor can they lower the federal deficit. Both houses of Congress must do those things. But Congress is "terrified" to do so, according to Rockefeller.

Frankly, I am more terrified of the 10% inflation, calculated by the traditional formula, that we are now seeing, and the increase of inflation that must occur as the dollar is devalued as a direct consequence of deficit spending at record levels. But I digress . . .

Rockefeller calls for "shared sacrifice." Of course he is lying. What he is really calling for is that the oil companies, and soon every company, and finally every individual, sacrifice profits and wealth in order that he, the Senate, and the House do not need to lose their power and prestige (earned as it is through promises and pork) by making the tough choices. Ultimately, since he believes that the United States owns all of us, and all of our productivity and our wealth, he need not "share" the sacrifice at all. He, and the Congress and the Administration--none of them--have any intention of sharing the sacrifice of wealth to dissolute spending. Rather than lose his power and prestige, he is willing to pour the wealth of others, wealth he does not own, down the toilet. This is known as "eating the rich."

This is the problem with "eating the rich." Once they are consumed, who do you "eat" next? The slightly less rich? The comfortably well-off? The middle class? The working poor? And once that wealth is gone, who is going to be creating wealth at all? It is the investment of wealth that drives productivity, and productivity that makes profits and pays on the investment two, ten and a hundredfold. Eating the rich is a sacrifice indeed; it is a race to the bottom, and will produce nothing.

The show is being put on in order to convince us non-corporate types that it is "us against them." But we do own pieces of those companies, or other companies that produce other products in other markets. Millions of us have our retirement funds invested in many different companies. The return on our investment comes when the companies make profits for us by producing value used by human beings. The wealth that is created by profits is indeed the "shared prosperity" that Watson was talking about in his testimony. It would be a terrible sacrifice indeed--and a moral evil--for the federal government to steal that wealth and pour it down the unproductive maw of the federal deficit just to delay their own day of reckoning.

It is very likely indeed that Americans are going to have to make hard choices, demanding that Congress make extreme cuts in spending and we will have to become more self-reliant in order to do so. But this is not a sacrifice on our part. We would be reducing our reliance on government and reducing our consumption temporarily because we wish to preserve a greater value: future prosperity for ourselves and our children. And we would be doing it in order to preserve the greatest values of all--life, liberty and property. These values make possible the great engine of wealth that America once was and may yet be again--should we so choose.

I cannot know what choices others might make, but as for me and my family, we will pay for our future prosperity and happiness with the coin of self-discipline and self-reliance, knowing that this entails a change in our own financial habits. And we must demand that the federal government do the same. You can keep your sacrifice, Mr. Rockefeller, and we will keep our wealth. We choose prosperity.

Justice in Abottabad

2011-05-02T21:32:00.010-06:00

Last night, as I was sitting in bed, catching up on Facebook, I saw a post by the CIT stating that Osama bin Laden had been killed by American forces. At the same time, almost to the second, a friend had IM'd, saying: It looks like the bogeyman is dead." And so he was. Almost ten years since he had become a household name, and many more since he had begun his war with the United States and others, and he had been killed by Navy SEALS, his DNA taken, and his body buried at sea.

I felt a moment of solemn satisfaction of my sense of Justice. I wanted to stand up and sing The Star Spangled Banner, which is what the crowd in Times Square did at almost the same time. I went to sleep after a long day doing various tasks to get the house ready for sale--it's a long, drawn out business--and getting the loss of our friend's new dog registered with the Pet Alert. I did not spend any more time on the internet. And I am glad I did not. I did not want to see the moment of justice politicized and criticized, nor hear any theories about why the government was lying to us about this, too.

So today I put up my flag, and then drove down to Los Lunas to look for Tri. (No luck, but three sightings were reported through the Alerts, so we know where she is hanging around).

It was not until I was driving back up here that I heard the politicization. And later, checking on the web, I saw that the crazy train has once again pulled away from the station, this time with a series of theories on the Libertarian Enterprise alleging that bin Laden has been dead since 2001, and the death was just announced now in order to save Obama's presidency in 2012. I was not perturbed. I do not believe that this one incident will save the O-incompetent from being a one-term president. Only the Republicans can do that by once again choosing a candidate who hardly differs from the Big O himself, himself.

I was not perturbed, but neither do I have either the gumption or the patience to construct fancy arguments to counter either ideologues or loonies. However, there was one protest that kept cropping up that I do want to address, and that is that POTUS and our government are somehow murderers of Osama bin Laden. No, I am quite convinced that bin Laden was ultimately his own worst enemy, and after years of escalating attacks in on the West, he had finally met his match, and even if it took nearly 10 years, vengance is a drink best served cold.

Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States particularly, and upon the West in general. He took up the sword, and he used it against both military targets and civilians in Yemen, in Africa, and within the borders of the United States. He made deliberate, well publicized threats to kill many thousands of innocent people through the organization of terror he created, Al Quaida.

Osama bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEAL Team 6 on 1 May 2011, decades after he began his open war on the West and everything that is not Muslim and not extreme. He was killed, but not murdered. Murder is the unlawful killing of one human being by others, and the victim is innocent within the circumstances of the crime. Self-defense is the killing of one human being by others in order to stop him from committing assault that results in morbidity and death, or the destruction of property resulting in injury or death of innocents. In the case of killing for self defense, the one killed is not innocent, but has initiated force against innocents.

As Americans living under what is left of the Constitution, we have ceded self-defense against foreign invaders--whether they are a nation state or a band of brigands--to the federal government. This is one of the few actions of the federal government that is entirely lawful and Constitutional. Because bin Laden declared war against the United States by his threats, and followed it up with action, he is not a criminal, he is an enemy. We do not capture enemies and bring them to trial, we make war against them. War is not a rule-abiding exercise, and those who make war as Osama bin Laden did, know that. By taking up the sword against the United States, by attacking us on our own soil, he could expect nothing less than total destruction. And so he got it.

This is justice. To cut a man like Osama bin Laden any slack is to discount the rights of the innocent people who were working at the embassies in Africa and at the World Trade Center, and the innocents killed within the Islamic (so-called) House of Peace. It also discounts the fact that Osama deliberately provoked and attacked US military targets,including the USS Cole and the Pentagon. To ignore or excuse such behavior for any reason is to commit an injustice against those whose lives and property were destroyed by a deliberate act of war. It is not within the purview of the federal government and its executive to do that. In order to "provide for the common defense", the President of the United States must act. In this case, Obama acted properly and must be commended.

Of all of the sayings in the "other" Testament, there is one that unequivocally true. It is: The one who takes up the sword will die by the sword. Osama bin Laden took up the sword of Islam against innocents and against military targets. He made war on the United States. Responding to that is not murder, it is justice. Osama died at the hands of those whose Constitutional duty is to defend the people of the United States and their property.

Although I think that to madly celebrate the death of this evil man is unseemly, I do think that the sense of relief that people feel, and the pride that they exhibit at having finally gotten justice--shown in such acts as the singing of the Star Spangled Banner in Times Square Sunday evening--is entirely appropriate. There is pride in doing justice, because it is the moral response to acts such as Osama bin Laden's murderous terror. He chose his behavior, and in so doing, chose the consequences of it. The innocent people falling from the sky to their deaths on September 11 did not so choose.

I am not joyful about this, and I do not celebrate; rather, this moment has caused me to be happy that their deaths have finally been accorded the justice that they deserve.

Eliyahu's Cup: Why Utopia is Always 'Not Yet'

2011-04-23T09:33:00.010-06:00

This week is Pesach, and last Monday evening, Jews worldwide gathered to usher in the "Season of our Freedom" by participating in the annual ritual of the Seder, a meal surrounded by the telling of our redemption from slavery. And through telling the story, the Haggadah takes us each year through the journey from slavery to freedom.

The Seder has a prescribed order, and the ritual is set up to tell the story four times and in four different ways, corresponding to the four promises made by G-d during the going forth from Egypt. Each promise is linked to one of the four glasses of wine that is drunk during the Seder, and each telling is linked to a particular type of bondage. The tellings address what it means to be so enslaved, and why the Eternal demands freedom from every bondage not only for our ancestors but for us, so that the by the end of the Seder each year, we have progressed through tellings of physical and mental and spiritual servitude and into freedom.

But there is also a fifth cup representing a fifth promise: 'I will bring you into the land.' The fifth cup is set out for Eliyahu ha-Navi (Elijah the prophet), a mythic, apocalyptic figure whose coming foreshadows the coming of the Messiah. During the ritual for the fifth cup, we read From Malachi, who wrote:

"Behold, I shall send to you Eliyahu ha-Navi before (in the face of) the great and awesome day of Adonai; and he shall return the hearts of the parents to the children, and the hearts of the children to the parents lest I shall come and strike the land with cherem (war of total destruction)." (My translation: many Haggadot leave out the phrase starting with "lest" at the end of verse).

After these words are read, Eliyahu's cup is set down untasted, for this is the only promise of the Seder that is left unfilled, as Eliyahu's time is not yet. After the promise is pronounced and the cup set down still full, and the door opened for Eliyahu is shut, then the assembly joins hands and sings Eliyahu ha-Navi, expressing the unfulfilled and unfulfillable longing for the coming of Utopia, a time that is always not yet.

Human beings have been dreaming of Utopia--the perfect world--since we achieved an understanding of linear time. What was cannot be changed, and what is will pass away, and there is no going back, only forward. But with this understanding came the idea that at some point that is entirely unknown and unutterable, time could come to an end. And so after--if the word has any meaning--the world as we know it will become unknown, and what is will be static and perfect. And dead. So dreadful and so terrifying to contemplate is this vision, not only one's own death, but of total non-existence and non-order. So terrible and dreadful it is, that people substituted the idea of perfection attained while still living, Utopia, a time/place where "everywhere will be called Eden once again", according to Judy Chicago.

But perfection is the enemy of the growing and changing that is always in the living. Biological beings, full of life, can never be perfect. There is always the movement, the exchange of molecules, the division of a cell, the dying and the coming to be. Eden was, if it ever was, and can never be again. Eden was not perfect, it was full of life; it was innocent of choice and therefore, of any knowledge of good and evil. It is a restoration of innocence that is longed for in Utopian visions, that is what perfection is understood to be, in that elusive Utopia.

Utopia, is innocence imposed, and it is therefore the opposite of freedom. For freedom requires consciousness and choice, which means an understanding of life and death, of goodness and evil. Utopia is cosmic equality imposed, and is therefore the opposite of the fullness of of life and freedom. For as soon as life exists, differences among individuals are introduced and differences are inherently unequal in the cosmic sense. For human beings, choice brings the inequalities to our conscious awareness, for choice by its very definition implies different possibilities of action, which creates differences in outcomes, inherently unequal.

In the Passover Seder, we tell the story of going from the slavery of physical bondage to freedom, from the degradation of idolatry and dependence to liberty. Each step of our liberation requires choice, and differences among us evolve with our freedom. Elijah's cup goes untasted, because as much as we may long for perfection,it is goodness we are after, and goodness requires the freedom to choose. Freedom is inherent to the nature of the human being, and necessary for the fullness of life.

Eliyahu does not bring the "great and awesome", terrifying nothingness of Utopia. Instead he turns parents and their children toward one another; their differences not erased, but understood, in order to reach fullness of life and prevent total destruction.

Our Rabbis were wise, they understood the human longing for perfection, and they understood that perfection is another idolatry. Therefore, although they recognized our desire for it and accommodated it, they also understood that it is freedom that we need in order to live and live well. And they put it all in the Seder.

How is This Pesach Different?

2011-04-10T10:36:00.006-06:00

Ma nishtana, ha-laila ha zeh, mi-kol ha-leilot!
How different is this night from all other nights!
On all other nights, we eat chametz or matzah,
but on this night only matzah.
On all other nights we eat all kinds of herbs,
but on this night, only bitter herbs--maror.
On all other nights, we do not even dip once,
but on this night, we dip twice.
On all other nights, we eat sitting up,
but on this night reclining."
--The Four Questions of the Haggadah

I have been making Pesach in my own home for more than 20 years, and with the exception of a few years, I have had a first night Seder each year as well. Over the years, I have developed a rhythm for doing the spring cleaning, and for turning the kitchen over, and for making the Seder. This rhythm has carried over from apartment to rental house, from rental house to my first house, and to two homes with the Engineering Geek.

But this Pesach is different from all of the other Pesachim I have made. All my previous moves have occurred either after Pesach--meaning that the packing and spring cleaning accommodated one another, and after the Seder, the move could begin in earnest. This year, is different. The protracted move to the Ranch was supposed to over long before the cleaning began. And although this year, I was not expecting to make a Seder, I did expect to be settled in one place. Instead, I have been wandering in the wilderness, with some of my things here, and others there, with the things that are there needed here, and the things that are here needed there.

This is most disconcerting, as I had carefully nurtured my routine for Pesach, and I took comfort in the yearly process that led me physically from Chametz to Matzah, and spiritually from slavery to freedom. Pesach seems to have snuck up on me this year, and I am not ready. Everything is changing, including my relationship to my synagogue, my proximity to other Jews, and my predictable journey to Pesach itself.

It seems that through some choices and decisions that are good in and of themselves, I have quickly made changes that I was not at all prepared to make. Although I have felt that in a very strange way, guided through this process, as if each step was bashert, the messy way that some of this is happening--and not at all as I had planned, does not feel at all familiar or at all comforting. It doesn't feel at all as I think it is supposed to be.

I am not ready for this holiday. I just barely bought my Matzah before the store was out of it. And I was beginning to feel that sense of failure, of feeling that I am--as I often am--a day late and a dollar short.

Except, I realized that today, this year, I am meant to learn that Pesach is not about me being ready for it; it is about the holiday coming whether I am ready or not. That, as often as not, the joy of freedom can be found in the midst of the chaos of change.

And I think of all of the Jewish women, from Sinai until now--who by choice or perforce--also greeted a Pesach that was different from all other Pesachim that they had made; a Pesach that they did not make but that made them see the journey from Chametz to Matzah differently.

the women who put the dough on their backs, in order to flee the slavery of Mitzrayim in haste;
the women who wandered in wilderness, wondering whether manna could be matzah;
the women who prepared a Seder before crossing the Jordan;
the women who marched, chained, to the waters of Babylon, and made their first Pesach in the first Tel Aviv;
the women who made haroset in the quiet years of Babylon, who chopped karpas while their husbands argued the Talmud in Yavneh.
the women who fled the sacking of Jerusalem, wondering what to do with the lamb now that the Temple was gone;
the women of Lincoln, who made Seder but did not taste the Matzah, driven out as they were into another exile;
the women of the Good Friday Pograms, who were driven from their homes during the Chol ha-Moed, in Kishinev, in Odessa, with no time to take the Matzah;
the women who prepared the Seder in the sewers and bunkers of the Warsaw Ghetto
the women washing the plates on the way from Jerusalem to Rome, and from Rome to Spain, and from Spain to Morocco, to Greece and to the New World;
the women throwing Chametz into the waters of New York Harbor, --a harbor indeed!-- at the feet of the Lady Liberty.

Pesach is, like all of the Holy times and seasons, zichronot-- a remembrance. And each year--Halvai!--we remember differently, we experience differently, we are different. And although each year is different, some year stand out so that we say:
Ma-nishtanah--How different it is! How different is this year from all the other years!

Why?

Because, Pesach is about freeing oneself and allowing oneself to be redeemed. And when routines and way of being change, whether due to external or internal forces, we are called by the Eternal to come forth and to meet the future with all of our hearts, minds and strength of being.

Whatever that newness might be. For whether it be good in our eyes, or bad, whether we confront good or evil in the world, the Holy times separate us out from that, and give us the time to meet it with joy and purpose. For we do not control the times we are born to, but we do control what we might do with the times we are given.

In my Bat Mitzvah Torah portion, Shabbat Chol-ha-Moed Pesach, Moshe makes anew the broken covenant with the Eternal, going up the mountain once again with tablets he carved himself, asking for the the black fire of the ten words to be inscribed there anew. And Moshe worries about the enormity of the task he has been given, to take this stiff-necked people on the journey from slavery to freedom, and he says to the Eternal, there on Sinai:

Moses said to HaShem: "Look, You say to me: 'Bring this people up!' But You have not informed me whom You will send with me. And You said: 'I have known you by name and you have also found favor in My eyes.'
And now, if I have indeed found favor in Your eyes, pray let me know Your ways, so that I may know You, so that I may find favor in Your eyes; and consider that this nation is Your people."
So He said, "My Shechinah--my Presence--will go, and I will give you rest."
--Shemot 33:12 -14

This year, I am--like many Jews before me--caught unready for the great passing-over from chametz to matzah, from slavery to freedom. But ready or not, the birth waters will part, and we will once again cross over, to encounter once again the meaning of our freedom, to come face-to-face with the stark choice: shall we be slaves to Pharaoh, and all that entails, or shall we choose service to the One who cherishes our freedom?

The task is enormous. And the way ahead and all its dangers and opportunities is unknown to us. We know only one thing about what lies ahead: the Eternal Shechinah--that part of the Eternal that dwells among us--will go with us.

I am going, like my sisters before me, this year that is not like all other years; this Pesach that is so different than all other Pesachim.
I am going, unready as I am, because:
Ready or not, here comes Freedom!

Differentiating Between Islam and the Code of the West

2011-03-29T20:25:00.003-06:00

There has been much discussion about the possibility of incorporating Sharia law into the jurisprudence of the United States, much as some Sharia law has been introduced to English jurisprudence by unthinking multiculturalists who believe that this would be the politically correct and oh, so tolerant thing to do.

Such discussion has also been motivated by a few legal decisions made by judges in the United States that have recognized Islamic law as being binding upon Muslim individuals acting within the United States, even when such actions violate American state and/or federal laws. One of the most notorious of these is the decision of a New Jersey judge to acquit a man who raped his wife because his Muslim religion allows such behavior, even though the New Jersey criminal code forbids it. We can all be thankful that such an idiotic decision--one that does not take into account the individual rights that are basis of American criminal and civil law--was overturned by a higher court. Freedom to practice one's religion does not come with the license to violate the rights of another person.

In most of the discussions I have seen, the majority of participants tend to oppose the recognition of Sharia law--or for that matter, any foreign jurisprudence--by American courts. However, many of the arguments are based in a rivalry of religious laws--the "Judeo-Christian" code as opposed to the Islamic code. Although this argument is correct in that there is a large difference between the two, it is limited. A look at the different ideas about law that have formed these two very different legal traditions shows why we in the West ought to be very wary of tolerating Sharia within our legal tradition. What follows is an expanded version of a a comment I made to one of the internet discussions about this issue.

Although American jurisprudence owes much to the Jewish and Christian concept of the rule of law, and is based on the development of this concept through Western religious thought, it is in its own self, different than religious law, and its jurisdiction supersedes the rules and dogmas of any specific sect or religion. Specifically, American law is based on the concept of individual rights that are understood to be bequeathed to each person by his or her Creator--Nature's God, as Jefferson put it--and are therefore fundamental to the being of the individual as an individual. As such, our legal tradition transcends the laws of any religion, and applies to all individuals. It is profoundly secular.

Although it is often called a "Western Religion" because it is derived in part from Judaism and Christianity, Islam did not partake in the unique melding of Greek ideas with the Mosaic ethical and legal tradition that came through Christianity to define the Western intellectual tradition. Whereas Christianity has, from its inception, differentiated between what belongs to God and what belongs to Caesar, carving out for Christian Europeans a secular realm, the Islamic Sharia law makes no such differentiation. Islam claims all aspects of life. It would be very difficult indeed for Islam as it is presently understood and practiced to allow for a separation of religious and state institutions.

Although Christianity had its internecine wars over doctrine--and the concomitant attempts to apply them by force--they were resolved relatively early with the division between the Eastern and Western Roman Empire. Later wars between the Christian church and state were a matter of arguments that turned violent about where exactly the division is between what belongs to God and what belongs to Caesar. Specifically, these struggles were about how the material benefits that come with power would be divided between the church and the state. As Western religious thought developed in Europe, the Reformation introduced ideas that placed more value on the ordinary individual and his choices and actions than Christianity had previously, and this created an evolution that from the scholastic idea of natural law to the enlightenment ideal of individual rights. (For a more thorough discussion of this evolution see Libertarian Ethics: Natural Law and Natural Rights). The consistent application of the ideal that each individual has rights by his or her very nature as a human being eventually required that one's religious expression becomes a matter of individual conscience and choice, and that it cannot be coerced by the state. The fullest expression of the idea of natural rights thus far has been through the American concept of republican government, which ideally limits government and its enumerated duties to the protection of the unenumerated rights of individuals. That this ideal has not been reached does not detract from the power and nobility of the idea and the admirable attempt to express it through American jurisprudence.

Because Islam did not participate in the fusion of Greek and Jewish/Christian ideas, it is not really Western in character. Within Islam, there is no differentiation between what belongs to God and what belongs to Caesar, and thus there is no possibility of a separation between religious and secular institutions. The concept does not exist. At the very beginning of Islam Online, this is boldly stated:

First of all, it is to be noted that Islam, being Allah’s final message to humanity, is a comprehensive system dealing with all spheres of life; it is a state and a religion, or government and a nation; it is a morality and power, or mercy and justice; it is a culture and a law or knowledge and jurisprudence; it is material and wealth, or gain and prosperity; it is Jihad and a call, or army and a cause and finally, it is true belief and worship.

Therefore, there is no way that Islam can tolerate a law that supersedes its jurisdiction, as American secular jurisprudence does over the specific religious laws and doctrines of all who live in the United States and its territories. Furthermore, Islam does not recognize the sanctity of the individual, the rule of reason in matters of individual conscience, nor individual rights. Under Sharia, there is no equality before the law, and some are not even recognized as persons with their own rights (women and non-believers, for example).

It is always possible that Islam could be reformed from within, in the same way that Christianity was reformed. But Christianity had that one statement in its scriptures that allowed such reformation. That is the statement about the differentiation between the realm of the Christian God and that of Caesar. The scripture of Islam does not make any such statement, and therefore such a reformation would require an intellectual leap based not on its own tradition, but solely upon the example of the West. Currently, few Muslims seem willing or able to create such a reformation. Therefore we should be very wary of any claim that Islam is a religion of peace rather than a religion of the sword. In Islamic understanding, only those who submit to Allah are accorded membership in the world of peace, and all others live within the world of strife, to be conquered by the sword.

In the West, we have been slow to realize these crucial differences in culture and the development of ideas. This is partly due to a lack of education in and understanding of our own history and heritage. But it is also due to the error of multiculturalism, the idea that all cultures are equal in every respect, so that it is wrong to make judgments about them and have preferences among them. Islam has no such moral relativism, and Muslims eager to bring the West under the dominion of the Crescent have no compunction about doing so by force through the Jihad, the Holy War.

We of the West have every right and reason to defend our culture, and our desire to live by its ideas and values. We have every right to demand that those who choose to live among us abide by our laws. We need not impose our laws on others living elsewhere, but should they attempt to impose theirs upon us by force, we need to be ready to repel them. Our is a unique heritage, one that has been built over centuries of thought and tears. It is a culture that has as its basis and ideal the hard-won idea that individual human beings have unalienable rights derived from nature and nature's God, and that no prophet or priest, king or state can remove them from us. That is an idea well worth defending with our very lives. It is the basis of human freedom.

Cult of Death: Islamist Thanatophilia

2011-03-20T12:11:00.013-06:00

"We have discovered how to hit the Jews where they are most
vulnerable. The Jews love life, so that is what we will take from
them. We will win because they love life and we love death."
--Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General of Hezbollah

During the Bronze Age, human societies engaged in the cult of death. Evidence of this can be seen in the Vale of Hinnon (Ge-hinnon, the original vision of hell) near Jerusalem where archaeologists have uncovered jars and jars of the bones and ashes of children sacrificed to the idol Molach. The children were thrown alive into the fires within the mouth of a graven image of the idol in order to appease the god. Similar evidence has been found that is associated with civilizations practicing human sacrifice on a large scale throughout the world. The cult of death seems to be associated with a level of tool technology and the organization of society that is consistent with the Bronze Age. Thus, the Aztec rulers were engaged in human sacrifice at the time of first contact with the Spanish explorers, which was well into historical times for European civilization.

In these cults of death, the sacrifice of individuals was justified for the good of the people, their lands and crops, and carried out by a religious hierarchy that was wedded in some way to the political rulers, whether by actual intermarriage or by a fusing of the ruling family with godhood. The religions tended to be nature religions in which gods were thought to be in control of the various functions of nature (the sun, moon, rain and storms, crops, etc.) and were considered to be capricious and so needed to be placated by the spilling of human blood.

The Western Religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) all stem from the Israelite Religion, which also began as a nature religion that required human sacrifice. It is the evolution of this religion through monolatry (the worship of one god while acknowledging the existence of others) to a monotheism that developed the replacement of human sacrifices with animal sacrifices, and then with prayer and study, as an understanding of the unique nature and value of individual human life seemed to go together with the worship of a unique and individual deity. This development has resulted only recently in the value modern Westerners place on the individual human being as an individual with rights.

Although Islam is categorized by scholars as one of the Western Religions (because it, too, developed out of the ancient Israelite Religion), it does not share the same Western values with Christianity and Judaism. A little more than a century after the death of Islam's founder Mohammed, it got stuck or turned away (the term is in the eye of the beholder), from such a development, maintaining instead a culture that placed value not on the individual and his choices, but upon the society as a collective, its values dictated by its ruler-priests. The reasons given for this turning away are varied according to historians and scholars of religion, and include the nature of Islam's parent society, and internal and external conflicts during its spread. Islam had access to much of the Western Classical Canon at a time when Europe did not, and in fact transmitted that heritage back into European culture while, at the same time, turning away from it.

In Islam, as it was among the Bronze age Israelites-to-be, the rules do no apply equally to all, but are administered through certain individuals according tribe and family. The tribal and familial heads have standing and everyone else is subsumed in those identities. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas terms it, the society is "strong group", which means that human worth is judged through group identification, rather than through individual character. This means that some lives are worth more than others, and that those whose lives are worth less than others may be sacrificed, sometimes even capriciously, with little remorse on the part of the killers for the lives taken. This means that it can be perceived as an honor to allow others to use one's life and death for their own purposes, so long as those purposes are referenced to the needs of the group. This is how Islamists can claim that they represent "the religion of peace" while condoning barbaric practices such as the stoning of women, or suicide bombings, or the ritual sacrifice of children. Their judgment of what is peace is made according to the impact on the group, and in these cases, only the group they value, and not the impact on the individuals who have been sacrificed to the perceived needs of that group. (This is a pattern shared with other collectivist cultures and sub-cultures whether they are religious or not).

A week ago Shabbat, the nature of the Islamist Death Cult was on display again as two terrorists invaded the home of an Israeli family, murdering the father, his three-month old baby daughter, and two sons while they slept. The mother was also murdered as she tried to fight them. The children were murdered in a manner consistent with the ancient cults of human sacrifices, the perfect knife slashed their throats in one stroke. The attack was a terrorist attack by definition, since these people were killed in an attempt to terrify others in the name of the political/religious goals of the Islamists. But even more ominous, the ritual nature of the sacrifice demonstrates the allegiance of the killers to the ancient and barbaric death cult.

There are those who will put themselves through all kinds of mental gymnastics in order to either justify the actions of these terrorists or to portray them as confused men who did not act on their own volition, but were used by unnamed "third parties". One such apologist commenting on my Facebook account even tried to argue that "nobody wants to harm others."
This is at its sorry best, wishful thinking, and at its worst, an injustice to the innocent victims of murder plain and simple.

Those who justify murder and child sacrifice often do so in order to maintain their fantasy that all ideas and cultures are equally good, and that one cannot be preferred over another. This is the concept of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism was the justification that hid behind the robes of the judge in New Jersey who thought it was just fine for a Muslim man to rape his wife in America because our laws should not override the husband's religious beliefs. Although this decision was overturned by a higher court, a sign that neither logic or righteousness are totally absent from American jurisprudence, most commentators still thought of this as a case of 'religious freedom' gone too far. Almost no one was able to articulate the principle that makes the original decision wrong. (Hint: It's Individual Rights).

It is clear that the Islamists' death cult is an example of Thanatophilia--a love of death over life--they have said so, and very clearly. If the Nasrallah quote above is not enough, here is one from the Albanian Islamist leader, Ali Benhadjj, who said:

"Faith is propagated by counting up deaths every day; by adding up massacres and charnel-houses." (Cited in Anna Griefman's Death Orders: The Vanguard of Modern Terrorism in Communist Russia).

What may not be so clear is that those who would make themselves apologists for such murders are also bowing down at the shrine of the death cult, and are worshiping at the idol of death, destroyer of worlds. To make moral equivalence between a three-month old baby in Itamar and her murderer, or between a four year old child running from the terrorists' guns in Beslan and his killers, is an exercise in the destruction of the difference between good and evil, and between evil and innocence. It is itself an indication about how far from Western values some westerners have strayed, and how willing they are to bow to the death-dealers, and have become themselves worshipers of death, the real haters of the human race.

Despite the peddlers of moral equivalence and multiculturalism, there are large differences between murder of the innocent, and the defense of one's own life and its value; there are large differences between a culture that values death over life, and one that values life over death, and values will ultimately determine how we make the judgment between them. While members of Hamas and Hezbollah were passing out candy and urging Islamists to celebrate the sacrifice of innocent children to the cult of death, their grandfather, speaking at their funeral was reminding his people of the commandment at the heart of the cult of life:

See, I place before you this day life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, that you and your children may live. (My translation).

In accordance with this commandment, with the value placed on life, indiscriminate murder is forbidden. And so the grandfather and rabbi pleaded for justice through law and sound judgment, and pleaded against indiscriminate revenge.

There can be no justice at all in a society that bows down to the idols of death and destruction on principle. There, one will always witness the "religion of peace" unselfconsciously stoning women, sending young men off to death and murder by suicide attack, and ritually murdering innocent children. A society that worships at the altar of death is likely to see the massive deaths of themselves and their own innocent children. This is more than terrorism for political purposes, it is the love of death for its own sake. It is the cult of death.

Those who love life will act on that value. They will defend the innocent and will not traffic in the moral equivalency between the murderer and the murdered, and they will not allow their own judgment to be clouded by moral relativism, but will stand up for the rights of the innocent, and justice for their undeserved murders.

Because We're Here: The Spiritualist, the Global Warming Truther and Least Astonishment

2011-03-13T15:23:00.012-06:00

"We come into the world and take our chances.
Fate is just the weight of circumstances.
That's the way that Lady Luck dances,
Roll the bones. Roll the bones.
Why are we here? Because we're here,
Roll the bones, roll the bones.

Why does it happen? Because it happens,
Roll the bones, roll the bones . . ."
--Peart and Rush, Roll the Bones

This morning, opening my Facebook and E-mail accounts for the first time in a week, I saw two posts whose headlines posited a reason for the earthquake and tsunami that occurred in Japan on Friday, March 11.

The first came to me through Facebook, and was a You-Tube video of a spiritualist warning people that a change in the earth's axis would cause "mega-quakes" and that people ought to prepare by moving away from all major faults. In this video the perpetrator of pseudo-science very skillfully mixed a small snippet of fact gotten backwards--earthquakes can change the earth's axis of mass to a very small degree-- with quite a few scientific sounding terms in order to develop a plausible-sounding prediction that was hailed by the person posting it as proof that because the earthquake occurred after the "prediction" was made, then the explanation given by the spiritualist must be correct and altogether right. It is the end of the world as we know it.

The second came to me through an e-mail link to a website blog called Grist. The title of the article is: How is Climate Change Connected to Tsunamis? The gist of the grist article claim is that climate change causes ice to melt, which causes isostatic rebound of the earth's surface, which can cause earthquakes, and thus that we might expect to see more tsunamis due to global climate change. This is also pseudo-science in broad strokes. And like the first, it is using speculation about a small fact--the disappearance of continental glaciers does create a measurable isostatic rebound that goes on for quite some time (in a geological time frame)--to posit a cause for a natural disaster. When all you have is a hammer, so the saying goes, everything becomes a nail.

Both explanations are being used to promote the author's respective agendas, and neither has much to do with science. And both are also a form of whistling in the dark. I have said before that human beings tend to operate by the Principle of Least Astonishment. That is, we expect that all of the events, accidents and chance meetings of history with natural processes that brought us to the moment of our advent upon the earth are now finished, and that now that we are here we can reasonably expect the conditions of the earth itself to remain unchanged and unchanging because it is now, as it was and ever will be, the world as we expect it to be, without end, forever.

Human beings, fundamentally conservative creatures that we are, generally do not like astonishment. We survive great shifts in human and earth history by stubbornly insisting that the earth should not move beneath our feet, and that the waters should not transgress the shoreline by more than the routine workings of the tide. The Principle of Least Astonishment is a psychological defense that allows the vast majority of us to survive our encounters with Deep Time long enough to get about the business of passing on our genes and supporting our offspring in a relatively normal fashion. A few of us recognize that we are riders on the storm, and fewer still want to confront nature. They are the ones who go forth chasing tornadoes, running Class V rapids, and flying into hurricanes with shit-eating grins on their faces, because they feel truly alive when confronting the power of nature. It takes all kinds . . .

And generally, when faced with the enormity of a natural disaster, there are those who want to establish a cause and assign blame. This is another psychological defense. It is a way of throwing salt over the shoulder and spitting into the fire in order to make sure that such a disaster could "never happen to me." This masks the fear that it could by assigning blame to the victims as a class, and positing a solution that relies on the virtue of a belief that is supposed to protect one from the same fate.

The spiritualist and the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) truther who wrote the items I found today have both convinced themselves that they know the cause of the earthquake and the tsunami, and they both have assigned the blame to human activity. The spiritualist believes that our spiritual darkness has created bad energy that has knocked the earth from its rotational axis--never mind that it was the earthquake that changed the figure axis of the earth by a mere 1.8 micro-second--and that we can expect terrible punishment for our sins in the form of terrible earthquakes to come. The AGW truther believes that our environmental sins in the form of large carbon footprints are to blame. Both believe with an absolute and religious fervor that if only humanity could become enlightened (the spiritualist) or reduce its carbon footprint (the AGW truther) by implementing a specific grand plan to attain perfection, then such disasters could be averted and the innocence of Eden restored upon the earth.

As a rather ordinary scientist, I have no program that can match such grand schemes and great plans. I have only the rather bare and plain assurance that natural disasters are likely to keep occurring at rather regular intervals of Deep Time that are unpredictable in the course of Human Time. We know that earthquakes will take place on active faults, and that when the fault typology is such that energy can build for long periods of time, those earthquakes will be spectacular. And that they will occur entirely without human causation or consent. The human suffering due to these disasters can be mitigated by our understanding of the natural processes involved, and by application of our technology and resources to warn people out of the way of an impending disaster and to protect them as best we can when that warning is insufficient.

We can mitigate and manage natural disasters. We can prepare and plan to ride the storms and survive, faces to the welcoming sunshine that follows. But we cannot put an end to them. They are as much a part of the nature of our dynamic planet as is our own existence. And there is always the chance that we, as individuals, will roll an unlucky sequence of circumstances. In that case, nothing we could have foreseen, nothing we could have done will change the facts. Any person is vulnerable to the accidents and exigencies of nature. That is the consequence of being alive.

In the novel Hawaii, one of the main characters, Dr. Whipple, is confronted with the death of one of the Hawaiian royalty, the Ali Nui, whose bones must be hidden according to custom or their will come a terrible consequence, the whistling wind. The bones are hidden, but the whistling wind came anyway, sinking the ships in the harbor at Lanai. The Hawaiians fall of their faces, sure that the spirits of the Ali Nui sent the wind. A puritanical missionary raises his arms in an aweful curse, saying that the Christian God had sunk the ships as punishment for the immorality of the sailors, drunkards and fornicators, all. But Dr. Whipple says quietly: I don't think the Ali Nui sent the wind, and I don't think that God sank the ships."

I don't think the spirits caused the earthquake, and I don't think global warming caused the tsunami. And making major changes to our ways in order to propitiate either the spirits or the climate will not prevent future natural disasters. Further, such actions taken rashly and out of a sense of misplaced blame and guilt could very well cause all too predictable harm to many millions of people.

The Spiritualist and the AGW Truther are both speaking and acting out of a kind of faith that refuses to recognize the uncertainty inherent in the nature of reality. Their tendency to resort to the reasons they have endlessly rehearsed is a defense against the realization that they, too, are vulnerable to that uncertainty. This is the Principle of Least Astonishment in action. It is understandable but it is an evasion nonetheless.

But much worse than that, both believe at some level in the myth that human beings are not a part of nature, but are instead the evil outside cause of the destruction of nature. This is a kind of thanatosis, a death wish, projected upon all of humanity, which in such a formulation is not quite real to them because they are thinking of humanity as a vast collective rather than a collection of individuals. It is a faith every bit as dangerous as that of the Inquisition or the Supreme Soviet. In the name of humanity, then, they would condemn many individuals to surely suffer due to their solution to the messiness of life on a dynamic planet.

Faith as cold as ice; Why are little ones born only to suffer,
for the want of immunity or a bowl of rice?
Who would place that price
On the heads of the innocent children,
if there's some immortal power to control the dice?
We come into the world and take our chances.
Fate is just the weight of circumstances . . .
Roll the bones. . .

I would rather brave the weight of circumstances, and take my chances on natural disasters, knowing that I can mitigate and plan for them, but not control them--knowing that I can die, that I will die from living eventually; I would rather that than I would place my fate in the hands of those whose fear leads them to thanatosis and the knowing destruction of human lives in the name of "humanity." I refuse to worship at the altar of a faith that lays the price of uncertainty on the heads of the innocent. That is idolatry pure and simple.

So bring on TOTO, the paddle and the airplane. It's time to put a shit-eating grin on my face and experience Most Astonishment at the amazing power and beauty of what is. And maybe learn something new about Creation. Because I'm here . . .

Jack -- relax.
Get busy with the facts.
No zodiacs or almanacs,
No maniacs in polyester slacks.
Just the facts.
Gonna kick some gluteus max.
Its a parallax -- you dig?
You move around.
The small gets big. It's a rig.
Its action -- reaction --
Random interaction.
So who's afraid
Of a little abstraction?
Cant get no satisfaction
From the facts?
You better run, homeboy --
A fact's a fact
From Nome to Rome, boy.

Whats the deal? Spin the wheel.
If the dice are hot: Take a shot.
Play your cards. Show us what you got.
What you're holdin'.
If the cards are cold,
Don't go foldin'.
Lady luck is golden;
She favors the bold. It's cold.
Stop throwing stones --
The night has a thousand saxophones.
So get out there and rock.
Roll the bones.
Get busy!

BECAUSE WE'RE HERE.
--Peart, Rush: Roll the Bones Rap

Baby Siete

2011-03-02T13:28:00.008-07:00

NEARLY WORDLESS WEDNESDAY

While we were completing the move of our furniture down to Ragamuffin Ranch, admidst the multiple trips back and forth, Lucy the Longhorn kicked her heifer off and disappeared. On Wednesday evening the 16th, I drove down to the ranch, and on Thursday morning as I prepared to drive the truck back up with the Engineering Geek, I noticed that Lucy was not with the herd. She had been looking wide across the hips for the past weeks, and I suspected that she was off calving. The CIT called Thursday night to tell us that he had seen Lucy come to the stock tank to drink and then hurry off again. He thought she was hiding a calf. Later he called to tell us he saw her with the calf near the dirt tank, but Lucy was in no mood to let him get close--she had a little male. For the first week or so, we saw little of Lucy and less of the calf, but lately he has been gamboling along with herd, trying to graze, playing, and checking out this new world of Ragamuffin Ranch. We call him Siete, because after Chuckwagon went from steer to meat, we had six cattle, making Siete the 7th again.

Not at all camera shy, Siete looks toward me from across the fence, trying to puzzle out what this strange person is doing. Mamma Lucy was less pleased, and I used the telephoto lens.

During the mid-afternoon the cattle settle in to chew their cuds after grazing all morning and getting a drink at the nearby stock tank. Siete rests too, here under the watchful eye of his sister, the heifer Blanche (not pictured). Blanche got up and faced me, her half-Brahma features looking remarkably fierce and she stared me and the camera down.

Here, Siete is checking out something of interest to a little boy calf under the juniper, while his mama grazes on the ditch bank. Occasionally he does escape his mother's attention . . .

. . . Siete hurries to near where she is, and when she is close enough, he allows himself to be distracted by his world again.

He's the only baby now, but very soon he will be joined a few others. Freckles is positively lumbering, so great with calf is she, and LB will be calving soon after her.

Spring is coming to Ragamuffin Ranch and so are the baby calves.

Fantasy Chickens Coming Home in Wisconsin: A Rant

2011-02-23T06:20:00.009-07:00

The fantasy chickens are coming home to roost in Wisconsin.

It's not about democracy.
Whatever one might think about democracy, Democrat party affiliated legislators who have now fled their duties in Wisconsin (and now Indiana), are clearly not interested in it.
Nor are they clear on their responsibility to represent the people of their districts who voted for them and gave them power.
Pulling this kind of stunt makes clear to all what it is really about in their own minds:
It is all about them. They have taken on the mantle of the annointed, they believe that they are right, and they believe that they therefore have the right to force their will on the demos, in violation of the mandate of the said people to balance the budget of Wisconsin.

Minority party Wisconsin have holed up in Illinois, in order to stop a change in the collective bargaining privileges of public employees in Wisconsin. Apparently, democracy--the process of majority rule with respect to voting--is fine for Egypt, but not so fine for the people of Wisconsin (and Indiana).

It is not that I promote pure democracy, which our founders rightly characterized as mob rule; rather I support our Constitutionally mandated representative republican government, in which government is accordingly a servant to the protection of the individual rights of the people, and in which the Rule of Law covers everyone equally, from the President of the United States to the day laborer. (That our current POTUS believes he is above the law, and is allowing his adminstration to act in contempt of court in a number of cases, does not obviate the Constitution, it only makes it clear that the executive branch is in rebellion against it). Democracy is not a form of government, but it is a process that, with certain limits, is useful to the workings of said government.

But what we are seeing in Wisconsin is not even democracy. For those legislators who have used "the nuclear option" as they are calling it, are denying a quorum to their respective legislators, and are refusing to do their jobs because in these cases, the vote will likely go against them.

Certainly there are time-honored ways to slow down a bill, but the spectacle of legislators picking up their marbles and going AWOL in order to stop bills that has widespread popular support among the people who are taxed to pay for public services is nothing so much as it is childish behavior, a kind of "my way or the highway" thinking that will neither solve the budget woes of the states nor endear these legislators to their constituents. In Wisconsin, those who actually work to pay for public services are now not only told that public servants who live off of their dime, have a "right" to free health insurance and pensions to which they need make no contribution--privileges that the ordinary taxpayer does not have--but they are burdened with paying for legislative sessions that accomplish nothing toward balancing the budgets of their states, now burdened with debt and close to bankruptcy. Since the states cannot print money and inflate their way to a temporary fix as the federal government can, these states--and many others--are now poised at the brink of insolvency.

To add further insult to injury, the people of Wisconsin are also treated to the spectacle of teachers walking out on their contracts, politicizing their students and lying about the reason that they are not in the classroom in order to receive sick pay for their antics. Imagine how this must go over in the minds of Wisconsin's working poor, who are little more than day laborers without contract--often having no sick pay, no collective bargaining privileges, and who must now scramble to pay someone to watch their children so that they can keep the wolves from the door for a little while longer. For such people, an extra expense such as this can mean the difference between eating and going hungry, or between having a home and taking to the streets in a different way, as homeless families with no place to lay their heads at night.

The fantasy chickens are now coming home to roost in Wisconsin, where a relatively privileged group of public servants believe that others owe them more than a living, that the taxpaying people who have no such privileges also owe them support for the rest of their lives, and that they need not lift a finger to save for that future. Even more fantastic, they further argue that if these privileges are not provided at the level of their wishes, they can walk out on the contracts they have signed with no consequences, and lie on national television by receiving fake doctors' excuses given out at their ~~temper tantrum parties~~. . .err, rallies. And they say with a straight face that this is all about teaching the children of Wisconsin. There are no adequate words in the English language that can be used in a family blog to describe such Chutzpah.

The Democrat party legislators encourage such fantasy, and partake in it themselves, when they walk away from the responsibilities that they were elected to accomplish, and which in Wisconsin includes a mandate to balance the budget.

Reality bites. There is no free lunch, and the universe does not owe anyone a living or a life. Money does not grow on trees, and when we choose to have public schools, they have to be paid for with money that is taken by force from some workers to support others.

The minority of teachers* who walked out of their classrooms, politicized their students and in general threw a temper tantrum on the streets of Wisconsin have broken their contracts and ought to be fired. The people of the various districts of Wisconsin ought to recall, impeach or otherwise censure their errant and AWOL legislators, and if these remedies are not available to them, at the very least, refuse to pay for this irrresponsibility. And as always, they ought to "remember, remember" on the 6th of November.

The "Democrats" have vividly demonstrated that they do not really respect democracy as the process that makes government work in Wisconsin. Apparently, democracy works for them only when they win the vote, but when they believe they will lose, well, then any action is acceptable. "Nelly, bar the door!"

*DISCLAIMER: I am a licensed teacher, and I have taught in both public and private school classrooms. I do not dislike teachers, and on the whole I believe that most labor diligently at an important, and often thankless task, but one that they took on willingly and for which they are compensated with a salary and benefits. However, I believe that walking out of the classroom without notice is a breach of contract written or implied, and it is a disgrace to the profession. Further, politicizing the classroom and influencing the students politically goes beyond the educational mandate of the teacher, and encroaches upon the rights and responsibilities of the parents. Lying shamelessly on national television by accepting fake doctors' excuses indicates that these "teachers" have no concern for the values or morals of their students. This is all about them, not about the kids that they are using so cynically.

Bread, Circuses and the Danger of Reading Science Fiction

2011-02-15T22:03:00.006-07:00

The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be

like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty

-first century will be like. I don't recommend that you turn to

thewriters of fiction for such information. It's none of their

business. All they're trying to do is tell you what they're
like, and what you are like -- what's going on -- what the

weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight,

look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists

say. But they don't tell you what what you will see and hear.

All they can tell you is what they have seen and
heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent

in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent telling lies.

--Ursula K. LeGuin, Introduction to

The Left Hand of Darkness

I have been engaging in the dangerous and subversive activity of reading science fiction.

As Ursula K. LeGuin tells us above, Science Fiction is never about the future, and it makes no predictions. Science Fiction is, she says--though far more poetically--always about us, now.

This is why when reading a particularly good Sci-Fi novel, one is apt to see truth within the lies so convincingly spun by a master in genre. And this is why one walks away from reading a well-crafted Sci-Fi story or novel with new insight into who we are at this moment in time.

An awareness of this can a little scary--when it's not downright terrifying.

I have been reading the Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins: The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay. The story, for young adults, is the tale of Katniss Everdeen, a young woman who grows up in the country of Panem, which exist(s)(ed) in what used to be North America. In this alternate future/world-- the people of12 districts are enslaved by a city known only as the Capitol, and in order to maintain their slave status of crafty obedience, the Capitol forces them each to send a boy and a girl to compete in the "Hunger Games", a fight to the death on national television. The people are told that these Games--and the need to send their children to almost certain death--is in punishment for a rebellion that took place almost a century before, so that the children are sacrifices--called "Tributes"--and their deaths are punishment for a crime that happened before any of them had ever been born.

There are many realities about us, now, that are reflected in these books: the sacrafice of innocent lives to sustain political power and the cynical use of the real aspirations of individuals for life and freedom to consolidate that power; the blurring of television and reality to the point where the misery of others becomes entertainment for the some and a cruel reminder of servility to others; the acquiescence of many to servitude for the sake, not of great riches and power, but merely for enough to (barely) survive another day; the spark of freedom and rebellion that dwells within the hearts of even the meekest of slaves.

In this story there is also the theme of the disconnect between the privileged Capitol Dwellers--one can certainly not call them free!-- and those born to the Districts, whose lot in life is to toil and to starve; and the work of their hands is taken from them, tribute to a class of political royalty who party and play in the Capitol, while the people of the Districts learn subtle disobedience to their masters in order to survive. Thus, while the people in the Districts understand that they are slaves, that the government owns everything, the support staff of that government do not. Rather, they primp and party and bet on the deaths of children in the Hunger Games each year, and within them there is no thought, only the constant distraction.

Katniss sees this stark contrast after she has won the Hunger Games through an act of rebellion. As she is being dressed and fussed over by her "prep" team for a televised appearance, she thinks:

"It's funny, because even though they are rattling on about the Games, it's all about where they were or what they were doing or how they felt when a specific event occurred. "I was in bed!" "I had just had my eyebrows dyed!" "I swear I nearly fainted!" Everything is about them, not the dying boys and girls in the arena." (The Hunger Games, p. 354).

For the people of the Capitol, the Games are a gruesome reality show through which they live a life and death adventure vicariously, and without thought, whereas for the people of the districts it is a grim reality to be endured, like all of the other privations forced upon them because of their status as the children and grandchildren of traitors:

"We don't wallow around the Games this way in District 12. We grit our teeth and watch because we must, and try to get back to business as soon as possible when they're over." (ibid.)

Thus, any child of the Districts of Panem learns that he or she is a slave, whose life and work belong to the government in the Capitol, whereas the people who do the mundane work of the government are adults in name only, acting like thoughtless children, their lives governed by the latest fashion, their heads full of the latest gossip about others. Not the power brokers, these people live silly, second hand lives.

The children who are forced into the arena each year come to understand that they are pawns, pampered and fed for a little while before their almost certain deaths in the arena; they are game pieces for the entertainment of the Capitol citizens, used to distract the privileged from the reality of serfdom. For the children, 'winning' means surviving by killing other innocent children, and their pampered future back in their districts is a life of nightmares and deceit, a damaged life sustained only by finding ways to evade the terrible knowledge that their lives are not their own, ever. Those "winners" who do not have a talent for that evasion live out their lives in madness. As another "winner", Peeta, says in a televised interview to a glittering talk-show host called Ceasar:

" 'Once you're in the arena,the rest of the world becomes very distant,' he continues. 'All of the people, the things you really cared about almost cease to exist. The pink sky and the monsters in the jungle and the tributes who want your blood become your final reality, the only one that ever mattered. As bad as it makes you feel, you know you're going to have to do some killing because in the arena you only get one wish. And it's very costly.'

'It costs your life,' says Ceasar.

'Oh, no. It costs a lot more than your life. To murder innocent people?' says Peeta. 'It costs everything you are.' " (Mockinjay , p. 23).

And so, within such a reality, there are those like the heroine, Katniss, who survive the Games through an irrepressible act of rebellion, a free act that may indeed cost her life, an act that demonstrates to those in power that physical chains cannot entirely supress the memory of freedom. Such an act is not consciously contemplated but arises out of the knowledge of the nature of human freedom that burns, unquenchable in the soul. And once such an action is taken, the person is changed, and one such act leads to another and another, until the reality of freedom bubbles into consciousness thought:

"As I drift off, I try to imagine that world, somewhere in the future, with no Games, no Capitol. A place like the meadow in the song I sang to Rue as she died. Where Peeta's child could be safe." (Catching Fire, p. 354).

Thus, reading a good Sci-Fi novel is dangerous. For as Ursula K. LeGuin says:

"In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find -- if it's a good novel -- that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard to _say_ just what we learned, how we were changed. " (Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness).

Oh, yes, reading Sci-Fi can be a subversive act. Sometimes, if it is good Sci-Fi, we see a truth that the author is telling us about our world, about our selves. And we cannot unsee it . Good Sci-Fi it is not about geeking out on the future or vegging out on technology. Good Sci-Fi is about us. Now. And once we have seen the particular truth about our condition, we cannot unsee it.

Reading science fiction is a dangerous thing. For a good science fiction novel strips away the evasions and the confusions, making stark the reality of our own lives within the text. In our real lives we often go about like Katniss's prep team, wrapped in the mundane and necessary routines that make up daily life. But in the dialogue between the reader and the text, the reader's reality is stripped of the little things, and the meaning of it, illuminated. We are made uncomfortable. Are we really like the citizens of the Capitol, living vicariously through others? Do we see revolution as a Google-made game, created for our entertainment, returning to our own fleshpots, making a pun of the crack-down that we ignore afterwards? Are we more like the people of the Districts, afraid to step out of line for fear of losing what little they have? Is there perhaps, something of Katniss hidden deep within us, something that drives us to act--albeit uncounsciously--in defiance of our own slavery?

No wonder, then, that unfree societies take up the time of the individuals that they enslave with bread and circuses, in order to distract. But even in the real world, bread and circuses are in themselves dangerous to the regime that uses them. For while they lull the "citizens" who are fed bread they did not earn into somnolence, they eventually remind the circus "performers" that their lives are not their own, that they are living for the purposes of others. But in real life, this may take generations. In the story of the Israelites in Egypt, it took 400 years for the Israelites to realize that they had allowed themselves to become enslaved, the lives of their children at stake to prop up the power of Pharaoh.

But in Sci-Fi novels like the Hunger Games Trilogy, the story begins at the place where the reality of the consequences of second-hand lives, and of enslavement is no longer obscured; in the stripped down version of a story about us, now, we the truth of who we are now, and what we are doing now. And what it means. Really.

Oh, reading Sci-Fi can be a dangerous, dangerous act. For by paring down what is, and placing it in another place and time, it can cut through the bread and circuses, and bring the reader into an uncomfortable confrontation with reality.

And that changes a person, until with that internal dialogue, and then another and another, the unconscious understanding of what human freedom entails bubbles dangerously up, irrepressible, and the undercurrent becomes a mighty stream that wakes us up and forces us to confront the reality that all is not as we thought it was. And that understanding leads us into a confrontation with those who wish to keep us asleep and compliant to the thousands of little slaveries that keep us in bondage to their wills.

And so the subversive act of reading Sci-Fi can enventually provoke us to recognize who we are, to break our bonds, and lead us out of our second hand lives into the liberty of who knows where?

The Principle of Least Astonishment: Deep Time and Human Time

2011-02-06T10:50:00.012-07:00

‎"People look upon the natural world as if all motions

of the past had set the stage for us and were now frozen

. . . To imagine that turmoil is in the past and

somehow we are now in a more stable time

seems to be a psychological need. Leonardo Seeber

. . .referred to it as the principle of least astonishment.

As we have seen, the time we are in

is just as active as the past. "

--Eldrige Moores, Tectonist;

from "Assembling California",

in Annals of the Former World, by John McPhee

Years ago, before I studied biology in graduate school, I graduated with a degree in Geology with Honors from a stable university on the continental craton. Although I ended up in a different field, my knowledge of geology has made the history of North America come alive for me in my travels across the continent over the course of the past 30 years.

Photo: Unconformity between the Tertiary volcanics of the Datil-Mogollon Volcanic field and the underlying Mesaverde shales and sandstones. The lavas were extruded during Eocene-Oligocene time (beginning approximately 28 mya). This unconformity is exposed in the wall of the Zuni Plateau north of the Zuni Salt Lake, Catron County, NM.

Browsing in the trade books section of the university bookstore one day during my senior undergraduate year, a title caught my eye: In Suspect Terrain, by John McPhee. A reproduction of a painting of the Delaware Water Gap graced the cover. It was a book of essays about geology and the plate tectonics revolution from the perspective of the USGS's conondont specialist at the time, Anita Harris.

The title caught my eye, because Skip Nelson, our structural professor, had been discussing with us the concept of "suspect terranes", pieces of the geology of a region that have a different geology from the adjacent country rock, and the origins of which are suspected to be from elsewhere on earth. In those early days of the theory of Plate Tectonics, little was known about suspect terranes, and it was hard to see how such terranes fit into the theory. Much arm-waving--the speculations of scientists scratching their heads together--became stories,and then hypotheses that had a decent chance of being tested as the both the science and the technology that supported it advanced over the years. But at that time it was still arm-waving and stories.

Of course I had to buy the book. And in rooting around a bit more in the same section, I ended up buying McPhee's first book on the subject, Basin and Range, as well.

I had gone into geology in 1979, after hearing about plate tectonics from my English professor at a small private liberal arts college. A transfer to the state university was required once my passion was ignited and my interests revealed. (That English professor saw that I was less than passionate about the liberal arts, and being somewhat of a curmudgeon, Dr. Pierson had written on one my papers: 'Does college bore you?' I was a little hurt at the time, because the truth hurts when one is trying to make the best of a bad college decision, but I was grateful to him later). The early '80's, as the revolutionary theory of Plate Tectonics was maturing in the field, was an exciting time to be thinking about geology and earth history, and I was captivated.

As I went through the spring semester of my senior year, with field trips to Missouri, Wisconsin and Ohio, I was also reading about the rise of the Basin and Range, the possible docking of micro-terranes on eastern North America, and the problem of overgeneralizing from theory without benefit of working field experience with the actual rocks. Reading McPhee and my texts in historical geology, stratigraphy, sedimentology, and structural geology became an obsession that took precedence over everything else. (I got a "C" in communications--required to "round out the degree"--which did not even upset me as it otherwise might have done).

Later, as a young mother chasing after a very energetic two-year old, I discovered McPhee's third book in the series, Rising from the Plains, about the Grand Old Man of Rocky Mountain Geology, David Love, whom I had met briefly during a field camp a few years earlier. Although my later interests and experiences, as well as the need to support my children by myself, took me in other directions, I maintained my interest in Geology. Recently, I found McPhee's Annals of the Former World, which contains the three original books about Geology,with updates and two new books, one on the geological origins of California, and one on the pre-Cambrian rocks that underly the sediments of the stable craton of North America.

Our move to the Ragamuffin Ranch, where the geology of the Colorado Plateau stands out in the Datil-Mogollon Volcanics, caused me to want to pick up Annals for a second time, and as with every really good book one re-reads, I noticed certain parts anew. In this case, I was thinking about the problem of dogmatism in science, encouraged both by scientists whose funding is politically motivated, and by non-scientists who confuse initial arm-waving with a testable hypothesis, and who take it to be the same as truth handed down from Sinai. "The science is settled," says one of the latter about one such arm-waving idea. But the science is rarely settled so early in the life of an idea.

Geology is by its nature a big-picture science, and one that depends a great deal on inference from what can be observed to how it got to be the way it is. Whereas much of science as practiced within the dominant paradigms of each scientific field today is deductive, the big-picture thinking about Geology is necessarily inductive. (Despite the turf wars about these two methods of discovery, both deductive and inductive thinking are necessary for a complete science). Further, Geology--by the nature of its subject matter--is primarily about TIME. Lots and lots of time. Or as geologists say it, "Deep Time". Time that is orders of magnitude greater than the span of a human life, or even the span of numerous human generations. The kind of time that geologists tend to discuss makes a million years appear as the blink of an eye, and the entire time of human existance on the earth is scarcely longer than that.

The disconnect between Deep Time and Human Time leads to some interesting human misconceptions about our power and place upon the planet. On the one hand, human beings are the first species upon the earth that have become self-referencing observers of the evolution of life on the planet. We are capable of thinking about and questioning the way life came to be here, and our place in that parade of "endless forms most beautiful". We can think about the meaning of our existence and we know the finite nature of our lives. All of this makes us important to ourselves, and perhaps, as an aspect of the universe that observes itself, we are important in the grand scheme of things.

But this disconnect between Deep Time and Human Time also leads to the idea that we are the culminating act of evolution: that our existence was the necessary end of a long chain of programmed events. It is rather like the paint on the Eiffel Tower believing that the tower was built for its own sake, as Mark Twain once remarked. Enter Seeber's Principle of Least Astonishment, which is the idea that all of what we see around us is the culmination, that now that human beings walk the earth, change should stop because evolution is finished. The continents are in their final place, the species that exist now shall exist forever, the climate that we have been born into shall not change. So we have written, and so shall it be done.

Evolution has no teleological direction. It is the response of organisms adapting to and failing to adapt to changing environments over time. This leads to changes in the gene frequencies within species, and that is evolution. If we were able to rewind and replay the course of the evolution of life upon the earth, there is no guarantee that the results would be the same as we now see; there are too variables along the way. Species that have the genetic wherewithal to meet and survive environmental change evolve. Those that do not become extinct.

And so it becomes somewhat amusing to watch as those who believe that they understand evolution, those that make fun of the Creationists and call them "neanderthals", are also those that have turned science into a political agenda and have begun an effort to "Stop Global Climate Change" by legislation. They have about as much chance of success as they do to "Re-Unite Gondwanaland!" (Both quotes can be found on bumperstickers.The first appears to be serious, and the second is geological tongue-in-cheek).

Even geologists get pulled up short by the disconnect between Deep Time and Human Time. And even though they predict that when the two kinds of time intersect, as they did during the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 and the Tsunami of 2004, turmoil becomes inevitable, we still tend to think that the earth should behave itself and stay still beneath our feet. We tend to want the species that existed when we were born to be there when we are old, and glaciers should neither retreat nor advance so long as human beings live upon the earth. We think of disasters as a nasty interruption of "normal" rather than a "normal" feature of a dynamic planet.

Never mind that we owe our big brains to the last ice age. Never mind that climate has been changing upon the earth since before the oldest rocks we can find on the continents existed. And never mind that life on the planet has had an effect on its environment since the oxygen revolution.

From the perspective of Human Time, an earthquake, a tsunami, a volcanic eruption, are all potential disasters. And it makes sense to think of them as such. Human beings are meaning-making individuals, and we view events from the perspective of their meaning to us.
And that is necessary and--dare I say it?--normal to our evolutionary niche. And if we can predict and protect ourselves from disaster, this is a good thing for us. But when put into the perspective of Deep Time, such disasters, even ones on a extinction-level scale, are more grist for the mill of evolution--the change over time of life on earth.

The Principle of Least Astonishment may indeed by a psychological necessity for going about the daily business of living. And yet now and then, the view from the perspective of Deep Time creates for us the Most Astonishment, it creates wonder at the precious nature of our existence, birthed on the edge of the creative maelstrom and able to look into it and see the circumstances of our genesis. Wonderful life, indeed!