Pictures of the Day: Valdosta, Georgia

---

Ours is Not to Reason Why. Ours is But to Do and Die.

Studs Terkel: We're seated here, two old gaffers.  Me and Paul Tibbets, 89 years old, brigadier-general retired, in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, where he has lived for many years.

Paul Tibbets: Hey, you've got to correct that. I'm only 87. You said 89.

ST: I know. See, I'm 90. So I got you beat by three years. Now we've had a nice lunch, you and I and your companion. I noticed as we sat in that restaurant, people passed by. They didn't know who you were. But once upon a time, you flew a plane called the Enola Gay over the city of Hiroshima, in Japan, on a Sunday morning - August 6 1945 - and a bomb fell. It was the atomic bomb, the first ever. And that particular moment changed the whole world around. You were the pilot of that plane.

PT: Yes, I was the pilot.

ST: And the Enola Gay was named after...

PT: My mother. She was Enola Gay Haggard before she married my dad, and my dad never supported me with the flying - he hated airplanes and motorcycles. When I told them I was going to leave college and go fly planes in the army air corps, my dad said, "Well, I've sent you through school, bought you automobiles, given you money to run around with the girls, but from here on, you're on your own. If you want to go kill yourself, go ahead, I don't give a damn." Then Mom just quietly said, "Paul, if you want to go fly airplanes, you're going to be all right." And that was that.

[ellipsis]

ST: One big question. Since September 11, what are your thoughts? People talk about nukes, the hydrogen bomb.

PT: Let's put it this way. I don't know any more about these terrorists than you do, I know nothing. When they bombed the Trade Center I couldn't believe what was going on. We've fought many enemies at different times. But we knew who they were and where they were. These people, we don't know who they are or where they are. That's the point that bothers me. Because they're gonna strike again, I'll put money on it. And it's going to be damned dramatic. But they're gonna do it in their own sweet time. We've got to get into a position where we can kill the bastards. None of this business of taking them to court, the hell with that. I wouldn't waste five seconds on them.

ST: What about the bomb? Einstein said the world has changed since the atom was split.

PT: That's right. It has changed.

ST: And Oppenheimer knew that.

PT: Oppenheimer is dead. He did something for the world and people don't understand. And it is a free world.

ST: One last thing, when you hear people say, "Let's nuke 'em," "Let's nuke these people," what do you think?

PT: Oh, I wouldn't hesitate if I had the choice. I'd wipe 'em out. You're gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we've never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn't kill innocent people. If the newspapers would just cut out the shit: "You've killed so many civilians." That's their tough luck for being there.

ST: By the way, I forgot to say Enola Gay was originally called number 82. How did your mother feel about having her name on it?

PT: Well, I can only tell you what my dad said. My mother never changed her expression very much about anything, whether it was serious or light, but when she'd get tickled, her stomach would jiggle. My dad said to me that when the telephone in Miami rang, my mother was quiet first. Then, when it was announced on the radio, he said: "You should have seen the old gal's belly jiggle on that one."

[source]

+++

Pictures of the Past Week: The Florida Panhandle

I took this with my crappy camera.  The Florida Caverns.

Happy Cows are from Florida..

Red Dirt Road.. Floridian Idyll.

Blackwater River:  Much, much more impressive in person than in this picture.. This river begs for an intertube or canoe.   I have a canvas chair that I planted in the middle of it (it's only about 6" deep in some of the middle parts) and read a couple chapters of Franscico de Osuna there.  Nothing like a little mystical recollection for a summer southern afternoon..

5 Turtles Sunning Themselves on a Log, Wukulla Spring

Alligator wallowing in reeds along Wukulla River

The Wukulla River

Crane, Image Taken From Boat on Wakulla River

And You're Welcome, Nikki. 

---

Enola Gay, Are You Proud of Your Little Boy Today?

This is from Daniel Larison at Caelum & Terra, posted today.  I quote it in full because I want to second everything he says there :

[ that post's address: http://caelumetterra.wordpress.com/2011/08/07/consequentialism-and-its-consequences/  ]

Every year around this time- the Feast of the Transfiguration and the commemoration of Hiroshima- I am again struck by the strange synchronicity of these things, and by the blasphemy that surrounded the atomic bomb.

They named the test site Trinity, and Oppenheimer famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita when he witnessed the first test bomb, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”, managing double sacrilege, appropriating the Divine Name and divine power as well. And then they chose the Feast of the Transfiguration to destroy Hiroshima.

Did they do this knowingly? I don’t know, but the date could not be more appropriate: the first use of atomic weapons against humans became forever a sort of Satanic Transfiguration, with vast numbers of lives vaporized in the destructive blazing created light, a mockery of the life-giving uncreated Light that shone forth on the holy mountain.

I think, too, of the moral reasoning that went into the decision to bomb Hiroshima. It was nothing new; both sides had been waging war against civilians for a long while, all because they had adopted the principles of consequentialism, the idea that an act is measured by its effects for good or ill.

Such thinking comes natural to the natural man. To the spiritual man, though, this is an error that opens the door for every horror. One must begin with the objective order: there are some acts that are intrinsically evil, no matter what the circumstances. Christians can argue about the precise meaning of the commandment forbidding killing, but at the very least everyone should agree that if it means anything it means that it is always wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings.

Of course, Americans, like everyone else, act like this is self-evident when they are the victims. After 9/11 Osama bin Ladin was called evil precisely because he violated this principle. However, when the situation is reversed, and it is Americans doing the killing, everything changes. We are justified because we had a good end in sight. Never mind that bin Ladin also considered his end- a godly world order- a good one. He even cited Hiroshima in justifying his own act. In the mind of bin Ladin, he and Harry Truman were morally equivalent. I agree, but note that bin Ladin killed a small fraction of those done in by Truman.

I am in Michigan this week, and by chance attended the Roman Mass at St Matthew’s in downtown Flint this morning. The priest, an elderly Augustinian friar, instead of commenting on the Gospel, offered some thoughts on the atomic bombings of Japan. He had been a missionary in Nagasaki a few years after the bomb was dropped there, in the most Catholic city in that nation.

He began by saying that he would not address the morality of the act, saying that it was “complex” and that there was a lot of disagreement about Truman’s decision. Instead he went on the tell heartbreaking stories of suffering among the Catholics he knew in Nagasaki.

True, he ended with a call for disarmament, but that a man who personally knew innocent Catholics who were victims of atomic weaponry could not say that this act- the deliberate killing of tens of thousands of civilians- was simply wrong made it clear in a new way to me just how deep the infection of consequentialism runs in American Catholics, who of all people should know better.

Amen.  Audrey Santo, pray for us. 

---

The Triumph of the Apes: All Bow Ye Before the Imminent Simian Singularity

The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, review.  B - , 3.5/5*  80% Tomato Meter. 

First, this is a good movie.

I've seen several big blockbusters this year, and haven't had the energy to give them the pannings they deserved here.   They - Fast Five, Thor, Captain America, so forth - have been mostly crap.  I've only bothered to review movies that really impressed me here.   I decided the other day that I'm going to try to review everything I see from now on, keeping the less interesting stuff to a paragraph long review..  I need material for the blog (I feel your ravenous need, my public.. )  and the writing exercise will be good for me..

Anyway, I liked Thor mildly, because there was enough of the Eddas there to make it interesting to me, but the rest - I say "rest" because there were more than those other two, but I can't remember them since they were all such innocuous crap that I've purged them - were just awful.  Captain America  I had hopes for, but it was just a blur of mindless and uninteresting violence.  There was never a second that the "good guys" seemed at all likely to be frustrated let alone defeated, and the "bad guys" were clownish, imitation Nazis that were totally uninteresting.

Captain America had certain salient thematic elements in common with Planet of the Apes though..  Very interesting ones, to my mind, these days..   I'll write about them soon.. I'll definitely get to drawing comparisons and all that in a later post.  

Here I need to praise this film a little more.  This movie was smart by Hollywood standards, and the computer effects were absolutely amazing.  I usually dislike CGI effects, but the quality of the apes' depiction was superb, I occasionally even briefly thought that I could actually be looking at film of real hyper intelligent apes.   The level of verisimilitude is becoming almost lifelike.  

"Virtual reality" is making great strides, folks.  The fantasy almost leaps off the screen into life..    

The actor who played Gollum in LOTR, Andy Serkis, also played the lead ape in this film, Ceasar, and this performance was just as good as that one, but even more impressive as the computer effects are even better.  

So, the story was above average for a blockbuster, it held my interest, and while there were few surprises in the story, but it was executed well, and did everything I came wanting it to do.  It had moments of tension where there was true suspense (albeit all while knowing what was going to happen ultimately) ..

About the theme, now:  

It's an old one in cinema.  Basically, it's a gnostic dystopia.  The main human character, played by 

is a scientist whose father has Alzheimers.  He is driven to find a cure.  He is working on a viral treatment that he expects to cure brain damage caused by dementia.  They test it on a dozen apes..

And discover that it works.  But better than expected, in that it increases intelligence. 

The only surprise here (I'm not going to tell you the rest of the plot, you can guess what happens) is that the only appealing human beings in the film are James Franco's character, his character's girlfriend, and his father (John Lithgow).   All the other humans are assholes.  

The apes - Ceasar, the main ape especially - seem at first to be all cruel.. But, as the plot unfolds, they are revealed to actually be quite noble, in that they only kill humans who are begging for it.  

The rest of the human race is taken out .. Do not read the next sentence - I've written it backwards - if you want to be "surprised" :

.suriv eht yB 

So, the stage is set for the triumph of the apes, and the arrival of Charleton Heston.  His character is actually in the film, too, but referred to only tangentially.  (There are a few media reports in the movie telling us that a Mars mission launches, but then disappears.. ) There are a whole slew of tribute lines and names to the earlier film series, of course.   They're going to treat us to a new franchise, which I can't say I mind, so long as they keep doing it this well.  

Now, the message here in philosophical terms is that nothing essentially separates apes and men but intelligence, that by attaining greater intelligence is essentially a technical problem itself "solved" by intelligence, and that the super intelligent product of that innovation benefits from the extermination of stupid humanity by means of a ..  (backwards agin, don't look if you don't want to learn..) 

suriv..

Yeah.  Prophecy of the Illuminati, or just the rehash of really stale plot line?

You decide.   One species of apes is done, long live the reign of the more evolved apes!  

Evolution is inexorable, and you who are stupid cannot escape.

But the singularity isn't happening this week, in the meantime you get to go to the moves.  Enjoy.

---

Thoughts on Luke 6:24

[concerning this blog's heading]


So, the big news is that Standard and Poor's has downgraded U.S. Federal debt from AAA to AA+ .

Two notes on this:  first these are the same cretins who gave a AAA rating to bundled subprime mortgage debt, at the behest of their Wall Street masters.   They served them then, and they serve them now.

Second, that lower debt rating means the government is now going to be expected to pay higher interest rates on the debt.  This is how these bastards work: they downgrade your credit worthiness, and then charge you higher interest.  The poor are thus inevitably screwed by high interest rates (because they have less money to repay loans, so banksters charge them more to cover all those poor people who fail to repay..)

Note, the lower credit rating will make those who hold the debt more money.


I guess I should try to explain my thinking about this in a bit broader fashion..


Ever since I've been to Mexico and Egypt I've been in reaction to the extreme poverty that I saw in those two places.   I lived and taught in Mexico for a year in the mid- 90's in the immediate aftermath of the Mexican debt crisis and U.S. engineered bailout that devastated that country in the early nineties.  They paid me 16k dollars, and gave me Mexican socialized health care benefits to work at one of the best (read wealthiest) prep school systems in the country.   They paid "North Americans" (U.S. and Canadian citizens, never mind that Mexico is in North America too, they still called us Norte Americanos to distinguish us from citizens of los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, which is the official name of Mexico) there twice what they paid their Mexican staff, which was an uncomfortable reality..

The people living in dirt floored shacks with livestock, the crowds of kids flocking intersections begging while giving cars unsolicited windshield wipings in the brief interval between lights..

 I didn't know how to process any of that - there were so many aspects of that experience that blew my mind's capacity to process sanely that the economic subtexts were left unanalyzed for a long while..

My year in Egypt five years ago brought these economic realities all to my mind's fore.  Poverty there is if anything more extreme, and the landscape - both geographic and spiritual is far starker and more barren.


That extremity scarred me.  I came home radicalized.


It suddenly became very clear to me that we in the United Sates (deliberate "misspelling" there) are at the center of a global network of wealth acquisition.   A very highly tuned one.

We (this "we" includes all American citizens, no matter how much money they have) are all the beneficiaries of this system due to the fact that our leadership - the men of money and power in places like New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago and Miami (and so forth) - are the architects of this system.   Further, our military is the "praetorian guard" (so to speak) of this class, who deploys American military force in such a way as to guarantee its integrity.


They will, and have, done anything necessary to maintain this flow of wealth toward themselves.


Now, I could say we will do anything necessary, because let's be perfectly clear here, anyone who supported either Iraq war, or the violent execution of the Cold War in places like Nicaragua or Vietnam (or any of the dozens of other places where that war became hot) is morally complicit in this system.


That's to say all of us, practically speaking, are guilty of advocating (which is tantamount to using) violence to maintain our bourgeois lifestyles.

To include myself.


Now, what we are witnessing - to put it clearly, in bald terms - in this global recession and all the "retrenchments" and "debt crises" - is the acceleration of the extent of debt servitude to the point that the masters of this system are now applying the same tactics of debt warfare that they have used against third world countries and their populations (so as to essentially enslave them with poverty, and then exploit their labor - and usually much more importantly - their natural resources ) to what until now we've called the First World.

Note that the "Second World" was the Communist Block.  Now that that threat and alternative to the Neo-Liberal Capitalist order has been removed, they are going for the jugular.   There is no socialist threat anymore to keep them in line.  It's been subverted.  They no longer have to share the wealth for fear that the masses will have them for lunch.

They are prescribing the same program for their First World populaces as they once did only for Third World satrapies.   The government will be reduced to the point that it exists to guarantee contracts, and protect the rights of the wealthy.  Courts, perhaps prisons.  Police, armies, maybe.  They can buy even those things, and privatize even the law.   And that's what they are doing, right in front of our bovine eyes.

Note I'm not bullshitting you or making this up.  I'm not babbling crazy.   They've come out and said it very clearly.  Google Milton Freedman, Grover Norquist, libertarian economics.  These people have said there should be no public sphere, or only a minimal one, meaning that everything should be owned by someone.  What they mean is that everything, and everyone that they deign to allow live will be owned (their time and services bought) by them.  And that "them" is a very small number of people.

They do not care about anyone except themselves.  They want to be rich, powerful - and ultimately transcendent - masters of the universe.  They will do whatever they need to to achieve this.  

I'm going to talk about this "transcendence" I think "they" hope for some more on the blog these coming weeks.


Now though, I'll conclude by saying this:

One of the main reasons I am a Catholic is that Catholicism is to my mind one of the very few coherent epistemologies and anthropologies that resoundingly rejects their worldview.

Islam is, incidentally, perhaps another one.

To be a Catholic is believe in the sacredness of every human person, even the poor, even the idiotic..

Even, note, the evil fascistic rich man.   Even he deserves a dignified trial before he is thrown in jail.


Justice, which is Mercy Himself, demands it.



---

Picture of the Day: This is a Manatee.

Taken @ Wakulla Springs.

---

Gnostic Propaganda & The Hive Mind: You Are a Zombie, But No Worries: Everything Tastes Like Chicken When Raw.

I've refrained from commenting on the charade taking place in Washington these last few weeks..

Or rather decades..

Because it's all too depressing, and I almost don't care about what I think about it, so why should I share it with you?  

Expect you to care, when I barely do?  

All pruny bathing in cynicism, here.    You are stupid.  You are stupid.  You are stupid.

Well, you know, whatever, right? 


All the discourse coming out of D.C. about default and all that is pure bullshit, cynical even for Washington and our "opinion making" elite.   Ever since the Iraq invasion I've been marking their lies and propaganda.   At first  I was shocked and incredulous, then for a while I was paranoid.

Now, I'm bemused verging into indifferent.   Still, I'll shake myself free of torpor to see if anyone cares to have a conversation.    I'll just make a few quick salient points to the void.   If anyone cares, you have my email address, or can leave a comment or whatever else may please you.


Study these two images:

This debt that the government creates is mostly held by Americans.   Some 70% - that's seventy  percent - of the debt is held by federal social security, military or civil pension funds, and our own investor class.  That's to say that the interest on the public debt for the most part enriches American citizens and corporations.


This means that the tax revenues being used to service the debt goes to major capitalists,  to private investors.  A default preventing the service of this debt would mean Daddy War Bucks might lose his free money stream.  Not gonna happen, as in not ever.  The warmachine and the banksters will get their lucre.  There will be no default that keeps their bloody paws from grubbing in the public till, believe me you.


There may come a point where there is a default that reorganizes the debt that could screw foreign interests, but barring war or some other major catastrophe I doubt even that. 


That's right.  Think about the scam, now.  Seriously.   You're stupid, but still.  Think about it:  TARP "bails out" the banks and major investment funds and insurance companies who deliberately created a bubble to run our economy into the ground.

Then, they demand that the government create public debt to "save the economy."   That public debt is then bought by the same private investor class who created the crisis.

They simultaneously demand that taxes on their investment and corporate income be abolished, thereby guaranteeing a sophisticated genus of debt bondage for the idiotic American public.

The wars feed the corporate contractors and the public debt simultaneously, as well.   Money goes from the public to the rich. 


The debt - no matter whether accrued by war or bailout - always constitutes a massive transfer of wealth toward our investor class, the wealthy, and the currently retired.


The very people who own and watch FOX News and read The National Review and profess to hate that house servant Obama.

The very people who say they hate the government are using it to rape the middle class.  Especially the future middle class, which will eventually be subsumed into the global working class (aka "proletariat") when it becomes feasible to pay the average American what they pay the sweat shop workers in Asia or immigrant labor here.   That day is coming, and even though most Americans are stupid they still feel it looming, which is why they are so mindlessly restive.  

The middle class being for the most part  catatonic, in a trance state where they blame the government for the mess,  not seeing that the government is the only agency that they have any real direct influence over, and is the only means of breaking the critical mass that monopolistic capital left alone always ultimately achieves, in which it draws all wealth to itself through interest on debt, and then enslaves all labor at a subsistence wage.

The zombies do not see that we have allowed our government and public discourse to be co- opted and utterly corrupted by the adepts of the rich.    


That's right.  I said it.


Enjoy your chicken.



---

Now is the Winter of Our Discontent Made Glorious Summer..

We, determined to prove villainous and hate the idle pleasures of these days, plots have laid, inductions dangerous, by drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams, set in deadly hate one against the other: subtle, false and treacherous.


All I can say is to repeat what I've already said: we deserve what we are going to get.




---

Pictures of the Day: River Styx to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' House

The River Styx.

Three Vultures above the Styx.

Smallish alligator feeding upon a deer carcass in the river (click to enlarge image if you can't see him: he's almost invisible but for the top of his head on the right of the deer; mouth on carcass, his submerged tail pointing to the upper right corner of the frame).

The Yearling, on the far side of the bridge.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' House.

Marjorie's Parlor.

Marjorie's tenant farmer's house, where the help lived.

---

Picture of the Day: Arc of the Covenant, Gainesville

I have an odd bunch of pictures to post, but it's late and I'm tired, this wireless connection is too slow, and I want to write clever amusing little captions but am too addled.   It'll have to wait for tomorrow, is all.  



---

Pictures of the Last Few Days: Jacksonville, Fort Clinch SP, Gainesville

I've not been in the mood to write anything these last few days - or week or two now, I suppose.   I've been turned inward, seeking to put myself in better order, lately.    There's work to do inside, is what I'm saying. Still, I did see a few things, and I did remember to use my camera on a few of them....

Like this, Fort Clinch State Park, a Civil War era park just north of Jacksonville that was begun just before beginning of the war, then taken and then abandoned by the Confederacy, and then taken and held by the Union after Florida was evacuated by Confederate forces in the middle of the war.  I have always loved old forts like this,  they move me somehow.   Here are a few images I seized of the place:

Then I saw this later that same day along the side of the road.  It's web was huge, probably a square meter in total span, and the little fellow was himself not all that little (in that if he were to grow any larger he would be a great nightmare, and not just a vividly colored little spook like he is now..)  being about two inches long or so with the extent of his legs..  He was very beautiful, but I was a a little too wary and respectful to get any closer than I did, which means the images I took are not as impressive as they should be:

I just looked him up online.  He's a yellow silk spider, also known as a banana spider, a calico spider, a writing spider, a giant wood spider or a golden orb spider.

He's not at all dangerous, and can even be touched or picked up if you have the guts to do it.   I like spiders, but prefer not to touch or get too close to them.  They're awesome to me, and that means I give them due respect.  I look, but will not touch.  

Some people are brasher in this than I.  Here's the proof of that:

That guy's a little bigger than the one I ran into, but not much.   Pretty amazing, eh?


I'm beginning to really like Florida.  It's really only a matter of paying attention to what is good and ignoring all the idiots.  That's just a matter of acting with grace and acquired wisdom, and then paying attention, really..



---