The sly-looking cat that witnesses the scene has clearly found an effective modus vivendi with humans, much sooner and more skillfully than the satyr!
One of the markers of conservatism in our modern democracy is a routine willingness to say one thing privately and another publicly. The reason for this is that our national consensus has turned towards justice, which causes defenders of the old order into a bad situation where they either say what they mean and sound like monsters, or they try to reframe their authoritarian views in liberal terms to confuse the issue. Historically, this has mostly been a stalling tactic, if in results if not in intention. Slave owners bought a little more time owning slaves by claiming slavery was good for slaves, because they weren't smart enough for freedom...In the early days of segregation, what was privately expressed as an explicit desire to keep black people as second class citizens was cleaned up and publicly presented as "separate but equal". When that stopped working, private support for segregation as segregation was cleaned up and presented to the public as "states' rights" or "private property rights". After desegregation, private anger at black people for demanding equality was cleaned up and presented as "law and order" in public. You know this history.
I believe that racism is what developed the strategy, but now it's endemic. Abortion is privately about sluts who can't keep their legs shut, publicly about "life".
Economic policies that that are designed to grow the gap between the haves and have-nots are publicly supported because they supposedly grow the economy and do the opposite.
Anti-gay bigotry is blatant in private spaces, but about "traditional marriage" in public spaces.
The problem with this strategy is it actually takes a lot of effort to maintain elaborate facades. And really, only people who are out in public are expected to maintain the facade. The blatant nastiness is freely expressed in private spaces, which is why, as I've pointed out before, elaborate email chains are one of those things that help create conservative solidarity largely out of the view of liberals.
Now, most of us do this to one extent or another, but with liberals I rarely hear a direct conflict between their private values and their public ones, but with conservatives, there's often a direct conflict, or at least mismatch, between private values and public ones.
My meaning, comfort, and wonder come from another place, from trying to understand people, creatures, life, the planet, the galaxy, the universe, and their amazing diversity from my miniscule perspective as a man living in the 20th and 21st centuries here on earth. From trying to be a good person, a good husband and father.
What will outlive me is not my soul, because I don't think I have one. But my children will outlast me. Their children, if they have them, will too. As will, perhaps, some of my words and ideas, like the ones written here. Anything that persists of me-besides the molecules that used to make up my body-will be in the memories of others, or in their genes (another type of memory). That might not be much, and it won't be up to me to decide what that includes.
The attractive young woman in the painting is teasingly prodding the cat with the prickly stem of a rose. The animal seems to enjoy the attention, with the particular pleasure that cats experience in being caressed in sensitive spots, especially behind the ears, purring loudly in return.
...the allure of sports drinks shows no signs of letting up. While Gatorade began as beverage for the Florida Gators football team - the seven tablespoons of sugar per serving were supposed to help replenish the carbs lost during sweat - it has since expanded into a Byzantine array of drinks tailored for different phases of the workout process. If we really want to maximize performance, then we can't just drink Gatorade while working out. We also have to drink Gatorade Prime before exertion, Gatorade Perform during and Gatorade Recover afterwards.
Needless to say, most of these claims are bullsh*t. But they're an interesting kind of bullsh*t. Because it turns out that sugary sports drinks (like Gatorade, Powerade, VitaminWater, etc.) do generate significant performance benefits. It's just that these benefits have little to do with the replenishment of lost electrolytes. And that's why we seem to get the biggest benefits from these expensive liquids when we spit them out.
Today, I read yet another angry article on the continuing death spiral of the American economy, which ended with what has become a rather stale cliché:
We can put a man on the moon, but…
Actually, no. We can’t put a man on the moon. We might have been able to do it once upon a time, a long time ago. But today? In this technologically overloaded era, we can chat with friends and rellies on the other side of the planet, we download half the Library of Congress on our Kindles and Kobos, we can tweet what we had for breakfast in California to the twittering lunchtime crowd in New York, we can play on-line video games with sophisticated graphics and total strangers, and we can blog about it to the entire world. But we cannot do what we once did with not much more than a slide rule and the completely insane self-confidence that we as Americans could do anything we set our minds to. Failure was not an option.
Gene Cernan [the last astronaut to walk on the moon] has long been a genial ambassador for America’s space program, but lately has become an outspoken critic of what he considers a deliberate agenda to destroy what NASA has achieved. It’s not just about the end of America’s space shuttles. ‘The agenda is to dismantle America’s space program, Cernan said. ‘There’s no objective. There’s no timetable. There’s no goal. And there’s no mission. We’re retiring America’s space program. We’re out of the business.’
In our rush to cut back all the ‘unnecessary’ programmes, such as Medicare and Social Security along with NASA, in order to ‘balance the budget,’ we will continue this long, not-so-slow slide down into irrelevancy and endemic depression. Where we had a Kennedy who could galvanize the American spirit and bring out the best in us, this administration, hounded by the jackals on the right to cut everything to the bone (unless you’re an oil company or a multi-billion dollar bank, that is) is not only allowing us to fail, but helping us along. With a poke in the eye for good measure.
We can put a man on the moon, but we… well… can’t put a man on the moon. How sad is that?
This week I will be teleworking on Wed rather than Tues so I can attend a training session on Unauthorized Commitments.
Said training is tomorrow 1100-noon, so I'll just pass on running at midday. I might go out in the AM if I can summon some motivation.
I asked a Republican friend how I could get motivated. He said "Cut taxes for the rich and let the free market fix it."
Anyway, I probably won't see you all this week. My surgeries are on Thurs, and I expect to be out 2-4 weeks. I'll email when I know more.
Regards/Gary
"Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution is pretty simple. It says, 'Raise an army.' It says absolutely nothing about race, color, creed, sexual orientation. ... Let's just move on, treat everybody with firmness, fairness, dignity, compassion and respect. Let's be Marines," - Sgt. Maj. Michael Barrett, the top non-commissioned officer of the Marine Corps, on the repeal of DADT.
The young man with the wispy moustache and crude hairstyle gives us a knowing look while trying to soothe, with practiced caresses, a rather too lively kitten.
On this day in 1855, Walt Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass. The first edition consisted of 12 poems, and was published anonymously; Whitman set much of the type himself, and paid for its printing. Over his lifetime, he published eight more editions, adding poems each time; there were 122 new poems in the third edition alone (1860-61), and the final "death-bed edition," published in 1891, contained almost 400. The first edition received several glowing -- and anonymous -- reviews in New York newspapers. Most of them were written by Whitman himself. The praise was unstinting: "An American bard at last!" One legitimate mention by popular columnist Fanny Fern called the collection daring and fresh. Emerson felt it was "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed." This wasn't a universal opinion, however; many called it filth, and poet John Greenleaf Whittier threw his copy into the fire.
The 1855 edition contained a preface, which was left out of subsequent editions, and in it he wrote:
"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."
...and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.
The top Republican in the Senate invoked the high-profile acquittal of Casey Anthony on charges she murdered her daughter as a reason to oppose the use of civilian trials for terrorism suspects.
"These are not American citizens. We just found with the Caylee Anthony case how difficult is to get a conviction in a U.S. court," Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said on "Fox News Sunday." McConnell has called on the Obama administration to place suspected terrorists in Guantanamo Bay and prosecute them in the military justice system.
"I don't think a foreigner is entitled to all the protections of the Bill of Rights. They should not be in U.S. courts. They should be at Guantanamo and before military commissions," McConnell said.
Late update: In an email to TPM, McConnell spokesman Don Stewart writes "the Administration itself has tacitly acknowledged that once a foreign national is brought into this country and into the civilian system, the ability to indefinitely detain them is lost, regardless of whether they are convicted in a civilian court of criminal offenses. Civilian courts have ordered released into this country foreign nationals who have been convicted of violent felonies after the United States has been unable to deport them. That problem does not exist if foreign terrorists are detained at Guantanamo Bay."
Renoir also included cats in several paintings, perhaps the best-known being Girl with a Cat. Renoir's cats were always pleasant, contented felines. To share their warmth, he often nursed one of the many cats that lived around his house. Occasionally, the Institute Pasteur in Paris, checking the authenticity of Renoir's paintings, has found cat hairs in the paint, which helps date the paintings.
Human embryos are examples of human life. Therefore, by absolutist religious lights, abortion is simply wrong: fully fledged murder. I am not sure what to make of my admittedly anecdotal observation that many of those who most ardently oppose the taking of embryonic life also seem to be more than usually enthusiastic about taking adult life....
There are two ways in which scripture might be a source of morals or rules for living. One is by direct instruction, for example through the Ten Commandments, which are the subject of such bitter contention in the culture wars of America's boondocks. The other is by example: God, or some other biblical character, might serve as a role model. Both scriptural routes, if followed through religiously, encourage a system of morals which any civilized modern person, whether religious or not, would find--I can put it no more gently--obnoxious.
To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and "improved" by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries.
Is it a mere decorative element, or is it a symbol of freedom, linked to loyalty to the Spanish crown (and as such, a symbolic representation of the strong working and intellectual relationship between Velazquez and Philip IV? Critics seem to disagree over these interpretations. In the meantime, the cat, confirming its ancient reputation for laziness and indolence, is the only living thing that is idle in this setting that, in contrast, is a hive of activity.
As a labor lawyer I cringe when Democrats talk of "saving" Social Security. We should not "save" it but raise it. Right now Social Security pays out 39 percent of the average worker's preretirement earnings. While jaws may drop inside the Beltway, we could raise that to 50 percent. We'd still be near the bottom of the league of the world's richest countries - but at least it would be a basement with some food and air. We have elderly people living on less than $10,000 a year. Is that what Democrats want to "save"?
