Moristotle

Morris & Ken have made up

2012-01-27T18:56:00.001-05:00

Ken is the good-looking one

Ken Marks and I have agreed that our friendship is too important to us not to get back onto speaking terms again. Look for Ken's comments once again on Moristotle.
My wife had discovered on Monday that it was the birthday of my friend of about forty years, and she immediately called on me and Ken to "negotiate a peace," effectively offering her services as an interlocutor, if not as a full-fledged Switzerland-type intermediary. "Neither of you boys," she pointed out, "is getting any younger, and I would hate to see one of you die before restoring diplomatic relations with the other."
Good thought, and bless my dear wife for having it. She'd already communicated with Ken, who seemed to doubt seriously that I would agree to make peace without some serious mediation. But my wife's touching plea was already enough mediation for me, and I immediately agreed to a reconciliation.

Scourge [used to inflict severe
corporal punishment...on the back
–Wikipedia]

In case the break in relations escaped your notice, I'll just say that about seven weeks ago Ken and I defriended one another (as they say on Facebook). I won't report the personal aspects of it, except to say that I was now prepared not only to apologize publicly but also to flagellate myself with a scourge for any and all offenses I may have given, possibly using the instrument shown to the right—the instrument of choice among innumerable Roman Catholic self-mortifiers of their flesh down through the sad ages of the Christian religion.

Another contributor to Moristotle, who has already been told of Ken & Morris's refriending, says that this is really good news. "It will be nice to perhaps cross swords with him again."
Moristotle looks forward to the recommencement of Ken's thoughtful comments.
Welcome back, Ken!

Eagle webcam in Decorah, Iowa

2012-01-26T15:35:00.000-05:00

Bald Eagle

My neighbor who provided a link to the "Eagle webcam at Jordan Lake" has provided me another one. Says she:

The second camera is in Decorah, Iowa. Straight across the upper part of Iowa from my family. I watched it all last year and it has sound and can be seen at night. Right now the parents come at various times to check the nest and eat. They will not lay eggs until the later part of February. It will be fun to watch the different age babies

For more links to nature webcams, go to the site where I found the code: http://www.ustream.tv/decoraheagles.

Eagle webcam at Jordan Lake

2012-01-22T11:43:00.004-05:00

Many thanks to our former next-door neighbor in Chapel Hill for sending me the link to a webcam posted near an eagle's nest at Lake Jordan, in North Carolina. I've added to my sidebar (on the right) the code for seeing what's happening. And I add it here for your convenience (sorry about the ad, if you have to watch one before the webcam):

Mystical bent?

2012-01-22T11:13:00.002-05:00

William James (1842-1910)

Yesterday, I referred to myself as "of a mystical bent." Admitting this surprised me as much as quoting Rilke; I hadn't meant to get into anything like that.
Maybe I'm ready to try to say what spirituality (or being spiritual) means for me?
Phrases like reverence for life [Albert Schweitzer], benevolence toward the humblest living creature [Charles Darwin], practice compassion [Dalai Lama], and The earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth [Chief Seattle] come to mind.
What can I say? Dwelling on such concepts in the awareness of nature and of our life on Earth casts a sort of numinous spell over me, a feeling that resonates with William James's characterization of mystical experience as "a deepened sense of significance." And, even when I'm not "having the experience," I try to maintain an abiding sense of the deep significance of things, the deep significance of choices and actions.
James even excuses my inability to say much about this deep sense: "There is ineffability: the subject of a mystical experience cannot find words to describe it."
Rainer Maria Rilke came close, very close indeed, in his Duino Elegies and other writings:

Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.
[–Sonnets to Orpheus, XXIX, Stephen Mitchell's translation]

Bulgaria trip remembered

2012-01-21T10:38:00.003-05:00

The photos I published last June from our trip to Bulgaria included several from Rila, which my son recently featured on "Тук не е Америка: 20 years in Bulgaria," in his article, "New Year's Notes from Rila." Here's a sample of what you can see there, the balcony on which we stood last May (the 10th):

Humanitarian inclusion

2012-01-21T10:12:00.003-05:00

On my residential community's website the other day, someone asked whether anyone else had heard early-morning gunshots nearby. Someone else wondered whether local people were taking shots at the coyotes, which she had several times seen early in the morning as she headed out to work.
A gun enthusiast in our community commented approvingly:

There is no closed season for coyotes, so as long as it is daylight, then you can hunt them. This area is also outside the city limits, so there are no limitations on discharging firearms. I am a hunter/shooter and I say more power to these folks if they are hunting coyotes. Coyote packs are a danger to small pets in the neighborhood and perhaps even to calves and small livestock in the pastures down the road.

While predators of course need to be dealt with for such reasons as he gives (I do not condemn the killing of a home-invader, for example, if that's the only way to protect oneself or one's family), I asked this hunter/shooter to suggest humane ways to reduce the local coyote population. I pointed out that shooting them might not result in a clean kill, but only wound the animals and result in their prolonged suffering. I told him that I was opposed to hunting on philosophical grounds (and I cited my statement on sentients rights).
This morning, I was thinking about the grounds of my opposition, but in doing so I misremembered characterizing the grounds as humanitarian rather than "philosophical." Humanitarian, of course, seems perfectly congruent with my asking the hunger about humane ways to deal with the coyotes.
But opposition on humanitarian grounds doesn't seem quite right. Humanitarian is usually used in the context of the mistreatment of humans (human animals), even if humane has a wider berth—the humane treatment of animals is a common phrase, focusing on the idea that compassionate human beings would not treat animals badly.
It didn't take me long to identify a nearly perfect synonym for humanitarian to include the mistreatment of other animals as well as human ones: sentientarian, derived easily from my statement of sentients rights.

I say nearly perfect. In fact, plants, too, are sentients, as my wife correctly observed (in attempting to demolish the moral foundation of my opposition to eating animals, but not to eating plants). "Plants can react to their environment. That's practically the definition of life."
Which brings me back to a sentence from Wikipedia's entry on sentience, which I omitted in my statement on sentients rights:

For Eastern philosophy, sentience is a metaphysical quality of all things [emphasis mine] that requires respect and care.

(I myself avoid phrases like "metaphysical quality," however much they impressed me when I was in school.)
Respect for life should of course take in respect for plants, but also for our environment, for our planet—the laboratory of our natural creation and evolution fueled by solar energy.

Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875-1926)

And Rainer Maria Rilke (and others of a mystical bent, myself included) would count manufactured things as well. From the eighth of his Duino Elegies:

...Are we here, perhaps, for saying: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit-tree, window—
at most: column, tower......but for saying, realise,
oh, for a saying such as the things themselves would never
have profoundly said. Is not the secret intent
of this discreet Earth to draw lovers on,
so that each and every thing is delight within their feeling?

I didn't see it coming, that I would end up quoting Rilke this morning. But it is most agreeable to be reminded of the many transfixed hours I have spent reading his Duino Elegies, his Sonnets to Orpheus, and many others of his poems....

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
[– Archaic Torso of Apollo, Stephen Mitchell's translation]

Follow-on to Motomynd unmasked

2012-01-15T11:08:00.006-05:00

A reader of Moristotle asked me whether I had a clue how Paul (Motomynd) fell upon my blog?
Actually, at the time, I didn't—or at least didn't remember whether I'd ever had a clue or, if I did, what it was. (I hope this failure carries no omen foretelling the demise of my ability to blog.)

However, encouraged by Motomynd's generous recent forthingcomingness with photos and accounts of his exciting adventures, I asked him how he'd "fallen on my blog," and he said:

Well I guess we could say I met this interesting couple with a very interesting and interestingly named dog at the Historic Occoneechee Speedway Trail and while the guy was making notes about me for his blog (without my knowing such), I was making notes about him (without his knowing such), and when I googled the information I remembered it led me to the blog. And as a joke I commented not only as me but also as my alter ego Motomynd, and since the latter seemed to be the more interesting persona and better writer, I just stayed with that. I guess we could say all that.

Motomynd graciously added, "...in more literary fashion," but frankly I don't think that's necessary (if even possible).
And I think it's interesting that we googled each other. There must have been something about that chance encounter (my wife and me and Siegfried taking a walk, Paul doing some serious physical conditioning), some impression made, something provocative said—"mystery men" to each other apparently. Anyway, Motomynd's story is on the way to unfolding, as mine has been unfolding already here for several years.

fritter.com

2012-01-14T16:19:00.002-05:00

Reminds me of the time I innocently referred to a fictional website I gave the address flogger.com. It was supposed to be for political advertising (to flog is slang for sell hard), but it turned out that flogger.com was already taken by a porn site (as in sado-masochistic sex).
Anyway, I just discovered that fritter.com is actually someone's personal website.
But never mind. What I wanted to share today is that yesterday over coffee, a friend and I got to talking about social networks—specifically, about how much time they can eat up.
He said he was thinking of starting a new network and naming it Fritter....

Motomynd: On the trail (and not on a bike)

2012-01-13T13:34:00.000-05:00

It is 11:00 p.m. on January 12 and the weather broadcast just announced there is a cold front ripping into the mountains just west of my home in Virginia. It is bringing with it the first measurable snow of the season; that means it is time to head out to properly greet an old friend too long gone.
So while the safe, sane world sleeps, I am putting on running gear and headlamp and heading for an 8-mile trail run/walk to properly welcome real winter at one of my favorite places in Virginia—a sharp-edged piece of rock called McAfee Knob that juts from the face of Catawba Mountain and knifes into that west wind bringing a bit of Canada our way. A wind that also picks up a lifetime of memories from more than 100 trips to my family's home place in Upstate New York and hurls them frigid to the body yet warming to heart and mind into my life of relative southern softness.
It is only a 20-minute drive to the trail head where Route 311 crests Catawba Mountain, and even in the dark I can manage this eight-mile section of the Appalachian Trail in under two hours. With any luck I can fit in the outing and still steal five hours sleep before tomorrow's schedule sweeps me away. Live strong and sleep less. Or, to quote the refrain from an old Warren Zevon song, "I can sleep when I'm dead."
When I climb from the car, the wind cuts through my layers of running clothing. I will be cold the first couple of miles or so but as I hit the climb—1,300 feet of elevation gain in a little over a mile—I will warm quickly. What I don't think about, however, is that those first two miles are on the lee side of the mountain, unprotected from the wind. When I hit the climb I am assaulted by gusts of wind and feel ever colder.
There are few things in life as exhilarating as being on an exposed mountain side in the dark, in a swirl of snow, during a period the weather service calls "high wind warning." More than I bargained for and almost more than I wanted. I find out later that the area supposedly had gusts in the range of 60 miles per hour. Knowing how the wind feels on a motorcycle at 60, I bet these gusts were every bit of that. Somewhere just to the right and safely downwind a tree crashes to the ground. Thinking of possible "widow makers" upwind raises my pulse and finally I begin to warm a bit.

On a warm, soft, safe summer day,
a hiker sits on the perch where
Motomynd and others like to stand
and lean into the winter winds of fate

Reaching McAfee Knob, I walk to the very knife edge of the rock and lean into the biting wind. This is a game many of us have played countless times over the years, body jutting outward with feet well behind our center of gravity, arms spread like vultures' wings, only the support of the wind sparing us a fall of more than 100 feet into the trees and rocks below. Eventually a lull in the wind will claim one of us and we will finally get our name in the paper. But not once so far in the 40-plus years we have done this, and not tonight. I spread my arms and lean out hard into the dark until the cold takes the fun out of it, then I pull back and continue on to Campbell Shelter and the turn back toward my car.
Near the spring below the shelter a herd of deer trots away, snorting in the dark. Halfway back to the car another tree, again mercifully downwind, crashes to the ground.
Back at home I take time for a quick shower and reload some carbohydrates with a bowl of brown rice spiced with a touch of organic molasses and Sunbutter, a peanut butter-like substance made from sunflower seeds that seems much more nourishing and tasty than Skippy or Peter Pan or their kindred. Unfortunately I lie awake listening to the howling wind and reliving the rush of leaning into the abyss at the Knob, and the planned five hours sleep drifts toward four, then three.

It is 6:00 a.m. and BBC news is talking about a financial crisis in Hungary. I stretch and roll in bed to loosen up a bit before I even try to walk. That is not nearly enough recovery time for a body now aged well toward 60, but it is all I have. Over breakfast I realize I was literally leaning into the wind of fate on Friday the 13th. I resolve to live carefully on the busy day that awaits.
Call it silly, or immature even. Feel free to consider it rampant over-scheduling. Some of us just call it wringing all we can from every day. When you've lived on borrowed time for 20 years you grab every piece of life you can. What can be called crazy can also be called living.
Now on toward a mundane day, carried not by extra rest but by the rush of the night before. All the best with your day.

Thursday morning's backyard birds

2012-01-12T22:16:00.008-05:00

My wife thought she had spotted a Downy Woodpecker on our woodpecker feeder (later she allowed that it might have been a Hairy), so I set up my digiscoping equipment and waited.

When I saw a bird alight on the woodpecker feeder, I managed to repositioin and get two shots before it flew off. My wife looked at them and didn't think it was the Downy (or the Hairy) Woodpecker she'd spotted earlier:

Here's our array of feeders:

Happy my birthday

2012-01-08T19:03:00.000-05:00

Dessert after brunch at the Carolina Crossroads Restaurant in Chapel Hill's Carolina Inn, a surprise from our waiter:

Sunsets & moon risen

2012-01-07T20:41:00.001-05:00

January 5, 5:38 p.m., from back yard in Mebane, North Carolina

About half an hour after sunset, actually

January 7, 5:04 p.m.

5:28 p.m., from front porch

Click to check out the edges

_______________
All photos were taken with a Nikon Coolpix P300. The sunsets were hand-held; the Moon was digiscoped with a Nikon ED50 field scope (mounted on a tripod, of course).

Sentients rights

2012-01-06T15:08:00.010-05:00

About 225 years ago, Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) formulated a "categorical imperative," one version of which was that we "act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end." [Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals]
Yet another way of stating it is that we should respect the right of persons to be treated as ends in themselves (as existing for their own sake).

Recent reading encourages me to consider whether a unified statement of rights for both human animals and other animals might be useful.
An article in the January 2 New York Times, "Animal Studies Cross Campus to Lecture Hall," reports that the Animals & Society Institute lists "more than 100 courses in American colleges and universities that fit under the broad banner of animal studies." Five of the courses are offered by three universities in the state where I live. Three of the courses are offered at Duke University in the area of women's studies, and two courses are offered, one at East Carolina University and another at North Carolina State University, in philosophy. The description of ECU's course, "Ethics and Animals," explicitly states the connection:

The primary goal of the course is to learn more about ethics or morality from considering the significance of animals in moral deliberation. In thinking about whether animals have rights, for example, we shall also need to ask wider questions such as, what are rights and how do they fit into the system of morality?.... [emphasis mine]

I had realized in November, when attempting to lay the foundation for my own statement of animal rights, that the existence of any rights depends on prior agreements that have the force of law. And "any rights" includes those of humans, who even quite recently were held in slavery in many parts of the world and, if they are women, are still held virtually in slavery in many places. That is, the existence of human rights, too, depends on prior agreements that have the force of law.
The Animals & Society Institute also states explicitly the connection between humans and other animals. The Institute's announced objectives are "to promote new and stricter animal protection laws, stop the cycle of violence between animal cruelty and human abuse, and learn more about our complex relationship with animals," and its website home page flatly asserts that there is a link between cruelty toward animals and violence toward humans.
Agreements about both human and animal rights are becoming more enlightened.

A poignant case for animal rights is given by Steven Pinker in his most recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined:

Let me tell you about the worst thing I have ever done. In 1975, as a twenty-year-old sophomore, I got a summer job as a research assistant in an animal behavior lab. One evening the professor gave me an assignment. Among the rats in the lab was a runt that could not participate in the ongoing studies, so he wanted to use it to try out a new experiment. The first step was to train the rat in what was called a temporal avoidance conditioning procedure. The floor of a Skinner box was hooked up to a shock generator, and a timer that would shock the animal every six seconds unless it pressed a lever, which would give it a ten-second reprieve. Rats catch on quickly and press the lever every eight or nine seconds, postponing the shock indefinitely. [If this was well known, I wonder what the professor hoped to learn by subjecting yet another rat to the procedure.] All I had to do was throw [throw?] the rat in a box, start the timers, and go home for the night. When I arrived back at the lab early the next morning, I would find a fully conditioned rat. [Again, if he knew what he would find...?]
But that was not what looked back at me when I opened the box in the morning. The rat had a grotesque crook in its spine and was shivering uncontrollably. Within a few seconds, it jumped with a start. It was nowhere near the lever. I realized that the rat had not learned to press the lever and had spent the night being shocked every six seconds. When I reached in to rescue it, I found it cold to the touch. I rushed it to the veterinarian two floors down, but it was too late, and the rat died an hour later. I had tortured an animal to death. [pp. 454-455]

The episode is for me even more poignant (if that is possible) because I remember that when my wife and I collected seven-week old "Dark Cream Boy" (whom we renamed Siegfried), we were told that he had been "the runt of the litter." Had he been neglected because of it, perhaps ill-treated? Certain of Siegfried's behavioral characteristics suggest that he might have been.
Pinker admits that as the experiment was being explained to him, "I had already sensed it was wrong."

Even if the procedure had gone perfectly, the rat would have spent twelve hours in constant anxiety, and I had enough experience to know that laboratory procedures don't always go perfectly. My professor was a radical behaviorist, for whom the question "What is it like to be a rat?" was simply incoherent. But I was not, and there was no doubt in my mind that a rat could feel pain. [emphasis mine] The professor wanted me in his lab; I knew that if I refused, nothing bad would happen. But I carried out the procedure anyway, reassured by the ethically spurious but psychologically reassuring principle that it was standard practice. [emphasis mine; p. 455]

Pinker writes that he included the anecdote "to show what was standard practice in the treatment of animals at the time." And he summarizes even worse practices before stating:

I'm relieved to say that just five years later, indifference to the welfare of animals among scientists had become unthinkable, indeed illegal....[emphasis mine]
Any scientist will also confirm that attitudes among scientists themselves have changed. Recent surveys have shown that animal researchers, virtually without exception, believe that laboratory animals feel pain. [emphasis mine] Today a scientist who was indifferent to the welfare of laboratory animals would be treated by his or her peers with contempt.
The change in the treatment of laboratory animals is part of yet another rights revolution: the growing conviction that animals should not be subjected to unjustifiable pain, injury, and death....[emphasis mine; pp. 455-456]

To say that agreements about rights are becoming more enlightened is equivalent to saying that standard practice is becoming more enlightened.

Richard Dawkins was quoted in the Times on September 19 (in the article "A Knack for Bashing Orthodoxy"):

"Consciousness has to be there, hasn’t it?...It’s an evolved, emergent quality of brains. It’s very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too."
(He has embraced the Princeton University philosopher Peter Singer’s Great Ape Project, which would accord legal rights to apes, including a prohibition against torture.)

When I invoked the comparison with human slavery above, I hadn't yet seen the first paragraph of Singer's paper explaining "why the [Great Ape] project":

Aristotle refers to human slaves as "animated property." The phrase exactly describes the current status of nonhuman animals. Human slavery therefore presents an enlightening parallel to this situation. [emphasis mine] We shall explore this parallel in order to single out a past response to human slavery that may suggest a suitable way of responding to present-day animal slavery.

So, what to call rights respecting both humans and other conscience beings? Something, perhaps, that identifies Dawkins's essential, common "emergent quality of brains" The terms consciousness and sentience are obvious possibilities, each of which has a paired term: conscious beings and sentient beings. The latter can also be rendered sentients; there doesn't seem to be such a term for the former.
And Wikipedia's entry on sentience seems to establish a precedent for the use of that term in this context:

...The concept is central to the philosophy of animal rights, because sentience is necessary for the ability to suffer, which entails certain rights. In science fiction, non-human characters described as "sentient" typically have similar abilities, qualities, and rights as human beings.

Sentients rights, therefore, let it be. And can we update Kant accordingly?

Act in such a way that you treat sentients, whether in your own person or in the person of any other sentient, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.

Yes, but only if we reach agreements to do so and write them into law. Notice that these agreements would need to address the eating of animals.
_______________
I might well have mentioned Sam Harris along with Pinker, Dawkins, and Singer. I quoted him on animal rights last April.

Motomynd unmasked (mostly)

2012-01-05T08:51:00.004-05:00

When I first published Motomynd, I identified him as a "mystery friend." Since then, by dint of diligent detection, I've learned a few things:
By googling back in November, I came across a website named "Motomynd" (and I actually announced the find that month).
Then, just this morning, I happened to be fooling around with the Contacts in my new cell phone, and I noticed that the phone number I'd put there for Paul's Eclectic World (one of the Daniel Boone Traders in Hillsborough) is the number given on the Motomynd site (919-370-0413).

My wife and I had visited Paul's Eclectic World a month or so ago, and I even bought some wonderful decorative stones made in Africa—tiny rounds that could serve as coasters if only they were wider and absorbent. The proprietor, who said he was the very Paul, gave me a discount. I had mentioned my blog to him, so did he recognize me as Moristotle, but coyly decline to acknowledge that he was Motomynd? Mystery Man indeed—with an interesting sense of humor. (Or is he perhaps some sort of borderline recluse? That's yet another mystery....)

Having discovered that connection, and with Sherlock Holmes juices now flowing, I did some googling this morning and found the same telephone number for a photographer's website, "Photo Active Inc," and an obviously related website called "Model Mayhem."
I say obviously. The proprietor of Model Mahem identifies himself at the top as "Photo Active Inc," which is indicated as doing business in North Carolina, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. The lead paragraph cinches it:

Thank you for stopping by. I am a career editorial/event photographer and writer with credits in more than 400 publications around the world. In 2012 I am launching a motorcycle website [emphasis mine] devoted to touring and road-course racing, and am looking for models—male and female—who actually ride or who are at least comfortable handling a bike. I am also expanding my fashion niche in lifestyle, fitness fashion and swimwear photography.

  No recluse here, so scratch that conjecture. But "interesting sense of humor" is still in the running.
  Elementary, Watson?

But who is this "editorial/event photographer" (and what is an "editorial photographer")? His first name, we will assume, is Paul. But what is his last name? Judging from what he has written so far (on Moristotle and on his presumably own websites), I am unlikely to be successful if I return to Paul's Eclectic World with the intention of beating it out of him. I'd be more likely to have my ass handed back to me.
But maybe not. He was, after all, willing to donate the biker photo when I called to ask him for one this morning. (He's very prompt; add that to the mix of evidence.)
  And whoever answered the phone did sound like Paul of Eclectic World....

Oz man: thus*

2012-01-02T09:18:00.002-05:00

We planted two new Osmanthus bushes recently along the southeastern side of our garage, and they are delightful in their evergreen leaves and subtly fragrant blossoms.

Osmanthus

_______________
* Mnemonic device: Frank Morgan (1890-1949) was the cinematic Oz Man. He played the title role in the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz.

Innocent bystander

2011-12-31T11:47:00.005-05:00

Sitting still yesterday for the woodpecker to return (he didn't), I noticed a number of much smaller birds among the tangles of branches, including this lovely House Finch:

The focus isn't perfect. The range is quite shallow with the fieldscope, and I'm wondering whether it's better to set the focus a bit on the far side or a bit on the near side? I plan to test this on my next outing; a bird won't even need to be in view. I could even tack up an optometrist's chart a hundred feet away.

Or just focus on a detail of a tree? Here's a photograph of the woodpecker's suspected nest (taken with a Nikon D60, using its 55-200 mm lens):

Note the two big holes in the center of the photo

But perhaps the fieldscope focus was fine and the strong wind blurred the image a bit (relative to shutter speed)? The three photos of the Finch were taken in just a few seconds, and you can see the different positions of the surrounding twigs and tendrils.

Peck on wood

2011-12-30T21:56:00.003-05:00

I used a different strategy today (from my last outing—not reported here—when I moved my setup several times trying without success to get a photograph of the elusive woodpecker, who moved from one spot to another so quickly I couldn't react in time). This time I set up my digiscoping equipment and sat down in an unfolding chair to wait patiently until a woodpecker might show up.

First photo

Second photo, taken seconds later;
the last I saw him for today

My setup consisted of a Nikon ED50 fieldscope, a Nikon camera attachment FSB-U1, and a Nikon Coolpix P300 camera. It was about ninety feet from the tree, and the woodpecker was about fifty feet up.

Thanks to my wife for some identification:

The woodpecker is a juvenile red-headed woodpecker, a threatened species. When I first saw the bird some months ago, I thought it was a juvenile red-head but I couldn't be sure until I saw these photos. A mature red-headed woodpecker doesn't have the black bars among the white feathers, and the head is even redder. Notice how this guy has some black showing in his red head. Check out the photos on this Red-Headed Wookpeckers page for comparison.

Haircut

2011-12-29T16:30:00.003-05:00

For about a year I've had my hair cut by students at the Beyond Measure Barbering Institute in Mebane. Today, my barber took photos before and after the job. (Click each photo to get a closer look.)

Before (Jeff in the mirror)

After

Before

After

Before

After (the hair isn't darker in the middle—just longer;
growing from the depression left by 1996 brain surgery)

Jeff told me that he'll graduate in about a month, already has a job lined up in a friend's shop in Burlington.
We got to discussing the barbering trade, disinfecting the instruments, disposing of blades. I said it was like medical waste; did he know that several hundred years ago, barbers were—
"Surgeons," Jeff said. "Chapter One of the textbook covers the history of barbering. We study anatomy too."
And to think I had thought that the Institute was just about cutting techniques.
"Mr. Long requires that we submit a complete business plan also, before we can graduate. Ready to present to a bank."
I knew that my neighbor (Mr. Long) was a dedicated and competent businessman, but I hadn't known much about his business (other than the practically important part that his students' haircuts are a fine bargain at five dollars).
On the way out of the shop, I asked him if I could borrow a copy of the textbook.
"I'll drop it by your house," he said.

New day's resolution: S-p-R

2011-12-29T09:52:00.009-05:00

Moristotle, you recently said that you'd be more mindful how you spend your time. Are you spending it better?
If you'd asked me that yesterday, I don't think I could have answered coherently—and not sure I can yet. Apparently, the challenge to be more mindful went deeper than I realized. It raises lots of difficult questions.
For example?
Well, first, I got off on questions of how humans in general could make better use of their time. Thinking about "obvious truths" such as that people ought to choose to eat healthier foods (when such choices are available to them) made me realize that I have virtually zero influence over other people's choices. As I said the other day, who's going to enforce them? And on what basis? Maybe it would be "better" overall for some people to eat as unhealthily as they possibly can—so that they'd die sooner and overpopulated Earth could get on with recycling their bodies.
That sort of thinking would be a distraction.
Indeed. My "new ten commandments" (or Christopher Hitchens's or George Carlin's, or anyone else's—except perhaps God's, if some new "God" should come along and bring Scripture up-to-date) will make next to no difference whatsoever.
How could an update from "God" be an exception?
Simply that millions of people believe that commandments that enjoy "God's" endorsement deserve fealty, even when they contradict clearly superior ethical principles.

Ah, so it really comes down to what "better" means? And maybe that comes down to each individual's having to decide for him or herself—at least in a more or less free society, if not in places like North Korea, where the State decides for you, or in an Islamic theocracy, where the local mullah tells you what to do?
Right. Just yesterday did I finally come around to the realization that perhaps the main way I could spend my time better would be to stop thinking (and writing) about how other people could better spend theirs. They're going to spend it how they will. Even principles with "God's" endorsement for how people spend their time won't cut it with someone who won't buy into them.

So, what did you do this morning to spend your time better on a strictly personal level?
I took a book to the restroom after breakfast rather than a Sudoku puzzle. Doing Sudokus is absorbing (and may even have health benefits in terms of "sharpening the brain"), but I'm sure I get more out of serious book reading.
As simple as that?
Yes, quite. Simple might be the operative word. Another distraction I was having besides thinking about how people in general could better spend their time was the fact that some questions run so deep they could overturn my life—like, Why not live somewhere else? Why not find new friends? We need to let some things lie. At any rate, we can't reasonably make huge changes all at once, unless we're in a very dangerous situation and need to extract ourselves from it at once. Someone I know recently fled a man who had been beating her and she thought might be planning to kill her.

Okay. So, what else did you do this morning?
Well, something I've actually been doing for several days—"pencil push-ups" that my neuro-ophthalmologist mentioned again recently for strengthening my eye muscles for reading. (I do thirty reps of following the eraser on a pencil as I move it to and from my eyes.) I'd neglected this exercise of late, but became mindful that perhaps I should be doing them. Also, I stretched before even getting out of bed. I got myself more fully awake before stumbling into the kitchen, if only in order to be more self-aware of what I was doing so that I could do it more efficiently—and maybe even enjoy it more. (I think I did.) And when I was turning on my computer to do my "daily" blog (this is the first one since Sunday), I got out my new cell phone to finish ripping an audiobook to it. And while I was waiting for the computer to be ready to rip, I started updating my contacts...It actually started to seem ridiculous. I was afraid I would forget some of what I wanted to say in this web log.

So, even just "doing the simple things" can get pretty involved?
Indeed! It made me realize that trying to make better use of my time can get me off into yet another distraction—the idea that there's an absolutely best thing to do, right now. That kind of thinking tends to paralyze me, throw me into confusion.
So, have you found something solid now that you can more or less rely on?
I think so. Actually, it's something from more than half a lifetime ago, some advice I heard from a traveling lecturer. Simply to pause before responding to stimuli (of my own choosing) in order to think of alternatives and inject a bit of "free choice" as to what my response will be. Stimulus-pause-Response.
Why did you put air quotes around "free will"?
Are you sure your will is actually free?
Ah, right. I see what you mean...Anyway, may we call the pause-before-responding maxim a "new day's resolution"?
Sure, why not? You know how I dislike holidays.

Bright, warm, cheerful, loving

2011-12-25T19:20:00.003-05:00

Gifts were exchanged, photos were taken, pie was eaten, cheer abounded.

My wife's gift tree

Pecan pie (no chocolate, no bourbon, and no
whipped cream yet)

Vera Bradley tray

Matching Vera Bradley ornament box

Vera Bradley ornament on display

L.L. Bean gift bag (pancake mix & maple syrup)

See's candy trove (didn't include crystal)

One of three Philip Kerr thrillers
(featuring Bernie Gunther)

Backpack for SLR and accessories (including tripod)

Pecan pie with whipped cream

First two of four pieces cut (for two overeating humans)

Gift array (1)

Gift array (2)

Gift array (3)

And Siegfried was ever photogenic.

"Let's go for a walk!"

And a dove, so peaceful and quiet.

Killer instinct

2011-12-24T09:34:00.007-05:00

Yesterday was the morning after. The night before, I had watched Part 2 of the 2008 French film pair, Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Mesrine: Public Enemy #1, starring Vincent Cassel as the "most famous criminal in modern French history" (Wikipedia). Cassel was in last year's Black Swan, opposite Natalie Portman, who, interestingly in the current connection, debuted in the 1994 French film, Leon: The Professional [assassin].
My wife stopped watching about half-way through, a little after I'd almost stopped myself. But even after she went to bed, I remained to watch, to the bitter end. Why did I do that? I "officially" rated Part 1 (which we had watched the night before) F[air] and Part 2 P[oor], but I'm not sure they are that bad (although Part 1 is a better-made film than Part 2, which was shoddily edited and tediously repetitious—my wife later commented that the additional depictions of Mesrine's bank robberies, prison escapes, and kidnappings provided "no new information").

I might have downgraded both ratings because of a recent challenge from a friend, who doesn't find anything positive in movies about such people, who he thinks should be exterminated rather than glorified in film. He said that films like Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather and TV programs like The Sopranos desensitize us toward evil. He hasn't seen either of these, and he wondered why I watched them (The Godfather and its two sequels at least twice each).
I plead a fascination with story, and I'm especially fascinated by a true one.

Bonnie & Clyde in March 1933;
photo found at their hideout

Because of his caution about the corrupting influence of depictions of evil people, I did watch the Mesrine films a good deal more thoughtfully than usual: I more closely watched myself watching. I was glad to find myself clear on the point that Jacques Mesrine—even with all his (or was it Cassel's?) charm and evident intelligence—was no one to imitate (the French likened him and one of his female associates to Clyde Barrow & Bonnie Parker).

I should disclose that I didn't know that Mesrine (pronounced may-reen) was a real person until I looked the movies up on the Internet Movie Database. I think I would have been less inclined to stop watching Part 2 if I already knew that, just to see how it actually (as opposed to fictionally) turned out.
Yes, it was a true story and, as my friend recommended, after Mesrine's several incarcerations in MSPs (maximum security prisons), from all of which he had escaped, the French police decided they had no choice but to exterminate Mesrine. The photo at the top is the final shot of Cassel as Mesrine slumped over thoroughly dead behind the wheel of his car, having been shot by several officers firing down on his windshield with rifles from a truck that had managed to position itself immediately in front of Mesrine at a stop light.
Not knowing beforehand that Mesrine was real sharpens the question: Why was I watching? Such stories are the stuff (when well produced) of strong dramatic cinema (or TV), same as Oedipus Rex, with its patricide and oedipal sex and self-mutilation, was strong dramatic theater to the Athenians, or Macbeth, with all its carnage, to the Elizabethans. I plead a fascination with story, not any glorification or worship of characters portrayed.

Plato (424/423-348/347 BC)

Movies & TV dramas present the irony that even though people usually identify with certain of their characters and enter into the story in their imagination, they usually don't map the world of a story to the reality of their own lives. Or at least I don't. I tend to objectify story worlds and analyze them in terms of plot, theme, dramatic arc, etc., as well as of writing, acting, directing, editing. I watch as an amateur film connoisseur.
My sense of the Mesrine films is that their producers had not set out to glorify or worship the bad guys depicted. But does that matter? Might not people who cut other people up with a chainsaw have gotten the idea from Brian De Palma's 1983 gangster film, Scarface? What if we knew that that's precisely where one such person got the idea? Should Scarface therefore not have been made? In Book X of Plato's Republic, poets are banished in order to protect the populous from indulging base emotions, if vicariously, and transferring them to their own lives, where the emotions can transform them into the characters they saw on stage.

Aristotle (384–322 BC)

Plato's student Aristotle looked at differently. Stories about bad guys permit us to examine and deal with our own "dark side." Aristotle held that achieving catharsis was a healthy reason to go out to the theater; it cleanses your emotions.
But, again, it matters who "your" is. Myself, I don't ordinarily think I need an emotional purging; I don't think The Godfather—and certainly not the Mesrine films—helped me get in touch with my dark side. I know clearly where I stand.
But I suppose some people, who actually lean toward doing evil and being bad guys (whether they're aware of it or not), can be schooled in evil by such portrayals, perhaps even be taught behaviors to emulate. Most people who have seen Scarface (including me) haven't attacked (and will not attack) other people with a chainsaw. Isn't it okay for those people to watch such films? Just not okay for the few people who do get evil ideas (and are likely to act on them)?
So, who's going to enforce who watches what, or what films and TV programs are produced (or what books are written or published)?

Only I myself "enforce" what I will watch. My friend's challenge to me is that I be more mindful whether there's a better way for me to spend my time. A better movie to watch, a better TV program? A better activity altogether than watching—Reading? Going for a long walk? Writing a letter?
My friend was questioning whether it's morally justifiable to watch a movie (and especially a movie about bad guys) because doing so is our habit or our custom or our tradition. I agree that habit/custom/tradition is not a moral justification—for anything. And it's often just the opposite, tradition granting permission to continue to indulge in questionable behavior.

Business plan

2011-12-22T16:20:00.003-05:00

The overbalanced-wheel
perpetual motion machine

Some friends and I were free-wheeling this morning what sort of retirement business we might go into. One of us suggested that we do consulting, in which our core service would be to put clients into a therapeutic trance, during which we would implant suggestions congruent with what we had previously learned of their desires for changing their lives or "succeeding." Our suggestions would generally be of the sort that the next day or the next week a revelation about "what to do" would pop into the client's mind accompanied by a sense of his or her resourcefulness to undertake the revealed action or first step.
"Ram Dass already did something like that," somebody said.
"What? He's patented it? Would we have to buy a license?"
I said I didn't think so, our idea was different. Our marketing plan would feature the guarantee that our service was entirely free if nothing materialized—for whatever reason, even including the client's not having the courage to undertake a revealed action (and of course including the possibility that no action ever got revealed in the first place). We'd get paid only if an action were revealed, the client acted, and the results were beneficial. (We haven't worked out a fee schedule yet.)

It occurred to me later (as something almost always occurs to me when I'm trying to think of something for the day's web log) that the religion business is somewhat similar. People go to church and either are put into a trance or put themselves into a trance and expect good things to happen as a result.
For most people, something good happens frequently enough that they continue to pay the fee of continuing to go to church and contributing to its upkeep.
The main difference with the religion business is that the client doesn't have to do anything but pray. When the thing prayed for happens, prayer is confirmed; when it doesn't, it doesn't count—according to the casuistry that "God answers prayer according to his will, not to that of the person praying." Religion thus perpetuates itself.

The blogging business (or the business of dedicated writing in general) is much more like the trance-induction business plan than religion is. Signing on for the writing business, thinking of yourself as a blogger or a short story writer or a novelist, dedicating yourself to it, is an act of auto-suggestion, which, if you're lucky, results in regular "revelations" of things to write about or ways to approach a piece or even (when you're really lucky and tending to imitate Wolfgang Amadeus) what words to write.
And the result, like the daily web log, is the practitioner's reward, his pay-off. On days when nothing materializes, no pay.
If reward is paid often or regularly enough, a habit is established, revelations establish expectation, expectation provokes revelation. A perpetual motion machine has been set running.
A doing-business-as name may have just popped into my mind.

North Koreans will keep quiet, or else

2011-12-21T17:00:00.003-05:00

The late Kim Jong-il

As you may not have been able to avoid learning, North Korea's "great leader" died Saturday, and his son, "the great successor to the revolution" and "the eminent leader of the military and the people," took over. The king is dead; long live the king, and all that.
According to Monday's New York Times ("Kim Jong-il, North Korean Dictator, Dies," by Choe Sang-Hun and David E. Sanger):

An enormous funeral service is scheduled for Dec. 28 in Pyongyang, according to K.C.N.A., a state news agency. The following day, a separate “national meeting of mourning” will take place, with all North Koreans instructed to pay a three-minute silent tribute to Mr. Kim. [emphasis mine]

If you're wondering why they have to be instructed to be quiet, you might find instruction of your own in the following passage from Christopher Hitchens's 2010 memoir, Hitch-22:

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted and where there is either too much law and order or too little...One of the articles for Graydon Carter [Vanity Fair] that won me the most praise was an essay titled "Visit to a Small Planet," in which I described acquiring another identity and bribing my way into North Korea. Every time I got a tribute to the success of this piece I felt a slight access of shame, because only I could appreciate what a failure it was. I had exerted all my slack literary muscles to evoke the eerie wretchedness and interstellar frigidity of the place, which is an absolutist despotism where the slaves are no longer even fed regularly (and is thus its own version of the worst of all possible worlds), but I knew with a sick certainty that I had absolutely not managed to convey to my readers anything of how it might feel to be a North Korean even for a day. Erich Fromm might perhaps have managed it: in a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved.... [p. 349]

"Visit to a Small Planet" appeared in the January 2001 issue of Vanity Fair. It is not included in Hitchens's final collection of published essays, Arguably, for it had already been collected, in 2004, in his third collection, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays.

Nicholas D. Kristof reports today in The New York Times ("A New Kim. A New Chance?") that when he went to North Korea in 1989, he visited quite a few ordinary North Koreans in their homes:

The most surprising thing I found was The Loudspeaker affixed to a wall in each home. The Loudspeaker is like a radio but without a dial or off switch. In the morning, it awakens the household with propaganda. (In his first golf outing, Comrade Kim Jong-il shoots five holes-in-one!^*) It blares like that all day.
The Loudspeaker underscores that North Korea is not just another dictatorship but, perhaps, the most totalitarian country ever. Stalin and Mao were murderous but low-tech; the Kim family added complex systems of repression.
Anyone disabled is considered an eyesore, for example. So people with disabilities are often expelled from the capital, Pyongyang.
Government propaganda is shameless. During a famine, North Korean news media warned starving citizens against overeating by recounting the cautionary tale of a man who ate his fill, and then exploded.
Once in North Korea, I stopped in a rural area to interview two high school girls at random. They were friendly, if startled. So was I when they started speaking simultaneously and repeating political lines in perfect unison. They could have been robots....

_______________
* December 22. Apparently this refers to an actual announcement. The Christian Science Monitor reports (in "Kim Jong-il: Legendary golfer and mythical powers even in death," by Jean H. Lee) that "The first time he bowled, Kim Jong-il scored a perfect 300, according to North Korean media. Similarly, in his first-ever round of golf, he had five holes-in one for a 38-under-par round."
I googled but couldn't find any photos of Kim Jong-il playing golf (or bowling). But I did discover that someone has been running the "Kim Jong-Il looking at things" Facebook page.

Quote of the day (Paul Krugman)

2011-12-20T13:15:00.000-05:00

Paul Krugman's statement, below, from his December 18 New York Times column, "Will China Break?," is striking because he's an economist and even awarded the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences:

All economic statistics are best seen as a peculiarly boring form of science fiction.

In Memoriam: Hitch

2011-12-19T09:53:00.002-05:00

As I said on Friday, Christopher Hitchens will live for a long time in the memories of his many friends. The first remembrance I read was that of Sam Harris, titled simply "Hitch":

There was simply no one like him...Hitch produced more fine work, read more books, met more interesting people, and won more arguments than most of us could in several centuries. [–The Blog]

And, this morning, reprinted in a local newspaper from The Washington Post was Kathleen Parker's "There was just one Hitch":

To say I was a friend of Hitchens would be an exaggeration, though I did enjoy the pleasure of his company on several occasions. But one needn’t have known a writer to mourn his passing or to feel profound sadness about all the silent days to come. No matter what the topic, I always wanted to know what Hitchens thought about it, and, lucky for the world, he seemed always willing to end the suspense....
Among the many things that made Hitchens unique was his precision of thought and expression. What made him rare were his courage and tenacity. He was fearless in the field and relentless in his defense of the defenseless with that mightiest of swords—his pen. Judging from his final essays, he was also fearless in the face of death. Terrified that he might lose his ability to write and therefore his being? Well, that was something else.

And Ms. Parker referred to yet another remembrance, that in The New Yorker by whom she calls "The Other Christopher" (Christopher Buckley), "Postscript: Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011. It begins thus:

We were friends for more than thirty years, which is a long time but, now that he is gone, seems not nearly long enough. I was rather nervous when I first met him, one night in London in 1977, along with his great friend Martin Amis. I had read his journalism and was already in awe of his brilliance and wit and couldn’t think what on earth I could bring to his table. I don’t know if he sensed the diffidence on my part—no, of course he did; he never missed anything—but he set me instantly at ease, and so began one of the great friendships and benisons of my life. It occurs to me that "benison" is a word I first learned from Christopher, along with so much else.

And, brought to my attention by an email just read from a friend, Robert Scheer's "Christopher Hitchens: Reason in Revolt," on Reader Supported News:

...This was a man unafraid of intellectual challenge and committed to pursuing the heart of the matter.
That was his driving force, a seeker of truth to the end, and a deservedly legendary witness against the hypocrisy of the ever-sanctimonious establishment. What zeal this man had to eviscerate the conceits of the powerful, whether their authority derived from wealth, the state, or a claim to the ear of the divine.

Gentle creatures

2011-12-18T14:24:00.005-05:00

Two doves in a tree

Before I read Andrew D. Bleckman's 2006 book, Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World's Most Revered and Reviled Bird, I would have called the gentle birds doves who frequently visit our back yard (usually ten or twelve at a time). I spotted two of them this morning in the trees behind our house (about seventy-five yards from my lens).

Although a pigeon and a dove are the same bird, the more delicate members of the family are called doves, while the seemingly less graceful members of Columbidae are also called pigeons..."Dove" has come to mean petite and pure. Colloquial usage of the word "pigeon," on the other hand, emphasizes the bird's docile nature and places it in a negative light. "Stool pigeon" is synonymous with stooge, and to be "pigeonholed" is to be arbitrarily stereotyped in a disparaging manner....
Despite this linguistic bias, the unassuming pigeon is truly special. It doesn't live in trees but prefers nesting on rocky ledges (although a window ledge will do just fine)...It breeds enthusiastically in captivity and is naturally gregarious, enjoying the company of its own kind.... [pp. 7-8]

If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men. –St. Francis [ibid., p.i]

Direct focus

2011-12-17T14:45:00.004-05:00

(original—click to enlarge)

Focusing the fieldscope after swinging the camera-mounting platform away 90° afforded better results this morning (than focusing through the camera monitor last Sunday). The trees were about a hundred yards from the setup (Nikon ED50 fieldscope, Nikon camera attachment FSB-U1, and Nikon Coolpix P300 camera).

Limb density lent itself wonderfully to various filtering treatments in Photoshop:

(Filter: colored pencil)

(Filter: water color)

(Filter: cutout)

(Filter: fresco)

(Filter: poster edges)

(Filter: rough pastels)

As did the photo of woodpecker holes:

(original)

(Filter: cutout)

(Filter: dry brush)

(Filter: smudge stick)

I also experimented with a magnification loupe, only to find that it offers me no advantage—especially after laser surgery yesterday on my right eye (the one I have to use with the camera swung away to the right). Sharp, sharp, sharp. (My doctor removed some occluding membrane from behind the lens he inserted two years ago by cataract surgery. The procedure is known to practitioners as "Nd:YAG laser posterior capsulotomy for cataracts.")

Here's the setup:

Wave clouds

2011-12-17T08:14:00.000-05:00

Wave cloud
over Birmingham

Raleigh weather forecaster Mike Maze, who broadcasts on WRAL-TV, showed us some photographs of "wave clouds"^* yesterday evening.
More photos on his Facebook page.
And many more on the Internet at large.
_______________
* A wave cloud is...created by atmospheric internal waves. [Wikipedia]

Christopher Hitchens is dead. Long live Christopher Hitchens*

2011-12-16T22:12:00.001-05:00

Christopher Hitchens died yesterday, the day after I noted that he insisted he was living with cancer, not dying of it. Technically, he died of pneumonia, according to his obituary in The New York Times.
His intellectual throne will not be empty. It will yet awhile be occupied by his published works and memories of him in the minds of his many friends and associates.
_______________

* The King is dead. Long live the King is...a traditional proclamation made following the accession of a new monarch...The phrase arose from the law...that the transfer of sovereignty occurs instantaneously upon the moment of death of the previous monarch...The throne shall never be empty; the country shall never be without a monarch. [Wikipedia]

Christopher Hitchens's new commandments

2011-12-14T09:13:00.005-05:00

Front of dust jacket

Standing at the counter in UNC's undergraduate library last week, waiting to pick up the book I was told was being held for me, I could see across the way the relatively few books there for pick-up. One stood out, its broad spine in bright yellow (as in most libraries, the dust jacket had been removed). Must be four inches wide, I said to myself. I hope that isn't it. I was already carrying the book I'd commuted with that day and I was hoping for this new book to be of normal size.
But the yellow book it was: Christopher Hitchens's most recent collection of essays, Arguably, which was listed in Sunday's New York Times Book Review as one of the five best non-fiction books of 2011. Of the book the Times says:

Our intellectual omnivore's latest collection could be his last (he's dying of esophageal cancer [note: Hitchens has insisted that he's living with it, not dying of it]). The book is almost 800 pages, contains more than 100 essays, and addresses a ridiculously wide range of topics, including Afghanistan, Harry Potter, Thomas Jefferson, waterboarding, Henry VIII, Saul Bellow, and the Ten Commandments, which Hitchens helpfully revises.

"Ridiculously wide range" is admiringly ironic, of course. The first two essays I read were about Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ezra Pound.
The third was about the Ten Commandments. Hitchens begins this essay by trying to identify just which commandments the Ten are, "since the giving of the divine Law by Moses appears in three or four wildly different scriptural versions." [p. 414] Having settled on the "first and most famous set...in Exodus 20," which "ends with Moses himself smashing the supposedly most sacred artifacts known to man," Hitchens proceeds to review each.
For example, Commandment VI, Thou shalt not kill.

We can be fairly sure that the "original intent" is not in any way pacifistic, because immediately after he breaks the original tablets in a fit of rage, Moses summons the Levite faction and says (Exodus 32:27-28):
Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor. And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.
The whole book of Exodus is...littered with other fierce orders to slay people for numberless minor offenses (including violations of the Sabbath) and also includes the sinister, ominous verse "Thou shalt not suffer [permit] [Hitchens's comment] a witch to live," which was taken as a divine instruction by Christians until relatively recently in human history. Some work is obviously needed here: What is a first-degree or third-degree killing and what isn't? Distinguishing killing from murder is not a job easily left to mortals: What are we to do if God himself can't tell the difference? [p. 417]

Hitchens concludes the essay with a quiet statement of some ethical principles for today:

It's difficult to take oneself with sufficient seriousness to begin any sentence with the words "Thou shalt not." But who cannot summon the confidence to say: Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color. Do not ever use people as private property. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature—why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them? Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly. Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife. Turn off that fucking cell phone—you have no idea how unimportant your call is to us. Denounce all jihad-ists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions. Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above. In short: Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form. [pp. 421-422]

Here endeth the reading for today.
And reading that concluding paragraph makes me wish that I could have written my own New Ten Commandments so flowingly well. Not even numbered! And I feel no compunction to count them.

Oh, one more thing. The book isn't four inches thick. It's only two and three-eighths. It must be that bright yellow spine.
What essay shall I read next? Maybe the one in which Hitchens describes being waterboarded for the purpose of journalistic research.

Filthy bird feeder exposed through digiscoping

2011-12-11T17:41:00.006-05:00

Today's bird picture is so much better than previous photos of backyard birds, I can clearly see now that we need to steam-clean the filthy feeder. Probably just replace it.

That photo and the photo below were taken with a Nikon Coolpix P300 mounted to a Nikon ED50 fieldscope. The tree was about seventy-five yards away.
Neither photo is quite optimally sharp¹, because I focused the fieldscope looking at the camera's monitor rather than looking through the fieldscope's eyepiece (after swinging the camera platform away from it). I'll do it properly the next time I go digiscoping.

In the course of becoming more familiar with the P300, I discovered that it can also take panorama shots, either 180- or 360-degree. A fluid-motion video tripod lends itself well to this application. Set the vertical plane to stiff and slowly rotate the camera 180 or 360 degrees². The result is a very wide photo, which displays slowly in the camera monitor with photo height equal to monitor height—displayed from left to right, or right to left, depending on which direction the camera was rotated for the shot.
Another thing I discovered is that it's easy to lay the P300 down someplace and not be able to find it quickly, it's so small.
_______________

A photographer friend (who prefers to use a telephoto lens on his camera) points out how shallow a fieldscope's depth of field is. He thinks I did pretty well getting a focused photo, and suggests that the use of a magnifier loupe (held to the fieldscope's eyepiece) might facilitate the sharpest possible focus.
A vertical panorama shot is also possible, for a tall building or cliff, for example.

Getting in the car is the last thing you should do

2011-12-10T21:15:00.002-05:00

The worst threat of personal violence I have experienced occurred in the eighth grade. It followed my grabbing back my baseball cap from classmate Barry Ballew, who had just lifted it off my head. Barry looked at me in a way that I still believe can be fairly described as malevolent (I can see his eyes yet in memory, after more than fifty-five years). After school, Barry charged at me and I tore off for home. I was clearly faster than Barry and he soon gave up and turned back to school.
That was it. Next day Barry had cooled down, and I never heard any more about it. I've never been mugged, never had my house invaded. I've never been confronted by another driver in road rage, although I witnessed an incident once. After parking at work in California, I was surprised to see another employee who was driving in being followed at high speed by another car. The driver of the second car got out, ran to the employee's car, pulled open the door, dragged the driver out, and punched him a couple of times. I'm glad he then got back into his car and drove off, for I don't know what I would have done.
But what if I were confronted by a mugger, or someone invaded my house while we were home?

What would you do? What would you do if you were accosted in a dark parking lot by someone who said, "Get in the car, and you won’t get hurt"?
Well, getting in the car is the last thing you should do, according to author Sam Harris in his blog article, "The Truth about Violence: 3 Principles of Self-Defense." I highly recommend it to you; it could save your life. An excerpt:

However bad your options may appear in the moment, complying with the demands of a person who is seeking to control your movements is a terrible idea. Yes, there are criminals whose only goal is to steal your property. But anyone who attempts to control you—by moving you to another room, putting you in a car, tying you up—probably intends to kill you (or worse). And you must understand in advance that your natural reaction to this situation—to freeze, to comply with instructions—will be the wrong one.

Precocious shopper overheard

2011-12-09T08:26:00.002-05:00

"And what are you buying," the store clerk said to the three-year-old girl whose mother had just paid cash for a couple of items.
"I'm buying a bracelet," the girl said, flawlessly.
"And how will you be paying for that?"
"My charger count."
The girl's mother laughed. "Now, honey, you know you don't have a 'charger count.'"
"But, Mommie, you know we have your ready-card."

Think fast, or think slowly?

2011-12-08T11:25:00.003-05:00

Daniel Kahneman (b. 1934)

Sometimes we know intuitively exactly the right thing to do.
When a lot rides on our response, and we have time to reflect, we might be advised to examine more closely what our intuitions tell us. The statement below, from psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on decision-making with Amos Tversky (1937-1996), was elicited by the following question from Sam Harris (as reported on Harris's blog): "Much of your work focuses on the limitations of human intuition. Do you have any advice about when people should be especially hesitant to trust their intuitions?"
Daniel Kahneman replied:

[People should be especially hesitant to trust their intuitions] when the stakes are high. We have no reason to expect the quality of intuition to improve with the importance of the problem. Perhaps the contrary: High-stake problems are likely to involve powerful emotions and strong impulses to action. If there is no time to reflect, then intuitively guided action may be better than freezing or paralysis, especially for the experienced decision maker. If there is time to reflect, slowing down is likely to be a good idea. The effort invested in “getting it right” should be commensurate with the importance of the decision.

Failure to heed this advice (or failure to be hesitant without having heard it) led to the folk wisdom, "Act in haste, repent at leisure." There are, of course, a number of variations, to suit the purpose: "Sin in haste, repent at leisure," "Marry in haste, repent at leisure,"¹ even "Regulate in haste, repent at leisure"....
_______________

William Cowper
by Lemuel Francis Abbott
From William Congreve's comedy of manners, The Old Batchelour, 1693:
Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure:
Married in haste, we may repent at leisure.

Hope for sea animals' rights

2011-12-07T10:28:00.001-05:00

Great to see a marine animal featured in this photograph of the latest Miss North Carolina, Sydney Perry, 21, a senior at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, who is reported to be majoring in marine biology. The Wilmington Star News Online reports that Ms. Perry won the Miss NC USA pageant in High Point on November 12 and will compete in the Miss USA pageant next year.

In the universe's own image

2011-12-05T21:15:00.004-05:00

Lynn Margulis,
mother of her co-author,
science writer Dorion Sagan,
the son of Carl Sagan

I've found reading harder and harder of late, not sure why.Visually, it's a bit challenging. I get fidgety trying to sit still. There's so much more I'd rather be doing, even trying to sit still enough at my computer to do my "daily blog."
But what a difference to pick up a book that compels me to read it. Such is Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan's book Microcosmos, which I introduced yesterday. From Chapter 1, here's a paragraph that begins below a simplified table labeled "Geological Time Scale," which names the aeons, eras, periods and epochs from 4,500 millions of years ago (when Planet Earth was formed) to 0 millions of years ago (an interesting way to characterize "now"):

Over the first million years of expansion after the Big Bang, the universe cooled from 100 billion degrees Kelvin, as estimated by physicist Steven Weinberg, to about 3,000 degrees K, the point at which a single electron and proton could join to create hydrogen, the simplest and most abundant element in the universe. Hydrogen coalesced into supernovae—enormous clouds that over billions of years contracted from cosmic to submicrocosmic densities. Under the sheer force of gravity, the cores of the supernnovae became so hot that thermonuclear reactions were fired, creating from hydrogen and various disparate subatomic particles all the heavier elements in the universe that we know today. The richness of hydrogen is in our bodies still—we contain more hydrogen than any other kind—primarily in water. Our bodies of hydrogen mirror a universe of hydrogen. [emphasis mine; pp. 40-41]

That image reminds me of the haunting final paragraph of Lewis Thomas's foreword to Microcosmos, a meditation on language, with which his 1974 book, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, was well supplied:

Perhaps we have had a shared hunch about our real origin longer than we think. It is there like a linguistic fossil, buried in the ancient root from which we take our species' name. The word for earth, at the beginning of the Indoeuropean language thousands of years ago (no one knows for sure how long ago) was dhghem. From this word, meaning simply earth, came our word humus, the handiwork of soil bacteria. Also, to teach us a lesson, humble, human, and humane. There is the outline of a philosophical parable here; some of the details are filled in by this book. [p. 12]

I would enjoy reading The Lives of a Cell again.

Waiting for the real human article

2011-12-04T10:56:00.006-05:00

Lewis Thomas (1913-1993)

"We used to believe," wrote Lewis Thomas in 1986, in the foreword to Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors, by Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) and Dorion Sagan,

that we arrived de novo, set in place by the Management, maybe not yet dressed but ready anyway to name all the animals. Then, after Darwin, we had to face up to the embarrassment of having apes somewhere in the family tree, with chimps as cousins.
..."Man's Place in Nature"...[was to] fix Nature up, improving it so that the world's affairs might move along more agreeably; how to extract more of the earth's energy resources, how to preserve certain areas of wilderness for our pleasure [emphasis mine], how to avoid polluting the waterways, how to control the human population, things of that order. The general sense was that Nature is a piece of property, an inheritance, owned and operated by mankind, a sort of combination park, zoo, and kitchen garden.
This is still the easy way to look at the world...now we seem to be everywhere, running everything, pole to pole, mountain peaks to deep sea trenches, colonizing the moon and eyeing the solar system. The very brains of the earth. The pinnacle of evolution, the most stunning of biological successes, here to stay forever.
But there is another way to look at us, and this book is the guide for that look. In evolutionary terms, we have only just arrived. There may be a younger species than ours, here and there, but none on our scale, surely none so early on in their development. We cannot trace ourselves back more than a few thousand years before losing sight of what we think of as the real human article, language-speaking, song-singing, tool-making, fire-warming, comfortable, war-making mankind. As a species we are juvenile, perhaps just beginning to develop, still learning to be human, an immature child of the species. And vulnerable, error-prone still, at risk of leaving only a thin layer of radioactive fossils. [pp. 10-11]

"The real human article" is, for me, an evocative phrase. I don't think the real article has arrived yet. It would be much more advanced morally, however advanced technologically it thinks it already is. It would have developed social and political contexts in which, more or less universally, individuals subscribed to something like the New Ten Commandments and A Declaration of Animal Rights.
But I fear that the real article will never arrive, given mankind's brief but already evidently disastrous record of success in polluting the planet and of failure to control human population. Mankind seems not to be going to have sufficient time to grow up.
No laughter attends today's reflection.
_______________
Footnote: For additional quotations from Microcosmos, see the eleventh comment on "Don't forget that you are..." (February 24, 2011).

Laughter, too, as well as love and learning

2011-12-03T09:31:00.016-05:00

Story behind photo

As a result of writing yesterday's post—or rather of dislodging its concluding joke ("It's probably because of all the meat they eat")—I have added "laughter" to Moristotle's masthead. Its tag used to read, "An ironic celebration of evolved life, love, and learning on Earth."
Now the masthead says, "An ironic celebration of evolved life, love, laughter, and learning on Earth."

And how do we celebrate laughter?
By more laughing, of course.
Same as we properly celebrate love by loving, life by living, and learning by continuing to learn.
Fortunately, the best learning comes from loving and living, especially when we can laugh about it.
_______________

Footnote: The photo initially published with this post came from a quick google, which netted a group of anonymous, mixed-race, but all young people. To me, at the time, it was a photo of laughing people. Nevertheless, I decided to replace the photo with my favorite one of myself laughing. I guess it could be titled, "Laughing Oldster."

Here's the first photo I considered using. I didn't decide against it because the individual laughing isn't human. He (she?) is higher-animal enough for me. But somehow we can't be entirely sure that that is a laugh, we are that different from chimpanzees.

Lost in the numbers

2011-12-02T14:13:00.008-05:00

About for days ago (maybe it was five), I noticed that one of our coffee cups was missing, and I mentioned it to my wife this morning as I was putting some dishes into the washer after breakfast.
She started to count the cups in that pattern, but I said she needn't bother, I was sure that there were only five in the kitchen now.
She wondered what had happened to the sixth cup, then? Had she set it down some place? She went to look in the spots where she might have done that.
While she was out of the kitchen, I looked again in the refrigerator—sometimes we set a cup in there.
Still not there.
I looked in the free-standing cupboard. Still not there either. (At least, I think I'd already looked there, too—at least once.)
She returned and said she didn't seem to have set it down anywhere. Had I set it down? How about upstairs (in the "loft" above the garage where my computer is), or out in the shed (where I had recently installed some electrical wiring)?
I'd looked in these places already also, and the cup was still in neither place.

Okay, then, she said, if we hadn't set it down someplace, what about Joaquin¹? He's the man who cleans our house once a week. He may be the best, most reliable cleaner my wife has ever engaged, but he has nevertheless broken a number of items, including, she says, all of her little ceramic "California Missions" coaster tiles.
Well, it was possible, of course, that Joaquin had broken it. If so, it would be characteristic of him not to mention it. If it had been broken into smithereens, he might simply have discarded it.
Still, surely not. We didn't want to believe it.

But if not Joaquin, then, what about André? He'd come over to help us get Thanksgiving over with for another year.
Could André have taken it when he left?
No, André could never have done that. Anyway, he left on Friday, and I was pretty sure there had been six cups on Saturday and Sunday. Nevertheless, I went into the guestroom to check whether he might have left it sitting on the nightstand.
No, not there either.
I went back into the kitchen to finish loading the dishwasher. Why not count one more time? I asked myself.
Okay, there are two in the cupboard to the right of the stove. And, in the dishwasher, one, two, three,...four!?

I told my wife the sixth cup had just turned up. "It had just gotten lost temporarily in the numbers," I said.
"You're probably not getting enough Vitamin B-12," she said. "The vegetarian kick...."
I thought, but didn't say it, that I was probably eating enough meat. When André was here, she told me that if I didn't eat any turkey, I couldn't have anything else either. No sweet potatoes, no Brussels sprouts and tomatoes, no.... And no pumpkin pie.
Of course I ate some turkey. Besides, as I've told my readers, I routinely compromise the moral principle of respecting other animals' right to life for the sake of the moral principle of not dishonoring my meal provider by refusing her offerings. (But, as I've also told my readers, I sometimes doubt whether I can honorably justify that compromise. I continue in a quandary over this.)

Things often get lost, or found, in the numbers—the loss or the finding conjured from the whole cloth of imperfect thought.
When I believed in God, I was but finding him in the numbers. He was nowhere to be found in extra-mental reality.
Just as I finally discovered that the cup was only missing in the numbers, so did I finally realize that God was only to be found there too, and not worth such finding.
Most people (a majority of Americans, anyway) are patently more successful in performing that conjuring trick than I was.
It's probably because of all the meat they eat.
______________

Not his real name

Gracing life

2011-11-28T07:00:00.001-05:00

Fully visible from our back windows, gracing our domestic life, Camellias.

(colored pencil)

(cutout)

Motomynd: Is there a case for religion? Unfortunately yes

2011-11-26T07:35:00.001-05:00

[Without prior discussion and before I heard from Ken Marks on the subject, Motomynd submitted the first draft of his own answer whether there's a case for religion.]

Moristotle, in a comment on your article "A Declaration of Animal Rights," you quoted Genesis 1:26 and reported that the King James Bible’s translation and a number of parallel translations all expressed the sense that mankind was to have dominion over the rest of creation. I wonder whether the Hebrew word rada, which is apparently at the core of the original "dominion" concept, was mistranslated by all of them.
In the traditionally accepted translation—and conveniently the most useful to humankind–rada does mean to have dominion or power over all. In modern research there is apparently considerable question as to whether rada was supposed to imply power over or at the heart of.
Not being a trained translator of Hebrew, I can't argue it one way or the other, but I know which translation feels like it makes the most sense. Those with power, adults for example, are supposed to look after those without power, children for example. That much is generally accepted: rampant child abuse, international trafficking of children for sex and alleged pedophilia cover-ups in the Catholic Church and at Penn State non-withstanding. And it has long been the way of many cultures to believe that since they have power they should look after victims in other countries who don’t have power: France helping a fledgling North American democracy win its freedom from England, for example. That way of thinking begat the United Nations, after all, and inspires the United States to spend as much on military might as the rest of the world combined.

So are we to believe that humanity has this duty to look after those who can’t help themselves, yet be supposed to brutally utilize animals, who are the most innocent and absolutely least able to help themselves? And are we to believe this because someone, somewhere, sometime, was allegedly inspired by some mythical being to have a thought, and that thought was at some future time allegedly to be perfectly translated to stone or paper or a slab of wood, then to be retranslated perfectly every time a village was destroyed or a culture was lost for a few hundred years?
What if the person chiseling in the rock was left handed? What if the person doing the translating was dyslexic? Maybe dog really is our co-pilot, instead of just a family pet or a menu item in too many restaurants around the world.
Some people love to accept long-held dogma on faith, but if you actually stop and think about it, how does it feel?

When we try to bring factual, accurate translation to ancient religious texts, are we arguing a point as inconsequential as why don't light sabers cut each other in half in Star Wars battle scenes since they slice and dice everything else? What point is there in conducting a factual investigation of a possible mistranslation of some nearly prehistoric word that may be based in fantasy with as much scientific and historic proof as the tales of King Arthur or the legend of Bigfoot?
If the world suffers a disaster and the only remnants of our time that survive are a VHS player and a Beta version of Star Wars…or Cinderella…think of the mistranslation that could create. Eons from now people could be choosing between the worship of Darth and Luke, or between fairy tale princess and wicked witch. It could be the horrors of "The Inquisition" all over again. Or Disneyworld in August. Either way it will be really bad news.

Take accurate records out of the equation and the facts can quickly get murky. Even with reams of newspaper and magazine print and thousands of hours of broadcast footage clearly stating that no one in Iraq had anything to do with 9/11, ten years later something like 30% of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein was involved in it. Can you even begin to imagine how twisted that tale could be after several thousand years if no one ever wrote it down?
So, to answer the question you posed at the end of the cited comment: Is there a case for religion? Even for a street-level practical thinker such as myself, yes, there is a strong case for religion. Religion must exist so that people of power can shape it to their benefit and use it to help justify and achieve their goals, and so that people of little or no power can use it to rationalize their own way of living rather than making the effort to live better. Without religion how do people stomach the daily mini-atrocities they commit? Can you imagine the chaos if people actually had to take an honest look in the mirror and hold themselves accountable instead of being able to pass the buck on to some mysterious something?

In 1971, Ian Anderson, of the music group Jethro Tull, summed it up nicely in these three paragraphs of album notes preceding the lyrics to the song "Aqualung":

In the beginning Man created God; and in the image of Man created he him.
And Man gave unto God a multitude of names, that he might be Lord of all the earth when it was suited to Man.
And on the seven millionth day Man rested and did lean heavily on his God and saw that it was good.

Do these paragraphs have the backing of any great religious thinker? No. Were they intended for any reason other than figuratively poking a stick in the eye of establishment thinking? Probably not. Did Ian Anderson himself even take them seriously? Maybe not. Do they have at least have more chance of being documented accurately than what some person or some mythical being allegedly said, or allegedly inspired some person to think thousands of years ago? Absolutely.

With a different roll of the dice our feature holiday meal might be the only fresh grasshopper we have found the past two days. Some believe that with another roll of the dice we could be the turkey on the table rather than the person sitting at the table with gleaming carving knife in hand. Yes, there is a case for religion, but less dogma and much more strong, logical and independent thought offers far greater hope for the future of humanity, animals and the world.

Thankful that's over

2011-11-25T10:05:00.001-05:00

Turkeys before slaughtering

Whew, it's over. Thanksgiving done for another year and no need to thank anyone for anything for another 365 days (there'll be a February 29 before the next Thanksgiving Day).
And turkeys can rest easy until perhaps late summer, when the factory turkey farmers start sending them off to be "processed" and frozen for November.

Did you give thanks yesterday that you aren't a turkey? And none of your friends? Unless, of course, you happen to have befriended a turkey. They may not be as intelligent as a dog, but they aren't so dumb you couldn't befriend one, give it a name, love it.
I'm told there's an Irish proverb, “A turkey never voted for an early Christmas.” And never for an early Thanksgiving, you can be sure.

Ken Marks: The case for religion

2011-11-24T15:23:00.007-05:00

[My long-time friend Ken Marks suggested in a comment on "A Declaration of Animal Rights" that "there is indeed a case for religion, and understanding it should precede an effort to make a case against. I'll try to state the case for it if you'll create a new blog entry for that purpose. I think the topic is too significant to be buried as the 20th comment under this entry." Anyone who can write this well and significantly can find a receptive editorial staff here any time.]

Opium den

The case for religion isn't a pitch for making religion a part of our lives; it's an explanation of why religion is an inevitable part of our lives. In other words, religion must exist, at least for the foreseeable future.
Hobbes famously said that life in mankind's early millennia was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." He might have added "painful, "terrifying," and several other ugly qualifiers. By his own century, the conditions of life hadn't improved much. Even today in much of the world, to be alive is to wrestle with various forms of suffering. To make matters worse, we know that pain, aging, and death lie in our path. We are conscious of the fragility of our lives and the inevitability of death. It should be no surprise then that we cry out, at least on an unconscious level, for some kind of relief. Our cry is answered by mythology and the fog of faith. Reason is suspended, hope replaces realism, thought gives way to recited answers, and we are calmed. No wonder Karl Marx called religion "the opium of the people."
If there were some magic way to withhold religion as the existential drug of choice, should we? Well, should surgeons operate without anesthesia? Should people in the throes of hideous pain be asked to just muddle through? I don't think we'd choose to be so cruel. So, will religion keep us in its grip forever? Not necessarily. But two things will have to happen. First, much more progress will have to be made in reducing suffering. As the pain of living subsides, the joy of living will keep religious impulses at bay. Second, we will need to find more thoughtful ways endure and sublimate the suffering we cannot escape.

Declaration of misstep

2011-11-20T20:53:00.002-05:00

Captive Bolt Pistol

Yesterday, when I published "New Declaration of Independence," I cast it as a revision of our Declaration of Independence. Doing that was to stumble out of the chute, like a slaughterhouse animal whose skull had only been grazed by the captive bolt.
I've republished the article with a new title and a preamble explaining something of what seems to have gone wrong.

A Declaration of Animal Rights

2011-11-19T09:23:00.011-05:00

Sunday. Yesterday, when I published the draft below of the opening for a statement of the rights of animals, I stupidly cast it as a revision of the historical document, our Declaration of Independence. I did so thinking wrongly that I would be imitating the way my New Ten Commandments attempted to bring the Mosaic original up-to-date and replace it with a more enlightened set of ethical principles. I thought I'd be imitating the way a rewrite of "Twas the Night before Christmas" would dissolve the saccharine fantasy of Clement Clarke Moore's original lyrics and reveal some of the sordid underbelly of real Christmas as it is "observed" by most Americans.
Neither imitation applies. Yesterday's opening should have been presented simply as inspired by the Declaration's opening assumption of the rights of man. Then go on from there.
I still think, though, that a useful parallel might be developed with the 1776 document's declaration of independence—even if, in the case of animal rights, independence is a more complex concept than political independence from England. For in the case of animal rights, from what would independence be declared? And for whom or what?
It's not simply a question of animals' independence from something (cruel treatment at our hands, for one essential thing), but also of our independence—from a variety of things: our meat-eating tradition, the market power of the meat industry, perhaps even our inner demons (in contrast to the "better angels of our nature")? A serious obstacle to achieving our "independence" from those (and other) things is that most of them would require a giving-up of something most of us now value—even value so highly as to consider necessity.

I've given the article a new, more accurate title. Its original title is shown below. Despite its being misleading, I'm glad I made a start, however halting and tentative my first step.

New Declaration of Independence

A couple of years ago, I wrote an alternative version of the Ten Commandments¹. And the other day, I suggested that, on behalf of animal rights, the poem "Twas the Night before Christmas" needed updating to show that all was not peace upon Earth at that time of the year:

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the slaughterhouse....

My impulse to revise the creeds by which we ought to live has been extending for days to our Declaration of Independence, which declared in writing the "unalienable rights of man."

Other animals, too, I do believe, have rights. And if "the rights of man" existed before they were championed by Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson and codified in the Declaration of Independence, then so, too, perhaps, did those more fundamental rights of animals. Or, if the rights of man didn't really always exist, but came to exist only by the essential act of a people's pretending that they did and proclaiming them in writing, then a similar pretense and proclamation could be made on behalf and for the sake of animals who cannot speak for themselves.
It is from that understanding and in that spirit that I propose a New Declaration of Independence. It might open like this:

When, in the course of animal events, it becomes necessary for the animals with a voice to speak for those that have none, and to assume among the powers of the earth the station to which their place in cultural evolution calls them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to speak for the unspeaking.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all animals are created equal with respect to certain unalienable rights, that among these are life....

The recognition of human rights took time, and so will the recognition of animal rights. Conscience calls upon me to begin speaking for the unspeaking, now rather than later.
_______________

My statement of the New Ten Commandments needs further revision, mainly to reduce their number so as to avoid redundancy. That was the motivation for the late George Carlin's radical reduction of their number to two.

Blessed relief

2011-11-18T07:02:00.003-05:00

On Monday, even though it was only a few minutes to Blowing Rock, I just had to stop along the Blue Ridge Parkway to pee. After scrambling back up from the ditch where I'd relieved myself behind an oak tree, I took this photograph, the view across the road as pacific as I now felt.

I told my wife on the drive over to the mountains that I wanted to learn why Blowing Rock was called that. We wondered whether the main feature of the "blowing rock" might be some musical sound it made. I wondered whether maybe there was a long hole in the rock through which the wind rushed and gained speed according to Bernoulli's Principle or something....
Of course, nowadays you don't have to go to a place to learn that sort of information. You just need to google it:

How the Blowing Rock Got Its Name...
The Blowing Rock is an immense cliff 4,000 feet above sea level, overhanging Johns River Gorge 3,000 feet below. The phenomenon is so called because the rocky walls of the gorge form a flume through which the northwest wind sweeps with such force that it returns light objects cast over the void.
The current of air flowing upward from The Rock prompted the Ripley's "Believe-It-Or-Not" cartoon about "the only place in the world where snow falls upside down." Visible from "The Rock" down the gorge to the southwest are Hawksbill Mountain and Table Rock. To the west are Grandfather Mountain (the highest peak in the Blue Ridge chain) and Mount Mitchell (the highest peak east of the Mississippi).[Found at http://www.theblowingrock.com/name.html]

Note that this is not the answer to the literal question I asked: How did the town of Blowing Rock get its name? But I guess that part is obvious. Anyway, I had to google for the information about the rock, for I didn't learn it in the town.
Hmm, I wonder how many people who visit the town also visit the rock? Maybe I'll google it.

Folded with care

2011-11-15T21:03:00.002-05:00

Inside our hotel room in Blowing Rock yesterday, the folded towel in the bathroom immediately arrested my eye.

Immodest tribute to a modest man

2011-11-13T22:23:00.005-05:00

A photo by Steve published
on Moristotle's forerunning blog
(May 2006)

I'd learned more about my nephew Steve Glossin over the past dozen years than I ever picked up in our "youths." Working with him on several writing projects had us in touch by email often several times a day for several years.
Extraordinarily talented, Steve is one of the most unassuming, modest people I know. When he approached me, in 1999, I think, with fifty pages of manuscript to look at (if I would; Steve would never presume), I didn't know what to expect. I'd never known Steve to write anything (that I can now remember trying to remember).

Well, the story he had started writing, just for fun, commanded my attention with its sure voice and authority. It was set in Iraq and involved U.N. weapons inspections and a messianic imam. I recognized it for the real thing and encouraged Steve to continue. The story became his first novel, Prophecy of the Medallion.
Another book followed in quick succession. Steve knocked out The Grail of Malta while I was editing Prophecy. It wasn't that I'm a slow editor, it was that he's a very fast writer. Set mainly on Malta, it had significant scenes in Germany and Jerusalem as well, and heavily involved the Roman Catholic Church, on whose "watch list" his two main characters are listed.

And Death Mask quickly followed that, incorporating some characters from Prophecy, traveling them half-way around the world to cross swords with as sharply drawn an assassin as I've come across in fiction.
Death Mask may be my favorite. While I was editing it, Steve set to work on a sequel, to be titled Far Stone. For a while, it looked to me as though Steve had found characters and their profession on which to base a series of novels; his two main characters were sort of salvage experts, to borrow a phrase from John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee.

I want you to know the contents of an about the author paragraph we fashioned for submission to prospective publishers:

Before settling down in Bavaria to write, retired U.S. Army Logistics Warrant Officer Steve Glossin served in Vietnam and Germany. A world traveler, Glossin is also a veteran speaker who has engaged many audiences, both military and civilian.

All of Steve's books have been inspired by and set in places he has visited. Few travelers make so good use of their visits to foreign lands.
So far, Far Stone has not been finished. Steve and I had worked hard to try to find a publisher for his books, but with no success in the New York publishing world or in any other publishing world I sent submissions to. He finally got fed up reading published thrillers inferior to his own—which no publishing house was snapping up—and stopped writing.
But electronic publishing was getting big, and it became a why-not no-brainer to try. All three of his finished novels have come out on Kindle and Nook, but Steve has withdrawn them for further work.
I hope he'll pick up Far Stone again. I'd love to read it.

Steve's fictional output also includes ten or so short stories—quite accomplished, too. One or two of them I thought I'd published on Moristotle, but if I did I can't find them. Perhaps Steve published them on one of his blogs.
You can find some of Moristotle's posts that mention Steve here.

Steve's main writing now seems to be for his blog, Visitors, where he follows the exploits of the various scamps who grace his back yard in Germany.
It was with Steve that I started blogging. I'm not sure why we did it—probably out of curiosity—but we experimented for a couple of months, both posting to a blog I set up on Blogspot, which had been suggested to me by an IT friend at work. After we got the hang of it, Steve started his own blog, and our joint blog became...Moristotle. In fact, a few of its first posts (from 2006) were written by Steve. As you'll see if you check them out, he was already an accomplished photographer (see his copious work on Visitors). But photography is another of the many things he does without crowing about them.

Out of the blue, Steve's story about motorcycling in the 1960's has just been published on Motomynd, which I featured on Thursday. What I find distinctive about it is the video that accompanies it, translated from an old 8 mm movie. I know it's an important video, for Motomynd told me: "Between Steve's effort and the bank ad video, I feel the fledgling moto site has two signature videos that do a better job telling people what Motomynd is about than all my words in between." Signature video, dig that. (And check out the bank ad video Motomynd mentions.)

Has Steve ever crowed about anything? Well, maybe one. He might have been crowing (it was many years ago) when he told me that he was a member of MENSA. I was impressed then, and I'm still impressed now.

"Do you know who this is?"

2011-11-13T08:15:00.002-05:00

Have you ever answered the phone and been asked, "Do you know who this is?"
Sometimes you know very well who it is, and it's fun to be asked. Perhaps an old friend, a former lover, a brother or sister or cousin you haven't heard from in years.
Other times, you don't recognize the voice, and you have to let them tell you they are. That's okay, too, depending on who it is.
But sometimes it's pretty clear that not only don't you know who it is, they don't either.

The elderly-sounding woman who called a couple of weeks ago didn't seem to know who she was—or who I was; she seemed to have called a wrong number.
It has continued to haunt me until today that I could not help her. Or maybe it has haunted me more that I didn't try to help her. Maybe I could have asked her questions to help her get her bearings. Maybe I could have....

No gata do it, no haeftu

2011-11-12T12:40:00.012-05:00

Traditional Irish
Turnip Halloween Lantern

While fiddling around with an interesting if trivial idea for today's post—the question how the verb to have to (or have got to) came to be used to mean to be made or required to: Wikipedia's article on modal verbs suggests that have to and have got to developed in Hawaiian Creole English, in which "modality is typically indicated by the use of invariant pre-verbal auxiliaries...gata 'have got to,' haeftu 'have to,' baeta 'had better,' sapostu 'am/is/are supposed to'"—

While I was fiddling around with that, I realized that I hadn't paid enough (or any) critical attention to the reasons my friend gave who gently suggested it was because I had become a grumpy old man that I had dumped on Halloween. He had written to me:

This Halloween, I was reflecting on the fact that it's nice that our most celebrated Holidays (Halloween, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day) all revolve around giving gifts and appreciating the company of others. Rather than abstain, I think it better to put your own twist on the holiday, because God knows, they've been twisted plenty over the millennia for a million different reasons.

I think I gave this a bye because it's so hopeful and positive-seeming, and my friend has two young daughters, on whose behalf he and his wife have to make difficult parental choices.
But do these holidays really revolve around sweetness and light? I've already examined Halloween a bit, as well, actually, as Christmas and Thanksgiving. They don't come off well. Christmas and Thanksgiving, in particular, promote an orgy of animal slaughter.
On Thanksgiving, people go about giving thanks—some of it, admittedly, to the animals they're about to eat, but more of it to their Heavenly Father for "providing" it. Thank you, God, for putting me atop the Great Food Chain of Being. Second only to him.
During Christmas, people pray for peace on Earth (but not in the abattoirs) and love one another, while participating in the culture of violence toward other animals. Clement Clark Moore's poem needs updating:

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the slaughterhouse....

And do you need reminding that the man whose birthday is associated with Christmas was put on Earth by a "loving" God, according to the pagan myth that came to ennoble it¹, in order to be cruelly tortured and executed? But we get to celebrate that on another holiday.

I think that these second thoughts on grumpiness were sparked by a recent interchange with Motomynd. We were talking about the grand-opening video shown on the Crystal Bridges website for its collection of American art. Among the images the video features are two eighteen-wheelers (like the rigs my Bentonville brother-in-law used to drive for WalMart); one sports a photograph of cooked cow on its side, and the other heralds the logo of one of the world's biggest factory animal farms.
Motomynd commented:

Did you notice how the camera lens lingered noticeably on each of the logos on the trucks? It struck me as odd to be watching a video I assumed was in some way going to celebrate the grand opening of a wonderful new art museum, but in reality turned out to be mainly a commercial for WalMart and some of its favored vendors. Given the nature of the video, one has to wonder what is in store for visitors to the museum.

The values embodied in the video clip seem to me to contradict art's essential role in challenging tradition, however useful the WalMart money may have been for the acquisition of Alice Walton's collection and the construction of a museum to show it to a public all too reluctant to be challenged.

I have one of those decorative calendars that comes with a frame in which, month-to-month, you switch to a new placard. The placard for this month features the image of a turkey. I display November with the same spiritual sorrow I feel when I eat "meat" because I'm served it by a host whom I choose not to offend or conflict with.
_______________

Another related myth is cited in a letter Thomas Paine wrote to President Thomas Jefferson on Christmas Day 1802: "I congratulate you on the birthday of the New Sun, now called Christmas-Day, and I make you a present of a thought on Louisiana.²"
–Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography, by Christopher Hitchens, 2006, p. 138
Paine had in the preceding paragraph suggested that Jefferson, to help France out of her financial straits, purchase the Louisiana Territory, which Spain had just ceded to France. Jefferson did so the following year, for four or ten cents an acre, depending on the source.

11/11/11: The same, palindromic day all over the world

2011-11-11T07:44:00.008-05:00

Yes!—at least, it's the same-notated day in North America (month/day/year), Europe (day/month/year), and China (year/month/day). (For a more precise accounting, by country, see Wikipedia.)
I prefer the Chinese convention for file and folder naming, so much better for sorting reliably by date:

[20]10-01-08
[20]10-11-11
[20]10-12-14
[20]11-01-15
[20]11-03-07
[20]11-08-14
[20]11-11-03
[20]11-11-11

In North America, the files would sort this way:

01-08-[20]10
01-15-[20]11
03-07-[20]11
08-14-[20]11
11-03-[20]11
11-11-[20]10
11-11-[20]11
12-14-[20]10

And in Europe, this way:

03-11-[20]11
07-03-[20]11
08-01-[20]10
11-11-[20]10
11-11-[20]11
14-08-[20]11
14-12-[20]10
15-01-[20]11

Our Chinese predecessors understood sorting.

I'm reminded by this superfluge of 11's that Youie's number, when I was manically besotted with magic and deity, that Summer of '89, was 11. Wouldn't today have been the day to go Youie-manic?
No, today is as good a day as any not to fall down that rabbit hole. Retain your rationality, young and old.

November 11, 2011,
11 November 2011,
2011 November 11—

they're all the same day on the planet to which we all belong.

By the way [my wife just reminded me], today is the grand opening of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, located in my Arkansas sister's hometown of Bentonville. WalMart heiress Alice Walton's name is barely mentioned on the museum's website, but she's behind it all, as described in the June 27 New Yorker article, "Alice's Wonderland." 11/11/11! Go, Alice!
_______________
Further reflections on Crystal Bridges

Calling all bikers & philosophers

2011-11-10T10:40:00.002-05:00

Moristotle's sometime guest contributor Motomynd has launched his own website. I gather, from the runaway popularity of Motomynd's two articles here, that his new website will quickly become even more wildly popular than Moristotle (if you'll indulge me in a little irony this morning).
Motomynd.com is said to be "for people who know enough about motorcycles to understand they will never know it all. If you are a beginner we can help you get started safely. If you are an experienced rider we can help you stretch your limits."
I think that motomynd.com is more generally for people who examine their lives and ask the Socratic questions, the Paul Gauguin questions: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? Particularly the last two questions—the first one might not be practical enough for Motomynd. He's a man of the road yet to be traveled.
And, who knows?, maybe the true philosophers are the ones who ask the big questions while they're tearing down the road with the wind in their eyes and the bugs in their teeth. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, you know?
Go ride with Motomynd, but come back from time to time to do some armchair philosophy with Moristotle.

Don't look grumpy

2011-11-09T11:18:00.007-05:00

But, then, how does grumpy look?

Click to enlarge so you can read
some of the book titles

Anyway, I did this self-portrait yesterday, with our new, digiscoping-ready Nikon Coolpix P100 camera. All we need now, to hook it up to the field scope, is a wide eyepiece, something I failed to order with the camera and the adapter.

Actually, the expression we should be seeing in the self-portrait is relief. I started out the day fasting for an upper endoscopy scheduled for about 9:30. And, though only vaguely aware of it at the time, I was in a shitty mood.
But as soon as I was come to again from the procedure (which had involved light sedation to render me sleepy and amnesiac), I felt quite chipper—even before I'd had anything to break my fast, even including the two cups of cranberry-grape juice and two packets of graham crackers I was given a little while later. The sunny feeling made me realize that I had been fairly worried about the procedure, with its potential for finding that I, too, along with Christopher Hitchens, might be expected to die fairly soon of esophageal cancer.
Not anytime soon, at any rate.
So let's admire our relieved look.
_______________

Dwarf Grumpy

Here's how Walt Disney & Co. thought grumpy looked:

Becoming too contrary?

2011-11-06T08:03:00.008-05:00

In Frank Rich's October 27 review of Brian Kellow's new biography (A Life in the Dark) of movie critic Pauline Kael (1919-2001) ("Roaring at the Screen with Pauline Kael"), he refers to Kael's "self-dramatizing contrarianism" and writes that she should have gotten out while the getting was good, before she would "invariably flame out in...self-parody [and] first-person megalomania."
Self-conscious about my own recent possibly excessive contrariness (see, for example, "What was that about Halloween?"), I have to stop to wonder and consider whether I'm in danger of turning into a grumpy old man, as an old friend observes with a wink and a smile. Clues that this might be so include an occasional pervading sense of unease—not entirely relieved by going back, often several times, to try to reduce a post's rough edges—and the wish that I hadn't posted something or shared it to Facebook before I'd done the sanding.
Too late, too late.
For those particular posts, anyway, but hopefully not for myself.

What was that about Halloween?

2011-11-04T12:34:00.017-04:00

On October 31, I proposed that participating in trick-or-treating has no sound basis, and that's why "it's silly." Well, what is the basis of Halloween, and how is it unsound?
The holiday's tap root is pagan (i.e., from pre-Abrahamaic religions), in primitive man's harvest festivals and festivals remembering the dead.
The Abrahamaic (monotheistic) religion Christianity adopted elements of the practice for its evening before All Saints' Day. Halloween is short for "All Hallows' Evening." The verb to hallow means to make or set apart as holy, or to respect or honor greatly, to revere. And a hallower is one who hallows.
Little hallowing happens on Halloween. Anyway, hallowing would better be done continually throughout the year. To relegate reverence to one day out of 365 leads to neglecting the other 365, same as remembering the planet on Earth Day forgets it the rest of the year.

Typical Halloween activities include carving pumpkins and trick-or-treating. I used to participate in them myself, but then I realized that doing so was...silly. And having realized that much, I also realized that to continue to participate would be to disrespect myself. The time had come for some public reflection.

Trick-or-treating, according to Wikipedia, "already existed in Great Britain and Ireland in the form of souling, where children and poor people would sing and say prayers for the dead in return for cakes."
How much less sound can you get? What could a "prayer for the dead" possibly do, seeing as how there is not a single, corroborable instance of a prayer's ever having been answered?
Anyway, if that's the original reason for kids going around in costumes to collect candy (cakes), why aren't they dropping down on their knees to merit the treats?
No, they're not learning anything about reverence; they're just out for some free loot and a bit of fun. To do what everybody does.
For the loot, let them ask their parents to pick up some candy for them at the supermarket, which their parents might do many times a year, rather than wait for the one night when they're permitted, by unthinking custom, to go out and bother their neighbors (some of whom, admittedly, get into the spirit of the thing and don't mind terribly—everyone gives candy to trick-or-treaters, you know?).
As for reverence...good luck. America may be "religious," but its daily practice doesn't seem to have much to do with reverence. And Halloween is its once-a-year big betrayal.
_______________

November 6 misgivings; yes, I've been back to the post above quite a few times...

The land will be here

2011-11-02T08:11:00.005-04:00

UNC Pembroke
[image from the cutting-room floor]

The land will be here yet awhile, after man and his images have passed.

Quick work is the most fun,
the mind humming in Sudoku speediness.
Alive and well, yet awhile.

All that's [not] needed is rhymeyness.

Halloween: the silliest holiday?

2011-10-31T09:03:00.007-04:00

Halloween is perhaps the silliest of our holidays, a good example of following tradition just because it's tradition, like the woman who always cut her turkey in half for Thanksgiving baking.
One day her daughter asked her, "Mom, why do you cut the turkey in half?"
Her mom said, "Hmm, I don't really know, that's just what my mother always did."
So her daughter called her grandmother: "Grandma, why do we cut the turkey in half?
"Lands, dear, I don't know. You'd have to ask my mother."
So her granddaughter wrote to her great grandmother: "Great Gran, why do we cut the turkey in half?"
And her great grandmother replied: "Oh, sweetie, our oven wasn't big enough for the whole bird."

That's my treat for readers today. And you didn't even have to put on a witch's costume and come out in the dark to knock on my door.

November 4: Follow-up on the silliness of Halloween
_______________
Thanks to William B. Ross, MD, for the anecdote, which he told me in about 1973 in order to illustrate that just because something is a tradition doesn't mean there's a sound basis for continuing to observe it. It has continued to instruct and guide, reminding me to look for reasons for doing things rather than to follow unsound habits.

Mystery machine

2011-10-29T16:51:00.007-04:00

Something that doesn't exist can be anything we want. That's why God, for example, is so many different things to people. Everything from a forgiving father to a despot demanding the heads of infidels. He's whatever people want, or think they want, or have been told they want—or their parents wanted.
And our imagined future is another example. We can't be different today from what we are today, but we can imagine that, in the future, when we don't yet (and might never) exist, we can be anything we want.

Something that doesn't exist can be anything we want. What a strange thought that is. And what a play on be!
Nature, in evolving minds, created not just exquisite plumages and coats, symmetrical smiles and curves, but a marvelous, mysterious neuronal machine—a machine that can play with what isn't as well as what is.

Work imagined in progress

2011-10-27T12:05:00.002-04:00

Software for
writing screenplays

Moristotle is contemplating retiring from his retirement job (forty hours a week for the University of North Carolina) in a few months. While he looks forward to being able to spend more time blogging, he wonders whether he might enjoy a larger writing project, such as a novel or a screenplay—assuming that his brain hasn't deteriorated too much to keep in mind all that writing a novel or a screenplay entails.
He has already concluded that if he undertakes a larger project, it'll be a screenplay, simply because he knows less about screen writing and would likely learn more from it than from writing another novel¹.
He had begun, idly, to wonder what he might write about, realizing that it should be something that he cared enough about to become "passionate" over.
This morning, while heating water for coffee and ruminating over the morality of eating animal flesh when a host serves it to him, he thought of a screenplay about someone (or some group) that tries to do more for animal rights than just becoming a vegetarian or vegan (especially if mostly a "philosophical" one)....
_______________

In 1974, in one hundred days, he wrote The Unmaking of the President: A Bicentennial Entertainment. Alas, it never found a publisher.

Sacraments

2011-10-26T14:55:00.003-04:00

Cow being restrained for stunning

An often brilliantly astute reader tells me that Heather Moore's letter (October 23, in Durham's Herald-Sun)¹ is "hysterical propaganda." He contrasts it to Wikipedia's entry on animal slaughter, which includes the following statements in its section about "approved methods" of animal butchering in the United States:

Chemical (carbon dioxide)...The animal is asphyxiated by the use of carbon dioxide gas before being bled.
Mechanical (captive bolt)...A captive bolt stunner is applied to the livestock so as to produce immediate unconsciousness in the animals before they are bled.
Mechanical (gunshot)...The gun is used to render the animal immediately unconscious (and presumably dead) before being bled.
Electrical (stunning or slaughtering with electric current)...The current applied is sufficient to ensure surgical anesthesia throughout the "bleeding" of the animal.
Each of these methods is outlined in detail, and the regulations require that inspectors identify operations which cause undue "excitement and discomfort" of animals.
[and, from the linked-to entry on slaughterhouses] Investigations by animal welfare and animal rights groups have indicated that a proportion of these animals are being skinned or gutted while apparently still alive and conscious [emphasis mine]. There has also been criticism of the methods of transport of the animals, who are driven for hundreds of miles to slaughterhouses in conditions that often result in crush injuries and death en route. Slaughtering animals is opposed by animal rights groups on ethical grounds.

The reader probably saw my April 14 log, "No country for old men," which quoted a passage about animal slaughter from Jonathan Safran Foer's 2009 argument, Eating Animals. The reader may even have read Foer's book. His tolerance for the inhumane treatment of other animals seems nevertheless much greater than mine². Sensitivity to animal suffering is a minority position in this country.
The vast majority of Americans eat their "meat" without much thought, out of habit and from tradition. If they think about what they are eating, some such rationalization occurs to them as, If my parents and their parents ate pig, cow, and chicken, how can it be wrong? And if they're Christians, they may, in worshiping their carnivorous God, even eat and drink the flesh and blood of a man.
_______________

The Herald-Sun ran my letter yesterday, under the title, neither reviewed nor approved by me, "Is there a moral way to eat meat?"
Either that, or he's perhaps two or three times as sensitive as I am, which would explain his apparent tendency to want to minimize what happens in the factory farming and slaughtering of animals (that is, so that he can protect his own feelings through denial).

Courtesy's dilemma

2011-10-23T21:33:00.004-04:00

Alec Baldwin narrates
"Meet Your Meat"

Letters to local editors have been unremarkable lately. But in Durham's Herald-Sun this morning, under a title that "quoted" a yard sign I saw in Mountain View a couple of weeks ago, was a letter from Heather Moore of the PETA Foundation¹.
"PETA" stands for "People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals." I'm not a member of PETA, but I am a person for the ethical treatment of animals.
Or am I?
Ms. Moore's letter asks whether we "want to be truly horrified this Halloween?" Assuming we do, she suggests that we "forget Friday the 13th and watch 'Meet Your Meat'—frightening footage from factory farms and slaughterhouses, chilling places full of panic and bloodshed...."

In writing to commend her, I came to an unexpected, and self-challenging, conclusion:

Thanks to Heather Moore of PETA for reminding us how horribly we human animals treat other animals, many of whom have sufficient intelligence and consciousness to suffer terribly in the process of being fed and slaughtered for our unnecessary culinary pleasure.
Ms. Moore asks whether we "want to be truly horrified this Halloween." The answer, of course, is that we do not. We'll not spend a second longer on this topic than we need to realize that we must change the subject to preserve our peace of mind.
We won't stop eating animals, however beneficial to our health, or however much they suffer. Just don't make us think about it.
Philosophically, I'm not one of the "we" or the "us," but out of courtesy to my host I will eat animal flesh if it's served. Ms. Moore prompts me to reconsider whether that courtesy is morally justified.²

I like it that there's a religious angle to all of this. If God wrote the Bible (and God were ethical), there'd be no animal sacrifice in it, Old or New.
_______________

The full text of Ms. Moore's letter, which may not be available on the web for long:
Want to be truly horrified this Halloween? Then forget Friday the 13th and watch "Meet Your Meat"—frightening footage from factory farms and slaughterhouses, chilling places full of panic and bloodshed. Nearly 10 billion terrified animals are killed in slaughterhouses every year. They bellow in pain and agony and fight for their lives, but they are no match for the knife-wielding killers who string them up, slice their throats, and often dump then in scalding water to soften their skin and remove their hair or feathers. Many are boiled alive or dismembered while they're still conscious.
This eerie scene plays out not just on Halloween, but 365 days a year. See it for yourself at www.PETA.org. But I warn you: It will give you nightmares. The only way to make the horror stop is by switching to a vegan diet.
The Herald-Sun ran my letter on October 25, under the title, neither reviewed nor approved by me, "Is there a moral way to eat meat?"

Political half-gainer

2011-10-20T14:58:00.004-04:00

After ridiculing yet another of the myriad rationalizations he exposes in his 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens states unequivocally on p. 379: "I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind."
The statement could be this blogger's motto, called upon as I am, in my own small, self-respecting way, to expose religious absurditities and theological half-gainers.
During the Republican presidential primary debate in Las Vegas on Tuesday night, Mitt Romney responded to comments about his religion's being a cult. He is reported by The Washington Post ("Mitt Romney takes on Mormon ‘cult’ comments, takes fire from GOP rivals") to have said: "That idea that we should choose people based on their religion is the one that I find to be most troubling."
Rick Perry was one of the rivals present. He's the governor of Texas. Article 1, Section 4 of the Texas state constitution states that

No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments....

Pretty good, eh? You might not have thought that one of Romney's opponents had such a convenient rug for Romney to pull out from under him.
Oh, but wait. The passage from the Texas state constitution specifies a provision:

No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being [emphasis mine]¹.

Hey, come on, Rick, Mitt passes that test.

The trouble here, of course, really is that business about acknowledging the existence of a Supreme Being (a Supreme Being?—aren't we monotheists, here in America?). You do pretty much have to do that to be electable to higher political office anywhere in America, and not just in Texas.
Or at least you have to not deny it—if you can avoid being asked where you stand in the first place. But what are the chances of that in an American political campaign?
We have every reason to doubt that Romney's self-serving response doesn't mean that if he were to be chosen, he would oppose "the idea that we should choose people based on their being religious."
_______________

I didn't find this passage myself. A skeptical reader questioned one of my Christopher Hitchens quotes yesterday and did some fact-checking. Hitchens had said, "[Texas has] laws, I think, that if you don’t believe in Jesus Christ you can’t run for sheriff." My skeptical reader reported that "The Hitchens quote is very close to the truth."

Doesn't need to run for sheriff

2011-10-19T14:44:00.001-04:00

Hitchens, Matthew Chapman,
Richard Dawkins, and Carol Blue
(Hitchens's wife)

While I was attending a mini high school class reunion two weekends ago at Lake Tahoe, Christopher Hitchens was in Houston receiving the Freethinker of the Year Award at the annual convention of the Triple A (the Atheist Alliance of America). In "A Voice, Still Vibrant, Reflects on Mortality," by Charles McGrath, published October 9 in The New York Times, Hitchens is quoted as saying

I’m not sure [atheists] need to be honored. We don’t need positive reinforcement. On the other hand, we do need to stick up for ourselves, especially in a place like Texas, where they have laws, I think, that if you don’t believe in Jesus Christ you can’t run for sheriff.

The word "mortality" in McGrath's title refers to the fact that Hitchens discovered in June 2010 that he had Stage 4 esophageal cancer. About that he wrote in September 2010, "In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist."

It adds up

2011-10-18T10:00:00.004-04:00

Yesterday afternoon I mentioned to a friend who lives down the street that on Saturday, while waiting on our daughter and son-in-law's boat at the Coyote Point Marina (until it was time to go to San Francisco International Airport for our overnight flight home), we watched The Sum of All Fears. It was the first, and we hope it won't be the last, Tom Clancy movie with Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan (and Bridget Moynahan as the supposedly future Mrs. Jack Ryan; she's Police Commissioner Frank Reagan's daughter Erin in Blue Bloods).
I got excited when my friend said there was a sequel.
"Have you seen it yet?" I asked eagerly. "What's its title?"
"Haven't seen it, but it's called 'The Fear of All Sums.' For people with a math phobia.
Zing! My witty friend had me again, for the what-teenth time I'm unable to say.

Nary a one

2011-10-17T13:49:00.001-04:00

Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

After recovering sufficiently from a ten-day vacation [on which I took along a copy of Christopher Hitchens's 2006 book, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography (Books That Changed the World)], I checked all of the editions of the Durham Herald-Sun that a neighbor had piled on our dining table, to see whether there were any more letters to respond to on the subject of the Bible's having been written by God.
Nary a one!
I think I detect some disappointment in myself that there wasn't one, but I'm mostly elated.

This way, I can imagine that Gordon Hansen & Co. have all gone back and re-read their Bibles with newly opened eyes and been able to discover for themselves what Thomas Paine could have told them:

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel. [–The Age of Reason]
The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of willful alteration, are of themselves evidences that the human language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God. [ibid]
What is it the New Testament teaches us? To believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married; and the belief of this debauchery is called faith. [ibid]

Paine wrote that "The Bible...has been read more, and examined less, than any [other] book that ever existed" [as quoted by Joseph Lewis in Inspiration and Wisdom from the Writings of Thomas Paine].

Hmm, if there had been another letter to respond to, I'm sure I could have found a way to quote Paine.

Hopeless in Afghanistan

2011-10-15T10:20:00.000-04:00

A very close acquaintance linked me to an editorial by Al Neuharth in Friday's USA Today ("Dollars and sense of 10 Afghan years") because he knows some of my thoughts on our adventure in Afghanistan and Neuharth seems to have expressed them for me. I agree. For example, Neuharth posits

the hopelessness of trying nation-building in Afghanistan. Three countries have tried, with these results:
The British tried it three times — from 1839-42, 1878-80 and in 1919. They failed each time and lost 28,000 troops.
Russia (then USSR) tried it for 10 years (1979-89) and failed, losing 14,000 troops.
Our 10-year misadventure in Afghanistan has taken the lives of 1,795 of our military men and women.
In addition to the sad loss of lives, Afghanistan has cost us more than $443 billion.

My acquaintance was dejected from having recently heard that his wife's niece's husband's second son is eagerly about to head for Afghanistan as a U.S. Marine. "That misplaced eagerness just broke my heart."

Oxnard idyl

2011-10-15T10:03:00.000-04:00

A very close acquaintance sent this photo to me the day before yesterday, from the Channel Islands Harbor marina (in Oxnard, California). He was staying with his wife at the Hampton Inn there.

Lake Tahoe idyl

2011-10-09T16:58:00.001-04:00

Click to enlarge

A very close acquaintance sent this photo to me this afternoon, from Lake Tahoe Keys. The geese were on his back lawn when he returned from a bit of boating on the lake with three of his guests.

Splitting the difference

2011-10-08T11:22:00.003-04:00

My wife and I are splitting up for a couple of days, and I was taking her luggage to her car.
"Don't mix up mine and yours," she said.
"If I did," I said, "for a couple of days we could cross-dress."

A mouthful of pain

2011-10-07T20:23:00.000-04:00

Click to enlarge

A very close acquaintance sent this photo to me this morning, from Mountain View, California, where he spotted it in a yard on Middlefield Road alongside California Hwy 85.
MeetYourMeat.org, whose subtitle is "The Website the Meat Industry Doesn't Want You to See," features a video statement by Paul McCartney. I wrote about this sort of thing on April 14: "No country for old men."

Nailed it (and no damn fooling)

2011-10-05T09:33:00.002-04:00

The Letters editor of the Durham Herald-Sun telephoned me last night. She was going to run my letter in the morning.
"You printed it this morning," I said.
"No, tomorrow's will be your 'abominable things' letter."
"I submitted that on Friday, right after reading Gordon Hansen's letter."
"Oh?" she said. "I just received it this morning. Hmm, I'm going to have to check what else might not be being sent on to me....
"You're right about religious rants," she said. "They do generate some interest. When letters have been kind of boring and one like that comes in, I'm glad to run it. And letters like yours, they're welcome anytime. Thank you for submitting them."

So, the game wasn't cancelled after all, although whatever happened that she didn't receive my letter immediately was a sort of rain delay.
And it appears that I hadn't needed to soften my "Constitution seems to guarantee the right of The People to believe any damn fool thing they want" in Friday's letter to "Constitution seems to guarantee the right of The People to believe anything they want" in the one she printed yesterday.
Good on you, Ms. Betsy O'Donovan!

Did you see my letter?" I asked my wife from the kitchen.
"You nailed it," she said.
_______________
Today's letter on the web

A former Baptist, that is

2011-10-04T09:01:00.002-04:00

A fitting objet trouvé to accompany my letter in today's Durham Herald-Sun¹ sort of reached up this morning from p. 376 of Christopher Hitchens's 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, and tapped me on the shoulder. I found the objet in the chapter, "The Jewish Question," in which Hitchens explains how he discovered that he was a Jew and reports on his extensive investigations into his Semitic roots:

As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions [I think these are the writings from which Mr. Gordon Hansen likes to select those that support his prejudices against gays and women], we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam....²

As ever and always, Christopher Hitchens, thank you, thank you for your mind and your heart.
_______________

The rest of the paragraph:
Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for "mind" or "intellect," and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over "exile" or "return." It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the "messianic" Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.
Today's letter on the web

A Baptist weighs in

2011-10-03T10:34:00.001-04:00

Well, they haven't printed my letter in reply to Gordon Hansen, but they printed Larry Bumgardner's this morning, and that gives me an opportunity to try again:

Judging by Mr. Bumgardner's letter this morning ("Southern Baptists will apologize again"), my having been a Baptist^* confers on me, too, some authority to enter this conversation.
Mr. Bumgardner writes: "Hanson [sic; “Hansen” according to the Sept. 30 edition] used scripture to justify hatred toward gays and a refusal to allow women to be pastors. If he were so disposed, he could use scripture to justify slavery…polygamy…stoning adulterous women…on and on."
Quite right; the Bible is used to justify many incompatible things. What is one to conclude from this? God did NOT write the Bible; it is NOT His inspired word. Or, the Bible is no more inspired of God than, say, the Merriam-Webster dictionary. I can pick a word at random from the dictionary (or from any book whose language I can read) and "get an idea" that might (or might not) be helpful to me in solving a problem, being cheered up, making the right decision, or whatever I'm looking for. That's the nature of inspiration, the only inspiration we know.
The First Amendment of our Constitution seems to guarantee the right of The People to believe anything they want, including that God wrote the Bible. That doesn't make it so—not when it flies in the face of facts and logic.
If having been a Baptist qualifies me to say that, I suspect that Mr. Hansen would say that my use of logic disqualifies me.
I’m not sure about Mr. Bumgardner. He too seems to be lapsed.

* Yes, I was a "First Baptist" for two or three years in high school, roughly fifty to fifty-five years ago. As well as I can remember, the church in the photo above—from somewhere on the Internet—could be the very one I attended (in Tulare, California).
_______________
In case the Herald's letters page should not be available for long), I include Mr. Bumgardner's letter here:

Southern Baptists will apologize again
I’m happy that Gordon Hanson wrote his letter (Sept. 30) objecting to my comments about Southern Baptist behavior. His letter speaks perfectly to the mindset that his children or grandchildren will one day be ashamed of.
I am particularly qualified to speak of Southern Baptists since I was raised in that tradition and, up until about 15 years ago, was affiliated with them. Their decision to break from a longtime theological position referred to as the “priesthood of the believer” and switch to a top-down authoritarian rule demanding a belief in biblical inerrancy has decimated Southern Baptist ranks. Membership and baptisms continue to fall. I suspect their apology for slavery was motivated by their desire to pick up membership from similarly disposed black churches.
Hanson used scripture to justify hatred toward gays and a refusal to allow women to be pastors. If he were so disposed, he could use scripture to justify slavery as his church years ago certainly did. He could justify polygamy, if he were so disposed. He could justify stoning adulterous women. The list goes on and on.
The Bible Belt states have the highest incidence of divorce of any states in the union. The most liberal state in the union, Massachusetts, has the lowest divorce rate. What is it those folks are trying to tell us about living a moral life? It sure isn’t by setting an example. Sooner or later, an apology or serious regret will be forthcoming. It’s just a matter of time.
–Larry Bumgardner, Durham

Water Hyacinths by light

2011-10-02T14:05:00.000-04:00

For a little night music, on September 19, I offered an early night-time photo of my wife's Water Hyacinths. Ken responded (on Facebook), "I'd like to see a daytime picture." So, thank Ken for two photos of recent blossoms (taken on September 29, no later than 6:40 p.m. Eastern). I trust that you can spot the almost-originals—they weren't filtered, but they were brightened up just a bit and given more contrast.

Must avoid the sports-dejection syndrome

2011-10-01T07:30:00.006-04:00

Before I went to sleep last night, and before I arose this morning, I was excited with the anticipated excitement of reading my letter in Durham's Herald-Sun this morning.
I stooped nimbly to gather the newspapers off the driveway and slid off their plastic sheaths on the way back into the dining room, where I separated the main section of the Herald and opened to the middle.
But, but...no sign of my letter.
Damn, what a disappointment.
It reminded me the disappointment felt by sports fans who go to one of "their" team's games (or watch in on TV), only to suffer a loss. Had I become a letter-to-the-editor fanatic? I really need to retrace my steps and not become that.

...Maybe they'll print my letter tomorrow!

Abominable subjects

2011-09-30T07:21:00.003-04:00

Leviticus, of the Hebrew Bible

I've had enough of tsk-tsking at our local newspapers' printing religious diatribes in their Letters column. I've decided to just enjoy them for their humor. Upon reading the letter printed by Durham, North Carolina's Herald-Sun this morning under the title, "Regarding several abominable subjects," I wrote to thank the editor:

Dear Editor, thanks for continuing to print religious rants like that this morning of Gordon Hansen ("Regarding several abominable subjects"), for they are hugely entertaining, what with their statements like "God was very specific when he wrote Leviticus 18:22" and "If we read further, verses 24-26, we read that God will hold America responsible for the abominations committed here"—as though the ancient Israelite who wrote the verses (or the scribes who came along later and either intentionally or by mistake altered the original wording) had foreknowledge of nations formed millennia later! As I said, very amusing and for that reason much appreciated by adult readers on the lookout for irony.
I can understand your desire to entertain your readers, but it seems to me that from an ethical point of view you maybe ought to let Mr. Hansen & Co. know that you're using them. While the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution seems to guarantee the right of The People to believe any damn fool thing they want, it seems only fair to Mr. Hansen & Co. to let them know that that's not the main reason you publish their diverting opinions.

_______________

In case the Herald's letters page should not be available for long (for as long as I hope Moristotle will be available, anyway), I include Mr. Hansen's epistle here for posterity:

Regarding several abominable subjects
In the Sept. 28 Letters to the Editor, I read the letter by Larry Bumgardner of Durham. His statement was, “sooner or later Southern Baptists will apologize for their view on homosexuals, and their refusal to accept female ministers, just as they apologized for slavery over 100 years too late.”
The question I would like answered according to God’s Word, the Bible, and not by liberal judges that for the most part deny the very existence of God, is this: Since God was very specific when he wrote Leviticus 18:22—“Thou shalt not lie with a male, as one lies with a female; it is an abomination” (NASB), which seems pretty clear to me—do we disregard what God has written or do we take the politically correct position to keep the liberals and that ilk happy?
If we read further, verses 24-26, we read that God will hold America responsible for the abominations committed here.
Also, one should read about Sodom and Gomorrah, when those cities became so immoral. God did not apologize and did not excuse their lifestyle, and neither should Southern Baptists who are born again.
The second part of Bumgardner’s article concerns Southern Baptists who refuse to accept female ministers. I assume he would like someone to rewrite 1 Corthinians14:34-35. That to me is clear and concise. It reads: “Let your women keep silent in the church: for it is not permitted unto them to speak: but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law.”
If a woman wants to learn she should ask her husband or a Godly man. “Women speaking” refers to preaching and not conversations.
–Gordon Hansen, Durham

We sort of have to make Mr. Hansen out to be a Vaudeville comedian, don't we? If we took him seriously, we'd be forced to weep rather than laugh.

The party will still be going on

2011-09-29T06:52:00.003-04:00

Christopher Hitchens is believed by many to be terminally ill, to be going to die of his esophageal cancer. He himself said in March, on 60 Minutes (on YouTube while it lasts), that the chance of surviving it is about one in twenty. He said he was trying to live as though he would win at the odds.
Yesterday, in my reading of Hitchens's 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, I discovered that the beginning of his chapter disclosing "Something of Myself" speaks eloquently about living:

About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view...I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life?....
...A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called "meaningless"...Whereas, if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities...[ellipsis his]...but there, there. Enough. [pp. 330-331]

To be "terminally ill," in usual parlance, is to have been diagnosed with a particular illness of which one is expected to die. We are all terminally ill in the sense that we are going to die of something, even if "only old age." But we don't think about that. We tend to think of terminal illness only when we are given a specific diagnosis.
Christopher Hitchens was thinking about it before he got the specific diagnosis. The passage above continues by addressing terminal illness in a more general sense:

The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one to despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. (It's the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall. [p. 331]

I assume that Hitchens's "tap on the shoulder" is purely metaphorical—not literal, like the young supernaturalist's use of the image on the bus yesterday.

"Nothing happens by accident," he said

2011-09-28T08:36:00.004-04:00

"You're a plantiff's lawyer?" I said to the snappily dressed young black man facing me from the port side of the Chapel Hill bus this morning on my way to work. His brown loafers shined, his socks looked expensive, his light-weight sports jacket possibly tweed.
"No," he said, "but it's an honor to have you say so."
"So," I said, "you're not in the UNC Law School?"
"No," he said, "I'm in Health Care."
"You said it would be an honor to be a plantiff's lawyer, though," I said; "could you have missed your calling?"
"It could be," he said. "Nothing happens by accident." And he tapped his shoulder, which I understood to suggest that he believed my remark might have been arranged by his guardian angel.
"Ah," I said, "hmm."
"This conversation might appear in a book someday," he said.
"Shall I tell you my name, then?" I said, "so you can identify whom it was with?"
He reached out his hand and said his first name. It sounded Arabic, or Muslim.
"Morris Dean," I said. "And your name, does it have an apostrophe?"
"My last one does," he said, and said his whole name.
"Are you a retired professor?" he asked.
I smiled. I always love to be asked that question by a young person. "No," I said. "I work up here at UNC General Administration, where President Ross's office is."
"The Spangler Center," he said. "I know it."
"You've been there?"
"No, but I'm at Harvard, and Dick Spangler has an office there."
At my stop outside the Spangler Center, we both rose and shook hands again. I repeated his name.
He repeated mine, too. In case he needed to remember it for his book?
"Good meeting you," he said.
And I bounded off the bus with a little more energy than usual, today's log just handed to me, as though by angelic intervention.