More Americans get their news from TDS than probably should?

Okay. I admit it. I watch The Daily Show.

Apparently that makes me simultaneously cynical and apthethic, and a big part of the problem.

You know something though? I don't get it. They're saying (they being Richard Morin in the Washington Post) that

This is not funny: Jon Stewart and his hit Comedy Central cable show may be poisoning democracy.

Two political scientists found that young people who watch Stewart's faux news program, "The Daily Show," develop cynical views about politics and politicians that could lead them to just say no to voting.

and then tell us that

The results showed that the participants rated both candidates more negatively after watching Stewart's program. Participants also expressed less trust in the electoral system and more cynical views of the news media, according to the researchers' article, in the latest issue of American Politics Research.

I don't know. Maybe I'm just too old - they tested college students after all. But everyone I know personally who watches The Daily Show watches other news as well - though many of them, like me, do shun the American mainstream media in favor of the BBC. We all read papers, too - several of them - plus news web sites. I like to think that we don't "get all our news from The Daily Show", as TDS's old slogan put it. (We vote, too.)

But I will tell you one thing we get from The Daily Show, and its sibling The Colbert Report: real questions on real topics.

(Quite coincidentally [see, I'm not that cynical ;-) ], Stephen Colbert addressed that very topic on Friday's show, skewering the morning news shows for their hard-hitting topics such as "is suntanning addictive?" and celebrity marriages and such. He's the one who asked Lynn Westmoreland to name the 10 Commandments... instead of something about cheese or Brangelina's baby. Why doesn't anyone else ask anything substantive?)

[Note - I pretty much exempt the BBC from that complaint. Their journalists have mastered a trick American media types might want to learn: "Yes, but that doesn't answer my question." This, coupled with a repeat of the question, might not get you any real answers but it does at least show that you're aware of the situation. And if the question was good to begin with, well, you're well on the way to something meaningful.]

We don't just watch TDS & TCR because they're funny - though they are. We watch them because that's where the truth gets told. When Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld says something that flatly contradicts what they've said before, only these shows have the guts to show both film clips. Everyone else just goes along ... For instance,

On June 21, 2004, Jon Stewart showed a video clip of Dick Cheney lying through his teeth about a statement he made in December 2001. When accused of saying that "it was pretty well confirmed that Mohammed Ata met with Saddam's people in April of 2001," Cheney stated emphatically, "I didn't say that." Stewart followed this video taped segment with an older film clip that shows Cheney clearly stating on December 9, 2001, "It is pretty well confirmed that he (Ata) did meet with them (Iraq) last April."

And people are surprised that this sort of thing "breeds cynicism" in viewers?

See, maybe college students are just smart enough to figure out that they're not being told the truth. When they can see actual film footage of Cheney lying - with actual film footage of proof that he's lying - then maybe it's not really cynicism that makes them distrust politicians more than people who haven't seen that.

Maybe it's just plain common sense.

After all, there's no proof that this cyncism, if cynicism it is (let's not forget how Ambrose Bierce defined a cynic: A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be), will make them "just say no" to voting. Perhaps it will drive them into grassroots politics, instead, into the arms of someone like Russ Feingold and Progressive Patriots, or Dean's Fifty States, or just something local, like Ned Lamont taking on Lieberman.

Now, I realize that for many people that's much worse than their "just saying no". Upsetting the status quo can be like that.

But I think it's a bit rich, blaming the one man (indulge my hyperbole) who consistently calls it fairly and tells it the way it is for "poisoning democracy". After all, as Jefferson once said, "whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right."

If you want the people to be well-informed (I'll assume you do, for the sake of the argument), well, then, let's face it. What's the alternative to Jon Stewart?

It would be nice if the mainstream media actually did two things that he does: call a lie a lie, regardless of who tells it; and admit that sometimes there is indeed only one side, that 'balancing' 99.99% of scientists with one or two lone fringe voices isn't balance but rather a lie of its own. But they don't.

In fact, until recently, they didn't even seem to notice the lies, just repeated them blithely and without questioning.

"We know where [the WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." "I never said that." "No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people than the regime of Saddam Hussein and Iraq." "The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want [is to] get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that." "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories." "Our unity, our union, is the serious work of leaders and citizens in every generation. And this is my solemn pledge: I will work to build a single nation of justice and opportunity."

"We have always been at war with Oceania."

So - who's at fault, here? Who's poisoning democracy?

Morin did get one thing absolutely right, though.

It's not funny.

Buy a Hummer and Teach Your Kid to WIN!

WTF is up with these Hummer ads? First there's the Restore Your Manhood after your girlfriend pussy-whips you into buying tofu. Then there's the couple cruising on the beach in their behemoth because they "need" a Hummer, and the woman who drives the empty streets (a reflection of how they feel to her, perhaps, in her heavy metal cocoon - I keep hearing the song from the Simpsons (it's a deer-crushing, squirrel-squshing driving machine!)) never even bothering to look around her.

Now it's the mother whose little boy's place in the line for the slide is taken by an obnoxious little girl - or a little girl with an obnoxious mother. Poor little boy's mother! She's so humiliated that she immediately runs out and buys a Hummer! Yeah! She Gets Her Girl On! That'll teach little Jake how to rule the world. Maybe they can crush the little girl's mother's car at the next play date. Won't that be fun?

Hiding in the Encke Gap - Pan

Saturn's moon Pan is 26 km across (16 miles) - so tiny.

Imagine then how thin the rings are to look like this.

Pan floats among the rings, partly in shadow, tucked into the Encke gap.

What They're Really Saying in Indian River, Delaware

Ophelia Benson, at the wonderful Butterflies and Wheels, has her own take on the whole "Jew Boy in Delaware" mess - and, as usual, it's at a different angle and dead on target.

Definitely read the whole thing, but here's a taste:

She quotes the Amherst Times article:

After the graduation, Mrs. Dobrich asked the Indian River district school board to consider prayers that were more generic and, she said, less exclusionary. As news of her request spread, many local Christians saw it as an effort to limit their free exercise of religion, residents said. Anger spilled on to talk radio, in letters to the editor and at school board meetings attended by hundreds of people carrying signs praising Jesus. “What people here are saying is, ‘Stop interfering with our traditions, stop interfering with our faith and leave our country the way we knew it to be,’ ” said Dan Gaffney, a host at WGMD, a talk radio station in Rehoboth, and a supporter of prayer in the school district.

And then she comments:

No, actually, that's not what people there are saying. What people there are saying is, 'Stop trying to use a public facility that is by law open and free to all citizens in a more constitutional manner and instead put up with using it in an unconstitutional manner that we here, the majority who claim to have been here longer than you the outsiders and Jews have, prefer and want to impose on everyone including you you Jews because these are our traditions and our faith and those are two holy sacred words that stand for two holy sacred things that no outsider Jews are going to interfere with so stop interfering with them or else get out and actually we'd prefer you to get out because we don't like Jews and if they get pushy we call them things like Jew boy.' That's what people there are saying.

And so on ... trenchant and true... and, as she says, these people are scary.

My Nerd Score

Ah, well... But some of those questions had no answer. Friday night? That's SciFi Channel - especially when Dr Who is on!

The Week (or several) in Entertainment

What with one thing and another, it's been three weeks since I did this... But it's back.

DVD: Dr Who! Second season! Brilliant, some of it - most of it. British Queer as Folk (two episodes) - well written and acted. Must see the rest of it.

TV: Some British Open. Stargates SG1 and Atlantis... Vala might grow on me if she's actually grown up.

Read: (a lot, due to long airplane rides and hotel rooms) Quite Ugly One Morning and One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night, by Christopher Brookmyre - David put me on to these and they're brilliant. A bit violent so if you don't like that don't read them, but they're funny and well-plotted and highly recommended. Map of Bones - James Rollins's cashing in on the DaVinci bandwagon, but as good as his earlier ones (she said carefully). The Fourth Bear, Jasper Fforde's second Nursery Crime novel; these aren't as good as the Thursday Next books, but they're funny and tightly plotted. This One and Magic Life - an excellent read. Unnatural Selection, the latest Gideon Oliver - I was relieved not to guess the ending this time, as I have the previous two; Elkins is back on form! And Delectable Mountains, the latest Benni Harper mystery; I still hate Gabe but it's pretty clear he's not going anywhere, and otherwise the books are good.

They're Everywhere

I just came back from two weeks in England.

First week was a course, in a smallish town up in Yorkshire. The second week was a short vacation, visiting a friend in London.

First - yes, it was hot. Okay, it's hotter here, but here we have air-conditioning. Including on the busses and subways. There's not much like riding the Underground home at the end of the work day with people crammed in close together, 95 degrees Fahrenheit, muggy ... and no a/c. Whew.

But I enjoyed the week despite the heat. Did a few museums: the British Museum, of course; the Tate (speaking of no a/c) - love the pre-Raphaelites, and they had a wonderful exhibition of Constables; and a gem of a little place I never heard of before: Sir John Soane's Museum. Sir John was a packrat of the first order - he wandered around all these digs and if he liked it, he picked it up and brought it home, where it rubs shoulders with antiquities and replicas - Apollo Belverdere gazing at a bust of Sir John done a la Roman senator; bits and pieces of marble, like feet and torsos and pediments; painting series like "The Rake's Progress" and "The Election"; and the actual sarcophagous of Seti I. The place is simply jaw-dropping.

I went up to Cambridge (blogged on that already), and also went to Westminster Abbey. I love the inscriptions - Anna says she's going to take a notebook and spend various weekends writing them all down as there's no published collection of them. They're fascinating: all the various euphemisms for "died" (exchanged his earthly for a heavenly dwelling) and the glimpses into the lives. My favorite is the 17th c woman whose tomb extols her virtues to finish by saying how they made her a fit companion for another woman, who was to be buried in Westminster and so the dead woman was buried there to wait for her... And Thomas Willis, who I learned about from Carl Zimmer's brilliant Soul Made Flesh, as well as the authors I never heard of - with the long epitaphs - and the ones I love - with the short ones... Anyway, Westminster is great.

And David showed me the whole second season of Dr Who! Whoooo-hooooo!

But - what I wanted to mention was something completely different. When I said to a woman at work that I was going to London, she was pleased for me - and then said, quite baldly: "But it's all changed now. There are Muslims everywhere now."

I really wasn't sure what to say to her. I kind of lamely said, "That doesn't bother me."

"No," she said, "I mean they're everywhere. All over. It's too bad."

I just kind of stared for a minute, and then said, "That's the great thing about big cities - real cities, you know? All the different people."

I wish I'd said something stronger ... I get flummoxed when people say things like that, people I don't expect it from, I mean.

But you know what? She was - almost - right. There are Muslims all over. And Hindus, and Sikhs, and who knows what else. Women in black burkhas (in this heat - I feel sorry for them, and if it's so cool why are the men in jeans and t-shirts?) and colorful salwar kameezes and everything in between - men in long shirts over loose trousers and more Western dress, and little kids everywhere. Mosques and temples and gudwaras mixed in with the little churches and meeting halls. A mixed crowd of people walking along the streets and on the underground and in the restaurants - and what restaurants! Everything under the sun ... places specializing in south Indian or North Indian or Chinese take-away, and places offering ploughman's lunch next to curry on the menu. Storefronts in a mix of scripts...

So yes, they're everywhere. And it's vibrant, and cosmopolitan.

And perhaps not everyone is happy with it. But that's the way it is in big cities, right? And in many ways, London is the big city.

(ps - Manhattan, I still love you. And San Francisco, too)

Welcome Home ... to - CAMELOT!

Okay - this is too silly not to post.

The cast of the original Star Trek doing Monty Python's "Camelot".

See it to believe it.

Happy Birthday, Alexis

de Tocqueville, that is - born in 1805.

"He went with his best friend, Gustave de Beaumont, and after a brief stop in Newport, they arrived in Manhattan at sunrise May 11, 1831. Over the course of the next nine months, Tocqueville and his friend traveled more than 7,000 miles, using every vehicle then in existence, including steamer, stage-coach, and horse, going as far west as Green Bay, Wisconsin, and as far south as New Orleans. He interviewed everyone he met: workmen, doctors, professors, as well as famous men, such as Daniel Webster, Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence and the richest man in America. At the end of nine months, Tocqueville went back to France, and in less than a year, he had finished his masterpiece, Democracy in America (1835)." [quoted from The Writer's Almanac]

"America demonstrates invincibly one thing that I had doubted up to now: that the middle classes can govern a State. ... Despite their small passions, their incomplete education, their vulgar habits, they can obviously provide a practical sort of intelligence and that turns out to be enough."

(Let's hope that remains true!)

Happy Birthday, Gerard

Born today in 1844 in Stratford, Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of my favorite poets (still, though I don't agree with his philosophy).

Bless you, Robert Bridges, for publishing his work after he died, in 1888, too young and no longer writing...






Winter with the Gulf Stream

The boughs, the boughs are bare enough
But earth has never felt the snow.
Frost-furred our ivies are and rough

With bills of rime the brambles shew.
The hoarse leaves crawl on hissing ground
Because the sighing wind is low.

But if the rain-blasts be unbound
And from dank feathers wring the drops
The clogged brook runs with choking sound

Kneading the mounded mire that stops
His channel under clammy coats
Of foliage fallen in the copse.

A simple passage of weak notes
Is all the winter bird dare try.
The bugle moon by daylight floats

So glassy white about the sky,
So like a berg of hyaline,
And pencilled blue so daintily

I never saw her so divine.
But through black branches, rarely drest
In scarves of silky shot and shine,

The webbed and the watery west
Where yonder crimson fireball sits
Looks laid for feasting and for rest.

I see long reefs of violets
In beryl-covered fens so dim,
A gold-water Pactolus frets

Its brindled wharves and yellow brim,
The waxen colours weep and run,
And slendering to his burning rim

Into the flat blue mist the sun
Drops out and all our day is done.

How Weird Am I? Weird Enough, I Guess...

You Are 50% Weird

Normal enough to know that you're weird... But too damn weird to do anything about it!

How Weird Are You?

A Day in Cambridge

I went up to Cambridge today - 45 minutes or so on the express from London, £17.40 for a round-trip ticket. The train to Cambridge was actually cool! (Unlike the Underground, which has been brutal this week. It may be hotter in the States, but at least the subways and [most] building have a/c!)

I had a blast! Wandered around the city, getting lost only once (it's easy to do, so few of the streets have signs with their names on them) - saw the Wren library (first edition of Principia Mathematica with Newton's own notes for the second edition!) and the Pepys library (the diaries themselves!), and took a punt tour of the Backs.

Lovely city and a lovely day - wind came up and it cooled off, threatening to rain - which it finally did at 1716, just as the train was pulling out. Of course, when I got back to London I learned that it had barely spit a few drops and it was just as hot and nasty as ever - just the 10 minute walk from the station was more exhausting than the whole 7 hours in Cambridge!

Still, I'm enjoying London. The city is vibrant and filled with all sorts of people ... and such wonderful things to look at, too.

Cassini sends us another beauty

Sweet... Mimas passes in front of Dione in this image from Cassini. But photography can be deceptive, especially when the distances and lenses are as long as these. The whole of Saturn lies between these moons, who are a quarter of a million miles apart.

"Dione's night side is dimly lit by reflected light from Saturn. Much of the planet's sunlit side would be visible from the dark terrain seen here on Dione.

Saturn's shadow stretches across the rings at the bottom of the image." [JPL]

Happy Birthday, Maxfield Parrish!

Yes, born today born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1870, Maxfield Parrish - purveyor of dreams.

Happy Birthday, Zelda

My father grew up in Montgomery, and once when he was ill Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald read him a story. She was beautiful and crazy, and her life is a tragic romance...

Carnival of the Godless!

Carnival of the Godless #45 is up! My post 'Logging' is one of the attractions; head over to Beware of the Dogma for the whole carnival.

Happy Birthday, Stephen

Vincent Benet, that is. Born in 1898.

They bred such horses in Virginia then--
Horses that were remembered after death,
And buried not so far from Christian ground
That if their sleeping riders should awake
They could not witch them from the earth again
And ride a printless course along the grass
With the old manage and light ease of hand...

Logging

Agnostic Mom has been posting her deconversion story. It's interesting - very. But she has been distracted from her blogging by other - real-life - concerns, and her last-but-one post mostly aimed her readers at other such stories put up recently on other blogs. I read through several last night (when the hotel's router finally decided to behave itself and let me onto the Net again).

Perhaps not surprisingly, the stories Agnostic Mom pointed us at were all Mormon deconversion stories. Now, despite the occasional Pat Begley cartoon I post, I'm not, and never was, Mormon, and perhaps that's why I find them (the stories) fascinating but not familiar. Or not entirely familiar, at any rate.

I do know a couple of Mormons. They don't talk much about their religion. Oh, they talk a lot about being religious: going to church, Sunday school, classes, teaching, counseling, picnics, activities, etc etc etc. But they don't talk about their religion. Oh, a story here or a comment there, but no doctrine.

This gives these deconversions stories an exotic flavor. Rituals and oaths and complaints about the elders and the Prophet(s) - unfamiliar books of scripture and angels (or are they minor deities, demigods?) - The Book of Abraham - the angel Moroni - it's all very strange and foreign. Some of it I remember from college days when I made the mistake of accepting a copy of the Book of Mormon from a missionary (I was curious, and it's always better to own the book than borrow it, and if you can get it for free... Well, I didn't buy it, but I paid for it. Those guys were harder to shake that the Children of God (granted I didn't get a book from them) or the Hare Krishnas (I did from them... what can I say? I was curious.). The Mormons like to never stopped bothering me. My roommate was ready to commit murder, I fear... I need to extricate myself from this parenthesis. Pretend I did it gracefully.) Some of it, I repeat was a bit familiar, but I don't remember it well. It was a long, long time ago.

I do remember finding it historically implausible. Okay, not just implausible. Fantastic - as in "a fantasy". It was chock full of anachronisms, and the whole plot line seemed very Victorian and wish-fulfilling and somehow inherently unbelievable. The Brigham Young story, now - what I knew of it back then - seemed almost noble: brave, persecuted people fleeing to a promised land. Eerily familiar, too, patterns of history repeating themselves right down to the 'we deserve this place more than the folks already here because we're the Chosen of God' rationale. But as for that, I reminded myself not to judge the actions of the past by the standards of the present. So Brigham Young, then, seemed admirable, if deluded.

Joseph Smith, on the other hand, struck me as a real con artist - the L Ron Hubbard of his day I'd say now (back then, ol' L Ron was just a writer). The whole golden tablets/Egyptian papyrus - miraculous translation story was, frankly, an obvious crock, even without taking into account just how spectacularly bad the 'translation' was. The fact that they were so demonstrably unfactual was just one more proof to me that, just because the early Mormons had suffered and died for their faith didn't make it true. Or worth suffering for, let alone dying for, for that matter.

So I just shrugged and wrote the whole thing off. (Along with Hare Krishnaism, by the way, the Children of God, and the I Ching, and the rest of the early 70s college 'spiritual' search...)

Now, the above isn't meant as an indictment of Mormon history or doctrine, nor as a smug 'har, har, I'm so much cleverer than Agnostic Mom or Equality or the others.' No, my point is a lot simpler, and a lot more personal, and not nearly so flattering.

After all: I still thought of myself as a Christian.

I went to church, I went to Sunday school, I read books, I wrote articles for the church paper, I was even on the Altar Guild for a while... I stayed in the church for another twelve years or so beyond college, and for most of that time I was pretty active.

I kept reading about other religions, too (as well as a lot of other things, including astronomy and cosmology and biology). And there were things I liked about other religions, their stories or some of their attitudes towards God(s) or the world. But no matter how much I might find to like or even admire, I could still see quite clearly the foolishness of actually believing in them as truth (as opposed to accepting that they had some useful moral or lesson to teach, say). Icarus teaches us not to try to do more than our technology is able to support, but no man ever flew on wings of wax and feathers, whether too close to the sun or not, for example. Oh, maybe I wasn't always drawing the lesson they wanted me to draw (all the better, right?) - Bloddeuwedd's 'betrayal' of Llew Llaw Gyffes always spoke more to me of an essential flaw in men (their belief that they make a woman love them by command) than in women (their fickleness): after all, Blodeuwedd was never asked if she wanted to be married to Llew, was she? But even while arguing the philosophical point of the story I never actually believed in a word of it: no boy born of a virgin, incubated in a chest, cursed by his mother, married to and killed by a woman created for him out of flowers by his magician uncle, a woman transformed into an owl to never see the light of day again...

It was just a story, as meaningful and at the same time as ridiculous as any other. As ridiculous as golden tablets buried in the American midwest by the descendants of Jews who had built a glorious but doomed civilization here, tablets translated by a guy using magic stones to hear angelic voices. Just a story, and in fact a more useful one because it didn't pretend to be fact. Just 'true'.

And yet somehow... somehow... a world-wide flood that nobody noticed even when it supposedly wiped out their civilization (Egypt, anyone? China?) - a story that did claim to be fact - made it under my radar into the "useful moral lesson" category. I read Hebrew Iliad and other books that explained quite carefully how the whole construct was put together, and still I didn't draw the parallels. After all, my church had already accepted that most of the early Bible was allegory and parable. We could believe in an old earth and evolution and an expanding universe because Genesis was a teaching story. The prodigal son wasn't fact, nor the wise and foolish servants ... and the same was true of the flood, the tower of Babel... heck, even Moses was probably an amalgam of several religious leaders combined to teach the lesson of God's revelations to the Hebrews.

But I still was supposed to believe in the 'facts' of the Bible. I was supposed to believe in the history of the Old Testament and the acts of Jesus and the Apostles. In the miracles. In the walking on water and healing of lepers and turning water into wine and bringing the dead to life (the centurion's slave and the girl Tabitha)... In the Resurrection.

It became hard - heck, it was hard even in college. But people obliged me with their explanations: the apostles thought he was walking on water; people shared the food they were hoarding; they had some other skin disease; they weren't really dead, just unconscious; the groom's family hadn't in fact used up the good wine and Mary shamed them into it...

The problem with that, though, is that once you start tearing down the miracles, you're left with a big "So what, then?"

And then you start looking at the whole thing. And you start seeing things that can't be explained because they're just impossible. Some are just ridiculous (try adding up the numbers of soldiers the little nation of Israel could muster in, say, Samuel (hint: it'll be over a million fighting men). Some are unbelievably cruel (God moves David to take a census, then kills tens of thousands to throw the results off. WTF?) And some are just evil (kill everyone but the virgin girls and bring them home to rape - or worse, kill everyone, babies included). And slavery's just fine and dandy, and ... well, you know the list. And if you don't, try checking here.

And you find it hard to reconcile the psychopathic Yahweh with Jesus. But Jesus came from Yahweh, to fulfil his law. So they must be reconcilable, are in fact the same god.

And then the Church itself...

Well.

So, eventually I am forced to admit it. If I weren't a Christian, my attitude to those stories would be the same as my attitude towards Mormon stories, or Hindu, or Hare Krishna, or whatever.

I've got the proverbial log in my eye.

Or I did. But now I see clearly.

There was never any one watershed moment, one blinding light, one slap-myself-in-the-head epiphany (if I may use the word, which after all means merely "making clear"). Virtually everything I've seen or read or learned or done for the last twenty years upholds the new way of thinking, but I'm not absolutely sure when that new way arrived. It might well have come sooner if I'd been forced to choose between the facts of the universe and the "revealed inerrant word of god", but as Thomas Aquinas told us, when the facts of God's creation and your interpretation of God's word clash, it'll be your interpretation that's off, not the facts.

So it took a while to happen, and I'm not sure exactly when it did.

I'm just glad it did.

This is long and rambling (it's nearly midnight here in England, regardless of the timestamp). I hope it's meaningful. I'll probably say more some other time.

Pssst! Want some ... Knowledge?

Please, check out this Sinfest strip:

Just Say No to Knowledge

It's so, as they say, totally right on!

Oh, My

Yes, I know it's early days yet - but Oh My! My favorite golfer is only 4 back at the British Open!

Fred-dee! FRED-DEE! FRED-DEE!

Happy Birthday, Francesco!

Born today, Petrarch, who made the sonnet the form of choice for great poets everywhere...


Sonnet 24 To Laura in Death

The eyes, the face, the limbs of heavenly mold,
So long the theme of my impassioned lay,
Charms which so stole me from myself away,
That strange to other men the course I hold;
The crisped locks of pure and lucid gold,
The lightning of the angelic smile, whose ray
To earth could all of paradise convey,
A little dust are now —to feeling cold.
And yet I live—but that I live bewail,
Sunk the loved light that through the tempest led
My shattered bark, bereft of mast and sail:
Hushed be for aye the song that breathed love's fire!
Lost is the theme on which my fancy fed,
And turned to mourning my once tuneful lyre.

W's Hypocrisy

Well, you know what happened.

W finally broke out his veto.

Although an overwhelming majority of Americans is in favor of stem-cell research, Bush vetoed the bill that would allow excess embryos' stem cells to be used in the hunt for the cures for a number of diseases.

This smacks of - no, reeks of political posturing, opportunism, and hypocrisy. It will all the same folks who carry on about other "value-"laden but otherwise empty positions to claim some sort of victory.

But it won't save any lives.

Even if you believe those "tragic" embryos are lives, this won't save them. The bill was specifically targetted to permit the use of embryos that would otherwise be discarded. So this isn't "killing children" to save lives - it's wasting "corpses" - it's the same (even if you believe them to be "children") as donating a dead child's organs, not killing the child.

If W and his cronies really believe their rhetoric there are other bills I expect to see them introduce. Such as banning all fertility treatments that cause these embryos to be produced. Or mandating that each embryo be brought to term - in the womb of some nice Republican right-to-lifer or wife thereof - and then adopted by same. How about everyone who applies to such a program has to bring all the embryos they create to term?

But it's not going to happen. The "tragedy" will go on, and people will continue to spend thousands upon thousands of dollars to perpetuate their very own genes (in an excess of Darwinistic fervor that they'd probably deny) in the face of overpopulation and thousands of children needing homes.

And people with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and juvenile diabetes will continue to suffer.

It's disgusting - and no matter where you stand on the issue, the rank hypocrisy of it should make you gag.

Edited 20 July to add today's Pat Begley cartoon... apropos.

Rhea and Enceladus in Saturnshine

Frigid moons ... I'm telling you, that would be nice right about now. No blogging recently due to travel, and to England's hottest day in 100 years. You would know I'd be here when that happened!

At any rate, here's another unearthly shot (yes, I know, of course it's unearthly, it's Saturn). In this one, "two frigid moons, Rhea and Enceladus, shine in reflected light from Saturn. In such low light and at great distance, Rhea's cratered surface looks deceptively smooth. Light from the distant Sun creates the bright crescent on each moon and scatters off the icy spray above the south pole of Enceladus. " [JPL] (The lighter band across the center is the E ring...)

Carnival of the Liberals 17

Yes! Over at Brainshrub, it's the Carnival of the Liberals!

Two more from Cassini

Cassini delivers again!

I know, I'm obsessed. But honestly ... the pictures are too good not to share.

In this one, the JPL page says,

The unlit side of the rings glows with scattered sunlight as two moons circle giant Saturn. The light reaching Cassini in this view has traveled many paths before being captured.

At left, Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) presents its dark side. Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across), on the far side of the rings, is lit by "Saturnshine," or reflected sunlight coming from the planet. Saturn, in turn, is faintly lit in the south by light reflecting off the rings.

Saturn's shadow darkens the rings, tapering off toward the left side of this view.

And in this,

Saturn's two largest moons meet in the sky in a rare embrace. Smog-enshrouded Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) glows to the left of airless Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across).

I've said it before, and this probably won't be the last time either: What a time to be alive.

Happy Birthday, Rembrandt!

Rembrandt van Rijn, of course. Look at these two self-portraits and marvel at way he captures his own aging self... 1629 and 1669.



And here's what's arguably his best known work, The Night Watch (or The Company of Captain Frans Cocq) painted in 1649.



And this makes me think of the wonderful jacket of one of Terry Pratchett's best novels, Night Watch, which came out in the US with a crappy jacket of two stylized heraldic angels holding a cop's badge ... but with this in the UK:



And it's not the first time, either. (Hogfather leaps to the mind, also Monstrous Regiment...) No wonder I buy these from amazon.co.uk instead of here.

Le 14 juillet

Allons enfants de la patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé !
Contre nous de la tyrannie
L'étendard sanglant est levé ! (bis)
Entendez-vous dans les campagnes,
Mugir ces féroces soldats ?
Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras
Égorger nos fils, nos compagnes !

Aux armes, citoyens !
Formez vos bataillons !
Marchons ! Marchons !
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons !

Happy Birthday, Woody!

Woody Guthrie, born this day in 1912.

He wrote a lot, and he he gave a voice to the unheard.





Pastures Of Plenty

It's a mighty hard row that my poor hands have hoed
My poor feet have traveled a hot dusty road
Out of your Dust Bowl and Westward we rolled
And your deserts were hot and your mountains were cold

I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes
I slept on the ground in the light of the moon
On the edge of the city you'll see us and then
We come with the dust and we go with the wind

California, Arizona, I harvest your crops
Well its North up to Oregon to gather your hops
Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine
To set on your table your light sparkling wine

Green pastures of plenty from dry desert ground
From the Grand Coulee Dam where the waters run down
Every state in the Union us migrants have been
We'll work in this fight and we'll fight till we win

It's always we rambled, that river and I
All along your green valley, I will work till I die
My land I'll defend with my life if it be
Cause my pastures of plenty must always be free

Going on a business trip

Blogging might be somewhat sparse the next couple of weeks ... don't know how much time I'll have.

One more...

I know I just posted four a couple of days ago, but this one's something special. Titan, lit from behind by the sun, and occulted by the rings.

Who knew how astoundingly beautiful and breathtaking this system - this universe - is?

ps - FWIW, Sorry, Canada ... again

Yes, once again Fox decides it's better to run a commercial than the Canadian National Anthem.

OTOH, the wind there in Pittsburgh has got your flag streaming out, while ours hangs limply. If I believed in such things, I might think it was divine redistribution or something...

Restoring one's manhood... WTF?

Have you seen the new ads for the Hummer?
Two guys in the checkout lane at the grocery. Guy one is buying wimpy food - like (gasp!) tofu - stuff you just know his girlfriend/wife makes him buy. He's all embarrassed about it, too, especially since guy two, behind him, is all loaded down with red meat - ribs and steaks and such. It's just awful.

But then, guy one spots a Hummer brochure. He leaves the grocery, goes straight to the dealer, and drives away in a big old honking Hummer.

And the caption splashes across the screen:

Restore your manhood.

Yeah.

Restore your manhood by buying and driving a Hummer.

I'm pretty much speechless.

I mean - can manhood be so easily lost? And so bizarrely restored? Going deeply into debt (okay, a "mere" $30,000 for a bare-bones H3, but more than $55,000 for an H2, and a totally insane $140,000 for the H1 - and yes, I see those damned things on the road) and being a menace on the highway? (I mean - c'mon, the guy was driving in suburbia.) 16 mpg at today's prices? (And they won't even tell us what the milage is for the H2 or H1...)

This "restores your manhood"?

O, wow. I think I'm very sorry for Hummer drivers.

(Of course, it won't last past the next one who takes up four parking spaces, or threatens to run me off the road, or makes it impossible for me to see in traffic... But just now, at this moment? Yeah, poor emasculated guys. I feel sorry for them.)

Vacation...

Well, I'm on vacation. And I got to ride my sister's horse for a while.

I had horses all through college and on into the first seven or so years of being in the army. But not since then - more than two decades. I just don't live where it's practical.

Radar's a good old man, though. Nice gait, patient and willing.

He's a Walker, like the mare I owned in college - but she was a big old roan (17 hands) and he's, as you can see, a pinto. A skewbald, if that's your vernacular. A good horse.

Wish I had one again.

Unearthly beauty: Saturn's Rings and Moons

And more mesmerizing and literally unearthly shots from Cassini! (you may need to click on the images to see all the details... Blogger only has a couple of size choices. Bigger, and they're under the side bar.)

First, sunset on - no, around - Titan, as the light diffuses through its atmosphere. Wow. Just, wow.




Look closely for a glimpse of tiny Janus, far away on the other side of the rings...


Next, this of three icy moons and the rings:

The real jewels of Saturn are arguably its stunning collection of icy moons. Seen here with the unlit side of the rings are Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across at right), Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across at left) and Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across at center) with its fountain-like geysers.

The faint, vertical banding in the image is due to "noise" in the spacecraft electronics. This noise is difficult to remove from an image that has a very wide dynamic range--i.e., a wide range of brightness levels--as in the difference between gleaming Titan and the faint plumes of Enceladus.

Additionally, a reflection of Titan's light within the camera optics is likely responsible for the faint secondary image of Titan's limb to the left of the giant moon. (JPL Cassini-Huygens site)

In this next one, we see two moons, tiny Enceladus and, just under the rings and barely peeking out, slightly bigger Rhea.



As NASA/JPL's page says:

Enceladus blasts its icy spray into space in this unlit-side ring view that also features a tiny sliver of Rhea.

The south polar region of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) peeks out from beneath the rings to the right of Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across).

And then this beauty. Look closely - very closely - and you can just make out little Mimas hiding in the shadows:

To the left of Mimas are several bright features in the faint D ring. The innermost of Saturn's medium-sized icy moons, Mimas, is 397 kilometers (247 miles) across.

Gorgeous!

And check out the moons page at the JPL Cassini-Huygens site for more spectacular shots.

What a time to be alive...

Happy Birthday, Marcel!

Joyeux anniversaire!

Marcel Proust was born this day in 1871. His great novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, which is called both "Remembrance of Things Past" and the more literal "In Search of Lost Time" in English (unlike other novels, which get stuck with one name, no matter how oddly translated), was published in 8 volumes, 3 of which appeared after his death.

The Week in Entertainment

Film: saw The DaVinci Code again (it improves in some ways with a second viewing, but not in all: Vernet's actions make no sense at all in the movie!); Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (what a blast!); The Lake House (I liked it ... we had a good time talking about it afterwards, too - the ramifications and the whys and wherefores. Interesting characters. Lovely movie)

DVD: Everything Is Illuminated (I still like the film better than the book...)

TV: some World Cup, some USGA Women's Open (I hate it when two players I like get locked in a playoff...)

Read: Deed Without a Name; Final Account; began At The Water's Edge

44th Carnival of the Godless

The Carnival has pitched its tents over at Ebonmuse's Daylight Atheism this time around. My post "Liberty Desecrated is there... Go on, take a look. You know you want to.

PTSD - Livin' on Easy Street. ... Not

Over at Respectful of Otters Rivka has a long and detailed post taking apart Canadian conservative columnist Margaret Wente's column in The Globe and Mail viciously attacking veterans with PTSD.

Read it - and be prepared to be angry.

Happy Birthday, Nikola!

It's the birthday (1856) of the man who invented alternating current - and made the modern world possible.






And check out Coturnix's set of posts honoring his compatriot:

• Approaching Tesla's Birthday


• Tesla Links


• Tesla's Personality


• Tesla Quotes 1


• Tesla Quotes 2


• Tesla Quotes 3

And the big daddy post of them all:

• Happy Birthday, Nikola Tesla

What the...

So, today is the birthday of Donald Rumsfeld (and I hope it's a miserable day). In the Writer's Almanac they have this to say:

In 2003, he published Rumsfeld's Rules: Wisdom for the Good Life, a list of guidelines for his colleagues that he'd gathered over the years. It includes advice such as, "It is easier to get into something than to get out of it."

Okay. Setting aside that "It's easier to stay out than get out" is better advice (Mark Twain, of course), why didn't he listen to his own freakin' guidance? Instead he was saying stuff like this:

* Sep. 18, 2002, to Jim Lehrer on PBS's The News Hour: "The military leaders and the combatant commanders and the services and I have all met repeatedly; we have a force sizing construct and a strategy that enables the United States of America to engage in two major theater conflicts near simultaneously to win decisively in one and to occupy the country to swiftly defeat in the other case and hold; and to simultaneously provide for homeland defense and a series of lesser contingencies such as Bosnia or Kosovo."

* Sep. 19, 2002 to the Senate Armed Services Commitee: "There are a number of terrorist states pursuing weapons of mass destruction - Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, just to name a few - but no terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people than the regime of Saddam Hussein and Iraq."

* Nov. 14, 2002, on Infinity CBS Radio: "I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today will last five days, five weeks or five months, but it won't last any longer than that."

* Feb. 7, 2003, to U.S. troops in Aviano, Italy: "It is unknowable how long that conflict will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."

* Mar. 30, 2003, on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos: "Oh, goodness, you know, I've never -- we've never had a timetable. We've always said it could be days, weeks, or months and we don't know. And I don't think you need a timetable. What you really need to know is it's going to end and it's going to end with the Iraqi people liberated and that regime will be gone.

Now, you know I could keep on going, but ... the point is made.

If only he'd have listened to himself.

One-off Dog Blogging

I don't do this regularly and probably won't (since I don't have a dog) but I can't resist sharing this picture of my sister's elderly (and obviously overworked!) Peke ...


Squeeky, taking a hard-earned rest after terrorizing the other dogs.

Happy Birthday, Gustav!

Ah, Gustav Mahler (born this day in Bohemia in 1860)! What horns! What songs! Nine completed numbered symphonies, the song cycles Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and Kindertotenlieder, and the synthesis of symphony and song cycle that is Das Lied von der Erde.

But I have to confess that nowadays, when I hear Mahler, I think of Alma...

Last December 13th, there appeared in the newspapers the juiciest, spiciest, raciest obituary that has ever been my pleasure to read. It was that of a lady name Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel who had, in her lifetime, managed to acquire as lovers practically all of the top creative men in central Europe, and, among these lovers, who were listed in the obituary, by the way, which was what made it so interesting, there were three whom she went so far as to marry.

One of the leading composers of the day: Gustav Mahler, composer of Das Lied von der Erde and other light classics. One of the leading architects: Walter Gropius of the Bauhaus school of design. And one of the leading writers: Franz Werfel, author of the song of Bernadette and other masterpieces. It's people like that who make you realize how little you've accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years. It seemed to me, I'm reading this obituary, that the story of Alma was the stuff of which ballads should be made so here is one.

The loveliest girl in Vienna
Was Alma, the smartest as well.
Once you picked her up on your antenna,
You'd never be free of her spell.

Her lovers were many and varied,
From the day she began her -- beguine.
There were three famous ones whom she married,
And God knows how many between.

Alma, tell us!
All modern women are jealous.
Which of your magical wands
Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz?

The first one she married was Mahler,
Whose buddies all knew him as Gustav.
And each time he saw her he'd holler:
"Ach, that is the fraulein I moost have!"

Their marriage, however, was murder.
He'd scream to the heavens above,
"I'm writing Das Lied von der Erde,
And she only wants to make love!"

Alma, tell us!
All modern women are jealous.
You should have a statue in bronze
For bagging Gustav and Walter and Franz.

While married to Gus, she met Gropius,
And soon she was swinging with Walter.
Gus died, and her tear drops were copious.
She cried all the way to the altar.

But he would work late at the Bauhaus,
And only came home now and then.
She said, "What am I running? A chow house?
It's time to change parters again."

Alma, tell us!
All modern women are jealous.
Though you didn't even use Ponds,
You got Gustav and Walter and Franz.

While married to Walt she'd met Werfel,
And he too was caught in her net.
He married her, but he was carefell,
'Cause Alma was no Bernadette.

And that is the story of Alma,
Who knew how to receive and to give.
The body that reached her embalma'
Was one that had known how to live.

Alma, tell us!
How can they help being jealous?
Ducks always envy the swans
Who get Gustav and Walter,
you never did falter,
With Gustav and Walter and Franz.

lyrics by Tom Lehrer

Happy Birthday, Marc

Marc Chagall born today in 1887 - it was then Russia, now it's Belarus, but he's the world's.

Happy Birthday, Alice

Alice Walker, celebrated author, born today in 1944

The Old Men Used to Sing

The old men used to sing
And lifted a brother
Carefully
Out the door
I used to think they
Were born
Knowing how to
Gently swing
A casket
They shuffled softly
Eyes dry
More awkward
With the flowers
Than with the widow
After they'd put the
Body in
And stood around waiting
In their
Brown suits.

The Uncredible Hallq: Carnival of the Liberals, Independence Day edition

The Uncredible Hallq: Carnival of the Liberals, Independence Day edition : "Okay, so Independence Day was yesterday, but it's close enough. If we can have fireworks on the 2nd of July, we can have a carnival on the 5th."

My post "The thing the symbol stands for" is part of the Carnival. Go on over and read the rest!

Happy Birthday, America

I love this country.

I spent ten years in the Army defending it, and another 23 years (so far) working for the Federal Government.

So I wish us another 236 years as a start, and hope that our vision remains clear and our ideals strong, and that we don't falter in our commitment to what does indeed "make us better".

I leave you with some reading, if you're so inclined. If not, enjoy the party!

The Declaration of Independence	The Constitution of the United States

Leaves of Grass

One's-self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

Of physiology from top to toe I sing,
Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say
the Form complete is worthier far,
The Female equally with the Male I sing.

Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,
Cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing.

(published today in 1855)

Liberty Desecrated

"Where liberty dwells,
there is my country."

-- Benjamin Franklin




Lady Liberty stands in New York Harbor to both welcome the travelers, the visitors and the homeward bound, and to show forth to all the world what we believe in. She's called "Liberty Enlightening the World", and her torch shines forth as a beacon to those arriving, and those still journeying, promising them hope. She's crowned with a diadem of seven spikes, representing the seven oceans of the world, across which her pilgrims travel to reach her, and she carries a plaque with the date July 4, 1776 written on it - the date when our Republic took its first full breath of life. Below her is a pediment with the invitation - nay, the command - "Bring me your tired, your poor..."

Liberty stands, stern and unyielding, the guardian of what we in this country have always held most dear.

But now...

A church in Memphis Tennessee - with the attractive name of World Overcomers Outreach Ministries Church - has turned the Lady into a Jesus freak.

Into a travesty.

She holds, not a torch to light the darkness, but a cross. Her crown is emblazoned with the name Jehovah. She carries the Ten Commandments, and beneath her there they are again.

And she's crying.

Well she might be, poor Liberty, dragooned into the service of a religiosity that no longer knows what it means, that confuses patriotism with religion, and seeks to show that America belongs to Jesus. This evil twin of Liberty doesn't want to welcome, but to dominate. And although Jesus echoed some of her concerns, it's clear that many of his followers don't.

Liberty is much older than Jesus. A statue was erected to her on the Aventine hill during the Second Punic War, which was more than two centuries before he was born.

Christian liberty, so called, is not the same thing. It is, according to Bible studies, called "the glorious liberty of the children of God" (Romans 8:21) but consists of being free from spiritual burdens:

• The law
  Romans 7:6; 8:2
• The curse of the law
  Galatians 3:13
• The fear of death
  Hebrews 2:15
• Sin
  Romans 6:7,18
• Corruption
  Romans 8:21
• Bondage of man
  1 Corinthians 9:19
• Jewish ordinances
  Galatians 4:3; Colossians 2:20

(listing and references from crosswalk.com)

There's only one of those things that deserves the name of 'liberty', and that's freedom from slavery - and the Bible's pretty clear that slavery exists and is a good thing, and for that matter, though in Corinthians Paul says "we" are "children of the free woman and not of the slave", in Philemon he sends Onesimus back to his owner, and he frequently admonishes slaves to be obedient to their masters. Slaves could be Christians, and Christians could own slaves: it just wasn't a deal-breaker for Paul even though he constantly harped on being "born free". But even then, he didn't mean liberty. For the early Church, freedom wasn't liberty.

After all, Jesus is Lord - and that is a political term. Lord = "one having power and authority over others : a ruler by hereditary right or preeminence to whom service and obedience are due," or "a master of servants" ("lord." Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002. http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com (3 Jul. 2006). It's the Kingdom of Heaven, after all, not the Republic of Heaven. God is "King of Kings" and "Lord of Lords" and Jesus is the "Prince" of Peace...

Christians are always told to yield to those set in authority over them - only worshipping false gods is forbidden them. Occasionally some rebellious sect rises up (think of the Puritans) but even they set someone up in authority over the people to replace the one they overthrow. Political liberty is simply not a Christian concept.

It's an American concept though - nurtured by the great thinkers of the Enlightenment and transformed from a radical idea into a political reality by the Founders, liberty is, in fact, the quintessential American concept. It's inseparable from that other great American concept: the separation of Church and State. Liberty doesn't care what god you worship, as long as you accept Her. And establishing one church over another puts some people over others, and that's not good for Church or State.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Baptists of Danbury (who were a religious minority in Connecticut and who had written to him to complain that in their state, the religious liberties they enjoyed were not seen as immutable rights, but as privileges granted by the legislature - as "favors granted.") :

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and state.

Take another look at the travesty in Memphis. There's no separation there: she's ready to beat other religions over the head with that cross, and to shove her tablet of religious laws into the face of anyone who dares to disagree. She's draped in Christianity.

She might as well continue to wear that veil to hide her shame.

Church members said the mixture of the statue and Christian symbols represent "America belonging to God through Jesus Christ."

George Washington The Treaty of Tripoli, January 4, 1797, approved by President John Adams and Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and ratified by the Senate, gives them the lie direct:

The United States is in no sense founded upon the Christian doctrine.

There's no denying most Americans are Christians. But that's beside the point - well and truly beside the point. The point is that America is a "nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Christians may choose to subordinate themselves in a servant/Lord / ruled/ruler relationship with their god, just as Muslims submit to theirs, but Americans are free. "We the people" are our own rulers.

Merging Liberty with Christianity is not merely (merely, I say!) crappy civics, it's crappy theology. But this Memphis horror isn't Liberty. Liberty welcomes all, not just the elect.

Here's what the Lady who stands in New York Harbor says to the world:

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Let's not change that message for the narrow-minded, religious dogma exemplified by the Travesty in Memphis.

Lady Liberty, Goddess of America: long may you lift your lamp against the darkness.

---

[amended 5 July to correct which president approved the Treaty of Tripoli]

Happy Birthday, Franz!

Franz Kafka, born this day in 1883.

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a cockroach...

The Week in Entertainment

DVDs: Goodnight and Good Luck (could have used some more extras, but notwithstanding that, a damned good film)

TV: PHC's 4th of July special. Very nice...

Read: Shadows Before; and Soul Made Flesh - da-yam, but Carl Zimmer can write!

Happy Birthday, Thomas!

Thomas Cranmer, born this day 1489, true architect of the Anglican service - author of the Book of the Common Prayer.

Even a freethinker can admire his genius...

...and hold up his death as a horrible example what happens when religious affiliation is a political weapon.



Admire Cranmer!
Stevie Smith

Admire the old man, admire him, admire him,
Mocked by the priests of Mary Tudor, given to the flames,
Flinching and overcoming the flinching, Cranmer.

Admire the martyrs of Bloody Mary's reign
In the shocking arithmetic of cruel average, ninety
A year, three-hundred; admire them.

But still I cry: Admire the Archbishop,
The old man, the scholar, admire him.
Not simply, for flinching and overcoming simply,
But for his genius, admire him,
His delicate feelings of genius, admire him,

That wrote the Prayer Book
(Admire him!)
And made the flames burn crueller. Admire Cranmer!

Happy Birthday, Thurgood

Justice Thurgood Marshall, born this day 1908