The hysteria of today –
embedded by Embedded VideoYouTube Direkt
– contrasted with the breeziness of then –
YouTube Direkt
Man is in an unavoidable relationship with nature. He is part of it, but almost uniquely (so far as we know) the only conscious part of it. The mechanics of that relationship are described by science, but it is often characterized by politics and culture. The conflicts between those two modes are highlighted by geologist Ian Plimer “a prominent critic of creationism and of the theory of human-induced global warming”. Plimer recently gave a talk at the Sydney Miner’s Club criticizing the theory of Global Warming. His talk and presentation are here. The action starts with slide 2; the introduction is a little slow.
Hmm, deep in the woods of N. Carolina… I wonder if they arrived back home with a bunch of ticks on their bodies?
“They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.”
Romans 1:25
The difference between then and now was that in the past, man was in the universe as a participant. He was brother to the trees and stars. He lived with nature and lived on it, just like everything in the chain of life. Now he is viewed simply as something alien to it; exogenous, a disturber of the force. The tree huggers in the first video are wailing, but they are crying because they are alone, and know it. Romeo and Juliet had company. The stars were nearer then; so close you reach out and whisper to them.
Twits and ninnies. Whiners and criers and thieves. Sheep.
It would be funny except these types are now running the show. I just read that the Dept of Energy is giving $66.9 million to an outfit in Montana that is going to sequester carbon dioxide underground in old mines. Good grief. Can you think of a more pointless waste of money, time, talent and resources? And by the way, all that CO2 could have gone to the poor dear trees! They need it to live! Wahhhhhhhh!!!
I work in biomedical research. Among people who are doing unimportant things like researching cancer or neurodegenerative diseases. Getting a mere $500,000 to fund this research is considered lucky. But then, that would go to help cure nasty humans of diseases, and we wouldn’t want that, would we? Considering that humans are a scourge on the planet.
If these people went out into the woods and stayed there, I wouldn’t have a problem. America has been the home of all sorts of weird sects. The problem with these enviro whackos is that the come out of the woods and work hard to dictate to the rest of us how to live our lives and what our resources (financial and otherwise) will be spent on. They don’t do this simply by scolding us. They succeed over time in getting the government to implement their ideas. This is why there are not merely funny, but dangerous.
Here’s the link, if you want to read about the wonderful carbon sequestration scheme that is worth so much of our limited taxpayer dollars:
http://www.fossil.energy.gov/news/techlines/2008/08059-DOE_Makes_Sequestration_Award.html
The Anchoress posted a link to a Hubble telescope Advent calendar that is a must see.
To walk through a clear cut shortly after the wood has been harvested is a shattering experience. It is reminiscent of a war zone after a heavy artillery barrage (except, of course, the large timber has been carefully removed for use in a wide variety of products). In a carefully managed clear cut, and most are these days, careful observers will see that all of the scrub branches and waste has been cut so it lays close to the ground, providing cover for small game and breaking up rushing streams of water from rainfall, slowing it and allowing it to seep into the soil. Water breaks will have been carefully carved in the sides of the mountains to once again slow the water and prevent erosion. Depending on the timber management goals, some large seed trees will be strategically left to provide reseeding. In other areas, teams will follow the cut with plantings of different types of timber, to provide diversity rather than a monoculture of all one species.
In time, new types of plants will thrive in the open spaces, providing food and shelter for small game and large (deer, bear, turkeys, etc.) This will gradually fade away as the reseeded or replanted trees once again grow to a climax crop ready for harvest (depending on part of the country – North Central Pennsylvania is what I know best – 75 years is usually required).
Then it starts again, given wise management. Wood is truly a gift from God. It is a renewable resource. This process is enhanced, by careful thought and planning, LONG term planning.
By the way, as others will probably point out, there are other ways to manage tracts of timber land that do not clear cut and and wait 75 years for the forest to regrow, but rather selectively cut each year, caring for the forest as one would care for a garden, culling as needed, pruning where required, well you get the idea.
Anyway, the hippies have much too short a world view to be loggers and true tree people,…in my opinion.
Good Lord… I only made it through about 30 seconds of that self indulgent weeping, to the woman screaming that she wants… to mourn… THE LOSS…
Click. I’ve seen enough.
These people aren’t really full members of humanity – they’d be happy to tell you they reject membership in their own species. Now, if somebody would guarantee that if I stuck it out I’d see a hungry bear come onscreen I’d keep watching. But otherwise I have no sympathy for these self absorbed precious drama queens. Note that they had to have a camera to record their asinine gesture?
Where’s the Blair Witch when you need it?
What makes these environmentalists, and others in their vein like PETA, oddballs is their personalization of their beliefs. One doesn’t mourn a tree or a chicken like one mourns a person. That doesn’t mean that these environmentalist don’t have any valid beliefs at all.
Old growth forests are unique. It takes more than 75 years of re-growth after being clear-cut to generate an old growth forest. It would take 300 – 500 years, if it could ever be regenerated.
Old growth forests do have an intrinsic value that should be saved. They are unique scientifically. They hold biodiversity. They are unique ecosystems. They shouldn’t be cut down to be turned in 2by4s to be shipped to Japan.
Utopia Parkway,
Do you live in a house that has no wood anywhere in it? If you do, you have my respect for walking the walk. Otherwise, not so much, but I respect your right to your opinion.
Old growth forests, in my opinion, are a mess. Trees die. They do not live forever. Fire and insects and disease affect them, just as any other life form. In my opinion, which I am sure is the crux upon which we probably disagree, I think not harvesting and managing an old forest borders on sacrilege. What a waste of a gift. However, it’s a big world and there is probably room for a messy, old growth forest for you to treasure. Find it and help preserve it.
You treat old growth forests differently from plantation. Plantations are sown in identically aged blocks, each planted on a certain date harvestable by another date. Imagine that you have a grid 10 squares by 10. There are a hundred squares. Imagine that you sow grid 1 in 1900 and grid 100 in 2000. By 1975 you can harvest block 1 and replant. In 1976 you move to block 2 and so on. In 2076 you are back to back to block 1 again. Each block is clearcut, but only 1% of the entire stand is ever cut.
The old growth is different. It is full of life of different kinds only some of which are commercially important. But suppose you did an inventory of the species of interest. It’s age distribution would resemble some sort of demographic curve. The principle to managing the old growth is to harvest the oldest trees — and then to stop. Assuming you have not damaged the other age cohorts, the curve will shift to the right as the saplings grow up and within a certain period the demographic will be just as it looked. Harvesting in this way doesn’t affect the old growth any more than operating a cemetery affects a human population. But of course, managing the forest selectively is an expensive proposition. It requires careful felling, bucking and extraction. You can’t drag the logs across the forest floor. You can highline them out. Or something.
I don’t know much about forestry in the first world, but I do know that the Philippine forests have been driven to near extinction because nobody wants to support plantation forestry. “No clear cutting!” goes the cry. But nobody seems to care whether this relates to plantation forest or natural forest. The result is that the bureaucrats have made plantation wood uneconomical and in consequence increase the pressure on the natural forest. Plus there is an ideological aversion to “making money” from forestry. It should be treated, or so it is argued, like a sacred resource. Nobody considers that if you don’t have a commercial, sustainable source for wood, then the poor rural man who needs firewood or a structural pole for hit hut is going to go out with an axe or a chainsaw and cut himself a flitch.
I don’t want to judge all environmentalists, but those I’ve met don’t want to know anything about the real forest; or the people who live in them. The Manobos, Mangyans, Kalahan, Taalandigs or whoever else. They don’t want to know about the subsistence farmer who goes out each season with a machete and a box of matches to clear his swidden so he can plant sweet potatoes and graze his goats before moving on to clear yet another patch. If we really wanted to stop forest destruction we quit building roads into forested areas, give people jobs in cities and encourage plantation wood. Did I say wood? There’s more than trees in the woods. There are people – indgenous people — in the forests of the Third World. Shouldn’t we mourn for them too?
programmer,
My house doesn’t have any Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in it. No Scarlet Tanagers, no Blackburnian Warblers nor any of the other animals that depend(ed) on deep forest to survive. The old growth forests are more than tree farms. There’s more there than board feet.
I understand your desire to cut and manage and make a buck from the natural world around us. It’s a dangerous fetish that needs to be resisted. IMO, there are natural areas that should be largely left alone.
Sadly, environmentalism changed from the preservation of wild spaces and holding off commercial development of such places, ala John Muir and the Sierra Club, to weird, status-obsessions of First World Yuppies, in the mating game that never ends.
Wretchard asks why no one cares about the indigenous peoples of Third World forests. Well, duh, because wealthy First World Yuppies are competing for status and mates!
Thus everything is dumbed down to status in the First World Yuppie class, and not actual results such as habitat preservation, or even saving some wild areas to be well, wild. Muir was not against commercial forestry, in fact he supported it as an alternative to simply logging over every wild space and public lands.
But then as we’ve become more and more removed from the natural world, and more and more status-driven, what can we expect. The weeping hippies are merely demonstrating their status in status and mating game that drives their lives. They don’t actually want to accomplish any goals beyond being cooler among their peers.
I grew up in the timber business in SD. (Yes, trees grow there – in the Black Hills). We practiced selective cutting and it worked, because of the terrain, climate, threat of wildfires, etc. The result is a much healthier forest than was naturally there in past decades AND more trees.
Even though the methods of logging there have changed, the method of selectively cutting harvest-ready trees and leaving others to mature and regenerate, has not. It reamains a good strategy for that type of alpine forest.
I now live in NC where clear cutting makes better sense. The climate allows the natural forest regenerate in a more commercially viable manner, with straight, healthy second-growth timber. It does take years before the area can be harvested again, but I was suprised how fast the trees naturally regenerate here.
My point is that, if managed properly, woodlands can be used for commercial harvest AND afford fantstic recreational environments. But like any good business venture it has to be managed, rationally, reasonably and accordingly.
Gen 1:28 Yahweh blessed them and siad to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the Earth and subdue it. ”
Those people in #1 are really pathetic and almost as crazy as the director that cast Clint in a musical.
Programmer summed it up much better than I could. The picture of what these ninnies believe represents “sacred” old-growth is actually a relatively sterile ecosystem, at least in Pennsylvania. Hordes of white-tailed deer, only partially kept in check by slowly dwindling numbers of hunters, and their only natural predators the automobile and semi-truck, have essentially strip-mined the understory in vast areas of Pennsylvania forest. The only plant species that can persist are those unpalatable to the deer.
Even the Indians used to set forest fires to clear areas in order to plant crops.
To get to “pure” old-growth in the US, you would have to somehow roll the clock back more than 25,000 years, maybe 50,000 or more.
I.E. before the arrival of humans.
Maybe that’s what they want. Somewhere online someone once said the last trappings of civilization these types would give up would be the pistol and the bulldozer…
Can these people in the “today” video just be…. I don’t know. Shot?
Okay, maybe that’s a little harsh. A little. Only. But I’d say the men in the white coats, carrying straight jackets would be good for them.
I’ve never dealt with PETA folks, though I have met people who are passionately attached to animals, usually pets. Sometimes it is only the idealization of animals. I recall once there was a homeless guy (during a bad economic time) who would park across the street in his old Dodge wagon. He had a do which lived with him in the car. The animal was as well cared for as could reasonably be expected, he always had food and water. One day some do-gooder nitwit was outraged at the conditions in which the dog was living, called the SPCA and had the dog taken away. It was pitiful to see the man begging to keep his dog friend and the woman insisting that the dog deserved better than to live in such a squalid situation. Not good enough for the dog, but plenty good enough for the man.
I observe a curious and sickening moral inversion that places more value on things (be they ideas, trees, animals, etc.) than on human beings. In this I think I am witnessing a kind of idolatry in which men divinize creatures and reify Man made in the Divine Image. I use this inversion as a rough measure of the extent to which people have lost their souls, or traded them, for mere objects. So surfeited is our world with all kinds of good and glamorous things that we forget that our own creaturely status is dependent on and defined by the Creator.
And thus the root of sin, manifested how you will: Lost sight of God, I cannot know myself as crested in His image, which means I cannot know myself. Failing to know myself, I cannot truly know another human being, or descry the Divine Image in them, or forge a relationship with them based on that primordial reality. All my relationships must perforce be utilitarian. I am therefore empty and alone, a self-filled monad bereft of true companionship. The unendurable agony of that vacuum must be filled by [pick your poison].
Mourning for dead trees is the easier alternative to growing a true, living self and sharing with others.
My opinion.
@2 quotes Romans 1:25, which is appropriate to the topic here, but it does not elaborate on the consequences. Over and over the chapter recites the same theme. “Therefore God gave them over in their sinful desires . . .”, “God gave them over to shameful lusts”, “he (God) gave them over to a depraved mind . . .” It would seem that God is willing to let such folks pursue their folly unrestrained, all the while unaware that God has given up on them.
@18. Very insightful and beautifully written. I hope someday I can express my own beliefs as well.
About twenty years ago I saw a talk about the fuel build up (dead trees and organic matter) in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. If there were a prolonged drought the resulting forests fires would be all but impossible to put out. The amount of energy being released was compared to nuclear explosions. The fires would just roll through cities. Areas the size of states would be consumed by flames. Interesting stuff.
Actually there are more trees in the eastern US now then there were 100 years ago. That’s because farm land has gone out of production and the trees soon take over. They are like these giant weeds. And I love weeds. Bigger the better, I say.
A couple of years ago I was reading about the Agrilus Planipennis that was attacking some of the 4 billion ash trees here in Ohio. And I went, “Hold on! There are 4 billion ash trees in Ohio? Dude, there are only 6 billion humans on the entire planet.” And I wondered how come no one complains about ash tree over population? And that is only, like, one type of tree. I can tell you that Ohio got many types of trees and they are all over the frikin place. So we are talking mucho billions of varied trees that are in one state that is not even known for having trees. And Pennsylvania? Pennsylvania is even worse. That place is over run with trees.
Of course the glaciers will come by soon and plow them all up and scour the soil clear. Because surely we will do nothing to stop the next glaciation. Then in 300,000 years the ice will melt and the trees will come back. Because, I tell you, they are like big weeds.
Web http://www.phrases.org.uk
Bill Shakespeare–As You Like It–Sermons in Books, Stones in Running Brooks
Posted by Bruce Kahl on October 03, 2000
In Reply to: Please help: Sermons in Books, Stones in Running Brooks posted by venky on October 03, 2000
: Hi
: I’ve come across an expression that goes something like: There are sermons in books, stones in running brooks… I’m not sure if this is right. Could someone please tell me (preferably on my e-mail)
: 1) what the correct expression is.
: 2) what it precisely means.
: 3) what the origin of the expression is.
: This is kinda urgent. so prompt help would be greatly appreciated..
Find tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. — Shakespeare, As You Like It”
I think it means to look for gratitude, spirituality and serenity in everyday things but this is just my personal opinion.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616). The Oxford Shakespeare. 1914.
As You Like It
Act II. Scene I.
The Forest of Arden.
Enter DUKE Senior, AMIENS, and other Lords, like Foresters.
Duke S. Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference; as, the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which, when it bites and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say
‘This is no flattery: these are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.’
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
I would not change it.
Didn’t mean to post that stuff above ‘As You Like It’–drat
YGBSM. How do these people function day to day with this kind of asinine silliness inside them? I’m with Skubinna; as soon as “mourning scream” started up I had to hit the stop button. FAST.
Wow. Just…wow.
The problem with the Earth First crowd is that like all terrorists, and they are, they are profoundly selfish. They are consumers. They are consumers of nature who contribute nothing to preserving or maintaining any form of life. They are vampires.
20. hdgreene:
I live in Pennsylvania, in a modest suburban house with a modest-sized yard. There are various trees, shrubs, and gardens around the neighborhood, but the ground is mostly grass lawns.
I skipped mowing my lawn for a couple weeks this past spring, and the next time I went outside to mow I noticed my whole yard was covered with tiny maple seedlings. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them.
That told me that if I stopped mowing my lawn for just one summer, by autumn my property would be covered by young saplings. It wouldn’t take long at all for the forest to come back.
Humankind is as much a product of nature as the trees in these videos. The growth of a city is no less a natural process than the growth of a forest.
The people in the first video don’t love nature so much as they simply can’t handle the up and downs of relating to their fellow human beings. They define the word tragicomic.
The land my brother and I share is part of a suburban neighborhood lying smack in the middle of a major metropolitan area of Southeastern Virginia. It has been farmed and worked by European settlers since the first decades of the 17th century, and by various native american Indian tribes for scores of centuries before that. In the middle of Virginia Beach, we have foxes, raccoons, deer, woodchucks, possums, red-tailed hawks, herons, egrets, Canada geese, and temporary populations of many migratory birds.
When I lived in the South Bay area (Silicon Valley, CA) you could see similar critturs in the ditches and marshes ten feet from the 8-lane Nimitz Highway, and coyotes and mountain lions lived on the slopes of the hills running north-south to both the east and west of the San Francisco Bay. When I lived outside of Sacramento, a little west of Folsom, we had a nightly chorus of coyotes hunting around the surrounding hills and ranches, and one day we had a black bear loping through the meadow down by the lake below our house.
All those critters managed to sort things out and survive without any assistance from Peta or the people from EarthFirst!
Tanquam: I observe a curious and sickening moral inversion that places more value on things (be they ideas, trees, animals, etc.) than on human beings. In this I think I am witnessing a kind of idolatry in which men divinize creatures and reify Man made in the Divine Image.
I don’t think the problem is placing a greater value on things than on human beings. The group we observe in the video is of one mind. They probably like each other; they just don’t like people who don’t think like they do. As such, they would constitute a cult. One could say a religious cult. The problem with the rest of us is one of attitude. Hence, the need for re-education camps.
Here is another take on the relation of humans and animal life:
The westside chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was sandwiched between warehouses on a cul-de-sac in the industrial section of Santa Monica — a collection of storage buildings and body shops near the bus station. Shopping carts full of derelicts’ worldly goods parked in doorways served as declarations of homesteading claims. Blanket rolls, layers of newspaper, and empty wine bottles spilled onto the sidewalk. [Bob] couldn’t help but wonder about a civilization that sheltered and fed the stray animals and left the humans to face the elements alone. Of course, the hospitality extended to animals lasted only so long. No easy answer.
Barbara Seranella, No Human Involved (1997)
With all due respect to the good work done by animal shelters, the next to last line from Seranella suggests that the care for life, for many, is an aesthetic, not a principle; a style, not a commitment. Because the feelings are not rooted in principle, it might account for the cognitive dissonance of those in the first video who mourn for the loss of the tree, but care not a bit for the loss of a “fetus.”
I am a Climatologist. I need $70 million for my carbon storage experiment. If you don’t give me $70 million all your trees will die and your ice caps will melt in five years. Please forward the check for $70 million to Ledger at the Goracle Institute of Climatology. Thank you.
I revisited the first video again today and my takeaway feeling (am I turning into a hippie from watching?) was one of unease about our educational system. Something is woefully wrong with any darn system that teaches young people (and older) that sitting around in a circle and howling in agony over the death of a vegetable (even a magnificent, tall woody one) is an appropriate response. As my younger colleagues in the binary digital arts would say, What The Fudge (or some such)?
Years ago, I was on a solitary hunt in the early winter in heavily wooded Pennsylvania hills. Darkness was approaching. The ground was covered with about 8-10 inches of soft newly fallen snow. Large, soft flakes were still drifting down among the tall, stately second growth forest of hardwood all around. The wind was quiet. If you have ever been in the woods on such a day, you know that you can actually hear the flakes as they fall. Whether from ice crystals, or what, there is a bell like quality to the sound. All other sounds are hushed. The trees are dark grey and black against the white of the snow. I came to the edge of a ridge near the top and looked down on the ridges below me, rolling away to the river bottom below. I stopped, breathing deeply in the clean, crisp air. As I gazed down, I heard a tick of sound of something hitting a branch, then again. Below me, in absolute silence except for the occasional sound of feathers hitting a branch, a large tom turkey glided through the air among trees headed for a pine cove at the end of the ridge line, where he could roost for the night. I watched until he disappeared into the pines. Snow continued to fall as I trudged homeward, no where as graceful as that turkey, serene in his mastery of the air.
My point? Forty or fifty years ago, the forest that I was hunting in that day had been a clear cut. Nothing left standing except seed trees and some trees among the rocks that were too difficult to harvest. But on that day, once again trees and the wildlife that they sheltered had reclaimed the hills on which no other crop could be tilled. They increased in value every year and in the nonce, provided a spiritual balm those willing to walk, stop, and listen could enjoy.
I work in the woods on a regular basis, in the middle of Jackson State Demonstration Forest in Mendocino County, California.
‘Demonstration’, because it is a model of sustainable forestry.
Yet even this is too much for the envirowhackos, who forced years of injunctions on timber management and logging, even after all the plans had been approved and re-approved by all the requisite State depts and all legal hoops had been jumped through.
Finally, it seems to be coming to an end.
Old growth is amazing and precious, but that is not what lumber companies are after any more.
It is protected in California.
Unfortunately, the monkeys run the zoo here, and go overboard in the wrong direction.
Witness the recent year-long idiocy in Berkeley over some fairly young oak trees…
programmer #30
Beautifully written. I’ve put that in my permanent files.
“My point? Forty or fifty years ago, the forest that I was hunting in that day had been a clear cut. Nothing left standing except seed trees and some trees among the rocks that were too difficult to harvest.”
Thirty years ago, my wife and I bought 400 acres of clearcut – and I mean everything gone except slash – in northern Ontario, for $25 an acre. For the first 20 rears we seldom visited it – it being 2000 miles away from the pacific northwest. A few years ago we re-visited the place. It was starting to mature and was teeming with jays and chickadees, flying squirrels, weasels and martin.
We decided, after that visit, that when my young wife retired, we would build a cabin and spend our remainind days there. Retirement is less than 12 mos away. The cabin is being constructed and I feel an excitment that I haven’t felt for years.
Viktor:
Congrats on your retirement. I hope you live long in your place of dreams. Your patience rewarded.
Viktor silo,
Congratulations. It’s great when a plan comes together.
Oh. My. Goodness.
How sad.
L3
viktor silo,
Wow, congrats and best wishes. But I’m a little surprised to hear that your land is teeming with weasels. I would have thought northern Ontario too far away from Washington DC.
Cheers.
L3
“In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but gallows.”
–Edmund Burke, warning of the new intellectual radicals springing up here n there within the scepter’d isle’s ‘enlightenment’.
Last weekend I drove out to west virginia for some contra dancing. At intermission there were lots of announcements for country contra and square dances. Someone stood as well to announce an innagural ball in DC for Obama. The air went tense for a moment before the festive mood continued. I heard at the dance that the Antietem Battlefield was lighting candles. So I drove to the old civil war battlefield at midnight and joined a long line of cars with headlights off that drove over a one lane blacktop. On either sides were candles that marked the places of fallen soldiers. There were thousands of candles on either side of the road. I had music on for awhile and then I shut it off. The quiet and the flickering candle lit bags spread across the rolling brown winter fields on either side were a reminder of the cricket war. Here and there fire spilled from the lunch bags and burned the grass around for couple feet square.
When people are blessed so much that they consider their blessings a burden and a drudge to them, you
may always calculate on a cricket war, a grasshopper
war, a drought, too much rain, or something else to
make the scales preponderate the other way.
The first cricket war I ever heard of was in the 1740′s between the Shawnee and the Wyandot along the Juniata River in central pennsylvania. A dispute between two boys of two tribes over a pet cricket escalated to include all the warriors of bothtribes. Many braves died.
The first white men built wood huts along the river a couple years later.
I chatted with a guy who was the picture of a civil war vet. Maybe even a re-enactor. I said that age like others is now gone forever. There won’t be anymore real fun for a couple generations–not until the first big waves of earth colonists leave for space. In the meantime you just have to do the things to make it happen, raise your family and keep your powder dry.
The next day I joined my church choir and sang Christmas carols at the white house Christmas tree in DC . It was bitter cold. But singing kept everyone in good spirits for the brief time we were on.
A full weekend. I don’t do that often.
L3
Perhaps, upon reflection, “teeming” with weasels seems a bit silly. What I should have written is that the land was teeming with wildlife.
That visit was in the winter and there was hardly a square foot of snow that didn’t have tracks of some sort on it.
I just re-read programmer’s post. “Spiritual balm”: what a wonderful term. That is the perfect description of what we felt.
Many years ago, when I first came to the pacific northwest, I wrote a poem about the ocean:
The sound of the surf
The scream of the gulls
The distant waves
Blend into oneness
Seeing but not looking
Hearing but not listening
Aware but not conscious
I return to to the source
The limitless
The unknowable
This sums up how I feel about my new home. I am returning “to the source.”
Really, there is not much difference between “man’s relationship to “nature” in the past as opposed to today; certainly little has changed since Shakespeare’s day. Excluding better science, knowledge and capability, these psychotic ninnies and the vile propagandists of the Left that manipulates them are the chief differences.
OK, here is the chief difference: Today we actually take these lunatics seriously and, unbelievably, give them power over the rest of us. This is because we have become a tribe of fearful, sentimental, dimwitted and spoiled children who are afraid of their heritage, particularly their religious and material ones. This is sentimental hogwash that only a society with piles of spare wealth can tolerate. No society can survive this silliness for long should it allow itself to hold these notions as core beliefs. In Shakespeare’s day these nincompoops would have been laughed of the stage. Literally.
Political environmentalism at this level is just a modern expression of the crudest form of paganism or animism; to more refined “acolytes” it is a sort of parody of Christianity, complete with its own Genesis myth, Original Sin and even Indulgences. Hitler was surrounded by the same sort of tree hugging idiots, and should our collectivists’ propagandists achieve his sort of power for their masters then these loon’s fates will be the much same as that of their coreligionist way back then.
Moreover, if the voters cannot see through this nonsense, then they deserve what they get. Environmentalists and their Marxist puppetmasters have to be constantly exposed for the fools and knaves they are, and at every level they are encountered.
Mankind apart from nature? How can we be anything else but apart? This is what it means to be human. This is one of the signal points of the human experience: Man is perforce apart from yet amidst “nature”. It is the core mystery of our experience.
This is an age old question with many facets: The faces of which are alternately sentemental and emotional, physical and practical, intellectual and philosophical, and, most importantly, religious. Man is unique among all creatures in his ability to pose this question or seek its answer, and that metaphysical fact precludes man ever being “at one” with nature or “at peace with nature” in the senses that these sentimentalists maintain in all their dreary treacle. The West came up with unique and powerful answers to this problem and we would be wise to stick with them.
Most certainly at one level, the sentimental level, “nature” is mostly a point of view. It rests as much on imagination and inclination as it does on experience or reality, though it is colored by one’s experience and circumstances. However, no matter what poets say to their patrons, for most of history man viewed “nature” as a dark force to protect against or a powerful mystery to placate. The whole business was hardly seen as a walk in the park, so to speak. The sentimental regard of “nature” as a paradise would seem to require considerable distance from nature itself.
Here these yahoos expose themselves for the fools they are for they would not survive 2 month in the woods. “Nature” is a reverie they have while they are showering in their air conditioned room at the local Holiday Inn after one of their “outing”.
Whatever the case, one is free to feel as “close to nature” as one wishes; our times hardly require a particular view on “nature”, particularly when on can purchase all that nifty outdoor gear and all that dehydrated camp food to boil and eat.
In a physical sense it is, of course, an impossibility for man to be truly “apart form nature” altogether, though thankfully modern science can limit the damage which being “part of nature” generally incurs. Thanks the heavens for pharmaceuticals.
One does imagine that at times people in the past would rather all to glad to be “apart from nature” for a day or two, say like during a plague year.
On the positive side more people have more access to “nature” — and more leisure time to enjoy it — than ever before in history. What do you imagine that the poor folks of London did for “nature” 500 years ago when their extremely short and brutal lives where one of grueling day to day struggle to survive. On top of that, we have far greater understanding of “nature” and more control over it. This is a very good thing:
But does knowledge subdue awe? Only in savages. Does our great store of scientific and practical knowledge really diminish nature before us? It only increases our amazement.
Again, our command of nature, to the extent that we have it, is an altogether good thing.
But “nature” or the worship of it will not answer the fundamental problems of being human.
Chesterson once said:
The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a stepmother. The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.
We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate.
(please, let us avoid any discussion of evolution — it is a completely absurd and irrelevant issue to me. I am making a point about the human spirit in the world.)
There have been nature cults throughout history and they have all lead to barbarism. Modern Scientism can be view in a way as a nature cult. They all miss the point for there is no useful morality to the natural world in and of itself and all attempts at find it through animism, shamanism, spiritualism and all other forms of paganism leads to darkness. Judaism threw back this darkness; Christianity added to the light. From the Christian POV, God removed himself from the world after he created it and only through the mediation of mankind in the world can sanctity reenter it and god be immanent in it again. Man can only do this through redemption.
(OK, there are lots of variations on this, but you get the point I am sure.)
This is a main lesson of the west, and no matter what one’s beliefs, the working out of the Christian faith has created our humanworld, and that world includes our sciences for science would have been impossible without Christianity fecund base.
So the response of the Christian West to “nature” is a singularly profound and rich heritage — it is exquisitely more powerful in real terms than that of any other civilization, religion or culture past or present.
We forget this at our peril.
Buddy: great Burke quote. Where is that from?
Christianity’S fecund base.**
viktor silo,
Magnificent.
I hope you can get internet access up there. I mean returning to the source is fine, but don’t abandon your compatriots here at the Belmont Club!
Cheers.
L3
Viktor,
True Zen!!! Thank you for sharing.
the stupid bitch in the tree hugger video kept putting her hand in the poison ivy. lol.
To paraphrase an old koan:
A monk asked Jason: “Does a dog have Buddha Nature?”
Jason barked back: “Mu!”
A very old and wise man once pointed out that
dams built by man for the purposes of men
were just as much a part of nature as dams built by beavers for the purpose of beavers.
Quick everybody, what was the name of that
“Senior” fellow? Hint: in his “Notebook”
he could always find “Time Enough For Love”.
Oh, come on now. Gotta be at least of few of you with the answer.
Probably the same guy who said:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
L3
I will have internet up there. Also, I intend to start a blog. It will be devoted to spiritual matters. When the time comes I will let you know where to find me.
I may post some comments here from time to time but, to tell the truth, the commenters here, in the aggregate, are so well informed that I feel I have nothing important to add.
Then there is something else: this is, essentially, a political blog. Right now “the world is too much with me.” The present political environment is toxic. It is sapping my strength and poisoning my soul. I hope you understand.
Thanks to all of you for your kind comments.
Ignorant hippies. The golden calf thing has been tried before. From what I read, it didn’t work out so great…
Lazerus Long
Programmer, he also noted that one should “be wary of strong drink. It can cause you to shoot at tax collectors and miss.”
Was skimming through the comments and came across the phrase “teeming with weasels.” Why did the word ‘Chicago’ come to mind?
great thread –wonderful writing –the Antietam battlefield story –so good to hear the details of that –the crowds in the night honoring those fallen soldiers.
Mongoose, thanks for the query @ #41: Find it in the first paragraph here (no haven’t seen it directly in EB writings, but do trust this source).
I approve of colonizing Mars and heading outward. I would love to be part of something like that.
I don’t approve of viktor silo’s wilderness retreat. I would never, ever, do something like that.
I wonder what the difference is since they are both a way of cutting off current life, escaping the toxicity around us, and creating a change.
The tree huggers in the first video are wailing, but they are crying because they are alone, and know it.
/////////
The tree huggers are cut off not because of any condition of the forest but rather because of the condition of their own souls.
The are for the most part — atheists.
You simply don’t find this sort in any evangelical church.
Mars looks like a dead world to me. I would never want to go there. Ix-nay on northern Ontario too, seems way too cold (though surely warmer than Mars). But to each his own.
The looniest of the loony left’s worshipful reverence for egalitarianism knows no bounds. It must cover, not merely us, but all of Creation. God set Adam in the garden of Eden and told him to “dress it and keep it,” but that implies being in charge, and for these wackos there’s nothing to give humankind the right to be in charge over a tree or a rock or even a pebble. We must not go around acting like we’re the crown of creation.
I’m with Vik.
Who in a right mind wants to live in an urban jungle?
The trouble with Mars is, it’s too darned small. In no time at all, we’d be bumping into one another again.
And, we’d have trouble with the gravity.
Maybe people would grow to be twelve feet tall on Mars, who knows? And on second thought, the weak gravity might make climbing the stairs easier in old age. I bet you could do some nifty swam dives in slow motion into the swimming pool on Mars, too. And the water would splash way high.
Gravity on Mars is 38% that of earth.
Gravity On Mars
Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich sure looks the punk, doesn’t he?
Unfortunately, many expressions of “compassion”, or caring, are just other means or narcissistic self-fascination. These people are easily manipulated and are easy marks for the politically cynical and active. At heart, its all about them, fundamentally a severe contradiction.
thanks,buddy. that is the second fine article I have read over there lately. That article surely buttresses my point about the West’s traditional response to nature — it is a counterpoint to my argument.
I fine myself going back to Burke more and more these days (Chesterton too).
Programmer: it’s not about education, it’s about individual pathology. Ic is very close to the mark. Patients like this tend to have traits of borderline, histrionic, narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders. You may also be surprised at how often patients who present with behaviors like these will have abnormal brain imaging. ‘Emotional incontinence’ (which may have been displayed by the woman in the clip) is a classic symptom of frontal lobe damage.
In my opinion, behavior like this is often the result of combining a juvenile political philosophy with neuropsychiatric pathology.
viktor silo,
Glad you’re not going to completely unplug from the matrix. But I understand the desire to take the “red pill.”
A blog on spiritual matters would be great, especially coming as it will from the great white north. One of the downsides of living a modern urban existence is the noise, which easily drowns out the soft whisper of God’s voice. I expect you’ll be able to hear it better on one of those still, quiet mornings.
But don’t despair of today’s environment. The toxicity you describe is real, but it is a necessary part of our healing process – a sort of social chemotherapy. We have decades of cancerous decadence to purge from the system. And while it will be painful, folks like you can play a valuable role by providing the salve of peaceful reflection on the meaning of man’s true nature, and nature’s true meaning to man.
And while your path would not work for many of us – if my wife and I were to live in a remote subarctic cabin with 5 kids and 2 dogs, it would be like the 7th circle of hell to us – God has given us a wide variety of saints, from hermits to kings. And each of us is called to sainthood, each in our own way.
I raise a glass to toast you on your path to sainthood. Godspeed, and stay warm.
Cheers.
L3
There have always been nutters.
Let’s hope that we still have the wisdom to not give them keys.
What is it about Twits and ninnies, Whiners and criers and thieves, Sheep, that’s so wrong???
Must we be so Judgemental?
What would Colin Powell think?
Stop the shouting!
—
Abbott on Costello
– Steyn
Criminals in Kimberly
Actually, old growth, at least in this country, is associated with lower biodiversity. It represents the triumph of one species at the expense of others, hogging all the solar energy. Fish density in forest streams is lowest in old growth, for example.
Carol Browner to the Rescue!
Crooked Carol Browner: Obama’s ethically-challenged energy czar
Carol Done Right
Doug
The One can put Carol Browner and Jamie Gorelick in charge of everything. It won’t matter because we’ll all be too poor or too dead to worry about it.
Carol Bankrupts us, and Jamie gets us killed.
I’ve always thought it was egotistical to believe climate change is anthropogenic. The presentation by the inconvenient Professor Ian Plimer affirms it for me.
Heathen essays:
Patients like this tend to have traits of borderline, histrionic, narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders. You may also be surprised at how often patients who present with behaviors like these will have abnormal brain imaging. ‘Emotional incontinence’ (which may have been displayed by the woman in the clip) is a classic symptom of frontal lobe damage.
Programmer (exhibiting his usual party behavior) asks:
Are there any indications (or studies that indicate) that current common cultural influences (video games, drug usage, etc.) are causation of these syndromes? Are we as a society “programming” this behavior into certain genetically inclined receptors? Or in a somewhat facetious manner, is this just the result of too many raves and head banger balls?
Somewhere the other day I read that because of increased CO2 in the world , since the year 2000, the vegetation of earth is estimated to have grown 6%.
Now, maybe I’m a just a cornfused evil conservative, but aren’t these wailing greenies, who wail in such agony about the critical need for more vegetation, greater bio-diversity, more resilience in our native habitats, more protected open space, etc, etc, etc, the same greenies who view CO2 as a pollutant and want production of it criminalized?
Before I get accused of Rhinoceros chasing with the above question, let me identify my curiousity further. I look at the election just passed, the Coyote Clan drum circling the stumps, the bad decisions being made by leaders who are still revered by about half of our population as the “smartest” people in the room, there seems to be a collective “emotional incontinence” (that is such a cool description) on the part of whole segments of our population. Read any comment thread on a left leaning blog or the trolls that pop up periodically on this blog (with the exception of me, of course) for further examples. The incontinent trashing of Sarah Palin is another example. Are we suffering from a very insidious plague, an epidemic that is not yet recognized? How do you cure something like this when it is viewed as exercise in freedom of expression? Arrrrghhhh, I need more coffee…..
Many many years ago a girl that I probably should have married told me that her plan was to buy 100 acres in Indiana and plant it with Black Walnut trees in the expectation that our grandchildren then would not have to work. That is wisdom. It is the opposite of the “Hooking Up” culture that Amy Alkin defends.
——-
@Doug,
Jamie Gorelick having destroyed the foundations of capitalism at Fannie Mae and the foundations of national security at Justice, leading to both the housing meltdown and looming Depression as well as 9-11 and global war, moved on to Schlumberger. Where to I turn to for protection as I believe she is to her vast profit stalking me?
The “soft whisper of God’s voice”:
- the SF earthquake
- the Katrina hurricane
- the Indonesian tsunami
- Mt. St. Helen’s volcano
Sometimes God makes it *real* hard to ignore him. I wonder how the Arabs manage to keep doing it, seeing that he is even harder on them than he is on Christians.
@74 programmer asks “Are there any indications (or studies that indicate) that current common cultural influences (video games, drug usage, etc.) are causation of these syndromes?
I don’t know about studies, but I doubt video games are the culprit here. Rather it’s one more excess of a spoiled generation (the baby boomers, of which I am one) that’s so lost in its own BS it can’t see straight. I’ve met lots of people like that here in the Northwest – great lovers of nature who don’t know a thing about it and would happily see an entre tribe of people who do understand the natural world get relocated to a city and end up homeless than countenance the possibility of a “threat” to some bug or other. The icing on the cake is they can then put on their social conscience outfits and wail on behalf of the dispossessed “people of color”.
As others have noted, it’s narcissism, pure and simple. The world is their mirror, and only a wealthy society would tolerate their idiocies.
buddy larson – Nyquist is a true find. I’ve been working my way through those essays since you posted a link to them somewhere last week. Thank you very much.
And thanks to all – this is a wonderful thread. Charles’s story about the lights at Antietam was absolutely beautiful.
L3
I are leaving for the property tomorrow am. I’m driving; My wife will leave on Friday; she’s flying. Heh, heh.
Naturally, I’m checking the weather. Prince Albert, Sask. was -58 F. last night.
I didn’t know that Al Gore was scheduled to speak there.
Mongoose @ #61 –yessir, who knows what those tree worshippers would think had they ever been exposed to –or never been steered away from –the likes of Burke (both Edmund and “31 Knot” Arleigh) or Chesterton. Then, the emotion poured out onto a tree (which, let’s be serious, lacking ears in all liklihood can take no comfort from) might be poured out instead on the humans who at Lepanto saved their world from actual enslavement. Could the screamers in the video find any emotional release in these snips (pls forgive bad practice of snipping a poem) from Chesterton? Where as the ominous unstoppable Jihad flows westward
“The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young.”
To march south to the sea, and take ship against
“Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.
They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From the temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be,
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,–
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, “Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide….”
…one wonders.
55. NahnCee:
“I don’t approve of viktor silo’s wilderness retreat. I would never, ever, do something like that.”
Why not?
I would like to remind everyone.
These people may seem odd and crazy to most of us.
But do not kid yourself into complacency.
They may not on an individual basis want to eliminate us.
But they surely will support those of them that do.
These are the same people that brought us the Inquisition, the Master race, the Great Patriotic war, the Great Leap Forward, the Year Zero, and all of the lesser Genocides of history.
La liberté n’a pas de prix.
Jim (one who excepts the challenge put before him and with faith in the Almighty it shall be overcome) So Mote it Be
small (i hope) interesting aside: Chesterton’s poem closes
“Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade….
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)
Cervantes fought there, a soldier before he wrote in “Don Quixote” of acting on the dream, on the impossible dream, as the great song from “Man of La Mancha” put it. Is this how our tree worshippers see themselves? Dreamers of the impossible dream? A very romantic tradition to be sure –but isn’t ‘romantic” a compliment that must be bestowed by others? If one bestows it on oneself, isn’t that, um, ‘unromantic’? Or worse, ‘anti-romance’?
If a tree mourner screams in the forrest and nobody is there to hear it, is he still an idiot?
Quig – no shoe stores in the wilderness.
Seriously though, wilderness living is *much* harder on women having to do laundry and food preparation and day-to-day cleaning, while Mr. Frontiersman just has to go out and shoot a deer every once in a while. I don’t know what kind of 21st Century appliances Mrs. Victor will have but I bet it’ll be hard to pop out for a dozen eggs and some milk when she’s whipping up a cake. (What kind of oven will she have to bake the cake in?)
I remember watching my grandmother doing laundry with a hand-cranked washing machine. I remember watching my mother canning tomatoes on a hot August day with a pressure cooker. Trying to do either of those things in the Canadian wilderness in freezing temperatures is not my idea of an idyllic existance.
Secondly, it just seems like a cop-out. I can see heading for a wilderness retreat if the Big One falls and you’re trying to escape radiation. But to take your football and go home to Canada, ceding the game to the moonbats because they’re being too icky is lazy. Both mentally and physically. If you can’t out-perform an inferior moonbat specimen, then the least you can do is stick around and be just as icky back at them as they have been in the first place.
–if all the tree worshippers fall down and the world doesn’t laugh its ass off, can this be the universe?
Buddy: Yes, a great poem and a great battle for the West — just what I am talking about. No, these people would not have been there, or if the had they would not have come out of it alive nor with honor. The fighting was bloody that day. Relative to that age and the size of the fighting forces, it was one of the bloodiest naval battles in history: The Holy league lost somewhere just shy of 8K but the Turk lost more than 25K (the League freed from the turks about as many Christians as they lost in the battle). Would have loved to have seen that day. I always think of the stand the Knights Hospitaller made — we need to remember their valor and courage when the going gets rough.
The battle was a close run thing, we should never forget that. tenacity, bravey, steadfastness and some raw good luck took the day.
People said after the battle that God seemed to have turned the battle himself. A change in the weather would have changed everything.
Oarsmen in the The Holy League fleet where often convicts or debtors. They unchained the oarsmen that would fight and offered clemency and forgiveness. The Turks oarsmen were all slaves, many of them Christian — they could not dare unshackle them. This is one of the reasons that we won that day.
Something to think about.
OK Buddy, I will see your Chesterton and raise you a Yeats, and this one includes reference to another major naval battle that saved our civilization from the East.
This poem has never been more appropriate to the times:
The Statues (by W. B Yeats)
Pythagoras planned it. Why did the people stare?
His numbers, though they moved or seemed to move
In marble or in bronze, lacked character.
But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love
Of solitary beds, knew what they were,
That passion could bring character enough,
And pressed at midnight in some public place
Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.
No! Greater than Pythagoras, for the men
That with a mallet or a chisel” modelled these
Calculations that look but casual flesh, put down
All Asiatic vague immensities,
And not the banks of oars that swam upon
The many-headed foam at Salamis.
Europe put off that foam when Phidias
Gave women dreams and dreams their looking-glass.
One image crossed the many-headed, sat
Under the tropic shade, grew round and slow,
No Hamlet thin from eating flies, a fat
Dreamer of the Middle Ages. Empty eyeballs knew
That knowledge increases unreality, that
Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show.
When gong and conch declare the hour to bless
Grimalkin crawls to Buddha’s emptiness.
When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side.
What stalked through the post Office? What intellect,
What calculation, number, measurement, replied?
We Irish, born into that ancient sect
But thrown upon this filthy modern tide
And by its formless spawning fury wrecked,
Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace
The lineaments of a plummet-measured face.
This is my favorate Yeats poem. How prescient he was.
Might as well talk to the trees, as the US Supreme Court—
Leo Donofrio isn’t optimistic about his chances tomorrow.
All good Libertarians like Leo should be really saddened by this, if that’s how it turns out, as his case is very logical and strongly argued.
In give and take with some of his posters he says—
[Ed. Come Monday, there is no Constitution. There is no "Supreme" Court, just a court. And it doesn't appeare honorable to me anymore. And it never will be as long as that clerk has a job.]
[Ed. The case will be denied. I don't think they ever wanted anything to do with it. Look what they allowed the clerk's office to do to my case and Cort's, flagging Cort's for anthrax and everything else they did to stop it from reaching the justices. Bickell must have been operating under orders from higher up the food chain. The fact that he still has a job there is frightening.
Bickell has protection but the Constitution does not.
On Monday, the United States will wake up with no Constitution. It's all over for this Country as a Constitutional Republic. It's done as done can be. My case was strong, and Cort's case was virtually air tight. But factions of the Court didn't want these cases before them because now they didn't want the burden of history on them. Now they have no excuse.
[Ed The cases are not linked and I haven't read Berg's motion. I have no idea what will happen. Both Cort and I made the nbc issue number 1, but both of us plead in the alternative as well as to the SOS checking BC etc. I had to plead that point to cover all bases, but I don't believe it will lead to anything but a a solid BC for Obama. Berg and others like in the Keys case only plead as to the BC issue. I'm happy that Cort's case and my case took a broader approach, but I don't think any of these cases are going anywhere.]
The natural born citizen issue was squarely before them. All of the resulting damage and the blood of the Constitution is on their hands forever.
Cort’s case will be denied on Monday. And that will signal the very end of the nation’s unique Document.]
With this election, something is dying in America.
NahnCee,
True, sometimes He shouts. But I once had a wise man tell me that when you really want people to listen, speak very softly. I’ve certainly found this works with my kids. And He certainly understands this better than we do.
Doesn’t mean I don’t let loose every now and then. After all, I’m only human…
Cheers.
L3
Leo’s in the dumps today–
[Ed. Doesn't matter. It's too late. Your Constitution is gone. Wave goodbye to it. you'll never see its kind again. Ignorance is probably bliss at this point. You have no Supreme Court. There is no "United" States. The experiment is over. Ben Franklin said, "It's a Republic...if you can keep it." Well, we didn't. We lost it and it's gone never to return.]
[Ed. I’m sorry reader, but you are wrong. I have ABSOLUTELY NO FAITH IN OUR GOVERNMENT. It’s too late. Our Constitution is gone. Wave goodbye to it. You’ll never see its kind again. Votes are counted by touch screen… nobody will ever know whether they are voting or not. There is no Supreme Court. This experiment is done dusted and doomed.
from Natural Born Citizen blog
I’m with Nahn-cee. Give me the city (within reason)any day. I have always preferred the sound of gunfire to crickets. Just get a couple big dogs, iron on the doors, whatever weaponry seizes your fancy.
Another thing I’ve learned in a lifetime of living in factory towns and marginal neighborhoods, most of the property crime is across town where the real swag is. What are they going to get if they come in my house?
The dopes in the video are the kind of pretentious, self righteous know-nothings that drive me batty. They make sure they film themselves looking like utter jackasses for posterity. They’re like the white “Indians” you see at Native American festivals talking about their ancestors’ way of life when in reality they grew up in a Polish mill neighborhood in Cleveland. Fools one and all.
It’s what you are used to, I quess. I wouldn’t last two weeks in L.A.
NahnCee #86
NahnCee:
“Seriously though, wilderness living is *much* harder on women having to do laundry and food preparation and day-to-day cleaning, while Mr. Frontiersman just has to go out and shoot a deer every once in a while. I don’t know what kind of 21st Century appliances Mrs. Victor will have but I bet it’ll be hard to pop out for a dozen eggs and some milk when she’s whipping up a cake. (What kind of oven will she have to bake the cake in?)
I remember watching my grandmother doing laundry with a hand-cranked washing machine. I remember watching my mother canning tomatoes on a hot August day with a pressure cooker. Trying to do either of those things in the Canadian wilderness in freezing temperatures is not my idea of an idyllic existance.”
Me:
NahnCee, it’s time you returned your copy of Nanook of the North back to Blockbusters.
NahnCee:
“Secondly, it just seems like a cop-out. I can see heading for a wilderness retreat if the Big One falls and you’re trying to escape radiation. But to take your football and go home to Canada, ceding the game to the moonbats because they’re being too icky is lazy. Both mentally and physically. If you can’t out-perform an inferior moonbat specimen, then the least you can do is stick around and be just as icky back at them as they have been in the first place.”
Me:
Yeats wrote:
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
There is far too much passionate intensity out there, NahnCee. Are you listening?
I am 70 years old but I am not leaving the battle. I am going to do what people my age should be doing: extracting whatever wisdom I can from my life and passing it along to the next generation.
After getting off of the elevator at the 6th floor of the Al Gore Institute of Climatology, I noticed my mail slot was empty.
I need $70 million for my C02 storage experiment.
Picture a world where all of your green trees have died and are being ravaged by a huge infestation of termites – long black dead bodies laying on the ground with small movements caused by termites eating away at the rotting black tissue.
Picture a world where the ice caps have suddenly melted causing a 200 meter title wave to crash over Manhattan Island – just like the movie.
It’s not a pretty world or one that you would what to live in.
Please send a check for $70 million to Ledger at the Al Gore Institute of Climatology. Have a nice day.
@89
“With this election, something is dying in America.”
Warning: A rant follows.
programmer rants:
When I was musing earlier about possible brain damage from video games, etc., I realize I sounded kind of like a kook. I did not express my thought well, because, well…It is a complicated thought (for my trollish self, anyway). What I am pondering is that the human brain, is to a great extent, a computer, or more to my point, the computer models a human brain,… as well as it can be made to do so. Computers resemble human brains more and more because humans think, design, and build computers to extend the reach of the human mind and extend the range of human senses, to magnify the ability to store and retrieve information. However, in my opinion, for this very reason computers are not to be feared, as some sci-fi writers would have. Humans teach and condition the computer to do as they wish. (I choose to avoid discussing Windows Vista at this time).
How are human brains, human computers, if you will, taught and conditioned? In a primeval environment, they learn by observing nature, listening to (and in time, reading and studying) the accumulated knowledge of their elders. Survival, in a Darwinistic sense, chooses what programming is passed on to future humans. Tested algorithms using good information usually lead to successful outcomes.
It is not only the Moon that is a harsh mistress, as Heinlein wrote, but also the earth. In a primitive environment a single mistake can lead to the end of a genetic line. Reference to our current discussion, any one who has ever fallen a tree realizes that outdoor work is dangerous. In logging, farming, and other necessary endeavours, stupidity and even just simple mistakes are, or can be, capital offenses. The accumulated knowledge of how to survive and and multiply in a harsh environment is valuable programming.
So now, it seems, we have large numbers of people who are subjected to constant bombardment of false and foolish information. In a video game, kids learn that if they need to win, they just die over and over again until they get it right and go to the next level. Games, television shows, and movies beat the constant drum for solutions to problems that just don’t work in the real world. May the women commenters on this blog forgive me, but one of my pet peeves is the constant theme that women are the equal of men in a hand to hand barroom brawl (or some such). Men are generally stronger and faster than women and almost always hit a heck of a lot harder. Most every one knows this, but it has become one of those fictions that we are all forced to cough up when required. So, some young lady learns a martial art, achieves a black belt, goes somewhere dangerous, and learns the difference between a polite opponent bound by rules and political correctness, and a bar room brawler. Hell, I learned the difference the hard way and I’m a guy. My nose is still a tad crooked.
So my question resolves to simply: What effect is the cognitive dissonance between observed reality and politically correct falsehoods having on the programming of young brains? There is an old saying in the programming trade, “Garbage in, garbage out”. The human brain is a marvelous thing. But it must be programmed well. Truth, or the very best information we possess is required. And those truths need to be tested rigorously and constantly. Good critical thinking skill must be taught and absorbed. Anything else leads, in my opinion, to a form of mental illness.
Those poor lost souls, sitting in the drum circle, mourning and keening for loss of they know not what may be just the end result of faulty programming. Their brains have been damaged by constant bombardement with bad data and untested algorithms. So instead of being able to do something useful with their lives, they use up resources and clutter up the air with noise. Instead of becoming one with the forest and learning how to husband and harvest the valuable resources therein, benefitting others with their skills and in nonce, learning applied physics, applied chemistry, applied botany, and a whole other host of really neat stuff, they sit and whine.
Something is dying in America. I fear it is the ability of a lot of Americans to engage in critical thinking. They cannot discern what is real, truthful, and what isn’t and they have no idea how to do so if they even wanted to try. No wonder we have economic issues. These hippies and others are merely consumers and produce nothing.
viktor – I have to say that what you are describing is a 70-year-old who is afraid, and is retiring away from the fray lest you be mugged by a coked-up Mexican gangsta. Which is fine, and probably a suitable choice for good health for the rest of your life, but let’s not tart it up in mild murmurings about soul searching and blogging about god’s whispers.
(I also have to wonder just how young and tough the wife is that she’s hardy (hearty) enough to be your care-giver all by herself. But that’s her issue and if she wants to go there and do that, more power to her.)
I think mostly what I’m getting from your plans is a whiff of fright. And that’s so sad, because that’s how my parents were as they aged, too. I wonder if it’s avoidable.
three cheers for viktor silo. such a deft defense bespeaks a mind and spirit which combined with threescore and ten years of observation is surely most productively employed pen in hand in a place requiring vigor and offering repose –the conditions of literary creation. leave the street to those still building what may be worth writing someday.
have you seen Ledger’s corporate publicity photo, he’s chatting with another scientist outside the Al Gore Institute of Climatology.
“At ten, an animal; at twenty, a lunatic; at thirty, a failure; at forty, a fraud; at fifty, a criminal” And at sixty, I would add (since by that time one will have gone through all of this), one begins advising one’s friends; and at seventy (realizing that everything said has been misunderstood) one keeps quiet and is taken for a sage. “At eighty,” then said Confucius, “I knew my ground and stood firm.”
from Joseph Campbell
That habitat, Buddy, and a .30/30 Winchester, is all one needs out this way to make it, when the great cities burn and starve.
yep –the proper tools, Bob –as always, the given. to need one and not have it consigns one to remedial and thus very harsh natural selection: “Oops –goodbye!”
Bob, if you like Joseph Campbell you’ll like Jacob Bronowski.
@96 programmer, I have to disagree on your last point. They’re not doing nothing, they are educating the children. There may be plenty of high school students who don’t know the periodic table from the phone book, but I doubt there’s one of those who hasn’t managed to absorb the ‘fact’ that greedy oil companies are destroying the planet. This afternoon I was on the bus, where one can find among the advertising placards with poetry submitted by the citizenry – and what do I see but the following:
I dream about trees
Big trees
Small trees
Medium trees
They pull up their roots
And come to my house
Then they knock it down
Eat up my town
And all because
Everything in it
Is made out of trees
The author was six years old. Her teachers are probably telling her parents she’s wise beyond her years
one of my pet peeves is the constant theme that women are the equal of men in a hand to hand barroom brawl – Programmer
That’s a flying distraction from the real equivalence, which is measured in courage. That is evenly distributed between the sexes (or well, maybe not until the chest-thumpers have passed a basketball through their nostrils.)
Something is dying in America. I fear it is the ability of a lot of Americans to engage in critical thinking. – Programmer
I’ve been saying that forever – a long time at least. It’s not dead, but the hiatus is over-extended. Maybe with repetition …
Or a poem.
Or Myth.
re slade’s hiatus: a riddle, how is the NEA like the UAW?
1) both produce stagnant parking lots full of overpriced and rapidly depreciating units being obsoleted and devalued by superior performers from elsewhere.
…but that’s not the real riddle. the real riddle is, why are those two organizations able to keep doing that?
no, wrong again, the REAL riddle is “how long does political protection last?”
Answer “until the host organism dies”.
Slade,
A good catch about the real equivalence, courage. That is a fact, a truth! Any man who has watched his wife have their child learns what true courage in the face of pain is. In fact, my wife often says, when I have annoyed her sufficiently with my rants, that if birth were shared between men and women, we wouldn’t have a population problem.
marymcl,
What can I say. That is so sad in more ways than one. I feel for that little girl if she actually dreams those dreams.
AP PANIC: ‘Obama left with little time to curb global warming’…’cooling trend illustrates how fast the world is warming’…
by Seth Borenstein
—
Seth Borenstein’s Education:
Boston University – BS, Journalism, 1979 — 1983
Bexley High School – 1975 — 1979
Funny take on the environment by George Carlin on youtube
“George Carlin on Global Warming” warning: adult language.
It’s all good, Programmer – not a hill I stand on anymore. But a word of caution from Buddy’s buddy who may or may not be sane:
What is the catastrophic event that signals the [market] bottom? I suspect it will be World War III. A military outbreak may be months or years away. Before this outbreak begins, Europe must be detached from America. Already the process is underway, initiated by Moscow; and this process craves wary watching. America’s leaders are presently distracted. All eyes are on the economy. But today’s crisis is not merely economic. It is a strategic crisis as well.
Jeffrey Nyquist makes Nouriel “Dr. Doom” Roubini look … well, very young.
Not sure how I got here, did Buddy post this pic of him and his girl at UT?
…um.
Okay, first things first, I grew up in NC and, much to my annoyance, still live there.
That said: I’ve been to this forest.
It is a park. Joyce Kilmer something-something, and possibly one of the most boring parks in the state unless you get off on looking at really big trees & can’t afford to travel to where the really big ones are.
Only things threatening those trees is idiot environmentalists and disease…
slade –LOL –Roubini as Nouriel of Sunnybrook Farm. –yes, advise taking JRN in small doses (tho in fairness the quote is from late October before we had gotten more used to utter panic) –he really will get you wondering if we’re not just in danger at the margins but –deeper in. Read too much of him and you’ll start thinking about the world of Dec 06 1941. And other things you’ll wonder about –are the Boomers proof against a um, misplacing of the football?
doug, so you’re saying that sometimes you ARE sure of how you got someplace?
That’s being investigated, so I cannot comment on that.
maybe it’s a senate investigation: “ok, we the senate investigating committee wants to know why didn’t WE get Countrywide mortgages too?”
Gee Buddy, you don’t like my Yeats?
Ingraham has the hilarious sound of this great moment in the Senate:
Frank no ‘chick magnet’ but ‘stimulus’ suits him fine.
Frank was back at it on Monday, as he addressed the Office of Thrift Supervision’s National Housing Forum. Discussing what further action the government might take to jump-start the economy, he contrasted the semantic differences between “recovery” and “stimulus.”
“People say, ‘Would you rather recover or be stimulated?’ I think I’d rather be stimulated,” Frank said.
—
Check out Tatiana Boncompagni at the top of that page.
Some caller was just mentioning her on Miller’s show, but somesheimers is kicking in on the recall.
To be Frank, it’s Tatiana messin with my mind.
…er, NOT to be Frank.
can you imagine if barney’s Fannie was republican runs –i mean run? Why the fold in the NYTimes would be nothing but a gluteal cleft from now until they could say of the republicans “we wrecked ‘um, we wreckedum real good”.
oh yes –i agreed with you on the Yeats, Mongoose, how it speaks to today. i meant to answer but it’s hard to characterize the modernists, ok the WW1 poets, as we now would expect that all their optimism or hope must necessarily have died in those trenches (any poet retaining lightness and romance wasn’t talking about the only real issue). Yeats’ apocalyptic sensibility is prophetic yet, here now almost a century later (The Second Coming he wrote at the close of WW1), we are still here and in at least good enough order to still feel we have a say in what happens tomorrow. i mean, couldn’t we say that WW2 took away the curse that he saw in ‘second coming’? nah, who am i kidding –we’re still in the same war –the same enemy –the nazis. pay no attention i have commenced the babble part of the day.
Yeats sits firmly on this earth and sqaurely in his time but looks backwards and forward across great distances. Thus he stands out of time – think Brahms or late Beethoven. Vistas so wide they are timeless, universal.
He was talking about a much larger, long lived sickness of the soul, of a cataclysm for what he loved: The Nobility of the West’s creative spirit as manifested by the individual and the traditions and institutions he cleaves toward.
WW1 and ww2 were challenges along the way, not the destination. We may be headed toward that end now.
He need not be seen as completely pessimistic, but he is a fatalist and, oddly, a realist — a spiritual realist. He was (is?) sounding an alarm and respects us enough to explain to us why he does so.
Joyce Kilmer. 1886–1918
119. Trees
I THINK that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day, 5
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain. 10
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
Gosh, all I can say is I dimly saw the connection between Charles Schulz’s work, his life, and his experiencing the loss of his beloved mother while he was an 18yr old GI in Europe in WWII.
Guess I won’t be publishing anything about those deep thoughts.
Glad I got to see his beautiful family @ his funeral on the Internets, tho.
Psalm 19
A psalm of David.
1 The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
2 Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge.
3 There is no speech or language
where their voice is not heard. [a]
4 Their voice [b] goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun,
5 which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion,
like a champion rejoicing to run his course.
6 It rises at one end of the heavens
and makes its circuit to the other;
nothing is hidden from its heat.
Isaiah 6
Isaiah’s Commission
1 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. 3 And they were calling to one another:
“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty;
the whole earth is full of his glory.”
4 At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.
5 “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.”
6 Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”
Romans 8
Future Glory
18I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21that[i] the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.
22We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? 25But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
26In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. 27And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will.
(tried to stretch the gamut there, mixing Peanuts ‘n Poetry)
Tell me how green Kuai is, Charles!
…I’ve never been there, but they always get about twice as many storms as us.
“Kauai”
I saved the bookmark for this post in my “humor” folder! Great stuff! Thanks!
Gyres, Double Gyres, Cones
George Carlin on Global Warming
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljNDbKpusT0
I was searching for the movie clip, about the old hill lady Bemoaning that she hadn’t seen the woods burn in an unhealthy long time, and wished to see the woods a fire once more before she passed on.
Alas I couldn’t locate it, maybe my brain is playing tricks with me, dreaming ‘ma Job’ mouthing a WV oral history. But I do know this, that U tuber is listed in the comedy section for good reason. The same reason the second U tuba ought to have been put in the comedy section. Pure theater.
More Yeats (blame mongoose and the 6-year-old poet I read on the bus) – from “The Two Trees”
Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while;
For there a fatal image grows
That the stormy night receives,
Roots half-hidden under snows,
Broken boughs and barren leaves.
For all things turn to barrenness
In the dim glass the demons hold,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in times of old…
My Dad (adoptive father) was one of Pershing’s doughboys. One of his books
was “Rhymes Of A Red Cross Man” by Robert W. Service.
A good look at the trenches of WWI—–
and why the human race shall endure in spite of (fill in the blank).
My Mother gave away a lot of books when she moved to a smaller house while I was away.
Unfortunately, that was one of them.
And on a lighter note for you Canucks: In the Eighth Grade we in West Texas did learn about
“The Cremation of Sam McGee”.
Yeats is superb. Great quotes!
Didn’t he believe that the world went in cycles of 2,000 years and that the cycle of reasoning and rational thought (science?) inaugurated by the birth of Christ was coming to a close, to be succeeded by an age of superstition and magic? I think his poem “The Second Coming” speaks to this. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,…”
My Mother gave away a lot of books when she moved to a smaller house while I was away. Unfortunately, that was one of them.
that’s a freaking tragedy, even if it is in a teacup.
jeez, i just read marymcl’s Yeats snip slowly a second time –he’s RIGHT –”only gaze a little while” because to linger there is to see too much –even into our own selves, thru the human being down down into the lusting carnal cannibal wolfman at the core. Three cheers for entertainment & diversion –and at last the meaning of the celebrity culture comes a little more clear –they’re our modern Olympus dwellers. As the Hellenes related to their gods –models of human beings, but ever so much farther from the Thing Inside.
So Yeats joins my short list of Christ-like sacrificial beings –thinking about death deeply enough that he can warn us that deep down we already sense that it is inside us (even if vaporized by a trench mortar, death comes from the inside) trying, or waiting, to escape –and that we best contain it by not thinking too much about it –lest it steal a march on our spark.
need levity, here’s an attempt:
There was an old poet named Yeats
who wrote of humanity’s fates
he said that the devils
come not through our revels
but by bi millennial dates
I can’t stop laughing. That was a hilarious hippie video. I’m sending it to all my friends.
Buddy:
When the young Kant
Was told to kiss his aunt,
He obeyed the Categorical Must,
But only just.
Auden.
haw –
but he could’ve let dread
mess around with his head
and emmanuel kant
might’ve said to his aunt
“i know that i must but i can’t”
Excellent, Buddy.
why thanks, Bob –limericks are deadly –write one and everything else for hours tries to slip into the form –takes resistance. the limerick writer, his stance, must be to offer resistance –awwww daaamn –stoppit
hmm reminds me of short list on bathroom walls at college.
Genghis Kahn
Immanuel Kant
yuk yuk –”Genghis Kahn”
“Oy, an empire i should built ya tink?”
(Charles, long ago i did it too, same way, and Jamie Irons made a similar joke at my expense –so you’ll probably get revenge someday too)
From trees to Yeats – Kudos to PRog and Bud – Occurs to me some of ya’ll might try GWS Trow’s THE HARVARD BLACK ROCK FORREST – a 1984 New Yorker piece – republished by University of Iowa Press, 2004. 109 pp. Sightline Books: The Iowa Series in Literary Nonfiction;. $14.95 paper. From a short review…
George Trow’s essay is reprinted here as part of the Iowa Series of Literary Nonfiction, and most certainly because of the profound influence it must have had on contemporary decision makers charged with the stewardship of a neglected legacy. When first published, it inspired the permanent protection of the three-thousand-acre forest bequeathed to Harvard in 1949. There is a richness in this writing that comes from weaving threads of science—of research and teaching—with threads from the history of resource exploitation, and even the threads of university governance—of gifts made and legacies honored. Every student of the history of conservation should read it. Twice.
Apologzie for cliche-density above but he’s right re re-reading Trow’s FOREST. And I say that as a city-man who had no deep interest in “the hsitory of conservation” – PS Reviewer fails to underscore that Trow “inspired” Harvard U to live up to the terms of the original bequest by (gently) excoriating the Pres of the U. who was considering selling the Forest (which is about 30 miles from NYC)…
The whackjobs are either going to finish off this country OR we are going to stop them before they finish the job and finish THEM off, permanently.
Dave,
Look a here
, the entire thing, (“Rhymes of a Red Cross Man”) on line for you.
A pleasure to be of “Service”.