Bumper Sticker installment for Labor Day
I ' m going to skip ahead on bumper sticker to match the occasion: " Capitalism lifts people up from poverty. "As usual, I ' m not sure exactly what the implication of this is supposed to be. In grand historical terms, it is true that human material well being has increased enormously since the advent of industrial capitalism in the 19th Century. That is the economic system that converted fossil fuel into the astonishing technological development and material infrastructure that distinguishes the modern world from all of previous history. But it doesn ' t seem to be much of a political point. Nobody on the left ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - September 4, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: The Comfort Hits Absolute Zero
MacLeish in J.B. casts Bildad as a priest, which seems about right. He tells Job, whose 10 children have just been murdered by God on a bet with Satan, that they must have done something to deserve it; and that Job himself must deserve his own fate. He insists that God is just. (BTW he is not called Yahweh in the Book of Job, but the Almighty, as reflected in the translation.) If you ' ve been reading the Bible so far, you know that isn ' t true. What a thing to say to someone whose children have all just been killed. 8 Then Bildad the Shuhite replied:2 “How long will you say such things? &...
Source: Stayin' Alive - September 3, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The Bumper Sticker Problem
I haven ' t posted the past couple of days because my mother died on Wednesday. Not a tragedy really, it was overdue, but I had to deal with various issues. Next item: Parents determine the education of their children.The bullet list I ' m working through can be thought of as bumper sticker slogans. Yes, they ' re short and simple but that doesn ' t mean anybody can understand them. On the contrary, they may seem superficially plausible or even convincing, but it turns out that they evade the facts, or complexity of a problem. They may contain an unstated assumption that turns out to be false, or make sense only in an...
Source: Stayin' Alive - September 2, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: The human condition
In Chapter 7, Job doesn ' t exactly curse God, but he certainly complains about the pain and injustice of existence. I think this is the essence of the book because we never do get a satisfactory answer. God just doesn ' t have to be accountable for anything, he ' s mighty and inscrutable and we ' re just dirt. Job wants an explanation. We ' ll see if he gets one.7 “Do not mortals have hard service on earth? Are not their days like those of hired laborers?2 Like a slave longing for the evening shadows, or a hired laborer waiting to be paid,3 so I have bee...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 30, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Ignorance is Strength
The next item on our bullet list: " An open border is no border. " Taken as a hypothetical, this would be half true. When you cross an open border, you enter a new jurisdiction and become subject to its laws. The border between Maryland and Virginia is open, but it ' s still a border. The same goes for the national borders within the European Union. To be sure, that has caused some friction, but it is obviously incorrect to say that they aren ' t borders at all. Keeping people out is not the only function of a border.That said, what this is supposed to mean is that keeping people out is indeed the principal func...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 29, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Gibberish
Next on the bullet list: " Reverse racism is racism. " These are just words, until you define exactly what you mean. If you just mean that an ideology that treats a normally privileged caste as inferior is racism, as is an ideology that endorses a traditional hierarchy, sure. If someone were to claim that people of European descent are somehow inferior humans, and ought to be deprived of educational an economic opportunity and even the right to vote, that would be racism. However, that is obviously not what people are trying to assert, since nobody would argue with them.What they are really saying is that frankly ackn...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 28, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Despair
Job responds with what amounts to despair. He wants to die, and he wants his despair to be respected. This soliloquy, and especially the second half of it in the next chapter, reminds me of Hamlet ' s " Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt " soliloquy, the somewhat lesser known one. But as a literary critic, I would say that Shakespeare does it much more efficiently. This runs through an excessive amount of imagery to make a pretty simple statement.6 Then Job replied:2 “If only my anguish could be weighed and all my misery be placed on the scales!3 It would surely outweigh th...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 27, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The most atrocious crime in all of history
The next point on the bullet list is " Human flourishing requires fossil fuels. " I ' m not going to spend time arguing about the science, which is absolutely settled and has been for decades. In fact the pace and consequences of climate change have been at the upper bound of previous estimates. The disaster is already upon us, which is obvious to anyone. And no, all those dead and homeless people aren ' t flourishing. Fortunately, the cost of sustainable energy is already lower than the cost of fossil fuels. We do need to make major investments in energy distribution and storage, and electrification. Inste...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 26, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sex, sexuality and gender
The second bullet point is " There are two genders. " In the vernacular, people may use gender and sex (in the sense of whether an entity is male or female) interchangeably, but in scientific language they do not mean the same thing. Sex is a biological term, gender a sociological term.* Biologically, most metazoans mostly come in two sexes, designated male and female, distinguished by their role in reproduction. They both contribute half the genetic material to offspring, but the gamete -- the cell that combines the genes of the two parents and then divides and redivides to produce the new animal -- remains with the ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 25, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
God bothering
I thought our commenter ' s list of reasons, via Vivek Ramaswany, why people would want to vote Republican was interesting, and possibly largely correct -- or at least it reflects the surface of how Republican candidates and pundits talk, although I think it probably doesn ' t represent all of the underlying reasons. Anyway, it gives me an agenda, so I ' m going to take the assertions one by one, starting with this one:God is real. While there is no doubt that religion, or professed religion, is a motivator for Republican voters, there obviously has to be a lot more to it than just the assertion that God is real. Joe Biden...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 24, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: The comfort keeps getting colder
Eliphaz continues to yammer on, now at great length riffing on how God is all powerful, and recommending prayer. The way I read this is basically " Beg for succor, and you might get it. " Of course that doesn ' t explain anything - - the whole premise is that God (here called The Almighty) is capricious.5 “Call if you will, but who will answer you? To which of the holy ones will you turn?2 Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple.3 I myself have seen a fool taking root, but suddenly his house was cursed.4 His children are f...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 23, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
A promise I won't make
Running for First Selectman makes me think about some issues a bit differently. Our town has fiscal problems, because we have a very small commercial tax base, and few kids in school which means our per pupil cost is high. (We still need a principal and a custodian and a building, and class sizes are small.) I might be able to do something about that. At least I have ideas and I ' ll campaign on them.But one of the biggest complaints people have is that the power goes out very frequently, and it usually takes a long time to get it restored. I finally broke down and got a standby generator, but they ' re expensive and this ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 22, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
A couple of thoughts
I presume my Friday post was put behind the wall of protection because it contained a naughty word, but I must say I ' ve used naughty words before without that happening. This seems to be a sign of the times. Previously I had mused about the cult of Trumpism, and I got a comment to the effect that people turned to Trump because they had lost faith in government after being lied to repeatedly over the years. Since Trump never says a single word that isn ' t a lie, that seemed like a strange argument so I asked for examples and the ones I got were so ridiculous I couldn ' t publish them. They even included examples of ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 20, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Cold Comfort
I don ' t publish comments that are ridiculous. It ' s that simple. I ' m trying to keep the discourse here at least reasonably reality based.Now we hear from the three comforters. In the play J.B., MacLeish makes Eliphaz a psychiatrist, Zophar a priest, and Bildad a communist. In other words he translates the comforters into contemporary discourse, but just as in the original, their attempts at comforting Job are pretty much gibberish and no help at all. Here in the original Eliphaz basically says that all people are miserable sinners, no-one is innocent, Job must have done something to earn his fate. Obviously this makes...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 20, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Five alarms
The U.S. corporate media have extensively covered the Maui wildfire, they have mentioned the fires in the Northwest Territories and particularly Yellowknife, but there are immense fires burning all around the northern hemisphere that they barely mention. That they areignoring the fires in British Columbia seems particularly strange, since the province borders the U.S. and areas of large population are threatened. There is also amassive fire on Tenerife, andfires on the Spanish mainland.The earth has changed, and the change is building on itself and accelerating. We can ' t stop it but we absolutely must slow it down,...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 18, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
