Liz King, the senior program director for education at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said: "She thinks the guidance should reflect recent research showing police in schools don’t reduce gun violence but do increase suspensions, expulsion and arrests of students — especially for Black students."
Lying. I hoped that maybe I'd learn something, maybe even something counterintuitive. But no.
In their central concerns I see the Puritans in the same stream as the ascetics and contemplatives of the Middle Ages. They shared both in the concern for discipline and in the concern for prayer which the latter had. True, the Puritans did not espouse celibacy or the cloistered life. However, they stressed sexual purity and, in regard to possessions, they called for frugality. They tried to get people who did not live in monasteries to live with the dedication of monks. Above all, they wanted contemplatives. Richard Baxter’s Saints’ Everlasting Rest is a Puritan treatise on meditation. It has much in common with the exercises taught in the contemplative tradition. Despite the avowedly anti-Catholic sentiment of the Puritans, it sounds much like Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises in its use of imagination on scriptures.
I'd bet they'd have been shocked by the comparison.
Back in '74 a cohort of MK's were brought to Richmond for a get-together, survey, and trip to Colonial Williamsburg. One of the things the Board tried to do was make sure the missionaries didn't have to worry about their children, so they were checking up on how we were doing on our return to the States and giving us a little advice on integrating into US culture--all of which I quickly forgot.
The trip to Williamsburg was interesting and fun. I made the acquaintance of a very attractive young woman, and we toured together for the afternoon. No, I didn't see her again after that Saturday afternoon, and I don't remember her name, but "Come Saturday Morning" played in my head that day and for long afterwards.
I'd noticed for years that women could be fascinating, but it hadn't occurred to me until that afternoon that I could be fascinating in return.
It turns out fascination is just the start.
We've good composers--everybody knows John Williams, and there are plenty of others writing in classical styles, but they generally write for movies or play--and probably ads too. Not for concerts. I've not found much recent concert classical music to be memorable, even when it isn't unpleasant.
A review of The War on Music finds the book's thesis inadequate (postwar suppression of music the Nazi's liked and things they disliked), but its critique accurate:About one thing, though, he is absolutely right. He writes with derision about the “trinity” of postwar music: the donor (usually the government), the critic (not infrequently an idiot) and the institution (the university that employs the composer, the orchestra that commissions his music). It’s a nice arrangement, Mr. Mauceri remarks, but it “leaves out something quite significant: the audience.”
Wright has a somewhat polemical attempt to understand why recent efforts in books and movies have often been dull. Painting and sculpture have been famously weird for decades, and "performance art" seems to delight in nonsense and chaos. An old joke says that "Modern art is what we got when painters quit painting women and decided they had a better idea."
Francis Schaeffer suspected that the modern world slowly came unmoored from Christianity, from tradition, and finally from reason, with the disconnect starting with the more rarified disciplines (philosophy) and working its way out through the rest of culture.
It's hard to see how to maintain a connection to tradition and roles when you're hooked on novelty. After a while novelty-hunger corrodes everything else: nothing else matters as much.
Hat tip to Maggie's Farm
So, before we have to head off to music rehersal for the morning service, the father reseats the step and screws a temporary reinforcement in place.
The old carpet on the steps concealed a flaw that the home inspector missed 28 years ago: the free-standing stringer is splayed slightly at the bottom. Lower steps just barely fit in the slots, and are mostly held in place by the nails.
UPDATE: the carpet is held in place with over 55 staples per tread, each 1 1/2 inch long. In order to get the fresh support to be wood-to-wood, the carpet has to come off, and yanking those staples raises blisters.
His adventures and Knivet's are included with editor's comments. Names are not necessarily the same as modern names--for example Sierra Leone is probably not the modern country.
Granted, captives aren't always perfectly accurate witnesses (Knivet claims to have been places he probably wasn't), but I grant witnesses on the scene a bit more credibility than commenters centuries later.
Battell's group are not paladins:
We found a village of negroes, which are sent from San Tome, for the Portugals of San Tome do use, when their slaves be sick or weak, to send them thither to get their strength again. For the islands are very fruitful, and though there be no fresh water, yet they maintain themselves with the wine of the palm-trees. Having refreshed ourselves with the fruit of this island, we burned the village.
Granted, this might have been revenge against the San Tome folk, but then it would seem to miss the mark a bit.
In search of trade, he found himself captive (although a useful one) to the Gagas, when his Portugese captors abandoned him. ("Adventures" is a better description than "Travels".)
The women are very fruitful, but they enjoy none of their children: for as soon as the woman is delivered of her child, it is presently buried quick [alive], so that there is not one child brought up in all this generation. But when they take any town they keep the boys and girls of thirteen or fourteen years of age as their own children. But the men and women they kill and eat. These little boys they train up in the wars, and hang a collar about their necks for a disgrace, which is never taken off till he proveth himself a man, and bring his enemy’s head to the General: and then it is taken off and he is a freeman, and is called Gonso or soldier. This maketh them all desperate, and forward to be free, and counted men: and so they do increase. In all this camp there were but twelve natural Gagas that were their captains, and fourteen or fifteen women. For it is more than fifty years since they came from Serra de Lion, which was their native country. But their camp is sixteen thousand strong, and sometimes more.
Later visitors suggest this may have only been the children born inside the war camp--but maybe customs changed.
He succeeds in escaping, but the Portugese wind up with him again.
Here they made me serve like a drudge, for both day and night I carried some stone and lime to make a fort.It lyeth right under the Line, and standeth in a bottom in the middle of four hills, and about are many fogges [bogs] but not one river. It is the unfirmest country under the sun. Here the Portugals die like chickens. You shall see men in the morning very lusty, and within two hours dead. Others, that if they but wet their legs(*), presently they swell bigger than their middles; others break in the sides with a draught of water. O, if you did know the intolerable heat of the country, you would think yourself better a thousand times dead, than to live there a week. There you shall see poor soldiers lie in troops, gaping like camelians [camels?] for a puff of wind.
Here lived I three months, not as the Portugals did, taking of physick, and every week letting of blood and keeping close in their houses when they had any rain, observing hours, and times to go abroad morning and evening, and never to eat but at such and such times. I was glad when I had got anything at morning, noon, or night; I thank God I did work all day from morning till night; had it been rain or never so great heat, I had always my health as well as I have in England.
Perhaps the Portugals' approach to medicine left somewhat to be desired.
"Of all these friars the Italian Capuchins alone appear to have done good work; ... Many of the other friars seem to have been men whom their superiors in Europe were glad to part with; and the same may be said with reference to the secular clergy."
UPDATE (*): elephantiasis? but that's mosquito-borne. But there are snail-borne diseases, not all classified.
But somebody has to "bend tin", process the food to make it edible, package and move things--where do those people live? Don't tell me robots will do it all, and offshoring just shifts the problem somewhere else and generates a new one--unemployment. Where do the factories go? Where is the space for the children?
Fixing the crime problems are a sine qua non for restoring a city, and fixing the corruption would be an excellent follow-up, but the systemic problems of space (where do you put something when everything is already full?) and inhuman scales need attention too.
It is not enough for a popular monument to be artistic, like a black charcoal sketch; it must be striking; it must in the highest sense of the word be sensational; it must stand for humanity; it must speak for us to the stars; it must declare in the face of all the heavens that when the longest and blackest catalog has been made of all our crimes and follies there are some things of which we men are not ashamed.
If the smell of a little nard can last a couple of days, I suppose the smell from a pound's worth could have lasted 6 days, from Mary's anointing to Passover.
Of course Jesus wasn't announcing salvation, but accomplishing it--with His feet anointed. I wonder who noticed.
"They begin with the obvious truth that the root of the problem of school shootings cannot be guns, or mental health, or bullies, since school shootings are a distinctly American problem. Every country has enough guns, and nuts, and bullies." ... "Since Americans are unusually prone to run amuck, there must be something about America that drives people especially crazy."
No.
Something about our culture shapes the craziness into this form. The language of our imaginations is the language of our memes and movies and songs: "Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws." I doubt that it's a single aspect that shapes it, and that makes it extremely hard to pin down--you could make an argument for almost anything. Superhero movies--the hero has to keep himself secret, but he's really a superpowerful being who could take revenge if he was pushed too far. Or our apotheosizing of children--if they're so much smarter than the adults, they're the ones really responsible for my situation. Etc.
It probably would help to Damnatio memoriae the culprits. And combat the notion that "the measure of their violence ... is ... the measure of the injustice done to them". Is there a good reason not to start?
These things wouldn't be universally popular: people like to know whodunnit, and the Internet is forever (sort of). Some enjoy special power through their disproportionate reaction to subjective slights and stand to lose that power if we start honoring measured response and self-control.
Hardest of all, these changes are things we have to do ourselves and in ourselves.
School shootings are, outside of gang battles, rather rare. It's hard to understand why we have them at all; hence the arguments. The "gang" fights, on the other hand are getting more common in the local schools. But that's a touchier subject, so the noise is about the rare and dramatic problem.
"In October 2018, the public interest groups petitioned the Commission to list four species of bumble bee as endangered species" They did. "In September 2019, petitioners challenged the Commission’s decision": the Fish and Game Commission of California had no authority to do so.
They didn't claim that the bee wasn't endangered--just that the Commission had no statutory authority to include it.
"Prior to 1969, section 45 defined fish as “wild fish, mollusks, or crustaceans, including any part, spawn or ova thereof.” In 1969, the Legislature amended section 45 via Senate Bill No. 858 (1969 Reg. Sess.) (Senate Bill 858) to add invertebrates and amphibia to the definition of fish." Of course this was accompanied by the note that "[t]he expanded definition of fish will permit closer control and monitoring of the harvest of species such as starfish, sea urchins, sponges and worms, and the . . . "
Later regulation changes added some specific species: 3 butterflies and a snail. Their DNR pled that
"The [1970 Legislation] defined species as birds, mammals, fishes, reptiles, and amphibians. Although, technically, these terms name only vertebrate classes of animals, it was the Department’s understanding of legislative intent that the [1970 Legislation] was to extend to invertebrates as well. It was not believed necessary to include the term invertebrate in the original legislation because ‘fish’ is defined in the Fish and Game Code to include ‘invertebrates’
Page 19 mentions a "rule against surplusage", "which provides courts should “avoid, if possible, interpretations that render a part of a statute surplusage." I'd not heard of it before, but that's a good principle. If a statute spells out details, don't expand one of them to encompass others--the statute presumably has a reason for the breakdown. And if there is no good reason (contempt for congress seems mandatory sometimes), why am I to believe the judge is any smarter?
The ruling promptly ignores this on page 27, where the separate addition of the bristle snail to the list is taken to prove that the definition of "fish" is already expansive.
Never mind whether some organization needs to keep track of endangered species in California. That's a different question. As constituted, the Fish and Game Commission didn't have the authority to monitor "non-watery" things besides game. The Third Appellate Court seems to go at the issue backwards--they want a result and are willing to expand definitions beyond the law to get it. It seems like an innocuous goal, but HumptyDumpty means are dangerous. And in this case, also ridiculous.
SciTechDaily has a story "A new method of lie detection shows that lie-tellers who are made to multitask while being interviewed are easier to detect.". This is probably not a surprise. If I may quote a part of the article:
You find a lawyer whose first words are "That will be a $5,000 retainer and please, do have a seat, and what was your name again?".
...
Your lawyer gets to go first. He asks your opponent the standard "name, rank, and serial number" questions and then after peering solemnly over his lawyerly half-glasses, says "Mr X, when you were 3 years old and you got a handful of feces from your diapers and you smeared it all over your little sister, did you enjoy licking your fingers afterwards?" (His - your - Private Investigator discovered that tidbit - for more bucks) Your opponent will say "I'm not going to answer such insulting questions".
Your lawyer will slide his glasses down to the tip of his nose, peer over them and say to opposing counsel, "Counselor, please instruct your client to answer the question". He'll do so. If your opponent still refuses to answer, the attorneys will call each other names (they have drinks together afterwards - it's just a game) and maybe they'll pull out the speakerphone (all lawyers have speakerphones) and call a judge who will decide whether or not your opponent has to tell whether or not he likes the taste of crap. This will go on for a couple of days. Then your lawyer will do the same thing to the other guy's expert witnesses and any other witnesses they've slated to testify. And then the tables turn and you get it ALL back. Except that the other lawyer is now play-pissed at YOU (never at his drinking-buddy) so HE asks YOU if the crap stuck to YOUR teeth!
A couple of days later, you have a pile of transcripts that are big enough to use as a printer stand along with a court reporter's bill that is strictly COD. THEY know how the system works too. You and your attorney sit down (you know the old $5k line by heart by now.) and do a post-mortem of the transcripts. You then realize why lawyers ask you about the taste of crap - it serves as a diversion to make you drop your guard for when they ask the real questions. The thought "Did I REALLY say that?" recurs over and over. You spend a LOT of time trying to figure out damage control.
UPDATE: Douglas2 found the link, in the comments.
They fortified two of their towns, and some points along the causeways. Maybe outsiders, or maybe they had a history of civil war? Look at the lidar image, and imagine where wooden structures might go. People don't usually live inside fortified areas much of the time--it's crowded and unsanitary. I'm guessing that there'd have been wooden houses not far from the causeways. The image is from the above ArsTechnica article:
The group in question seems to have started going sometime around 500AD, and abandoned things about 1400AD--pre-Columbus=pre-known-epidemics. Climate change, perhaps? "This'll only last a century or so"--but technology can vanish in a generation.
The Amazonian civilizations made "geoglyphs", which were supposedly for ceremonial uses. "The count is three and two, two men on, ... and he calls time."
This is from Nature: article "articles/s41467-018-03510-7"
Unfortunately thorough excavation and analysis will probably take decades, but it should be fun to see what we learn in the meantime. I assume there was some trade across the Andes, and it looks like feathers (The influence of Amazonia on state formation in the ancient Andes It is argued that Arawak expansion in the Amazonian lowlands, completed by c. AD 500, was a prerequisite development for stimulating the rise of Andean highland empires, which were heavily dependent upon imported prestige Amazonian feathers.) might have been an important item. I wonder if it was easier to trade with the Aztecs and their precursors.
