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 17 Feb 2006 @ 11:55
The wonderful thing about Zen practice is that you get to do it whether you like it or not.
---Zen saying
When we are not sure, we are alive.
---Graham Greene
I lay on the bowsprit, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight towering above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment lost myself---actually lost my life. I was set free...dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm and the high dim-starred sky....I belonged within a unity and joy to life itself.
---Eugene O'Neill
I do not want to talk about the hunting weekend. As Joel Achenbach says the incident already has had more coverage than the landing at Normandy. What interests me are the final moments of the Britt Hume interview Wednesday on SweetMother Fox:
Q On another subject, court filings have indicated that Scooter Libby has suggested that his superiors -- unidentified -- authorized the release of some classified information. What do you know about that?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's nothing I can talk about, Brit. This is an issue that's been under investigation for a couple of years. I've cooperated fully, including being interviewed, as well, by a special prosecutor. All of it is now going to trial. Scooter is entitled to the presumption of innocence. He's a great guy. I've worked with him for a long time, have enormous regard for him. I may well be called as a witness at some point in the case and it's, therefore, inappropriate for me to comment on any facet of the case.
Q Let me ask you another question. Is it your view that a Vice President has the authority to declassify information?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: There is an executive order to that effect.
Q There is.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes.
Q Have you done it?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I've certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions. The executive order --
Q You ever done it unilaterally?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't want to get into that. There is an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously focuses first and foremost on the President, but also includes the Vice President.
[link]
Fortunately Pete Yost, of the Associated Press, picked up on the comment yesterday...but I hardly notice the nation reeling from this announcement. Here's his account...but stick with me: I've got more questions about this~~~ [link] More >
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 16 Dec 2005 @ 10:36
When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
---George Bernard Shaw
Searching for words, hunting for phrases, when will it end?
Esteeming knowledge and gathering information only maddens the spirit.
Just entrust yourself to your own nature, empty and illuminating---
Beyond this, I have nothing to teach.
---Bankei
Dying cricket,
His song so full
of life.
---Basho
Mary Hufford took this photograph of mountain top removal. This and others are at the Library of Congress site Tending the Commons: Folklife and Landscape in Southern West Virginia. [link]
One of the first questions people ask when they move to a mining area of the Appalachians---or even just drive through mountains of West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Ohio---is "What's happening over there?" They're referring to a startling bare spot on the horizon, out in the middle of nowhere, no towns around, maybe a big crane thing sticking up. What you're seeing is called strip mining or mountain top removal, and the little part of the machine inadvertently visible from the highway might be something like The Big Muskie, which was the largest mobile land machine in the world [link] . It would take a stack of books to describe the history of coal mining and its effect on the lives of the people here---and certainly other regions of the Earth too---but did you know that history continues? Mining goes on here, providing jobs and taking them away, with mountain folks wrestling the same issues they've had to deal with for 200 years. More >
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 2 Nov 2005 @ 10:35
In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. You may depend on it, that poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.
---Henry David Thoreau
Pride flees from the man who penetrates into the self as the light of a campfire before the rays of the sun.
---Zen saying
You should know that no one can hold the mind by himself, if it not be held by the Spirit. For it cannot be held, not because of its mobile nature but because, through neglect, it has acquired the habit of turning and wandering hither and thither....A mind thus inclined and withdrawn from God is led captive everywhere.
---St. Gregory Of Sinai
An Iraqi man cries over the bodies of his children in Hillah, some 110km south of Baghdad, after US troops bombed a residential quarter of the town. (Photograph:Reuters, April 1, 2003)
How many civilians, the elderly, women, children, male noncombatants, have died in the War on Iraq? It used to be that a casualty count was important in warfare. It's how you knew you were winning. Of course that's when soldiers would gather on a field of battle, face each other, march up with some fancy footwork and football plays, and shoot it out. Civilians got killed in the seige of a castle or city...or mass execution later...but it's been fewer than a hundred years of glorious history since we've improved ourselves enough to provide access to air attack. More >
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 26 Sep 2005 @ 12:24
The farther you enter into the truth, the deeper it is.
---Bankei
To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.
---Oscar Wilde
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
---Rene Descartes
Some 30 years ago, I took my bag of teaching out of public and private schools and into a factory. The name of the company was TRW, which is about as nondescript as you can get, but I soon learned the initials represented the first letter of the last names of the 3 men who founded it. I also learned the 2 factories in our town, which were the last remaining major industry there, were only a toenail clipping in the vast global body of this corporation, headquartered in Cleveland. I decided TRW must stand for The Real World. At one point I even thought those guys could control the weather. Ho ho, clearly I was out of my mind.
Anyway, when I took the job I had a more naive view of manufacturing America. The place had a tutoring and education program especially for returned Viet Nam vets, who were trying to get back on their feet to support that wife and kid(s) that had come along during our "police action" over there. Most of these guys had put a payment down on a house, were settling in to a secure job with high pay and lots of benefits, and needed a program to improve some skills they had that might move them up into management. I thought this was a wonderful way for a corporation to share its wealth with the community of workers upon which it depends. More >
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 20 Jul 2005 @ 11:15
Every day you must say to yourself, "Today I am going to begin."
---Jean Pierre De Caussade SJ
One day a nonbeliever visited the Buddha, and said: "Question with or without words?" The Buddha remained silent. After some time, the nonbeliever bowed deeply before the Buddha and said, "Because of your great compassion, I am relieved of all illusion and see the Buddhist Way clearly before me." He bowed again and left.
Afterward, Ananda questioned the Buddha: "What did the nonbeliever find that caused him to see the Way?"
The Buddha replied, "A good horse is one that runs merely on seeing the shadow of a whip."
---Zen story
We now know that the moon is demonstrably not there when nobody looks.
---N. David Mermin
A Late Afternoon in Summer - (Thomas Moran - 1909)
Last night my wife sent out an article by David Corn, who is a writer I like and whose stuff for The Nation sometimes shows up at Yahoo News. Mr. Corn was lamenting about the right-wing disinformation machine and, like many folks I guess, it made me wonder what will become of Rove/Libby and the Plame case now that John Roberts is here. Some analysts this morning are worried the President announced his Supreme Court nomination on primetime television in order to push his administration's problems right out of the public's mind. More >
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