Regular readers of this blog know that I have a habit of looking at issues that We the People blame on Them (you know who “They” are) and suggesting that “They” are the ones that you – and I – shave with every morning.

That’s probably how come there are so few of you regular readers. And there will probably be even fewer of you after this post. But I’ll risk it. Because Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground website (I’ve mentioned him here before) has written, I think, the second most important bit of Internet information on human interaction with planet Earth that there is.

(This is number 1. It’s a video series, it’s long, and it’s a fairly standard university-style lecture without fancy bells or whistles. But watch it, all eight parts, and pay attention. It’s every bit as true today as when it was first presented, a decade ago. Do not view the comments unless you have a hard head and a strong stomach – they are prima facie evidence that our species deserves nothing more than to go straight to Hell, without passing “Go”, without collecting $200.)

Masters writes, in his blog entry, which is about equal parts book review and his own distilled scientific judgment, about “manufactured doubt” – the industry that spreads disinformation about scientific evidence, when that evidence threatens the profitability of corporations whose products put humanity at risk. He documents the role that the “manufactured doubt” industry played in delaying or derailing efforts to limit the damage created by tobacco products, asbestos, and various toxic industrial chemicals including the chlorofluorocarbons responsible for the destruction of atmospheric ozone.

And, most recently, its attempts to safeguard the profits of the fossil fuel industries by debunking the evidence for anthropogenic global warming.

Masters gives details about the “bag of tricks” that the practitioners of “manufactured doubt” use to achieve their ends. Including the disparaging of peer-reviewed science and, at both the professional and personal levels, of the scientists who produce that science – impugning, among other things, that the scientists are “just another bunch of hired guns” whose findings are for sale to the highest bidder.

A disparaging that’s easy for the “manufactured doubters” and their corporate sponsors to do, since so many people with scientific credentials (some fairly substantial) are prepared to be just this type of hired gun. But what else to expect, Jerry, when jobs in, and funds for, non-corporate research are so scarce (thanks in part to these very same “manufactured doubt” campaigns), and the opportunities for selling out are so lucrative, amounting to a doubling or even more of the standard academic salary?

Now, all this reads like a diatribe against corporate moguls, doesn’t it? But then, Masters flashes the mirror. He states:

I believe that for the most part, the corporations involved have little choice under the law but to protect their profits by pursuing Manufactured Doubt campaigns … The law makes a company’s board of directors legally liable for “breach of fiduciary responsibility” if they knowingly manage a company in a way that reduces profits. Shareholders can and have sued companies for being overly socially responsible …

He cites the sad case of Henry Ford, who:

… was successfully sued by stockholders in 1919 for raising the minimum wage of his workers to $5 per day. The courts declared that, while Ford’s humanitarian sentiments about his employees were nice, his business existed to make profits for its stockholders (emphasis added).

This, dear readers, is not the revelation of a global corporate-mogul conspiracy against the “common man”. Much as those who see their own profit opportunities in such rabble-rousing would have you think otherwise.

This is your 401k telling the corporate moguls what they must do.

Masters did not end his post with any cosmic conclusions. He is, after all, a scientist, and as a scientist (rather than a propagandist such as are the “manufactured doubt” generators), he offers conclusions cautiously, and only those supported by evidence, as much and as rigorously-tested as is to hand at the time of writing. Besides, Masters has a large blog, and probably is wary of doing any more damage to his readership – and his company – than a post of this sort risks already.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba, on the other hand, has a small blog, and therefore little to risk. So I write what my conclusion is, on the basis of this evidence – and take some comfort that the message is the same as the one that scientist and science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov set down in his Bathroom Law:

The goal of preserving a planet suitable for human habitation, and the goal of preserving the individual liberty of humans living on this planet, are incompossible.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

In his post for yesterday (23 November 2009), O‘ahu blogger Ian Lind, among other things, relates a story about how reporters who used to work for a newspaper in Seattle are having a tough time finding paying jobs in journalism.

Lind is himself a ‘former’ journalist who used to do reporting for one of Honolulu’s two major newspapers. Well, they used to be major newspapers. One of them is now a tabloid, while the other, though it’s folded like a traditional newspaper, is about half as big and is printed on toilet tissue. So it’s no surprise that the travails of career journalists, and indeed of journalism as a career, have gotten his attention.

But it’s not like these travails come as a surprise to Quilly and me.

Y’see, both of us, had interest in, even dreams of, careers as reporters, once upon a time.

Quilly’s tale is hers to tell, if and as she should choose to tell it. Suffice to say here that an editor sent Quilly out for an interview, and when that interview didn’t yield gossip that would allow the editor to crucify the interviewee on his paper’s pages, facts be damned, he sacked Quilly, and a dream ended.

Oh – did I mention that this took place in the context of a university course in journalism?

Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba’s dream was broadcast journalism, specifically radio – television requiring that one’s appearance doesn’t instantly turn viewers to stone, thus depriving the station of advertising revenue. It was not a serious enough dream to displace the prime directive – an academic career in the sciences – but it was an itch to be scratched in the music, news, and sports departments of campus radio stations. On occasion, it even provided some minimum-wage, graveyard-shift income.

And it came to pass that the campus radio station of a Division I university in a major market chose (and obtained permission) to broadcast home basketball games, live. For one glorious season, an amoeba provided color commentary on men’s games – including one contest with Wooden U. where the crowd was so loud, it was impossible to hear oneself think, never mind speak.

That same amoeba was also the play-by-play “voice” of women’s basketball. I studied charts and stats, interviewed coaches and players, and was having a blast.

Then, at the end of the year, the team collapsed, embroiled in catfights between players and coaches, with (if I remember correctly) intimations of physical wrongdoing on the part of at least one coach.

And I was blindsided. Heard exactly nothing about it until the story broke on “real” media.

Unlike in Quilly’s case, no program director descended on me, irate that I didn’t ‘get the dirt’. None had to: I sacked myself. It dawned on me, finally, that I wasn’t doing any kind of job as a reporter (though in my defense, this was campus radio, essentially a club, and I was at the time supposed to be 100% engaged in getting my Ph.D.), and that I wasn’t getting any pay for being a shill. Another dream ended.

Six months later, I left that major-market city. And, except for occasional interviews in my capacity as a working scientist, I never again stepped in front of a microphone.

Both of us, Quilly and I, had run afoul of the ‘dirty laundry syndrome’. Journalism died for us because neither was willing to chase after the gossip, the racier the better, that is the only stuff for which most readers/listeners/viewers will pay. (Oh – did I mention that both of our stories took place 25-30 years ago?)

One of the laid-off journalists quoted by Ian Lind wrote:

There are very few opportunities to do the sort of important work that the old [newspaper] invested in, because it is expensive and unsexy. The point that it is important to society has become irrelevant.

On reading this, I could only think that here is a baby boomer, one of the aging children who grew up thinking the media is the message and are only now figuring out that media and message are not about what the messenger wishes to say, but about what the customer wishes to buy.

As you most likely know, Quilly’s blog is partially for hire. The sponsored posts she writes bring in a few pennies here and there. Not long ago, she was presented with an offer that would pay her more than usual. She investigated – and discovered that the opportunity was linked to a full-time blogger who runs nearly 30 sites.

All of them pornography.

When challenged on this, the blogger responded (I paraphrase):

These sites make money. If you’re serious about making a living writing online, this is where you need to be.

One begins to understand how societies throughout history have moved to ban activities such as this.

Such bans provide journalists something profitable to write about that isn’t T&A.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of the year 1918 of the Common Era (there having been precious little evidence of the presence of “Our Lord” in the muddy trenches of western Europe), the shooting stopped in Flanders fields, bringing an end to the First World War.

The War To End All Wars, Adolph.

It rearranged empires. It begot massive personal and national fortunes and then callously broke them on the anvils of hyperinflation and economic depression. It dropped men and women (25 out of every 100 or even more) on bread lines, and bred demagogues, Mr. Limbaugh, to feed them on a diet of anger.

And in a mere 21 years, the shooting started again. A war thought so horrific that no sane person would ever risk war again, a war that blasted millions of lives in mere days, led to another that blasted millions of lives in mere seconds. Despite which, no one proclaimed at its end that “now we have seen the worst.”

Some historians, I understand, argue that what we call the First World War ended, not in 1918, but (maybe) in 1989, with the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the empire that constructed it. When the focus of war changed, from the grapplings of European titans to the efforts to bring down the last titan standing by pecking at it and watching it slap itself silly.

A quarter of a million Iraqis, or rather their loved ones, regret being in the path of the flying elbows.

On this Veterans Day, I have not seen any poppies. There used to be poppies, handed out by men in uniform in remembrance of those who lie under the poppies of Belgium, in their own personal trenches in Flanders fields.

Perhaps We the People have read the poem, and are resisting the lemming call to enlist, to follow the dead into the carnage, into the wastage of persons and treasure that is war.

Or perhaps it’s just too much of a nuisance to have to deal with a gnarled old soldier who’s working the mall when you want to go shopping.

After all, Christmas is coming.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

He: “That bicycle* pedal doesn’t feel good.”

She: “Doesn’t sound good, either.”

He: “No, it doesn’t.”

She: “Sounds like a bearing to me.”

He: “‘Fraid you’re right. Looks like I’ll have to go fishing.”

She: “In the Bering Sea?”

He: “Yeah! How did you know?”

She: “Sweetheart, the story of human colonization of the Americas via the land bridge across the Bering Strait is an essential part of the 5th grade curriculum.”

He: “I see. Does that curriculum also discuss the role that the Bering Sea played in the inception of the Industrial Revolution?”

She “I don’t think so …”

He: “Or in the commercialization of striptease? After all, you were in Vegas …”

She: “Certainly not!“

* That bicycle, together with Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba, is, as of 0900 HST, 26 October 2009, officially living on borrowed time. Next post.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

On this date in 2001 in America, our greed caught up with us.

The first time this decade, that is.

I don’t think I need to tell you about the second time. Unless of course you’re one of these people who’s driving a Lexus down Honolulu’s Kal Highway, instead of pushing a bicycle and collecting unemployment while the collecting’s good, lest the Governor People decide that unemployment benefits are putting too much of a burden on Lexus drivers and cancel the program.

Once upon a time, I’d go out with a bugle and play “Taps” in remembrance of when the first World Trade Center tower was struck. I won’t be doing that here. That would be 02:46 Hawaii time. The wee small hours of the morning. The neighbors would beat me up, smear me with pork blood, strap me to a leaky wa‘a, and consign me to the sharks.

I vividly remember sitting in a church on the evening following the 9/11 attacks, and asking that we examine ourselves, to remove the logs from our own eyes before we talked about the specks in anyone else’s. And I was shouted down. By everyone. Including the liberal pastor.

I vividly remember the rally in the local YMCA the following weekend. When I saw Konrad Lorenz’s militant enthusiasm up close and personal, and felt, with profound fear, as if I were witnessing Hitler returning to life.

We the People of the Untied States of Amerika chose not to pay attention to how our avaricious sucking up of the world’s resources had made us a target. We embraced, instead, the concept of revenge. Of racking up massive deficits to fund that revenge. Of inventing massive schemes to rack up profits and pay off the deficits.

Derivatives, for instance.

We permitted the transformation of our airports into cattle drives and recycling centers. We allowed ourselves to be distracted by prancing idols and dancing stars from the deterioration of our infrastructure, the politicization of what used to be minimally-partial sources of information (e.g. the sciences), and the dissolution of our politics into armed camps, Rush …

I have squandered my resistance on a pocketful of mumbles such are promises. – Paul Simon, “The Boxer”

On this 11th of September, 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 3000 points from its low point in March 2009. Sighs of relief from the Lexus drivers.

Meanwhile, the Internet is flooded with calls for donations from someone, anyone, to save local and university libraries.

One American in ten, near enough, is out of a job. Only massive mortgaging of the futures of our grandchildren – on top of the massive mortgaging already incurred in the name of vendetta – has prevented that from becoming one American in five. So far.

Debate over ways to fix the national disgrace that is our current health care “system” focuses, not on facts and figures, but on soundbites and video clips from demagogues on all sides, screaming at each other. Because the demagogues know that real facts and figures will drive Us to prancing idols and dancing stars, while screaming will rally the troops (see “militant enthusiasm”, supra).

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. – Abraham Lincoln, 1838

So – how long before we take the gun from our own heads?

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Some little while ago now, Quilly, Tilden, and Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba were dining at a restaurant in the town of Friday Harbor (about which you’ll be hearing more in this space, though not today), when we saw this flag flying from one of the eatery’s neighbors.

Standard American flag, we thought. Some patriotic soul is letting his Old Glory fly. Except …

“Isn’t there something wrong with that flag?”

“Looks OK to me … waitaminute, the stars are weird.”

“Yeah. They’re like too regular or something.”

“Very regular. Six rows, eight columns … makes 48.”

“Forty-eight? Well, where’d the other two go? We lose two states and nobody told us?“

As we quickly confirmed, the Union has not lost any states. At least not yet. Some might argue that the country has gained a few, but, the last time YFNA checked, Panic, Confusion, and Insanity had not yet held constitutional conventions, and were therefore not yet eligible to send voting representatives to Congress.

Instead, we realized, that neighbor’s Old Glory was really and truly old. It had flown as the emblem of the American Republic from 1912 to 1959, before either Alaska or Hawai`i were admitted to the Union. When that Union had 48 states.

We never figured out what this person had against Alaska and Hawai`i.

Perhaps he was a jigsaw puzzle fan, and was irritated that, with Alaska and Hawai`i in the mix, you couldn’t complete a puzzle based on the outline of the USA without a whole lot of extra work.

Perhaps he was willing to forsake Alaskan oil if it meant not having to hear about Alaska’s politicians.

Perhaps he’s one of those who is seeking a way – any way – to deny Barack Obama’s legal right to be President.

Or maybe, just maybe, he’s simply related to Jennifer.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Dude!”

“What?”

“Did you know?”

“You mean, like, biblically?“

“In your dreams, dude. Baseball player had your batting average, they’d ban him for life. Take away his bat and everything. I mean, like, chronologically.”

“Next time I see you being logical will be the first, dude.”

“Did you say something, dude?”

“What am I supposed to be knowing, dude?”

“Hawai‘i has been a state for 50 years today.”

“Hawai‘i has been in this state for half a century? No wonder people are surly.”

“Not that kind of state.”

“You sure, dude? Economy don’t get fixed, or people don’t get their attitudes adjusted, these islands will be lying in state, that’s for sure.”

“I mean a State of the Union, dude. 50th star on the flag, dude. And people won’t be surly ’cause they have the day off.”

“AAACK!!“

“Aaack? Aaack what??”

“I thought they weren’t going to do furloughs, dude. Thought they were going to be tied up in court for months, and in politics until Armageddon. Now what are we gonna do?”

“Party.”

“With virtual money?”

“Why not? We’ll have virtual guests in our virtual apartment. Chill, dude, it’s a holiday.”

“Last tango on Sandy Beach, dude?”

“Dude?”

“Yeah?”

“Go back to bed.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

I dreamed I stood upon a hill, and lo!
The godly multitudes walked to and fro
Beneath, in Sabbath garments fitly clad,
With pious mien, appropriately sad,
While all the church bells made a solemn din -
A fire-alarm to those who lived in sin.
Then saw I gazing thoughtfully below,
With tranquil face, upon that holy show,
A tall, spare figure in a robe of white,
Whose eyes diffused a melancholy light.
“God keep you, stranger”, I exclaimed. “You are
No doubt (your habit shows it) from afar;
And yet I entertain the hope that you,
Like these good people, are a Christian too.”
He raised his eyes, and with a look so stern
It made me with a thousand blushes burn,
Replied – his manner with disdain was spiced:
“What! I a Christian? No, indeed! I’m Christ.”

Ambrose Bierce (writing as “Gassalasca Jape S.J.“) penned this near-perfect indictment of Christian incomprehension sometime around the turn of the 20th century; it was included in his 1911 Devil’s Dictionary under the heading CHRISTIAN. Every time I read it, I think back to when I first began to question what people were telling me about this Jesus person.

I was nine. Third grade, in the American public school system. More importantly, the “confirmation year” for our church, at the end of which each of us kids received our first Bibles. Ours was the last year that the confirmation class graduates received unannotated copies of the King James Version. I spent the next fifteen years trying to figure out who the hell the prophet Esaias was. But I digress.

I suppose most of my classmates took their gifts home, planted them on a bookshelf somewhere and promptly forgot about them. Me, I couldn’t wait to get mine. I read anything I could get my hands on anyway, mainly ’cause reading helped me forget that I was beneath useless at “gym” and “recess” (I was the odd one out every time the ball sides were chosen, and I stopped noticing that this was happening when there was an even number of kids in the pool). I especially wished to read all about this wonderful, kindly, Sunday school “Prince of Peace”.

I read some, and was perplexed. More, and grew dismayed. Still more, and I became positively alarmed. I wasn’t getting no Prince of Peace out of the pages of that KJV New Testament. What I was seeing was a razor-tongued SOB who was violent (Mark 11: 15-17), vindictive (Mark 11: 12-14, 20-21), petty (Mark 6: 4-5), and bigoted (Mark 7: 25-27; for “children”, read “Judeans” – in case you missed the memo, Jesus was a Judean). His own people were terrified of him (Mark 9: 32), and no wonder, for he was a master of the put-down (Mark 8: 17-18). No public school in today’s America would let this self-esteem killer anywhere near the children.

I can understand Jesus yelling at dense bureaucrats, and especially at demons. Sometimes you just have to speak in the language that your audience has a chance of understanding. But, your own people? And what did that poor leper do …?

Then a leper comes up to him, pleads with him, falls down on his knees, and says to him, “If you want to, you can make me clean.”

Although Jesus was indignant, [in first-century CE Judaism, the leper was about the filthiest sin-fouled skunk this side of a Samaritan or a Roman - for a righteous Judean literally untouchable] he stretched out his hand, touched him, and says to him, “Okay – you’re clean!” And right away the leprosy disappeared, and he was made clean.

And Jesus snapped at him, and dismissed him curtly with the warning, “See that you don’t tell anyone anything, but go, have a priest examine your skin.” – Mark 1: 40-44 (Scholar’s Version)

Prince of Peace? Hell. This Jesus of Nazareth character sounds more like your boss. Except dirtier (Mark 7: 1-5) and without the stock options. Not that those stock options have been doing your boss any good lately.

In taxonomy, the branch of science that takes on the task of putting names on living things, the name of a species is based on a physical object, the “type specimen”. In the case of a dispute over whether organism X belongs to species A or not, the judge and jury in the case is the type specimen of species A. Oftentimes, a scientist who is putting names on organisms and does not know, or has misunderstood, the type specimen of species A, will put species name A on organisms that actually belong to species B or C. Only later, when those specimens of B or C are reexamined together with A’s type, is the mistake discovered, and corrected. This happens, a lot. Crede expertum.

Bierce’s point, and mine, is that religions bearing the name “Christianity” have been named in the absence of the type specimen – Jesus of Nazareth, who had the misfortune to die before the institutions that bear his title, “the Christ”, had a chance to become established. Should it indeed come to pass that the type, Jesus, return to the third rock from Sol and make himself available for examination, we think that it will prove necessary to assign another name to “Christian” churches, on the basis of nonconformity of the name “Christian” with the type. We would expect, in this assessment, the vehement assent of Jesus himself.

And, just as the choicest rebukes in Mark’s gospel were reserved for the people in Jesus’s own retinue who weren’t “getting it”, so, I think, a returned Jesus would speak most sharply to those modern-day people who are the most conspicuously certain that they are following him.

NOTE: The quotations in this post are drawn exclusively from Mark’s gospel for several reasons.

1. Most scholars think that Mark is the earliest gospel, the first drafts of which were penned a mere twenty years or so after Jesus’s death (ca. 50-60 CE).

2. The gospels of Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source, grafting other materials onto Mark’s narrative structure and, in the process, providing semi-independent corroboration for nearly all of Mark. The only major story in Mark that is missing from Matthew and Luke is that of the Syro-Phoenician woman (Mark 7:25-27). Neither “Matthew” nor “Luke” wished to remind their readers that Jesus was a mainstream, partisan Jew – “Matthew”, because his community had split from Judaism, “Luke” because he wished to “sell” the Christian movement to Gentiles.

3. Nearly all of the words of “Jesus” in the gospel of John are likely, instead, to be those of “John” – who was trying to unify his proto-Christian community under his leadership in the face of severe persecutions from both mainstream Judaism and Rome, some 70 years or so after Jesus’s death.

I therefore have assumed that, of the four canonical gospels, Mark comes closest to offering a picture of the “real Jesus”. Though it probably still isn’t very close.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Of all the thoughts and images that have sprung, in my mind, from the assassination of Dr. George Tiller last Sunday (31 May 2009), one leapt to the fore immediately, and has stayed there ever since.

The man was killed in a church.

Say anything you like about the religions that built the churches, or mosques, or temples – their avarice, their bigotry, their hypocrisy. I’m even likely to agree with most of it. But if there is any one thing that the houses of worship themselves have come to represent, it is this.

Sanctuary.

Hell, most of them are called “sanctuaries”, in whole or in part.

In Europe during most of the Common Era, Christian churches have been known as places of sanctuary, where persons in strife go for protection against their circumstances or their adversaries.

The principal is pretty universal. In pre-Christian Hawai‘i, a person who broke a kapu or otherwise offended the gods or their agents on Earth had the option of retreat to a pu‘uhonua (sanctuary, usually part of a heiau, or temple). Getting there was more than half the fun (to reach Pu‘uhonua o Honaunau, the refugee had to swim a fair distance across a shark-infested bay), but when (if) the offender arrived, the attendant priest (kahuna) would absolve the refugee from wrongdoing and release him [sic] back into the community, where he would be immune from harm. At least until the next time he offended.

To be sure, the principle of sanctuary has been both abused and violated throughout history. We the People of these Untied States, for example, are used to being told that, for certain Iraqi mosques, “sanctuary” is spelled A – R – M – O – R – Y, which is why those mosques are now one with Ozymandias’s lone and level sands.

Nevertheless, I think we relinquish the notion of sacred sanctuary at our peril. Which is why the death of George Tiller, a man whom I did not know, on whose attention I had no claim despite his position of prominence in our culture wars, continues to bother me.

For whatever it may be worth, a piece of music sprung into my head as a result of my reflections on George Tiller’s murder and the violation of sanctuary that the killer, and whatever sponsors he may have had, committed. Below, a link to a sound file of that piece of music (.mp3). The sound is not quite what I’d like, and I can’t add the lyrics; I’m at the mercy of my rather inexpensive music-writing software. Maybe one day you’ll get to hear it with live instruments/voices:

Sanctuary
Words: John W. Thompson and Randy Scruggs, alt.
Music: John W. Thompson and Randy Scruggs, setting IHL*

(* Latin [in hic loco], “in this place”. Pig Latin: drunken and crazy.)

Inscription: In memory of Dr. George Tiller, and of all those who have sought the sanctuary of a house of worship in vain.

Lyrics: (slightly altered from the original)

Lord, prepare me to be a sanctuary,
Pure and holy, tried and true,
With thanksgiving, I’ll be a living
Sanctuary for you.

It is you, Lord, who came to save
The heart and soul of each one of us,
It is you, Lord, who knows our weakness,
Who gives the strength we hold in trust.

Lead me, Lord, from all temptation,
Purify me from within.
Fill my heart with your holy spirit,
Take away all my sin.

[Repeat v. 1]

For any who are interested in such things. The music is scored for oboe, English horn, and four-part choir. The oboe and English horn parts can be played by any number of instruments of similar sound quality, including flutes, recorders, or harmon-muted trumpets/cornets. I tried adding rhythm (guitar, keyboards) but didn’t care for the results, at least not yet.

Copyright as for this blog. Contact me or Quilly if you’re interested in the sheet music or whatever. Especially if you plan to make a million bucks off this thing. As if.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

She: What’re you doing?

He: Research.

She: Business or pleasure?

He: Well, um, it’s like this.

I was writing a report on an organism that we have in our collection. The records say that the organism was collected in “St. Joeseph Bay”, Florida. I didn’t believe that there was any such place as “St. Joeseph Bay”.

So I looked it up.

And I read about a place called “St. Joseph’s Bay”, which was named after a Florida ghost town. It was a boomtown, until a yellow fever epidemic wiped it out.

Yellow fever in America? I didn’t know we had yellow fever in America.

So I looked it up.

And I read all about yellow fever epidemics in these United States. Including a big one in Philadelphia in 1793 that chased President George Washington and the rest of the US Federal government out of town, and killed the first husband of the woman who later became President James Madison’s wife. And a whole bunch of others, that continued right up until the time that Carlos Finlay of Cuba figured out how to control the disease.

Carlos Finlay? Who the howpeculiar is Carlos Finlay? And I thought that discovery was made by an American, Walter Reed.

So I looked it up.

And I read that Carlos Finlay did indeed figure out that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes, and he did it twenty years before Reed did. In fact, as Reed himself reported, repeatedly, all he really did was test and confirm Finlay’s findings. Which the rest of the world had ignored. But then, I suppose, Finlay didn’t have a big ditch (the Panama Canal) to build. Reed did. And what Reed rediscovered allowed Army Surgeon General William Gorgas to all but wipe out yellow fever in Florida, Havana, and Panama.

Gorgas? Wasn’t there a Civil War general – a Confederate, no less – with that surname? What are the odds …?

So I looked it up.

And I read that William C. Gorgas was indeed the eldest son of Josiah Gorgas, a Pennsylvanian who joined the Confederacy because he had married the daughter of an Alabama governor, and it was probably more than his life was worth to try to remain loyal to the Union. Gorgas spent the war in Richmond as Chief of Ordnance, in which role he proved to be about the only truly effective administrator the Confederacy had. Johnny Reb didn’t have a uniform, he didn’t have shoes, he didn’t have rations. But he did have guns and ammunition.

For which I always figured that Josiah Gorgas finished the Confederate Revolutionary Civil War at the end of a hempen rope. But this might possibly have made it difficult for William Gorgas to come into this world.

So I looked it up.

And I read that, not only did Josiah Gorgas not face execution for being perhaps the person most responsible, after Robert E. Lee, for making … um … that war as long and bloody as it was, he wound up as President of the University of Alabama. Where the library was named after his wife.

Wasn’t it the University of Alabama that only started recruiting African-Americans to its football team after it got beat by an integrated University of Southern California team coached by John McKay?

So I …

She: And did you finish that report?

He: What report?

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Once upon a time, a man from Maine went to war – the Confederate Revolutionary American Civil War – because he thought something was intolerable. That man was Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. The Hero of Gettysburg’s Little Round Top. A man lionized for his steel on the battlefield and his compassion in the hospital tent.

That something was the plight of the slave in America. Or so he thought.

Chamberlain was a polymath, an accomplished scholar fluent in seven languages. He could have sat out the Civil War in peace and security as a professor at Maine’s Bowdoin College – about as far away as one could get from the fighting while still remaining in the United States sensu lato. His wife, his family, and his College all urged this course.

Instead, Chamberlain snuck off and joined the Union army, because he hated slavery and secession, and thought it his duty to fight against them. Maine was a hotbed of anti-slavery activism in the years leading up to the Civil War. It was also, then as now, the whitest state in the nation. Most 19th century Mainers had never actually seen a black person, slave or free. Including Chamberlain.

That changed on the march to Gettysburg. It changed when Chamberlain’s regiment encountered a field hand, wounded by a rifle bullet. The man was black, barely articulate (possibly, newly arrived from Africa), and scared nearly to death. And Chamberlain didn’t know what to do. As Colonel and commanding officer, he could order a surgeon to look at him, and he did. But he could not relate to this heavily-melanized derangement of his egalitarian assumptions. He could only offer this man the gleanings of medical care and a dismissal into the nebulous world of the street people, with no way of knowing what would become of him.

For all of Chamberlain’s ambivalence, the field hand got off lucky. The croplands and woodlands around Gettysburg were full of marching and riding men that day. A column in gray likely would have lynched him for being black and free. For threatening the white man’s mastery. A column in blue, other than Chamberlain’s, likely would have lynched him for … being black and free. For threatening the white man’s jobs.

And over the next four days, those columns of white men in blue and gray would kill and maim a quarter of their number, in a dispute over the label to be put on the field hand’s coffin. Or, rather, the label to be put on the image of the field hand’s coffin, the original being left under the weather to rot, ignored by gray and blue alike.

The label? How about Luis Ramirez of Pennsylvania?

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

As I wrote yesterday, the fat version of Michelangelo’s David has been getting a bit of internet attention lately.

What’s been lost in the shuffle, perhaps, is that the (public service) ad campaign that launched the career of “fat David” actually featured two historical figures.

The other one?

Abraham Lincoln. Old Abe himself.

I was thinking about Lincoln today. Particularly, about Lincoln’s role in the formation and growth of the Republican Party – which, in the 1850s, was a fusion between big business interests and fundamentalist Christians. (Yes, that should sound familiar.) Either one of which could have told the other, at any time, to do things my way or hit the road, Jack.

Lincoln, especially in Illinois, was the organization man. He was the one who put things together, smoothed over differences and difficulties, kept the party focused on what would allow it to grow and become competitive in what then passed for national elections. On more than one occasion, he put his own ambitions for public office aside in order to advance the party.

To be sure, Lincoln’s task was made easier by the one issue which the otherwise-mismatched elements of the party could champion without reserve: the abolition of slavery. Since slavery offended both the morals of the Christians and the avarice of the capitalists. But Lincoln played this card to near-perfection, using it to secure alliances within the party and to prevent those alliances from fracturing under the stresses of events. The Republicans held together, and, in 1860, won an election that changed the face of the United States, and arguably the world.

Fast-forward to 2009. The Republicans are beset by a narrow faction that is hell-bent on creating an American “Land of the Pure”, and its leader tells any who fail its white-glove test, Arlen, to begone, and take your filthy fellows with you. It may wind up being a small party, but, by God, it will know what its principles are, and every shelf in the freezer on which each one is kept.

It’s enough to cause any national icon to slouch in his armchair, gorge himself on tortilla chips, cheez whiz, and beer, and stare vacantly into space.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

The other day, blogger buddy Thom discovered the fat version of Michelangelo’s famous statue of David. Yes, that David. The one who slew Goliath and became King of Israel, in the process putting the neighbors into a snit over his occupation of the West Bank.

I tracked the original image back to an advertising campaign for the German Olympic Sport Federation, back in November 2007. The message of that campaign was, “If you don’t move, you get fat.” Sometime during 2008, the tale surfaced in the blogosphere that the original ‘David’ made a two-year tour of American museums, and returned to Italy in its (ahem) enlarged state.

Man. You don’t want to mess with the American diet, if Big Macs can turn even solid rock into the Pillsbury Doughboy. No, folks, I mean the marble, not the abs. We all know already what Big Macs can do to abs.

The “American obesity epidemic” moral is clear, and there have to be a million places on the Web where you can read all about it. But not here. Because, when I saw “fat David”, a number of thoughts came to mind that did not drive me to my nearest health-food profiteers outlet, despite my increasingly uncanny resemblance to the, er, revised version of the statue.

The professor, for instance, who, he told me, had complete confidence that, in the event of a famine, he would outlive me (I was much skinnier in those days), because of his ability to store fat during times of plenty.

The island cultures that value stouter women, and praise the husband who can keep his spouse heavy as the best possible provider – because he had protected his family, in the best available way, against times of dearth.

The Venus figurines of antiquity, most of which portray women whom we now would label as morbidly obese – perhaps because they were well-enough nourished to deliver and nurse healthy babies.

To be sure, the health risks that we now associate with being overweight are unlikely to have been any different in the past. However, you may have noticed that most of these risks – heart attack, stroke, atherosclerosis, diabetes, respiratory distress, certain cancers – are expressed in people over the age of 50. Through most of human history, the person who survived the various wars, diseases, accidents, birthings of children, and (most particularly) famines long enough to reach the 35th birthday had already attained a ripe old age. The elder who died at 55 of a coronary was a veritable Methuselah.

Which means that, for the five (out of seven) billion of us who have reasonably ready access to the appropriate technologies (have you thanked a scientist today?), we obsess over scales and body mass indices, and shower money on multibillion-dollar medical, diet, and health-food industries …

… to combat a trait that has evolved in humans over millions of years to confer a survival advantage.

Yes I will have fries with that. Small.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Surely, dear readers, you’ve been following the recent uproar over piracy in the waters off Somalia. Especially, the capture and dramatic rescue of merchant marine Captain Richard Phillips. A rescue that was celebrated with blasts from the horn of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy’s training vessel.

The Academy is Phillips’s alma mater.

And it is located on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts – where 17 out of every 10 of the tourist attractions has a pirate theme.

Hey. We the People love pirates. Especially those pirates active in the Caribbean during the 17th and early 18th centuries, the so-called Great Age of Piracy from whom most of the romanticized outlaws of fiction have sprung: Long John Silver, Conrad, Hook, Jack Sparrow. Consider the popularity of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean movies. All those sports teams with pirate-inspired nicknames, particularly “Pirates” (of course) and “Buccaneers”. (Which is not what their earrings cost. At least, I hope, for the sake of their health, it was not.) The rafts of pirate-inspired romance novels.

Alas, writes David Cordingly, the author of Under the Black Flag, the sober historian finds little support for the romance in those novels, even for the most notorious captains such as Sir Henry Morgan, Blackbeard, and William Kidd.

From him, I learned what I already suspected. That the lives of real pirates were short on glamor, romance, and time, and long on brutality and violence. That the men and women who sailed under the Jolly Roger were neither noble rebels nor cartoon villains.

They were terrorists. Which is what we’re calling the Somali practitioners of the art.

And they were in it for the money, the legit livelihoods available to them having been taken away, or reduced to starvation wages, by earlier iterations of the current economic downturn.

Which is what the Somali pirates are in it for, the legit livelihoods available to them having been taken away by the collapse of Somali central government and the larger-scale piracy of Somali waters by the fishing fleets and trash haulers of “developed” nations.

What I had not previously known was the organization of the terrorist organization known as a pirate vessel in the Great Age of Piracy. Those vessels were as large and imposing as the pirates could manage to steal, and they crammed as many men on board as possible. They could therefore promise to overwhelm the skeleton crews of most merchant vessels, and fulfill the promise if necessary. It was seldom necessary.

(Somali pirate vessels, in contrast, are small and seemingly insignificant, and their crews are small. Then again, one dude with an AK-47 can make one hell of an impression, and make it a hell of a lot faster, and cheaper, than 100 men with cutlasses.)

Obviously, though, that many men on a boat, the largest of which wouldn’t be considered big enough, today, to carry three software billionaires, is a recipe for trouble unless there’s a strong and effective organization in place. And, contrary to what you might expect, that organization was not based on despotic rule.

Instead, each voyage was conducted under a set of written articles, signed (willy-nilly) by every member of the crew. Each signer was then entitled to vote on all matters relevant to the craft and its maintenance. The crew voted the captain in (and out), the cruise route, the rations, codes of behavior and the punishment for violations, the distribution of plunder, and the compensation due those injured.

In other words, at a time in the history of the world when most governments were headed by absolute monarchs, these ocean-going vessels represented the planet’s most able and active democracies, embodying liberty, equality and brotherhood a century before the American and French revolutions. Democracies of violent men, which existed solely for the sake of plunder, for the unrepentant robbery of the wealth of others.

Did somebody say something about Iraq?

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Or, maybe, in your household, you wait to dye the Easter eggs until Saturday afternoon …

Ever since I started to question the supernatural origin of baskets containing chocolate bunnies, I have had a problem with Easter.

Not so much with the holiday. Hey, I’m not that dumb. This is free chocolate we’re talking about.

No, it’s the word “Easter” itself that gave me fits.

I mean, easter than what?

Was it supposed to refer to Jerusalem, which is more east than, say, Cairo, but isn’t as east as Tokyo? And if that’s the answer, what about somebody celebrating the holiday in New Delhi? Would that person celebrate “Wester”? Would somebody in Sydney celebrate “Northwester”?

As any one who grew up in New England, USA remembers, we periodically would be granted a holiday called a “Northeaster“. But that was usually “celebrated” with snow shovels, not chocolate bunnies. Though occasionally there would be mugs of hot chocolate waiting for us after we shoveled out the driveway. Assuming the storm hadn’t taken out the electricity.

And if a nor’easter happened during Easter, there wouldn’t be a lot of holiday spirit going around. More like weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. And maybe some weary spirits raiding the spirits locker at the end of the day. It didn’t seem like my investigations were on the right track.

Then I discovered that Easter wasn’t a direction, it was a religion. Specifically, a Germanic pagan religion. Now I’m even more confused. The biggest event on the Christian calendar, and the Christians can’t even come up with their own name for it? I suppose things worked out that way because the obvious first choice – Christmas – was already taken. Evidence that, though the early Christian evangelists may have been passionate believers, they were a few tests short of a passing grade in business acumen.

Easter is, of course, the celebration by Christians of how the judicially-murdered Jesus of Nazareth returned to life, after “three days” (actually, somewhat less than two, from around 3 PM IDT Friday to an unspecified hour on Saturday evening). To be sure, he presented himself a couple of times to disciples and promptly vanished, never to be seen again despite two thousand year’s worth of predictions of his imminent return.

But that doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the promise of new life that the “risen Jesus” represents. A promise also represented by fresh flowers and green leaves and Easter eggs.

An empty promise if you happen to have been one of the embryos in those eggs you just boiled up for the Easter baskets.

On the other hand … I suspect that the fine new clothes that, in the Western ecclesiastical traditions, are usually trotted out for Easter, were originally intended to disguise the fact that the devout of northern European churches were living skeletons, saved from death by starvation or nutrient-deficiency diseases by the appearance of those flowers, leaves, and eggs.

To such people, the resurrections of springtime must have been, in the most fundamental way, the beginning of a new year. And, indeed, in early European societies, the new year was deemed to start at the commencement of spring growth. A convention observed for millennia by many happy families.

Until some astronomers got together and decreed that the year should begin, not at the time of life’s rebirth, but at the time of its greatest apparent peril, when the length of day is at its shortest and the harshest of the winter weather still lies ahead. The shift of New Year’s Day from the spring equinox to the winter solstice must rank as one of the earliest instances of a human population choosing to follow the dictates of an “expert” rather than those of common sense.

Perhaps it’s time to shift New Year’s Day back to the spring equinox. And play practical jokes on unsuspecting “January fools“.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.