To the list of phrases it may be best for political leaders to avoid after a major security incident, add “the system worked” right after “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”Just as the public did not really share President George W. Bush’s assessment of how things were going after Hurricane Katrina, so too was there a good deal of skepticism when President Obama’s homeland security secretary declared faith in a system that failed to stop a guy who tried to blow up a passenger jet on Christmas Day.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
The System Worked
Peter Baker, "A Phrase Sets Off Sniping After a Crisis," NYTimes (Dec. 29, 2009):
&&&
Monday, December 28, 2009
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Winter 2009 in Jersey City
&&&
This part of Jersey City is a neighborhood from a bygone America. This is not so much because of the (undistinguished) architecture. It is because the homes and apartments are close together, the population of the neighborhood is relatively stable, and people in the neighborhood know each other (though sometimes only by sight). The population is predominantly but not entirely Italian-American.
Holy Rosary Roman Catholic Church
344 Sixth Street
From the church's web site:
"During the first few years of the early 1880’s the Italian speaking population of Jersey City began to increase rapidly, but they had no church of their own. In the towns, villages and cities of Italy the local church had been to these people a spiritual and social force. By the end of 1884 Bishop Wigger directed Father De Concilio to organize the Italians of Jersey City into a parish and to build a church. Father James S. Hanly, the pastor of St. Bridget’s was assigned to guide the new parish through its embryonic years.
With the money contributed by the congregation, two lots, 340 and 342 Sixth Street, between Monmouth and Brunswick Streets, were purchased for about two thousand dollars. A small frame structure already on the site was used as a temporary chapel. The first Mass celebrated was in February 1885."
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Outdated Heirlooms?
A "jewelry exchange" says it wants my "outdated heirlooms."&&&
But isn't the point of an heirloom to be outdated? Would an heirloom be an heirloom if it weren't outdated?
I suppose what the jewelry exchange means is that it wants my outdated outdated heirlooms.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Mayor Healy on Bicycles
Ricardo Kaulessar, "Not just spinning their wheels," Hudson Reporter (Dec. 13, 2009):
Bicycling enthusiast Chris Bray, a Bergen-Lafayette resident for the past five years, recalled at the meeting a conversation with Mayor Jerramiah Healy about making Jersey City more amenable to bicycle riding.
According to Bray, “[Healy] said, and this is a direct quote, ‘You bike around here, are you crazy? I want people to use public transportation.’ ”
Friday, December 11, 2009
Shale Gas & Russia
Shale gas in Poland may eventually ease Russia's vise-like grip on energy supplies for Eastern Europe and Ukraine.
&&&
The dynamic evidence page
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Newspeak in Health Care Reform
"Congress plans to pay for its reform plans partly with about $150 billion in Medicare cuts to hospitals, nursing homes and home health agencies, referred to as 'permanent annual productivity adjustments to price updates.” George Orwell would be proud.'" Grace-Marie Turner, "Home Health Cuts Will Backfire," NYTimes (Dec. 3, 2009).
&&&
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Canada Recalls the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
Andris Straumanis, "Canadian lawmakers back day to remember Molotov-Ribbentrop," Latvians Online (Nov. 30, 2009):
In memoriam of one of the consequences of the pact: June 14, 1941, a cattlecar, a barge, and death for two people (and many others):
View Larger Map
Wikipedia: "Between 1930 and 1989, more than 500,000 people were banished to Narym and its surroundings."
&&&
The dynamic evidence page
Canada’s lawmakers have adopted a resolution calling on the government to name Aug. 23 a “Black Ribbon Day” in remembrance of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Secret protocols to the treaty carved up Eastern Europe—including Latvia—into territory to be controlled by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
The House of Commons on Nov. 30 gave unanimous consent to the resolution, which among other points noted that knowledge in Canada about the totalitarian regimes and how they terrorized people in Central and Eastern Europe is “still alarmingly superficial and inadequate.”
In memoriam of one of the consequences of the pact: June 14, 1941, a cattlecar, a barge, and death for two people (and many others):
View Larger Map
Wikipedia: "Between 1930 and 1989, more than 500,000 people were banished to Narym and its surroundings."
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Zhu Zhu = žūžū
Some company may think that "Zhu Zhu" is the trademarked name for a fake hamster. But I have news for that ^$&*! company: "Zhu Zhu" -- "žūžū" -- is a Latvian phrase for a baby bear, or "little bear" (" lāča bērni" [plural?]) -- or, in any event, for cradling, or hushing, a baby bear. The phrase "žūžū" appears in an old Latvian folk song, a lullaby, a folk song that antedates, by several hundred years, any known trademark law in any Western country. First in time, first .... So there!
Zhu Zhu = žu žu
Some company may think that "Zhu Zhu" is the trademarked name for a fake hamster. But I have news for that ^$&*! company: "Zhu Zhu" -- "žu žu" -- is a Latvian phrase for a baby bear, or "little bear" ("laču berni" [plural]) -- or, in any event, for cradling a baby bear. The phrase "žu žu" appears in an old Latvian folk song, a lullaby, a folk song that antedates, by several hundred years, any known trademark law in any Western country. First in time, first .... So there!&&&
Friday, November 27, 2009
Memories & Horrors & Tyrannies
I visited with a colleague the other day. She reminded me that she and her family had been deported to Siberia when she was a girl. (Her sin and her family's was that of being Jewish.) She told of her father and other adults trudging through knee-deep snow to cut trees during the Siberian winter. It was a memory worthy of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
We talked some more and she said to me, "After the war I really believed 'never again!'." But, of course (we agreed), it has happened again -- in Biafra, in Indonesia (the Sukarno years), in Cambodia (Pol Pot), Uganda (Idi Amin), Rwanda, the Sudan, and so on.
Ach weh! Human depravity!
I remember telling my high school teachers of 55,000 Latvians -- that's the number I had heard -- having been deported to Siberia by the Stalinists before WWII. I think my teachers thought of me as a rabid right-wing nut. I hope my former teachers later read Solzhenitsyn -- or that, at least, heard of his accounts of the Soviet Gulag Archipelago.
I also remember the high school teacher who tossed me out of his course ("Problems of Democracy") when he said, "Anyone in America can become President," and I moaned, "No, that's not true." That former teacher of mine taught "Moral Rearmament" in his course (a public high school course). He had ordered me to keep my mouth shut after I had questioned (politely, I thought) some of his strange claims. It was after that happened that he threw me out of his class. And I was a conservative-minded fellow at the time. But not conservative enough.
Solzhenitsyn. He got a Nobel Prize. And he was invited to give a commencement address at Harvard. He disappointed his hosts by saying (in 1978), for example:
The Solzhenitsyn Reader pp. 563-564 (Edward E. Ericson, Jr. & Daniel J. Mahoney, ISI Books, 2006).But the persisting blindness of superiority continues to hold the belief that all of the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems, the best in theory and the most attractive in practice; that all those other worlds are but temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in that direction. But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, a result of mistakenly measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet's development bears little resemblance to all this.
His Harvard hosts had apparently expected this champion of liberty to be a liberal campaigner against tyranny.
Tyrants victimize all sorts of people. Stalin tormented all sorts of people -- right-wing, left-wing, middle of the road, Jews, non-Jews, Poles, Chechens. It rained on both the poor and the rich, the good and the evil. He repressed, killed, and imprisoned them all. Consider Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (Harper & Row: Robert Chandler, trans., 1985) (Translator's Introduction, p. 8: "In February 1953, however, as a new series of purges, directed particularly at Jews, gathered momentum, Grossman was again attacked, possibly at the instigation of Stalin himself. During the following months he was repeatedly and hysterically denounced as a Jewish nationalist, a reactionary idealist alienated from Soviet society..."). See also John Garrard & Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman (Free Press, 1996) (the blurb on the book's flap states: "Born a Russian Jew and an ardent patriot of the Soviet motherland, Vasily Grossman rationalized away the Stalinist horror of his time as he chronicled the Red Army's westward sweep during World War II, becoming the Soviet Army's premier wartime correspondent. It was not until he discovered 30,000 victims were massacred by Nazi forces in his hometown of Berdichev--including his own mother--that he confronted his own Jewishness and the genocidal horror of the Holocaust. Determined to tell the story of Soviet complicity with the Nazi extermination of Russian Jewry, Grossman was labeled an enemy of the state by both Stalin and Kruschev--barely escaping Stalin's death squads--and his exposes were suppressed and buried deep within the Communist Party's archives.")
Monday, November 23, 2009
Presidents and Prose
I try to get my students to write decent prose on their essay exams, but then I am undone by college presidents and other supposedly educated people who say things such as the following: "Charge each student what they can afford."&&&
Perhaps this former college president was having a senior moment. I have written my own share of rotten prose.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Fragments of Liberty Park on a Late November Day
On late November days, Liberty Park (which is adjacent to Ellis Island) has few visitors. These are some of my favorite times in the Park. Between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m. is best. On this day (Nov. 20) the air was cool, the breeze was light, the mid-day sky had been blue, and the late afternoon light was crystalline.
Central Railroad of New Jersey Terminal in Light and Shadow
The Central Railroad of New Jersey Terminal in Liberty Park, hard by Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, was the gateway to the interior of the New World for millions of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. The terminal building has many moods.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Saturday, November 7, 2009
A & B
Question: Why the above image (Venn Diagram)?
Answer: No particular reason. I am meditating. And the diagram looks nice -- and provocative, yes?
In any event: this is the blog for personal meditations & musings & notions & images having no particular point or purpose.
Friday, October 30, 2009
October 31: Reformation Day
The sale of indulgences shown in A Question to a Mintmaker, woodcut by Jörg Breu the Elder of Augsburg, circa 1530.
Reformation Day, WIKIPEDIA:
Reformation Day is a religious holiday celebrated on October 31 in remembrance of the Reformation, particularly by Lutheran and some Reformed church communities. It is a civic holiday in Slovenia (since the Reformation contributed to its cultural development profoundly, although Slovenians are mainly Roman Catholics) and in the German states of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia. It is also a national holiday in Chile since 2008.
[snip, snip]
In 1516-17, Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar and papal commissioner for indulgences, was sent to Germany by the Roman Catholic Church to sell indulgences to raise money to rebuild St Peter's Basilica in Rome. Roman Catholic theology stated that faith alone, whether fiduciary or dogmatic, cannot justify man; and that only such faith as is active in charity and good works (fides caritate formata) can justify man. The benefits of good works could be obtained by donating money to the church.
On 31 October, 1517, Martin Luther wrote to Albrecht, Archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg, protesting the sale of indulgences. He enclosed in his letter a copy of his "Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences," which came to be known as The 95 Theses.
[snip, snip]
Luther objected to a saying attributed to Johann Tetzel that "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory [also attested as 'into heaven'] springs." He insisted that, since forgiveness was God's alone to grant, those who claimed that indulgences absolved buyers from all punishments and granted them salvation were in error. Christians, he said, must not slacken in following Christ on account of such false assurances.
According to Philipp Melanchthon, writing in 1546, Luther "wrote theses on indulgences and posted them on the church of All Saints on 31 October 1517", an event now seen as sparking the Protestant Reformation. Some scholars have questioned Melanchthon's account, since he did not move to Wittenberg until a year later and no contemporaneous evidence exists for Luther's posting of the theses. Others counter that such evidence is unnecessary because it was the custom at Wittenberg university to advertise a disputation by posting theses on the door of All Saints' Church, also known as "Castle Church".
The 95 Theses were quickly translated from Latin into German, printed, and widely copied, making the controversy one of the first in history to be aided by the printing press. Within two weeks, copies of the theses had spread throughout Germany; within two months throughout Europe.
There Is Hope
"Medvedev: Soviet-Era Terror Cannot Be Justified," NYTimes (Oct. 30, 2009):
&&&
In a blog-posted video marking a day set aside in 1991 to commemorate victims of Soviet political repression, Medvedev suggested young Russians are getting a lopsided picture of their country's past -- learning plenty about its proud moments but little about the bloodbath that reached its peak under Josef Stalin in the Great Terror of the late 1930s.
''Let's just think about: Millions of people died as a result of terror and false accusations -- millions,'' a somber-faced Medvedev said. ''They were deprived of all rights, even the right to a decent human burial, and for long years their names were simply crossed out of history.
''And yet today it is still possible to hear that these many victims were justified by some higher state goal,'' he said.[snip, snip]
Medvedev said Oct. 30 is a day to remember ''millions of maimed destinies: people shot without trial or investigation, people sent to the camps and into exile, deprived of civil rights.''
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)