FEED MY LAMBS, BUT ONLY IF THEY CAN PAY

FEED MY LAMBS, BUT ONLY IF THEY CAN PAY

Aurora, Colorado is an American city of 345,000. It has a 5% unemployment rate. It has a six-week free summer concert program annually. Its best hotels have rooms for $500.00 per night. And at Dakota Valley Elementary School in the Cherry Creek School District, Della Curry was fired from her job in the school's lunch room for giving a free school lunch to an elementary school child who didn't have money to buy lunch.

Isn't there something ABSOLUTELY wrong with a city with a new “resort and convention hotel” and boasting of having a dozen colleges and universities, but which can't allow a city employee to give a hungry kid a school lunch?

Isn't there something ABSOLUTELY wrong with the school managers who fired
Della Curry at Dakota Valley Elementary School for giving a hungry kid a school lunch?

Couldn't the principal have paid for it? Or one of the seven vice-principals? Or even maybe a teacher?

Not to mention President O'Bama, who has billions of dollars a day to spent on bombs and drones and other weapons and surveillance devices.

Maybe President Obama should use some of his expensive surveillance devices to discover how ABSOLUTELY wrong this whole country is.

Maybe Warren Buffet could pay for a few school lunches. He could feed all the hungry kids in America, every day, and not spent even the interest he earns every day. And Bill Gates likewise.

Isn't wealth like theirs ABSOLUTELY wrong?

Instead of contributing to politicans and their election campaigns, Americans should give their money to feed poor children school lunches.

Why don't we just NOT ELECT anybody to office this year? As a nation, we would save enough money to bring everybody up out of poverty. And if we did away with high-tech weapons of mass destruction we could have mass assistance--and good instruction--for all of our school children, and for their parents as well.

If we actuaally need a president, let's have Donna Curry, formerly of Dakota Valley Elementary School in the Cherry Creek School District in Aurora, Colorado. She wants to feed the hungry. Let's let her lead us.

Or are we all too stupid--and too stupidly selfish and mean--to want to change? Are we as greedy as Warren Buffet or Bill Gates--or the person in Aurora, Colorado, who fired Donna Curry?

3 June 2015  

Academin Nuts

ACADEMIA NUTS

 

News from the Department of Nutritional and Intellectual Science

 at the Center for the Advancement of Peripheral Thought

 

            Saarbruecken, 2 June 2015.  Working in cooperation with Artificial Intelligence and Distraction scientists at MIT and Infectious Disease researchers at PSI, scientists in the Department of Nutritional and Intellectual Science at the Center for the Advancement of Peripheral Thought have discovered a potential cure for the most ravaging of academic diseases, Ismism.  In its various forms, Ismism incapacitates thousands of academics--mostly in the Humanities--every year.  Now there may be a cure for this debilitating and obfuscating disease.

            Severe acadismal academicism and exponentially infectious ismism among academismists lead to scholaritis, pseudoscholaritis, and acute pseudoscholarly ismism and ismitis. 

             Researchers wearing earplugs have developed a cure for these maladies by electroshock elimination of bollyglobs of fructifying ismgism and a simultaneous infusion of intravenous literature.

             Preliminary results indicate that this treatment results in more than 99.44% speechlessness among ismism-addicted academismists treated for more than thirty consecutive days.  Chief researcher Prof. Dr. Clarence Peach, though pleased by the general success of this regimen of treatment, says that the most seriously infected ismists may have to spend the rest of their lives in treatment. 

            Daisy-Belle Monitor at the World Air Pollution Control Center welcomed the news.  “Most academic speech can be classified as useless noise,” she said; “some of it is listed by the Bad Language Institute as grade one anti-communicational nonsense.” 

 

                                                                   -0-

SPEAKING OF TONGUES

SPEAKING OF TONGUES

            “Speaking in tongues” is an old trick.  The ancient Greeks must have done it, since they used the word:  a word for babbling with the tongue.   “Babble”  is either an onamatopoeic word like “blab” or “burble”—a nonsense sound—or it has as its source the Tower of Babel in the Western Bible.  Jesus’s apostles supposedly spoke in tongues when the Holy Ghost sat on their heads on Pentecost. In later Christian times, it has been associated with inspired talk, presumably in a language only God can understand, and is reverenced. 

            Religions often reverence things that can’t be understood:  like Athena being born out of Zeus’s forehead, or the virgin birth of Jesus, or the Christian idea of three persons in the one god.  Those are all imaginable, even if they are illogical or unnatural.  But speaking in tongues—babble—is well beyond that.  It doesn’t communicate anything, and nobody ever bothers to write it down.  Still, in some traditions it is reverenced.

            But speaking of  tongues, maybe we should think about the ways the animal world—not including humans, for the most part—speaks with tongues.

            Humans use their tongues to turn the noises that breathing and the voice box make into various different sounds, which become words and language.  And human have become clever enough to translate those mostly tongue-differentiated and tongue-controlled sounds into symbols, and sometimes to write them out.  Many children use their tongues—unconsciously—when they are learning to write, making lingual gestures which might be linguistic gestures

            Western languages share an “alphabet”—which, as a word, must be the most absurd bit of babble ever recorded.  It gets its name from the first two letters  for the ancient Greeks, alpha and beta.  There is no reason, of course, why they should be the first two letters.  “O”—or “OM”--has a long tradition of being considered the first sound, the original word of the God.  “I” is a straight line, a simple part of the circle:  it might have been a good place to start, especially as it is the me-word.  And all language comes from a self.  It isn’t a separate creation.

            The oldest of the Western languages, Sanskrit, from maybe five or six thousand years ago, has a very carefully logical ordering of sounds and the letters that represent them.  (In the West, with a nice blend of ignorance and arrogance,  we call the Sanskrit letters an “alphabet.”)  And the Korean language has a similar ordering of its sounds, thanks to King Sejong, a fifteenth century king, who learned the Sanskrit lettering system from Buddhist monks in China.

         But animals—or some of them, anyway—speak with their tongues, or with their wet noses.   Being kissed by a dog may be sloppy, but it’s reliable.  Dogs don’t do Judas kisses.  And though cats licking each other at bath time isn’t kissing, it is both friendly and seemingly pleasurable both for the licker and the licked.

            Humans say that snakes are not trustworthy:  they “speak with forked tongues.”  But snakes lie on their bellies, not with their tongues.  Snakes aren’t talkers at all.  Human tongues are the ones that lie—so why do we malign reptiles for having forked tongues?

            When humans say that someone speaks “with a crooked tongue,” they mean that the crooked-tongued person can’t be trusted.  Although there are untrustworthy animals of various kinds, we don’t identify them as being so by their having crooked tongues.  Even monkeys don’t use their tongues to play tricks.

            With the exception of humans, the animal world seems to have honest, trustworthy tongues.   Does our more elaborate intelligence enable us to misuse our tongues?   Sure.  It’s not just a matter of our giving false kisses.  Look at all the dishonest things we say!

            “I love you” frequently doesn’t mean what it says.  Indeed:  as saying go it’s about as trustworthy as     “I O U,”  among humans.   And the saying “Speak softly, but carry a big stick” doesn’t suggest that what we say is worth much, or to be trusted.  And “Telling lies,” we say, “is easier than telling  truths.”  Our language is so full of sayings that promote dishonesty that we should probably call tongue a dirty word.

             Speaking of tongues, perhaps what we should say is that maybe we would be better off if we didn't.

               

A FABLE FOR OUR TIMES

A FABLE FOR OUR TIMES

            A little boy was playing on the beach.  He decided to build himself a sand castle.  He would be its king, and its walls would defend him from invaders coming in from the sea.

            

            He started  scooping sand up around himself to build his castle’s  walls.  He built them well, packing them tightly so he could build them tall.

            

            As he built his walls he was also digging the moat around his castle.  But as the walls became higher and higher and the moat became deeper and deeper, he couldn’t reach any more sand to build with.  So he started scooping sand from the floor of his castle, and adding it to his walls.  Soon he was standing on his tiptoes, and stretching up as far as he could, adding more sand.

            When he had dug so far down that he couldn’t build his walls any higher, he declared his castle finished, and sat down in the hole he had dug, and looked up, admiringly, at his walls.

            And he sat there.

            Then some other kids walked by, and kicked it down, on top of him. 

            They weren’t bad kids, just kids.  And one of them wrote with his toes in the sand, “God Bless America.”

GOD BLESS AMERICA

GOD BLESS AMERICA!  GOD BLESS THE CIA!  GOD BLESS AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE!

Poor Americans go without food while the CIA funnels millions of dollars to middle eastern war lords.

There is no public transit for the poor (and Black) people in Detroit, but lots of money for diplomatic junkets.

We have no money for decent public schools, but billions of dollars for daily military training flights.

Obama can have a dinner party for fancy people, at a cost of several million dollars--which might have been spent on feeding starving American citizens one decent meal.

The United States of America is a strange thing.  In some ways it is like the United Cantons of Switzerland, in its catering to the filthy rich.  But Switzerland has neither an overwhelming national debt nor an absurdly expensive and infinitely dangerous military.

The United States thinks of itself as in some way like the European Union.  But the European Union is a society, and the United States is an anti-social competition.

I live now in Germany.  In the aftermath of the two world wars it had caused, and out of the ashes of its defeat, Germany built the European Union.  Not an empire, but a union.  And the union began as an economic union, and became a political and social union.  Not just a nation, and without any of the nonsense of "God Bless the European Union" or "the rockets' red glare," or now seventy-five years of constant war.

I was five years old when the United States entered World War II.  I am now eighty years old.  And the United States has been at war  for almost all my life!

Nations apply for membership in Europe.  It began with six states:  Western Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, and Italy.  Five economically stable states, and Italy.  Then it accepted Denmark, Britain, and Ireland:  a small but economically prosperous state; a large, proud (or vain) and economically weak nation; and a third-world state.  Then Greece, Portugal, and Spain:  all three states   which Europe would have to fund.  And now Poland, and the smaller Eastern European countries.  Maybe Russia will be next.  I hope so.

Europe doesn't have an army.  Or a navy.  Or an air force.

And the murder rate--not just in Germany, but in all of Europe--is almost zero!

Can there be a society in which everybody has a gun, and one half of the nation's wealth is hoarded by 10,000 rich people and the other half spent on what is called "national defense"?

I can't understand people--my friends, many of them--who "believe in" the United States--who accept, support,  identify with and emotionally or intellectually or morally defend the United States.

I don't ask for a perfect world--and given my moral, social, and intellectual limitations probably wouldn't be able to recognise a perfect world if I saw it.  But I know very well that this world we live in is not perfect, and that for all its self-glorification and self-praise and military might and murderous use of that military might, the United States is not in any way qualified to lead this world.  It is not qualified to lead anything more important than a bully's fight on a bad school's playground.

THE EUROPEAN UNION: A VOTE FOR THIRTY-ONE

A VOTE FOR THIRTY-ONE

The history of the European Union goes back to the dark days of 1939, when Winston Churchill began to plan what was to be the union of Britain and France. But in May of 1940 Adolf Hitler's Nazi army chased the British out of France, and six weeks later France surrendered. During those six weeks, the British had not even tried to help the French, though on 16 May Churchill--newly Prime Minister Churchill-- had flown to Paris, to encourage General de Gaulle to fight on. France surrendered, however, on 22 June 1940. And Europe was on the verge of being united by force, under Hitler.

After the war, the United States launched the European Recovery Program--usually called the Marshall Plan, after Secretary of State George C. Marshall--which was designed to rebuild a Europe badly damaged in every way by five years of war, and to rebuild it with fewer national barriers so as to encourage economic and cultural ties. And this was perhaps the real beginning of what has become the European Union. And the leader of the European Union--politically, financially, philosophically--is Germany.

In 1950, a freshman member of the British House of Commons made his maiden speech arguing for a “united Europe.” Winston Churchill was then the British Prime Minister. Churchill was so impressed by Edward Heath's speech that he made him a junior cabinet minister. And though Britain was Europe's most reluctant state, and was not one of the founding members of the European Economic Community in 1957, in 1971--with Heath as Prime Minister--it joined Europe, along with Denmark and Ireland.

Three nations joined Europe. They weren't conquered or annexed or adjoined. They applied for membership, and their membership was accepted. In the now nearly sixty years since the signing of the Treaty of Rome, what is now called the European Union has grown from a membership of six nations--Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, and Italy--to a membership of twenty-seven nations. And not a single one of these nations has been brought forcibly into this remarkable and unique union.

A unique union: yes. The United States, one must remember, were once thirteen British colonies. As that union grew in numbers of member states, some were bought, and some were won by war. And with the exception of Alaska and Hawaii, they were all taken from the indigenous population of Native Americans--many of whom still live of “reservations.” And many of the inhabitants of the United States were first brought there as slaves, and for more than a century after those slaves were “emancipated,” they were legally and forcibly “segregated” in much of that country, and a large percentage of those Americans still live in ghettos.

The union established in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome was a union of five economically sound nations and one poor nation. Of the next three members accepted in 1971, one (Denmark) was prosperous and stable, one (Britain) was economically troubled, and one (Ireland) was practically a third-world state economically. In 1981 Greece--another third-world European nation--joined, followed in 1986 by Spain and Portugal. None of these three new members was a “valuable” possession; they all needed economic assistance. In 1995 three economically sound nations joined: Sweden, Finland, and Austria. And in 2004, The European Union accepted eight nations from Eastern Europe--the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, and Slovakia, and the Mediterranean nations of Malta and Cyprus. In 2007 it accepted Europe's two poorest nations, Bulgaria and Romania.

Acceptance into the European Union for many of these nations is something like a poor child's being adopted by a rich family. “Empire” is an ancient Roman word, and history's great nations have all been empires, grown out of wars and conquests--until the European Union came into being. This union is a social union--and an economic one. It is not an empire.

“Economic” doesn't have to be a bad word. Etymologically, it is benign: it refers, descriptively, to how we live at home. So economic is a social word. And the European Union is a social union, dedicated to a common standard of living and a common social success.

Croatia, Macedonia, and Turkey have applied for membership. Once they have been allowed to join, the European Union will almost be complete. Switzerland won't apply for membership, and could not be accepted if it did apply. But Russia? Of course Russia should be a member, as should Ukraine. It is clear that Ukrainians want to join. And maybe Europeans--the united Europeans--should invite Russia. Having Russia in the European Union could be the making of world peace. It could eventually make this world a safe place in which human history may live on.

With Russia a member of the European Union, the United States would have to quit trying to undermine Russia. The Russian economy would benefit by its membership in Europe, and Europe would have less complicated access to Russia's vast natural resources as well as a significant protective military capability. With Russia in the European Union, Europe could negotiate with the United States for a reduction of nuclear arsenals and eventually for the elimination of nuclear weaponry world-wide.

The European Union was founded as an economic cooperation which would evolve into a political and social union that would guarantee peace among its member states. Two hideous wars had taught Europeans the need for such a union. “Never again” was the mantra of the war-weary and belatedly wise continent which undid the idea of nationalism without destroying nations.

Russia and Russians seem ready to join such a union. Why not invite them?

 And then?   

GENERATING LIFE

This planet of ours, that we call “earth,” has what we call life. What we usually mean by that is that this planet contains living trees and plants and animals—like us. But the earth itself has life. We need to realise that, before it is too late. And maybe we don't know what its life is.

In the plant and animal world, seeding provides for continuous life. Generation and regeneration keep what we call life going. We animals are still generating and regenerating, but the plant world with which we live and upon which we depend isn't doing very well. It seems, in fact, to be dying. And the earth itself? Is it dying? In what way or ways?

In the last fifty years we have been exploring what we call “space,” to discover whether or not there is what we call “life” on those other lumps of matter wandering around out there. We call those wanderers “planets.”

What we are looking for , out there in “space,” is our version of life. We are looking for what we already know. And we are thinking of the possibilities of our colonizing somewhere out there. That's what animal scientists call the “fouled nest” syndrome. Humans and some other animals live that way: when they have made a big enough mess of where they live, they move somewhere else.

But science isn't just a housing office, or Noah's dove looking for someplace to land. Science should be much more than that—and smarter than that.

What we call life—plant life and animal life--grows from seeds. Have we asked if this earth itself has seed? This earth seems to be dying; all things, we say, must die. But in our experience, generation is the companion of dying, which lets life itself continue.

But is there just one kind of life? And does it have to live by our rules?

In exploring space, we look for life on other planets: but we are looking for what we call life. Ego interferes with learning, even with understanding. Other is hard for us to accept. Our exploration of space is limited by our self-centered definition of life.

And thus we think of colonizing other planets. “Will other planets support life?” we ask. Of course, what we mean is will those other planets support us, and what we call “life.” Once we have made this planet, earth, uninhabitable, we will need someplace to go. We are like vermin, or maggots. And when we have killed our host we want to move on to some new body.

With our determined assistance, this earth may be dying. So we want off. We want another planet to go to. But maybe what is needed, in the larger order of existence, is for earth itself to “seed” another planet, not with us but with its own seed.

Of course, we don't know what earth's seed is. And we haven't even tried, yet, to find out. Or imagine. So we are stuck with the other scenario. Never mind a “seedling” earth--which is a natural image. We are the vermin who want to leave this carcass and find a new one to foul and kill.

Human ego would send us to other planets. But other planets may not want us. Other planets may see us as parasites. Parasites who have killed our own host body: this planet.

This world is—by definition—what we know. The universe is everything, or everything-once-around: an unmeasurable continuous ring. “Everything” is bigger than what we know, bigger by far than what we are or what we know or can imagine, even with our space ships and telescopes.

 And maybe nobody out there will want us. Maybe we had better try to save our world's life instead of exploring elsewhere. Let's spend our money on this world, not on leaving it.