Take a Break, Think about Home

From Sippican Cottage:

I was reading Essays In Idleness by Kenko. He was dead in 1350. . . .


. . . the personal essay is tie that binds us.


I hate the term: blog. It's ugly, and it's come to mean something even uglier than the sound of it. It's become the minor leagues of hate. I write personal essays here. Zuihitsu. It might not be noble, but a person has little to offer to others but knowledge of which they are sure. "I am an expert in the affairs of all men" is the banner of the professional politician and their toads. Not hardly.


Why am I wandering in the few moments between exhaustion and sleep in the dusty stacks of an alien culture dead and buried for seven hundred years? To find a kindred spirit. . .


I have never been in a hotel room as comfortable and pleasant as my own bedroom, and I have been in Presidential Suites before. Money can't fix the problem, and the availability of money without the governor of a framework of rules to expend it almost always makes things worse.


Our post-modern zeitgeist evangelizes that rules of any sort that govern personal behaviors or the appearance of our surroundings or entertainment are stultifying and worthy only of mindless opposition. The unthinking rejection of all tradition leads to a counterintuitive outcome: a set of rules, much more stringent than what they replaced, will replace the old ones, and they will consist of the worst possible alternative to what was there before.


. . . How else can I explain a Japanese man writing about my house, and the house you should be living in, in the fourteenth century?

From our own unfashionable but comfortable home and garden:

Interesting Tomatoes, both old and new varieties
Assorted garden gifts and a dog
BIG tomatoes
Ripe Green Tomatoes

And recipes for garden vegetables:
Skillet Lasagna with Zucchini
Grandma's Chili Sauce

Some thoughts on happy children and expectations

Confucius: "morals and art will deteriorate"

“If language is not correct . . . . . . morals and art will deteriorate":

Many years ago I went through an art exhibition at a glitzy mall in Newport Beach. I remember two of the art exhibits. One was a model wearing one of those iconic French Maid outfits - the short black, form-fitting dress with the little white apron and cap. But the model (perhaps the artist) was a rather tall man who also wore black tights, some really ugly black and white gym shoes and a gas mask. The other memorable exhibit featured wall hangings which exploited the various textures and colors of lint removed from clothes dryers.

I think there was some sort of environmental message intended by both of these art pieces, but I'm not sure what it was.

There are at this moment in history a lot of "artists" on the Left delivering political messages through "art". Relatively few on the Right, most of them
satirists pointing out rhetorical or other excesses on the Left. Moe Lane compares Australian Green protesters (dignified by American standards) to performance art. I can imagine myself in the audience. He says
about the second photo in this post:

". . . it looks for all the world like a snapshot of a particularly boring and pretentious piece of performance art. You know the kind that I’m talking about; one featuring three or four people moving about and talking aimlessly while atonal, yet annoying, stringed instruments play in the background. You’re there because your S.O.’s friend is involved with the production, and you have been promised that the party afterward will not be dull - so you spend the time trying to decipher the program, which reads like it was translated from German to English via Academic Marxist, with a quick stopover at Martian. You suspect that it has gained in the translation; meanwhile, up on the stage someone has just waved a broomstick at a man wearing a cow suit, which apparently has something to do with the Falkland Islands War.

It is about that time that you grimly conclude that the party afterward will be dull."

Hyperbole on the part of Australian Greens has reduced the tendency of the general population to pay attention to the Global Warming Issue. Particularly since the Australian contribution to greenhouse gasses is so tiny compared to, say, China's growing emissions. But the Greens still have the attention of the news media - just like in America. This may be one reason why political "performance art" gets more and more extreme while serious, fact-based discussions of issues go unnoticed.

Confucius and Clarity of Language

Confucius said:

“If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion.

Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.”

The translation above makes me wonder how the end of a sentence is indicated in Chinese. That's some first sentence. We're really not used to long sentences these days. I put in a paragraph separation just to make the quote easier to get through.

The piece from which this quote was taken makes some over-broad statements about government spending. But it includes some really good points about how people have been misled about government money. Click on the link at the bottom of the page for comments from readers which reveal some of the ways government involvement tends to make everything more expensive while sometimes making stuff seem "free". David could tell many similar stories. Money from government allows corrupt or astonishingly inefficient systems - public or private - to survive much longer than they would if they had to earn their own money.

Dr. Helen has some interesting advice concerning how teachers can help their students think critically and clearly understand some of the ways propaganda works:

" . . . in my opinion, it is not your job to decide the politics of the students in your class, it is your job to expose them to the critical thinking skills that will help them make informed decisions and back them up in a reasoned way. This is what is sorely lacking in our present educational system."

Did you know that there was a Propaganda Game ? Some non-PC books for kids would also help provide some balance to the liberal mindset which filters down from our higher education system.

Growing up in the Age of MTV

Yesterday, I heard part of this discussion between Dennis Prager and a physician/author worried about the psychological and other effects of casual sex on young people. She believes that it adversely affects their ability to form a lasting commitment to a partner and a family due to changes in brain chemistry. Thankfully, the young people she described were quite different from the ones we watched at the Stake dance Saturday.

One of the points Dennis made was how quickly the educational system was destroying Judeo-Christian values in America. It takes a strong counter-balance to the popular culture and the educational system for young people to hang onto those values. He described his favorite moral question to students: whether they would save a drowning human or their drowning beloved pet. A 16 year-old caller described a class discussion in which her classmates casually accepted Nazi-like ideas concerning killing the infirm (expressed by another student) as just another point of view. Tolerance of various points of view has become a higher good in many people's minds than basic agreement on principles such as as not murdering imperfect people.

Worthwhile listening, even if you don't agree with everything you hear.

Related: Feminine modesty: Between Bare and Burqa. Many young women have no idea of the effect that skimpy clothing has on male observers. On the other hand, completely obscuring your femininity with clothing can be dehumanizing.

Update: Dennis' latest written argument in favor of Judeo-Christian values. I usually find Dennis more interesting on the radio that on a page, as I think he often outlines only the barest skeleton of his principles when he writes. When he discusses the same principles on the radio, it's easier to see how they apply in people's lives. I would be interested in other's reactions to this piece.

Introduction to Dennis Prager

Dennis Prager, the talk-show host and lecturer, is an original. He has helped me clarify my thinking a lot over the years.

When he was young, some in his family thought he was retarded because he would sit for hours twirling the tail of the family's pet dog while staring at a lake. He decided in high school that, in his case, youth would not be "wasted on the young". He skipped high school classes, getting into a lot of trouble. Instead of going to class, he visited all the interesting adult in New York City whom he could manage to visit. He also taught himself to conduct symphony orchestras, learned foreign languages and read serious political journals. He almost flunked out of high school, but got good grades in Community College. He took a graduate degree in the Soviet system of government at Columbia, where he says that his faith in God was confirmed by observing the irrationality of some of the positions of the non-religious professors there.

He has visited more countries than any 20 people I know. He is Jewish, and after the first airline highjackings (before highjackers started steering planes into buildings) he started an outreach called the "Center for Ethical Monotheism", promoting an ethical basis of understanding between Christians, Jews and Muslims (I might not have the name quite right).

I listened to him when I lived in Southern California. In addition to his regular broadcast, he did a show on Sunday night called "Religion on the Line" where clergy from different faiths discussed theological and other issues. It was fascinating, sometimes emotional, and the clergy got along with each other very well. There has been nothing like it since.

When I first started listening to Dennis, he called himself a "passionate moderate" - someone interested in balancing important principles which were inherently in conflict. As our political system moved further to the left, he started to identify himself as a "conservative" or as a "classical liberal" - terms he thought of as practically synonymous at that point in history. He continues to identify with conservatives and classical liberals today. He made a difficult (for him) change in party affiliation from Democratic to Republican several ago.

Dennis decided a few years ago that he needed to take his show national, and KABC in Los Angeles cut him lose. He still talks about a wide range of issues, both personal ("micro") and cultural or political ("macro"). If I'm not interested by a particular topic, I just wait for the next one.

Today, in his first hour he presented persuasive encouragement for people to balance trivial entertainment time with time spent in "elevating" pursuits - reading good books, listening to elevating music, studying scripture or other wisdom literature, etc. He reminded us that this used to be something that people regularly thought about. Times have changed. Now most of us are totally oriented toward entertainment in our free time.

Dennis is more tolerant of "expressing our lower natures" in harmless ways than are some religious people. But he still talked about feeling the need to take a bath after watching a particular MTV program.

His second hour was an interview with the (mostly) conservative columnists George Will , who defined the difference between liberals and conservatives in a simple way. Will related a memory about Daniel Patrick Moynihan. They don't make Democratic senators like him anymore. Prager and Will discussed audio books, the great advantages for Democrats in this year's election, and two very important reasons why conservatives should vote for McCain even if they don't like him much.

Audio of his programs is available here or (commercial free) at Pragertopia here. In the Central Valley, we can listen to him on KTIP 1450 AM from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. - his third hour is not broadcast.