I visited some folks this weekend who live back up in the hills in a northern county. He was doing a foundation repair on his house.

The old foumdation was shallow, un-reinforced with steel, and cracked.

The room involved was a nonconforming low-ceilinged room, with wood floors with lots of earth contact and a musty odor of rotting wood.

My friends solution was to excavate inside the cracked foundation 12" below the bottom 

of the old foundation, undermine it by 2", form & pour a new 6"x 24" concrete footing the length of the room. ~9'

One day at a time, the insulation on the wires to the motor got softer and oilier.

Over the years it broke down gradually until one day, the voltage began shorting to the motor housing.

Slowly and imperciptably at first perhaps, but finally and suddenly,

the motor overheated. The fan belt was not well aligned with the motor shaft either, adding heat and wear to the system.

A new motor purchased at Grainger was swapped in and realigned with squirrel cage fan.

Anagnorisis and Peripeteia

http://www.dillonhillas.com/dumspirospero/lamb-castration-peripeteia-and-anagnorisis-and-the-war-on-work/
"“reversal of intention” (peripeteia) and “recognition” (anagnorisis)"
http://youtu.be/r-udsIV4Hmc

Also note the juxtaposition of the ideas imitation and innovation.

The bride of Christ...

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/godandthemachine/2012/09/the-gnostic-noise-machine-and-the-wife-of-jesus/




http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304178104579535540828090438

Scylla and Charybdis

between a rock and a hard place

One Cosmos Bob

The great and even sometimes correct physicist, Albert Einstein: "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." In the view of many, religion is primitive, childish, and "nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses." Therefore, for Einstein, science without childish nonsense is entirely lame.


Could this be why he refused to eat his peas and accept the unsettling implications of quantum mechanics? Yeah, probably. If only he had practiced a less primitive and childish religion -- or maybe even understood his own -- perhaps he could have realized that complementarity and nonlocality are here to stay, irrespective of what mere physicists have to say about them. I mean, God is surely a physicist, but not only a physicist.

I think even Einstein would agree that physics can only discover truth, not invent it. And if physics arrives at a theory which renders the person who affirms it an illusion, well, so much the worse for the theory. Back to the drawing board.

God will wait for the prodigal scientist. What did Robert Jastrow say? "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

Now, what is so interesting about this is that, at the top of that mountain, man doesn't discover an equation, or a singularity, or subatomic particle. Rather, what he discovers is another... face? Jesus Christ!

We'll get back to this provocative idea later, but let's just stipulate at the moment that it is indeed possible to come face-to-face with reality and to graze in the mirror and recognize the phase before one was born. There I AM, just as I left him!

As we were saying yesterday, there is no object that lacks an "interior horizon". It is forever inaccessible to the cold and eager grasp of the materialist. Hate to be so antipromethean, but Way It Is.

"Even subspiritual entities are not completely bereft of this kind of protection.... There is no being that does not enjoy an interiority, however liminal and rudimentary it may be" (Balthasar, but see also Whitehead for exciting details).

The above holds true unless, I suppose, your faith in yourself is total, in which case there is literally no getting through to you, because you are entirely complete and therefore closed.

"what we actually experience of the world always remains an infinitesimal sector of the knowable" (ibid).

For as the "sphere of knowledge" expands, so too does the edge that shades off into the unKnown. Thus, if restricted to the horizontal plane only, it is quite accurate to say that "the more we know, the less we understand," and it is not difficult to see why this must be the case.

To playgiarize with another shopworn truism, it is possible to know more and more about less and less until we know everything about nothing, at which point we are granted tenure.

Conversely, only the Raccoon knows a little nothing about everything.

The little "nothing" we know about everything is that inaccessible essence known only to... God? But isn't it interesting that even this little "nothing" speaks to us?

In other words, in the act of knowing, there is a kind of "cosmic movement" from interior to exterior. But the moment we try to clutch at that interior, it recedes back to its private sphere, like a mirage in the desert road on the way to Vegas.

Thus, "even so-called exact science remains an approximation of the truth about the essence of matter. It is no more and no less than a never-ending attempt to woo the core of the material world, which is not directly available to sense perception" (ibid).

Rather, it is veil upon veil upon veil, just like Einstein's "primitive" religion, Judaism, says it is. Not sure if Einstein ever got to the next part, which is that the veil simultaneously conceals and reveals, which is why reality is always a revelation.

Is this a bad thing? No, of course not, unless you think that a negligee on a Victoria's Secret model is a bad thing. Nature woos us with similarly seductive veils, and we don't mind at all. Rather, she can use us until she uses us up.

Does this mean that we are championing the romantic and irrational? Hardly. Well, sort of. Again, we can know any number of things about nature. Just not everything -- any more than one could know oneself completely. Indeed, assuming that you don't even know yourself, and that you know yourself best, what makes you think that you could completely know anything else? What are you, a machine?

Balthasar: "[R]eality, not merely by reason of some accidental circumstance, but by reason of an intrinsic necessity, must always remain richer than any cognition of it," and "the truth even of the lowest level of being contains a richness that so utterly eludes exhaustive investigation that it can continue to engage inquirers until the end of time yet never ends up as a heap of unmysterious, completely surveyable facts."



For those of us who actually enjoy science, this should be wonderful news, because it means that there is no end to the knowledge party, no matter how late one arrives. Like the burning bush, or the wine at the wedding, or the feeding of the five thousand, there's always more where that came from.



However, this cosmic fact will not be a liberating joy, but a frustrating persecution, for those who pursue science with secret pretensions to omniscience. There are always scientific party-poopers, those annoying know-it-alls who tell everyone to break it up and go home.



For such narrow-minded and snake-eyed scolds, it will be extremely disturbing to learn that God enjoys playing a little dice now and then. And history teaches that the biggest gamble of all was the creation of a bunch of big-brained Einsteins with the freedom to deny that he plays dice.



But even before that -- before mind -- comes the shocking phenomenon of Life and all it implies. For when God told the cosmos to get a life, he wasn't just serious but really yoking around with time. Time to roll 'dem bones!



To be continued....

Para. 1: Einstein I'll take (with a grain or two here & there); your comment re: the troll's drawdown on Albert's aphorism is perfect:


for Einstein, science without childish nonsense is entirely lame.

Para. 2: what could be added or subtracted? 10 of 10.

Para.3: So much quotable throughout, well-characterized by this paragraph. Sentence 2 alone is a tour de force. I must memorize it or work it into a song lyric. Perhaps sentence 3 could be the song title.

Para. 4:I remember my father-in-law, a devoutly modern renaissance man/taxi-cab driver/telescope builder quoting Jastrow to me at he apex of his "highest peak", after having skewered me for my "faith".

Para.5: Ah, yes. How to render that revelation into a succinct 4 part formula we can fit on a 3x5.

Para.6: Boo. It is scary to us is it not to confront the reality that we are all straw men, as

Para.7: so succinctly expresses it. But do you get back to Para.5 later?

Para.8: "there is no object...that lacks an 'interior horizon'...[which remains]forever inaccessible to the cold and eager grasp of the materialist." Am I parsing this correctly? "Way it is", dude.

Para.9-14: amplifies the preceeding, culminating in tenure

Para.15-17:

millenialism

A quote from a comment stream by someone named TitusStaccato

I liked this weeks program on all counts. Libertarian Millenials is a spot on label. I think it applies my Gen X a lot too. I am not implying that Snowden specifically is part of this creedless creed, but the Libertarian Millenialism I recognize in myself, wanting to be--I believe it was P J Buchanan's term "a multimedia ninja [motorcycle rapping adult film] performer" --I believe the demographic rootlessness of the middle class of the last three decads is probably the culprit in part. Not being quite young enough to be a millenial allow me to delude you into believing I have an insightful perspective on the causes.

Millenials are not all bad people and under no circumstances shouldbe used as a food source without first consulting with the millenial in question. What millenials are lacking, speaking for myself (a late X-er) are ordinary affiliations such as church, scouting, Indian Guides or even school clubs. If like me the millenial's family finally seemed to get rooted when they were past 10 years old, the part missing from the normal socialization and practical skill set that comes from, for example learning in groups of peers while chaperoned/ learning in an ordered or stratified group environment. Computers retard progress in those sorts of skills and serve as a shield to hide the deficiencies, in the same way radical politics, bizarre fashions and food fetishes do.

I used to tell myself that I would fill in those traditional knowledge gaps later, but I never wanted to start way behind the Joneses in learning to start fires or chart a course on a paper map thus never did. I've got arithemetic down pat though. The millenial strives for fame, glamor and/or money and generally doesn't believe in nation, family or creed because he has been taught formal analysis critical theory to look for goblins of political incorrectness and ignores the bigger picture. Anger, unless it is trivial and extremely personal OCD anger is grounds for automatic dismissal and one less person the millenial has to deal with. It is narcissm wrapped in a false choosines that borders on misanthropy.

So the big concern is 45 million entitled jerkweeds whose only skill is feeling good about themselves, I can recognize the type. Millenials' enablers are only as bad as the average millenial requires. But when a millenial body is displeased it behaves like the 150 million zomboid Shi'ites who are the world's other great scourge. Meanwhile the lack of talented shepherds is preventing the millenials from doing the only thing that could possibly save him or her, patriotism, tradition, or a laissez-faire competitive challenge. The solution is to make outer space seem attractive to all of them and their enablers and launch them all out there. The strategy "I hear Allah calling, sign right here, see ya" .
I'm sure I am missing something in this analysis but I hit the high points of why we're doomed, in my own words. Here is a link to a non-partisan think tank devoted to keeping the future from being insubstantial, the Long Now Foundation,http://blog.longnow.org/02013/... Please remember to recycle.

Thirty-Six Years Ago Today, Richard Nixon Saved Israel—but Got No Credit

History that escaped the media circus at the time...

James Piereson writes in The New Criterion

Conservatism in America deploys the principles of tradition, reason, and orderly change in defense of liberal institutions—the Constitution, representative government, liberty and equal rights, the rule of law.

Rules of Mark

in no particular order:



one must focus on the secondary or the intermediate to accomplish the primary



paradox is the crux of every issue



morality dictates theology

(more to follow as addendum)

5 albums that shaped me before age 20

John Wesley Harding by Bob Dylan

To Our Children's Children's Children by the Moody Blues

Nashville Skyline by Bob Dylan

Meet the Beatles by the Beatles 1964

The Ventures

Bonfire of the Trivialities

Charles Krauthammer on bailout bonuses.

Niall Ferguson interview: "There Will Be Blood"

This interview fleshes out in some detail what one of the foremost thinkers is predicting in the next few years, world-wide.

There will be blood, in the sense that a crisis of this magnitude is bound to increase political as well as economic [conflict]. It is bound to destabilize some countries. It will cause civil wars to break out, that have been dormant. It will topple governments that were moderate and bring in governments that are extreme. These things are pretty predictable. The question is whether the general destabilization, the return of, if you like, political risk, ultimately leads to something really big in the realm of geopolitics. That seems a less certain outcome. We've already talked about why China and the United States are in an embrace they don't dare end. If Russia is looking for trouble the way Mr. Putin seems to be, I still have some doubt as to whether it can really make this trouble, because of the weakness of the Russian economy. It's hard to imagine Russia invading Ukraine without weakening its economic plight. They're desperately trying to prevent the ruble from falling off a cliff. They're spending all their reserves to prop it up. It's hardly going to help if they do another Georgia.”
“I was more struck Putin's bluster than his potential to bite, when he spoke at Davos. But he made a really good point, which I keep coming back to. In his speech, he said crises like this will encourage governments to engage in foreign policy aggression. I don't think he was talking about himself, but he might have been. It's true, one of the things historically that we see, and also when we go back to 30s, but also to the depressions 1870s and 1880s, weak regimes will often resort to a more aggressive foreign policy, to try to bolster their position. It's legitimacy that you can gain without economic disparity – playing the nationalist card. I wouldn't be surprised to see some of that in the year ahead. It's just that I don't see it producing anything comparable with 1914 or 1939. It's kind of hard to envisage a world war. Even when most pessimistic, I struggle to see how that would work, because the U.S., for all its difficulties in the financial world, is so overwhelmingly dominant in the military world.

I think the IMF has been consistently wrong in its projections year after year. Most projections are wrong, because they're based on models that don't really correspond to the real world. If anything good comes of crisis, I hope it will be to discredit these ridiculous models that people rely on, and a return to something more like a historical understanding about the way the world works.” “I mean most of these models, including, I'm told, the one that policy makers here use, don't really have enough data to be illuminating … You're going to end up assuming that this recession is going to end up like other recessions, and the other recessions didn't last that long, so this one won't last so long. But of course this isn't a recession. This is something really quite different in character from anything we've experienced in the postwar era. That's why these projections give positive numbers for 2010. That's the default setting. And it just seems to me ostrich-like, to bury one's head in the sand and assume this has to end this year because, well, that's what recessions do.

Kevin Kelly

innovation is more important than price because price is a derivative of innovation.

Rush

The response from Rush. He's never been a legend in my mind, but he's a great infotainer. He doesn't live up to his own hype in my mind, but I have no problem with his hyping, because it's half tongue-in-cheek, half self-fulfilling and half on target. He's iconoclastic and a good antidote to the liberal group-think ooze that masquerades as conventional wisdom.

Vertical Politics

the politics of solutions, not ideology, attributed by Mike Volpe at the Provocateur to Mike Huckabee. For example, the fair tax. Worth looking into.

In his book, Do the Right Thing, Mike Huckabee talked about the concepts of vertical and horizontal politics. Horizontal politics is when solutions to policy are figured out based on ideology. In other words, whatever is the issue, the individual tries to figure out how their ideology should deal with the issue. Vertical politics is when someone just tries to figure out what the solution is and doesn't worry about how that applies to ideology. Huckabee made the point that most voters want people that solve problems. They aren't ideological and so they aren't as impressed with ideological solutions. Explain to someone how a policy will help them and that is the person they will vote for.

Ready, set, go

Now where was I? Oh yes, seemingly random links, posts, thoughts to share....


Warren Buffet weighs in on the economic outlook:
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/71649/



I watched CPAC for a coupla hours last night. Ron Paul, Wayne LaPierre, Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.



Pundita picked up my link to an article about Pope Benedict XVI in the Dec 2008 issue of Asia Times Online by Spengler discussing economics and localism. All of which ties into my current interest in GK Chesterton's distributism.
http://pundita.blogspot.com/2009/02/president-barack-obamas-speech-to-us.html

Modern day McClellans

Powerline's Scott Johnson fleshes out the issue of the general's footdragging in Iraq. Bottomline: Petraus=Grant.
The full article he references is here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122221472541069353.html

the OODA loop

Observe, orient, decide, act. Do this at a quicker clip than your opponent or obstacle and you win.

OODA “Loop”

For the background on OODA see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_Loop
For a personal historical testimony of Colonel John Boyd's OODA loop theory:
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/thoughts.html#OODA

further musings

the oldest is first but for blog writing time is reversed....ie the the first is the last or latest, the most recent.

When the miracle flows, it flows both ways. With each gift the threads of benevolence are knotted, snaring both giver and recipient. I've only slowly come to realize that good givers are those who learn to receive with grace as well. They radiate a sense of being indebted and a state of being thankful. As a matter of fact, we are all at the receiving end of a huge gift simply by being alive. (Kevin Kelly)


Pasteur once said, chance favors only a mind prepared.

sesquipedalian (characterized by the use of long words)
(said of the prose of WF Buckley)

Narrative is the quality of story telling. Story is a fundamental prism through which we as human beings can look at ourselves and derive meaning, purpose and direction in our living. Our lives are stories, and stories resonate with our primal approach to integration with our environment. Bringing a sense of story-telling, or narrative, to our conscious self-dialogue or our social interaction is a basic tool for framing meaning within a context of particulars that apply to ourselves in time and space, i.e. reality. And Meaning is the meat our brains need to grow.

"The harvest of old age is the recollection and abundance of blessings previously secured" (Cicero)

What's it for or about anyway, when you, alone, is all that's at risk
Temporal for sure, foreclosure assured, consider it done.
If you hear things that still the storm for you, or find the stillness within the storm,
There's nothing that can rob what's bequeathed to you
It's out of reach for all the cosmos except you
And if you let it go
It won't slip away.

"We find ourselves facing a version of the paradox of the Cretan liar: (if) all beliefs, including this one, are the products of evolution, and all beliefs that are products of evolution cannot be known to be true....But how can reality have any moral quality without having an immanent or transcendent purpose? ... The last of the atheist's Ten Commandments ends with the following:"Question everything." Everything? Including the need to question everything, and so on ad infinitum?
(Theodore Dalrymple)

Aristotle noted, "That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it."