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Saturday, February 22, 2014

Tony Judt and Dumitru Tsepeneag

Hotel Europa by Dumitru Tsepeneag

It is now nearly four years since we lost the inimitable Tony Judt, the finest historian of Europe of our generation.  His magisterial Postwar: Europe Since 1945 stands as the most incisive work of historical scholarship and humane erudition produced in recent memory. Judt wore his learning lightly, wrote lucidly, judged according to clear and rational standards of historical conduct, and remained remarkably untainted by the ideological distortions that have diminished the writings of so many contemporary historians.  What reader of the New York Review of Books or of the London Review hasn't marveled at Judt's ability to distill a career ("Goodbye to All That? Leszek Kolakowski and the Marxist Legacy"), demolish the "useful idiots" of the early 2000's ("The Silence of the Lambs: On the Strange Death of Liberal America"), or cut to the heart of a complex contemporary political question ("The Country That Wouldn't Grow Up")?  Well, plenty of them. Because he refused to climb on board any bandwagon and was equally critical of all parties guilty of self-serving mendacity and gross stupidity, Judt had plenty of enemies--those blindly loyal to Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories, supporters of the intransigence of the PLO under Arafat, unreconstructed Marxists, the editors of the New York Times who supported W. Bush's war in Iraq, those who adored Pope John Paul ("A Pope of Ideas?" one of the most devastating essays ever written about the pretensions of papal power), and anyone hoodwinked by the fatuousness of Thomas Friedman.  Even when I didn't agree with Judt's viewpoint on some question it was difficult not to be charmed and persuaded by his prose, his deep and humane learning, and his ethical sincerity.

All of which is a long prologue to the tale of Hotel Europa by Dumitru Tsepeneag, surely a household name in the literary precincts of our republic (!).  Hotel Europa (a bit of a joke I think: Bucharest is closer to Istanbul than to Paris) was published in Romanian in 1996, not long after the political events it depicts, translated by Patrick Camiller, and issued by Dalkey in 2010, by which time the sclerotic memories of Romania's descent into chaos (from somewhat greater chaos) had already fallen into the black hole of forgetfulness that the zombies of the informationless age inhabit.  This is one thing among many I loved about Tony Judt--he knew everything worth knowing, he thought it was important to know everything, and he appeared never to forget what he knew. Even in his dying from ALS, he dictated a book to his secretary (Ill Fares the Land) that puts every other book about our nation's predicament to shame. And what are some of the things Judt hadn't forgotten?  The unspeakable crimes of Ceaușescu for one thing: the torture centers, the extra-judicial murders, the violence against dissenters, the lies he told to hoodwink three or four American presidents (Ceaușescu was a critic of the Soviet leadership during the Cold War and thus an ally of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and others).  Despite his brutality--for example, in an effort to increase the "pure Romanian population," beginning in 1966 both birth control and abortion were prohibited in Romania, a draconian measure which resulted in the deaths of at least 10,000 women--in spite of such Stalinist madness, Ceaușescu was granted IMF loans that he repaid on the backs of the poorest people in Europe, MFN trade status, membership in GATT, a state visit to London, and fawning attention by Western politicians who should have known better.

Dumitru Tsepeneag, pictured above and to the left, is among the most popular writers in Romania and highly regarded in his adopted nation of France.  In the 1960's he was among the founders of the Oniric group of Surrealists--indeed his books have a strong surrealist strain: they are dreamlike, fracturing space and time, dispersing with chronology and causality, jumping from fiction to (purported) fact, from autobiography to novelistic invention.  Tsepeneag had his Romanian citizenship revoked by Ceaușescu's government in 1975 and in that year emigrated to Paris. At first he published in Romanian, and then, as he puts it, his publisher asked him to write in French to save money on translation. His most popular novel thus far, The Vain Art of the Fugue was his first to appear in his adopted language--it's a good place to start with this difficult writer.

Hotel Europa tells the story of the 1990 revolution in Romania through the eyes of both the narrator (who is trying to get away from Paris and his French wife in order to write the book that we are reading) and a group of students victimized by the riots of that year.  The novel is full of mordant playfulness--witty exchanges on the forever twinned subjects of  politics and sex, not unlike those that fill Hopscotch, replace traditional plot lines.  Who, for example, is Ion, whose principle role appears to be the mouthpiece of the author, but a most uncooperative one?

"Ion [the novel's main character, a student] might accuse me [the novelist] of speaking more about myself in this novel than him, despite the fact that he's the main character. Of course it would be easy for me to reply that he doesn't decide who the main character is. . . But that, I admit, would be unworthy of an author who hates appearing to his readers as a god or a father in relation to his characters. . . "

Although he wrote a generation earlier, I often thought of Tsepeneag's countryman Eugene Ionesco as I read Hotel Europa.  The two exiles had a lot in common, including residence in Paris, a love-hate relationship with their country of birth, and the adoption of the French language.  I remember my first reading of Ionesco's brilliant absurdist play The Chairs, a farce not unlike Waiting for Godot (but darker)--Tsepeneag doesn't unhinge reality in quite the way that Ionesco did, but the comparison is apt. Both writers, coming from a country where, as Tony Judt pointed out, there has been an "obsession with identity," confront the facts of displacement and a lack of rootedness. Tsepeneag's books (of the two I've read) place his characters in predicaments that consistently undercut their sense of gravity.  No one belongs; no set of circumstances feels fixed beyond the moment, and political violence sweeps up everyone--"all that is solid melts into air"--even under communism.

Back to Tony Judt: "'Some countries,' according to E.M. Cioran, looking back across Romania's twentieth century, 'are blessed with a sort of grace: everything works for them, even their misfortunes and catastrophes. There are others for whom nothing succeeds and whose very triumphs are but failures. When they try to assert themselves and take a step forward, some external fate intervenes to break their momentum and return them to their starting point.'"  This is from Judt's essay "Romania Between History and Europe," included in the collection Reappraisals, published in 2008.

There is an interview with Dumitru Tsepeneag, in French, here

Hotel Europa is published by Dalkey Archive.

George Ovitt 2/22/14

Saturday, February 15, 2014

"The problem for an engagé writer, as they call them now, is to continue being a writer. If what he writes becomes simply literature with a political content, it can be very mediocre. That’s what has happened to a number of writers. So, the problem is one of balance. For me, what I do must always be literature, the highest I can do . . . to go beyond the possible. But, at the same time, to try to put in a mix of contemporary reality. And that’s a very difficult balance."*

Save Twilight and Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar

                                                                                He was a beautiful man--there's a little of Chet Baker in this image, though Cortázar was darker and his face had more sadness in it.  (Chet would catch up in the sadness department, pretty quickly).  In my study I have lots of pictures, but only one image of a writer--Julio, bearded, smoking (of course), looking off into the distance, looking, perhaps, for La Maga in some Parisian cafe, or thinking about a philosophical paradox posed by Gregorovius, that spinner of paradoxes.  Oh to have lived in that Moveable Feast, Paris in the Fifties, cheap wine and jazz and conversations that lasted all night!  When I dip back into Hopsccotch, or, as now, reread it for the third or fourth time, I almost weep at the beauty of it--the gorgeous writing, the flow of ideas, the lost world, the riffs on politics and love and art that follow Oliveria/Cortázar as he wanders the streets in his lumberjack coat and leaky shoes, looking for, or trying to forget, La Maga, that life-force, that enigma, who just happens (among other things) to be a woman.

He was a poet of course, a poet in prose, like so many other writers in Spanish.  This morning, reeling from half-a-dozen poems from Save Twilight, I was thinking that, for sure, no language has more beautiful writing than Spanish--Cortázar, Márquez, Bolaño, Vila-Matas, Lispector, Abad--I could go on, but what's the point?  Russians and East Europeans do politics better than anyone; the French have no peer when it comes to malaise, the Brits are the great chroniclers of imperialist regret, Anglophone Indian writers are the best storytellers (Rohinton Mistry, e.g.), and Americans own bewildered self-regard--but literature in Spanish, whether peninsular or colonial, is by far the most poetic and passionate and beautiful.

From section 25 of Hopscotch: (I like to read the novel straight through and have never attempted playing rayuela according to Cortázar's directions in the preface): "Gregorovius thought that somewhere Chestov had written about aquariums with a removable glass partition which could be taken out any time and that the fish, who was accustomed to his compartment, would never try to go over to the other side. He would come to a point in the water, turn around and swim back, without discovering that the obstacle was gone, that all he had to do was to keep on going forward....."

He tosses this sort of thing off on every page--emblems of deeper truths, hints at the inner lives of his characters (who we know to be real people, thinly disguised).  Cortázar/Oliveria is this fish, walking and smoking and talking in riddles to his cercle intime--and then traveling back to Argentina to work in a circus that is an insane asylum and in an insane asylum that is a circus (yes, the glass partition can be removed and the fish never tries to go to the other side).  There is a yearning in Cortázar for truth and clarity that I find brave and touching and deeply moving; he is the greatest philosopher among writers, far more bracing than Dostoevsky because he is far less willing to capitulate to dogma or to divide the world up at all--no, Julio/Horacio swallows life whole, just as it is and must be.

 Look, I don't ask much,
just your hand, to hold it
like a little frog who'd sleep there happily.
I need that door you gave me
for coming into your world, that little chunk
of green sugar, of a lucky ring.
Can't you just spare me your hand tonight
at the end of a year of hoarse-voiced owls?
You can't, for technical reasons. So
I weave it in the air, warping each finger,
the silky peach of the palm
and the back, that country of blue trees.
That's how I take it and hold it, as
if so much of the world
depended on it,
the succession of the four seasons,
the crowing of the roosters, the love of human beings.

This is "Happy New Year."  In interviews, like the one given to the "Paris Review," Cortázar often made the point that the real and the surreal are one and the same thing--I think he felt the glass partition between consciousness and the unconscious to be porous, or non-existent.  His novels, like 62: A Model Kit  aren't at all like dreams, but they are dreamy, the prose languorous rather than sharp; there's nothing business-like about Cortázar's writing, and he's never eager to take the reader to some destination of plot or character development. Things pop up in the stories embedded in Hopscotch, like that marvelous long account of Horacio/Julio wandering into an eccentric piano recital by the deluded impresario Berthe Trepat--this is writing as jazz, Charlie Parker put into words, and Horacio/Julio is, in La Maga's words, "like a glass of water in a storm."

He was a beautiful man who died too young (at 69), possibly from a blood transfusion.  He was born in Brussels, taught elementary school in rural Argentina where he began to write, then moved to Paris in 1951.  He offended the Peronists who ruled his native country and wasn't welcome--and that was all right since Paris was his natural home.  He translated for UNESCO, played the trumpet, collected books and art, wrote and thought and lived.

Here is a photo of his wife, Carol Dunlop who died in 1982.

Julio Cortázar died in Paris in 1984.  I visited his grave in Montparnasse; it was covered with flowers.

*From the Paris Review interview:

Hopscotch was translated by that genius Gregory Rabassa who has done so much to make Spanish and Latin American Literature available to us.

City Lights Books published Save Twilight in a nice pocketbook edition, with Spanish texts and translations by Stephen Kessler.  It's #53 in the City Lights Series.

Here he is, looking like Jean-Paul Belmondo.

George Ovitt, 2/15/14

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Israel: Women at War

The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

The first time I saw Israeli women in uniform was on the train ride between Tel Aviv and Haifa. Actually they were girls, teenaged girls in combat boots and sagging fatigues with machine guns slung low on their backs. Clustered between cars, they stood teasing each other, chewing gum, chatting on their cell phones, smoking cigarettes, and listening to their I-Pods like teenagers virtually everywhere in the industrialized world. As deterrents to terror, they seemed delightfully harmless, though the facts, the statistics, prove otherwise. It has long been a successful Israeli strategy to post soldiers everywhere—at border checkpoints, airports, and federal buildings, surely, but also on buses and trains, in markets, synagogues, parks, schools, hospitals, shops, museums, restaurants, nightclubs, movie theatres, hotel lobbies, and even on the beach, where we had occasion to see them, often uniformed girls with Kalashnikovs and M-16s, strolling arm-in-arm on the sand.

By law, all able-bodied Israelis between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one are required to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces, known by the Hebrew acronym Tzahal for Tzva Hahahgana Le Yisra’el, a national conscription that has always included women. Charged to “defend the existence, territorial integrity and sovereignty of the state of Israel,” they—like their male counterparts—have done so, again and again, in the course of Israel’s brief and tumultuous history, if with an increasingly volatile mixture of loyalty and ambivalence, of courage, compassion, and fear.

The People of Forever Are Not Afraid charts the boredom and yearning of three teenaged girls in a dusty outpost not far from the Lebanese border, as they struggle to make meaning out of their empty, conventionally hapless lives. It is only when they are conscripted into the army, when they are pressed to enact and enforce the absurdities and contradictions of modern Israeli life, in short, to defend the indefensible, that they come to understand what it means to be an Israeli today.

The philosopher-historian Will Durant once calculated that there have only been twenty-nine years in the history of human civilization in which a war was not underway somewhere in the world. In the now sixty-six year history of the modern state of Israel there has never even been one, not a single year in which the nation was not at war. Politics aside, just think of it—the resources, the madness, the daily wear and tear on soldiers and civilians alike. While in Tel Aviv, my wife, my sons, and I had dinner with a friend of ours, a lovely evening with him and his wife and children in their home that ended with a tour of their bomb shelter, an architectural feature mandated for all Israeli homes, apartment buildings, and factories since 1951. To be an Israeli (or Palestinian) today, in my friend’s case a secular, cosmopolitan, politically progressive Israeli, is to live one’s life in a strangely normalized state of siege, a fraught, impossibly suspended now. Surely something soon must give.

While I strongly believe that the world needs to continue to plead the case of the Palestinians and their equal right to a just, secure, and autonomous state, the effort will falter to the very degree that it inspires the vilification of Israel and of Israelis themselves. What this good novel does, what all good novels of the region do (including those of such tireless and courageous Palestinian writers as Elias Khoury, Susan Abulhawa, and Ghassan Kaanfani, to name just three), is to re-humanize the struggle there, to put a face—some very anguished human faces—on the latest philippics, invectives, and screeds. The wonder of such fiction as Boianjiu’s is the way in which it fleshes out and complicates the matters, clouding, precluding, that all-but-irresistible desire to simplify this war through caricature and propaganda, to paint it in black and white. For when this war is finally ended (as I’m convinced it will be, maybe even someday soon) the terms of peace are sure to be just as messy, complex. Then—just as now—the region’s best writers are sure to play their part.

Shani Boianjiu served in the Israeli Defense Forces for two years and still lives in Israel today.

Peter Adam Nash

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Her Last Day on Earth

AVA, by Carole Maso

"Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naivete, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentricism, hasn't been ashamed of her strength?"

Helen Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa"

Many of the ideas of  Cixous are rather more elegantly expressed in the great classic work of feminist aesthetics, A Room of One's Own.   My friend and I have discussed the question of a uniquely "women's writing" (ecriture feminine) at some length.  I have expressed the view that there is a form of literary expression unique to women, and though I am unable (still!) to specify what I mean, my view is that women's novels and poetry in the modernist and post-modernist mode encompass a sensibility that no male writer could duplicate.  By coincidence, I reread parts of Kate Millet's Sexual Politics this past week and found that she shared my view--Millet also asserted that there is a "writing of the body" that belongs to women (and to Jean Genet).  My friend has hesitated to accept this viewpoint and "yearns to believe" that gender can be overcome, that empathy and full identification with others is possible.  I wondered, foolishly as I now see it, if a man could write Sense and Sensibility; my friend rightly reminded me of Trollope and of George Eliot, writers whose male and female characters are equal in psychological depth and (in Cixous's terminology) bodily verisimilitude.  My counterpoint to the argument from fictional realism was to cite the great modernist novel Mrs. Dalloway, a book I cannot imagine a man could write, but then, of course, there is Michael Cunningham's The Hours, a more than competent piece of ventriloquism, a book that, once again, forces me to wonder about my thesis--that men cannot write women and that Cixous is right to find in women's fiction a unique form of expression, a literature freed from the phallocentricism--to use a convenient, if awkward and demeaning bit of shorthand--of Western culture.

Then I read Carole Maso's extraordinary novel AVA and felt vindicated: surely this is a book that no man could write (I asserted, phallocentrically).

Ava Klein is dying of a "rare blood disease."  The novel is a recording, or perhaps an opening,  of the rich contents of Ava's mind, the vestiges of her flickering consciousness, as it alights on memories, dreams, desires, and illusions--evoking lovers, travels, ideas and associations, as well as plenty of banalities--just in the way one imagines the diminishing consciousness of any person (of you or I) dancing among sentences that are mere (!) representations of who we once were. A few pages into AVA and  I thought I was in for another take-off on the Tractatus--a fictionalized rehash of those aphoristic paradoxes Wittgenstein offered as the end of philosophy.  But after twenty pages I felt myself fall into Ava herself--there was no need to make comparisons or to think of some other writer or character.  In her dying, Ava became gloriously alive.

It's pointless to review-quote AVA since the impact of the novel is cumulative--any one page seems meaningless or at least too cryptic to bear much significance by itself.  This novel isn't just "stream of consciousness" in the Joycean sense but something more subtle; Maso recreates ("pictures" is, I think, just the right word, in a Wittgenstein mode) the horrible reality of dying, the sheer intensity of one's desire to cling to life through the exercise of memory.  AVA is all eros and no thantos.

"Who gave me life/Continues to give me life."  Yes, this is a novel as poetry: fragments of thought that are broken and reassembled a few lines later; tropes repeated over two-hundred and fifty pages; themes that need to be recomposed by the reader: theories of feminist literature (Cixous), Schubert's brief life and works, the streets of Paris, the Holocaust, the difficulty of writing...Maso breaks consciousness down to the level of aide-de-memoir: "The poet writes love; the poet writes death," or the single word, "Treblinka" repeated over and over in slightly different contexts and therefore each time possessing a unique resonance.

Maso, like David Markson, breaks the traditional novel down into its most basic unit--the sentence. No, that isn't quite right. In fact, Maso's text has a staccato quality that makes Markson seem long-winded: there are about 5,000 or so individual bits of Ava Klein's memory in AVA--words, sentence fragments, sentences, short paragraphs.  Naturally as I read the book I thought of the unlikelihood of any traditional venue reviewing such an odd duck of a novel: where's the plot? The character development? And at the same time I was stirred by the possibilities for fictional expression Maso opens for those who find the realist novel stultifying.  In an interview given to the editor of "Rain Taxi," Maso says this about traditional narrative forms:

"The kinds of mysterious, hypnotic, lyric leaps that happen in the first two books become the method of AVA. To me all my work is of a piece. I feel slightly perplexed I must say when I hear AVA is not narrative. I think it just redefines narrative, reformulates it. It's like where Ava says somewhere "and if not the real story, then what the story was for me." I don't think it's such a good idea to assign to old definitions of what narrative is to new work. The worst thing of all, and I've probably already said this, is to emerge already constructed. Somewhere most writers entered a pact, some weird silent agreement was made as to what story is, character, time, all of that. What passes for narrative in most fiction I just find senseless. Literally, I cannot make sense of it. For me, narrative does not reside in these old, artificial notions. Narrative in AVA is refigured; I think that is true."

I love her comments on the "weird silent agreement".  A narrative must be whatever it needs to be to convey the mystery of character or the depths of the "story".  Honestly, is life lived as stories or as  shards of memory?  How do we go through the day?  Do we think in "rational arguments," mystical koans, or bits of trivia mixed in with images of the past that express our longings and desires? Are we screens onto which are projected Aristotelian rising action, denouements, tragedies, and climaxes, or the bearers of mostly incoherent bits and pieces of memories and dreams?   I can't speak for anyone else, but my internal life is far more closely allied to Ava Klein's than to Nathan Zuckerman's.

Then there remains the question--could a man have written this Ava?  I wish I knew.

AVA is published by Dalkey Archive.

Interview with Carole Maso here

George Ovitt (2/5/14)


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11 November 2010

Veterans Day

Today is Veterans Day in the States, a holiday that honors all military veterans. But before 1954, it was observed as Armistice Day in memory of the end of World War I (the Armistice was signed by the Germans on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, formally ending major hostilities).

The “War to End All Wars” did everything but end all wars (many would argue that it led directly to World War II) but instead marked a loss of innocence and the arrival of the modern age. So today, lets not forgot those who originally inspired this holiday and remember the sacrifices they made on the fields of Europe and elsewhere.

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ASIFR - Tales of Iron

A Gambol with Death

Month 7, Day 1, the 296th day since Aegon’s Landing, Castle Fellwood.

A day had passed since a Stark envoy was intercepted on his way to King Joffrey’s court at Steadwater. Captured with two oathbreakers from the Night’s Watch, Sebastion Steadwater, Clancy Fortale, and Ser Rhaen of Danien & Rimchurch let him continue on his way out of the Fellwood, without letting Lord Harwood Fell know of a presence of a man sworn to the self-proclaimed King in the North.

The oathbreakers were put to death; the penalty for fleeing the Wall under the King’s justice.

While their prisoner, Stark’s emissary was relieved of his possessions, including an encrypted missive which Ser Sebastion deciphered. The message made clear that Stark meant to declare for Joffrey, however, the ravens had brought word to Fellwood of Stark secession from Seven Kingdoms under the Iron Throne.

The days passed under Lord Harwood’s hospitality. Steadwater’s men whiled away their time in the yards, honing their skills. Ser Sebastion plowed his way through handmaidens and maid servants of Castle Fellwood; many a Storm bearing Ser Sebastion’s looks will sprout from these furrows we’re certain.

Suddenly, the sound of the portcullis slamming shut brought all eyes to the wall. There, down the road could be seen 100 armored horse following a carriage bearing the arms of House Errol of Haystack Hall. In their panic, Lord Fell’s men had cut the winchrope holding up the gate. However, Lady Errol’s emissary rode under a peace banner and sought parlay at the gate. Fell’s riders camped in the wood, rode out to meet them.

The gate was hastily repaired and Lady Errol’s carriage was welcomed into the inner ward. The coachman stepped down to the side and unbundled the stairs before the door. The door opened and two strong swordsmen wearing Errol livery stepped out. Lord Fell and his retinue gathered before the carriage to await the appearance of the Lady Shyra. What emerged was an enormous fat man who squeezed himself through the narrow doorway from the carriage, the Lady Shyra’s good-brother, Master Jayce Errol.

Soon the fat lordling was ensconced in his rooms at Castle Fellwood, indulging in sweet cakes and the finest from Lord Harwood’s larder. Ser Sebastion told us how Lady Shyra was the widowed wife to the late Lord Errol, but Jayce, being the younger brother and entitled to this late brother’s seat eschewed it for the sake of growing fat off harvests of Haystack Hall. This and the 5 companies of heavy horse that comprised Jayce’s escort to Fellwood had left Haystack Hall impoverished, their small lands almost incapable of supporting either Jayce’s appetite or the maintenance of such an army.

Clancy had some notion that Jayce would be Steadwater’s ticket out from under the yoke of Fellwood’s hospitality and joined the obese lordling at his gluttony. There, he learned that his appetites were not as prodigious as that belonging to the Errol and that Jayce had been invited by Lady Shyra to tour the Stormlands, indulging the hospitality of the other lords. It is surmised that she envisioned this as a form of economic warfare, for Jayce’s appetite for food would quickly deplete the provisions of many a castle. Indeed, Jayce had quickly found his welcome overstayed at the inns and holdfasts he had visited en route to Fellwood.

Meanwhile, Ser Rhaen busied himself by making merry with Lady Errol’s men, or the company that formed Jayce’s bodyguard while inside the castle. Two stayed at Jayce’s side at all times, while 20 gathered in the great hall and drank themselves through the day, much to Ser Rhaen’s delight. Ser Oisin visited the Errol camp, where the remainder of the host from Haystack Hall waited 4 bowshot lengths from the castle walls. Not much was learned from Errol’s men except that they had little love for Jayce and had been travelling through the Stormlands at the Layd Shyra’s bidding.

As the day waned, a great fanfare erupted at the gates and Jayce waddled his way excitedly to the inner ward. There he welcomed a troupe of tumblers and musicians, jugglers and bear-baiters. This company of entertainers had followed him throughout his tour and he excitedly extolled their virtues.

The feast that night passed without incident. Jayce found himself aghast at the fare on offer at Lord Fell’s board, deeming it little better than dogfood. He contented himself with the sweet meats he had gorged on throughout the day, and with the music played by his minstrels and the dancing bear that capered to their tune.

Next day, yet more ravens arrived and Lord Harwood summoned Ser Sebastion to his solar. Sebastion attended on the Lord of Fellwood with the Dreadbow and Clancy at his side. There, he learned that word had arrived of King Stannis’ march down the Rose Road into the Reach. Lord Fell meant to dispatch the Steadwater company and the Errol host to meet Stannis at Bitterbridge, the seat of House Caswell.

Later, Clancy learned that Jayce was quite excited by the prospect of meeting a King and showing off his tumblers, minstrels, jugglers, and bear. A farewell feast was planned and the Steadwater company prepared to make their departure. The Dreadbow organized the provisions and the men. Ser Rhaen found the Errol men-at-arms strangely subdued, refusing to drink with him. Ser Sebastion made his farewells with all the ladies he had made merry with over the sevenday he had spent in Castle Fellwood.

There was little evidence of anything untoward afoot.

Then, the feast. Then, the minstrels, the tumblers, and the fool and juggler. Ser Sebastion and his good-sister the dowager Lady Steadwater took their seats next to Lord Fell. Ser Oisin took his place behind Ser Sebastion near the Errol and Fell guardsmen. Ser Rhaen sat with the Errol men-at-arms, at the lower end of the hall. Clancy sat near Jayce, Lord Harwood thinking that two fat men should sit near one another.

The fool and the juggler progressed through their act until they were flipping knives end over end into the air. The skilled juggler added first three knives, then four, then five… Finally, six knives he had spinning all at once.

Finishing his act, the juggler caught all six in a fluid motion and threw them at Lord Fell and his guests!

Three knives struck Lord Fell, wounding him. Lady Steadwater, leaning over to listen to some jest by Lord Harwood, was mortally wounded. One knife buried itself up to the hilt in Jayce’s corpulent neck. Ser Sebastion was struck by two knives but escaped with only minor injuries.

Then, the hall erupted into violence. The Errol guardsman struck and killed Lord Fell’s bodyguard. The Errol men-at-arms produced knives and began murdering their way through the great hall.

Soon, 40 armed men were engaged in melee around the hapless Knight of Danien-Rimchurch. The Errol fighters had the upper hand, quickly whittling their way through the Fell men-at-arms even though armed only with knives. Clancy’s 8 man cadre joined in the battle, but they were quickly killed, but not without reducing the Errol men to a single soldier.

After the assassin’s daggers flew, Ser Oisin sprung from his place upon the wall behind Ser Sebastion. He stood over Lord Steadwater’s uncle, seeking to secure the Steadwater knight’s safety, shield raised and blade ready. Lord Fell, though wounded, jumped at his assailant, pulling forth his sword and readied to strike the dagger-flinging foe. Behind him, Ser Alestor Errol,the Errol Captain, drew forth an axe and threw it across the room at Lord Harwood’s defenseless back. The Lord of Fellwood weathered it and continued to press his advantage against the treacherous jongleur.

Seeing his host attacked, the Dreadbow, ruing his lack of the dread weapon, turned for the axeman and struck out at him. Fell’s captain joined in the fight and Ser Alestor was pressed hard for a time, though both Ser Oisin and the Fellwood Captain found few openings in their opponent’s guard. Ser Sebastion Steadwater gathered himself and joined in the attack, though soon found himself winded. Frustrated, the Errol knight aimed to strike the Dreadbow, deeming him the greatest threat, but the axe flew wide and escaped the axeman’s grasp! The weapon flew across the room, landing on the far side of the feast table.

Lord Hardwood had taken many wounds so far in his fight with the Errol Assassin, but still he fought on. Clancy joined his side as did Ser Rhaen, leaving the massacre of the Fellwood men-at-arms and Clancy’s bodyguard behind. The assassin found himself outmatched, but still sought to finish his murderous task. With a final blow from the assassin’s blade, Lord Harwood Fell was struck down, his ruined body laying bloody at the feet of his would be protectors. With a roar, Ser Rhaen raised up to his full and massive height and struck down with his borrowed blade, laying low the villainous juggler with a vicious strike, yet sparing his life.

Seeing his fellow’s fall, and his axe flung far beyond his reach, Ser Alestor lept away from the Dreadbow, Ser Sebastion and the sole remaining Fellwood fighter. He sprung over the table and gathered up his axe to strike at Ser Rhaen and Clancy. The two soon found themselves beset by the devilish fighter, demoralized by the death of their host and companions. Ser Rhaen was grievously wounded, many wondered at how he still remained alive.

Ser Oisin followed his prey, again bemoaning his missing bow. As he lept to the top of the table he was heard to grunt, “Had I my longbow, this battle would be over already!”

Standing amongst the roasts, the trenchers, the spilled cups of wine and pools of blood from the dead and dying, Ser Oisin struck down at the Errol knight. Beset by 3 swordsmen, the axeman was steadily beaten to his knees.

Suddenly, Ser Alestor dropped his axe and threw his hands into the air. The Errol knight declared, “I yield! I yield in the name of King Renly, true King of the Iron Throne!”

Looking forward to part 2 of this excellent story, great write up so far :-)

A Gambol with Death

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text:
Damiao unlikely to join Tottenham in January, reveals agent

Leandro Damiao celebrates scoring for Brazil

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Tottenham target Leandro Damiao is unlikely to leave Internacional this month, according to his agent.

Spurs have been chasing the talented striker for two years and new manager Andre Villas-Boas is keen to finally land him during the January transfer window.

It has been reported that Spurs will make a cash bid of around £15m before the window shuts as they attempt to seal a place in next season's Champions League.

But the Brazilian's agent Vinicus Prates has played down the chances of his client upping sticks to Europe before the summer.

He told newspaper Zero Hora in Brazil: "I have not received any offers, I can assure you.

"It is normal to see rumours because he is a fashionable player in Europe but I don't think he will leave in January because he is happy at Internacional and under contract until 2015."


WARC-Truncated: length

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Tuesday, 16 February 2016

NOTE: In this article, the term Indic refers to the autochthonous religions of South Asia, Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, but excluding Sikhism, which is a relatively recent religion. In some cases, the term Hinduism is used instead of Indic religions for convenience.
The ideas and views presented here come from a perspective of inspiring reform and lifting Indic religions out of the declining trajectory they have been on for centuries. They are meant to, and should be taken as intended to, provoke introspection, rather than outrage or denial or nitpicking.
A basic familiarity with the history of the Indian sub-continent reveals Hinduism shrinking over the past one and a quarter millennium in the face of external invasion and evangelism. Hinduism, and overlapping religions Jainism and Buddhism (together referred to here as Indic religions), used to extend from Afghanistan to Indonesia. Over the past dozen centuries, this area has shrunk greatly and now remains confined to the Rrepublic of India. This isn’t due to relentless attacks by immense armies. Mohammad Qasim or Babur attacked India with a few thousand men and were able to conquer a country of millions. So did numerous foreigner invaders with armies insignificant compared to the population of India then, including the British whose army was primarily manned by Indians themselves.
This process is still underway. In the latter half of the 20th century, we see in both Pakistan and Bangladesh Hindus being expelled or massacred. In the late 20th century, Hindus have been expelled from Kashmir, having been already reduced to a minority there centuries earlier by Afghan and Mughal rulers. Even within India currently, we see a demographic shrinkage of Hinduism. Thus, it is clear that Hinduism is in a long term trend of decline, with perhaps a hiatus for now. In general, a trend that persists for centuries cannot be blamed on individual errors or misfortune; there are likely more systemic reasons for it. What then could be the reason for the slow decline of Hinduism?

The decline of Indic religions in the subcontinent is congruent with conversion to Islam and this article will focus primarily on why I believe they have lost so much ground to Islam. The reasons commonly put forward for conversion from Hinduism to Islam are:
  1. Invasion and demographic displacement by foreign Muslims like Arabs or Turks.
  2. Conversion at sword point.
  3. Conversion to obtain patronage or privilege or escape taxation (jizya).
  4. Conversion to escape caste discrimination.
  5. A reason which I don’t see mentioned often, which I think likely plays an important role is the desire to imitate the winners and dominant rulers of the day, much like trends from the West, whether bell bottoms or jeans, or socialism or democracy, are avidly copied in India in recent times.
All of these likely have contributed to varying extents to the displacement of Hinduism, however, we can assume that conversion of local Indians to Islam forms the vast bulk of the Islamic population in the subcontinent today, thus the focus of this article will be on points 2-5.
Why were Indic religions susceptible to conversion? After undertaking a study of the relevant topics, I have come to the conclusion that to an overwhelming extent, this is a natural consequence of the respective natures of Indic religions and Islam. Although the following might feel hurtful to some, the intent is not to insult but to introspect and improve.
Let us begin by discussing the respective characteristics of Indic religion and Islam.

HINDUISM: The oldest and most authoritative religious texts of Hinduism are the Vedas, in particular the Rig Veda. The Vedas comprise of 2 broad parts, the Mantras or Karma Khanda (action part, dealing with sacrificial rituals and hymns) and the Bramhanas and Aranyakas or Jnana Khanda (philosophical sections). Within the Jnana Khanda, we find the Upanishads, which contain the philosophical doctrines that has come to shape Hindu thought through the millennia.

The Upanishads, of which there are hundreds, and 108 in the Muktika Canon, are thought to have been composed starting several centuries BCE, upto the 2nd millennium CE (1), and they contain the core philosophy that has shaped Hinduism.

Apart from the Upanishads, texts such as the Bramhasutras, Bhagwad Geeta and the Manusmriti, themselves influenced by the Vedas, have shaped or reflected Hindu spiritual and practical thought over the ages.

The time span over which these primary texts of Hinduism were composed are generally considered to span several centuries, involving during the course of which the emphasis and scope of the texts undergo change. Nonetheless, the broad thrust of Hindu philosophy, as contained in the Upanishads, is as below. Hindu readers who have experiential knowledge of Hinduism will find these points quite familiar.

a) A prescription of detachment from this world and a desire to escape from it.

b) Related to the above, conspicuous absence of communal identity or collective consciousness or presence of outside competitors. This is compounded in daily life by divisions on the basis of caste.

c) Resulting from point b, a lack of zeal in defending or proselytizing the religion.

Let us consider this in more depth.

Perhaps the most distinctive doctrine of Hinduism, is that each being has a soul (Atman), which undergoes a series of cycles of death and re-birth in different forms, a fate which is considered sub-optimal at best and repulsive at worst. Salvation from this cycle, called Moksha, is attained by realization of, and submergence into, the ultimate reality of which everything is composed, Brahman. There are variations on this theme (Dvaita, Advaita, etc schools of thought), but the general idea is the same.

No empirical evidence is proffered in support of the above Moksha thesis, which must be taken for granted on the authority of scripture. This is illustrated by the verses below:

Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7:

“Now, that which is the subtle essence−in it all that exists has its self. That is the True. That is the Self (Atman). That thou art, Svetaketu”

Katha Upanishad (II.20):

“The Self is subtler than the subtle, greater than the great; It dwells in the heart of each living being. He who is free from desire and free from grief, with mind and senses tranquil, beholds the glory of the Atman”

Mundaka Upanishad (3.1.9):

“That subtle Atman is to be known by the intellect here in the body where the prana has entered fivefold. By Atman the intellects of men are pervaded, together with the senses. When the intellect is purified, Atman shines forth.”

Chhandogya Upanishad 5.10.1-2:

“Those who know this and those who, dwelling in the forest, practise faith and austerities go
to light, from light to day, from day to the bright half of the moon, from the bright half of the
moon to the six months during which the sun goes to the north, from those months to the
year, from the year to the sun, from the sun to the moon, from the moon to lightning. There
a person who is not a human being meets him and leads him to Brahman. This is the Path
of the Gods (Devayana).”

Chhandogya Upanishad 5.10.7-8:

“Those whose conduct here on earth has been good will quickly attain some good
birth−birth as a brahmin, birth as a kshatriya, or birth as a vaisya. But those whose conduct
here has been evil will quickly attain some evil birth−birth as a dog, birth as a pig, or birth as
a chandala”.

“Those who neither practise meditation nor perform rituals… ...become those insignificant creatures which are continually revolving and about which it may be said: ‘Live and die.’ This is the third place. Therefore that world never becomes full. Let a man despise this course… “

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10:

“This self was indeed Brahman in the beginning. It knew itself only as "I am Brahman." Therefore it became all. And whoever among the gods had this enlightenment, also became That Brahman. It is the same with the seers (rishis), the same with men.”

Manusmriti 1.50:

“The (various) conditions in this always terrible and constantly changing circle of births and deaths to which created beings are subject are stated to begin with (that of) Bramhan and to end with (that of) these (just mentioned immovable creatures, like plants and trees)”

Adi Shankara’s Upadesa Sahasri, 1.44:

“One, who is eager to realize this highest truth spoken of in the Sruti (revealed texts, i.e. Vedas), should rise above the fivefold form of desire: for a son, for wealth, for this world and the next, and are the outcome of a false reference to the Self of Varna (castes, colors, classes) and orders of life.…”

Apart from the existence of the self, which is self-evident (e.g. Descartes’ Cogito ergo Sum; I think therefore I am), no empirical evidence is put forth for the existence of, or the special mystical properties attributed to, Brahman, or the existence of concepts such as re-incarnation and Moksha. The general implicit perspective is presented in Upanishadic and thereby broader Hindu thought, whereby existence in this world is considered a burden to be stoically borne, serenely doing one’s prescribed duty (Nishkama Karma; described in the Bhagwad Geeta), or even a distasteful misfortune to be spurned, by adopting renunciation (Sannyasa) in the pursuit of Moksha, to be attained by various means, including spiritual exercises (Yoga), as prescribed by Adi Shankara.

It is then not surprising that a focus on empirically unsupported metaphysics of withdrawal and renunciation should lead to neglect of a sense of community or group identity, compounded by caste discrimination. Thus, it is no surprise that the name commonly used to refer to Hindus, is not given by Hindus themselves, but originates from foreigners referring to the residents of the banks of the Sindhu (Indus) river. It is also to be expected that, lacking a sense of group identity and believing in renunciatory metaphysics, we see no historical example of Hindus mounting a collective defense of their religion or culture when attacked by Muslim invaders who burned libraries and temples or imposed jizya. This is in contrast to examples like that of Christians defending the Middle East against Islamic invasion by launching the Crusades, or the more recent example of the Islamic nations against Israel.

A very similar renunciatory trend is seen with other Indic religions, namely Buddhism and Jainism; quite possibly based on the same zeitgeist which permeates the contemporary and preceding Upanishads. Briefly (assuming the reader has basic familiarity with Buddhism), the four noble truths of Buddhism declare that dukkha, or sorrow, is caused by attachment or craving, and that this can be remedied by putting an end to craving and instead undertaking behavior that leads to Nirvana or release. As with Hinduism, the implied perspective is one of dissatisfaction with the rigors of the world, of escaping from it rather than taming it.
Similarly, the word Jain is derived from Sanskrit Jina, meaning victor. In this case the victory is over mental passions like greed, lust, anger etc. In practice, Jainism is emphatic about non-violence, not just towards fellow members of society, but all humans, and sentient being, even including animals and insects, possibly an extension of the Hindu concept of the Atman (soul) being one across all living creatures.
Given this metaphysical perspective pervading the ancient Indic religions Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, it is unsurprising that persons who are accorded an exalted status in Indic religion and culture are Sannyasis, Bhikshus and Jinas or Tirthankaras, who have attained a metal state of indifference towards the world.
Let us now look at the nature of the major competitor of Indic religions, Islam.

In contrast, the nature and circumstances of Islam from its foundation onwards have been concerned with survival, conflict and expansionism. Briefly, after having to flee his native Mecca upon claiming prophethood and casting doubt on the reigning deities of the Kaaba, Muhammad with a few followers emigrated to Yathrib (now Medina). Here he gained political power for the first time and engaged in raids and several armed conflicts with rivals from Mecca as well as within Medina, in the course of which hundreds of people were killed and women and children enslaved, as was the norm then. Eventually Mohammad emerged victorious and conquered Mecca itself. His utterances during the course of his life, many of them explicit calls to war, form the koran and Hadith, which are considered perfect and immutable. There are also more placatory sayings, but these are typically made in Mecca when his political position was tenous and are superseded by the later, violent Medinan ones. The sayings in Medina, upon attaining power include the infamous verse of the sword 9:5:
Then, when the sacred months have passed,
slay the idolaters wherever ye find them,
and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush.
But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free.
Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful

There is much debate today about the context of these verses, but there does not seem have been any doubt in the minds of his immediate followers, who, well placed to judge the context, after Mohammad’s death in 632AD proceeded to attack and conquer neighboring Byzantium and Persia. The motivation of these early Arab conquerors is perhaps summed up in the passage below,
“..he ordered us to invite neighboring nations to justice. We are therefore inviting you to embrace our religion…if you refuse, you must pay the jizya. This is a bad thing, but not as bad as the alternative; if you refuse to pay, it will be war” (2).
Given the cut-throat nature of life in the steppes of Arabia, Mohammad insisted on the unity of all Muslims, whether rich or poor, into one community, called the ummah. An illustration of the zealousness with which this unity is guarded is illustrated by the fact that conversion from Islam invites the death penalty in many Islamic countries today. The promotion of unity amongst the nomadic tribes of Arabia re-directed their military potential from being focused on each other to being focused on outsiders (a theme we see again with other mobile nomadic peoples like the Mongols and Huns). Thus, following Muhammad’s death, the newly converted Arab tribes burst forth from the steppes and successfully conquered their immediate neighbors, the Byzantine and Persian Empires.
Eventually the Arabs extended their reign over all of North Africa, Middle East and much of central Asia, and attacked and conquered Afghanistan and Sindh in the Indian sub-continent. Although the Arab Empire started to decline eventually, the mantle was taken up by the recently Islamicized Turks, who started invading South Asia in subsequent centuries.

The practical effects of this difference of outlook is vividly exemplified by the contrasting behavior of Hindus and Muslims when their lands are attacked. At no point did Central or South Indian Hindus unite together to launch a collective defence of Northern India during the Islamic conquest, unsurprising given the lack of community in Hinduism. In contrast, we see nations like Malaysia or Indonesia, which do not share either the language or the blood of Arabs, vociferously refusing recognition to Israel, solely on the basis of religious solidarity.
Moreover, on a long term, statistical level, in competition with a religion like Islam which promotes reproduction, wealth accumulation etc, the fate of Indic religions is sealed; they prescribe or at least celebrate, worldly extinction in the form of Sanyasa or monkhood (renunciation), often following directly after Bramhacharya (studentship) without starting a family, to its adherents (as exemplified by famous proponents of Hinduism like Adi Shankara or Swami Vivekananda), while Islam prescribes conquest, wealth acquisition and reproduction. Thus, it is likely that, in an evolutionary sense, the number of devoted Hindus who take Hindu metaphysics seriously will not grow at the same pace as their Islamic counterparts, if at all, based on the respective prescriptions of their religions.
We can now return to the causes of conversion from Hinduism to Islam mentioned above.

  1. Conversion to obtain patronage or privilege or escape taxation (jizya).
  2. Conversion to escape caste discrimination.
  3. A desire to imitate the winners and dominant rulers of the day, much like fashion trends from the West, whether bell bottoms or jeans, are avidly copied in India in recent times.

a) Conversion at Swordpoint/to escape taxation: In my view, two developments are necessary for this to occur; military weakness, and weak attachment to religion. Given the aggressive milieu in which Islam arose, it is no surprise that they embarked on an invasion of their neighbors. To substantial extents, Indic religions are vulnerable on both counts owing to their renunciatory metaphysics, especially the explicitly non-violent prescriptions of Buddhism and Jainism. A lack of attachment to religion is also likely given the exclusive focus of Indic religions on personal salvation rather than the promotion of a unified community.
b) Conversion to escape caste discrimination: Given the focus of Indic religions on the individual, much less focus is directed at the creation of a unified polity. This leaves space for divisions based on caste or ethnicity to arise and persist. In contrast, the aggressive and insecure environment of the steppe necessitates close group affinity for security, a feature carried over into Islam, although ethnic discrimination is not absent. Nonetheless, the theoretical equality available in Islam is an understandable incentive for those irreversibly stuck at the bottom of Hindu society.
c) A desire to imitate winners: This path is particularly likely in the absence of a strong sense of identity and attachment to one’s community, a point on which, Indic religions are particularly vulnerable. It is also possible that conversions to Islam that have occurred without a significant external invasion, such as those in Kerala or South East Asia, may have been owing to the attractiveness of a pro-wealth and growth religion like Islam, when contrasted with the austere and retreating ideology put forward by Indic religions.
It must be pointed out that other socio-political and geographical issues have a substantial role to play apart from the reasoning mentioned here. There are also warlike statements in some Hindu scriptures like the Bhagwad Geeta, in which Lord Krishna urges Arjun to war even against his relatives. It is also likely that the general political and military leadership in India was not aligned with the renunciatory direction prescribed in Indic religions although other elements of society likely were.
Nonetheless, I believe the overall point remains that the decline of Indic religions by conversion to Islam is at least partially a natural consequence of their respective tendencies and outlooks.

What must be done to salvage Hinduism? The answer may lie in what we have already seen regarding the Upanishads. These texts were written by numerous authors over a span of several centuries (centuries BC to centuries CE), and reflect a change of focus relative to the preceding texts and even direct criticism of the preceding Vedic approach (Chandogya Upanishad 1.12), and have passed on into the Hindu religious canon. Irrespective of whether one agrees with them or not, we thus see a plasticity in Hindu thought, which there is no need to think has exhausted itself. Thus, the authors of the Upanishads chose to lay out what they believed was the best approach to fulfilling what they thought ought to be the goal of life, thus reforming Hinduism to what they thought worked best.
If we are their true descendants, we must live up to their example and do likewise.
How? I shall lay out my thoughts about this in the near future.

  1. The great Arab conquests, Hugh Kennedy, 2008 edition, pg 51.


text:
A Further Reply to Dr. Henke

A Further Reply to Dr. Henke

November 15, 1999

I do set My bow in the cloud

In November, 1999 Dr. Kevin R. Henke responded to my articles at

in an article entitled MORE YOUNG-EARTH CREATIONIST MISCONCEPTIONS ON RADIOMETRIC DATING. This article was posted to the talk.origins newsgroup and e-mailed to me personally. I thank Dr. Henke for the considerable effort he put into his reply. This is my further reply.

The root question is whether radiometric (that is, isotopic) dating is reliable, especially on fossil-bearing rocks. Dates for fossil-bearing strata obtained by radiometric dating are commonly in the hundreds of millions of year range, while a literal reading of the Bible implies that life has only existed on earth for six to ten thousand years. Actually, the title of Dr. Henke's article is misleading, because my main concern is not the age of the earth but the age of life, as Dr. Henke should have known from reading my previous articles. In this response to Dr. Henke's article I discuss the questions of concordances between different dating methods, the properties of various minerals and how they are used in dating, excess argon, mixings and isochrons, possible changes in decay rates, and a few other items of less significance.

Concordances Between Different Dating Methods

Harland et al (1990) gives 700-odd dates on which the geological time scale is based. Dr. Henke has carefully examined this list and found 28 instances in which different dating methods from the same location agree. There are also a few others that he did not explicitly mention. I appreciate his thoroughness. However, about 30 concordances among a list of over 700 dates, selected from a larger sample of unknown size by a process having unknown statistical properties, is not very impressive. In fact, one can explain some concordances on the basis of randomness. We know that there are at least four common dating methods, K-Ar, Rb-Sr, U-Pb, and Ar-Ar. Each method can be used on individual minerals or on whole rocks, and can be used to measure a simple daughter-to-parent ratio or can be used as an isochron. This gives us probably sixteen different methods in all, not counting Pb-Pb dating and fission track dating. If we assume that there are at least 10 samples (or collections of samples) from each area on the average that are datable by each method, we can obtain at least 160 dates from each location. Let's say 100 for simplicity. Among these there are about 5,000 pairs of dates, most of them between different methods, and just on the basis of chance we would expect many of these pairs to agree fairly closely. In fact, it would not be surprising to find pairs that agree with any expected age of the geological formation. In addition to this, geologists often select minerals and methods of dating (such as magnetic separation) to increase the chance that the different methods will agree, as I indicated in my last response to Dr. Henke.

For the sake of a simple probability analysis, suppose that the K-Ar dates for formations are generally taken as their accepted ages, and that the other methods have random values uniformly distributed between 0 and 600 million years on phanerozoic formations. This does not imply that the K-Ar dates are correct. If we define a concordance as an agreement of two dates to within ten percent, then the expected number of concordances is about five percent of the total number of dates, and most of these concordances will be between different methods. The observed number of concordances in Harland et al (1990) is about 30 out of over 700 dates, or somewhat under five percent. Although these probability assumptions are overly simplified, this shows that the observed number of concordances between different methods on the phanerozoic is not inconsistent with a random distribution of the non-K-Ar dates.

One should also remember that concordant dates can all be inherited from an earlier event. If a concordance does not agree with expectations, this can be explained as a later heating event or as an inheritance from an older event, so it does not upset the dating scheme. Woodmorappe (The Mythology of Modern Dating Methods, Institute for Creation Research, 1999, p. 30) references a couple of studies indicating that discordances among different dating methods are much more common than concordances.

The situation on the phanerozoic (Cambrian strata and above) is qualitatively much different than on meteorites, and possibly on some old rocks on earth, where concordances are very common. Therefore, conclusions about the reliability of radiometric dating should not be extrapolated from meteorites or older rocks on earth to the phanerozoic.

It's also interesting that the geological time scale is based on less than 800 dates. This undermines the often-quoted argument that hundreds of thousands of dates have been measured and there are only a few percent of them that do not agree with the expected dates. We are here dealing with a sample of less than 800 dates, not hundreds of thousands.

How the Properties of Minerals Affect Dating Methods

Dr. Henke states that the properties of various minerals are known and used by geologists in determining which radiometric dates are reliable. However, glauconies are considered one of the more unreliable minerals for dating by Faure (1986, p. 71) and others, and dates from glauconies make up a considerable portion of the dates listed in Harland et al (1990). Even "good" minerals for K-Ar dating such as biotite are only considered by Faure (1986, p. 71) to be "often reliable." Faure (1986, p. 72) lists some minerals as often containing excess argon, while others do so only rarely. Dickin (1995, p. 248) states that excess argon can collect in "crystal dislocations and defect structures." Since all crystals can have defects and dislocations, all minerals can have excess argon. Thus a date from an unreliable mineral can be accepted if it is in agreement with expectations, and a date from a reliable mineral cannot always be trusted. Besides the problem of excess argon, it can always be argued that the date was inherited from an earlier event, or reset by a later event. It can also be argued that the sample is a xenolith or a xenocryst. I also gave a number of quotations in my last reply to Dr. Henke indicating that minerals are chosen not for their a priori properties, but because they give dates that are in line with expectations. Thus the properties of a mineral play only a minor role in whether the date measured is accepted or not.

Dr. Henke cites the Eldora quartz monzonite stock (Faure, 1986, p. 69-70) which reveals the temperatures at which various minerals lose argon. This is interesting, but does not deal with the propensity of these minerals to incorporate excess argon when they form, or to adsorb it after they cool.

Excess Argon

Excess (or inherited) argon is argon that did not result from radioactive decay of potassium, and can lead to incorrect K-Ar dates. This argon can either have been present when the mineral formed, or have entered later. Excess argon can make K-Ar dates too old by an arbitrary amount. In order to reliably date rocks, this must be taken into account. The question is whether excess argon can always be detected. In reality, no method appears to be foolproof for detecting excess argon, and no one can say for sure whether argon present in a sample is excess or radiogenic. The tests used to detect excess argon (the spectrum test and isochrons) can all have problems.

Dr. Henke mentions a statement of Dalrymple (1984) that excess argon is rarely found in volcanoes that erupted in historic times. I gave a reference to the contrary. It would be appropriate to give the evidence on which Dalrymple bases his statement. Furthermore, the number of volcanoes having excess argon today is not necessarily the same as it was in the past.

Dr. Henke states that the flow of argon is primarily out of a rock rather than into it, precluding the possibility of excess argon. At high temperatures, argon will indeed flow from a rock containing much argon to a rock containing little argon. At low temperatures, the reverse is clearly true, because essentially no diffusion of argon occurs at low temperatures, but argon still accumulates on the surface of rocks. In fact, the longer the rock is exposeed, the more argon it can accumulate, and this argon can become so firmly embedded in the rock that it cannot be removed even by baking in a vacuum, according to references I gave in my last reply.

Dr. Henke cites a reference that shale often has more argon near the surface than lower down, attempting to discredit my proposal for excess argon as coming from the mantle. But wherever excess argon comes from, it can be removed by heat, so the properties of shale have no bearing on the question.

Dickin (1995, p. 250) states that argon is not preferentially incorporated into any mineral at the time of formation. This implies that it can appear in any mineral, and that any mineral can have excess argon.

Dr. Henke also mentions a so-called "3-dimensional test" for excess argon. I read Faure (1986) and Dickin (1995) and am not sure what test this is referring to. Furthermore, if there were a foolproof test for excess argon, then Faure and Dickin would have been sure to mention it.

A possible source of excess argon is argon that diffuses up from the mantle of the earth. Dr. Henke belittles this concern and implies that it is mainly a concern of creationists: "Like Slusher (1981) and other creationists, Dr. Plaisted has an overriding concern that 40Ar rises from the mantle, routinely migrates into a wide variety of minerals, and fools geologists by producing K-Ar dates that are too old." This is not just a concern of creationists, but is mentioned in Faure (1986, pp. 72, 79) as a possible source of excess argon.

Excess Argon and Cooling Lava

Dr. Henke asserts that as lava or magma cools, it cracks, permitting the flow of argon, so that argon from the center of the lava or magma will have time to escape, since the center takes longer to cool. He implies that this eliminates the problem of excess argon. He also states that sediment is highly permeable to argon, also removing the problem of excess argon.

However, we know that cool rocks permit much less diffusion of argon than hot ones. Even if the rock has cracks, most of the surface area of cooling lava will be covered by cool rock, which will obstruct the flow of argon. So it is only reasonable to assume that argon will tend to be trapped inside in many cases and give K-Ar ages that are too old. Besides, if Dr. Henke's scenario were valid, then we should never have a problem with excess argon, but in fact it is very common, even according to geologists. Dr. Henke asserts that "excess argon in plutonic rocks is rare," citing Harland et al (1990, p. 75) who state that "excess Ar in intrusive rocks is rare." However, Dickin (1995, p. 250) says that excess argon "may be a particular problem in plutonic rocks." Of course, whether argon in a rock is excess or not is largely a matter of interpretation, and no one can say for sure where the argon came from. If excess argon is never a problem, then why do geologists use isochrons and the 3-dimensional test and the spectrum test to attempt to detect it? Finally, if argon diffuses through sediment so easily, then this is not a problem, because it would explain how argon rising from the mantle could enter cooling lava and magma and give K-Ar ages that are much too old.

Dr. Henke questions the relevance of the fact that ancient lava flows were often flat. I discussed this before, and will not repeat myself here. He also questions how I know that ancient lava flows were often flat. For constructing a geological time scale, one needs lava flows that are narrowly bounded in time, which implies that they are bounded above by a flat layer of sediment. I also don't recall seeing volcano-shaped lava flows in the midst of sediment, though they may exist.

Mixings and Isochrons

I asserted that mixings often create isochrons having no age significance, but Dr. Henke, citing Dalrymple (1984), disputes this. Dalrymple states that mixing processes are unlikely in magma. However, Faure (1986, p. 141) mentions that mixings can occur as magma rises through the earth, Dickin (1995, pp. 43-35) discusses mixings in the mantle. Faure (1986, p. 147) also discusses how mixings can produce isochrons having no age significance. He states that mixings are an important geological phenomenon. Geologists themselves often suggest that spurious isochrons are caused by mixings. Dr. Henke repeats an argument of Dalrymple (1984) that isochrons produced by mixings should tend to have a negative slope as often as a positive slope. However, it is easy to imagine the probability distribution being biased so that isochrons with a positive slope are preferred to those with a negative slope. There are also a number of mixing processes that can create isochrons with a positive but not a negative slope, as I will indicate. Dalrymple (1984) attempts to explain away the fact that many published isochrons have correlations suggesting mixings, saying that such correlations do not prove a mixing. But it is difficult to imagine probability distributions that would cause so many isochrons to have such correlations, unless they were indeed caused by mixings. I also did not see Dalrymple's arguments about mixings repeated in Faure (1986) or Dickin (1995).

Here is a mixing process that can create K-Ar isochrons. Suppose that we have lava with uniform potassium and argon 40 concentrations, and considerable excess argon 40, but very little argon 36. Then suppose that some argon 36 and argon 40 from the atmosphere enters the lava, more in some places than others. This will produce a nice K-Ar isochron, but the age will be meaningless, and much too large. Such an isochron may have a correlation suggesting a mixing, but this does not matter, as isochrons having such correlations are routinely accepted as valid by geologists. This process can produce isochrons with a positive, but not a negative, slope. The assumptions of this process also seem natural in lava which does not cool slowly, as one would expect the concentration of potassium to be relatively uniform.

Here is another process that can only create isochrons with a positive slope. Suppose we have two sources, both having the same percentage of Sr88. One source also has substantial Rb87 and Sr87 and the other source has very little of either. Then a mixing will produce an isochron giving an age equal to the daughter-to-parent age of the first source. In this way, daughter to parent ages can be converted to isochrons. Therefore any process that can disturb daughter-to-parent ages can also lead to isochrons giving false ages.

Woodmorappe (1999, p. 70) gives references stating that even if an isochron does not have a mixing correlation, it can still be caused by a more complex mixing process.

It is also of note that isochrons cannot always be done; I imagine that it is difficult to do them on glauconies, for example. And the points may not line up as required in an isochron.

Devitrified Glass

Dr. Henke disputes a quotation I gave concerning devitrified glass. If one reads the quote, the assumption of Evernden et al is that the K-Ar date of the devitrified glass gives the date of the devitrification, but not necessarily the date of the lava flow. When devitrification occurs, glass can lose argon. Evernden et al were puzzled because the K-Ar date of the devitrified glass was young even though it appeared that the devitrification occurred at the same time as the lava flow. Here is a case where a young, possibly correct date is rejected by geologists due to long-age presuppositions.

Radiation and Decay Rates

I considered the possibility that radiation, specifically neutrinos, could influence decay rates. Dr. Henke asks how radiation could reset radiometric clocks. It should be obvious from my articles that if decay rates were increased rapidly, then radiometric dates would rapidly become very old, resetting the clocks. Dr. Henke states that since so few neutrinos interact with matter, it is unlikely that they could influence decay rates. I admit that this seems strange. However, such a prodigious number of neutrinos are produced that they might influence decay rates even if only a small percentage of them interact. To determine whether this could happen requires a detailed calculation. Complicating the matter are 1) that the physics of neutrinos is still not completely understood and 2) the radiation from supernovae and black holes is not isotropic, but concentrated in narrow beams, based on recent observations. This makes it more difficult to estimate the amount and energy of the radiation produced, and also means that if the solar system were in one of these high-intensity beams of radiation, the intensity of radiation would be greatly increased. Such radiation would not necessarily sterilize the earth, as Dr. Henke suggests, but it might heat it up and lead to volcano eruptions and steam escaping from the earth, precipitating the Flood. But such radiation might indeed destroy life. It need not be neutrinos that produce such effects, but could be other kinds of radiation, such as gamma rays. It would only be necessary for radiation to increase decay rates near the surface of the earth, since fossils are mostly found in sedimentary rock, and all sedimentary rock was once near the surface. At this point, we don't have enough information to know whether radiation from a nearby supernova could have produced such a catastrophe, but the possibility is worth considering.

I suggested that such a supernova might have increased radiometric dates by about 600 million years and produced the observed one percent discrepancy in dates observed in meteorites. This would invalidate dates on the phanerozoic. Dr. Henke states that a one percent discrepancy on the phanerozoic is not significant, but this comment is irrelevant to my point.

The following comment by Keith Wanser, a creationist physicist, quoted in Creation Ex Nihilo 21(4) p. 40 is significant:

Actually, it turns out that when you get the nucleus "excited", decay is going to be much quicker, making things look vastly "older". People have been talking recently about magnetic stars giving off big bursts of gamma rays; there are all sorts of ways that radiometric "clocks" could have been reset catastrophically, during the Flood, for example.
Concerning the possibility that a change in the speed of light could have affected decay rates, Dr. Henke says that any such change would have been small. However, some (non-creationist) cosmologists are proposing very large changes in the speed of light. Dr. Henke also says that observations of distant supernovae show that rates of decay have not changed. This is not conclusive, however, because there is reason to believe that the speed of light and decay rates would change by the same amount. Since a slowdown in light would make distant objects appear in slow motion (think about it), the decay rate would not appear to have changed.

The Use of the Literature

Dr. Henke suggests I read Odin's two volume survey of radiometric dating. This would serve little purpose, since Harland et al (1990) used all the dates from Odin that they could. It is true that this might indicate which dates were obtained by isochrons. However, it would have taken only a little space for Harland et al to have included this information, and would have saved the reader considerable effort. This is after all part of the purpose of a book, to save the reader from chasing down many separate references.

Dr. Henke suggests that I read still more references. I have already read a number of the most central books about this topic without finding the pot at the end of the rainbow that would show that radiomatric dating is valid on the phanerozoic. How many more should I read, and to what purpose? It would aid this exchange if Dr. Henke would be more careful to read my responses and not misunderstand or misrepresent them in his subsequent replies.

Finally, I recommend Woodmorappe (1999) as a good source of quotations from the geological literature about problems with radiometric dating.

Minor Matters

Dr. Henke states, "Dr. Plaisted continues to cite erroneous and insulting claims from Slusher (1981, p. 38) that scientists tend to `fudge' the K-Ar branching ratio." This is completely false. I managed to determine the true situation about the branching factor from Harland et al (1990), since Dr. Henke's previous reply did not completely settle the issue in my mind. In my previous response, I acknowledged that the true value of the branching factor has been known and used since the mid-fifties. Even Dalrymple did not refer to Slusher's statement about this in as severe terms as Dr. Henke did. Slusher was using an outdated reference, which is an understandable mistake.

Dr. Henke asserts that Slusher's claim that there is far too much argon 40 to be produced by decay of potassium 40 in 4.5 billion years, is based on an erroneous branching factor. This cannot be true, because the branching factor error would only change the amount of argon 40 generated by a factor of about 1.5. I already discussed the situation concerning this claim in my previous response to Dr. Henke.

Dr. Henke misunderstands my use of the one percent discrepancy in meteorite dates. He states, "However, doing the math, we see that a 1% error for a 550 million year old Cambrian rock is 5.5 million years and not 45-50 million years." I encourage Dr. Henke and others to read my previous reply to see my comments on this matter.

Dr. Henke states, "it takes up to about 1 million years for glaucony to transformation to glauconite (Faure, 1986, p. 78)." This statement is probably based on assumptions from radiometric dating, which is itself at issue in this discussion.

Dr. Henke states, "Dr. Plaisted is concerned that minor heating or groundwater interactions may somehow add or remove argon and mess up K-Ar dates without leaving any other chemical or mineralogical changes." In fact, it is not only I that am concerned, as the following quotation from my previous response shows: "Faure (1986, p. 123) verifies that modest increases in temperature of one or two hundred degrees centigrade can have drastic effects on radiometric dates without any observable changes in the rocks. Faure (1986, p. 69) mentions specifically that heating can cause argon loss without any other physical or chemical changes in the rock."

Concerning errors in K-Ar dating due to atmospheric argon, Dr. Henke states, "Dr. Plaisted omits the next critical sentence in Dickin (1995, p. 247), which indicates that these errors are NOT a problem for old and/or K-rich samples." Unfortunately, I could not determine exactly how much atmospheric argon can be deposited on or in a rock in various lengths of time. Unless we know this, we cannot decide how old a rock has to be for this not to be a problem. But geologists are sufficiently concerned about it to try to account for atmospheric argon whenever K-Ar dates are measured.

Concerning a statement I quoted from Harland et al (1990), Dr. Henke responds

In response to this consistency between fossils and radiometric dating, all Dr. Plaisted can do is accuse Harland et al. (1990) of "circular reasoning" based on the old fallacious creationist mantra: "rocks date the fossils and the fossils date the rocks."
Actually, I have accepted the reality of the geological sequence, and so I found this statement from Harland et al to be rather curious. The statement from Harland et al follows:

Biologic evolutionary history, especially for Phanerozoic time, has given us not only the principal means of time-correlation but the basis of the unique progressive traditional stratigraphic scale.

This statement does make me wonder whether the creationist claim of circular reasoning has some validity. Probably what is meant is simply that there appears to be a regular progression of life forms which can be of use in dating, independently of whether evolution is true.

Dr. Henke states, "Therefore, the following quotation by Dr. Plaisted from somewhere in Harland et al. (1990) (see http://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/harland.html ), which Dr. Plaisted calls a `bombshell,' is really a dud: ... " Unfortunately, Dr. Henke omitted the part of the quotation that I considered a bombshell, thus completely misrepresenting me and attempting as often is the case to make me look ridiculous.

Another example of Dr. Henke's ridicule is the quotation "Of course, geochronologists don't scan the surface of mineral grains looking for argon "dust bunnies" in cracks to vacuum up. The samples are baked under a vacuum (Dickin, 1995, p. 246)." But I gave a quotation that baking under a vacuum is not always able to remove atmospheric argon.

Dr. Henke's replies have been useful for me as prompts to examine the literature more closely. However, on checking the literature, I found that many of his points are not valid. In addition, it appears that Dr. Henke does all he can to heap abuse on me and other creationists, attempting to make creationism appear in the worst possible light. There are also some cases in which my earlier replies are misunderstood or misrepresented. But I think that anyone who has the stamina to read through our exchange will learn a lot about the subject.

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Friday, 14 October 2011

How to mold the punish production and vegetative juicers

How to mold the punish production and vegetative juicers

There are some factors that resolve which of the numerous juicers out there is the punish squeezer for you. Many of the factors that you demand to view are:

� Juicer Identify
� What exhibit you are most probable to humour
� Cleaning
� Power
� Noise Layer

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Tuesday, 4 June 2013

Why is this book taking so long?!! Please, keep reading...

Hmmm, have you ever wondered why some things takes longer to unfold than others? I have & while I contemplate this mystery I'm also coming to grips with my book's own timeline. It's not the timeline I would have chosen, No, I wanted this baby out into the world months ago but hey, my book had it's own schedule so I've decided to defer to it.

After I consciously allowed this to happen, it was going to anyway, regardless of my thoughts or feelings about it, things got easier. I mean I settled down about the book, the timelines (mine), the deadlines (also mine) & all the other little hiccups & and realities that make up the process of self-publishing a book.
It takes as long as it takes.

Sure, I could have pushed it out weeks ago...I almost did but the thing that kept me from doing that was my overriding belief that it just wasn't good enough-yet. The book is already written so that wasn't the issue, No, it was all the other the details-to be accurate-the dozens of other details that come after the book is written.

The cover is original art-work not from a ready-made template. More time. I've sourced out my own copy-editor, proofer & formatter-huge amounts of time, energy & second-guessing!
The entire book writing & publishing process has been one that I've personally done or organised, all 100% of it plus I learned it all from scratch.
The biggest time consumer by far has been with the endless edits. I wrote my book using MSword which is what I'd recommend to anyone embarking on this journey. Fewer formatting hassles later. I believed that this would give me a head start with the editing & yes it did but seriously, it's the very basics of spell check & grammar-that's all! Once my book was written I then asked a new copy-writer/editor to look it over. She did a terrific job however, this too is just a prelude to more edits. I then went through again & picked up some 'stray' spelling & misc. structural errors. Ta da! I'm done, or so I thought.

I settled on createspace as a publisher for a couple of reasons-it's free! Very important. They will assign an ISBN# , also free (you will need one to display your book in a bookstores as well as the library & a separate number for digital & traditional formats). They have an excellent forum & even better free, brilliant tutorials. Their customer service is unbelievable-fast & very courteous & knowledgeable.
So I first found & selected a formatter. Hmm, what's that? Right, exactly, I took a leap of faith on this one & got excellent help plus this person has gone above & beyond for me & my book. 2 weeks later...after uploading my formatted files to creatspace it had to go through their proprietary checks which took less than 24 hours but it identified many errors with my file. After much, subsequent  'tweaking' my file (manuscript) & especially the cover-art image was accepted as 'error free' (2-3 weeks), yipee!! Or so I thought. The next phase was something they 'strongly' recommended-proof my book. This meant 2 things: 1) order a proof copy (softcover) then go through it 3 times looking for specific things each time such as structure, flow, errors etc, etc. 2) Go through the electronic version 3 times as well!
Are you getting a sense of the massive time requirements for all that proofing & editing?! I think you are. I can say now though,with absolute clarity-I'm, at last, done!
My files need to resubmitted to first the formatter (done) for any changes/corrections (one week) then reloaded to createspace for their approval (another 24 hours of waiting). Once these 2 final steps are completed, guess what? I'll have a book on Kindle (in about a week, fingers are xed) & I will be able to order soft copies as well (& you will too).

It's been a tremendous learning curve & I'm better prepared & equipped for my next book 'The Reluctant Lesbian' which is actually the prequel to The Distracted Yogi.
I've been busy uploading photos to TDYogi facebook page,  cuz I really want you to have a connection to my story through them.
Please let me know what you think...I love comments & I'm excited that you are still here patiently waiting, with me, for this book to be birthed;)
Cheers, Michelle

  1. I am so proud of you my friend. You are so amazing. I will wait 'as long as it takes' (to quote someone near and dear to my heart.)

  2. Thank you Dailah, sincerely. Your support is huge...embrace the power of your words, I have.

Your comment is being moderated;)


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Sunday, May 31, 2009

Laundry lists

     The nursery is as good as done now. Outside of getting Lydia's room painted this week, I have bookoo loads of laundry to do. Pete will have to do most of Lydia's room on his own. I am really feeling it lately. I cleaned the house yesterday and will spend today paying for it. Soreness abound. Pete did finish Lydia’s furniture. I’m happy with it and it looks great in her room! I love the new arrangement. The tall dresser really works much better than the long dresser in her room.
     Pete went to play in his alumni soccer game at Herkimer yesterday and is still sleeping now. He needs to get up and start breakfast soon. I sent Lyds up to wake him. That has become his task since I was pregnant with Lydia. For whatever reason, I could eat breakfast but I just couldn’t make it. It made me sick, so he took it over and I never took it back. It has worked into a nice weekend family tradition!
     Today is the last day of Sunday School for the summer and we have a few play dates to go to this week. Next Saturday we have a birthday party to attend and Lyds and I need to go get a "Father's Day surprise" done for daddy in the morning. Sounds like a good morning to send daddy off fishing for the morning. (Pete did you read that? For the morning. Not all day. Just the morning buddy. Be home at 2pm. It's in writing so now you can't mess with the time. :D ) Ah, and next Saturday night I have a girlfriend cocktail party to go to. Good times. Looking forward to an evening of good girlfriend chat. I need to check with Beck to see what she wants me to bring.
     Lyds is continuing with her lists. Last night she made a "list" for daddy. Again, it's a list of her wants. Good lord, we are in trouble.
     A neighbor had a garage sale so I scooted on over to ask her how she does. She said she advertises on Craigslist and in the Scotsmen/Pennysaver. She does well enough that she does one every year. I wondered how garage sales faired on our street since it's not a through street. The only people that travel on it are the people that live here or the people that make a wrong turn. So knowing what she said, I have enough stuff I want to get rid of to have a sale myself. I'm thinking the Friday and Saturday of Father's Day weekend. Writing this reminds me...I still have to get that bin of summer clothes washed and pressed for the consignment shop! Ha, MORE laundry.

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Mother’s Day 5K

  • Start: May 14, 2017 2:00 PM
  • End: May 14, 2017 3:00 PM

2 North High Street, West Chester, PA, United States

Register for the Mother’s Day 5K HERE

Where: West Chester – Church St and Market St.

Who: Female only 5k Run/Walk

What: Pink Tech T Shirt.

Why: Proceeds go to Team CMMD

Team CMMD is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit charity team of runners and non-runners, led and founded by Christine Meyer, MD, on January 1, 2013.

We come from all walks of life and several different states, but we have a common thread—FIGHTING CANCER. Each of us has desire to do what we can to make a difference in our community and in the lives of those affected by cancer.

Pre Registration: Courthouse steps on High and Market Streets from 12:00-1:50pm.

Awards:  At the SideBar Restaurant on Gay St.

Register for the Mother’s Day 5K HERE


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50 Years Of Pink Floyd: The Wall Then And Now

Brick by brick?

In 1980, Pink Floyd’s de-facto leader Roger Waters redefined the concept of a rock show, in an experiment that threatened his solvency, tested his sanity and ultimately split the band. But that didn’t stop him rebuilding The Wall in 2010, exorcising his personal demons in the process.

Bricks. Hundreds of them. Spanning the stage. Scraping the rafters. It’s February 7, 1980, and the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena has never seen anything quite like the debut performance of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. During the first part of the show, a blockade has been built between us and them. Now, 45 minutes later, a one-brick hole remains, where Roger Waters stands, picked out by spotlights, singing the eerie, valedictory Goodbye Cruel World. As he delivers the kiss-off, ‘Goodbye’, a final brick flips into position and he is entombed. Blackout. House lights up. End of Act One.

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The Powerless UN Proposes Worldwide Taxes. Again.

Written by Gary North on October 4, 2012

The United Nations Organization is where Third World bureaucrats long to be assigned to. They live in New York. Their governments pay huge salaries to them: tax-free. They live in expensive apartments for free. What do they do for a living? Pretend they are important. Pretend that anyone cares what they do. Pretend that they […]

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