Livejournal remains probably the most conducive format for me to talk about things with myself, in the admittedly rare times where I'm willing to sit down and listen to the silence. For starters, no one reads this anymore, and those with even a remote chance of it know things that, say, others likely won't. Additionally I'm not really looking for ( Read more... )

There's a problem with the old adage preached by the entelechy-driven, "The only meaningful adversary is yourself". The bull is you. The matador (Spanish for "killer") is you. The sword is you. The horns are you. Either way you win. Either way you lose. Either way you live.

My grandfather approached the winter of his life with great difficulty - always a man who prized his ability to actualize his goals through working with his hands and mind, being forced to rely on the help of others was catastrophic to his sense of self. His eyes weakened, his strength diminished, and he began to approach life with what would only ( Read more... )

America's political strength lay in its comparative advantage of the application of coercive force - that is, weaponry. Clausewitz has been reiterated in blood multiple times - once man enters the world of force - of the irrational - man's ability to impose limits on that application of political strength becomes increasingly precarious. I ask ( Read more... )

It's a sad coincidence that "Curveball" admitted he was proud of starting a war - in which he was an unwitting pawn - that has cost 100,000 lives in the same month that Egypt, with a longer-lived dictator, was able to secure political change relatively peacefully. It seems clear that such a fate could have easily been Iraq's, as well, without the ( Read more... )

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"You'll always have the poor but you won't always have me." There are certainly less tepid ways to interpret the last days of Christ but the most simple explanation I can understand for the conflict between Judas and Jesus is in the betrayal (or was it?) each had in common, whether present or future.* (An aside: back when when I taught religion the ( Read more... )

The fast horse is catching up.
The sinking water is dark.
The memory of the tracks are carved in the dust.
The river howls its toll.

Learning is sometimes the surd of conflict or of the byproduct of some pause in inchoate ignorance. One would expect a Math conference to be full of individuals searching for truth or in some "discovery" of a better world. That's the way Math works - nothing is invented, it's often tripped over when reading a tattered and broken map ( Read more... )

Happy New Year, everyone ... well, to the 2 people left that read this. (And rightly so, since I don't really update this ever.) It's going to potentially be a year of changes for me - I'm starting on the Master's in Counseling next week (!) - but right now my mind is more on maintenance than anything else. Maybe that'll even mean maintaining this ( Read more... )