Karmic-Dragonfly

Random quote I stored away, in a file I saved on 2019. Not a bad thing to meditate on, I think.

Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible
pour les yeux. -Le Petit Prince

Here is my secret. It is very simple: one only sees well with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eyes -The Little Prince

I had taken the summer off from book club. Our numbers had dwindled, and I was either hosting the club myself, or providing a place for another member who is out of town, just a little too often. And I just wanted to have some time alone I think lol.

In any event, I came back for the September meeting and volunteered to host in October. The host responsibilities are to select the book, provide dinner, and give a brief intro to the book as we discuss after our meal together.

For October, I have chosen A Month in the Country by J.L Carr. The reason I chose it is that the idea of spending a month in the bell tower of a medieval church in the north of England, uncovering a mural of the Last Judgement, and shitting in a pit toilet seems like a perfect vacation to me!

A quarter way through the book, I was starting to doubt my choice. But I ended up liking it it a lot. It was a quick read -- short book -- with some twists near the end. And I came to like the protagonist. I have to say, I'm not up on my Yorkshire accent, so some of the dialog slowed me down as I deciphered.

Also slowing me down a bit was a bit of Middle English that popped up variously throughout the book. This was a verse from 2 Timothy. Now, I have never read anything in Middle English, but I dutifully gave a try at putting the text into Old English.

I actually tried to find a translation online, but either 2 Timothy (a relatively minor book) never got translated into Old English, or the manuscript didn't survive, or it's just not available anywhere online.

Middle English:
And he shal com with woundes rede

To deme the cwice and the dede.

Old English:
And he sceal cuman mid wundum reodum
Deman þa cwicu and þa deaþas.

New English:
And he shall come with red wounds
To judge the living ("quick") and the dead.

There's a slight gay sub-story, which fits well with this being a gay book club.

And it has a the feeling of "Fall". “The first breath of autumn was in the air, a prodigal feeling, a feeling of wanting, taking, and keeping before it’s too late.”

It's worth a read.

Recommend this book: "On Tyranny" by Timothy Snyder.


It's short, easy to read. Recalls history. Makes some good suggestions, and the suggestions are how the book is organized into chapters:
1. Do not obey in advance.
2. Defend institutions.
3. Beware the one-party state.
4. Take responsibility for the face of the world.
5. Remember professional ethics.
6. Be wary of paramilitaries.
7. Be reflective if you must be armed.
8. Stand out.
9. Be kind to our language.
10. Believe in truth.
11. Investigate.
12. Make eye contact and small talk.
13. Practice corporeal politics.
14. Establish a private life.
15. Contribute to good causes.
16. Learn from peers in other countries.
17. Listen for dangerous words.
18. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.
19. Be a patriot.
20. Be as courageous as you can.

I saw this book quote on Reddit, I think, and the ideas tickled my fancy. I added some spacing to help the readability.

"All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans
need...fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? No. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little-"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN
SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET - Death waved a hand.

AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point-"
MY POINT EXACTLY.

― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/66591

Just read a book called "The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World".

It's a decent read. Some of these passages in that book remind me of what's happening now: intolerant Christian leaders inflaming their flocks, stochastic terrorism, Christo-nationalists skirting laws (or disobeying them) - in order to force others to obey the rules of their religion, etc. I've seem so many articles lately quoting right wing Christian leaders speaking of the left as being demonic.

Excerpt from the book from the timeframe of year 382 CE:

In the crowing words of one triumphalist account: "The pagan faith, made dominant for so many years, by such pains, such expenditure of wealth, such feats of arms, has vanished from the earth.

It had not. Nevertheless, it is clear that a staggering reversal had taken place. Tens of millions of people had converted — or were said to have converted — to a new and alien religion, in under a century. Religions that had lasted for centuries were dying with remarkable rapidity. And if some of these millions were converting not out of love of Christ but out of fear of his enforcers? No matter, argued Christian preachers. Better to be scared in this life than burn in the next.

The worshippers of the old gods pleaded eloquently with the Christian elite for toleration. One of the most famous requests was sparked by a dispute over an altar. The Altar of Victory had stood in the Senate House in Rome for centuries, and for centuries Roman senators had made offerings at it before meetings of the Senate. It was an ancient custom, dating back to Augustus, and a revered one. But Christians began to find it increasingly intolerable that they had to share the Senate with idols and breathe what they saw as the polluting demonic smoke. After decades of to-ing and fro-ing, in AD 382 the Christian emperor Gratian ordered the altar out.

Rome's senators— at any rate those who were still worshippers of the old gods - were dismayed. Not only was this a gross break with tradition, it was a serious insult to the gods. The brilliant orator Symmachus wrote an appeal. First, he begged the emperor to allow religious difference among his subjects. Echoing Heredots, Celsus, Themistius and many another before him, Symmachus observed that "each person has their own custom, each their own religious rite" and that mankind was ill-equipped to judge which of these was best, "since all reasoning is shrouded in ambiguity." He doesn't ask for any curbing of Christianity. It was, he said, "not possible to attain to so sublime a mystery by one route alone." One can dismiss this as mere pragmatism and politics - and true, Symmachus was hardly in a position to ask for more. But that is too cynical: whether the Greco-Roman polytheism was truly "tolerant" or not, there is no doubt that the old ways were fundamentally liberal and generous. Men such as Symmachus had no wish to change that. Or, as he put it to his intolerant Christian rulers: "We offer you now prayers, not a battle."

Symmachus might not have wanted a battle but a battle was precisely what the Christians saw themselves as fighting. For a Christian, reasoning was not shrouded in ambiguity: it was explicitly laid out in the Bible. And the Bible, on this point, was clear. As those thundering words of Deuteronomy had it, toleration of other religions and their altars was not what was required. Instead, the faithful were required to raze them to the ground. " No Christian could agree with the relativistic quibbles of Symmachus. To a Christian there were not different but equally valid views. There were angels and there were demons. As the academic Ramsay MacMullen has put it, "there could be no compromise with the Devil." And, as Christians made clear in a thousand hectoring sermons and a hundred fierce laws, objects associated with other religions belonged to the Dark Lord. "The Devil's worship," fulminated one Christian, "consists of prayers in the temples of idols, honours paid to lifeless idols, the lighting of lamps or burning of incense." Symmachus lost. His plea was ignored.

Then, some twenty years later, in AD 408, came one of the fiercest pronouncements yet. "If any images stand even now in the temples and shrines," this new law said, "they shall be torn from their foundations...The buildings themselves of the temples which are situated in cities or towns or outside the towns shall be vindicated to public use. Altars shall be destroyed in all places.

Rome's ancient cults were collapsing. And yet though Symmachus lost —perhaps because he lost — his words still have a terrible power. "We request peace for the gods of our forefathers," he had begged. "Whatever each person worships, it is reasonable to think of them as one. We see the same stars, the sky is shared by all, the same world surrounds us. What does it matter what wisdom a person uses to seek for the truth?"

I did proofread the above, but any errors I can blame on my phone's image to text scanning :)

Enjoyable book club tonight. I was host, which means I chose the book, provided dinner, and also provided some info about the book and/or author.

The book I chose ("On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" by Ocean Vuong) was a bit hard to get into, written in a poetic manner and non-chronological. But in the end, I was glad I read it.

The Book Club is a group of older gay men. And we have been instinctively choosing more gay themed books lately...perhaps a reaction to the zeitgeist of late.



The Clematis have started blooming!

I'm in a book club, and I have very much enjoyed being there. At one point in my life, I had gotten to the point of not reading books at all -- I just wasn't making time for it. But being in a book club has sort of forced me back into it.

Reading a book really is a different skillset from reading articles online. Online means skimming and jumping from spot to spot, but reading a book is much more focused, and really takes much more mental energy.


Which brings me to a personal quandary I'm wrestling with. Many (not all) of the books we are reading are old -- sort of 'books you should read' type of books. And many of them contain racial stereotypes and racist language, as was typical of previous eras.

I used to think you should read those books in order to see how things were, so you could understand current events (like the mess the US is in right now).

But when I have tried to read those books, my whole being has sort of rebelled against them -- for example, I just couldn't finish Robinson Crusoe last year. I quickly got tired of the archaic language, but more importantly, the racist attitudes in it. I mean damn...even using the name "Friday" for someone because that was the day of the week? How about treating him like a human being and asking for a name?

When I read those old books, it's as if I'm polluting my mind." Even if you don't agree with a concept, the more you hear it and read it, the more de-sensitized you get to the concept. And as you become de-sensitized, you don't react as strongly against it. Reading those books really felt like pollution to me.

This article is somewhat descriptive of how I'm feeling about this -- https://www.dw.com/en/avoiding-racism-the-struggle-to-use-the-right-words/a-37767796


So here we are...still having old books on the selection list, and there's nothing wrong with that. But I'm finding that I stop reading as soon as I get to a racist section. An example was last month's One Flew Over the Cuckoo Next. As soon as the racist attitudes started in the book, I really had trouble continuing.

And this really is a quandary. Because it makes me feel like I'm in the same camp as the book burner folks...which I am definitely not. I think books should be read, but I just don't want to read them. I am not sure how to resolve this. But the racist crap is just too much for me.

I have read the Lord of the Rings many, many times, and I had never noticed this until I saw a TikTok the other day -- sadly, I can't remember which TikToker posted it -- talking about how Frodo defunded the police! And sure enough...as Deputy Mayer, Frodo reduced the Shirriffs to their proper functions and numbers. Hilarious!

The thing I remember about that TikToker is that she reads the LOTR every year! I have read it 20+ times, but it's interesting that there are those of in the world who read the trilogy so often!

I added the bold below --

Old Will Whitfoot had been in the Lockholes longer than any, and though he had perhaps been treated less harshly than some, he needed a lot of feeding up before he could look the part of Mayor; so Frodo agreed to act as his Deputy, until Mr. Whitfoot was in shape again. The only thing that he did as Deputy Mayor was to reduce the Shirriffs to their proper functions and numbers. The task of hunting out the last remnant of the ruffians was left to Merry and Pippin, and it was soon done. The southern gangs, after hearing the news of the Battle of Bywater, fled out of the land and offered little resistance to the Thain. Before the Year’s End the few survivors were rounded up in the woods, and those that surrendered were shown to the borders.

Regarding the recent release by Pentagon of UFO tapes from 2004 and 2015 encounters -- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/27/pentagon-releases-three-ufo-videos-taken-by-us-navy-pilots -- my question is why did they release the tapes? Their explanation of "cleaning up misconceptions" about whether the tapes are real seems really weak. Why would the Pentagon want to "clear up misconceptions"? So I question that explanation.

What about belief in aliens? In general, I really don't see why anyone would NOT believe in other civilizations. Just from the vastness of the universe perspective, it makes a lot of sense that there would be other species. Isaac Asimov's book (wow, now 40+ years old!) on the subject -- https://www.amazon.com/Extraterrestrial-Civilizations-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0449900207 is a calculation of the odds of other civilizations based on the number of planets in the universe, etc. It has been a LONG TIME since I read the book, so I'm doing this from memory and really simplifying, but his probable answer was that yes, alien civilizations could exist. And he gave some thought to the reason we don't have definite contact. Due to the vastness of time, it could be that only a very few civilizations capable of interstellar flight/communication ever exist at the same time, so that no civilization ever finds another.

There have been lots of sightings over the years (although granted, most are very poor quality). But I'm not sure I would expect the videos to be good quality. Any distance or low light situation reduces video quality substantially. If you're using your phone at night trying to capture a moving image, you can generally expect it to be of bad quality. It's easy to ignore UFO videos when they are blurry and taken with someone's old VCR recorder or with someone's phone at night. But videos are harder to ignore when taken from military planes, and when the planes show unusual technological capabilities.

There also have been lots of reports of abductions, which are usually explained away as some sort of mental illness, some sort of dream paralysis, a mass psychosis(?), too much DMT in those peoples' systems, etc. I personally have never known anyone who believed they were abducted (See what I did there? I downplayed the abduction by talking about the person's 'belief' that they were abducted.), so it's hard to judge these.

I personally am going to assume other life forms could exist. And for my part, I'm even going to assume that there are civilizations in existence right now that are technologically more advanced than us. That's a pretty unfounded assumption, but there you go.

If there are other lifeforms, and they are visiting, then that calls up the question about their agenda. What could the agenda be? Here are some possibilities, and note that only a 2 or 3 of the items are "good" from our perspective.

1. Peaceful contact -- this assumes they are peaceful, and that we are sophisticated enough that they would deem us worthy of contact.
   
2. Parental good will -- maybe they are like caretakers and the fucked up situations we always seems to be finding ourselves in is causing them concern?
   
3. Making sure we don't spread our violence would be the premise of the old film The Day the Earth Stood Still.
   
4. To "serve humans....for dinner" lol would be using us for food as in that old Twilight Zone episode. There was also a Simpson's take on that, lol.
   
5. We might make decent slaves.
   
6. Maybe they need a new planet, theirs being all used up? There has been definitely been sci-fi stories about that. One example is the old War of the Worlds. Speaking of which, there have been a surprising number of remakes of that movie, some better than others. And there is a "re-imagining" series on Epix right now.
   
7. I think I have made a post about this at some point, but maybe our own lives are just part of an alien first person point of view video game, where the aliens can relax and experience primitive societies, then finish the game and go back to their normal boring lives. In that case, the UFOs would be the aliens keeping the video game running and doing some maintenance. Although interesting to think about, this idea doesn't help me make decisions or live my daily life, so this is not something I believe.
   
8. Hell, maybe we are like a zoo where the aliens can take the kids to go look at the primitives!
   
9. There is a fair amount of sci-fi about aliens being where we get our ideas of god from. An example of that is The Fourth Kind -- not a particularly good movie, but I did like the language angle.
   
10. Creating a new race of hybrid-human people. I recently read an Octavia Butler book called Lilith's Brood with a story line kind of like that.
    
11. Maybe the UFOs are our future selves time traveling to prevent a bad thing? There have been lots of sci-fi on that also, like Interstellar, Travelers, Star Trek films, etc.
    
12. Maybe the aliens are sort of species "farmers" or preservers, realizing we're headed for a tragedy and they are trying to salvage some of our species to start again.

There are theories that the aliens arrived and integrated long ago, and have been molding our cultures for a long time to suit whatever their agenda happens to be.

So what do I believe?

Do I believe in aliens? If you pushed me to take a side, I would say that yes, I do believe alien civilizations exist because it makes sense. Why wouldn't there be other civilizations based on the vastness of space, and plain-old probability (reference Asimov's book linked above)?

Do I believe the aliens are visiting us? Well the odds are against it, again given the vastness of space and the low likelihood of different species developing interstellar space flight at the same time to enable communication.

But given all the videos, I would say yes, I believe that either the aliens ARE visiting -OR- there is human flight technology/capability which is greater than is generally known. I guess militaries "could be" hiding advanced flight capability and then the UFO videos would be slip-ups. Which would also explain the release of the videos -- what better way to hide your slip up but to release it as a 'UFO' video? But again if I have to take a side, I would say, yes, I believe aliens are visiting.

Do I believe in the alien abductions? That's a harder question for me because these could be psychological trauma. I mean, if you're already messed up psychologically (and there is no shortage of that among humans), then it seems only a small step to absorb and transform the story of abduction as an explanation for your real-life trauma or mental illness. And let's talk about this -- if alien abductions are real, then aliens are to be feared. I mean, being treated in the same way that we humans treat lab rats is not a pleasant thought, right? And I have enough daily life stuff to worry about right at this moment. So on this one, I think I'm gonna fall into the 'NOT believe' camp for now -- if only for the convenience of not having another item on my list of daily worries.


I feel like there should be some epilogue, which I don't have. Generally, I find the timing (COVID anyone?) and reason for the Pentagon's tape release as odd. But definitely interesting, and something I'll keep an eye on!

And a quick aside -- the first recorded time of a European descent person seeing a UFO in North America -- 1639 baby!:

https://archive.org/details/winthropsjournal00wint/page/294/mode/2up

So now we have a third US president to have been impeached -- 2 in the last 20ish years:

• Johnson
  
• Clinton
  
• Trump

There have been 5 elections where the votes of the electoral college differed from the popular vote (where the president elected by the electoral college got fewer votes in the election) -- again 2 in the last 20 years:

• Adams/Jackson (1824)
  
• Hayes/Tilden (1876)
  
• Harrison/Cleveland (1888)
  
• Bush/Gore (2000)
  
• Trump/Clinton (2016)

****
I've been readying a book about the death of the Roman Republic. I find it useful to read about the Roman Republic because that political system is what the founders of the US based our political processes on.

The book by Edward J. Watts is called Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny. (The page references below are from the first hardback edition from Basic Books.)

The Republic was based on compromise and competition guided by a set of political norms that could be unfair but that were nevertheless recognized by all elites. They allowed themselves to be bound by the rules of the Republic in exchange for the chance to compete for the rewards it offered. (p. 91)

Marius undercut public faith in the legitimacy of the elites who had been running the Republic for most of the past generation....A delegitimized establishment helped Marius in the short run, but it seriously damaged the Republic. The political system had encouraged compromises and generated political consensus was now discredited alongside the men who had led it. Politicians like Saturninus then took advantage of this structural weakness.... (p. 117)

This sounds to me remarkably like what the far right has been doing in the past 30 years -- delegitimizing the system that has worked since the second world war.

In reading the book, I believe I finally understood the founders' intentions with regards to the US Senate. The Roman Republic had several lawmaking bodies -- the Council of Plebeians, the Tribal Assembly, the Centuriate Assembly, etc. -- each with its own sphere of influence. The Roman Senate was intended as a check on these assemblies -- basically a sort of brake to keep the assemblies from driving the Republic off the rails. I suspect that the US Senate (longer terms, more deliberative, slower moving) was intended similarly -- to be a check on the popular laws originating from the House.

And of course, Congress as a whole was intended as a check against the President and the Courts.

But when the Senate votes by party to support a corrupt president, well, you can see now where that leads.