You won’t hear this in the debates

Our politicians today don’t talk about ideas and ideals the way some pols did in days gone by.

I’m not saying—no way!—that politics and politicians were somehow better in the mythical “good old days.” The sham and the shenanigans and the shame have always been there.

Every so often, at least, lip service is given to the notion of doing the right thing for the right reasons.

How about this:

“Public good is not a term opposed to the good of individuals. On the contrary, it is the good of every individual collected. It is the good of all, because it is the good of every one.”

I think that’s a decent approximation of the common sense meaning of “the common good.”

p.s. The quote is from Thomas Paine, 1778. He’s the guy who wrote the blockbuster Revolutionary War pamphlet,  Common Sense.

Source:

Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), 89.

The Six Grandfathers

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A dreary contemplation

Student debt: the wrong solution

Same old, same old....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

A dreary contemplation

Full disclosure: Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) is not my favorite person.

I’ve been thinking about Boehner’s blockbuster announcement last week that he will step down as Speaker of the House and resign his seat at the end of October, in other words, more or less immediately.

An abrupt change like this—a necessarily speedy and unavoidably messy change in a high-profile leadership position—is not good for our political process, not good for our government and not good for our country.

Some commentators have connected some of the obvious dots: Boehner now has a personally fail-safe option to orchestrate a bi-partisan bill to continue funding the government, without support from right-wing, anti-government Republicans in the House who want to attach poison pills to such a bill.

I’m willing to admit that Boehner is willing to accept personal sacrifice to get this essentially reasonable bill to pass in a form that President Obama will sign. I respect that motivation.

Yet, he knows and all of us know that this short-term bill is a can that’s going to be kicked down the road a bit. The government funding clash is going to recur, and soon.

Boehner isn’t solving THE problem. He’s solving HIS problem. He won’t get booted out of the Speaker’s chair by his own party.

It’s all too dreary to think about this tempest of leadership failure.

Our elected representatives in Washington aren’t leading or governing in the public interest. They’re making a lot of noise, and keeping an eye on the re-election cycle.

Why do we keep sending these folks back to Washington?

Another view on Boehner from The New Yorker:

The Six Grandfathers

Book review: The Bartender's Tale

What does it take?

Pelosi: "feisty" or "feckless" ?

Let's spread the blame around....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Still waiting for the perp walk

Do you think that justice has been done to the people who did all the bad things that created the 2008 financial meltdown?

Think again.

In the September issue of The Atlantic, William Cohan lays out the bad and the ugly about “How The Bankers Stayed Out of Jail.” Read it here.

Here’s the short version:

Since that horribly destructive financial crisis, 49 banks and other financial institutions have paid almost $190 billion (yeah, that’s BILLION) in fines and regulatory settlements. All of the payments came out of their shareholders’ pockets. Some of the penalty payments were tax-deductible (!).

How many Wall Street executives and other big players have gone to jail for their manifest misdeeds?

One.

Cohan mentions, for comparison, that in the aftermath of the U. S. savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s, more than a thousand bank execs and others went to jail for their crimes that drained $132 billion from taxpayers’ pockets.

I think it’s going to be a long wait for the perp walk.

(While I think of it, I’ll guess it could be a long wait to find out which Volkswagen executives and managers go to jail for tampering with their diesel cars’ emission control systems.)

The Six Grandfathers

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Beef and poop, an American story

These employers should pay for welfare

Let's redefine "work from home"

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Surprise!

You thought the guillotine is ancient French history, right?

Well, here’s a shocker:

The guillotine was the legal method of execution in France until 1981, when capital punishment was abolished.

The iconic terror of the French Revolution was last used in 1977 to publicly behead a murderer named Hamida Djandoubi.

The Six Grandfathers

It was the Renaissance, everybody knows that....

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You can call him Quake

Uncle Sam was born in 1813

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Glimpse of the dark side….

How do you justify raising the price of a 62-year-old drug from $13.50 per dose to $750 per dose?

You don’t. You can’t.

But Martin Shkreli thinks he can do it.

In fact, he has already raised the price. Now he’s into the justification phase.

I think he should be in the “hot seat” phase.

There is no moral tenet that can make this price hike acceptable.

There is no “free market” pillar of wisdom that makes this a good idea.

Shkreli, a dubiously ethical hedge fund wunderkind, used his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, to buy the rights to the drug Daraprim, which has been used since 1953 to treat a small number (about 10,000 or fewer) of folks who have a rare parasitic infection. He pushed the drug price to the sky so he could make a lot of money.

I think health insurance companies and our government should jump into all-out development funding for a generic substitute.

I think our government should remind Shkreli and Turing Pharmaceuticals that their manufacturing and financial practices are subject to regulatory scrutiny, and give Shkreli-Turing a full measure of same. He bumped the price of Daraprim by about 5,400 per cent. I think a half dozen IRS tax auditors should be assigned to Shkreli/Turing immediately.

Make that a dozen tax auditors. Shkreli likes big moves.

The Six Grandfathers

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Big Pharma uses your money to do drug research

Massachusetts seniors--where will they live?

Sometime, "something" won't be what you want....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

You can call him Quake

About 2,885 years ago, a man was born in Mesoamerica, in what we now call Mexico. We know only two things about him: he died about 750 B. C., fighting against the Zapotec empire; his name was 1-Earthquake.

Among the tens of millions who lived in ancient times in the American hemisphere, 1-Earthquake is the earliest whose name we know.

1-Earthquake

In the Mesoamerican cultures that flourished three millennia ago, the day of birth often was an augury of the future of the newborn, and often the birth date was adopted as a name. 1-Earthquake was the Zapotec name for the 17^th day of their 260-day sacred calendar.

It is apparent that the name was carved as two glyphs in the stone threshold of a temple in San  José Mogote, near the city of Oaxaca. This is the earliest known writing in North or South America that can be accurately dated: 750 B.C.

Urban site in Zapotec empire

Note the date.. At about the same time as Rome was founded (753 B. C.), when  the early Greeks were emerging from their own Dark Ages, and when much of Europe was populated by the “barbarian” Germanic and Celtic tribes, there were civilizations in the Americas like the Zapotec and the earlier Olmec, that had sophisticated cities, governments, organized religion, art, agriculture, commerce, astronomy and mathematics.

Source: Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 243.

It was the Renaissance, everybody knows that....

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Uncle Sam was born in 1813

How Geronimo became a celebrity

The Six Grandfathers

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Too many guns in America

Bloomberg reported this week that 145 Americans were killed by guns on the Labor Day weekend.

That’s one dead person every 30 minutes.

Another report from the Gun Violence Archive said that, year-to-date, 507 children under the age of 12 have been killed by guns.

We have too many guns in America.

Too many dead people.

The Six Grandfathers

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I guess I believe it....

Murders in Charleston

Police have killed 385 people so far this year

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Take a look at a Syrian refugee camp

Syrian refugee camp in Jordan

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Words, words, words

I was intrigued by a passage on early transliteration of key words in the New Testament, in a most fascinating book about the history of the English language. Ooops, you yawned. Give me a chance.

Owen Barfield, in History in English Words, explains that “passionate Hebrew meanings were gradually imported into the cold and clear-cut Greek words” during the centuries, before the life of Jesus, when Egyptian Jewish scholars translated Hebrew scriptures in the Greek (Koine Greek) language to create what is known as the Septuagint.

The meanings of words change continuously, with changes in knowledge and social interaction, evolving cultural milieu, travel and other environmental factors. This has been happening since humankind started talking.

Barfield relates what happened in plain talk: “Seeking for words to convey such notions as ‘sin,’ ‘righteousness,’ ‘defilement,’ ‘abomination,’ ‘ungodly,’ the Jewish translators had to do the best they could with noises which to Heraclitus and Plato had implied something more like ‘folly,’ ‘integrity,’ ‘dirt,’ ‘objectionable practice,’ ‘ignorant.’

The Greek version of the scriptures was known in the synagogues of Palestine. It’s possible that Jesus 

read it.

I wonder what Jesus thought the words meant.

Source:

Owen Barfield, History in English Words (Hudson, NY: The Lindisfarne Press, 1953), 114-15.

The Six Grandfathers

Book review: A Literary Life: A Second Memoir

Not your daddy's bookshelf

"Daddy, I need another book!"

King George as a kid....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

How Geronimo became a celebrity

The U. S. cavalry was still fighting “Indian wars” in 1886. Sad but true.

1886 was 20 years after the Civil War.

Coca-Cola was invented in 1886.

The Statue of Liberty was dedicated in New York harbor in 1886.

In 1886 strikers and the Haymarket rioters fought successfully for introduction of the eight-hour workday.

Geronimo, an Apache warrior, was the last Native American chief to surrender to American soldiers. In August, 1886, he and his hardy band of 50 Apaches gave it up to Gen. Nelson Miles in Skeleton Canyon, Arizona, after fighting the white intruders for 30 years in Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains and in southern regions of what would Arizona and New Mexico.

The strangest part of the story is that after a brief imprisonment, Geronimo moved to Oklahoma, became a Christian and was a successful farmer. He did some work as an army scout, and then became a rehabilitated (call it exploitation if you want to) symbol of the Wild West.  He did high profile celebrity gigs at world’s fairs and expositions, and rode in Teddy Roosevelt’s inaugural parade in 1905.

Call it a sell-out if you want to.

The Six Grandfathers

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Woodstock: that was a music thing, right?

Guacamole is an Aztec word

Miep Gies saved Anne Frank's diary

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Yore word fur today

“Acyrologia”

More or less, whatever you’re thinking, there’s a word for that.

I love words, so it’s a treat to stumble on an obscure example of a delicious word for what passes for a trick-or-treat foray into the English language.

This word isn’t in any of the dictionaries I consulted.

Here’s the best definition I found for acyrologia: “An incorrect use of words, especially the use of words that sound alike but are far in meaning from the speaker’s intentions.”

I could mention a pueblo of witty stuff that comes to mind, but I recline to do that. I’ll just quote a synonymous whit who said “…for all intensive purposes, this is a Pullet Surprise winner.”

The Six Grandfathers

Book review: A Literary Life: A Second Memoir

Science ruins everything

Carpe diem, annotated....

Sometimes elephants are people, too

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

In search of….music

“Music”

by Juhan Liiv

I read darn little poetry, modern or traditional, that I like a lot. I know that doesn’t make me special, it makes me ordinary.

So it’s more than a fleeting thrill for me to read a poem that deserves to be read more than once, deserves to be read aloud.

I think this is one of them:

Music

It must be somewhere, the original harmony,

somewhere in great nature, hidden.

Is it in the furious infinite,

in distant stars' orbits,

is it in the sun's scorn,

in a tiny flower, in treegossip,

in heartmusic's mothersong

or in tears?

It must be somewhere, immortality,

somewhere the original harmony must be found:

how else could it infuse

the human soul,

that music?

Liiv is an Estonian poet who hit his mark here. His topic is intuitive, but his is a rare kind of intuition: everyone knows what music is, but thinking about the first music and who made it and how is not something you hear about at the lunch table.

His musing about the essential nature of “the original harmony” is a premier exhibition of imagination and word craft—“furious infinite,” “treegossip,” “the sun’s scorn,” “heartmusic,” I could go on, but he did it so much better.

For my taste, the word “immortality” should be “immortal.” I venture to suspect that “immortality” is a typo in the translation from Liiv’s Estonian.

Wish I could read Estonian.

“Music” was originally published in Poetry, June 2011

It was the Renaissance, everybody knows that....

Book review: A Literary Life: A Second Memoir

The rain comes in...

Always

"...another little piece of my heart..."

"The someday, faraway passages"

Yes, singing

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Not your daddy’s bookshelf

When somebody mentions “a few books on the little table in the music room,” this is what comes to my mind:

When I read an old book, I can imagine the reader in a previous era who spent some time with eyes and fingers on the same pages. I guess that reader didn’t think of the book as a time traveler, or of me as a kindred spirit taking similar enjoyment and learning from the author’s work.

A 100-year-old book has so much more connective energy than a 100-year-old milk bottle or a 100-year-old chair. An old book smells better, too.

In about 92 years, a 100-year-old book is going to have so much more connective energy than a 100-year-old Kindle. Better smell, too.

It was the Renaissance, everybody knows that....

When safety tests were more interesting....

Book review: An Empire on the Edge

"Daddy, I need another book!"

King George as a kid....

"I don't remember the title..."

Ain't no quitter....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

Beef and poop, an American story

Your burger can bite you.

Try not to think about ordering your burger “rare.”

Here’s the sad but true backstory: the folks at Consumer Reports visited 103 stores in 26 cities and bought 458 pounds of ground beef. Pound by pound, they tested the raw meat for contamination.

“All 458 pounds of beef we examined contained bacteria that signified fecal contamination” is the finding reported by The New York Times Daily Digest.

Ground beef storage unit

Try saying it this way: all of the meat had vestigial poop in it. Salmonella was detected in 1 per cent of the samples.

The Department of Agriculture interpreted the report as “good news” because no bad E. coli had been found. The North American Meat Institute pointed out that the occurrences of bacteria were “far below U. S. D. A performance standards.”

Note that the federal standard is that it’s OK to have salmonella in up to 7.5 percent of meat samples. I guess the folks at Agriculture are happily convinced that every consumer handles raw meat in sterile conditions from start to finish, and fully cooks all portions of meat before the kids or Gramma eat anything.

You should fully cook beef to at least 160 degrees.

Or don’t eat ground beef.

Turkey burgers are pretty good. I like to toast my bun.

It was the Renaissance, everybody knows that....

Book review: An Empire on the Edge

These employers should pay for welfare

Let's redefine "work from home"

No surprise here

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.

I guess I believe it….

Go ahead, ask: what’s booming?

Sales of flamethrowers.

You know why? There’s been some talk about banning them, in Troy, Michigan, and elsewhere.

There are no federal regulations restricting the possession and use of flamethrowers, and only California and Maryland have some state regulations.

One company that’s selling these deadly machines says “Our goal is to bring fun and awesome products into the world.”

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Nobody needs a flamethrower. No one should own a flamethrower.

Somebody woke up this morning thinking about the nasty things he could do with a flamethrower.

Tell your local, state and federal representatives to do the right thing.

When safety tests were more interesting....

Book review: The Chosen

Science ruins everything

Carpe diem, annotated....

Sometimes elephants are people, too

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.