Category Archives: Civilization

Later! Later! Later! On Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!

08 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by in British Empire, Civilization, cooking, Uncategorized

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As our story left off, I was jonesing for a real meal. I fixed huevos rancheros from my existing inventory, using some Cuban-style black beans from a canner named Teasdale.

They are very nicely seasoned. Unfortunately, Publix had them on clearance, so finding them again is gonna be sketchy. I’ll just fix my own frijoles negros in the pressure cooker, which is what I usually do.

I took another nap, then J and I had an antipasto salad at a locally owned Italian restaurant. When I came home, I emptied then loaded the dishwasher. I threw out some plastic I could have recycled. It was dirty, and washing it to recycle would have wasted water and energy.

Now I’m watching my favorite Manchester You Tuber, Martin Zero tour around the surrounding counties looking for abandoned industrial sites. Half of the fun is trying to comprehend his Midlands accent, so thick, you must cut it with a Sheffield steel knife.

These urban explorers do valuable work, often recording sites facing demolition. Sadly, not all buildings can be repurposed. Manchester was one of the premier industrial cities of England. The British Labour Movement had its origin there. The Manchester Guardian was Labour’s flagship paper.

Now we know Manchester for the football team Manchester United, the Old Trafford Cricket Stadium. Its industrial heritage is disappearing. The industrial fortunes made in this part of England were instrumental in giving us the modern world. Friedrich Engels’ documentation of urban poverty is critical to Marxist thought.

Martin emphasizes the architectural and engineering artifacts, buildings, bridges, canals, culverts and viaducts. These inspired amateurs are so enriching our world.

Teasdale Simply Especial

Sri Lanka Wins.

21 Friday Jun 2019

Posted by in Civilization, Sport

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I was watching England vs Sri Lanka in today’s World Cup match. Sri Lanka elected to bat first. They did not produce a lot of runs in their inning. I thought England would trounce them. Yet Sri Lanka defeated them through adept bowling and fielding, what we Yanks would consider defence,(borrowing a baseball analogy).

Sport has accomplished things that religion would like to do, and at which it often fails. That is bringing people together in a peaceable pursuit. We can look at the oft-quoted example of truces between warring city-states in ancient Greece during Olympic years. I recall from my childhood USA-USSR track meets during the height of The Cold War. And who can forget ping pong diplomacy? (Forrest Gump.) Savannah is calling me Olivia.

Now apart from the India/Pakistan tensions, no nation in the World Cup is warring with another. There are internal tensions, to be sure, as in Afghanistan or Sri Lanka or tensions within England herself between Muslim and non-Muslim communities. But, by golly, people can make time for cricket.

It’s too easy to think of conflict resolution in such simplistic terms. Then again, there are few things as deadly as preconditions. I think what’s at work here is attraction, much like sex.

Roy Campanella, the American baseball legend once said of baseball, “You have to have a lot of little boy in you to play this game.” So very true of so many games.

A Thought

09 Sunday Jun 2019

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Civilisation. Are we civilised? Or have we merely pressed our ever-advancing technology into the service of our own nascent barbarism?

We have cities, hence we can use the word civilisation. We have marvelous roads, water systems, sanitary sewers and sanitary landfills. I haven’t seen a rat in my own dwelling in 41 years. Quite a testimonial.

We keep the killing on the down low. Nobody has trouble finding war abhorrent, especially our warriors. But killing has become the solution to dealing with pain. And the rationalisations for abortion and euthanasia are quite elaborate and believable to the mind that is eager to accept them.

Nobody says, “Is this the day we help Grandma cross the Rainbow Bridge?” At least not yet.

Brassieres. H-Bombs

30 Tuesday Apr 2019

Posted by in Civilization, Existential Despair, Fashion & Grooming

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I am watching Oksana and Julia consult with Russian women on brassieres. Brassieres. It is hard to believe that the United States, over nearly seventy-plus years, has been ready to wipe these people, or their parents or their grandparents, off the face of the Earth. It is also hard to believe that Russian government and its predecessors, was and is equally ready to destroy American brassiere shopping women, their children, their husbands and/or lovers, .

Don’t be so naïve to think that the politicians you support, would not authorize the launches that would destroy the world. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump. They’re all killers, given the chance.

I’m wondering how a President will do in the opinion polling after a thermonuclear conflagration? Will the guy from Gallup or the NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll knock on the door of your fallout shelter, seeking your opinion?

Would this thermonuclear exchange make you more likely, less likely, to vote for the President in the next election? Or will it have no effect, assuming you haven’t died before Election Day?

Black Friday/Thanksgiving

21 Wednesday Nov 2018

Posted by in Civilization, Spirituality

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Why?

It’s about our money that we give to Wal Mart, Amazon, Target, Macy’s, the others. They, in turn, bought stuff, from the Chinese, among others. They spent vast fortunes to acquire these things. They recoup their outlay and a little something extra for their trouble, costs and profit. Thus the great cycle of commerce completes itself.

By now, the disassociation with the Christian Holy Day of the Solemnity of The Nativity is almost complete. The Santa Claus Myth prevails. It is childish, naive, uncomplicated, readily dispensible once the child reaches seven or eight, and readily grasped again once these children grow up to become parents or aunts or uncles themselves. Another cycle completes itself.

What is stifled by Black Friday is that modest holiday of gratitude, Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving isn’t particularly Christian; gratitude for God’s blessings is present in the Christian world view, but that “attitude of gratitude” is part of many other spiritual traditions. Just the idea of being quiet and humble and grateful requires not a grand display of agricultural abundance but a grateful heart. We need to be quietly thankful for that sophisticated society that connects us all and gets food to our tables. Acknowledging our interconnectedness forces us to drop our pretences of selfishness, self-sufficiency and independence. We get by in this world because we work with people we don’t particularly care for.

Humility, Quiet, Gratitude.

Fornicating Shakers

31 Thursday May 2018

Posted by in Civilization, Relationships, Uncategorized

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You don’t hear much about the Shakers anymore. Sure, you can sing The Simple Gifts (think Copland’s Appalachian Spring ), collect some fine baskets, or acquire some superb furniture. But the Shakers are extinct. Why? They practiced celibacy on a grand scale. They eschewed reproductive sex. So in order to survive, the Shakers needed to attract new members from the world outside of their own ever-shrinking sphere.

Today, we live in a culture, poisoned by the ruminations of toxic intellectuals, like Paul Ehrlich, who decry the natural human impulse to procreate and perpetuate, not only the human species, but human cultures. These cultures are not merely the Western European cultures; Japan, through the practice of birth control, is experiencing a demographic collapse. China has a bleak future, brought on by the Maoist “One Child Policy”. As college students in the Seventies, we were constantly advised to adopt Zero Population Growth as a cultural value. Having more than two children per family was, at the very least, bad form, morally irresponsible, at the worst. Men became little more than human drones (“sperm donors”). Women, in the name of feminism, rejected what defined them as women. And for anyone, man or woman, to state this, is to invite anger, fury, and scorn. A child became The Ultimate Pet. About 35 years ago, in the mid-1980’s, I noticed more and more people refer to their dogs and cats, their pets, as their “babies”. Again, many of you will minimize or ridicule this observation.

The culture has rejected its own survival, guaranteeing its decay. Thanks to wide availability of artificial contraception, and the cultural value of sex as little more than primal recreation, we are dying out, much like the Shakers.

Except there will be a remnant who will survive at first, then ultimately flourish. Much as a forest regenerates itself after a calamitous fire, those who reject the contraceptive paradigm will preserve Western, Judeo-Christian, Catholic Civilization, where both males and females will be valued. And these humans will be valued from conception til natural death.