Returning to a little ordinariness today …
- A mindful guide to email in 20 minutes a day.
- The Dogington Post on six ways your dog might be tax deductable. Who knew?
- Kit Perez asks, “What now?” — after WikiLeaks proved our worst suppositions to be right.
- Alas, next the idiot bigots will be burning the books of male authors, and will do so with no clue as to the catastrophic historic meaning of their acts … because they’ve never read the works of the male authors who warned them of the dangers of suppressing thought.
- Wow. Praesidium: a short film about time travel and guns.
- A mystery cave down a rabbit hole in a farmer’s field.
- And speaking of rabbit holes, friend D. sent me this article by Norman R. Davies, who wants to re-establish contemplation in modern Jewish life. Which led me down the rabbit hole of the man’s blog, Jewish Contemplatives and led to one very interesting guy.
You heard it, ladies! Don’t you dare read things like this. Not only is it by a male author, he has the nerve to write it as a first-person narrative by a female protagonist. Scandalous!
The “rabbit hole” label called to mind my own adventure with an unexpected cavern.
I was raised in central Texas on a rock farm. The hilltop on which we had our house and barns had at least two to three inches of topsoil above solid limestone. Building fence was not easy.
One day while digging a post hole, I had achieved a depth of maybe a foot and wearily made another jab with the crowbar. I darned near lost the crowbar, as the rock above a cavern was penetrated. End of effort.
The drouth of the 1950s in central Texas had the occasional cavern collapse or sinkholes opening. Those were a cause of nervousness for us, wondering if we’d suddenly be living underground.
We already had a vague knowledge about daverns there. The water well driller got down about sixty feet and hit thirty feet of air before continuing. One foot down, however, was definitely spooky.
Innerspace Cavern near Geeorgetown, Texas, was discovered during core borings for a highway project.
I wonder what Moran would say about George Eliot?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eliot
Until you are grown – until you can argue, with confidence, with a narrator; with a genius; with a world-view – girls, do not read books by old men.
Of course if a girl shelters herself from us rude old men, she will never learn how to “argue, with confidence, with a narrator; with a genius; with a world-view.” Bruise in training, or bleed in battle.
larryarnold — LOL on poor George Eliot. And absolutely right. How on earth do people imagine they’re going to develop any intellectual skills at all if they’re forever protected against every idea or person they might not agree with? Completely nuts.
That was an awesome time travel/self defense film.
I love the cave. I wish I would find something like that- but if I did I’d move in.
It’s amazing those candles stayed lit all those centuries- but I guess I should have known that from watching Scooby Doo and old horror movies.
There have been many famous female authors who wrote under a male pen-name. Will these girls be burning those books too?
I wrote this back in the early 2000’s
The following quote was made by Senator Frank Church of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975 in regard to NSA’s ability to intercept electronic transmissions:
“At the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology…
I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over the bridge. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”
If the NSA could do this in 1975 what can they do today? It has been many, many years and a couple of revolutions in the computer industry since then. It is something to think about in the dark of night when the moon is full ….
Today, with the revelations from WikiLeaks about the CIA, it seems like his prophesy has been fulfilled and we are now living under a 100% surveillance police state. Which comes as no surprise to me at all.