unreasonable.org

Letter to the editor, Washington Post:

Besides slaughtering civilians, Israel has deliberately killed Palestinian Authority police in the Gaza strip. Targeting civil authorities in the occupied territories - the only people who could enforce a political solution, who could stop rogue attacks from being launched - shows that the current Israeli leadership has no interest in a peaceful settlement, and makes Charles Krauthammer's claim ["Moral Clarity in Gaza", Jan. 2] that Israel has some sort of moral high ground nothing short of nauseating.

Brendan Gregg, from Sun's "Fishworks" team, demonstrates how shouting at a disk drive causes vibrations that cause latency (i.e., slows down the process of accessing stuff from the disk). Wild.

A supremely windy New Year's Eve (winds 25 to 35 mph with gusts up to 60, according to the weather service), bringing to mind all the metaphors of "winds of change". And also a Wednesday, the day I usually go running. So I headed out, and right at the start as soon as I turned on to Edmondson Avenue, bam! Into a headwind which was like a hand holding me back. Fortunately that was just for a short bit, once I got into the woods on the Trolly Trail I was screened from the wind by the trees and the lay of the land.

But after a while, I turned around and came back; and so at the end of my run, from the same wind I got a tailwind, speeding me along.

And I'll let you judge what sort of portent or metaphor that is. In any event, Happy New Year!

Many conservative Americans regard killing a police officer as the ultimate crime, an attack on society itself. What will they think when they learn that the government of Israel is a cop-killer over 100 times over, that Israel's latest terror attacks have targeted Palestinian police, the only body that might keep Palestinian resistance fighters under control in a political solution to the conflict?

Well, it's a moot point, since they probably won't. They're hear about "Hamas operatives" being killed. I suppose that if a Palestinian Authority police officer is a "Hamas operative" by virtue of Hamas being the majority party in the Palestinian elected government, then as of January 20th all federal agents will become "Democratic operatives".

Today. by the way, is the anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre, when the U.S. government killed over 200 men, women, and children of the Lakota Sioux. There are sad and obvious parallels between the brutal U.S. genocide of the Native nations in the name of manifest destiny, occasionally interrupted by equally brutal, but ineffective, resistance by Indians; and the brutal Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people in the name of Zionism, occasionally interrupted by equally brutal, but ineffective, resistance.

Maybe in 100 years Palestinians will be running casinos in the West Bank.

Been meaning to write about this for a while:

Thus have I heard:

The planet Venus is sometimes so bright
it is mistaken for the lights of an airplane

and so during WWII
anti-aircraft crews would try to shoot it down

shooting at the stars like
a drunken cowboy shooting out streetlights

shooting at the stars like
a little boy throwing stones at the top of Olympus

shooting at the stars like
a dribbling ejaculation

shooting at the stars like
pissing into the hurricane

shooting at the stars like
slandering the Buddha

shooting at the stars like
trying to blow out the sun or deny the moon's tidal pull

shooting at the stars like
trying to deny love
to deny the goddess Venus

hopeless mistaken heroism -
the wise man knows when to fight

Tonight's Zelda's Inferno exercise: write a poem using alliteration, about this time of year (winter, holdays, new year, whatever)

wildly warm winter weekend and I am wondering
about weather
and what warming trend will wend it's way toward us
and whether we'll stop witlessly polluting the air before the waves wash cities away

and on a more personal level
about where I'll go and what I'll do on New Year's Eve, and whether I'll have a date

CNN reports that a Philadelphia man shot a moviegoer in front of him after an argument about talking during the film.

As if gunshots weren't louder than talking voices. Next time drag the inconsiderate theater-goer outside, then shoot him.

For many years, at the headquarters of our karate school in New York, students near the holidays do a "walking mediation" where they take food to homeless people on the street.

I've always thought that was a neat idea, but never did anything abou it until now. Christmas Eve I made up a bunch of bag lunches - each with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a Clif bar, a little piece of chocolate, and a small bottle of water - and yesterday I stopped off in the area around the stadiums, Conway Street between Howard and Light Streets, where there are always panhandlers and homeless people out, and gave out a few.

A few of the guys (I saw all men, no women, there) were pretty spaced out. Definitely not all there. I don't know if that's why they ended up on the streets, or if it's a product of their time there. But most were nice, thanked me, said "God bless you". Which actually made me feel more powerless than anything, that such a small act would be so responded to.

When I was a wee bitty lad, I - like most of my peers - believed in Santa Claus. I literally believed that there was a guy who lived at the North Pole, and had supernatural abilities, and showed up at our house (through the door, we having no chimney - I can remember asking my parents about this), and ate the cookies we left out, and left my brother and me a bunch of loot under the plastic tree.

Of course, I - like most of my peers - got over that. By the time I was seven or eight, certainly by age 10, I knew that of course there was no Santa. It was our parents! Liars who got their jollies by fooling little kids. A sad, even offensive, state of affairs.

But as I truly grew up, I saw that there was a still something to the "Christmas Spirit". Sure, there wasn't a magic guy with a flying sleigh, etcetera, but there was an aspect of the human experience, a generosity, that we could sensibly personify as the chubby fellow in red. Santa didn't live at North Pole, but in the human heart. Yes, Santa was our parents - humans incarnating a mythological role, each becoming for a moment here and there the avatar of that Christmas Spirit.

Now, when I was a wee bitty lad, I - like most of my peers - believed in God, specifically in the Catholic Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I literally believed that there was a magic guy (well, three guys, sort of, but really one) who lived outside the Universe in Heaven, that he/they had made the world, that he/they had come down and been born as a human 2,000 years ago, the works.

Of course, I - unlike most of my peers - got over that. By the time I was 13 I had rejected Catholic doctrine as a bunch of bunk, and by age 20 I called myself an atheist. Of course there were no gods.

But now, having grown up at least a little bit more, even though I will call myself an atheist in some contexts, I will call myself a pantheist in others. Just as I don't believe in a supernatural being at the North Pole who makes toys, I don't believe in supernatural beings in "Heaven" who made the Universe. But, just as I see a sort of "Christmas Spirit" in human experience and sometimes find it useful to hang the image of Old Saint Nick on that, so I know the mystical experience, and find it useful to hang the image of Pan or Dainichi Buddha or Aphrodite or Shiva or Eris (All hail Discordia!), or even once in a while that poor old carpenter Jeshua ben Joseph, on it. The gods and goddesses live not in some heavenly realm, but in our hearts and minds, in every aspect of human experience.

So, Merry Yule to all. I hope you get a nice chance to be Santa this year - and a nice chance to be god(dess) all the time.

Over at Slate, Donald Fagen writes about his appreciation for Jean Shepherd, known to most of us as the author of the stories upon which the classic film A Christmas Story is based. Shepherd also did the voice-over narration for the film. Fagan writes about Shepherd's career as a radio storyteller:

But long before A Christmas Story was made, Shepherd did a nightly radio broadcast on WOR out of Manhattan that enthralled a generation of alienated young people within range of the station's powerful transmitter...

In the late '50s, while Lenny Bruce was beginning his climb to holy infamy in jazz clubs on the West Coast, Shepherd's all-night monologues on WOR had already gained him an intensely loyal cult of listeners. Unlike Bruce's provocative nightclub act, which had its origins in the "schpritz" of the Catskills comics, Shepherd's improvised routines were more in the tradition of Midwestern storytellers like Mark Twain, but with a contemporary urban twist: say, Mark Twain after he'd been dating Elaine May for a year and a half. Where Bruce's antics made headlines, Shepherd, with his warm, charismatic voice and folksy style, could perform his most subversive routines with the bosses in the WOR front office and the FCC being none the wiser.