You've heard of leg men, butt men...

Foot men, breast men...

Lately I've been getting aroused by beautiful handwriting. There's a couple gals around here who really have it and I'm really enjoying it. I wish I could show you samples, but everything I can get my hands on right at the moment is somebody's address.

I used to hate that crap when I was a kid. I don't get that attitude at all now. I had no idea what a rarity it would be in my life to meet people who took pains to make the world a more beautiful place in little ways.

Ain't none o' that goin' on at home. That's for damn sure.

Oops! Did I say that out loud?

I didn't think of posting Grandma's obit

Here's a link to it in the Muskogee Phoenix.

They spelled our name wrong, but they got hers right, so I guess that's what counts.

I figured I'd show a couple pics of Muskogee

I'll probably put a couple more on the other blog - more of the Halloween/family stuff.

The weather was real nice Saturday. So nice I caught this guy out walking barefoot:

If that convinces you to move there, the house across the street is for sale:




This here is as much as I'll show now of Mom's house. Go ahead and feel free to use this image when you feel like refering to someone or something as a lightning rod.

BTW: in case you didn't catch it, the "guy" up there is my brother. We had a long, deep conversation that I think was pretty productive. I skirted the elephants in the room, but I did enjoy myself.

I'll be headed down to OK for Grandma's funeral tomorrow

But I felt I had to point out this incredibly important thing my daughter drew my attention to tonight:

THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN CROSS DRESSER - PART 1 - watch more funny videos

October Twenty-fifth - Minnesota

Can any good thing come out of Superior?

First Bud Grant, now this.

Oliver E. Williamson, US citizen. Born in 1932 in Superior, WI, USA. Ph.D. in Economics in 1963 from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Edgar F. Kaiser Professor Emeritus of Business, Economics and Law and Professor of the Graduate School, both at the University of California, Berkeley, USA.
www2.haas.berkeley.edu/Faculty/williamson_oliver.aspx

Oliver Williamson has argued that markets and hierarchical organizations, such as firms, represent alternative governance structures which differ in their approaches to resolving conflicts of interest. The drawback of markets is that they often entail haggling and disagreement. The drawback of firms is that authority, which mitigates contention, can be abused. Competitive markets work relatively well because buyers and sellers can turn to other trading partners in case of dissent. But when market competition is limited, firms are better suited for conflict resolution than markets. A key prediction of Williamson's theory, which has also been supported empirically, is therefore that the propensity of economic agents to conduct their transactions inside the boundaries of a firm increases along with the relationship-specific features of their assets.

I like the co-winner better, really.

Whattaya expect from Souptown?

My daughter just made up a word.

"Contrarium." (She meant to say 'aquarium.' I think the word needs a definition.

In my continual effort to cause trouble,

I thought I'd present you all with a little more Lloyd deMause, from The Emotional Life of Nations:

WAR AS A SACRIFICIAL RITUAL

War, then, is a sacrificial ritual designed to defend against fears of individuation and maternal engulfment by restaging our early traumas upon scapegoats. This theory is the exact opposite of the "social stress" theories of all other social scientists, since it is usually successes, freedom and new challenges that are experienced as triggers for wars, not economic distress or political stresses. The war ritual is the final chapter of the rehearsing of early traumas that we all experience as we grow up, from the 18,000 murders the average child sees on TV to the bullying of scapegoats [that] children practice on school playgrounds and the sports we play in which we rehearse the mental mechanisms necessary to dominate other groups and turn them into "enemies" (the truth reflected in the saying that "British wars are won on the Rugby fields").

That war is sacrifical, not utilitarian, and aims at reducing progress and prosperity is shown by the finding that major wars almost always occur after a sustained economic upswing. Not only are there many more wars after periods of prosperity, but they are much longer and bigger, "six to twenty times bigger as indicated by battle fatalities."¹⁷⁸ Wars sacrifice youth-symbols of our potency and hopefulness because it is our striving, youthful, independent selves that we blame for getting us into trouble in the first place. Wars are always preemptive attacks on enemies we create-enemies we must find "out there" to relieve the paranoia of having enemies "inside our heads" who resent our good fortunes. Most wars start "for the sake of peace" because we really believe we can have inner peace if we stop our progress and individuation, if we sacrifice our striving self. Only if we can stop growing can we protect ourselves from our most horrible fear-the repetition of our earliest tragedies.

I gotta tell ya, though, getting to those two paragraphs in that book - all of which is online, btw - is like reliving the birth experience.

Next day: let me tack this, from chapter five, on here:

Massive denial of the origin of humanity's problems in the traumatic abuse of children is, then, one and the same as the massive denial of the psychological origins of social behavior. They are two sides of the same historical coin. Both are rooted in the fact that our deepest fears are stored in a separate brain system that remains largely unexplored by science and that is the source of the restaging of these early traumas in social events. Only when the contents and psychodynamics of these dissociated traumatic memories are made fully conscious can we understand the waking nightmare that we call history.

While I'm editing, let me put in the commas that I think are missing from the previous quote. Actually one comma and one '[that]'.

One more thing (which also needs punctuation help):

Revictimization is actually the central cause of anti-social behavior, and addiction to trauma is at its core.¹⁰⁴ It is not surprising that prison psychiatrists find violent criminals invariably repeat in their crime the emotional traumas, abuse and humiliation of their childhood,¹⁰⁵ or that women who have been sexually abused in childhood are more than twice as likely as others to be raped when they become adults.¹⁰⁶ As one prostitute who had been sexually victimized as a child said, "When I do it, I'm in control. I can control them through sex."¹⁰⁷ What Freud was puzzled by¹⁰⁸ when he coined the term "the repetition compulsion" - puzzled because it violated the pleasure principle - is actually a self-protective device, protective against being helpless against the overwhelming anxiety of unexpected trauma. Traumas are therefore restaged as a defense, with the persecutory self as the stage director.¹⁰⁹ Restaging as a defense against dissociated trauma is the crucial flaw in the evolution of the human mind, understandable from the viewpoint of the individual as a way of maintaining sanity, but tragic in its effects upon society, since it means that early traumas will be magnified onto the historical stage into war, domination and self-destructive social behavior. And because we also restage by inflicting our childhood terrors upon our children, generation after generation, our addiction to the slaughterbench of history has been relentless.

That's what I said

No, really! I did say that!

What the heck is this?

Kissing Hank's @ss. Right at the moment, I'm somewhere where I can't view it, but it sounds interesting.

Happy Birthday to two old friends and a cousin

October tenth was always rather a festive occasion in my gradeschool class. I remember it fondly.

Check out what those crazy muslims are capable of.

I got it here. Just wanderin' around, lookin' at s**t.

Well, I suppose I could spill the beans

on the big "secret mission." I had jury duty for two weeks. Got the boot from both the juries I was in selection for. Actually, the one case settled before they finished jury selection. I didn't hear how. I think the defendant just collapsed under the torture of watching us answer inane questions for hours on end.

The good thing about that deal was, the judge told us to come in at 9:15 the next day, and when we did, we sat around waiting for fifteen minutes until the clerk came out and told us they were negotiating something and we should come back in an hour. So, we wandered around downtown Mpls for a while, came back and they told us to come back again at 2:00. So, I walked from the courthouse to the Barnes & Noble, then I walked down to Loring Park reading the book I mentioned (about a mile and a half from the courthouse).

Pretty nice flower gardens there. In fact, if you walk down Nicollet Mall there are an awful lot of beautiful flower gardens. Something worth doing when they're in bloom and the fountains are all running. I recommend it.

North of the courthouse, there's a sculpture garden with all these funny, cartoony guys doing odd things. That's due north, so a block up and a block over, kitty-corner from the cop-shop. The cop-shop is rather a marvelous old gothic structure that's worth examining inside and out all by itself. I walked up the stairs on either side of the atrium examining the stained-glass windows and all the marble work. The statue out front, that looks for all the world like Vladimir Lenin, is actually supposed to be Hubert Humphrey.

The reason I didn't want to say anything about all that was that I was nervous about ending up on a jury for some mob guy or gangster. I wouldn't want that to be known. Other than the whole public record thing, but that wouldn't be opened until after the trial. Then I'd be screwed.

So, other than that, the kids are back to school, the wife's got a part time teaching job, and big changes are afoot at Super Mega Corp. Life's just lovely.

On my way downtown to my secret mission Wednesday

...Come to think of it, it had to be Tuesday...I'll tell you all about it when the "danger" is past.

Anyway, as I was accelerating from the stop sign on Humboldt Avenue, I caught this flash out my driver's side window, then, a split-second later a bald eagle spreads his wings right in front of my windshield, drops down to the street... I thought he was going to land right there in front of me... I yelled, "Holy crap!" and started to jam on the brakes, but then he snatched something off the road and took off again. I kept up with him as he climbed steadily until he cleared the trees, close enough that I could see that the thing he'd snatched was a squirrel - which I hadn't noticed until he grabbed it, and would have negligently squashed flat - I watched those beautiful, powerful wings pinion him up until he veered off over the housetops back toward the Mississippi.

I looked in my mirror at the couple of cars backed up behind and asked, uselessly, "Did you see that?!" They weren't honking at me, so they must have been as enthralled as I was. I realized how slow I was going then and carried on with my mission.

If he'd landed there for even a second, I'd have schmucked him. I don't know what I'd have done then. Called the DNR, I guess. Luckily, he was only there on business.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to shop

at the Barnes and Noble in downtown Minneapolis. Yes, I took a stroll down by the Mary Tyler Moore statue on Nicollet Mall. Yeah, it's a nice statue.

Anyway, I wasn't looking for it, but they had a display of atheist literature - I noticed a couple of Dawkin's books...Sam Harris, that sort of thing... But there was one book there that I've wanted since I first saw it in the Second Renaissance catalog back in the late '90s: George H. Smith's Atheism: The Case Against God. [Oh, Heck! Here's the whole first chapter!]

So let's get right to the point (last four paragraphs of section VII):

Religion has had the disastrous effect of placing vitally important concepts, such as morality, happiness and love, in a supernatural realm inaccessible to man's mind and knowledge. Morality and religion have become so intertwined that many people cannot conceive of ethics divorced from god, even in principle -- which leads to the assumption that the atheist is out to destroy values.

Atheism, however, is not the destruction of morality; it is the destruction of supernatural morality. Likewise, atheism is not the destruction of happiness and love; it is the destruction of the idea that happiness and love can be achieved only in another world. Atheism brings these ideas down to earth, within the reach of man's mind. What he does with them after this point is a matter of choice. If he discards them in favor of pessimism and nihilism, the responsibility lies with him, not with atheism.

By severing any possible appeal to the supernatural -- which, in terms of human knowledge, means the unknowable -- atheism demands that issues be dealt with through reason and human understanding; they cannot be sloughed-off onto a mysterious god.

If atheism is correct, man is alone. There is no god to think for him, to watch out for him, to guarantee his happiness. These are the sole responsibility of man. If man wants knowledge, he must think for himself. If man wants success, he must work. If man wants happiness, he must strive to achieve it. Some men consider a godless world to be a terrifying prospect; others experience it as a refreshing, exhilarating challenge. How a person will react to atheism depends only on himself -- and the extent to which he is willing to assume responsibility for his own choices and actions.