mcdspot

“A single [German] Tiger tank can take out 4 [U.S.] Shermans, but there always seemed to be a fifth.”

– unknown German tank ace

From this site about a guy’s amazing private tank collection.

I liked this editorial comment from Liam Fox so much that I have quoted it here in full:

GOD IS NO EXCUSE

We are all born, and we have no choice in that. We have no choice as to the situation we are born into, good or bad. We have no responsibility for negative hardships that exist at the time of our birth anymore than we can take credit for any inherent advantages. We come into this world blind, ignorant and incompetent and we learn about our environment, the limitations and the potentialities as we develop. Each one of us share this experience. In fact, this is one of the few universal things that we all share equally. We are born, we share the vulnerabilities as humans to illness, pain, hunger, violence and suffering, and then we die. These are facts. This is the situation that all of us share. These are the things we have in common that none of us can escape. These are the things that none of us can exercise any substantive control over. We are born, we are vulnerable and then we die.

At any given instant, a snap-shot may be taken of our planet, and regardless of when that snap-shot is taken, the result would be the same. We would see a population of people who all share these same basic conditions of existence struggling to survive. All having arrived on this planet within the past several decades and all equally irresponsible for the condition they found it in. All of us are struggling to survive, but many are working diligently to capitalize on the discovered and created inequalities that sentence the vast majority of our fellow humans to incredible poverty, leaving a minority to live in comfort, and a fraction of a percent to wallow in absolutely perverse wealth.

Belief in divine intervention, or supernatural orchestration, only reinforces these inherited, institutionalized inequalities. Divine reasons are attributed to situations that provide benefit to those who have discovered the divine reasons. To give credit to a god for what has been attained, achieved or exploited removes responsibility from the beneficiary for becoming a ‘have’ at the expense of the ‘have-not’s’. People believe that they are blessed because a god has blessed them. This sounds selfless, to not take credit for personal achievement or acquisition. It sounds downright humble and pious. However, what it really does is free a person from the guilt of exploitation at another’s expense. If all blessings come from a creator or master conductor, it stands to reason that those not blessed, are so by the will and purpose of the same divine being, or supernatural power.

To believe that there is a divine power in charge is to believe that the impoverished, the suffering, the hungry etc… are such by divine decree, if not allowance. Somehow, and in some way, if one is deserving and worthy of blessing, the un-blessed must have deserved their lot as well. We saw and heard examples of this in the callous, dispassionate and selfish pronouncements from religious leaders following the disastrous earthquake in Haiti. Even if you discount them for their ignorance and believe that blessings rain equally on the just as they do the unjust, it’s still the supreme being in ultimate control of the ‘raining’ and the allowing of a huge majority of humans to be rained on by a merciless shit-storm of poverty, hunger and oppression.

To claim an intelligent design or divine orchestration of this world, is to escape personal responsibility by making the suffering of our fellow humans the province of an invisible supreme being. It’s very convenient. We declare it ‘horribly unfortunate’ for these destitute and suffering people and we offer them our prayers in lieu of equality. We send money, but never enough and always too late, and we never address the fundamental systemic issues that cause and perpetuate the suffering and inequality. We decide that the status quo is unchangeable and accept it as ‘just the way things are’. We tell ourselves there is nothing we can do about it. We work hard to convince ourselves that it is not only easier, but much wiser, to leave it in the hands of an unseen, unproven and unknowable god.

Believers in divine provenance seem conveniently able to ignore the exploitation, cruelty and oppression necessary to create the favored position they found themselves in by accident of birth. Others, unfettered by compunctions about exploitation and capitalization, increase their lot at the expense of others, and once again, reason that since they were able to, it must have been allowed by a supreme being and therefore is sanctioned by that supreme being. It is a wonderful mind-set that provides freedom from responsibility and gives divine permission to personal, gender, ideological, theological, ethnic and national exceptionalism and the subsequent exploitation and capitalization required to maintain that favored position of consumption and excess. Further, it is reasoned, that to share equally with our fellow humans in need, is to disrespect the gift of favored status and divine supremacy bestowed by said supreme being. It is by grand design that the favored children wallow in luxury while millions die, every day, lacking the basic necessities. This is considered glorifying to many gods, as long as public displays are made, giving the god credit for the excess.

Religions that believe in omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent gods or supreme beings, provide the supreme excuse to exploit, and accept as divine intervention, the fruits of past and current greed and lust. Religion is a barrier to human cooperation and shared prosperity. As humans, we are all in this together. We are equal. We share the fundamental experiences of birth, human frailty and death. We need to recognize this shared responsibility for all of our needs and challenges as well as our potential and achievable successes. The only way to ensure the safe, secure and mutually prosperous sustainable development for any of us, is to work towards it for all human beings. No more excuses, tricks or confidence schemes. We are the only answer.

“If you think it’s a socialist plot, then please drop out of the federal employees health program.”

– Sen.Richard Durbin (D-IL), to Republican lawmakers at the February 25, 2010 health care reform summit.

Dancing mania. In July 1518, numerous people in Strasbourg, France fell subject to an epidemic of ceaseless dancing, dying over the course of a month from heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion.

As further illustration of the point made in the post below, I now give you a link to the Malleus Maleficarum, a manual for hunting witches published by James Sprenger and Henry Kramer at the behest of the Catholic Church in 1486. The document specifies rules of evidence and procedures by which suspected witches should be detected, tortured and put to death. The manual provided the the justification for witch trials in Europe and Colonial America for over three hundred years.

Oh, and which continue to this day.

Cover Lay Down is dedicated to posting folk covers of various popular and traditional songs. I particularly like these Talking Heads covers.

Stanley Fish ponders an interesting question: Can there be truly secular reasons for making decisions? His question stems from author Steven Smith’s new book, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, in which Smith suggests that there are no secular rationales for anything that aren’t based on some religious or spiritual valuation system.

I agree, to an extent. Reason, empirical data, and logic, the hallmarks of secular thinking, seem to be tools of arriving at valuation; what informs the valuation itself is separate. In other words, I may use reason to deduce that killing my neighbor’s cat for peeing on my car seat will cause me X amount of jail time, Y amount in fines, and cause me Z amount of embarrassment and possibility of revenge. But what actually keeps me from doing the act is something less tangible, a moral valuation that killing someone’s pet without clear justification is wrong and should be avoided. To that end my motives have been directed by moral thinking ostensibly resulting from religious or spiritual feeling.

But doesn’t this assume that religion or spirituality is where morality comes from? I totally disagree. Moral behavior may have been co-opted by religion long ago and become a central part of religion’s message and purpose, but that doesn’t mean that but for religion we wouldn’t have morality.

Morality is a kind of logic, usually resulting from a cause/benefit analysis not unlike the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Or, as Emmanuel Kant put it, act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. This thinking produces the question, hopefully posed before I kill the neighbor’s cat, of “do you want to live in a world where everyone kills their neighbor’s cat when it causes a minor problem?” Once I ask myself this question, the answer is obviously no, and at that moment I am willing to forgo my personal anger for the benefit of knowing that I’m helping create a peaceful world, or at least a peaceful neighborhood. And since a peaceful world is much easier to thrive in than a chaotic one, the decision is clear.

Therefore, it seems false to say that no decision is truly “secular” because decisions are informed by a potentially complex layer of valuation and logic wholly separate from the simplistic “rules” stated by religious moral codes. No decision is either truly secular or truly religious.

And then there is the real question–so what if there is no thing as truly secular reasoning? Is Smith trying to say that we should go ahead and break down the wall between church and state since the two are linked on some fundamental metaphysical level? I hope not, because there are more than enough idiots out there saying that nonsense.

Rather, I would hope that Smith’s point is that underneath every secular or religious rationale is a valuation system which should be the true basis for judging whether that rationale is valid and should be followed.

Good list of 100 books that should be in any man’s library. And have been read.

Local officials inspect a dry pond in Mile County, Honghe Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture, southwest China’s Yunnan province, on Thursday Feb. 25, 2010. The worst drought in 60 years continue in Yunnan province, Xinhua said. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Chen Haining)

Via kokogiak.com   

Martin Rietze has a knack for finding the sublime places.

Jam band fan or Taliban? You decide.

Beautiful photos of some of the most alien landscapes on earth.

I like these belts made from old bicycle tires.

HOW TO BE A POET
(to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill-more of each
than you have-inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

– Wendell Berry

thanks Brenda!

Moth Trails

Originally uploaded by tim.addison

who knew they could be so beautiful?

See the whole set here.

The Spider Camera Holster looks pretty cool. There’s just not enough room in this town for two of them. Review here.

Fascinating sets of historical photos from the New York Public Library.

The U.S. Coast Guard on Monday shut down Loran-C, a navigation and timing system that has guided mariners and aviators since World War II. Now that GPS has taken over, this old solid-state technology is going the way of the dodo.

HDNet has put together an eight-part series presenting the journey of cancer survivor and former Dallas Maverick Ray Johnston and his band as they travel across the country trying to make it in the music business. Ray’s my cousin, so help me send the vibes out. Be sure and check out his website here.