The continuing Israeli attacks on Lebanon were, it’s said, sparked by the capture by Hezbollah of two Israeli soldiers.  But where were those soldiers captured?  In Israel, or as early reports seem to have indicated, in Lebanon?

I don’t know about all this.  But the track recrord with regard to the accurate reporting of incidents that spark wars hasn’t, historically, beeen especially good.  Watching Dan Gillerman on Meet the Press this moring, I couldn’t help but wish Tim Russert had asked for some clarification about the incident that’s provided the pretext for this whole mess.

Seems it was necessary, since it had become a haven for terrorists.

If you want to be impelled by pure coolness to spend all of your money, just go to Ebay and search for the word “Soviet.”  I’m almost entirely out of money for the month, but that didn’t stop me from just now buying this mysterious anti-iconoclasm poster from the mid 90’s.  I can’t wait to see it in the pulpy flesh.

According to a third class of theologians, a deliberate act which is not referred to a positively good end must be reputed as morally evil. Hence that which we have described as good in the doctrine of St. Thomas, and as indifferent to the mind of Scotus, must according to these theologians, be deemed nothing else than bad. Wrongly styled Thomists, the advocates of this opinion are one with the Angelic Doctor only in declaring that there are no indifferent deliberate acts. They differ from him radically in the unwarrantable rigour, and their teaching is condemned by the sense and practice of even the most delicately conscientious persons.

Gotta love the Catholic Encyclopedia.

Female praying mantids are notorious for sexual cannibalism – that is, for eating their male partner during mating. However, the possibility that males may also have something to gain from this violent act has never been resolved experimentally. In a paper in the August issue of The American Naturalist, Jonathan Lelito and William Brown (SUNY-Fredonia), study male risk-taking behavior in a praying mantis by altering the risk of cannibalism and observing changes in male behavior. They find that the males are able to assess the risk of cannibalism and become more cautious in the presence of particularly hungry females.

“We know that hungry females are more likely to cannibalize and a head-on orientation makes it easier for her to attack the male with her predatory front legs,” says Brown.

Lelito and Brown thus varied female hunger and physical orientation in order to assess how male mantids respond to variation in the risk of cannibalism. They found that males responded to greater risk by slowing their approach, increasing courtship behavior, and mounting from a greater – and possibly safer – distance.

“This shows that male mantids actively assess variation in risk and change their behavior to reduce the chance of being cannibalized,” explains Brown. “Males are clearly not complicit, and the act of sexual cannibalism in praying mantids is an example of extreme conflict between the sexes.”

link

“an interesting fashion question:why are so many men carrying purses?  Tomorrow on Nightline: the question of the Man bag.”

I’m not kidding.  Thank goodness there’s nothing more pressing than this for Nightline to discuss.

Since the Bush administration is planning to systematically degrade the reputation of elite liberal arts colleges, and since it’s set to ban historical interpretation outright—at the high school level, for now—I thought I’d pause for a minute on the subject of historical interpretation this fine afternoon.

I’ve been rereading John Locke.  Now, certain crazies to whom I am relucant to link directly have been lately mucking about with the history of the constitution, and so forth.  One University-employed religious revisionist writes this, for example:

Our nation’s forefathers declared that the government of the United States of America was instituted to secure certain unalienable rights bestowed on us by our Creator.  At the present juncture, these rights are under widespread and unrelenting attack as a consequence of the denial of God throughout society and the abandonment of public life by most Christians.  To restore the fullest expression of these rights in society and in our public institutions is therefore a critical duty for all Christian citizens of our nation.

Our effectiveness in this restoration rests first and foremost on the recognition of the sovereignty of God the Creator.  The concept of inalienable rights may be traced through Samual Adams, John Locke, and others, to an origin in Holy Scripture.  God has created us and we are His.

Would this count as “an interpretation”?  The author of this piece has taken a break from showing how the evolutionary record demonstrates various biblical truths, to here explaining how John Locke was an apologist for theocratic theories of government. 

Of course this position isn’t likely to be very persusaive to anyone who’s read much Locke.  In his “Letter Concernting Toleration,” Locke comes as close as anywhere else to expressing his concept of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in same words used by the framers of the US Constitution.  Note the context and significance of these words as they appear in Locke’s Letter:

I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other. If this be not done, there can be no end put to the controversies that will be always arising between those that have, or at least pretend to have, on the one side, a concernment for the interest of men’s souls, and, on the other side, a care of the commonwealth.

The commonwealth seems to me to be a society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing their own civil interests.

Civil interests I call life, liberty, health, and indolency of body; and the possession of outward things, such as money, lands, houses, furniture, and the like.

It is the duty of the civil magistrate, by the impartial execution of equal laws, to secure unto all the people in general and to every one of his subjects in particular the just possession of these things belonging to this life. If anyone presume to violate the laws of public justice and equity, established for the preservation of those things, his presumption is to be checked by the fear of punishment, consisting of the deprivation or diminution of those civil interests, or goods, which otherwise he might and ought to enjoy. But seeing no man does willingly suffer himself to be punished by the deprivation of any part of his goods, and much less of his liberty or life, therefore, is the magistrate armed with the force and strength of all his subjects, in order to the punishment of those that violate any other man’s rights.

Now that the whole jurisdiction of the magistrate reaches only to these civil concernments, and that all civil power, right and dominion, is bounded and confined to the only care of promoting these things; and that it neither can nor ought in any manner to be extended to the salvation of souls, these following considerations seem unto me abundantly to demonstrate.

So when fundamentalists seize upon the phrase “endowed by his creator” or similar phrases to suggest that neither the declaration nor the constitution establishes a separation of church and state, they ignore the historical significance of the rights listed in the declaration—which is precisely to distinguish between matters that concern civil government and those that concern matters of religion.

Jon Stewart at the top of his form.

The self-reproducing robot(s).  Sorta creepy, but at least it’s not Proteus.

More Robots.

The present temperature in Minong WI, right now, according to the bank sign across the street from Captain Dan’s.

Just sayin.

Ok, there are woods in Northern Wisconsin, or “the Northlands” as it sometimes seems to be called.  When people veture up to Northern Wisconsin, it is often with an intent to spend time in the woods. 

And, sure enough, there are woods to be found around here, yes.  Between Minong and Hayward, for example.  Beautiful.

But how can we begin to explain the odd and annoyingly persistant fad of building everything in Northern Wisconsin out of gigantic logs?  Buildings here are covered in half logs, bed frames are made of big chunks of unfinished wood—every building is supposed to remind you of your northwoods adventure by passing itself off as some rustic log cabin. 

Now I like wood well enough, it’s true.  I mean, wood’s beautiful.  But nailing giant chunks of unfinished lumber all over the exterior and interior of every building, and using huge logs to comprise every last bit of furniture and trim is, I have to say, sort of grotesque—especially when the acutal Northwoods are getting chopped down to make your rustic-themed buildings.

All around minong, tree farms are replacing woods.  And whole stretches of woods around here have been, I think, harvested by bulldozer, the trees thrown into trucks and carted off for pulp.    There are several such sections of lunar landscape near our place on the lake.

I’m not too much of an environmental activist, and I don’t really have much against wood construction, or even an occasional log-cabiny type thing.  But when a whole region decides to rebuild itself using extravagant quantites of wood, there is something a little dumb going on.  I mean, there was never a time in Wisconsin when such log buildings were really common.  As soon as somebody could rig up a saw blade, the white settler types started cutting and building normal wood frame houses. 

So, please Wisconsin in the near future get tired of the faux nostalgia and the SUV-type aesthetics of overconsumption and put up some building that don’t eat up the forest to remind us that we’re in what’s left of it.

Thank you and have a nice day.

It’s been quiet here at TDQ lately, I admit, and is likely to remain so for at least a while.  I’m up at the lake now, with three boxes of books, a laptop computer and a $30 printer.

In short, its a nearly ideal place to go and accomplish some writing, as I’m trying to do. I’m trying to finish a chapter by the end of the summer, and I’ve decided to hit it hard as I begin writing it.  My initial idea was to try and get half a chapter written in a single week by the lake.  We’ll see.  Except for a visit from some of my Minnesota cousins, and occasional random encounters here in Captain Dan’s Pirate Bar and Mini Golf Liquid Adventure Center, my human contact this week will be minimal, freeing me to concentrate on the seventeenth century, the essays of George Orwell, and the identification of trees and flowering plants of Northern Wisconsin.

I’ll probably be back at Captain Dan’s soon.  If so, you can expect to hear more from me this week.  If not, I pray you can get by without me. 

Buck up, fer crissakes!

Do your best, y’all, to have a happy Fourth of July. 

Here’s to fixing a county where things seem to have become more than a little out of wack.

Happy 4th!