Is it really so bad to have your tail yanked or to be given a bath? No. One growls and bites because it's scary; and what does this have to do with our relationship anyway? Well, if it's kin inflicting it, then it can't be lethal, and those treats are my favorite. We've got a deal.
Struck me that trance and mystic mental states in general are a kind of high one learns to enjoy from an ordinarily noxious cognitive dissonance--such as between "the everything" and "the one." That can't be healthy. On the other hand, it does seem like what William James had in mind when he called prayer the "sovereign cure for worry" (allegedly, I can't find the reference). Through prayer we can envision circumventing the ineluctable, see how good may come of bad and construe what things mean as what they don't.
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By the way, let me second my occasional phronesisaical colleague helmut's grave recommendation of this article on the political influence of a publicly little known group of extreme-conservative, mystically-minded Christians.
Now retired, the general who investigated Abu Ghraib quoted in McClatchy:
"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."
We didn’t even have a camera or a tape recorder or a written record of that event. I mean, who noticed? Nobody did. Nineteen sixty-nine was quite a year. Man on the moon. Woodstock. Mets won the World Series. Charles Manson starts killing these people here in Los Angeles. And the Internet was born. Well, the first four everybody knew about. Nobody knew about the Internet.
Leonard Kleinrock in How the Web Was Won, Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb's story in Vanity Fair.
Makes no sense otherwise for Maliki to have gambled so foolishly against Sadr's militia. Maliki had nothing to lose, being without even a faded reputation of effective control over Iraq to redeem, and with nobody to replace him (notice nobody is replacing him, now that he's failed). The current U.S. administration had a chance to pull out of the air the appearance of having accomplished something with the surge and the propping of the Maliki government--all the more if a successful anti-Sadr campaign appeared to have been Maliki's independent doing. Seemingly every increment of ostensible progress the nominal government of Iraq has so far accomplished (besides clandestine killings) has been with the hands of the White House forcing forward their behinds. Suddenly they propose to make Sadr's militia stand down? Quite a change of character. Notice how when Maliki was forced to push back the deadline for his ultimatum, he pushed it no farther than the date Patreus is due to testify to Congress on the state of U.S. troops and strategy in the former Iraq? That's a date Bush & Co. would choose. Notice that Malaki was quick to push back his deadline and quick to withdraw his ultimatum? Doesn't seem like his heart was in it, does it? And could he have really been such a booby about his army's chances against Sadr's militia? The only administration with a record of intelligence that bad there is Bush's.
