North Western Winds

Die Grosse Stille "When I left the monastery, I was thinking about what exactly had I lived through and it was realizing that I had had the privilege of living with a community of people who live practically without any fears." ... "We tend to say that our society is driven by consumerism or greed but it's not true. Greed, consumerism, wanting to have a new Porsche, for example, is a disguise of pure fear. It's a near panicking society and that was difficult to accept." Documentary filmaker Phillip Groening to the BBC Groening made his comments to the Beeb in light of his documentary, Die Grosse Stille . In English it means the big silence and its' subject is life in a Carthusian monastery called Grande Chartreuse. The monks live a regimented life of a kind that I can't really contemplate ever living personally. But I am glad to know that such places exist. I would be pleased to visit and stay awhile; I would understand my own life better, I th...

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Over at Rough Type , Nicholas Carr is writing (again) about the Wikkipedia and it's shortcomings. I've been a fan of the Wikkipedia for a while, and have linked to it often in my posts when I want offer a helpful background brief to a reader. It's something I know anyone can access. That said, I've never been of the opinion that it's as good or better than a paid encyclopedia with professional, paid editors - and without pranksters and worse. Carr writes: The problem with those who would like to use "open source" as a metaphor, stretching it to cover the production of encyclopedias, media, and other sorts of information, is that they tend to focus solely on the "community" aspect of the open source model. They ignore the fact that above the community is a carefully structured hierarchy, a group of talented individuals who play a critical oversight role in filtering the contributions of the community and ensuring the quality of the resulting co...

No promises, but here are some links that I thought were good enough to post. I'll even bring them full circle and comment on the cartoon controversy. One) Adam Kirsch writes in the NY Sun about Daniel Dennett's latest book , Breaking the Spell : Mr. Dennett wrote the book in the first place. He candidly describes him self as a "godless philosopher" and has invented an obviously value laden term, "bright," to describe people like himself who are proudly emancipated from religion. [how nice! -ed] He is careful not to pronounce outright on the existence of God or the truth of any given religion - preferring to argue that what religion needs is not affirmation or denial, but study - but there is no doubt that Mr. Dennett believes the world would be better off if religion disappeared tomorrow. If his actual assertions leave any uncertainty about this, his metaphors and images do not: On the very first page, for instance, he compares human religions to Dicroceli...

This is a post that I really didn't want to write, but I'm now trying to look at it a bit longer term and remain positive about it. I'm putting NWW on hiatus, probably until the end of Lent (that would be Easter). It's been very apparent to me, and probably to any long term readers that I have, that my interests have been elsewhere of late. I had hoped to make it until my second blogging anniversary in August but it's only early February now and I can see that that isn't going to happen. I'm not pulling the plug on the site but taking a much longer break than I have allowed myself to take thus far. It's possible I'll wind it down then but that is not my intent. Maybe by then I'll have some new books under my belt to share, and the editor's block that has been my nemesis for a while now will be in retreat. I hope so, anyway.

This trophy is for you, zebras: Worst super bowl refereeing I can recall. Let's review. Bogus "pushing off" call robs Seattle of touchdown number one. Pittsburgh touchdown number one does not clearly get into the endzone. In the second half a "holding" call takes Seattle from 1st and goal on the one to first and 20 on the 30. This call not only robs Seattle of a very likely TD, it leads up to a forced throw that is intercepted and ultimately it gives Pittsburgh a TD. I should have shut the TV off at this point as any hope of enjoying this contest was gone. On the interception I just mentioned the refs also had the gall to call Hasselbeck for a "low block" when in fact he made the tackle. There's no such thing as a "low tackle." That's a fourteen point swing at a minimum, and it could easily be a twenty-one point difference since scoring a TD from the one is a very high percentage play. There's an awful lot of garbage that ...

One Cosmos remains one of the more interesting blogs I've found of late. Today "Gagdad Bob" is writing about Taoism . I read the Tao Te Ching more than a few years ago, during university and also after when I was dating a girl who was rather hard left. This was long before I knew anything much about Christianity or even considered it worth looking at. You can imagine how pleased (and surprised!) she was when I (oh so delicately!) tried to tell her that it was not compatible with her political beliefs. You might stop and wonder how can anything be compatible with an every changing amalgam of anarchism and communism? You might give yourself an aneurism trying to reconcile just those two things, never mind adding a third element, but that would be to get ahead of things here. Do the aneurism on your own time, please. Writes Bob: wu wei is one of the central concepts of Taoism. Although literally translated as "non-doing" or "non action," it is probabl...