Slight Speculation...

A small poke at evolution.

I am informed that a large portion of Punctuated Equilibrium is filling niches. Evolutionary "niches" is something I am unsure as to the definition of, and in this I wonder if it is "something that is evolutionary necessary" or "possible by evolution" or even "just not there yet," albeit the latter two are the same if not for the final being funny.

Using all those neo-darwinist terms we all love so much, assuming "man" fills a niche, the purpose of filling a niche is parallel or equal with the purpose/nature of nature (rofl), would it not man defy his evolutionary "niche" by destroying nature with all our harmful greenhouse gases?

This argument is horribly incomplete, but I did want to jot down the gist in a public section before I forget. My number of post drafts doth increase by the week.

Yet it would be furthered to include "rationality" in this argument, in that our rationality furthers our destruction and by extension furthering our destruction of nature, which itself defies the nature of our evolutionary "niche," which defies our parallelism with nature.

However, Neo-Darwinists would have us believe we lack any form of "rationality" or synonymously "free will" (not as the Catholic definition being meant by "synonymous), so that doesn't work so well, what with me trying to follow their euphemisms.

Heh, not quite as preposterous on paper as it was in throught, but still funny to look at.

~Samuel

Scott Adams is a prophet -- with an addition

The proof: a 2000 Dilbert strip predicting in shocking detail the events of our present day.


Of course, everyone who's been reading Dilbert noticed his prophetic tendencies years ago.

Update: just two years later, yet more insight into the future?

Or is it just that the media is six+ years behind him in actually showing the public this nonsense? (Knowing the media...)

Preparing for War or the Dark Ages

I don't know what's going to happen to our country. In fact, I'm pretty sure almost nobody knows. But if you think loony extremists who are always freaking out anyway are the only people too seriously concerned, you'd better look again. Most of us may not be as worried about preparing to protect ourselves and/or hunt our own food as we are simply about keeping our jobs. Nonetheless, there is a notable increase of late in Americans stocking up on ammo and guns.

Myself, I'm young and I don't care to go through the legal hassles... if things collapse, I'll just make a bow and arrow set out of plastic coat hangers, rubber bands and stakes (a relative of mine did this for fun a long time ago, it works great) and nunchaku out of the small logs in my backyard and anything I can find to serve as rope (I've never been trained in them, but I've toyed with the dynamics of string with and without weighty things on the end long enough that I bet I could teach myself... with enough practice... to be effective enough against common thugs, any animal I need to hit, and/or zombies, even if helpless against any real martial artist...). And I don't even have to go through legal hassles about non-gun weapons because I don't even have to make them ahead of a collapse because I've got what I need here. Meanwhile, going to college, I'm prepared if things don't collapse. Come to think of it, I'm covered.

So, folks, be aware, and put a little thinking into what you can do to be covered either way too, and then don't worry -- but do keep yourselves aware.

On the Election of a Dark-Skinned Man

If you ask me, the striking thing is not that a black man was finally elected, but rather that there was ever a time when people were stupid enough to think such would be bad. Evil is the absence of due good. It is such stupidities as prejudice that are out of the ordinary in the proper sense of ordinary (not common, but rather rightly ordered), not things being as they ought to be. So I can see celebrating that the ordinary finally is becoming what it should be and certain evils are being remedied, but I think we've thrown our attention a bit too much toward what we ought to consider just plain old the way things should be and need to realize that the astonishing thing is the wrong way that we had to fix.

Of course, being in disagreement with our new president on some matters and especially on the matter of something I believe is an even graver evil than prejudice, and furthermore not being very agreeable to American politics and government in their current form at all, I'm not seeing much in the way of an overall gain today. I could say more on some other oddities related to such. However, I'd rather you just focused on the first point I raised: the extraordinary thing isn't what happened today, it's what happened in past days that today is supposedly remedying.

Some random quotations...

I went looking in the ol' dictionary of quotations in the back of the dictionary that used to belong to my mom's mom, wanting to add one I recalled from it to my list of quotations on the Aeviternity sidebar. It took me a ridiculous amount of time to find it because none of the key words were cross-referenced in the back of the d of q like they were supposed to be. As a result, I wound up stumbling across countless other quotes that I just had to either add to the sidebar there or post here. In both cases, they're not in much particular order.

In the end, I gave up looking, figuring that having read through well over half the d of q in random shots and not found it I would be as likely to find it elsewhere (actually, I started wondering whether I hadn't read it elsewhere) and that I was getting sick of deciding which quotes to copy (there are so many good ones) and which here and which to my sidebar to boot.

Anyway, here's some to mentally chew on, and I'll resist commenting on them myself as then I would really go on forever.

"Science is not a sacred cow. Science is a horse. Don't worship it. Feed it."
~Aubrey Eben

"The futility of riches is stated very plainly in two places: the Bible and the income-tax form."
~The Gilcrafter

"Russia has abolished God, but so far God has been more tolerant."
~John Cameron Swayze

"Most of us spend the first six days of each week sowing wild oats; then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure."
~Fred Allen

"Pity the man who believes in communism--he believes in something that doesn't believe in him."
~Fred McAlister

"The Devil is easy to identify. He appears when you're tired and makes a very reasonable request which you know you shouldn't grant."
~Fiorello H. La Guardia

"A fanatic is a man who does what he thinks the Lord would do if only He knew the facts of the case."
~Finley Peter Dunne

"One of the first things a man notices in a backward country is that the children are still obeying their parents."
~Claude Callan

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
~Oscar Wilde

"In the little world in which children have their existence, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice."
~Charles Dickens

"We forget what gives money its value--that someone exchanged work for it."
~Quoted by Neal O'Hara

"It seems that everyone is smoking the pipe of peace, but nobody is inhaling."
~Cherryvale (Kans.) Republican

"A sure sign of bureaucracy is when the first person who answers the phone can't help you."
~Dr. Kenneth J. Fabian

"There's something alive about a kitchen, the way it smells and sounds and feels. Maybe sick people would all live longer if they sat in kitchens."
~Christopher Morley

"If a nation values anything more than its freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money [editor's note: or security, someone else pointed out] that it values more, it will lose that, too."
~Somerset Maugham

"The U.N. was set up not to get us to Heaven, but only to save us from Hell."
~Winston Churchill

"When you make your mark in the world, watch out for guys with erasers."
~The Wall Street Journal

"It is a great mistake for men to give up paying compliments, for when they give up saying what is charming, they give up thinking what is charming."
~Oscar Wilde

"Remember when it took only heaven to protect the working girl? Today it takes a union, wage-hour law, unemployment insurance, Social Security, and a pension plan."
~Bert Bacharach

"The true value of horse sense is shown by the fact that the horse was afraid of the auto during that period when the pedestrian laughed at it."
~Atlanta Times

"Laws should be like clothes. They should be made to fit the people they are meant to serve."
~Clarence Darrow

"Few children fear water unless soap is added."
~William Franklin Gaines

"The error of youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitue for experience, while the error of age is to believe that experience is a substitute for intelligence."
~Lyman Bryson

"Classical music is the kind that we keep hoping will turn into a tune."
~Kin Hubbard

"Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a 'necessary evil,' it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil."
~Sydney J. Harris

"All men are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened. The courageous man is the man who forces himself, in spite of his fear, to carry on."
~General George S. Patton, Jr.

"The ultimate effect of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools."
~Herbert Spencer

"A boy gets to be a man when a man is needed."
~John Steinbeck

Conference:
"A meeting of the bored."
~Russell Newbold

"It is as absurd to pretend that one cannot love the same woman always as to pretend that a good artist needs several violins to play his music."
~Balzac

"When the Tatar curses one, instead of exclaiming, 'Go to-----!' as we do, he says: 'May you stay in one place forever!'"
~Trips

"No mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born in the twentieth century. Our ancestors knew their way from birth through eternity; we are puzzled about the day after tomorrow."
~Walter Lippmann

"I wonder where mothers learn all the things they tell their daughters not to do."
~Eddie Cantor

"The best cure for worry, depression, melancholy, brooding, is to go deliberately forth and try to lift with one's sympathy the gloom of somebody else."
~Arnold Bennett

"I think a man and a woman should choose each other for life, for the simple reason that a long life with all its accidents is barely enough for a man and a woman to understand each other; and to understand is to love. The man who understands one woman is qualified to understand pretty well everything."
~J. B. Yeats

"The world started going to smash about the time it abandoned the hand-cranked ice-cream freezer, the finest device ever invented for teaching youth that work has its rewards."
~Cleveland News

Being Alive

As Scott said, I've been adjusting to life at a secular university, and as Ambrose said, sorry for not letting you know sooner.

Life here is certainly not boring, nor is it comfortable. An example of this is that at the moment, I'm learning to trust God with the fifth in a series of spiritual attacks and writing a paper on elbowed squid.

Some days it's just hard to keep going- everything can frighten me if I let it, and not letting it takes exorbitant amounts of energy.

I have a plethora of ponderings on the election, amorality, ego and evolution, the prevalence of profanity, intellectualism, nutritional deficiencies, the importance of classical music, nonconformity, and why not joining a crowd of streakers setting off fireworks makes a person racist. I'll try to write them down as I reconjure them.

For right now, here's a poem my guardian angel led me to a few weeks ago when I was feeling really depressed. I've since committed it to memory and think it to myself whenever I start losing my grip on reality. It also fits to any 8787 hymn tune, if you want a mental accompaniment while reciting it.

A PSALM OF LIFE
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!-
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined path and way,
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than today.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,- act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.


~Mari

I'd say we're in trouble

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
-- Alexis de Tocqueville

(Whoever posted it and thus allowed me to find the quote must forgive me for forgetting who they were. I dug it up recently and decided to post it, but found I had never noted where I found it.)

Random science...

So I randomly decided to record alcohol purchase versus gender today at work. I wanted to ascertain whether males or females were more likely to purchase alcohol. Out of the 114 customers who came through my lane tonight, 77 were female and 37 were male. Here are the results:

Percentage of customers who purchased alcohol: 31.58%
Percentage of women who purchased alcohol: 29.87%
Percentage of men who purchased alcohol: 35.14%

Draw what conclusions you will.

A few notes about methodology:

• Anyone who was obviously too young to purchase alcohol was not included in the study.
  
• This study is not supported by any business, company, group, or foundation. It is purely the work of a single amateur. No personal or valuable information was collected.
  

On Editing Hymns

A sure-fire way to make a conservative Catholic with a deep love of classical music happy is to bring back some of the old hymns among the more contemporary songs heard today. There is a problem, though- many of them were written at earliest in the century before last, and there is some language that may cause confusion to your congregation.

Like Thee, Thou, Thy, and Thine.

Take, for example, the following hymn, written in the mid-1800s.

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,
Most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,
Almighty, victorious, thy great Name we praise.

Unresting, unhasting, and silent as light,
Nor wanting, nor wasting, thou rulest in might;
Thy justice like mountains high soaring above
Thy clouds, which are fountains of goodness and love.

To all life thou givest, to both great and small;
In all life thou livest, the true life of all;
We blossom and flourish, like leaves on the tree,
Then wither and perish; but naught changeth thee.

Great Father of glory, pure Father of light,
Thine angels adore thee, all veiling their sight;
All laud we would render: O help us to see
'Tis only the splendor of light hideth thee.

The first three verses are easily enough edited to substitute you, your, and yours, but that last verse is tricky. So it gets changed to:

Great Father of glory, pure Father of light,
Your angels adoring, all veiling their sight;
We too, God invisible, offer our praise;
O light inaccessible, Ancient of Days!

See what we did here? We couldn't think up anything to rhyme with see instead of thee, so we cut off the last half of the verse, rehashed and regurgitated the first verse, and tacked it on the end! Nevermind the climax of the poem, nevermind the expression of the immanence of God and that glorious revelation that nothing is between us and him.

Nevermind people whose favorite hymn phrases just might include 'Tis only the splendor of light hideth thee.

And now it's published in hymnals all over the nation, to be used in churches that say "Hallowed be THY name" out of sheer habit and then switch over to "For YOURS is the kingdom..."

Why not
All laud would we render: O teach us it's true
There's only a splendor of light hiding you.
?
Rather a vulgar combination of rhyme and contraction to fit the meter, but it's truer to the original than the "gracefully edited" one, and perhaps its clumsiness would make people question why it had to be changed in the first place...

One of these days I'm going to denounce and renounce the English language.

The Purpose of a Marshmallow?

This isn't a joke. It's a very serious philosophical question. In the form of a joke.

I randomly started asking this question (What is the purpose of a marshmallow?) to people who came through my checkout lane, and then tearing apart their answers with my logic skillz, a la Socrates. I got exactly the answers one would expect to get:

"To be squishy and soft and sweet?"

"Oh, they go great in hot cocoa!"

etc.

I however, do not think that this is the purpose of a marshmallow, as obviously a marshmallow can be used to build a model of atomic structure, or to throw at graduating seniors (don't ask). So what is the purpose of a marshmallow?

Man created marshmallow, and thus what he created them for must be their purpose. Man created marshmallows with the idea of eating them, so they exist to be eaten, right?

I disagree. Man did not create marshmallows - man did not create anything! He cannot create, he can only fashion something from something else. Man can form marshmallows out of sugar and preservatives, but he cannot create them. He gets marshmallow-ness from God, all that is marshmallow comes from him - the sugar, the preservatives, and the purpose. Therefore, along with all material creation, its purpose is to help us get to heaven, and nothing more or less. Just like the gold is created only to be made into the monstrance and the nourishment of our soul, the sugar is created only to be made into marshmallows so that we can have fellowship while roasting them over an open fire, so that the carbohydrates can give us the energy to worship our creator, so that a kid can either be consoled by its sweetness or discover the shape of a molecule.

So think next time before you eat your s'mores. XD

~Ambrose

Mark Twain on Patriotism

My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.

- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Happy Independence Day!

The Saga Continues - Prince Caspian Review

Alright, so I'm probably biting off a bit more than I can chew with a full review, so I'll stick to a simpler version based upon impressions. The movie theatre was positively empty when I saw it, which was only the Monday after it was released. Therefore, I had the rare but pleasant experience of actually getting to pay attention to the movie itself.

"It's a lot darker than the original" is what the guy at the concession stand said. I have to agree. It doesn't deal with darker topics - Edmund's betrayal in the first movie tops anything Prince Caspian could come up with - but it consequently doesn't ascend to the same heights of redemption. If you're looking for a pleasantly Christian film - look elsewhere. Although the cinematography was stellar, including brilliant appearances by Reepicheep, I didn't find the same warm, righteous feeling I got from the first. Still, the second book was vastly different from the first, so I'm not terribly surprised by this. What really angered me was a complete shift of focus from book to movie.

In the book, the main focal point is social revival. The few faithful who remain were lifted up and founded a new society - one where the opression, the fear, and the corruption had been lifted and they could freely pursue their own betterment. Aslan, Lucy, and Susan roaming the land giving freedom to the captive - be it captive of the education system, captive of oppressive government, or captive of railroading progression. It was a wonderful fairy tale that not only showed how the war was won nearly without fighting - scaring the badguys away with trees is what did it - but that also showed how the result was a society free to be what they were meant to be. The priggish schoolboys, the irate father, and the bridge all were symbolically done away with in Graeco-Roman style.

In the movie, however, the focus is entirely upon fighting, and the reconquest of Narnia. The reliance on the supernatural - another thing that was key to the book - is gone, and strength of arms replaces it. The freeing of the countryside is written off, and doesn't even make an appearance. Instead, the film makers chose to highlight all the wrong elements of the book - those that Lewis himself chose downplay. "You'll find Narnia a much darker place than you remember," states Trumpkin (who, incidentally, isn't named...), and only because the director couldn't find it in himself to focus on the societal change. Wonderful fairy tales of societal restoration and supernatural reliance don't sell tickets - wars, fighting, and meaningless romance scenes do.

~Ambrose

What we all need really bad

In a moment of inspiration, I picked up a catalog from the kitchen table and realized what America really needs-

http://www.bedbathandbeyond.com/search/search.aspx?InDimSearch=1&nty=1&dim=1&N=4294966210&order_num=-1

New trash cans! On average, you only pay about $130.00. Stainless steel. All-new technology.

Good grief, what is this society coming to-!

If anyone out there is tempted to invest in one of these streamlined beauties, please consider giving 90% of the fund to charity instead. So maybe your trash receptacle will seem a little less special- I'm truly sorry.

As one of my brothers commented, "Talk about throwing away money...."

Simplicity

I recently read T.S.Eliot's incredible poem Little Gidding, from the Four Quartets, and absolutely fell in love with it.

The last two stanzas culminate and climax the poem's beauty for me, but reading it again in the past week two lines stood out quietly from all the rest. In them, Eliot talks about finding-

A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)


...an especially beautiful thought to keep in mind during Lent.
I think it speaks for itself. Just wanted to share it with you all.

~Mari

Comment on Today's Gospel

'My mother and my brothers,' He said, 'are those who hear God's word and obey it.'

"Jesus is saying that, in this case, water is thicker than blood- when it's the Baptismal water that is our first step to following him." ~Fr. Bill