zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — concerning the two kids dead in border incidents – & you and me, if i may be so bold ]
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First of all, may they rest in peace:

Sources:

CBS, New details about 7-year-old migrant girl’s death in custody

WaPo, Guatemalan boy who died in U.S. custody tested positive for influenza

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My Question:

Is it any of our — your and or my — business?

My (tentative) Answer:

Let me take that in two parts. One is a bit Eastern, Taoist in fact, but we’ll get to that — and the other more Western, and I’ll tackle that one right away.

It seems to me these two needless deaths constitute an obligation: to hold the administration — and such super and subsets thereof as may be relevant, both up to and down to the level of individuals — to account. Such accountability is in my view one of the micro-slices of the price we pay for freedom — the States’ extraordinary experimental freedom.

And then, what probably interests and concerns me more.. Grief like a river.

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Grief, like a river, finds its own level.

Let it.

Media opinion people, and maybe others, fret quite a bit about the degree to which one can grieve for all the world’s troubles, should pick one’s battles, can care deeply only for those we know, family perhaps, or tribe.. the great question of compassion fatigue, or should that be moral fatigue?

Love your neighbor stays in the hood: love your enemy parachutes down enemy lines, oh and weltschmerz is way overextended, perhaps?

Let, therefore, your compassion, your grief, and your charitable outreach find their natural levels — don’t force them to some arbitrary limit or standard, they’re naturally overflowing in season, needing no push.

Or so I suggest, with however much humility comes natural to me, that too being subject to flow..

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Requiescant in pace, two younglings I never knew..

[ by Charles Cameron — the horror! the incongruity! ]
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To be fair, the Chronicle of Philanthropy carried this report because what happens to a MSF hospital in wartime is of appropriate interest to philanthropists.

The juxtaposition of journal title and topic, however, remains jarring — click on the link below and take a look at their page as it originally appeared, to see what I mean.

Sources:

Chronicle of Philanthropy, Report Examines Afghan Forces’ Role in Hospital Bombing

New York Times Magazine, Doctors With Enemies: Did AfghanForces Target the M.S.F. Hospital?

[ by Charles Cameron — a grumpy grammatical plaint, plus Proclus for poet’s delight ]
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You know me, maybe — I’m not a quant, if anything I’m a qualit, but even so..

CEOs at the top 50 U.S. charities, including Samaritan’s Purse, earn in the $350,000 to $450,000 range, which makes Graham’s $622,000 salary from his aid organization alone about 40 percent to 50 percent higher than average, according to a Forbes story. He receives the rest of his $258,000 compensation as CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

That’s straight out of the Washington Post, who got it whole cloth from Religion News Service.

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OK, we know what the writer means to say, but.

If top US charity CEOs including Franklin Graham earn between $350,000 to $450,000, and Graham earns $622,000 as his CEO’s salary, then — bzztzz — top US chatioty CEOs earn in the $350,000 to $622,000 range, , not “in the $350,000 to $450,000 range” period.

Further, if Graham earns $622,000 from Samaritan’s Purse — which purse it seems I shall not be filling any time soon, and which might want to change its name to Sadducee’s Purse — the “rest of his $258,000 compensation” doesn’t make any sense at all — bzztzz. How can $622,000 plus an additional fee possibly sum to $258,000?

There is a language, English, and a numerical method, Arithmetic, and this paragraph is lacking in one, the other, or both.

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Or is Franklin Graham paid in irrational numbers?

Proclus, as quoted by Danziger:

It is told that those who first brought out the irrationals from concealment into the open perished in shipwreck, to a man. For the unutterable and the formless must needs be concealed. And those who uncovered and touched this image of life were instantly destroyed and shall remain forever exposed to the play of the eternal waves.

Play of the eternal waves?

Perhaps Graham’s expefrience is not unlike that of George Boole, who wrote a sonnet on the Trinity, and of whom Margaret Masterman wrote:

Towards mathematical truth he had indeed a consciously religious attitude, which he sometimes expressed to himself by the phrase, ‘For ever, O Lord, Thy word is settled in heaven.’ Boole’s behaviour during his last illness was characteristic of the man… When his mind had been wandering in fever, he told his wife that the whole universe seemed to be spread before him like a great black ocean, where there was nothing to see and nothing to hear, except that at intervals a silver trumpet seemed to sound across the waters, ‘For ever, O Lord, Thy word is settled in heaven.’ And as he lay in bed on the borders of delirium, all the little sounds of the house, such as the creaking of doors, resolved themselves into a chant of these words, which expressed for him the excellence of mathematical truth.

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Ah, but I drift.