zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — where economics meets scripture ]
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The mundane:

Pete Nischt, 32, of Akron, Ohio, didn’t like the shutdown from the start, and now his flight from New York to Cleveland was delayed for three hours. In recent days, as he saw how people who had gone without pay for a month were suffering, he came to view the failure to pay public employees as “a breach of the social contract. Trump has been lying the whole time .?.?. and now we’re paying for it.”

That’s from How the shutdown ended: Americans just had it up to here

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The spiritual:

Okay, that’s the mundane “people who had gone without pay for a month” because of the shutdown — how about the spiritual? How about they also give God, in the person of Paula White, a month’s pay?

Trump's spiritual adviser Paula White suggested people send her their January salary or face consequences from God https://t.co/0U5fHNAGz7

— Dr. Death Studies (@AndrewChesnut1) January 30, 2019

Eh?

And:

Oh yes, she’s an Apostle of the New Apostolic Reformation.

Paula White, who heads up the president’s evangelical advisory committee, suggested making a donation to her ministries to honor the religious principle of “first fruit,” which she said is the idea that all firsts belong to God, including the first harvest and, apparently, the first month of your salary.

In any case, the principle is simple enough:

“January is the beginning of a new year for us in the Western world. Let us give to God what belongs to him: the first hours of our day, the first month of the year, the first of our increase, the first in every area of our life. It’s devoted…. The principle of first fruits is that when you give God the first, he governs the rest and redeems in,” she said.

“When you honor this principle, it provides the foundation and structure for God’s blessings and promises in your life. It unlocks deep dimensions of spiritual truths that literally transform your life. When you apply this, everything comes in divine alignment for his plan and promises for you. When you don’t honor it, whether through ignorance or direct disobedience, there are consequences.”

But what if — because of the shutdown, you weren’t paid for a month? Maybe you’re an air traffic controller, and received a check for $0.00? Offer it up?

Pouf! cancels out Pouf! In other words, that won’t cost you anything — beyond the original suffering mentioned above..

Ouch!

[ by Charles Cameron — an almost-Darwin-Award-worthy foolishness, coupled with a masterpiece of Zen art — just the sort of post I’d love to post, for my own sake, even if no-one else is listening ]
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Unbelievable!

That’s a serious journal article about a seriously un-serious drunking game.. And if you can’t read the fine print, not to worry — the two top articles below will brief you nicely..

Readings:

Atlantic, This Is What Happens When You Drunkenly Swallow a Live Catfish

LiveScience, A Drunk Man Swallowed a Live, Venomous, Spiny Catfish.

Acta Oto-Laryngologica Case Reports, A Jackass and a Catfish

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By way of contrast:

Here’s what the book’s about:

Zen art poses a conundrum. On the one hand, Zen Buddhism emphasizes the concept of emptiness, which among other things asserts that form is empty, that all phenomena in the world are illusory. On the other hand, a prodigious amount of artwork has been created in association with Zen thought and practice. A wide range of media, genres, expressive modes, and strategies of representation have been embraced to convey the idea of emptiness. Form has been used to express the essence of formlessness, and in Japan, this gave rise to a remarkable, highly diverse array of artworks and a tradition of self-negating art.

In this volume, Yukio Lippit explores the painting The Gourd and the Catfish (ca. 1413), widely considered one of the most iconic works of Japanese Zen art today. Its subject matter appears straightforward enough: a man standing on a bank holds a gourd in both hands, attempting to capture or pin down the catfish swimming in the stream below. This is an impossible task, a nonsensical act underscored by the awkwardness with which the figure struggles even to hold his gourd. But this impossibility is precisely the point.

Read or view:

Getty Research, Japanese Zen Buddhism and the Impossible Painting

Getty YouTube lecture, Japanese Zen Buddhism and the Impossible Painting

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On the zen of swallowing, or not:

In Zen work, an existential contradiction, Mumon’s “red hot coal,” sticks in the student’s throat; the inability “to swallow it or spit it out” precipitates a crisis to be resolved through an insight that is simultaneously an existential gesture. “If I am whole and complete as I am, why do I feel ignorant and incomplete?” might be one formulation of the conundrum, though encoded in a ritual question like “What is the sound of one hand?” The greater the contradiction, the greater the tension — ”doubt mass” — and the greater the breakthrough, according to Zen tradition.

Source:

Tricycle, Fruitful Contradictions: The Zen of mathematics

[ by Charles Cameron — the UK looks to be teetering over the White Cliffs of Dover, with 22 miles of channel separating them from the rest of Europe — and a hard border with Éire ]
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There are few more tumultuous games on earth than the British House of Commons, with its two sides lobbying and lobbing insults at one another, while the no-side-works-for-me cross-benchers face the no-side-I’ve-retired-from-the-fray Speaker across the length of the chamber, no doubt relishing the spectacle but, in the Speaker‘s case, regulating it with roars of “Order, order!!!”

And fray it is, glorious in its freedom, so wild as to demand frequent pruning — the Speaker, in the New Yorker‘s words, “presides over whatever fare — technical, listless, boorish, crazed — is unfolding in the chamber at a given moment. The House may be full with paper-waving cries of “Foul!” “Fiend!” Recant!” or even these days, I suppose, “Repent” — we do live, after all, in a remorselessly secular age..

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But then..

Pattern recognition: there seems to be a pattern of Speakers disinviting Donald Trump.

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Sources:

NYorker, Is the Speaker of the House of Commons Trying to Stop Brexit?

WaPo, Sorry, judges, we umpires do more than call balls

WHOtv, Speaker Pelosi Tells President Trump State of the Union Won’t Happen

Dates and Times:

te [re-invited] State of the Union is scheduled for 6.00pm Pacific, Tuesday, February 5

the Superbowl is 3.30pm Eastern, Sunday, February 3rd

Brexit will occur in un-negotiated form if nothing stops it, at 11pm GMT, Friday, March 29.

One way or another, fun times ahead..

[ by Charles Cameron — surprise, surprise — this isn’t the #15 I expected and predicted ]
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In Two eminently watchable TV series by Hugo Blick I looked at narrative artistry as an approach to understanding complex problems — and I do mean complex, the Israeli-Palestinian and Hutu-Tutsi errh, situations..

Here, we consider artistry of another sort — polyphonic, graphical, yet still clearly artistic in execution ..

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Here’s a drawing from Victor Papanek‘s Notebook — and very notebook it is — courtesy Roelof Pieters:

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Compare the above with this example of Mark Lombardi‘s fine art “conspiracy” graphs from his book, Global Networks:

We’re getting positively calligraphic here, and approaching the scope of one of those Song dynasty scroll paintings that feature (am I right? memory, imagination!) a hermit disappearing into his cave in some obscure not quite corner of the scroll, while thunder wreaks havoc on armies by a river in almost center field..

Speaking of which..

Ah, but we’re straggling away from our topic: On the felicities of graph-based game-board design. The point is that the arts have many inventive ways to approach complexity.

I mean, we could start with Hamlet..

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Earlier in this series:

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: preliminaries

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: two dazzlers

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: three

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: four

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: five

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: six

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: seven

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: eight

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: nine

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: ten

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: eleven

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: twelve

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: thirteen

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: fourteen

[ by Charles Cameron — curious “sign” sign seen outside today’s Roger Stone hearing ]
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Someone has a sense of humor? of art?

The statement “This is a Sign” isn’t even paradoxical, unless you remember Magritte‘s un-pipe — but it’s certainly an obvious statement of truth, albeit self-referential, ouroboric.

In my view, witty, to say the least..