The Pope & Concsience: What happens if we don’t read encyclicals.

The juistices are all catholic.Many of those refusing to attend and considering their demurral to be of significance were catholic.
On the west coast we’re getting a new sense of the abuse of money through the actions of some very rich Saudis termed sheiks.The behavior ranged from speeding million dollar cars through residential areas to sexual battery and enslavement. Flying out of the country on a special jet was only available to one who claimed he had diplomatic immunity.

The Octogenarians

A very good man spoke to our congress yesterday,He happens to be the Bishop of Rome.He was not interpreting the word of God ex cathedra.He’s not allowed to.But he said some really interesting things about greed,waste, climate change and succor to the poor.(Not suckering the poor, prime mortgage lenders, succoring them!)He condemned a throw away culture and probably didn’t know that he was echoing psychoanalytic(Freudian) object relations theory.If you waste things it makes it easy to waste people.He asked us to save our planet for it is God’s gift.Three conservative supreme court justices refused to attend (Alito,Scalia and Thomas).Boehner bawled and resigned today,claiming that the pope had nothing to do with it.Cruz says that the Pope should stick to church matters,refused to attend, and  is still  working to close down the government over the issue of defunding Planned Parenthood.Pippa may still be passing but Browning would have trouble convincing anyone but…

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More Lessons From The Pariahs

I remember this guy. I don’t have to rely on history or historiography.

The Octogenarians

Our speculation that Sgt.Bergdahl was caught between a parentally imbued ideology and the ideology of the gun, turns out to be accurate, although the detailed thought process is disputed.A reissue of Ken Burn’s magnificent “The American Civil War”indicates that John Brown was a thrice failed entrepreneur who invoked spiritual kinship with divinity.The Colbert interview with Donald Trump and Trump’s acknowledgement that the quote “the real strong have no need to prove it to the phonies” might have come from him was a powerful”gotcha” when Manson proved to be the author.

I have one more pariah to add to the list(I will not add Bobby Fisher,his genius is as little understood as his antisemitism and anti-Americanism)that person is George Baker who went from false god status during the 30s and proprietor of the “Kingdom”under the 155th st. bridge in the Bronx to being identified as a valid civil rights activist during…

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END GAME

The Octogenarians

William Grier the coauthor of Black Rage (with Pierce Cobbs) died this week at the age of 89.Ed Doctorow(an old classmate )from Bx. Science High) died several weeks ago and this blog recounted the death of Dan Sugarman another Bx.Science classmate,both were 84. There is nothing profound here.We have to accept that most octogenarians will not become nonagenarians and most nonagenarians will not become centagenarians.We think analogically and metaphorically and see only so far as this can carry us.We need help from the digital thinkers of this time in peering into the future.
Black Rage is anecdotal and ingeniously constructed and caught fire with the avant-garde of the 1960s. It gave an explanation for deviant black behavior ranging from urban gangs through the rise of groups like the Black Panthers.It included drug addiction and crime.Rage was the outcome of slavery,segregation and discrimination and its expression universally expectable.Of course it inadvertently…

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Analogic Thinking & National Character

The Octogenarians

Frank Marshall,the WW2 U.S.chess champion for eight consecutive years,was a tall red haired Californian who went east and founded the famous Marshall chess club in N.Y.C.He was a solidly built white male.Serena Williams is a solidly built black female who hails from Compton California and who at 5’11″just misses qualifying as tall by today,s standards.She has had her name emblazoned at Forest Hills as U.S tennis champion six(?)times.Both are deserving of the term”power player”and each has”owned” New York.Frank Marshall’s slashing attack style did not hold up well against the top Europeans.In a showdown with Edward Lasker,he went 0&8 with 7(?)draws.If they survived his attack other grandmasters usually dismembered his end game.Watching Serena through the years I find myself expecting her opponents to contribute to their own defeat by committing unforced errors.An intimidation factor that certainly affects outcome operating for her.
Is there such a thing as national character?Probably but it…

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Symbolic Interaction &The U.S.Open

The Octogenarians

Bill Dwyer’s article”Blake,Serena and Race Issue” in the sports section of the August 11th L.A Times, drew a tight circle around Serena’s quest for the calendar year grand slam and her pursuit of the other Graf record of 22 total grand slams(3rd best in women’s tennis)with the forcible detention and slamming to the ground of James Blake the black former tennis star on the previous Tuesday on his way to Arthur Ashe stadium.Blake’s treatment while standing in front of his hotel ,waiting for a car to take him to Arthur Ashe stadium was yet another case of a person of color being brutalized by law enforcement.The stadium was named in honor of the late Arthur Ashe,black man, a model of behavior and restraint who was also a great tennis star(defeating Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon in that famous 70’s match. If Serena thought at all of the symbolism of her ultimate…

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A Foolish Consistency…

The Octogenarians

Emerson’s dictum to the effect that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds adored by little statesmen,philosophers and diviners.”may be critical to the selection of an appropriate presidential candidate by both parties.
If pursuit of a series of micro strategies is what is called for,(while keeping in mind a major objective) a good chess strategy ,we need someone who can do just that.The republican candidates are lined up behind a fight or flight international attitude and a determination to minimize the importance of mounting domestic objection to racial,gender and religious barriers to access to opportunity.The democratic party is far from immune to monolithic thought.V.P Biden is without doubt a decent honest man but his pursuit of a “war on drugs”has contributed to the flooding of our prisons by minor drug users and possession offenders.Equally serious is the support of differential sentencing for possession of equal quantities of crack…

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Sixteen Men and One Woman…

The Octogenarians

The dead man whose chest the republican candidates are sitting on has been identified.It is our old friend Dick Cheney ,a.k.a.Darth Vader.Dearth might be more appropriate for lack of perspective,humility,and good judgment.He now professes to be the unofficial foreign policy adviser to many of the republican presidential hopefuls.Considering that Benjamin Netanyahu as such would be unacceptable to most Americans his choice might even be logical.His suggestion of a million man standing military as a deterrent to Iran would mean adopting a policy of conscription and even with the elimination of the last standing “social program” would mean an increase in taxes.By inference an acceptable strategy would be to push Iran into nuclear war before Iran has nuclear weapons.This would be something that Netanyahu could probably approve.The fact that Americans would be fighting and dying in Netanyahu’s war doesn’t seem important to the new Neo-coms.Donald Trump’s wall with 50 to 100,00…

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THE INTOLERABILITY OF INVISIBLE MAN STATUS: A CNN Revisit To Two Of Our Pariahs

The Octogenarians

This past weekend CNN played reruns of previous broadcasts featuring two of this blogs”pariahs”.Jim Jones and Charles Manson, charismatic individuals of above average intelligence each with a vision of the future that proved attractive to followers of both sexes.The followers themselves, as in most cults, are divided into a large passive group and a small active group with a deep investment in the cause.(More obvious in the Jonestown scenario.)From this group emerge the murderous followers willing to kill to demonstrate the strength of their belief.In the Jonestown group their zeal ultimately exceeds that of their leader who loses his hold on reality and who dies from a gunshot to the head possibly(from other sources than CNN) administered by his last mistress(some sort of paramedical?possibly a nurse) who also presided over the administration of the cyanide cocktails(particularly to the children.)
The acquisition of inexpensive or free land(Ellison’s Invisible Man’s Consolidated Edison’s…

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The Retrospectoscope Looks At A Recent Symbolic Interaction

The Octogenarians

Calhoun college is one of 12 Yale residential colleges modeled on the English 800+ year old Oxford/Cambridge template.The Yale system was installed only some 70 years ago with a 1932 gift of Sloane Hearkness,a multimillionaire benefactor.Each residential college has a Master and a Dean living on site with their families and providing hostelry and academic guidance respectively.A few days ago the President of Yale invited Yale community wide (including incoming freshmen) opinion exchange and commentary about Calhoun college.President Salovey is a distinguished social psychologist who also served as Provost of the University for eight years.Yale has established a new campus in Singapore and is opening a new campus(West) in New Haven.The establishment of degree granting campuses outside of the traditional and in a foreign country with totalitarian credentials has been a cause of much discussion and dissent.President Salovey has wisely chosen to apply the lessons learned from the advent of…

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