If McCain doesn't trust her, why should anyone else?But the one thing we know about the adviser is that he is untrustworthy. He's stabbing Palin and McCain in the back. Why take his word for anything?
"Diva" is a sexist, homophobic code word, a dog whistle whose use is cynically calculated to play upon deep seated sexual fear and patriarchal hatred.Simon said:
Why would we not assume that CNN is lying? Is there any reason - any reason at all - to believe that there was an unnamed source who spoke to "Dana Bash, Peter Hamby and John King [of] CNN"? That this unnamed source said what is alleged? That what is alleged is even true? Because we think that they're "professionals"? Who is still malingering under the sad delusion at this late hour that the media is throwing straight dice?
Not me. A controversial claim resting on attribution to an unnamed source, that serves the agenda of the agency? Why should I not think it's a lie? I say they made it up. Name the source and give us the video of them saying it, or tell us why we shouldn't think you're lying. You don't get to behave the way you've behaved and ask for trust.
Over the summer, the Oak Park Zen Community consecrated a vast hula mound Althouse built in the back yard — two large, enjoined grassy knolls that together form the shape of a yin-yang symbol....All right, then. Althouse says, have some joy in the midst of chaos.
"Hawaiian spirituality is in some ways opposite of Zen because there are in excess of 40,000 gods and goddesses" in its pantheon, [Tanoue] explained....
There is a spirit in the dance, she said, that complements, rather than competes with, her Zen practice. "The sacred is how we treat our experiences, how we're open to them," Althouse said. "We don't create something sacred. We find it right where we are by the way we deal with experiences. I think hula is very much an expression of that, and obviously, I also think that Zen is a way to access that.
"Hula's operating on a lot of different levels, metaphorically and psychologically. It's very hard to pin these things down, but when you see it, you recognize it," he said....
"Like now, for example," she said, referring to the tense climate we're all living in right now, with economic, political, societal and spiritual uncertainty all around.
"It's a good example of transforming something by approaching it with a lightness of heart," Althouse added. "Having joy in the midst of chaos."
Almost 30 years ago, the trippy flower-power film The Secret Life of Plants claimed pot plants could read minds, cabbages were easily annoyed and a cactus could learn the Japanese alphabet. Then just last year, a parliamentary panel of philosophers, lawyers, geneticists and theologians in Switzerland, charged with devising new rules for genetic testing, published a treatise on preserving the "dignity of plants". Its edicts included that it was "morally impermissible" to decapitate a wildflower by the roadside without rational reason.Ha ha. I enjoyed reading this article, especially after listening to the entire book "The Botany of Desire" last night while I slept. Ah, but did I understand it?
But while such fanciful claims continue to take root at the margins, scientists in Australia and abroad are quietly discovering plants are more sophisticated and complex than the wildest imaginings. Plants can navigate a maze, trade food for sex, sniff out and hunt down prey, use cost-benefit analysis, learn from past experiences and recognise friend from foe.
[T]hat very morning... I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs. Those folds in the trousers - what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel - how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous! And here they were again, in Botticelli's picture.And here's a little clip from "The Secret Life of Plants":
... Draperies, as I had now discovered, are much more than devices for the introduction of non-representational forms into naturalistic paintings and sculptures. What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful. A little of the knowledge belonging to Mind at Large oozes past the reducing valve of brain and ego, into his consciousness. It is a knowledge of the intrinsic significance of every existent. For the artist as for the mescalin taker draperies are living hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being. More even than the chair, though less perhaps than those wholly supernatural flowers, the folds of my gray flannel trousers were charged with "is-ness." To what they owed this privileged status, I cannot say....
"This is how one ought to see," I kept saying as I looked down at my trousers....
