Putting the "IS" in ISIS

I just wanted to bookmark this site which critiques the Atlantic article about What Isis Really Wants.

Interpretation. Every useful insight Wood has about end-times prophecy or the Caliphate is compatible with the more common scholarly view that ISIS’s version of Islam is one interpretation among many. One writer who strikes that balance well is Hussein Ibish. As he said in an interview:

Neither is ISIS authentically Islamic, nor is it in any meaningful sense not Islamic. It is a bizarre interpretation of Islam yoked to a political agenda which is very modern. If we just stop fretting about the relationship of ISIS to the religious base of its ideology and accept that it’s a bunch of extremists who come out of a tradition that they manipulate to justify their crimes and their ambitions, it’s not so complicated.

http://weeklysift.com/2015/02/23/the-islamic-state-separating-insight-from-stereotype/

Personal Bookmark

My Personal Bookmark of another thing to remember


 "In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind — and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing."

 "There was, however, one small incident of my boyhood days which touched this matter, and it must have meant a good deal to me or it would not have stayed in my memory, clear and sharp, vivid and shadowless, all these slow-drifting years. We had a little slave boy whom we had hired from some one, there in Hannibal. He was from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and had been brought away from his family and his friends, half way across the American continent, and sold. He was a cheery spirit, innocent and gentle, and the noisiest creature that ever was, perhaps. All day long he was singing, whistling, yelling, whooping, laughing — it was maddening, devastating, unendurable. At last, one day, I lost all my temper, and went raging to my mother, and said Sandy had been singing for an hour without a single break, and I couldn’t stand it, and wouldn’t she please shut him up. The tears came into her eyes, and her lip trembled, and she said something like this— “Poor thing, when he sings, it shows that he is not remembering, and that comforts me; but when he is still, I am afraid he is thinking, and I cannot bear it. He will never see his mother again; if he can sing, I must not hinder it, but be thankful for it. If you were older, you would understand me; then that friendless child’s noise would make you glad.” It was a simple speech, and made up of small words, but it went home, and Sandy’s noise was not a trouble to me any more. She never used large words, but she had a natural gift for making small ones do effective work. She lived to reach the neighborhood of ninety years, and was capable with her tongue to the last — especially when a meanness or an injustice roused her spirit."
-The Autobiography of Mark Twain

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/24/mark-twain-on-slavery-empathy-compassion/

Explaining the Un-explainable

I just had to note this...I don't understand the science of it but somehow it makes sense to me. He is writing how Einstein's realization on the nature of relativity explained the previously UN-explainable orbit of Mercury (who knew? Not me.)

In other words, in that November hour one hundred years ago when Mercury dropped out of his math, he alone of all humankind knew the universe was not what it had seemed for centuries. That’s the reason his moorings snapped, however briefly. As he later wrote, to do such work, one feels “akin to…the religious worshipper or the lover; the daily effort does not originate from a deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.”

http://gizmodo.com/how-ta-nehisi-coates-inspired-a-book-about-the-hunt-for-1739812368

I Had A Dream!!

I had a dream like night. Somebody was doing some Kotekaishi on me.

It has been way over a year since I last practiced Aikido.