If only I were making this stuff up . . .

Jon Stewart Trashes Fox News For Throwing Out The Constitution: The Law Is ‘No Match For Freedom Math’

by Josh Feldman | Mediaite

Jon Stewart took on one of his favorite punching bags, Fox News, in a segment calling the network out for always praising the wisdom of the Founders in creating the Constitution, only to discard over half of the Bill of Rights when talking about the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings. Stewart noticed every amendment seemed negotiable to people at Fox News except the second, and any legal arguments to the contrary were “no match for freedom math.”

Stewart likened terrorists hating the U.S. for its freedoms to Anne Hathaway: “you hate us, only because you can’t get with this!” He ran clip after clip of Fox News hosts praising the Constitution, only to then show them throwing out the Constitution in talking about the case of the Boston Marathon bombers. On their questioning of whether or not the alive suspect should have been read his Miranda rights, Stewart pointed out he still has them even if they don’t read them, because “you don’t have to say them out loud for them to become real.”

Stewart ran the gamut from treating the suspect as an enemy combatant to calls for torture to even suggesting that the FBI should wiretap all mosques to show how amendments are just being dumped like wildfire. Stewart was particularly struck by Ann Coulter saying the dead suspect’s wife should be jailed for wearing a hijab, remarking “she wants a fashion police state.”

Of course, in the interest of fairness, Stewart showed some Fox News personalities injecting their legal perspective into the mix, but as far as the rest of the network is concerned, the law is “no match for freedom math.” Of course, Stewart noticed the only amendment not being discarded willy-nilly is the second, and wondered what would happen if terrorists decided to establish a well-regulated militia of their own.

                   

Full transcript of April 24 The Daily Show segment below:

But we begin tonight with a celebration of what makes America the home of the brave and the land of the awesome, and why our enemies don’t get it.

BRIAN KILMEADE (1/4/2013): Hey, the Constitution founded our great country.ERIC BOLLING (7/6/2011): The American Constitution, the blueprints for our way of life…

SEAN HANNITY (7/2/2012): I really worry if we have lost an understanding of our Constitution, our founding principles, an understanding of what makes us strong.

LAURA INGRAHAM (8/27/2009): They hate our freedom, they hate our way of life, they hate who we are, they hate our liberty.

It is like we are the Anne Hathaway of countries.  (audience laughter)  You hate us, but only cuz you can’t get with this!  (Jon finger snaps)

Why do you hate America?  Is it that we’re too nice, that we sing too well, or that we’re too hot?  ♫  ”I dreamed a dream….”

And that’s why how we handle Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is so important.  For the strength of our system lies in how durable it is, even for our most heinous citizens.

SEAN HANNITY (4/22/2013): I’m a little bit concerned because now he’s, you know, he’s got his Miranda rights, the right to remain silent.ERIC BOLLING (4/24/2013): Miranda.  Mirandize the guy or not?

GREG GUTFIELD (4/24/2013): I don’t understand the point.

BRIAN KILMEADE (4/23/2013): First thing you gotta tell him is, you have the right to remain silent.  Fantastic.  So the bombs that could be exploding and the plots that could be unfolding, we can’t ask him.

OK, first of all, not reading someone their Miranda rights doesn’t mean they don’t have their Miranda rights.  (audience laughter)  You have Miranda rights under the Constitution.  You don’t have to say them out loud for them to become real.  You’re thinking of Beetlejuice.  (audience laughter and applause)

Now the only reason you have to read them is so that whatever the suspect has done or did, whatever they do say, is admissible at their trial.  It’s another hallmark of our constitutionally guaranteed right to due process.

4/22/2013:SEAN HANNITY: I think it’s a mistake not to treat him as an enemy combatant.

ANN COULTER: We ought to look at him as an enemy combatant, and moving him toward a military tribunal.

Yes, civilian trial for a terrorist, not gonna work!  It’s why Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, Ramzi Yousef, and the Blind Sheikh roam our fair country in a bus, going city to city singing medleys of original hits and….  (listens to earpiece)  What’s that?  Really?  They’re dead or in prison, huh?  Well, who am I thinking of?  Is it… oh, the Muppets.  Oh, all right.  I get it.  Well, to be fair, they both tried to take Manhattan.

So in the wake of an assault on our freedom and way of life, we have quickly jettisoned the Sixth Amendment’s right to a fair trial and speedy trial, and the Fifth Amendment’s right against self-incrimination!  What’s next?

SEAN HANNITY (4/22/2013): This guy ought to be, right now, being interrogated in a very intense way. … I’d waterboard him.  I don’t believe enhanced interrogation is torture.  I don’t.

You don’t believe enhanced interrogation is torture?  Because torture, like Tinkerbell, depends on if we believe?  So there goes the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.  Any freedom lovers want to take a crack at some of the lower ones, your Thirds, your Fourths?

4/22/2013:ERIC BOLLING: Should the FBI be allowed to now go into mosques and wiretap and surveil? … I think this is a great case for opening up that.

BRIAN KILMEADE: I think that we should be able to put in listening devices in there.

Sure, illegal search and seizure, done!  The freedom lovers at Fox are jettisoning Amendments like Han Solo dumping cargo to make the jump to light speed at the first sign of Imperial Cruisers, right Chewie?

But you know what?  Anybody can toss away the lesser-known Amendments.  Only a true patriot can set a course straight for the First.

BOB BECKEL (4/23/2013): We really have to consider, that given the fact so many people hate us, that we’re going to have to cut off Muslim students from coming to this country for some period of time.

Yes, a religious litmus test for school enrollment!, says Fox’s most prominent liberal voice.  Holy shit, what’s left?  A prohibition on the unmentioned personal rights in the Constitution that are designated to the people?

ANN COULTER (4/22/2013): I want to know about this wife as well. … I don’t care if she knew about this.  She ought to be in prison for wearing a hijab.

(shocked and disgusted audience response)

AND DOWN GOES THE NINTH AMENDMENT!!!  DOWN GOES THE NINTH AMENDMENT!!!

Ann Coulter doesn’t just want a police state, she wants a fashion police state!

Now of course, to their credit, any of the Fox contributors or anchors who have studied law, have a somewhat different take on this subject.

ANDREW NAPOLITANO (4/23/2013): To try him as an enemy combatant … the government can’t just willy-nilly do that.MEGYN KELLY (4/23/2013): I think now you’re getting into a dangerous place.

4/22/2013:BRIAN KILMEADE: Is that possible?

PETER JOHNSON, JR.: No.

But of course, these types of legal arguments are no match for freedom math.

ERIC BOLLING (4/23/2013): How many Muslims in the world, anybody? … 1.57 billion … Let’s just say 10% dislike us or hate us. … That means 157 million Muslims hate us.  If 5%, 10%, 1% are radicalized and would kill us, you know how much that is?  That’s one and a half million people who are radicalized to the point where they would want to kill you, kill us Americans.

Wow, that’s interesting.  Can I see a footnote citation for those figures?

Oh, that’s where he got them.  All right, I wasn’t sure.  (wild audience cheering and applause)

Well, hey, I have an idea.  Since we’re just throwing Amendments away willy-nilly, what if we wanted to, I dunno, track the weapons that any of these America-haters bought, or maybe do a background check, if any of them tried to purchase weapons here in America?  (audience applause)

ERIC BOLLING (7/19/2011): The right to bear arms is protected in the Constitution.SEAN HANNITY (6/28/2010): There’s no ambiguity here.  The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Oh, no ambiguity there.  You know, since, in the last few decades, there’s been 3,400 deaths from terrorism, Islamic and otherwise, and in that same period, we’ve had nearly, I dunno, a million deaths from gun violence, 30 to 40,000 a year, every year, is there anything we can do about that?

BRIAN KILMEADE (1/10/2013: What Constitution?  Vice President Joe Biden says the President may crack down on guns by executive order.ERIC BOLLING (4/3/2013): a.k.a., taking our right to bear arms away.

Yes, it turns out there’s only one Amendment in our Constitution’s pantheon that is exempt from statistical analysis or emotional freak-out-itude.  And it is the Second.  So God help us if the Muslims ever decide to form a well-regulated militia.

We’ll have no way to stop them.  We’ll be right back.

Related articles

• Jon Stewart destroys Fox News for jettisoning the Bill of Rights after Boston bombing (rawstory.com)
• Watch: Jon Stewart Lambasts Constitution-Obsessed Fox News for Turning on the Constitution (alternet.org)
• Jon Stewart Rips Fox News A New One For Ripping Up The Constitution (VIDEO) (addictinginfo.org)
• Watch: Jon Stewart Lambastes Constitution-Obsessed Fox News for Turning on the Constitution (alternet.org)
• Jon Stewart Takes Fox News to Warp Speed on Boston Bombing Trial – Esther Zuckerman – The Atlantic Wire (theatlanticwire.com)

 

“All the hardest, coldest people you meet were once as soft as water. And that’s the tragedy of living. ” ~ Iain Thomas, from I Wrote This For You

Ice Castle, Silverthorne, Colorado
by Brent Christensen

                   

“I, too, seem to be a connoisseur of rain, but it does not fill me with joy; it allows me to steep myself in a solitude I nurse like a vice I’ve refused to vanquish.” ~ Julia Glass, from Three Junes

Friday afternoon. Sunny, low 40′s. No snow . . .

So we had wet snow and rain last night. Absolutely nothing stuck, but we had delayed openings and closings anyway. This area is totally unprepared for any kind of winter weather, so accustomed to mild winters devoid of white. In response, I thought I’d post something I’ve been saving: images of real life ice castles.

Last night I had the weirdest dreams, and consequently, I woke up mad at Corey. Don’t you hate it when a dream causes a waking reaction? The gist of it was that Corey was flirting with a woman, and he thought it harmless, but I was offended, and it escalated from there. In between, Elliot, formerly of Law & Order SVU showed up because I found to women buried in the sand. I ran into an old friend of mine who made me the best mixed drink I had ever had, and oh yes, I won the lottery, twice. I was an uber millionaire, and I was planning to hand out money right and left to relatives.

Silverthorne Ice Castle
by Ryan Davis via Huffington Post

Also in this same dream sequence there were aliens, three to be precise. I had packed up my car to go somewhere (it was my old Trooper Izzie), and I was carrying a strange assortment of goods, including some kind of taser especially for the aliens that I carried. They were supposed to awaken in 12 hours, but woke up 9 hours early. I was fighting all three as the people who were traveling with me were running about inefficiently. Then I went to the Navy exchange to replenish my supplied, but I couldn’t find a charger for my phone, which I needed because I could communicate with base back on earth via Twitter, and I also needed some kind of battery charger for my vehicle.

I ended up going to an auto store to buy things, and I picked out a pickaxe for a weapon, but it was too heavy. I didn’t buy the generator because it was $450, but I bought a car charger for $40 and a portable lantern so that I could see in the dark to kill the aliens

Very, very, very strange. Perhaps I should not have watched “American Horror Story before going to sleep.” The insomnia and headache didn’t help. I saw something on my tumblr dash about a supposed Japanese legend that says that if you can’t sleep at night, it’s because you’re awake in someone else’s dream. I couldn’t find anything to confirm that statement, but I found it intriguing.

“Your head’s like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars . . . But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune’s all we are.” ~ Grant Morrison

Today began late as I got to sleep late, even though I really needed to contact people early. We’re trying to get my health insurance reinstated so that I can get my prescriptions, but in the meantime, I’m trying to get samples of my antidepressant from the doctor’s office so that I don’t have a full-blown crash. All of the maneuvering is causing incredible stress, and I really want to hide under the covers until it all goes away.

On top of everything else, I’m having computer problems. I couldn’t get my Yahoo mail to work, and I keep getting redirected on various sites. I cleaned up all of my unnecessary files and made sure my malware was active, but I’m just not in the mood for a persnickety computer. I did a little research, and apparently, other people have been having Yahoo issues. I found a site that offered a couple of fixes, and one worked, so that’s taken care of for now, but it slowed up my ability to deal with Human Resources.

Silverthorne Ice Castle
by Ryan Davis via Huffington Post

Add to this growing pile of crappiness the fact that my birthday is coming up next week, which I hate, and I realized as I was doing dishes today that I still haven’t done the paperwork to try to get a life insurance policy, which I really need to do before my birthday, as it’s one of those landmark ones that causes my available rates to go up. I don’t know how they arrive at these numbers, but I find the whole thing mystifying. So far I’ve been turned down by any mainstream insurance providers because of my health, and for some reason, I have it in my head that I need to have a hefty policy so that my family is not left in debt. Go figure.

“It’s not hard to decide what you want your life to be about. What’s hard, she said, is figuring out what you’re willing to give up in order to do the things you really care about.” ~ Shauna Niequist, from “Bittersweet”

I was really hoping for snow so that I could take some new pictures. I haven’t shot anything (with my camera) in quite a while. Brett, who has changed his mind about sitting out this semester, was thinking about taking a digital photography course, but he changed his mind, which is a bit disappointing because I was hoping to pick up some tips from him. The problem is that art classes are so limited at ODU, and art majors are always fighting for spots, so Brett didn’t want to take a spot that an art major may have needed.

Silverthorne Ice Castle
by Ryan Davis via Huffington Post

He does have a very cool semester awaiting him. I had suggested taking no physics and no math, just things he was genuinely interested in, so he’s taking an advanced poetry workshop (so jealous), a Harlem Renaissance lit class, a film class, and an art class. Personally, I think that having a semester in which he does only what he wants instead of what he has to take will really help him to get grounded again. I had anticipated that he would be a bit out of sorts when the semester began and he wasn’t going to class.

He’s still planning to go to New Zealand, just postponing until May.

Can I tell you a secret? The other day, I started filling out an application on the GW website for the doctoral program in English. Haven’t finished it yet because I got scared. Maybe this weekend I’ll be able to finish it.

“Which one of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?” ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Just remembered another strange detail about my dream sequence: I was putting this money into a counting machine to verify that I had won the lottery, and I kept messing up, inserting paper money when the machine was counting silver and vice versa. I had 10 pieces of silver shaped like forks which were worth one thousand dollars each. How does my mind work when I’m asleep? How do I end up in these places with these people doing these things?

Ice Castle, Silverthorne, Colorado
as found on inhabitat.com

I mean, wouldn’t it be great if I dreamt that I was walking through an ice castle? But no, I’m walking around a store looking for an adapter. Am I boring even in my dreams? Sheesh.

My response to the stress of the last few days and the bad sleep of the last few nights is to want to go into the bathroom and chop at my hair with scissors. Fortunately (or not, depending upon how you view it), my head hurts too much to stand in the fluorescent light long enough to do anything. But just another thought here: what genius (and you know it had to be a man because no woman would willing subject other women to this) decided that fluorescent lighting would be best used in the bathroom?

If I ever get to design my dream bathroom it will have block glass in the window, a moonlight above the bathtub, which will be jetted, naturally, and nary one tube bulb will be in sight.

“You’ve got forever; and somehow you can’t do much with it. You’ve got forever; and it’s a mile wide and an inch deep and full of alligators.” ~ Jim Thompson

I need to confirm with HR that I still get most of my tuition paid for, but I don’t want to hit them with that until I’ve resolved this health insurance fiasco. I’m not really certain what possessed me to begin the application; I just found myself looking up the program and then clicking on the complete application link. Perhaps clicking on links might be the death of me. It’s far too easy.

Silverthorne Ice Castle
by Ran Davis via Huffington Post

Jon Stewart was talking about that last night, how the White House petition website had such a low requirement for petitions to garner a response, beginning at 5,000 signatures, now at 100,000 signature. Hell, Gangnam Style has over one billion hits on YouTube, so how could the White House not imagine that people with nothing better to do would sign bizarre petitions, like requesting secession from the union?

Anyway, my point is that I was just talking about being linked in and what it’s done to us, and then I have this epiphany that my life now is just jumping from one link to the next, kind of like exploring the world the easy way. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? I mean, fear is what compels most of us to withhold, to stay put, to refrain from attempting things, but a wired world tends to push that fear from the forefront of our minds, allowing us to jump into things we would never have thought about a decade ago.

There be dragons, and there be alligators, but the water is fine . . .

Hope you enjoy the music and images.

More later. Peace.

(For the full story on the concept behind the ice castles and how the structures are made, click here.)

Music by Lindsey Stirling (filmed at Silverthorne Ice Castle), “Crystallize”

                   

Textbook Statistics

On average, 5 people are born every second and 1.78 die.
So we’re ahead by 3.22, which is good, I think.

The average person will spend two weeks in his life
waiting for the traffic light to change.

Pubescent girls wait two to four years
for the tender lumps under their nipples to grow.

So the average adult has over 1,460 dreams a year,
laughs 15 times a day. Children, 385 more times.

So the average male adult mates 2,580 times with five different people
but falls in love only twice in his life—possibly

with the same person. Seventy-nine long years for each of us,
awakened to love in our twenties, so more or less

thirty years to love our two lovers each. And if, in a lifetime,
one walks a total of 13,640 miles by increments,

Where are you headed, traveler?
is a valid philosophical question to pose to a man, I think, along with

Why does the blood in your veins travel endlessly?
on account of those red cells flowing night and day

through the traffic of the blood vessels, which if laid out
in a straight line would be over 90,000 miles long.

The great Nile River in Egypt is 4,180 miles long.
The great circle of the earth’s equator is 24,903 miles.

Dividing this green earth among all of us
gives a hundred square feet of living space to each,

but our brains take only one square foot of it,
along with the 29 bones of the skull, so

if you look outside your window with your mind only,
why do you hear the housefly hum middle octave, key of F?

If you listen to the cat on the rug by the fire with
the 32 muscles in your ear, you will hear

100 different vocal sounds. Listen to the dog
wishing for your love: 10 different sounds.

If you think loneliness is beyond calculation,
think of the mole digging a tunnel underground

ninety-eight miles long to China
in one single night. If you think beauty escapes you

or your entire genealogical tree, consider the slug
with its four uneven noses, or the chameleon shifting colors

under an arbitrary light. Think of the deepest point
in the deepest ocean, the Marianas Trench in the Pacific,

do you think anyone’s sadness can be deeper? In 1681,
the last dodo bird died. In the 16th century,

Queen Elizabeth suffered from a fear of roses.
Anne Boleyn had six fingers. People fall in love

twice. The human heart beats 3 billion times — only — in a lifetime.
If you attempt to count all the stars in the galaxy, one

every second, it’ll take 3 thousand years, if you’re lucky.
As owls are the only birds that can see the color blue

the ocean is bluish, along with the sky and the eyes
of that boy who died alone by that little unnamed river

in your dreams one blue night of the war
of one of your lives. (Do you remember which one?)

Duration of World War 1: four years, 3 months, 14 days.
Duration of an equatorial sunset: 128 seconds, 142 tops.

A neuron’s impulse takes 1/1000 of a second,
a morning’s commute from Prospect Expressway

to the Brooklyn Bridge, about 90 minutes,
forty-five without traffic.

Time it takes for a flower to wilt after it’s cut from the stem: five days.
Time left our sun before it runs out of light: five billion years.

Hence the number of happy citizens under the red glow
of that sun: maybe 50% of us, 50% on good days, tops.

Number who are sad: maybe 70% on the good days—
especially on the good days. (The first emotion’s more intense, I think,

when caught up with the second.) So children grow faster in the summer,
their bright blue bodies expanding. The ocean, after all, is blue

which is why the sky now outside your window is bluish
expanding with the white of something beautiful, like clouds.

Fact: The world is a beautiful place—once in a while.
Another fact: We fall in love twice. Maybe more, if we’re lucky.

~ Arkaye Kierulf

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.” ~ Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

Loch Maree, UK
by Tobias Richter

                   

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.” ~ Virginia Woolf

Wednesday afternoon. Rainy and cold, 44 degrees.

Technology is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, technology allows us to connect with people all over the world at any given our of any given day. We can sare what is going on in a country at war with itself in real time. Consider the Arab Spring. We cam share a sunrise on the other side of the world via real-time posts of photographs on networks like tumblr or Facebook or Twitter.

Isle of Skye: Talisker Bay
by Tobias Richter

Yet for all of its benefits, technology also serves to isolate us. I am speaking, of course, from personal experience.

It is so much easier for me to correspond wit people in the various circle of my life via text or e-mail or comments sections than it is to get in the car, drive, and visit someone in person. For isolationists such as myself, this is not a boon. By making it so easy to maintain virtual relationships it has also become so easy to abandon real-life relationships.

What I am contending is not anything new or groundbreaking, but it does helpt o answer some questions that I’ve been pondering, namely, how is it easy for me to stay in the house for weeks at a time? That, and have I become boring?

Technology answers the first, and probably the second.

“I am infinitely strange to myself.” ~ John Fowles, from The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Bollhagen, Germany
by Tobias Richter

Perhaps I should have prefaced the former by saying that today is a bad day. I am now officially out of my antidepressant; my health insurance is in limbo awaiting reinstatement after we catch up on premiums; Corey is becoming more sullen with each passing day that he is not working or hearing from prospective employers. Granted, he is still officially employed, but he so wants to move to a position that does not take him away for 90 days at a time, so this time his hiatus is quite different from the last time.

Nevertheless, he worries, as do I, and both of us fretting makes for tension. Between my health insurance, the mortgage, and the utilities, our income is being eaten before it materializes. Neither of us wanted to be back in this position. It is far too stress-inducing. The term “financial cliff” is more than a metaphor for the nation’s current solvency, and that is unfortunate. At least we don’t have to have a super majority vote to rectify our personal cliff, which, I suppose, is somewhat of a comfort.

So yes, today is prickly. I’ve had Patty Griffin’s playlist running for the past couple hours, prompted in part by Izaak Mak’s posting of the song on NCIS last night (see below). I love her voice, but granted, her songs are not exactly happy feet music. Of course, I don’t really like happy feet music, do I?

“The unknown is an abstraction; the known, a desert; but what is half-known, half-seen, is the perfect breeding ground for desire and hallucination.” ~ Juan José Saer, from The Witness

I had my military dream last night; the difference was that I was not in the military, but I had been chosen to teach a class to a group of soldiers, all female. The strangeness began when we boarded a bus that then became a boat of sorts. It took us down this waterway that was a graveyard for vessels of all kinds, shapes, and sizes. I was wondering how the bus was maneuvering through all of this without hitting anything when I suddenly saw a pile of skulls out the bus window. The skulls were bleached white from the sun.

Cuckmere Bay, Seven Sisters, UK
by Tobias Richter

As the bus continued through the water I saw more piles of skulls, some small and some so massive that they were cascading. I wondered how the military could allow its soldiers to come to their final resting place in wreckage, and it bothered me tremendously.

I realized that I had never seen a real human skull up close, only in film, and the starkness of the piles tore at me, but I could not show weakness in front of these female soldiers. I asked for a cup of strong coffee and tried to shake it off.

I awoke with a massive headache.

“To find is the thing.” ~ Pablo Picasso

So back to my opening statement.

My world has extended far beyond the borders of this house or this yard or this neighborhood. Beyond this city or this region or this country, and that is something I have always sought—to be a child of the universe, per se.

Each day I peruse pictures of nebulae, coastlines, ruins, architecture, pictures taken with satellites and phones. I see things that I wouldn’t have had easy access to even 20 years ago. I find this miraculous really. I mean, I know what’s going on in Namibia, Queensland, and Reykjavik. And if I am honest, I must admit that by expanding my horizons in this way I have also expanded my empathic circle.

Isle of Skye: Neist Point
by Tobias Richter

By that I mean, I care so much more. Let me back up for a moment. When I was young, a child only, I saw pictures of the war on the news and in newspapers. I saw suffering as it was presented to me through the filter of editors, publishers and producers. My first glimpse of a crystal blue sea was in a book.

Now, I access such information without anyone on the other side deciding whether or not it’s a good idea to put this image or that story out there for consumption. This is both good and bad. It is good as it allows us—all of us who care to—allows us to see what’s happening, but without the filter of an editor or a producer, we very often encounter those things that are extremely disturbing.

Without an authority figure out there to decide what is best for us, we can literally see everything. Is it too much?

“There is pleasure in the pathless woods.” ~ Lord Byron, from poem of same name (correction; previously attributed to Jon Krakauer)

I don’t think that this is the kind of discovery that Thoreau had in mind, and part of me yearns for simpler times, but isn’t that always the way that it is?

Regardless of how misguided you think Christopher McCandless was when he went into the wilds of Alaska, there is still something admirable about his vision quest when looked at simply: He wanted to be able to find his own truth without outside influences telling him what he should do or how he should think.

Isle of Skye: Trotternish Highlands
by Tobias Richter

I know that in many, many ways, that is the same thing that I have always wanted. Yet here I sit, allowing so very many outside influences into my life, pouring into my brain images of this or that or the other. I seek this deliberately, and in so doing, I contradict myself.

My friend on Titirangi Storyteller posted a beautiful image of a lighthouse on a craggy island. I was immediately drawn to this image much like the image in the section above, immediately understood what she meant about wanting to live there. But to live there would be, essentially, to live without all of the accoutrement of today’s technology. I am certain there is no wi fi on that island, no cable, no BBC America, no tumblr, no Internet.

It’s starkness appeals to me, but could I do it? Could I abandon these tethers for that kind of freedom? And if I did something like this, would it actually be freedom?

I have no answers, only more questions.

More later. Peace.

(All images by Tobias Richter, used with permission.)

Music by Patty Griffin, “Not Alone” (from last night’s episode of NCIS)

                   

The Moment

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can’t breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

~ Margaret Atwood

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