Beautiful things my friends experienced lately.

the rush of wind all around me.

my parents hugging after making peace.

a baptism.

true selfless love through a friendship.

thanksgiving and laughing with my family.

seeing my friends share their last moments in prayer before they made their vows to each other.

here's like 3 seconds of harmony in this one song from hair, and i was blasting it in my apartment today. it's amazing. it makes me feel alive.

the weather is getting colder and it feels beautiful when its cold out and im in a hat and gloves and a coat but i'm not cold.

the silhouette of the city pre-sunrise.

full moon to affirm my lunatic

שלומ

a sunset--god's amazing grace.

how absolutely incredible it is that we have a system to rescue children around the world. beautiful opportunities, i would say.

the city lights of milwaukee from a birds eye view after dark

one of the guys who live my house (the upstairs part)was sitting on the stone table in our garden, looking up at the sky. I asked him what he was doing and he said spending timewith his lover. He is a strange fellow, but his lover was the moon.Anyway, it reminded me of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "To the Moon"

Inversnaid

THIS darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth	5
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,	10
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;	15
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. Gerard Manley Hopkins (if you did not read that out loud, do it again. out loud.)

Advice to my Son

by J. Peter Meinke

The trick is, to live your days
as if each one may be your last
(for they go fast, and young men lose their lives
in strange and unimaginable ways)
but at the same time, plan long range
(for they go slow; if you survive
the shattered windshield and the bursting shell
you will arrive
at our approximation here below
of heaven or hell).

To be specific, between the peony and the rose
plant squash and spinach, turnips and tomatoes;
beauty is nectar
and nectar, in the desert, saves –
but the stomach craves stronger sustenance
than the honied vine.
Therefore, marry a pretty girl
after seeing her mother;
show your soul to one man,
work with another;
and always serve bread with your wine.
But, son,
Always serve wine.

Via TheArtOfManliness

As the ruin falls

Written by C.S. Lewis

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you
I've never had a selfless thought since I was born
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through
I want God, you, all friends merely to serve my turn

Peace, reassurance, pleasure are the goals I seek
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin
I talk of love, a scholar's parrot may talk greek
but, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin

Only that now you have taught me, but how late my lack,
I see the chasm and everything you are was making my heart into a bridge,
by which I might get back from exile and grow man...
and now the bridge is breaking

For this I bless you as the ruin falls
the pains you give me are more precious than all other gains.

Check this blog out.

http://burnsidewriterscollective.blogspot.com/2009/07/spirit-in-material-world-which-way-is.html

I found this post by accident, but thought it provoked a good question and left a good challenge.

is Vegetarianism moral enough?

Being vegan is about as close as you can come to being sympathetic to animals save Jainism, which is ridiculous. My Uncle Rick has been a Vegan for over 20 years. I was working my granddads garden when he decided to come chat.

Now, uncle Rick doesn’t just chat. He is a 50-something granola, tie dye wearing, white (yellow?) bearded man with a braid of hair three quarters down his back. Once he talks to you, he gets right in your face and immediately delves into politics or some deep subject. The only time he lets up is a quick lean backwards before he launches towards you again. It seems almost like he’s reloading his thoughts.

After talking to him, I came to the conclusion that being a person who eats meat , but not animal by products, is more of a humanitarian than the one who just refuses meat. He grew up on a cattle farm. Here’s his line of thinking:

BEEF: On his farm, the beef cows lived a healthy normal life. One day they were killed by being tapped in the head with a machine. Didn’t feel a thing. Then their bodies are carved into meat for you and I to eat. But the life of the cows is almost better than the wild in that they're protected from wild animals, and from having jealous bulls and such.

DAIRY: Dairy cows are given hormones to increase their milk. The goal is to get the udders as close to the ground as you can without them touching. If they touch, they kill the cow immediately. In order for cows to have milk, they have to have a calf. The calf is taken away from the mother immediately after birth. But, in order for the mom to produce more milk, the calf is kept alive in a crate where the mother can hear it’s crying in order to keep the mother producing. After two months, the calf is sold for meat (veil) because it’s too weak to grow into anything else.

The dairy cows, because of hormones and such, are in a constant need to be milked and feel immense pain. The only thing more painful, however, is the milking process when done by machines. Their life is one of constant induced labor, cramps from having too much milk in their system, sores on the udders, and hearing their calves until they stop producing; then they are killed (Usually younger than the beef cows). Dairy cows live a shorter, more pain filled unnatural life than any beef cow ever would.

Howabout we come up with a new term. A Diadairian or something.

Now, with that being said, my uncle said he'd make an exception for drinking milk and eating cheese. If he knew the owners of the animals and knew how he treated them. For an example, he would drink the milk of a cow that someone took care of like their dog. But, if they were the type of people that would get rid of the cow as soon as it stopped producing, my uncle wouldn't drink the milk no matter how nice he was during it's life. He's not a blood uncle so I definitely didn't get my stubbornness from him (though he has some to spare).

As long as you eat it afterwards, are the actions permissable? Should we eat no meat, no dairy. Or, no meat with dairy. Should we eat only from farms which treat their animals well? should we, in our current state, eat less meat? How do we justify killing a breathing thing for food when it's unneccessary?Should we eat no meat, no dairy. Or, no meat with dairy. Should we eat only from farms which treat their animals well? should we, in our current state, eat less meat? How do we justify killing a breathing thing for food when it's unneccessary?

Side note: Though I've been a vegetarian for the two past years, I am currently not one right now. I am eating meat.

Political Correctness.

Front Page magazine quoted this from Theodore Dalrymple:

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

David Berlinski once mentioned that great writers of the past--H.L. Mencken was the example used--wouldn't be great writers today because nearly everything they wrote wasn't Politically correct.

What is the real point of not offending people in the marketplace of ideas?