Poland hopes to identify remains of Auschwitz hero - Yahoo! News

Poland hopes to identify remains of Auschwitz hero - Yahoo! News
Excerpt:

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — It could hardly have been a riskier mission: infiltrate Auschwitz to chronicle Nazi atrocities. Witold Pilecki survived nearly three years as an inmate in the death camp, managing to smuggle out word of executions before making a daring escape. But the Polish resistance hero was crushed by the post-war communist regime — tried on trumped-up charges and executed.

Six decades on, Poland hopes Pilecki's remains will be identified among the entangled skeletons and shattered skulls of resistance fighters being excavated from a mass grave on the edge of Warsaw's Powazki Military Cemetery. The exhumations are part of a movement in the resurgent, democratic nation to officially recognize its war-time heroes and 20th century tragedies...

Anecdotal Evidence: `A Rush of Cochineal'

Anecdotal Evidence: `A Rush of Cochineal'
Excerpt:
It fed at the Calliandra californica, called the fairy duster, an airy pink puff of a flower. In flight, the bird was a gray blur. Hovering, it glistened green and red like a Christmas ornament. I love Emily Dickinson’s poem about the hummingbird in which she never identifies her subject by name, as though it were too speedy, too elusive to pin down with a mere word: 

“A Route of Evanescence

With a revolving Wheel--

A Resonance of Emerald--

A Rush of Cochineal;

And every Blossom on the Bush

Adjusts its tumbled Head, --

The mail from Tunis, probably,

An easy Morning's Ride.” 

A hummingbird in flight is less an object than a place or process – “A Route of Evanescence” – and its wings in profile give the impression of rotational energy, like a flywheel (did Dickinson imply the pun?). Her rhyming, as always, is wittily eccentric: “Wheel”/”Cochineal.”...

Nigeness: Mr Joad's 'buzzing bluebottle'

Nigeness: Mr Joad's 'buzzing bluebottle'

Abbey-Roads: Michael Voris on Fr. Bob and the normalization of homosexuality in the Catholic Church

Abbey-Roads: Michael Voris on Fr. Bob and the normalization of homosexuality in the Catholic Church

*Light-A-Lamp*: The Whosoever People

*Light-A-Lamp*: The Whosoever People
Excerpt:
She side-glanced at umbrella guy...

Man Uses His Schizophrenia to Gather Clues for Daily Living - NYTimes.com

Man Uses His Schizophrenia to Gather Clues for Daily Living - NYTimes.com
Excerpt:
Small things, maybe, but Mr. Greek has learned to live with his diagnosis in part by understanding and acting on its underlying messages, and along the way has built something exceptional: a full life, complete with a family and a career.
He is one of a small number of successful people with a severe psychiatric diagnosis who have chosen to tell their story publicly. In doing so, they are contributing to a deeper understanding of mental illness — and setting an example that can help others recover..

Anecdotal Evidence: `When Things Get Too Much for Me'

Anecdotal Evidence: `When Things Get Too Much for Me'

Hats and Rabbits: No Job Too Small

Hats and Rabbits: No Job Too Small

Abbey-Roads: The need to be more sensitive online.

Abbey-Roads: The need to be more sensitive online.

Eros as delusion: Poet Helen Pinkerton tips her hat to Thomas Aquinas (and Yvor Winters) | The Book Haven

Eros as delusion: Poet Helen Pinkerton tips her hat to Thomas Aquinas (and Yvor Winters) | The Book Haven
Excerpt:
Helen Pinkerton‘s interview in Think Journal, “The Love of Being,” starts out slowly – but by the time she gets to Thomas Aquinas, she’s on a tear...

We Are One: Accept it all

We Are One: Accept it all

The Gnomes Have Returned

The only way to read a book of aphorisms without being bored is to open it at random and, having found something that interests you, close the book and ‘meditate’.

·        mystery: …active mystery, mysticism, mystic…or…folly, illusion, magical spin…surrealism, magical realism… quhasaeuer….

·        It’s them eyes of his’n…they’s always lookin’ at you…or ‘in the blender’—the ‘new’[?] modus operandi:

“The gnomes have returned from under the ‘toad stool’, Hopkins.” 

“What’s that you say, Watson?”  

“The gnomes…”

“What about ‘em?  Speak up, man!”

“Well, they’ve brought all those aphoristic rolls with them.  They didn’t even bother to dust them off!  I saw them ‘in the library’ with a blender!”

“A library!  A blender?  Well, where was the librarian?  They should put a stop to this…this …triviation…!  And need I remind you, Watson, the correct term is ‘codex’, not rolls..Tell me, now, what went into the blender?”

“I was horrified, Hopkins, they actually tore pages from the books…encyclopedias, Bibles, novels…every kind…then stuffed them into the blender…and out came this…gooey mess…”

Terror in his eyes and voice Hopkins was barely able to speak in a whisper:

“Watson, what library was it? What are they doing with the …‘goo’?”

Watson peered across the table light specked with dust particles highlighting their table and in a barely audible whisper answered:  “This one, Hopkins…”, his voice choking. After the deconstruction from the blender they re-glue the bits and pieces to a sheet of blank paper and where there are ‘blanks’ or ‘torn edges’ they patch them with letters and symbols as if poured out of carafes.”

“Centos?  They are replacing the works in the library with ‘patchwork’ word quilts?  God help us, Watson!”

        [Chorus…it seems a new patch on an old garment, a purpureus pannus…]

“Well, Hopkins, the advertising age has hit the slopes, that’s what.  Maxims, slogans, perjorations, epigrams, and salutations.  But ‘in the blender’!  It’s irreverent, blasphemous, disrespectful!  Under ‘Aphorisms’ are…

•           Book of Proverbs

•           Chiasmus

•           Cliché

•           Ecclesiastes

•           Wisdom of Sirach

•           Epigram

•           Gospel of Thomas

•           Greguería

•           Maxim

•           Proverb

•           Pseudo-Phocylides

•           Sūtra:  Literally it means a thread or line that holds things together and is derived from the verbal root siv-, meaning to sew[1] (these words, including Latin suere and English to sew, all ultimately deriving from PIE *siH-/syuH- 'to sew'), as does the medical term "suture."

No codification rules, definitely deficient a priori (except one: be certain to not have any ‘a priori’), equate all in typographic ‘list’ as that above where there is a hint of ‘equal’ worth among the writings in the list.”

“Watson, stop! Pig slop…that’s what it is. No line drawn in the sand.”

[Chorus…in many cultures, including Samuel Johnson's England, many East and Southeast Asian societies, and throughout the world, the ability to spontaneously produce aphoristic sayings at exactly the right moment is a key determinant of social status. Many societies have traditional sages or culture heroes to whom aphorisms are commonly attributed, such as the Seven Sages of Greece, Confucius or King Solomon.

Misquoted or misadvised aphorisms are frequently used as a source of humour; for instance, wordplays of aphorisms appear in the works of P. G. Wodehouse, Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams. Aphorisms being misquoted by sports players, coaches, and commentators form the basis of Private Eye's Colemanballs section.]

“Humour? Word plays?” 

“Hopkins…I recall a conversation in a stroll through Oxford:

…"Sometimes however," said Middleton "one does imagine a quotation to be a whole when it is only a part. The effect is curious. I think what I mean would be explained by what you were saying. I have noticed sometimes this effect with regard to those quotations and tags of poetry and so on one sees added to the titles of pictures in the catalogue…”

“Yes, Watson, I remember that, too.  There were fiery debates on what ‘aesthetics’ had become.  The usual frenzy against any sort of absolutism. Then that dark mixing of theosophy and ‘inspiration’ spread its slithering ink everywhere.  Still see it continually morphing into surrealism, magical realism, and aphorism. Many never consider the need for or responsibility of ascertaining the source of inspiration.  Others are well aware of the source and repudiate it.”

Abbey-Roads: Thoughts on Truth, Love, and Happiness.

Abbey-Roads: Thoughts on Truth, Love, and Happiness.

Anecdotal Evidence: `To Unriddle the Job-Like Vagaries of the Human Heart'

Anecdotal Evidence: `To Unriddle the Job-Like Vagaries of the Human Heart'
Excerpt:
he most dispiriting book I can remember reading is While Europe Slept, by Bruce Bawer, an X-ray of a continent’s cowardice, hypocrisy and moral confusion. Bawer’s subtitle tells the tale: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. Bawer is an American writer who moved to the Netherlands in 1998 and later to Norway. These are nations I, like Bawer, grew up thinking were civilized, sophisticated, liberal-minded democracies – in short, like us. Bawer demolishes our naïve image by documenting patterns of knee-jerk anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and capitulation to Islamic thugs. Out of fear of offending barbarians (ponder that phrase for a moment), the French, Germans and others have given their tacit approval to female genital mutilation, wife beating, murder and routine Jew-baiting. It’s that last point I want to look at. Here’s Bawer:

“…since 2000, anti-Semitism in France has been epidemic. Synagogues have been burned down, schools vandalized, shops attacked, rabbis beaten, children assaulted, school buses shot at, gravestones knocked over and defaced with swastikas and the name of Hitler. At Muslim demonstrations, shouts of `Death to the Jews’ have become common. (one thing I’ve noticed is that while Americans speaks of `Jews’ or, more often, `Jewish people,’ Europeans usually say `the Jews.’)”

One day before I started Bawer’s book, I...