Half Staff

The picture shows all the flags flying at half-staff yesterday at the entrance to CITGO Corporation’s national headquarters in Houston.  This was done upon the death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and was also done at CITGO facilities in Lake Charles and Corpus Christi.

Chavez was never as globally significant as he wanted to be, but he did his best to be percieved as an enemy of the United States, and a friend to the leaders of countries like Cuba, Libya and Iran. 

The fact that a US corporation would honor him this way had a lot of people irate, but it is only fair to point out that CITGO is owned by Venezuela.

CITGO released a statement Wednesday which read, "President Hugo Chávez of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela leaves behind a legacy of support for the underprivileged and promotion of social justice that transcends geographical boundaries. We at CITGO Petroleum Corporation are deeply saddened by the news of his passing. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and the people of Venezuela in this time of grief."

The flags on those poles are the banners of the United States, Venezuela, Texas and the CITGO corporate flag.  Talk show calls and on-line comments would seem to indicate that more folks were incensed about lowering the Texas flag than the American one.

Canadian Camels

That is a little piece of bone lying on the rocky soil of  Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic. 

It, and other pieces like it, have led scientists to announce that Camels - the ancestors of the modern day Camels of Africa and the Middle East – got their start in Northern Canada. 

They say Camels originated in North America about 45 million years ago and underwent most of their evolution on this continent before dying off. The testing also showed that the Canadian animals were from the same line of camels that hiked from North America into Asia over the Bering Land Bridge seven to eight million years ago.

Over the years camel bones have been unearthed in Alaska and the Yukon, but this latest find is significant because it is 1,200 kilometers farther north, making it the “first evidence of a High Arctic camel.”

Scientists at Dalhousie University used a sophisticated dating technique to show the Ellesmere bone fragments are about 3.5 million years old.

Problem Solved

I mentioned a couple days ago that I had a heck of a time posting to my blog – that Windows Live Writer saw an expired security certificate and refused to connect.  Well, the problem has been solved.

An on-line search of the error led to an easy fix:

Certificate will not be valid until (date)

(site name) uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate has expired. The certificate will not be valid until (date). (Error code: sec_error_expired_issuer_certificate)

This error can occur if your computer clock has the wrong date, in which case the date given in the error message will be in the past. To fix the problem, set your system clock to today's date and time (double-click the clock icon on the Windows Taskbar).

Sure enough, a check of my computer’s calendar showed the date as February 3 instead of March 3.  I have no idea how or why that happened, but correcting the date solved the problem.

There is an option in the Date and Time setup that is supposed to prevent this problem from happening.  Obviously, it is not foolproof.

Non-binary Dualism

 

Native American culture, particularly the religions of the Desert Southwest, speak of the duality of existence, the duality of the universe, and the need to never stray too far from a center path.

Compassion and aggression, for example, exist in each of us, but too much of either can weaken our souls.  The chief purpose of healing ceremonies is to help the patient get back into balance, back to that center path. This is a concept that I have long embraced.  One that I felt sure I understood until a few days ago. 

That’s when I came across an incredibly racist  article claiming that non-Indians couldn’t possibly understand Native American religion because our thought systems are based on  binary thinking! 

The statement was made by a woman who is a Native American.  It’s the kind of statement I could never get by with, but members of minorities often make with impunity – but maybe that should be a subject for a later day.

Native American Professor Anne Waters, writing in American Indians in Philosophy for the American Philsophical Association says that while most European/American thought is based on binary thinking, Native Americans see the same dualism in a nonbinary way. 

Binary dualism is the division of things into two (opposing) categories. Good and evil, light and darkness, man and woman,  stillness and motion, and the list goes on ad infinitum. In European/American culture and tradition, thought and language are built around this notion of binary dualism.

Waters goes on to explain that a nonbinary, complementary, dualist construct would distinguish two things:

(1) a dualism, such as male/female that may appear (in a binary ontology) as opposites or different from one another in some important respect; and
(2) a nonbinary (complementary) syntax that puts together these two constructs without maintaining the sharp and clear boundary distinctions of a binary system.

A nonbinary (complementary) dualism would place the two  together in such a way that one would remain itself, and yet also be a part of the other. In this way, any hierarchical valuing of one as being better, superior, or more valued than another  is excluded by the nonbinary logic.

She says that such complementary (nonbinary) dualisms can be found today in language and religion of such diverse indigenous people as the Ojibwa (Chippewa) in Canada,  the Mayan in South America, and in the metaphysics of the Southwestern US tribes such as the Hopi and Navajo.

Maybe my tiny bit of Choctaw blood somehow made me immune from the stupidity of White Folks, but I’m pretty sure that I grasped the concept of a nonbinary dualism a long time ago.  I find her notion that people of European ancestry are incapable of the subtlety of thought necessary to understand such a concept to be extremely annoying.

An Old Story

 I hope you enjoy today's post.  I had a heck of a time posting it.  Apparently, Windows Live Writer has decided that Google has an expired security certificate and is refusing to connect.  I had similar notices yesterday with Google News and Google Search, but Firefox allowed me to connect anyway.  This morning, my Gmail account is blocked with no "connect anyway" option.  I can still access my blog page, but can't post to it from Windows.

I mentioned last month - Precinct Roulette – that I had received a jury summons. 

I am now of an age that I am no longer required to go, but I do have to notify the court by mail if I opt out.  There ought to be an easier way of doing that, but there is not. 

I have served on both criminal and civil juries in the past, and while I wouldn’t call it entertaining, it was always enlightening. I still haven’t decided if I’m going this time, but I need to make up my mind soon.

This morning, I came across this story from the Hampton Roads, Virginia Daily Press:

A juror who served on a recent Newport News murder trial technically didn't have to because of his age.

The man was one of 12 jurors who served last week in the case of 20-year-old Kwame Drayton.

After nearly four hours of deliberations on Wednesday, the jury found Drayton guilty of first-degree murder and related charges in the March 2011 death of Terrance Williamson. The jury then recommended that Drayton serve 48 years in prison.

As the jurors were exiting the courtroom, Newport News Circuit Judge Timothy Fisher asked one juror to stay behind.

"You do know you didn't have to serve?" Fisher asked him.

The juror gave him a puzzled look.

"You could have opted out because of your age," Fisher said.

"Really, now you tell me?" the juror replied.

"I wasn't going to tell everyone you were that old," Fisher told him, with a chuckle.

The juror and the courtroom erupted in laughter. It was a light moment at the end of an often tense three-day trial. In Virginia, if you are 70 years old or older, you may ask to be excused from jury duty.

The Amazing Self-deleting Grocery List

One day, as we were unloading groceries, Honey announced “I have been doing all of the grocery shopping for over thirty years.  The next thirty are your turn.”

That was about sixteen years ago, so my “turn” is a little over halfway done.  With the exception of special occasions like shopping for one of our trips, she has not set foot in a grocery store since she made that announcement.

She does maintain a handwritten grocery list on a five by eight legal pad.  On shopping day, I just tear off the top sheet and take it along to the store. As I pick up the items on the list, I draw a line through them.  This has worked very well, although it has led to me buying a lot of cheap ballpoint pens because I forgot to bring one along.

This week, when I got to the store, I glanced at the list and was surprised to find that everything on the list was already marked out!  The only exceptions were fresh veggies and salad stuff, purchases so automatic that I probably wouldn’t have bothered to write them down in the first place.

I was confused and a little annoyed.  I wondered why I bothered to bring the list at all.  I stuffed it back in my pocket and forgot about it.  When I got home, I threw it in the garbage in the garage before carrying the groceries into the house.

That was Wednesday.

Thursday, Honey asked me if I had bought hair spray and I replied “No.  It was marked out.”

“No it wasn’t.”

“Yes it was,  Everything on the list was marked out.  It was the most useless excuse for a list I ever saw.”

We argued about it for a while and finally just agreed to disagree.

Friday was garbage day, and just to prove I wasn’t crazy, I dug the list out of the trash before I hauled it to the street. 

The lines that I know that I saw at the HEB were gone!

The blue ink of the pre-printed ruling lines on the page was darker than usual – actually bleeding over a bit.  I can only assume that in the store’s fluorescent light those lines appeared to mark out the stuff written on the list.

Any other explanation would seem to suggest that I have a problem.

 

Steven Spielberg Frees the Slaves

 

The 13th Amendment was adopted by the U.S. in 1865.

Mississippi, like several other states whose delegations opposed the measure at the time -- New Jersey and Kentucky included – eventually voted to ratify the amendment.  

Only 130 years behind the rest of the country, the Mississippi legislature officially passed the amendment outlawing slavery in 1995.

Dr. Ranjan Batra, an associate professor at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, got interested in the issue after watching the Steven Spielberg movie "Lincoln." He, along with another UMC colleague, discovered that the state did not officially notify the U.S. archivist in 1995 as required.  Without that crucial notification, the ratification never officially took place.

They notified the Mississippi Secretary of State, who sent the required letter, and got this one back:

 

So now it is official, and all those imaginary slaves down in Mississippi are singing “Free at last, free at last.  Thank Steven Spielberg, I’m free at last.”

I couldn’t make this stuff up.  Here’s the story from the Jacksonville, MS Clarion-Ledger.