I was just reading --in TNY, where else? sigh-- that Upton Sinclair was Up-ended in his attempt to become the (Not Dot) Gov of California; by a new kid on the block called, "Campaigns Inc." which put in the newspapers, virtually daily, a quote from one of his many books. Many of them were out of context, such as the one which said, "I no longer believe in the sanctity of marriage." (this was out of the mouth of a depressed cuckolded and just-divorced character.)
This was a new model of campaigning, to dig up things the ordinary reporter has no time to do, even if so inclined. It was also sharply partisan and personal, and set the stage for many today to be hired to dig up dirt on the other side--but if paid sufficiently well, most of them will switch sides in a New Yorker Second.
I have already noted, somewhere, that most of my blogs would disqualify me for being elected for Animal Control Pooper Scooper Division. But it is rather piquant, is it not, that such a public or private investigator would only be semi-literate, and mostly dishonest in the first place? I don't even pretend that my friends really get what I'm trying to say, and my enemies less so, such that they would have to cobble something together out of random statements. And believe me, some of my statements can be pretty random! (But,O,Hey, that's evolution, right?)
Therefore, since Jesus said we should love our enemies; "I mean you, Bub, that's right IM talking to you!!!" I feel obligated to do what Christ said I should. (And you can read this out in, court, please do!)
"What I say to you, I say to all: watch! For the Son of Man will come in an hour which you know not."
In other words, Jesus loves you--but if you love Him not, and therefore obey Him not--well, ye shall have Him not. We get only what he have deepest in our hearts. And if your heart is full of wickedness and distorting the truth, the Truth, Way, and Life of which ye also know not one whit, you may well end up spending eternity with the people who hired you. Think about that for a minute.
Sunday, September 23, 2012
deep calls unto deep
where would I be
without your great, great mercy
where would I be
without your deep, deep love
where would I be
without your light to guide me
O my Lord
O my Lord
My Lord and my God
what would I do
without your great, great mercy
where would I go
without your deep deep love
where would I live
outside of your forgiveness
without the risen Son?
Where would I be?
--Glenn Kaiser, from the album, "Spontaneous Combustion," sung in the key of blues
without your great, great mercy
where would I be
without your deep, deep love
where would I be
without your light to guide me
O my Lord
O my Lord
My Lord and my God
what would I do
without your great, great mercy
where would I go
without your deep deep love
where would I live
outside of your forgiveness
without the risen Son?
Where would I be?
--Glenn Kaiser, from the album, "Spontaneous Combustion," sung in the key of blues
Sunday, September 16, 2012
New News--sort of...
In my last blog I hinted at why I was a little overwhelmed by circumstances, including some extraordinary demands that have continued from Aug. 31 on for the last 2 weeks, only in remission by dint of a weekend with no call at all.
The other factor may be that I have been waiting to have time to get into this new laptop, which puts me on par with my son Daniel, who has just gotten a work computer in addition to his Apple. I ended getting the exact same HP model as he just got, which was on sale.I figured if I had any problems with it, I would have two sons--John, who recommended this unit, and Dan, who is using it--who can help me with it. I got it a week ago but Dan just helped me with startup yesterday. In the process I managed to recover my blogspot user name and passwart. So all future blogging will be from my HP. My work computer is desperate for space, and doesn't need my >1,000 pix and vids on it!
(It still amazes me that I don't have to worry about film and developing costs.)
On another front, re: lo technico, I am not sure if I will put Dragonspeak on this laptop. I thought I would use it a lot for blogging, but it turns out that (a) I need the typing practice and discipline and (b)the process of writing seems to be different than merely dictating. Truly great writers like Milton could do just as well dictating as by using plume and ink. My writing skills and organizational abilities are already borderline enough, it wouldn't do to mix the two--unless I become blind. I think overall that Milton would have preferred to write more by sight and less by faith! (His faithful but very put-upon daughters who probably had a lot more discretionary time prior to Milton's acquired blindness) On the up side, if I were blind, I could sleep in!
With this I will close. But here's a question to ponder: should I keep my gift of the New Yorker subscription from my folks, or cancel it on principle and my visceral response to the magazine's ramped-up hostility to childbearing, motherhood, and even nursing? I am pondering--also my pent-up need to make a statement, which Flo says I should not curry--what to do. Maybe I could just cut out the cartoons I like and recycle the rest...what does the dear reader think? How much is it worth knowing what the other side is saying, when, after 30 years of being embedded in it, I find it so utterly predictable? It's not really much of an intellectual challenge anymore; nothing new under the sun, eh?
Or, since TNY will stop at nothing to advance their agenda...I could do nothing...and they would have to stop at it!!!
The other factor may be that I have been waiting to have time to get into this new laptop, which puts me on par with my son Daniel, who has just gotten a work computer in addition to his Apple. I ended getting the exact same HP model as he just got, which was on sale.I figured if I had any problems with it, I would have two sons--John, who recommended this unit, and Dan, who is using it--who can help me with it. I got it a week ago but Dan just helped me with startup yesterday. In the process I managed to recover my blogspot user name and passwart. So all future blogging will be from my HP. My work computer is desperate for space, and doesn't need my >1,000 pix and vids on it!
(It still amazes me that I don't have to worry about film and developing costs.)
On another front, re: lo technico, I am not sure if I will put Dragonspeak on this laptop. I thought I would use it a lot for blogging, but it turns out that (a) I need the typing practice and discipline and (b)the process of writing seems to be different than merely dictating. Truly great writers like Milton could do just as well dictating as by using plume and ink. My writing skills and organizational abilities are already borderline enough, it wouldn't do to mix the two--unless I become blind. I think overall that Milton would have preferred to write more by sight and less by faith! (His faithful but very put-upon daughters who probably had a lot more discretionary time prior to Milton's acquired blindness) On the up side, if I were blind, I could sleep in!
With this I will close. But here's a question to ponder: should I keep my gift of the New Yorker subscription from my folks, or cancel it on principle and my visceral response to the magazine's ramped-up hostility to childbearing, motherhood, and even nursing? I am pondering--also my pent-up need to make a statement, which Flo says I should not curry--what to do. Maybe I could just cut out the cartoons I like and recycle the rest...what does the dear reader think? How much is it worth knowing what the other side is saying, when, after 30 years of being embedded in it, I find it so utterly predictable? It's not really much of an intellectual challenge anymore; nothing new under the sun, eh?
Or, since TNY will stop at nothing to advance their agenda...I could do nothing...and they would have to stop at it!!!
Monday, September 10, 2012
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Killer Call/ER
I don't often write about my job, as you know, even though I may use medical illustrations at times, such as, "The Journal of Fretting Leprosy." But lately medicine has pretty much taken over my life--in fact it's the only reason I cannot blog regularly-or exercise regularly, sleep regularly, or even go to church regularly. I simply cannot be depended on to do anything other than medicine consistently and with quality. It has quite literally done what I feared it would do 30 years ago when I started. Not with crises as I envisioned, and dreams of the decay of all flesh, but just with the over-flux of information, expectations, and of course money, money, money; now more than ever. It has become an Overweening Abstraction much more than a benign- primum non nocere-force.
In the days of private practice, and even in the benign employ of a wonderful hospital and administrator, (all hatz off to Lynn KIein!) the postmodern practice of medicine has become a destroying angel. We rank 50th among the nations in health care effectiveness, yet we spends tons more money, and get further behind all the time. Many of the things upon which we have spent billions--including tons of medical records--have been shown to be ineffective or even harmful. A day doesn't go by in which people not get hospitalized and even die as the result of their own medications--regimens which require a constant flood of attention and study to manage. For instance, we have spent millions on niacin, fish oil, various diabetic treatments, fibrates and so forth--only to find out they do no good, do not prevent heart attacks or strokes, and have caused a myriad of side effects and even death for virtually no benefit at all.
And this same "science"; oh-so-sure-of-itself; and destined by evolutionary Might to rule and reign over us at every possible juncture; is what we are supposed to trust to define our very existence? "Imperfect" is certainly an understatement. True scientists who have an ounce of much-needed humility say that we know only an unimaginably tiny part of what could be known--never mind that which cannot be known.
Yet it depends intimately on law, lawyers, culture and society, to give it any existence at all, much less infinite credibility. The tail here is pretending it can wag the dog--but the assumption of materialism--not a provable hypothesis-- we have allowed largely because of the dubious largesse of tehno-wizardry, a religion unto itself-- and thus it is that we allow the cruelest of all possible Masters to rule over us, and throw out the only Manna we have ever had. A massive mess of pottage, indeed?
Now I have to decide, as a single individual before God, can I serve two masters? Generally speaking, no. But it takes a great deal of courage to throw oneself on the Greater master--the DOG if you will: in order to let go of the TAIL that has, ever so stupidly, declared independence from not only its Master but from the very Body to which it is attached; and without which it can only twitch for a few moments, then "dry; and die."
Even if we are no more important than a flea, as the world now tells us, while lying to use all the time to garner our money; c.f. "self-esteem" clubbery; it only makes sense, as we see the day approaching, to jump off the good-as-dead TAIL and make a flying leap of true faith to the very much alive DOG--Who is so great and so well balanced that He no longer needs, if ever He did, any kind of backwards appendage that ever points to the rear, and regress.
If thou art, not great, but a person of prayer, please pray that I will make decisions that are not only helpful but that please God in His Perfect Will and somehow in some minor way if not minor key, glorify Him and His and Heaven, leaving the tail convulsing in the dust from which it came and to which it still goes.
(Forgive the verbal excess--but I am very much a "man on fire" about this after a particularly horrible call. The Caller should trump "call" unless I very much have missed my calling."Hear what the Spirit says to the churches." )
In the days of private practice, and even in the benign employ of a wonderful hospital and administrator, (all hatz off to Lynn KIein!) the postmodern practice of medicine has become a destroying angel. We rank 50th among the nations in health care effectiveness, yet we spends tons more money, and get further behind all the time. Many of the things upon which we have spent billions--including tons of medical records--have been shown to be ineffective or even harmful. A day doesn't go by in which people not get hospitalized and even die as the result of their own medications--regimens which require a constant flood of attention and study to manage. For instance, we have spent millions on niacin, fish oil, various diabetic treatments, fibrates and so forth--only to find out they do no good, do not prevent heart attacks or strokes, and have caused a myriad of side effects and even death for virtually no benefit at all.
And this same "science"; oh-so-sure-of-itself; and destined by evolutionary Might to rule and reign over us at every possible juncture; is what we are supposed to trust to define our very existence? "Imperfect" is certainly an understatement. True scientists who have an ounce of much-needed humility say that we know only an unimaginably tiny part of what could be known--never mind that which cannot be known.
Yet it depends intimately on law, lawyers, culture and society, to give it any existence at all, much less infinite credibility. The tail here is pretending it can wag the dog--but the assumption of materialism--not a provable hypothesis-- we have allowed largely because of the dubious largesse of tehno-wizardry, a religion unto itself-- and thus it is that we allow the cruelest of all possible Masters to rule over us, and throw out the only Manna we have ever had. A massive mess of pottage, indeed?
Now I have to decide, as a single individual before God, can I serve two masters? Generally speaking, no. But it takes a great deal of courage to throw oneself on the Greater master--the DOG if you will: in order to let go of the TAIL that has, ever so stupidly, declared independence from not only its Master but from the very Body to which it is attached; and without which it can only twitch for a few moments, then "dry; and die."
Even if we are no more important than a flea, as the world now tells us, while lying to use all the time to garner our money; c.f. "self-esteem" clubbery; it only makes sense, as we see the day approaching, to jump off the good-as-dead TAIL and make a flying leap of true faith to the very much alive DOG--Who is so great and so well balanced that He no longer needs, if ever He did, any kind of backwards appendage that ever points to the rear, and regress.
If thou art, not great, but a person of prayer, please pray that I will make decisions that are not only helpful but that please God in His Perfect Will and somehow in some minor way if not minor key, glorify Him and His and Heaven, leaving the tail convulsing in the dust from which it came and to which it still goes.
(Forgive the verbal excess--but I am very much a "man on fire" about this after a particularly horrible call. The Caller should trump "call" unless I very much have missed my calling."Hear what the Spirit says to the churches." )
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Eutensiles
There are good tensiles and bad ones. u-tensils can be survival tools, even. But there is also, "good stress," and good pain--in fact most of pain and even malaise are prods to go here or there, fight, take flight, or blog. One can write novels like Walker Percy, whose primary subject was Deep existential Malaise, after Kierkegaard. "Nausea," was I think Sartre's word for it. (not sure what Camus called it--Dennis?)
The fly in the ointment of course is riches (those are not rubies or obsidian on your ice cream...) which cause us to not only become fatly embarrassed--by the end if not during the trials--but also invite ennui and a loss of appetite for the ordinary joys of life. I have these joys in abundance. But as D.L. Moody said, ""Madame, I leak." --referring to the Holy Spirit and Moody's insistence on regular infillings, not merely the manna-indwelling of yesterday. "People are about as happy as choose to be." Is't not so?
I am most fortunate to have many helpers, observers, and even Servants who are not afraid of the nakedness of the Imperator.
"Fork it over," I tell them.
"Must ye be spoon fed all the day?," they reply.
A Gordian Knife is what I really need. May I also borry a cup o' sugar, honey?
The fly in the ointment of course is riches (those are not rubies or obsidian on your ice cream...) which cause us to not only become fatly embarrassed--by the end if not during the trials--but also invite ennui and a loss of appetite for the ordinary joys of life. I have these joys in abundance. But as D.L. Moody said, ""Madame, I leak." --referring to the Holy Spirit and Moody's insistence on regular infillings, not merely the manna-indwelling of yesterday. "People are about as happy as choose to be." Is't not so?
I am most fortunate to have many helpers, observers, and even Servants who are not afraid of the nakedness of the Imperator.
"Fork it over," I tell them.
"Must ye be spoon fed all the day?," they reply.
A Gordian Knife is what I really need. May I also borry a cup o' sugar, honey?
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