Before summer ends stroll out to the tip of the long pier that slides like a spear into the Gulf of Mexico from the Biloxi Lighthouse. Quiet your mind and open your senses. The sun embraces you, the water gently slaps the girders below and a steady breeze strokes your face and tosses your hair. Squadron after squadron of brown pelicans glide serenely by, sometimes as high as you can throw a rock, sometimes only inches above the water. If you sit there long enough, you begin to notice individuals surfing the currents mid-air, scanning the surface below for fish. All of a sudden one of them pulls in his wings and curves into a 60 foot high dive! He disappears with a small splash, immediately bobs back up, and floats like a cork for a few moments. You imagine that he is either knocking back the fish he’s caught or reviewing his flawed technique. While he is floating there a second one a little farther off dives, and a third. Then the first pelican pushes his wings back out, beats back gravity and climbs into the late afternoon sky. At intervals the other two leave the surface for the sky, and, in a kind of ballet, the three birds repeat the sequence over and over and over. Continue reading PELICANS AND REALITY
Category: Show Blogs
Posts from hosts from different shows.
FACT. REALITY. TRUTH.
In the summer of 2002, reporter Ron Suskind met with a senior advisor to George W. Bush who famously accused Suskind of living in the “reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from (a) judicious study of discernible reality.” Suskind writes:
“I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment (sic) principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”
SCHLOCK
In 1950, Republican senator Joseph McCarthy brandished a piece of paper and declared “The State Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” There is some evidence that that piece of paper was blank, but the claim fanned the anti-Communism fear that was smoldering in America into a raging forest fire. “In the next few weeks,” according to the History Channel’s “This Day in History” for February 9th, “the number fluctuated wildly, with McCarthy stating at various times that there were 57, or 81, or 10 communists in the Department of State. In fact, McCarthy never produced any solid evidence that there was even one communist in the State Department.” Notwithstanding the obvious contrivance, it became a sensational story that led to a tsunami of media attention for the junior senator, stoked hysteria, helped spread fear of debate and dissent, destroyed lives, and brought the American constitutional political process to its knees. Continue reading SCHLOCK
