If Ye Love Me

If Ye Love Me

Thomas Tallis

John 14:15

Integrity

Barack Hussein Obama has integrity. Willard Mitt Romney has none.

The word "integrity"comes from the word "integer" or "whole number."A whole number. Not a fraction. Not divided.

In order to have integrity, a person must have a quality of wholeness, of not being divided against himself. He cannot speak out of both sides of his mouth. He cannot compartmentalize his life and have separate truths for each compartment. He must be centered and speak from that center and speak as a whole man.

Mitt Romney is not an integer. He is not undivided. He has no wholeness. He has cut himself like a pie into so many pieces that the eye could not see them all, the ear cannot hear them all. He has taken every position on every issue, always depending on which he calculates will win him a vote. I wonder how many votes his lack of integrity has cost him. Enough? I can only hope.

NOTE: This was written BEFORE ROMNEY staged his FAKE  food collection for the sufferers of Hurricane Sandy. This done in Ohio, in a part of the state that was not affected, but which he needs to win. The rally was originally scheduled as a Victory Rally. Same time. Same place. New name. He sent his staff to buy $5000 of food to give to attendees to make it look like they were giving more to enhance the appearance of his event. Is anything about this man honest?

Who "they" really are

Colonel Wilkerson: My party is full of racists.

George McGovern

NOTE: Senator George McGovern passed away Sunday, October 21, 2012.

Former Senator George McGovern (D-SD), 90, has entered a hospice near his home in South Dakota and, in his daughter's words, is nearing the end of his life. This man is a national treasure who has never received the full respect that he deserved. He was a B-24 bomber pilot who flew combat missions over Nazi Germany and a true hero in World War II. He was a minister, a history and political science professor, and a Congressman before becoming the first director of President Kennedy's Food for Peace program. Sen. McGovern has remained active in the fight against world hunger all of his life. He served two terms in the House and three in the Senate but is perhaps most remembered for his unsuccessful bid to prevent President Richard Nixon's re-election in 1972, running on a platform of ending the war, cutting defense, and granting amnesty to draft evaders. The 1972 election took place after what would become the Watergate scandal had broken but before the populace had awakened to it and before Nixon had been disgraced. Nixon won in a landslide. I remember during the campaign I was separated from my husband, whom I loved almost more than life itself. He told me I could come home if I promised to vote for Nixon and not McGovern, that he would have no McGovern supporters in his house. As much as I loved him, I had to say no. I cried for weeks, but he never knew this. But my vote was not for sale. 

McGovern is primarily remembered for his activism against the Viet Nam War and his work to end it, with many people forgetting even his bravery and heroism in WWII, and, in our polarized society, with some still holding his anti-war stance against him. He co-sponsored the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment to defense appropriation bills in 1970 and '71, which, had it succeeded, would have ended the war by cutting off funds. He addressed the Senate and said the following:

"Every Senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every Senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across our land—young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces or hopes. There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure. Do not talk to them about bugging out, or national honor or courage. It does not take any courage at all for a congressman, or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. But we are responsible for those young men and their lives and their hopes. And if we do not end this damnable war those young men will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the Executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us." Afterward, a fellow senator told McGovern that he was offended. "That is what I meant to do," McGovern replied. 

Send your positive energy, your thoughts, your prayers or daimoku to this remarkable man as he makes this transition. We are losing a giant.

    NOTE: Senator George Stanley McGovern died Sunday, October 21, 2012.

Following Einstein's Rules

My favorite lesson to be learned from Albert Einstein is number 5, "Make mistakes." I learned how important this step is to creativity and how liberating it is when I went to MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as a Visiting Scientist in the late 1980's. I remember my surprise in my first brainstorming session in a class in MIT's stellar Department of Linguistics. We were really brainstorming. People were shouting out the most ridiculous ideas, the dumbest suggestions, the most far-fetched possibilities with no inhibitions and without embarrassment. At first I was stunned. I couldn't believe my ears. But soon the ideas came faster and were better, more clever, and before too long we had a very good hypothesis for the solution to our problem. 

MIT, of course, ranks in the top 10 institutions of higher learning in the world. My regular school, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, ranks 42nd in the world. That's nothing to sneeze at. I'm talking the whole world. But at Carolina, we would have been embarrassed to offer the bad ideas that we had to go through in order to get to the good ideas in that class at MIT. We would has sat more quietly, holding back, waiting until we felt more sure of what we had to say. I was never in on a brainstorming session at UNC where any of the ideas were as bad as those at that first session at MIT or where such an elegant solution was reached in such a short amount of time. The reason? At MIT, the students were not afraid of making mistakes. They were not afraid of being wrong. They knew that you have to go through a lot of garbage before you find gold and they joyfully did so. 

I felt liberated. I had been set free. It was okay to think big, think wild, make mistakes, try things out, try things on. My whole approach to learning changed as a result of being in the environment at MIT. While I love Carolina and I learned a great deal there about linguistics and had wonderful professors, I learned my most important lesson at MIT. It's okay to be wrong. In fact, in linguistics, you want to make a claim about language that is strong enough that you might be wrong, that someone may know a language that disproves your claim. And you need to know that you have advanced knowledge by doing that, by discovering something about language that is NOT true. 

All of the linguists I admire do this type of research and publication. They make strong, explicit claims about the nature of language, just begging their audiences to come up with counter-examples. Those counter-examples may be re-analyzed and resolved or they may shoot their theories down. Either way, you have learned, and you have taught. 

Because of my experience in the brainstorming session in the class at MIT, I was able to be creative, to imagine a theory of Albanian verbs and their subjects and objects that far exceeded what I had planned to do in my dissertation prospectus. As a result, my dissertation was a thousand times better than it would have been, and MIT published it as the third in their series of Occasional Papers in Linguistics. I surprised my professors back in Chapel Hill when I mailed them their copies of my draft, pleasantly surprised them. My work was cited by many linguists coming after me. 

Hard work becomes fun when you follow Einstein's rules.