Our Niagara Falls

 

A little sneak preview of the lesson y'all are gonna get from me on Sunday as once again we discuss the Israelites rapidly going through the good/bad cycle as they try to stay close to God and as they fail.

Their prophets, and some of the people, see it coming, they can see the cycle slowly turning toward the bad, and though they warn and pray and try to act as they should. They knew the signs, but always fell for the trigger.

So what is our Niagara Falls?

The Summer of George is Over

The magic has left summer.

Let me explain: For the past billion summers, the family -- meaning all but me -- have gone to camp, whether it was Island Park Scout Camp or Treasure Mountain Scout Camp. Leaving me at home, of course, with the joke that I was the one earning the real money so they could go play all summer.

I reveled in the restored bachelorhood and found time to get chores done.

Then this summer.

I don't know what made the difference, but I've felt more lonely, more blah, and not all that motivated at all to get things done.

I've tried to get things done. I built a rail on the back steps. Twice. I've split some wood and worked on cleaning up the spot where the pine tree was. But it all feels mechanical. Part of it might be the heat. But I think traditional summer is coming to an end for me.

Part of me needs a vacation. But part of me wants that vacation to be me working on things around the house without having to fret over budgets and whatnot. I guess I'd better keep working so someday we can do that.

I'm trying not to be gloomy. But this year has been hard. Maybe next year, the Summer of George!

Between Books

I'm between books at the moment.

That's a tough place to be for a nebbish like myself.

I do have book pretty much wherever I go. I even took a boxful of books out to work because space is a premium at home and I had a shelf in my office that was pretty empty.

I do most of my reading at work now, at breaks and at lunch, of course. I need to have a new book on hand there, though. I finished one yesterday and forgot to bring a new one today.

I do grab one off the shelf at work in a pinch, but it's not the same. I've got so many that need to be read . . .

A Cloak for Cowardice

As I read "Three Against Hitler," by Rudi Wobbe and Jerry Borrowman - a telling of the story of Helmuth Hubener who, with his friends, including Wobbe, published and distributed anti-Nazi information in their native Hamburg as teenagers, I can't but help to look for parallels to our own day.

This story is an exceptionally good lens for me to look through, as with Wobbe and Hubener, I also am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Before you sneer, consider this: This isn't necessarily a churchy book or a "Mormon" book either; though the protagonists remain true to their faith, the goal of this book isn't to preach.

And, as with my own observations, it doesn't put all member of the church in a good light; some of them supported the Nazis either through enthusiasm or through simply trying to get along without making waves -- something Hubener and his friends didn't shy away from.

An aside: I don't know how true to the story this movie is. I haven't seen it. I've just read Wobbe's book.

The parallels: Though support of Donald Trump today certainly doesn't rise to the level of supporting the Nazis, there are troubling similarities in members of the church choosing to support, either wholeheartedly, or through a desire not to make waves, what's going on right now. We're on the cusp of something that could turn pretty sinister, and I think it's up to us to decide what side of the fence to be on. I know what side my Dad would have me be on, waves or not. so that's where I lie.

Wobbe's book isn't shy discussing this either. Even after immigrating to Utah, he finds some resistance to the idea of resisting tyranny. We have to be very, very careful in electing whom to support outside of God.

I see members of the church cling to some messages by past prophets as justifications for serving God and mammon. I can't do that. It's Jesus or nothing. If our government chooses to do the wrong thing, we can't go along with it just because one of the tenets of our faith is that we support government. Government does wrong, and we can't support wrong.

As I read this book, I see how easy it is to twist messages. Wobbe shares this from the White Rose Movement, an anti-Nazi organization active during the war:

There is a point at which the law becomes immoral and unethical. That point is reached when it becomes a cloak for the cowardice that dares not stand up against blatant violations of justice. A state that suppresses all freedom of speech and which, by imposing the most terrible punishment, treats each and every attempt at criticism, however morally justified, and every suggestion for improvement as "plotting to high treason," is a state that breaks an unwritten law.

Wobbe concludes that unwritten law is God's law of agency, where it lies in the conscience and heart of each person to decide how to act.

Some look at these words as treasonous. Some look at these words as an excuse to commit treason. It's the contradiction of all contracictions. Wobbe can't explain it, but he saw the result: Many, many people justified their actions out of righteous desires: Patriotism, freedom, loyalty, love.

Part of that unwritten law is do unto others as you would have other do unto you. It cannot be an eye for an eye, or a tooth for a tooth, as that leaves us all blind and toothless.

Wrong should be dealt with and punished. But wrong should be agreed upon, not made whim to whatever political winds blow. I've seen both major US political parties justify wrong in the name of doing something right, or wrong in the name of "The other side is doing it; we have to do so as well or we'll fall behind."

So I'm not a Republican. I'm not a Democrat. Nor am I a libertarian or whatever other political alliances are out there. They're all corrupt and try to justify their wrongness with a cloak of righteousness.

I'd rather go to prison like Wobbe than fall in league with that kind of fiction.

Just. Stop.

The AI slop continues to hurt.

I have not interacted with this one as I don't want to feed the algorithm.

That is the goal, of course. AI offers a refined way to produce ragebait for engagement.

Burn in hell, Dr. Marvin. (She never says that.)

Way too Late at the Movies: Project Hail Mary

I guess I'm not *too* late for this one, as it came out this year.

And wow, this is good old-fashioned hard science fiction with something Elon Musk would absolutely hate: Empathy.

I won't dwell on Musk's incredulous thoughts and focus rather on the movie, which displays self-sacrifice and empathy in spades.

Sure, part of the self-sacrifice is forced: Protagonist Grace is sent on a species-saving mission against his will **spoilers** literally drugged into a coma and winkled aboard the spaceship.

But he grows into empathy as he awakens and finds his other two crew members have died on the way to Tau Ceti where they hope to find the answer to a mystery that is threatening Earth's sun.

Back against the wall, Grace could have done nothing. But he finds Rocky, another sentient being sent to Tau Ceti, also alone, trying to find the answer to the same question.

They figure out how to talk to each other. They figure out how to help each other work on the mystery. And they figure out that the best way to help "save the world" is to get along and focus on the problem.

That is, of course, not all. Once the problem is solved, Grace runs into another problem that could threaten them both. But they're separated by a month of travel. Does he go back to help Rocky, and risk is own future?

Damn right he does. He sends his discoveries on to Earth in probes, as Earth's suicide mission originally intended, and goes back to help Rocky survive and live to help his own planet.

Absolutely loved this film.

Mortgage Going Down

We're to the point in our lives where we owe less than $40,000 on our home mortgage.

The number shown here is even a bit old.

Not bragging. Well, maybe a little about that interest rate. I still can't believe we got that -- this was from a refinance when we rolled $14,000 in debt for solar panels into the mortgage as well. (Sure, if we hadn't done that, we'd owe even less on the house, but doing so cut the interest rate on the panels by five full points, so it was worth it.)

I'd love to be able to do some kind of lump sum payment to get it all done at once, but we're not to that point yet.

One Last Log

Today, and thanks in part to a random Amazon driver who had some advice on log-splitting, I got down to just one more massive log to split. And at this point, I'm not sure I'm going to cut it up. Oh, I probably will, but I'm feeling pretty tired at the moment.

I still have a lot of work to do to make this area more presentable, clearly. But getting the firewood out of the way is a big step and should make the rest of the work easier to accomplish.

Copyright Strike Incoming

Spotted in the wild today:

United States Department of Education 'bout to get a copyright strike from Disney.

They do not play around with their IP.

Book Review: The Town, by Shaun Prescott

There’s a part in Groundhog Day where Bill Murray’s Phil Connors is talking with two Punxatawney derelicts in a bar, who knows how long into his confinement in the town, where one of the derelicts says Phil strikes him as a “glass half empty” kind of person.

Phil, lost in the neverending small-town hell, replies: “What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?”

The other derelict, soppy in his beer, responds “That pretty much sums it up for me.”

Phil, of course, escapes his exile in small-town hell as he gives up the self-pity and self-loathing and loses himself in service to what he discovers are the delightful characters of this small hamlet in western Pennsylvania that make the town pleasant, appealing, and definitely worth living in.

At the end of his film, having won the heart of his long-long-ed-for Rita, he says, “Let’s live here. We’ll rent to start.”

I’ve just finished reading Shaun Prescott’s “The Town,” set mostly in a dusty kinda central Australian town gradually being lost, footpaths, fibro houses, and listless, useless inhabitants and all, to a mysterious shimmer never really explained.

At first I saw Phil and the two derelicts in the town, in the story, and thought, “Well, maybe there’s redemption somewhere along the way.” I had my doubts – Prescott’s story was compared to Kafta, famous for no redemption whatsoever.

And I went with that feeling – but not with allusions to Kafka, but more with allusions to Jean-Paul Sartre, who famously wrote “Hell is other people.”

The concluding idea to Prescott’s story is similar, but perhaps even more gloomy: Apocalypse, it seems, is other people.

Because Prescott’s town suffers a nameless, formless apocalypse wrapped in the metaphor of holes appearing and causing blocks of the town and its inhabitants to disappear, but the story is really an apocalyptic tale without the apocalypse, as the people his characters encounter are a far worse fate than any mysterious shimmer could ever be.

There’s a lot about belonging to this tale, and at the end, well, nobody really finds it. There’s no surcease from the hell of the small town in the city.

Early on in the novel, we get this:

“People might be wiser to cower in towns. Maybe they wouldn’t be so devastated when the sea water rose. Maybe when everything became desperate, a small town would finally live up to the qualities that everyone believed them to have: Namely, that everyone would help one another out. Maybe the town would have tea parties during the apocalypse, while people in the city tore each other to shreds.”

Of course, people in the town tore each other to shreds, whether through a grudge, a fistfight, or general disdain. When the apocalyptic shimmer arrived and claimed victims, no one seemed too bothered, as it wasn’t them being lost forever.

The protagonist and Ciara, another small-town denizen, flee to the city, and quickly discover this:

“[Ciara] told me that everyone in the city speaks about the city in the same way that people in the town spoke about the town. They say the city is not what it used to be. If she asks what it used to be, they simply reply that it used to be more like a city.”

The apocalypse of people find them in the city, though the shimmer is long left behind. And it not needed, as the apocalypse is there all along.