What are we Fighting for/with?

Who are we Fighting???


Sunni or Shiite??? many policy makers do not know. Jeff Stein, writer for the Congressional Quarterly, posed the question to some people in the government, and they came up short. They still are!!!!

From articles in the Times: here is a cheat sheet I put together, in case some one wants to play trivial pursuits about who we are fighting, who they are fighting, and the wisdom to know the difference..... ??????

Here are some of the hot ones:

Al Qaeda: Sunni (Osama bin Laden etc.)

Saudi Arabia: Sunni

Iran: Shiite

Hezbollah: Shiite

Palestine: Mostly Sunni

Sadam Hussein: Sunni

Iraq is split between Shi'a and Sunni, with the latter further divided between Sunni Arabs and Sunni Kurds; and thus that Iranian influence over at least some parts of the Shi'a population is hard to avoid, even given the fact (which they should also know) that relations between the Iraqi and Iranian Shi'a have not always been particularly smooth.

Historically, the two branches of Muslim Islam, has been summed up as follows:

The split occured immediately following the death of Mohammed, and related to who should be his successor. Shias feel that Imam Ali, cousin of the Prophet, husband of his daughter Fatima, father of Hassan and Hussein and the second person ever to embrace Islam. should have been the first caliph and that the caliphate should pass down only to direct descendants of Mohammed via Ali and Fatima. Sunnis gave their allegiance to Abu Bakr, who lead prayers in prophet's mosque in the last few days of prophet's life, as the first caliph because they felt his old age would be a wiser choice to the young Ali.

Still confused? Me too. Why did we get involved? The Sunni Qaeda bombed us. With oil we bought from Sunni Saudi Arabia!!! IRONY SUCKS!!!! Yes it does!!

visions

The Hood County Courthouse


I used to work in that town. Baking bread at the Nut Shell, on the south-east corner of the square. Crocket and Pearl. A formidable old building, still sturdy after all these years, thanks in part to the native lime-stone walls: still sturdy after more than a hundred years. A nightmare to keep the plumging and electricity in good shape. Barbara and Kay have kept it a lively part of the town scene longer than any other business enterprise around this famous square. They took over in 1980, about the time I ended up here to work on the nuke plant.

The beautiful center of the square, of the town itself, really, is this formidable Court House structure, in its symetrical, graceful architectual units, narrow windows, mansart roof, clock tower that used to have red-painted, cheerful casements for its louvers, and a clock that had to be wound by a crank. I know that, because my friend, Hugh Raupe, was the clock-winder for many years. The winding was done by a crank turning a spindle that pulled a 10 pound weight attached to a long rope, up about 15 feet. (Huge rigged it to use an electric drill, with a socket bit...) When released, the weight, thanks to the law of gravity, would power the clicking mechanism for a week, before the weight reached the length the rope would allow. The chimes were a sometime thing, usually not keeping time with the clock hands... and sometimes you got a different time from each face of the thing anyway. Einstein's famous theory about the relativity of time was true in this case, then.

Hugh had a shop just behind the square on Lambert Street, set up to repare everything from clocks, vacuums, bicycles, a shop filled with all manner of clocks, photos and good advice and an ever ready sourse of history and knowledge of the town of Granbury he grew up in and loved to his dying day. He could patiently repair any small motor device that was reparable at all. Then get on his 10 speed bike, strap on the helmet, and ride to Austin!!!! He died on the steps of that shop in 1993.

When the courthouse was renovated, in 2000, if I remember right, the clock was removed and replaced by a modern, electric machine, with recorded chimes, which do not work now either. Maybe just not used! The fine old Seth Thomas clock was last scene in a pile on the Court House lawn. Alas. Also those red sashes and casement frames for the louvred fenestation, which was striped down to a more basic frame underneath, and the surface cover, with zink-coated fish-scale shingles, dull grey, quite un-impressive. Kenny Burns, the architect, told us to wait, it would look better when the weathering of the metal took place. Well, we had to wait, but in the mean-time we forgot the folk art look of the red and bright baige tower, and have gotten used to the blue-grey look of the tower today. Dull but stately still, proclaiming that justice for all is not always housed in showy design.... or something like that.....

Then they built City Hall, a tribute to the grand old style, with local Cretaceous limestone, from the old seas and shores where the great dinosaurs roamed...90 million years ago.

Time and the river rolls on. Man's efforts to make things go there way, will not outlast the motions of creation which is ever evolving and is obliged by forces ordained and maintained by a deeper, more powerful drive... Call it God. Call it Nature. Call it what you will, but it operates by its own laws. Laws which man can only exist with. Or work around.

dream reality

It is December 6th. St Lucy day or almost. The Scandinavians celebrate... the youngest blondest beauty child is adorned with a candle crown and present breakfast sweets to all in the house... and Santa Lucia is played or sung...

Flying through strange ethers

I have been in a very strange place, this morning.... before I woke to the bed and blanket reality I think I exist in... head is still a blurr at 5:13 AM, but of course we keep on crashing the all-to-familiar time-horizon along with riding our slow-whirling globe.... just try to catch the micro-second of now... the tiny hair-thin instant that separates the past, from the split second present, and we can watch it float off somewhere behind..... made real by the memory banks of brain where it is stored, for maybe future reference.....

I was in the air. or maybe it was something else that filled space, thick oxygen rich, breathable cream, through which this fantastic boat/car was noislessly hurling itself. I was in the back, the tub-like bed of an el Camino sort of truck, with features all rounded like Lord Voldemont's face, of a no space-suit journey above what may be earth maybe Jupitor, far below was a fantastic landscapes... tangled ropey boiling pasta shapes, stringy curvy pipes, but sort of nylon flexible clowding up. the colors were pastel blue-green and grey... some color...the space above grey-blue.... There was no wind, and gravity is not a problem on this smooth ride. I think I am in space. I get out and hold on, definitle being pulled, as my legs stretch out behind. I can let go and grab back on... I wonder if I get separated, floating where-ever, will anyone know and come back for me? So I climb easily back into the hot-tub like bed... But then I am floating-flying outside again... Looking down at the strange scene below, like none other I had ever scene.... Who ever is driving, if anyone is, and if that is what is happening, unseen... I am not afraid, even though the strangeness of a never-done-this-before experience unfolds. A strange dream of exotic space... the shapes below morph like under-water life forms, like kelp or ropey sargasso weed....log jams on a blue-green lake... The experience is not unpleasant, but not exactly exhilerating... The static feeling, the nothing is happening but just being in a new place occupies my mind... I did not seem to care where I had been, how I had gotten there, or where I was going. Did I die? Was I dead? These thoughts occur now in this waking life. Hey, that movie! WAKING LIFE... Was this another chapter in that strange, disturbing flic.... an avatar in pseudo, graphic ambience of another reality????? dreams, the concoction of the mind, which never sleeps when the body does. Sometimes we think the mind is asleep, but it is not.... Oh how strange, wonderful, ever changing our life....