What science can't prove, it sometimes denies.

Lately there has been  much back and forth jawing on the internet between the faithful and the skeptical.  Not much changes because people tend to be more steadfast when finished speaking than before  they spoke. 
Whenever science presents a new finding or a successful advance in knowledge, the atheistic members inject a tone of smugness about their 'rational' position on this issue.
Try as they might, they will never explain nor accept the observation recorded in the essay below.

In  The Bird and the Machine,  Loren Eiseley opens with his reading the newspaper at the breakfast table.  The paper has a story on the advances in machines and robotic engineering.  The most dramatic changes are in the smartness of machines and their enhanced brain capacity.  The joyous extrapolations the journalist draws from these scientific events leave Eiseley questioning the conclusions.
 Eiseley  recalls an experience from his time as a young archaeologist, one of a party of scientists exploring the wilderness of the upper mid-western United States in order to, as Eiseley puts it, 'capture the past.'  He describes coming "into the valley through the trailing mists of a spring night.  It was a place that looked as though it might never have known the foot of man, but our scouts had been ahead of us and we knew all about the abandoned cabin of stone that lay far up on one hillside."
He writes that they "had, in addition, instructions to lay hands on the present.  The word had come through to get them alive - birds, reptiles, anything.  A zoo somewhere needed restocking  It was one of those reciprocal matters in which science involves itself.  Maybe," Eiseley writes, "our museum needed a stray ostrich egg and this was the payoff.  Anyhow, my job was to help capture some birds and that was why I was there before the trucks.
"The cabin had not been occupied for years.  We intended to clean it out and live in it, but there were holes in the roof and the birds had come in and were roosting in the rafters...I got the door open softly and I had the spotlight all ready to turn on and blind whatever birds there were so they couldn't see to get out through the holes in the roof.  I had a short piece of ladder to put against the far wall where there was a shelf on which I expected to make the biggest haul.  I had all the information I needed, just like any skilled assassin.  I pushed the door open, the hinges squeaking only a little.  A bird or two stirred-I could hear them-but nothing flew and there was a faint starlight through the holes in the roof...
"Everything worked perfectly except for one detail - I didn't know what kind of birds were there.  I never thought about it at all, and it wouldn't have mattered if I had.  My orders were to get something interesting.  I snapped on the flash and sure enough there was a great beating and feathers flying, but instead of my having them, they, or rather he, had me.  He had my hand, that is, and for a small hawk not much bigger than my fist he was doing all right.  I heard him give one short metallic cry when the light went on and my hand descended on the bird beside him;  after that he was busy with his claws and his beak was sunk in my thumb.  In the struggle I knocked the lamp over on the shelf, and his mate got her sight back and whisked neatly through the hole in the roof and off among the stars outside...He chewed my thumb up...and lacerated my hand with his claws but in the end I got him, having two hands to work with.  He was a sparrow hawk and a fine young male in the prime of life."
Eiseley puts the bird in a box too small to allow him to injure himself, performs some repairs on his hand and retires for the night.
The next morning, Eiseley writes, "I was up early and brought the box in which the little hawk was imprisoned out onto the grass where I was building a cage.  A wind as cool as a mountain spring ran over the grass and stirred my hair.  It was a fine day to be alive.  I looked up and all around and at the hole in the cabin roof out of which the other little hawk had fled.  There was no sign of her anywhere.
"Probably in the next county by now," I thought cynically, but before beginning work I decided I'd have a look at my last night's capture.
"Secretively, I looked again all around the camp and up and down and opened the box.  I got him right out in my hand with his wings folded properly and I was careful not to startle him.  He lay limp in my grasp and I could feel his heart pound under the feathers but he only looked beyond me and up.
I saw him look that last look away beyond me into a sky so full of light that I could not follow his gaze...I suppose I must have had an idea then of what I was going to do, but I never let it come up into consciousness.  I just reached over and laid the hawk on the grass.
"He lay there for a long minute without hope, unmoving, his eyes still fixed on that blue vault above him.  It must have been that he was already so far away in heart that he never felt the release from my hand.  He never even stood.  He just lay with his breast against the grass.
"In the next second after that long minute he was gone.  Like a flicker of light, he had vanished with my eyes full on him but without actually seeing even a premonitory wing beat.  He was gone straight into that towering emptiness of light and crystal that my eyes could scarcely bear to penetrate.  The light was too intense.  Then from far up somewhere a cry came ringing down.
"I was young then and had seen little of the world, but when I heard that cry my heart turned over.  It was not the cry of the hawk I had captured, for by shifting my position against the sun, I was now seeing farther up.  Straight out of the sun's eye, where she must have been soaring restlessly above us for untold hours, hurtled his mate.  And from far up, ringing from peak to peak of the summits over us, came a cry of such unutterable and ecstatic joy that it sounds down across the years and tingles among the cups on my quiet breakfast table.
"I saw them both now.  He was rising fast to meet her.  They met in a great soaring gyre that turned to a whirling circle, and a dance of wings. Once more, just once, their two voices, joined in a harsh wild medley of question and response, struck and echoed against the pinnacles of the valley.  Then they were gone forever somewhere into the upper regions beyond the eyes of men."

I have read that essay many, many times and it still gives me a lump in the throat.

The quote below below is confirmation from The Outermost House:

“We patronize the animals for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they are more finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other Nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.”
― Henry Beston
_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Leech Alert

I am indebted to Michael Gilleland who owns a blog called Laudator Temporis Acti for the bracing piece of common sense which follows:

Leeches

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), Antepenultimata (New York: The Neale Publishing Company, 1912), pp. 306-308:

That I should give my hand, or bend my neck, or uncover my head to any man in mere homage to, or recognition of, his office, great or small, is to me simply inconceivable. These tricks of servility with the softened names are the vestiges of an involuntary allegiance to power extraneous to the performer. They represent in our American life obedience and propitiation in their most primitive and odious forms. The man who speaks of them as manifestations of a proper respect for "the President's great office" is either a rogue, a dupe or a journalist. They come to us out of a fascinating but terrible past as survivals of servitude. They speak a various language of oppression and the superstition of man-worship; they carry forward the traditions of the sceptre and the lash. Through the plaudits of the people may be heard always the faint, far cry of the beaten slave.

Respect? Respect the good. Respect the wise. Let the President look to it that he belongs to one of these classes. His going about the country in gorgeous state and barbaric splendor as the guest of a thieving corporation, but at our expense—shining and dining and swining—unsouling himself of clotted nonsense in pickled platitudes calculated for the meridian of Coon Hollow, Indiana, but ingeniously adapted to each water tank on the line of his absurd "progress," does not prove it, and the presumption of his "great office" is against him.

Can you not see, poor misguided "fellow citizens," how you permit your political taskmasters to forge leg-chains of your follies and load you down with them? Will nothing teach you that all this fuss-and-feathers, all this ceremony, all this official gorgeousness and brass-banding, this "manifestation of a proper respect for the nation's head" has no decent place in American life and American politics? Will no experience open your stupid eyes to the fact that these shows are but absurd imitations of royalty, to hold you silly while you are plundered by the managers of the performance?—that while you toss your greasy caps in air and sustain them by the ascending current of your senseless hurrahs the programmers are going through your blessed pockets and exploiting your holy dollars? No; you feel secure; power is of the People, and you can effect a change of robbers every four years. Inestimable privilege—to pull off the glutted leech and attach the lean one!

This April Afternoon

Except for wind that stirs Lombardy leaves
To watered silk first dark then silver-shot,
And mingling with their rustle interweaves
Its late lament with mine for what is not,
This April afternoon is counterpart
Of such a day of silver sun and thunder
As when we walked like children light of heart
Together lost in labyrinths of wonder.
Returning is a journey only dared
When all evasive efforts to forget
Have failed to quite annul the love we shared-
How long I feared to come this way and yet,
Now that I stand alone where then we stood
The wind absolves for me the empty wood.

Dorothy R. Howard
__________________________________________________________________________

Downton Tabby

This is Puddy, a domestic long-hair calico cat.  We first met her in 1999 as she crossed our yard on her way to somewhere.  She was thin but her coat was shiny and there were no signs of disease or infection.   Her bearing was regal.  Unlike most cats she disapproved of being picked up or even petted.  She had a way of communicating her rules of engagement when approached.  If you were too dense to observe them, a bloody scratch was your reward.
 Our first thought was that she was an abandoned cat, or lost.  On occasion she would lie on our patio, stretched out on her side.  I remarked to Patti that the poor thing looked like roadkill in that position.  She was that thin.  I started calling her Splat the Cat.
Shortly thereafter we learned Splat belonged to a home on our street.  The new couple who lived there were childless and both were away all day working.   They had four other cats and one cocker spaniel.   We decided Splat was very unhappy in that setting,  being much too regal to fight for food.  Royalty doesn't eat at boarding house tables.
We resisted the temptation to feed her.  She was not our cat and we felt sure her owners would soon see  she was thin and needed  more food than she was getting.
As time passed, Splat spent more time sitting or sleeping on our patio.  She developed a habit of climbing the fishtail palm that grows close to the front of our house.  From there she would leap to the roof, cross the roof and drop down onto the table in the rear patio.  Nothing prevented her from walking around the house except her deep need to let the world know that she did things her way.
One day she came to our house with a small wound on her neck.  She found an open closet door and settled in to clean herself, and sleep.  The next morning I came from our bedroom to find this lovely cat sitting by the sliding glass patio door, looking outside.  I opened the door and she left. 
That evening I was on the couch, reading.   The patio door was open to enjoy the air and Splat came in with a field mouse dangling from her mouth.   She put two front paws on the coffee table in front of me and dropped the mouse there.   She drew back and sat on the floor, waiting to see if I understood the meaning of this gift.  I did, and I expressed it to her with words and touch.
This was a life changing moment for Splat and us. We began to feed her occasional meals, and we began to call her Puddy.
A few weeks later Puddy's owners left for a nine day vacation.  The husband came to our house to collect his cat.  He said he wanted to be sure she was safe and cared for while they were away.  Someone had been hired to visit the house daily and tend to the animals.  We had to let her go with him.
Nine days later, just before noon, Patti said to me:  "What's that noise?"  I stepped out front  and saw Puddy, two houses away, walking toward me, meowing continuously, an angry complaint of sound.  Obviously it had been no vacation for Puddy.  She had been let out and her first stop was our house and a hearty meal.
The former owners were knowledgable enough to know that cats, like souls, select their own society and they made no further effort to convince  the cat they called Fluffy to stay with them.  She was Puddy now.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

A Confluence of Incongruities in the news

Many people who support letting women serve in combat also support the Violence Against Women Act.

The idea that there is an Israeli lobby is a myth.  Just like the idea that Israel has nuclear weapons is a myth.
_______________________________________________________________________________________

Lance Armstrong tells all! Lance Armstrong cries!

Celebrity gossip is news again.  Everyone is talking about Lance Armstrong.  What a terrible shame.  What to do?  What to think?  Oh, the humanity of it!  Lots of heavy discussion of moral conduct.

Also in the news today:  "More military personnel killed themselves last year than died in combat."
Ho hum.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

The 'dependency' Problem

Recently I was notified by Florida Power and Light that my electric meter has been replaced with a 'Smart Meter.'  This type of meter has many advantages including the ability to be read  remotely.  Thus FPL has eliminated the occupation of meter reader.
Technology continues to remove working men and women from the rolls of the employed.  Bank tellers, ticket agents and checkout cashiers are finding their jobs in jeopardy.  The Labor Department reports that more than 1.1 million secretaries lost jobs between 2000 and 2010 due to software that allows bosses to take their own calls, arrange their own trips and conferences.  The Department also reports that the number of telephone operators fell 64 percent, word processors and typists by 46 percent.  These are a few of many examples.
It occurs to me that technology may be the force or element that is creating a 'society of dependency.'  Governor Romney placed the blame on government and its social welfare programs.  But these programs are a response to the problem, not a cause of it.
I fear a day is coming when millions of people will be unemployed or underemployed because technology has replaced them.  This would not happen at such a rapid rate if we applied moral and philosophical thinking to the impact of new Technologies.  There are gains and there are losses.  We should ponder the long term effects of each.
I know we are supposed to believe that 'job training' will solve the problem.  It won't. 
Nothing will change until Technology finds a way to replace Congress.
__________________________________________________________________________________________