Flowers; these are found in different shapes, colours, fragrance and types. Flowers are the most beautiful parts of the plant.
They are so beautiful and attractive which is liked by all; humans, animals, birds, insects everyone. We will discuss Ayurvedic benefits of Hibiscus flower in this post.
Flowers are a medium to convey emotions like; sorrow, grief, happiness, love, care and affections! Flowers are the gorgeous creations of nature; which is really fabulous. These plays a vital role in the decoration of marriage, parties and some other auspicious occasions.
Many of us can't even think; these beautiful creations have hidden a wide range of medicinal values in it. What are flowers? Simply, these are the parts of our nature; and as we know every natural creation has some unique values in it.
Here we will be learning about the Ayurvedic and medicinal values of Hibiscus plant. Ayurveda explains a wide array of natural substances. It will be good enough, if certain diseases gets cured using these natural substances! Although, none of us likes to be bounded with medicines. Isn't it!
As roses, Hibiscus flowers are also found in different colours. They lacks fragrance but are very beautiful. Due to its natural beauty, elegance, bell-shaped structure and charming look; these plants are grown in pots in houses, temples, parks, gardens and many other places.
It is an evergreen plant which is approximately 5-9 ft in height. It has strong branches and trunk. The leaves are dark green, shiny, smooth and oval-shaped. This plant does not bear any fruit; the flowers are found in different shades; out of which white and red ones are mush beneficial.
Hibiscus belongs to kingdom Plantae and Malvaceae family. Its binomial name is "Hibiscus rosa-sinensis" which is Latin in origin. In English, it is called; Shoe flower or China rose. Its Hindi name is Gurhal.
Ayurveda believes to cure the ailment using natural substances; these are much efficient, free from side-effects and affordable. Hibiscus flowers are rich in Iron, phosphorus, calcium, riboflavin, thiamine, niacin etc. It also contains Vitamin C and carotene in small amounts.
Firstly, it is good for pitta kind of diseases. It is very useful to correct hereditary disorders. The wholesome plant is usable; its flowers, leaves, roots, stem, bark all. Now, let us move to the medicinal benefits of Hibiscus.
Alopecia; also known as baldness or hair baldness is one of the concerned problems for today's youth. Well, hair baldness has many reasons; but many of them are still unknown. In this, hair fall is very high and patches appears on the scalp which looks very bad.
For the treatment, take 6-8 leaves of hibiscus and grind it. Apply it on head and scalp; leave for 3 hours and wash with lukewarm water. Repeat this twice a week. It provides nourishment to the scalp and helps in hair growth.
Mix equal quantities of flower's juice with olive oil. Cook in fire till only oil is left. Store it in a bottle and apply on the roots twice or thrice a week. This ensures you with shiny, gorgeous, beautiful and healthier hairs. This is the reason why most of the hair products contains the extract of hibiscus in it!
Anaemia is a disorder in which the haemoglobin level gets decreased due to the lack of Iron content in body. In other treatments, several Iron tablets, syrups, injections etc are provided to raise the haemoglobin content. Here we will discover the natural cure of Anaemia through hibiscus.
Take 20-50 buds of Hibiscus flowers and sundry it. Grind it and store it in an air-tight container. Give 1 teaspoon of dried powder with a cup of milk every morning and evening. Within few months, the blood level will be raised making you active,physically youthful and increased with stamina.
You must have observed, many of us have slow ad blunt mind whereas some possesses very sharp and active mind. There are many reasons for this. Lets know how to increase brain potency with hibiscus plant.
Take 10 leaves and 10 flowers of hibiscus; dry them and the grind into powder ans store in a container. Give 1 teaspoon of powder with sweet milk; twice a day.
Hibiscus heals a lot for swollen parts and other types of skin sensations like itching, burning etc. Make a paste of tender and fresh hibiscus leaves grind with water; Apply the paste on swollen areas. It gives relief in few minutes.
We can even prepare an herbal tea using dried, vibrantly coloured calyces of the hibiscus flower. You can serve it hot or as a cold tea. It looks very good; as transparent red in colour. Hibiscus tea is good for those suffering from problems related to; Blood pressure, heart ailments, strokes, obesity and many more.
In this way, we saw numerous benefits of Hibiscus. Nature offers us a wide array of medicinal plants and herbs. We neglect all these and march to modern one. Are we doing justice to the nature?
Guys, it's not late now; get conscious and find healing in these natural substances only. You step forward and see the miracle of nature!
Mind blowing knowledge that u provide.
1. Include high amount of almond, mushrooms, pomegranate, chickpeas, asparagus, lean meat etc in your diet. These helps to boost estrogen levels thus increases fertility.
2. Yogasana such as boat pose, cobra pose and supported bridge pose helps to promote growth of the lining.
3. Iron foods increases the oxygen supply to the uterine system thus increasing the fertility.
4. Stay away from anxiety, stress and depression.
Someone advised to eat hibiscus buds ( by both husband and wife) in early morning empty stomach for better fertility .kindly advice.
Well, if you go through scientific findings and evidences, you will see there are no full proof for hibiscus aiding in fertility. At the same time, hibiscus decreases the estrogen levels and also can decrease male fertility.
You can better consult an Ayurvedic physician, and get the complete thing about hibiscus and fertility.
My question is variety colours of hibiscus flower are same benefit.
Hibiscus flower is there of different varieties with their respective colors. Although, all are beneficial but the red one holds maximum health benefits.
Hi , have gone thru the article, as it says the hibiscus buds helps increasing the blood level and also helps to be youthful and active.but whether it helps fertility ?someone suggested to eat the buds ( by both husband and wife) in early morning empty stomach for better fertility .kindly advice.
Extracted oil from hibiscus and some roots and herbs for conceiving baby for couples for more reply.
Hibiscus tea can be a an awesome home remedy for diabetic patients.
Sir, my mom has gallbladder stone . Is there any home remedies¿? Is there any treatment using hibiscus powder .???


text:
Sun Bei Bei (Shandong, 28 januari 1984) is een in China geboren tafeltennisspeelster die al haar gehele internationale sportloopbaan uitkomt voor Singapore. Zij schreef samen met Li Jia Wei in 2008 het dubbelspeltoernooi van de ITTF Pro Tour Grand Finals op haar naam. Daarnaast won ze met de nationale ploeg van haar nieuwe thuisland dat jaar zilver in het landentoernooi van de wereldkampioenschappen in Kanton.

Sun Bei Bei behaalde in december 2007 haar hoogste positie op de ITTF-wereldranglijst, toen ze veertiende stond.

Sportieve loopbaan
Bei Bei maakte haar debuut in het internationale (senioren)circuit in 2005, toen ze haar eerste toernooien speelde in het kader van de ITTF Pro Tour. Ze haalde dat jaar meteen de finale van het Kroatië Open enkelspel en van drie dubbelspel-evenementen. Tevens plaatste de Singaporese zich in haar debuutjaar voor zowel het enkel- als dubbelspel van de ITTF Pro Tour Grand Finals en kwam daarop in laatstgenoemde discipline tot de halve finale.

Bei Bei beleefde in 2008 het voorlopige hoogtepunt van haar carrière, toen ze samen met Li Jia Wei de Pro Tour Grand Finals won. Het Singaporese duo rekende daarvoor in de eindstrijd af met het Zuid-Koreaanse koppel Kim Kyung-ah/Park Mi-young, dat het een jaar eerder ook al met zilver moest doen. Bei Bei bereikte met de nationale vrouwenploeg in 2008 tevens de WK-finale voor landenploegen, maar kon niet voorkomen dat China daarin voor de achtste keer op rij goud won.

Erelijst
Wereldkampioen landenteams 2010, met Singapore (met Feng Tian Wei en Wang Yue Gu)
Verliezend finaliste landentoernooi wereldkampioenschappen 2008 (met Singapore)
Winnares dubbelspel Zuidoost-Aziatische Spelen 2007 (met Yu Meng Yu)
Winnares enkelspel Gemenebest kampioenschappen 2007
Winnares dubbelspel Gemenebest kampioenschappen 2007 (met Wang Yue Gu)
ITTF Pro Tour:
Enkelspel:
Winnares India Open 2007
Verliezend finaliste Kroatië Open 2005
Dubbelspel:
Winnares ITTF Pro Tour Grand Finals 2008 (met Li Jia Wei)
Winnares Rusland Open 2006 (met Li Jia Wei)
Winnares Duitsland Open 2006 (met Li Jia Wei)
Winnares India Open 2007
Winnares Singapore Open 2008 (met Li Jia Wei)
Verliezend finaliste Korea Open 2005 (met Wang Yue Gu)
Verliezend finaliste Taipei Open 2005 (met Wang Yue Gu) en 2007
Verliezend finaliste China Open 2005 (met Wang Yue Gu)
Verliezend finaliste Slovenië Open 2006 (met Wang Yue Gu)
Verliezend finaliste Koeweit Open 2008
Verliezend finaliste Brazilië Open 2008
Verliezend finaliste Chili Open 2008

Singaporees tafeltennisser

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


I really need some of your good news. It helps.
The Super Priest, Fr Justin has changed his schedule so I can receive the Sacrament of Penance!
And I talked to a future seminarian who has a mind for tradition… future traditional Catholic priests… that's good news.
And I am going to pray a Rosary for you tomorrow–perhaps you are a bit down in the dumps? Hope you find joy in Christ once again.
It looks as though my father-in-law won't be forced out of his apartment as we had initially feared.
I was in NYC over the weekend – alert people on the street and quick emergency services response helped shut down that attempted car bombing before the worst happened.
1st Communion at my parish last Sunday.
I may be in Delaware this Saturday for the ordination to the priesthood of a man I know.
My folks just observed their 46th wedding anniversary a couple of weeks ago, and a week later the parents of a good friend observed a similar landmark (give or take a year or two).
My brother will be confirmed tomorrow!
And Fr. Z, you'll be interested to hear, our AWESOME Fr. Rick celebrates with Maniple and Beretta!
The In-Laws have finally moved out of our house and will be boarding the plane to Alaska in 8 days on the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima! I will have a 4000 mile and a 3 time zone buffer!
Some good bird news: I had a bird nursery at the feeder today, young cardinals and chipping sparrows – brand new and beautiful!
Two of my nieces (one a god-daughter of mine) received their First Holy Communion this past Sunday, and another niece (also a god-daughter of mine) will receive hers this Saturday.
I was interviewed about the new English translation of the Mass on Relevant Radio on Tuesday.
And in July I'll be making a week-long pilgrimage to EWTN. First time there! And afterwards, it's onto "Liturgy & Lager" in Charlotte, NC, to meet some fellow bloggers, drink some delicious brews, and talk about the Mass!
My job at a new firm doesn't start for two months after my current one ends in July, so my wife and I will finally be able to make a long pilgrimage to Rome as Catholics–we've each only been there as pagans, and never together.
Our last pilgrimage (to venerate Santiago) was a tremendous spiritual success (and temporal: we now have a daughter) and are so blessed to be able to replicate it.
Kalendis maii ordinatus sum ad ordinem diaconorum.
We just found out that our son Alex, who was born at 26 weeks (instead of 40) weighing only 1 pound, 6 oz. today is almost 5 years old and will be starting Kindergarten in the Fall.
When he was born, they told us he would probably be severely retarded (he isn't) go blind (he isn't) have a lung condition (he doesn't) and several other issues that he doesn't have either.
Not that it wasn't a huge hill for all of us to climb, it was… but I know that has made my family even stronger.
God was smiling upon us all at his birth!
Finally! A CD is being produced of the schola, choir and choristers from St. Stephen the First Martyr in Sacramento, and later a DVD of the Solemn High Mass which took place after a three mile procession through Sacramento to the Cathedral on May 1. The statue of Our Lady of Fatima was carried through the streets. A crowning took place after the Mass and Rosary. The CD may be pre-ordered at http://www.BringMary.com.
I'm applying for a job with the College that I desperately want to get my MA in Theology at… And I think they're interested! This means financial security for me and my wife-to-be as well as free tuition if I get the job!
God is in control of all things. He loves us and we can trust Him to bring all things to completion for His glory and our salvation.
My final exam is tomorrow, and grades are due by next Tuesday, and then this semester will be over.
I finish my undergraduate degree in English when I hand in my dissertation today. TODAY.
CatholicVote has announced: The Mother-Teresa-Stamp is coming!
Rockies won the series with Padres 2-1.
Have done my first Exposition of Holy Relics for school today.
It was successful! The teachers and the students liked it. Lots of good questions being asked.
Currently instructing a number of non-Catholic Chinese. God willing, they will be baptized on June 29, Feast of Sts. Peter & Paul.
I am starting to learn how to walk again after several extensive operations to reconstruct one of my legs :) In about a month, I'll be taking my first steps of 2010!
my fiance and I took the FOCCUS test today!
Finally got a date for the stairlift to be installed in Mum's house (Tomorrow). Hopefully this weekend, she can come out of the hospital she's been in for three weeks. She is 80 and fell down stairs breaking her leg AGAIN..
Reading a god book by Father Bernard Hahesy of Plymouth (UK) called defending Catholic Teaching, the whole truth. Unfortunately it has been printed locally and does not appear to be available online, except from the Parish and certain other local outlets such as Buckfast Abbey.
AHA – I have now FOUND where the book by Fr Hahesy is on line, with a review by Daphne McLeod.
Yesterday I finished the all the work for my Master of Theological Studies degree-I graduate a week from Sunday.
Today's Gospel contained what I often think of very Good News, "As the Father has loved Me, so I have loved you." That's the Heart of Jesus speaking.
And young people giving themselves to the Lord in the consecrated life.
A few weeks ago I visited with a group of people who are preparing a World Congress on the Heart of Christ. These are people, mostly laity, who promote the renewal of family life through the Enthronement of the Sacred Heart. Their zeal is incredible.
Yesterday I was in St. Peter's Square and there were crowds waiting to enter the basilica. Maybe a lot were tourists or some curious, but there is something about that place that is drawing them and the Lord can touch them through that something.
– At the risk of sounding like a commercial and focusing on the totally trivial, I've been doing Weight Watchers since Christmas and it's actually been working. I'm trying to understand the underlying principles so that I can apply them elsewhere in my life. I figure that when I'm done doing that, I'll find everything already laid out in St. Francis de Sales or St. Benedict.
– Much of my herb garden survived Snowmaggedon and is now going like gangbusters, including, surprisingly, the rosemary.
I'm going on a Spiritual Exercises retreat sponsored by the priests of Miles Christi this weekend. This will be my third year of making the retreat.
My daughter Mary received her First Holy Communion last weekend, and we found out that our fourth child due in Sept. is a girl. The kids are very excited to know they have a little sister coming!
I plan on getting my own bird feeder pretty soon and will be posting any pictures of birds that visit it on my blog.
My son receives his First Communion on Sunday. For his gift he asked for a daily missal and a censer. When it comes to the future of Catholicism, youth is no longer wasted on the young.
I recently became engaged to a wonderful Cajun Catholic woman! I proposed in the place where we first saw each other – the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in DC (we were in the same line for confession :P).
I did not notice and missed Earth Day and its celebrations this year !
I saw a male cardinal (bird) this morning, he was very close to me but was not afraid, not even with all of the noise I was making. How I wish I had my camera!
I thought of you, so that must be a sign to keep you in my prayers. Will start immediately!!!
Next week I will be celebrating my 7th anniversary with my beautiful bride, and we will also be closing on the purchase of our first house!
Yesterday, for the first time in about a half century, this date started for me the way every May 5 should begin, with the silence of early dawn broken only by the quiet voices of priest and server in the prayers at the foot of the altar for a low Mass of Pius V.
Last Sunday I was at the Sung Mass, EF, at Christ the King Chapel in Sarasota, Fl.
There were EIGHT Altar Boys serving at the Altar – and this in a Traditional Community that had less than 160 souls at their two masses the prior week.
I just got back from a wonderful retreat at St. Meinrad's Archabbey. Our Bishop is going to ordain 3 priests for the diocese on May 29th, and the Fathers of Mercy in whose chapel I often go to daily Mass are ordaining one priest and 2 deacons.
I saw a male and female cardinal yesterday. Both of them were so beautiful! I was at the diaconate ordinations for the Archdiocese of St. Paul/Minneapolis last Saturday. We now have several more solid men in the transitional diaconate!
The Gates of Hell shall not prevail. That's good news, no?
I taught our first graders the "Regina Coeli"…their favorite line is "resurrexit, sicut dixit".
1. This past Sunday our son received his First Holy Communion!
2. From the depths of required undergraduate ethics classes, several young people recognizing the sanctity and dignity of all human life!
3. The great cloud of witnesses here on Father Z's blog!
In the last 14 months my husband and I have paid off $11,805.58 in debt! We still have a ways to go (chasing the wrong American dream back then) but we are committed to being debt free and teaching our 8 children to do the same!
Military daughter will be coming back to live in the States for the first time in 10 years.
Our son makes his First Confession on Saturday, 8 May and First Communion on Sunday, 9 May. He has worked hard to learn his prayers and lessons this year and is very excited – and I think not just about the party after First Communion either ; ) Please pray for him, our family, and for the other three members of the First Communion class in our EF community.
Also, about 8 pre-teen and teen girls and about 8 grown women will revive the long-dormant Sodality of Our Lady in our parish, with an induction planned for Pentecost Sunday, 23 May.
I passed my MA comps in Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas. I get to teach my first class in the fall!
This Saturday we will have the first High Mass in rural northeast Nebraska in almost fifty years!
Today being the first Thursday of the month I attended holy Mass and fulfilled all the other conditions in order to obtain the plenary indulgence granted in the Year of Priests. Now, all I have to do is find some priest to hear my confession. Domine, ut sanctifices et facias secundum cor tuum cunctos sacerdotes tuos, suppliciter deprecor!
Damian says Cdl. Pell's to be appointed to the Congregation for Bishops.
After spending Sunday night at ER and many tests, I found out I don't have appendicitis.
My brother and his new bride were married on the 24th of April. They lived a chaste relationship before there marriage, married as virgins, and are remaining chaste within their marriage. Praise God! My other brother will marry his honey this June, and their relationship is also a chaste one. Praise God again!
My daughter is slated to receive her First Holy Communion on Saturday, and then I'm a Godfather for a dear friend's daughter the next day.
A priest at my parish will soon reach the 60th anniversary of his ordination, on May 30. He is the funniest person I've ever known, and age has not tempered his ability to speak his mind, yet he is warm, gentle and humble. As a gift, I am considering sponsoring a seminarian of the Institute of Christ the King in his honor. Though he celebrates Novus Ordo, in talking with him I know he misses the Mass he was originally trained with. What do you think?
The bishop, of course, is not missing this anniversary, there will be a Mass and reception on that date.
After a scary weekend of successive bad test results and much prayer, my D-i_L's "mass on an ovary" was entirely begnign and removed by laproscopy; she went home that afternoon. After seeing pictures on TV of my daughter's boyfriend's house underwater to the roof during the Nashville floods and after much prayer, they returned to find no interior water damage.
I'm going to Cincinnati in July to see Fr. Corapi! He will be at Xavier U. presenting a conference on the Church's social teachings. I can't wait!
Forgive all the exclamation points, but, I'm just sooo excited!
It's Marine Week here in Boston, Big Family Day planned for Saturday. Helicopters, Tanks, Intel Support……..lots of Marines. Sempre Fi.
My grand-daughter made her First Holy Communion Sunday last.
I'm just 'thisclose' in getting my driving license back! Had to go through a ton of hoops-paying two traffic tickets, insurance [the company I had took me back-woohoo!], faxing, pleading with DMV to expedite the matter. I got my new plates and new registration this morning!
Thanks be to Our Lord, through the prayers of Our Lady, St. Joan of Arc, Venerable John Paul II, and Venerable Teresita Quevedo of Spain! Now I will 'back on the road again'!
Saw a bird I've never seen before. Brilliant blue all over except for a bit of brown on top of both wings. Amazing sight in my backyard, sitting on the grass in the sunshine. I'm guessing it's either a blue grosbeak or an Indigo Bunting. Sure made my day seeing a new bird! God is so good to us, giving us such variety of beauty to see in His world.
I'm scheduled for heart surgery on 5/13. It should correct health problems that have bothered me for several months.
My baby and little kids were good & quiet for the Solemn Vespers and Ordination Mass in which my husband became a deacon. My older son has just started to chant Vespers at home with us every night.
I recently finished a theology course at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit. That is one excellent school: serious, scholarly, orthodox, collegial. It is a truly fine place to study and grow closer to Christ.
My sons got into the win column in their CYO baseball league last night.
My eldest daughter who has been away from the Church for a long time called and said she loved the Pontifical Mass at the Basilica in DC. She asked many questions about why the Mass was changed, why did they strip the churches bare, why the awful music? I have hope now that eventually she will come back into the fold.
My youngest daughter was just hired for a very good position in Los Angeles.
I will be going to California next week to visit two of my daughters and grandchild.
A friend who had no knowledge of the Extraordinary Form saw that I assisted at the Pontifical Solemn High Mass at the Nat'l Shrine on 24 April. He asked me about it.
This has opened a door to conversation. I have been able to give a little introduction to the sacrifice of the Mass and the liturgy in the economy of the Church and salvation. This friend is now eager to go and pray at a traditional Latin Mass on Sunday.
This person came of age in the 1980s and early 1990s, and so his basic catechesis is pretty weak. His grip on Catholic Truth is not actively encouraged or strengthened by his employer – a Catholic publishing house (ironic!). By looking at the Mass as our highest prayer and a microcosm of our faith, centered on the immemorial sacrifice of Calvary, he has been thrilled by the sensus and substance that it is to look on things as Catholic.
We had a very nice choir and birthday party last night.
In the Brick-by-Brick category, First Holy Communion last Sunday in the EF was so very beautiful in Seattle.
Our daughter received her First Holy Communion May 2nd, during a beautiful high mass in the Extraordinary Form, at the communion rail of our lovely restored sanctuary, in our wonderful parish from our incredibly inspiring and orthodox pastor! It was a fantastic day!!
please, please say a prayer for me. i go back for a second interview for a job on thursday and, God willing, through the intercession of St. Joseph, i will get the job.
even more glorious, I found a church celebrating the EF nearby. they have a link of the English translation of the Liturgy on their homepage in a form which simple browsers can use, and a link to another site which posts the Propers each week. If i get this job, I will be able to afford a portable Braille reading device which would mean that i could finally, FINALLY, go to an EF Mass with my own Missal. Of course, if it works out, God willing.
I know it sounds trivial, but prayers would be so appreciated.
Gregg the Obscure-praying that your surgery will go well, through the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima.
Irishgirl – thanks for your prayer, that prayer is itself good news.
And I forgot to add, 'through the intercession of Blessed Francisco and Blessed Jacinta Marto', too!
Prayers as soon as asked. I'll put you on my Rosary tonight — both that you get the job and that it's everything you hope for.
And I feel for you . . . until surgery a few years ago I had very limited vision, and my best friend from high school has been fighting RP most of her life.
Prayers for you too. Would not say that heart surgery is in any way routine . . . it's never routine when it happens to you . . . but they have made tremendous advances in recent years. Will pray for a successful surgery and uneventful recovery.
Click the link, I had no idea that the whole city of Seattle would go this far to fulfill a child's wish.
My wish is that St. Peregrine will intercede for little Erik and bring about a cure to his liver cancer.
My dental appointment was yesterday. It is over and I don't have to visit the dentist again for a while!
after a rough start to a pregnancy I am 30 weeks or so and doing well. The three living siblings are happy and I get to see hubby this weekend. Yipee! Oh and I finally have my own unlimited access to Fr Z after two months of having to get permission to use my sister's computer. Long story but all is well.
I passed the Comp Exam!!!! Yay! I will never be forced to read Virginia Woolf again!!!
This is maybe "good" news in a Paschal Mystery-kinda way.
and yet…she is is in good spirits, wants to attend the First Communion of our niece on Sunday, and is a real trooper.
I'm so sad for all she has to go through; I am so at peace with the graces our Lord is giving her.
Roy Halladay was on the mound today.
I was able to meet Card. Arinze this past week in Denver when he was here for the Endow Gala. He gave me his homily notes, blessed a St. Benedict Crucifix for me, and gave me a signed copy of Redemptionis Sacramentum!!
Prayers will be offered for those seeking work, facing surgeries and for those going through treatments.
typing one-handed b/c baby #9 has arrived safe & sound.
Margaret! God bless you and your gorgeous family. May He grant you every good gift and grace.


1. Negotiate a reasonable settlement.
Get some professional advice from a CDFA or CFP to make sure you'll be able to live with the financial terms of the settlement — now and into the future. 1.Don't live beyond your income. Reduce your expenses — or increase your income — so that you are always saving something for a rainy day. Ask your financial advisor for help creating a budget if necessary.
2. Think twice about keeping the family home.
Ask your financial advisor whether you can truly afford it, and ask them to show you what cash you'd have available for investment if you moved to a smaller home.
3. Realize that you won't get everything you want in the property division.
Don't spend months and thousands of dollars fighting over furniture, appliances, or other personal items. Make a short list of "Must-Haves" and be prepared to compromise on everything else. Look at the big picture; is this asset best for your situation?
4. Protect your Retirement Assets.
In the U.S., have the QDRO (Qualified Domestic Relations Order) filed as soon as possible.
Get a copy of your credit report and close all joint accounts and all credit you do not use. Avoid maintaining balances on credit cards.


Movie Plot: Right from his childhood, Ganesh alias Jakkanna does anything for those who help him. He returns to Vizag in search of Bairagi, who is an `invisible` don in this area. In this process, Ganesh meets a girl called Sahasra and falls in love with her. Why is Ganesh in search of Bairagi? What is the relation between Bairagi and Sahasra?


text:
The Enveloping Imagination: Wildfire Consuming the Open Prairies of the Mind (Part I of II)
December 3rd, 2022 — reading
The Enveloping Imagination: Wildfire Consuming the Open Prairies of the Mind
(Part I of II)
This fire, these flames, is and are the imagination ablaze across the range and country and prairies and hollows and wildlands that encompass the globe of my mind. Here this mad rush of heat and energy waves both smoke and light on acquired knowledge and endured experience.
This enveloping imagination of mine reaches for whatever it can grab, then, connects it with the larger patch of bursting energy burning across the semiconscious land.
The flames grab Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) and her remarks on certain works by Kafka and van Gogh––how the final act of creation occurs when the reader-listener-viewer begins to think:
It often appears in works of art, especially in Kafka's early prose pieces or in some paintings of van Gogh where a single object, a chair, a pair of shoes, is represented. But these art works are thought-things, and what gives them their meaning—as though they were not just themselves but for themselves—is precisely the transformation they have undergone when thinking took possession of them.
(The Life of the Mind, (1971), ed. Mary McCarthy (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1978), Volume I. Thinking, p. 184)
And flames of the enveloping imagination found and flung and fed on Arendt's comments, then, connected them to passages from that tale from 1912––"Das Urteil" ("The Judgement") by Franz Kafka (1883–1924)––and that tale's absences of the character of "mother" and of the place of "Russia"––and how those absences reemphasize and highlight the ideas of "mother" and "Russia" rather than negate them:
Two years ago his mother had died, since when he and his father had shared the household together, and is friend had of course been informed of that and had expressed his sympathy in a letter phrased so dryly that the grief caused by such an event, one had to conclude, could not be realized in a distant country….
Georg stared at the bogey conjured up by his father. His friend in St. Petersburg, whom his father suddenly knew too well, touched his imagination as never before. Lost in the vastness of Russia he saw him. At the door of an empty, plundered warehouse he saw him. Among the wreckage of his showcases, the slashed remnants of his wares, the falling gas brackets, he was just standing up. Why did he have to go so far away! ….
"You have no friend in St. Petersburg. You've always been a leg-puller and you haven't even shrunk from pulling my leg. How could you have a friend out there! I can't believe it," [said Georg's father].
("Das Urteil" ("The Judgment"), trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, The Complete Short Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, (New York: Schocken, 1971), pp. 78, 85, 83)
And the flames move on. They now consider and consume shoes painted by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890):
(Wiki Commons)
The flames now run wild—consuming and connecting everything before them. Before Arendt, Kafka, and van Gogh, there was Gotthold Lessing (1729–1781), who suggests in a line from his play Emilia Galotti (1772), that "one praises the artist most when, in looking at his work, one forgets to praise him."
(Nathan the Wise, Minna von Barnhelm, and Other Plays and Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Anna Johanna Gode von Aesch, (New York: Continuum, 1991), I, iv, p. 80).
Somewhat following Arendt, Walter Kaufmann (1921–1980) encouraged readers to ponder the negation and opposition of an idea, if one is to understand the motivations behind that idea. This process of imagining the negative—as in the case of Van Gogh's shoes––is, at least according to Kaufmann, sometimes but haphazardly called Hegelian dialectic.
(Discovering the Mind Vol. I: Goethe, Kant, and Hegel, (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981), p. 266).
The fire now burns deep: it compares C. S. Peirce (1839–1914)––a reader, but perhaps, not a follower of Hegel––and how, as Peirce and fellow philosopher-logicians might say that the sociology of humans being is based on semiotics––though non-philosopher-logicians might instead say that a human's place in his or her community is itself a symbolic relation—a relation where the human is a symbol to the community. As Peirce puts it:
There is no element whatever of man's consciousness which has not something corresponding to it in the word; and the reason is obvious. It is that the word or sign which man uses is the man himself. For, as the fact that every thought is a sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that man is a sign; so, that every thought is an external sign, proves that man is an external sign. That is to say, the man and the external sign are identical, in the same sense in which the word homo and man are identical. Thus my language is the sum total of myself; for the man is the thought….
Finally, as what anything really is, is what it may finally come to be known to be in the ideal state of complete information, so that reality depends on the ultimate decision of the community; so thought is what it is, only by virtue of its addressing a future thought which is in its value as thought identical with it, though more developed. In this way, the existence of thought now depends on what is to be hereafter; so that it has only a potential existence, dependent on the future thought of the community. The individual man, since his separate existence is manifested only by ignorance and error, so far as he is anything apart from his fellows, and from what he and they are to be, is only a negation. This is man.
("Some Consequences of Four Incapacities," Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2 (1868))
Flame and soot and smoke and ember—elements indeed of any and all's imagination––now burn close. Closer to our own time, Umberto Eco (1932–2016) summarizes what Peirce is getting at:
It may seem paradoxical to talk of the icon, which Peirce held was the first moment of an absolute evidence, as pure disposition-to, of pure absence in some way, an image of a thing that is not there yet. It would seem that this primary icon is like a hole, given that we have everyday experience of it but nonetheless have difficulty defining it, and given that 152 can be recognized only as an absence within something that is present. And yet it is precisely from that nonbeing that one can infer the shape of the "plug" that could stop it up.
("Cognitive Types and Nuclear Content," Kant e l'ornitorinco (Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition), trans. Alastair McEwen, (New York: Harcourt, 1997), pp. 110–11. On the point of the plug, Eco cites: Roberto Casati and Achilie C. Varzi, Holes and Other Superficialities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994))
Wittgenstein (1889–1951) has also pointed out that space and object probably cannot be logically isolated. My imagination says I should say "probably" because Wittgenstein left some possibility open by suggesting we humans may not have yet exercised our imaginations to the fullest extent—we have not yet burned through everything:
An atmosphere that is inseparable from its object—is no atmosphere.
Closely associated things, things which have been associated, seem to fit one another. But in what way do they seem to fit? How does it come out that they seem to fit? Like this, for example: we cannot imagine the man who had this name, this face, this handwriting, not to have produced these works, but perhaps quite different ones instead (those of another great man).
We cannot imagine it? Do we try?––
(Philosophie der Psychologie – Ein Fragment (Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment) [formerly Philosophical Investigations Part II] in Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1953, 1958, 2001), Revised Fourth Edition by Hacker and Schulte, (2009) (Revised Fourth Edition, 2009), (II, vi, 50), p. 192)
Or, as Owen Barfield (1898–1997) once put it, imagination "seeks to sink itself entirely in the thing perceived."
(Romanticism Comes of Age, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1967), p. 39).
Do readers-listeners-viewers really sink themselves into Kafka's quasi-stories and the painted shoes depicted by van Gogh? I really don't know. But it sort of makes sense to me—me, neither firefighter nor firestarter—me, only a beholder of the enveloping imagination burning across my mind's land.
REFRIED DREAMS …. WITH CHEESE
August 11th, 2022 — reading
PART I. AGAINST PERFECTIONISM
So, just horsing around, not really meaning anything by it, I told myself I was tired of old lessons from old books—lessons most people never followed anyway, which is why we are where we are now, right? Still, I told myself:
The Perfect is not the enemy of the Good.
But seeking the Perfect may lead one to bypass the Good. One bypasses the forest in search of the perfect tree. How many good books have been passed over in search of the Perfect Book?
Give me the imperfect. If the Tower of Pisa were plumb, its remarkability and marketability would diminish to some great degree.
At some point, the pursuit of the Perfect requires tunnel-vision. It requires putting up unnatural barriers to blind one from so-called distractions, digressions, and other sundry paths one fancies. For the winning horse always wears blinders, and always stays in its designated lane.
Yes, if one is hyper-focused on an object or goal, one may feel lots of feelings while focusing––but, in that moment of focus, one will always be too busy focusing to instead take the time to reflect on those feelings which occur while one is focusing.
So one shouldn't look for a perfect trip to Europe. A good trip can be good enough. For there is no perfect plan for a good trip. Why, just yesterday didn't 孫子兵法 (Sun Tzu) (~544 BC–495 BC) warn against the totalitarianism of perfect planning? Didn't he say:
When the front is prepared, the rear is lacking, and when the rear is prepared the front is lacking. Preparedness on the left means lack on the right, preparedness on the right means lack on the left. Preparedness everywhere means lack everywhere.
(孫子兵法 (The Art of War)(c. ~500 BC), trans. Thomas Cleary, (Boston: Shambhala, 1988),"VI. Emptiness and Fullness," p. 108)
Nor can I write the perfect novel; though I would like to write a good one. I can't play the perfect song on guitar, but I will try to continue to go farther in my playing than from where I've been before. I will try to remember that 孔子 (Kong Fuzi a.k.a. Confucius) (~551BC–479BC) wasn't that interested in perfection:
The Master seldom spoke on profit, on the orderings of Providence [divination?], and on perfection.
(論語 (Analects) (475 BC–220 AD) in The Analects: or, the Conversations of Confucius with His Disciples and Certain Others, trans. William Edward Soothill, (Oxford UP, 1910; 1955), (IX, i), p. 80)
And C. S. Peirce (1839–1914) once reflected that:
It is but charitable to be a little inaccurate.
("Think Again!" Harvard Magazine 4 (April 1858), [pp. 100–105] in The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: a Chronological Edition. Vol. I: 1857–1866, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1982), p. 24)
Still, can such proverbs be rendered into protocols? Who dares to maximize the maxims of the past? Was Don Quixote the only one who dared to not only read and recite dichos, but actually apply them? Is this what 老子 (Lao Tzu/Laozi) meant by:
The way to use life is to do nothing through acting,
The way to use life is to do everything through being.
(道德经 Tao Teh Ching (The Way of Life) (c. ~500 BC), trans. Witter Bynner, (New York: Putnam, 1944; Perigee 1986) XXXVII, p. 64)
PART II. SOME INGREDIENTS FOR PREPARING TO COUNTER PERFECTIONISM; or,
HOW TO MAKE REFRIED DREAMS (WITH CHEESE)
Beginning with Francis Bacon (1561–1626):
Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that sheweth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, that sheweth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure.
Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?
("Of Truth," Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral (1625) in Essays, ed. Brian Vickers, (New York: Oxford UP, 1999), p. 3)
Next from Daniel Kahneman:
I have always believed that scientific research is another domain where a form of optimism is essential to success:
I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the fact of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers….
(Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011), p. 264)
You should know that correcting your intuitions may complicate your life.
A characteristic of unbiased predictions is that they permit the prediction of rare or extreme events only when the information is very good.
If you expect your predictions to be of modest validity you will never guess an outcome that is either rare or far from the mean.
If your predictions are unbiased, you will never have the satisfying experience of correctly calling an extreme case.
You will never be able to say, "I thought so!" when your best student in law school becomes a Supreme Court justice, or when a start-up that you thought very promising eventually becomes a major commercial success.
Given the limitations of the evidence, you will never predict that an outstanding high school student will be a straight-A student at Princeton.
For the same reason, a venture capitalist will never be told that the probability of success for a start-up in its early stages is "very high."
(Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, p. 192)
Then from Karl Popper (1902–1994):
No conclusive disproof of a theory can ever be produced; for it is always possible to say that the experimental results are not reliable, or that the discrepancies which are asserted to exist between the experimental results and the theory are only apparent and that they will disappear with the advance of our understanding.
(In the struggle against Einstein, both these arguments were often used in support of Newtonian mechanics, and similar arguments abound in the field of the social sciences.)
If you insist on strict proof (or strict disproof) in the empirical sciences, you will never benefit from experience, and never learn from it how wrong you are.)
("Scientific Method," (1934), Popper Selections, ed. David Miler, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985), p. 137)
Popper is, of course, following Bertrand Russell (1872–1970):
Scientific theories are accepted as useful hypotheses to suggest further research, and as having some element of truth in virtue of which they are able to colligate existing observations; but no sensible person regards them as immutably perfect.
("Philosophy and Politics," Unpopular Essays, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1950, 1969), p. 18)
Some Newish Advice for Writers, with the Aid of Chris Arnade
October 30th, 2021 — writing
The language he used was that of a man who was sick and tired of the world he lived in—though he had much liking for his fellow men—and had resolved, for his part, to have no truck with injustice and compromises with the truth.
––Albert Camus, (La Peste (The Plague), trans. Stuart Gilbert, (New York: Knopf, 1957), ch. I, pp. 11–12.)
I have previously written about the work of Chris Arnade here and here. I continue to study him. He is teaching me to observe the world, as well as the people around me, better. And I hope, in turn, that that will help make me a better writer.
Arnade is teaching me that, as I writer, I need to walk, watch, write—in other words, stop looking at every occurrence as a "problem" to be solved, resolved, contemplated, pontificated upon; instead, just look and listen. I must learn to apprehend what I can accept and accept what I can apprehend. As Arnade puts it:
But walking forces you to slow down and talk to the people living there. You get to see beyond the bleh, and watch the endless string of tiny dramas that make up a city, and most people's lives….
I also knew I would be reminded just how dramatically removed from each other the front and back row are. How little the front row gets these types of places, in a lived reality way, despite making claims to, and how little these places understand (or care about) what drives the front row, in an aspirational way….
There are plenty of very concerned articles in very serious periodicals about them, filled with suggestions that the residents themselves know little about.
But that isn't what I want to focus on, because I walk to see beyond those problems….
To be blunt, as much as I enjoyed my brief time in Holyoke, Chicopee, and Springfield, I ultimately left with a mixture of sadness, frustration, and anger. Few, if any, outsiders care about these towns. Beyond seeing them as problems that need to be solved.
("Walking America, part 1: Springfield, Chicopee, and Holyoke," Intellectual Inting, September 29, 2021.)
As a writer seeking to improve his craft, I need to beware of any sense in my soul of squirming at so-called sentimentality, quaintness. Admittedly, no, I don't like it when callers call-in to my favorite local morning radio show, because they slow down the pace of the show, its ongoing conversation, they try to be funny and fail, or they espouse empty insults. Nonetheless, I need to pay attention to why they make me squirm. It has something to do with what Arnade is getting at:
"Sense of place", "elevating life above the mundane", and "filled with soul" — Technocrats, city planners, Neo-libs, don't like these squishy phrases. To them they are sentimental nonsense. They like terms you can define, evaluate, and adjudicate with math and science. Numbers they can jam into a spreadsheet. Like GDP growth, or commuting times, or total cycle route mileage.
I as a writer I need to learn to not laugh at sentimentality:
A good man will see that everything he says is consistent with his dignity and the respectability of his character; for we pay too dear for the laugh we raise if it is at the cost of our own integrity.
––Quintilian, (Institutio Oratoria Vol. II, trans. H. E. Butler, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1920) (VI, ii, 35) p. 457.)
Instead, I need, as Seneca puts it, to start cultivating a relationship with poverty (whether economic or cultural) by writing about and listening to those in need. For:
Hunger will make you find even that bread soft and wheaty. One shouldn't, accordingly, eat until hunger demands. I shall wait, then, and not eat until I either start getting good bread again or cease to be fussy about bad bread. It is essential to make oneself used to putting up with a little. Even the wealthy and the well provided are continually met and frustrated by difficult times and situations.
(Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Letters from a Stoic), trans. Robin Campbell, (New York: Penguin Classics, 1969) Letter XVIII, p. 69; Letter CXXIII, pp. 226–27.)
Moreover, says Seneca:
You should live for the other person if you wish to live for yourself.
(Letters from a Stoic, Letter XLVIII, p. 96.)
And instead, as Marcus Aurelius advises, learn to live with those who have learned to live with the gods:
Live with the gods. To live with the gods is to show them at all times a soul contented with their awards, and wholly fulfilling the will of that inward divinity, that particle of himself, which Zeus has given to every man for ruler and guide—the mind and the reason…. (V, xxvii)
Adapt yourself to the environment in which your lot has been cast, and show true love to the fellow-mortals with whom destiny has surrounded you…. (VI, xxxix)
Let your one delight and refreshment be to pass from one service to the community to another, with God ever in mind…. (VI, vii)
Men exist for each other. Then either improve them, or put up with them…. (VIII, lix)
Enter into the ruling principle of your neighbour's mind, and suffer him to enter into yours. (VIII, lxi)
(Meditations, trans. Maxwell Staniforth, (New York: Penguin, 1962.)
Finally, recall always C. S. Peirce, how: "The best maxim in writing, perhaps, is really to love your reader for his own sake." And that part of being a merciful observer and writer means that, with regard to whatever (and whoever) one is writing about, "it is but charitable to be a little inaccurate."
(The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: a Chronological Edition. Vol. I: 1857–1866, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1982), "Private Thoughts, March 17, 1888," p. 9; "Think Again!" Harvard Magazine 4 (April 1858), [pp. 100–105], p. 24.)
Lean on Me (When You're Not Wrong)
January 30th, 2018 — Criticism
LEAN ON ME (WHEN YOU'RE NOT WRONG):
Relying on Others to Define Reality for Ourselves – Part I of III
It's a dangerous business to try and impose one's view of things on others.
Padma: if you're a little uncertain of my reliability, well, a little uncertainty is no bad thing. Cocksure men do terrible deeds. Women, too. ––Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (1981)[1]
As I've previously written, one of the key themes running through Professor Alan Jacobs's book How to Think (2017) is how we must come to grips that our individuality is paradoxically based on how those around us end up defining each of us as individuals.
For C. S. Peirce (1839–1914), all reality, including our thoughts on reality, begins with our reliance on others:
As what anything really is, is what it may finally come to be known to be in the ideal state of complete information, so that reality depends on the ultimate decision of the community; so thought is what it is, only by virtue of its addressing a future thought which is in its value as thought identical with it, though more developed. In this way, the existence of thought now depends on what is to be hereafter; so that it has only a potential existence, dependent on the future thought of the community….
For Peirce, the individual is but a negation—and when two individuals negate each other's individuality, they affirm community:
The individual man, since his separate existence is manifested only by ignorance and error, so far as he is anything apart from his fellows, and from what he and they are to be, is only a negation. This is man…."[2]
A century before the phrase "imagined communities" was popularized by Benedict Anderson (1936–2015) as a useful way to describe nationalism, Peirce recognized:
The care that men have for what is to happen after they are dead, cannot be selfish. And finally and chiefly, the constant use of the word "we"––as when we speak of our possessions on the Pacific––our destiny as a republic––in cases in which no personal interests at all are involved, show conclusively that men do not make their personal interests their only ones, and therefore may, at least, subordinate them to the interests of the community.
But just the revelation of the possibility of this complete self-sacrifice in man, and the belief in its saving power, will serve to redeem the logicality of all men. For he who recognizes the logical necessity of complete self-identification of one's own interests with those of the community, and its potential existence in man, even if he has it not himself, will perceive that only the inferences of that man who has it are logical, and so views his own inferences as being valid only so far as they would be accepted by that man. But so far as he has this belief, he becomes identified with that man. And that ideal perfection of knowledge by which we have seen that reality is constituted must thus belong to a community in which this identification is complete…. [3]
This "ideal perfection of knowledge by which we have seen that reality is constituted" is also, for Peirce, the method of science:
Such is the method of science. Its fundamental hypothesis, restated in more familiar language, is this: There are Real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those Reals affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as are our relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really and truly are; and any man, if he have sufficient experience and he reason enough about it, will be led to the one True conclusion. The new conception here involved is that of Reality….[4]
Even if the community renders something other communities think to be immoral (such as separate public drinking fountains for separate ethnicities), it is nonetheless part of reality, at least until a majority in the community agree to something different. Community creates the facts of reality by agreeing with what they are:
The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality….[5]
(Read Part II here, and Part III here)
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[1] Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children, (New York, NY: Knopf, 1981. Random House Paperbacks, 2006) II, "Alpha and Omega" 243.
[2] Peirce, "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities," Journal of Speculative Philosophy 2 (1868): 140–57.
[3] Peirce, "Ground of Validity of the Laws of Logic: Further Consequences of Four Incapacities," Journal of Speculative Philosophy 2 (1869): 193–208.
[4] Peirce, "The Fixation of Belief," Popular Science Monthly 12 (November 1877): 1–15.
[5] Peirce, "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," Popular Science Monthly 12 (January 1878): 286–302.
How We Should Rely on Others to Think for Ourselves (According to Machiavelli & Alan Jacobs)
January 1st, 2018 — Criticism
How We Should Rely on Others to Think for Ourselves
(According to Machiavelli and Alan Jacobs)
"Working toward the truth is one of life's great adventures."
––Alan Jacobs
"Don't regard a hesitant assertion as an assertion of hesitancy."
––Wittgenstein[1]
The thirty-fifth chapter to the third book of Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy is entitled:
"When Dangers Are Borne in Making Oneself Head in Counseling a Thing; and the More It Has of the Extraordinary, the Greater Are the Dangers Incurred in It."[2]
Machiavelli's chapter title gets at a point Alan Jacobs repeats often in How to Think: a Survival Guide in a World at Odds (2017): that it is impossible for one to think for oneself. In fact, one must rely on others in order to think for oneself, for "the problem of belonging and not-belonging, affiliation and separation, is central to the task of learning how to think" (p. 54).
Both Machiavelli and Jacobs focus on the perils of counsel. Now someone might say, "So what? I'm not a counselor," but I say, that we (as readers and writers) are participating in the public sphere; therefore, following Charles Taylor, I say we (as readers and writers) are, in some sense, counseling the government. In a republic, the political blogger/writer/commenter always potentially advises her authorities via her activities in the public sphere. Donald Trump, for example, could conceivably read something I tweet and act on it.[3]
Yet, according to Machiavelli, dispensing advice is always a gamble, for hesitant assertions are mistakenly interpreted as assertions of hesitancy:
Thus it is a very certain thing that those who counsel a republic and those who counsel a prince are placed in these straits: if they do not counsel without hesitation the things that appear to them useful—either for the city or for the prince—they fail in their office; if they do counsel them, they enter into danger of life and state, since all men are blind in this, in judging good and bad counsel by the end. (Discourses III, xxxv)
In either a principality or a republic bad advice can be fatal for the dispenser. Yet, as Machiavelli points out, bad advice is not judged on the accuracy of its contents, but on whether the results of that advice lead to something satisfactory for the ruling authorities receiving the advice.
Machiavelli writes that what counselors and advisors need (and by writing this he is actually advising readers!) is moderation:
Thinking over in what mode they [those who counsel] can escape either this infamy or this danger, I do not see any other way for it but to take things moderately, and not to seize upon any of them for one's own enterprise, and to give one's opinion without passion and defend it without passion, with modesty, so that if the city or the prince follows it, it follows voluntarily, and it does not appear to enter upon it drawn by your importunity. (Discourses III, xxxv)
Following Roger Scuton, Jacobs writes in How to Think how we, as advisors and counselors to the government (as well as to our friends and family and strangers) in the public sphere, must "negotiate our posture toward the other" (p. 83). We must "avoid displaying the zeal that's all too commonly characteristic of the convert," (pp. 149–50) because "the real outgroup, for us, is the person next door" (p. 72)—that is, the person who votes differently than we do, thinks differently than we do, etc. For as the author known as Kohelet writes:
Also take no heed unto all words that are spoken; lest thou hear thy servant curse thee:
For oftentimes also thine own heart knoweth that thou thyself likewise hast cursed others. (Ecclesiastes 7:21–22)
To defend one's opinion with moderation rather than passion is certainly something the twenty-first century public sphere could use more of, particularly when political matters are discussed. But risks remain nonetheless. Jacobs warns how "sheer animus … disables our ethical and our practical judgment" (p. 75). And Machiavelli has observed:
When you do thus, it is not reasonable that a prince and a people wish you ill for your counsel, since it was not followed against the wish of many—for one bears danger where many have contradicted, who then at the unhappy end concur to bring you to ruin. (Discourses III, xxxv)
Machiavelli also warns of those who contradict regularly, fully aware that they contradict without hesitation, will bring a countering writer-advisor to ruin, unless that countering writer-advisor be modest and moderate in their countering:
And if in this case one lacks the glory that is acquired in being alone against many to counsel a thing when it has a good end, there are two goods in the comparison: first, in the lack of danger; second, that if you counsel a thing modestly, and because of the contradiction your counsel is not taken, and by the counsel of someone else some ruin follows, very great glory redounds to you. (Discourses III, xxxv)
Or, as Jacobs writes, "The genuine community is open to thinking and questioning, so long as those thoughts and questions come from people of goodwill," (p. 59), which sounds not unlike an observation Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) once made:
Unless we make ourselves hermits, we shall necessarily influence each other's opinions; so that the problem becomes how to fix [stabilize] belief, not in the individual merely, but in the community.[4]
[1] Alan Jacobs, How to Think: a Survival Guide in a World at Odds, (New York, NY: Currency Books, 2017) 150; Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, (London: Blackwell, Revised fourth edition, 2009) p. 202.
[2] Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
[3] According to Taylor:
This space is a public sphere in the sense I'm using it here. That a conclusion "counts as" public opinion reflects the fact that a public sphere can exist only if it is imagined as such. Unless all the dispersed discussions are seen by their participants as linked in one great exchange, there can be no sense of their upshot as public opinion. This doesn't mean that imagination is all-powerful. There are objective conditions: internal, for instance, that the fragmentary local discussions interrefer [sic]; and external, that is, there must be printed materials, circulating from a plurality of independent sources, for there to be bases of what can be seen as a common discussion…. (Modern Social Imaginaries, (Durham, SC: Duke University Press, 2004) p. 85)
The public sphere is the locus of a discussion potentially engaging everyone (although in the eighteenth century the claim was only to involve the educated or "enlightened" minority) in which the society can come to a common mind about important matters. This common mind is a reflective view, emerging from critical debate, and not just a summation of whatever views happen to be held in the population. As a consequence it has a normative status: government ought to listen to it. There were two reasons for this, of which one tended to gain ground and ultimately swallow up the other. The first is, that this opinion is likely to be enlightened, and hence government would be well advised to follow it…. The second reason emerges with the view that the people are sovereign. Government is then not only wise to follow opinion; it is morally bound to do so…. (A Secular Age, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007) 188, 189)
It is a space of discussion which is self-consciously seen as being outside power. It is supposed to be listened to by power, but it is not itself an exercise of power. It's in this sense extra-political status is crucial. As we shall see below, it links the public sphere with other facts of modern society which also are seen as essentially extra-political. The extra-political status is not just defined negatively, as a lack of power. It is also seen positively: just because public opinion is not an exercise of power, it can be ideally disengaged from both partisan spirit and rational. (A Secular Age 189–90)
[4] Peirce, "The Fixation of Belief," Popular Science Monthly, 12 (November, 1877): 1–15.
Some Notes on "How to Think" by Alan Jacobs
Some Notes on How to Think (2017) by Alan Jacobs
"To be freely aware and richly responsible" means gracefully attending to the "relational goods" of one's neighbor (Jacobs 47-49)….
One must graciously attend/adjust/adapt these relational goods–what Roger Scruton calls "negotiating our posture toward the other," (Jacobs 83)….
Genuine questioning in a community is conversation, not communication, (Jacobs 59) as I've recently pointed out:
Communication [says Wendell Berry] is when you're being told to do something by someone else, like to remove a statue or let it remain. Conversation, on the other hand, is dialogue, a back-and-forth process of giving and receiving. Or to use the words of Martin Buber, while conversation is a mode of discourse where an "I" and a "You" function as reciprocal partners, communication is a mode of discourse between an all-powerful "I" talking down to a faceless, listening "It." The first treats humans as individuals; the latter as mere objects of manipulation. Hence the fluidity of conversation is open to inquiry in ways that rigid communication isn't.
Out of that negotiation one finds a You in their neighbor instead of an It….
My neighbor who voted differently than I….
As I read How to Think, I keep recalling words from Martin Buber (1878-1965) Knowledge of Man (1966):
Genuine conversation, and therefore every actual fulfillment of relation between men, means acceptance of otherness….  (69) Man wishes to be confirmed in his being by man, and wishes to have a presence in the being of the other…. (71)
By far the greater part of what is today called conversation among men would be more properly and precisely described as speechifying. In general, people do not really speak to one another, but each, although turned to the other, really speaks to a fictitious court of appeal whose life consists of noting but listening to him…. (78–79)
Man exists anthropologically not in his isolation, but in the completeness of the relation between man and man; what humanity is can be properly grasped only in vital reciprocity…. (84)
C. S. Peirce (1839-1914) repeatedly points out that science requires community, not individuality:
Now, since if there is anything real, then (on account of this reality consisting in the ultimate agreement of all men, and on account of the fact that reasoning from parts to whole, is the only kind of synthetic reasoning which men possess) it follows necessarily that a sufficiently long succession of inferences from parts to whole will lead men to a knowledge of it, so that in that case they cannot be fated on the whole to be thoroughly unlucky in their inductions. This second branch of the problem is in fact equivalent to asking why there is anything real, and thus its solution will carry the solution of the former branch one step further…. Each of us is an insurance company, in short….
The care that men have for what is to happen after they are dead, cannot be selfish. And finally and chiefly, the constant use of the word "we" — as when we speak of our possessions on the Pacific — our destiny as a republic — in cases in which no personal interests at all are involved, show conclusively that men do not make their personal interests their only ones, and therefore may, at least, subordinate them to the interests of the community.
But just the revelation of the possibility of this complete self-sacrifice in man, and the belief in its saving power, will serve to redeem the logicality of all men. For he who recognizes the logical necessity of complete self-identification of one's own interests with those of the community, and its potential existence in man, even if he has it not himself, will perceive that only the inferences of that man who has it are logical, and so views his own inferences as being valid only so far as they would be accepted by that man. But so far as he has this belief, he becomes identified with that man. And that ideal perfection of knowledge by which we have seen that reality is constituted must thus belong to a community in which this identification is complete…. ("Ground of Validity of the Laws of Logic: Further Consequences of Four Incapacities.")
Finally, as what anything really is, is what it may finally come to be known to be in the ideal state of complete information, so that reality depends on the ultimate decision of the community; so thought is what it is, only by virtue of its addressing a future thought which is in its value as thought identical with it, though more developed. In this way, the existence of thought now depends on what is to be hereafter; so that it has only a potential existence, dependent on the future thought of the community. ("Some Consequences of Four Incapacities.")
Great to see @ayjay and @austinkleon at @bookpeople tonight #books #thinking #literature #ATX #Austin
A post shared by Christopher Landrum (@bookbread2) on Oct 23, 2017 at 6:54pm PDT
Reading About Rod Dreher's Benedict Option (Part II)
July 1st, 2017 — Criticism
After a careful first reading of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option (2017), I find its central thesis to be found on page 83:
The real question facing us is not whether to quit politics entirely, but how to exercise political power prudently, especially in an unstable political culture. When is it cowardly not to cooperate with secular politicians out of an exaggerated fear of impurity–and when is it corrupting to be complicit?
Or as Miss Anscombe once put it:
It is indeed one of the troubles about government, that it is difficult to specify the 'things that are Caesar's.'[1]
This is the same question that confronts Thomas More in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons (1966). Its historical inaccuracies aside, it develops the question of whether the King or the Church would rule England.
It is the same question the butler Stephens refuses to face in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day (1989) with regard to whether his employer was a Nazi sympathizer and if Stephens "did his duty" by never questioning his employer's requests.
And what is the answer to Dreher's and Anscombe's and Bolt's and Ishiguro's dilemma? I suggested last time that it might involve Emersonian compensation. But now C. S. Peirce is nagging me, and I'm afraid he re-articulates the whole problem when he says:
Unless we make ourselves hermits, we shall necessarily influence each other's opinions; so that the problem becomes how to fix [stabilize] belief, not in the individual merely, but in the community.[2]
See also: "Reading About Rod Dreher's Benedict Option (Part III)."
"Reading About Rod Dreher's Benedict Option (Part I)."
[1] "On the Source of the Authority of the State." From Ratio 20 (1), 1978. The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe. Vol. III: Ethics, Religion and Politics. Blackwell: Oxford. 1981. p. 132.
[2] "The Fixation of Belief." Popular Science Monthly. No. 12. (November, 1877.) 1-15.
Advice for Voters: Politics in Fugue Form
In a democracy, the prisoners pick their wardens. While we are told this is an important election for Americans, the old standbys of political philosophy appear to not be as effective as once before. For example, Texas, recently voted for a multiple-alleged criminal to oversee and uphold the laws of the state.
Perhaps we should turn away (at least temporarily) from the usual suspects, away from Philadelphia 1787, away from the idolatry of forefathers and their slave exemptions. But then who will counsel meager citizen me? Who can help me choose the best politician—the best person to make me do what I don't want to do?
I will try to find my answer by listening to a fugue, that is, "the orderly and varied reiteration of the same 'subject'."[1] I will harken to points and counterpoints.
ITALIAN CANZONI
Caesar: "All folks strive toward freedom while despising all forms of slavery."[2]
Machiavelli: "Citizens of a republic want only not to be oppressed … only its nobles want to oppress others."[3]
Vico: "If people were left to pursue their private interests, they would live in solitude like wild beasts….  We defend our natural liberty most fiercely to preserve the goods most essential to our survival. By contrast, we submit to the chains of civil servitude to obtain external goods which are not necessary to life. [4]
ANGLO–IRISH BALLADS
Burke: "Liberty, when men [and women] act in bodies, is power…. In all bodies, those who will lead must also, in a considerable degree, follow… In this political traffic, the leaders will be obliged to bow to the ignorance of their followers, and the followers to become subservient to the worst designs of their leaders."[5]
Anscombe: "What is institutional must exclude all that is personal, casual or sporadic.[6] This is why 'possibility is the deconstruction of contentment.'[7] So to attain your goal, you've got to give up what you've already got."
Rawls: "To be at liberty and free from oppression is, in some sense, to be disinterested, and therefore detached, as it is written: 'one feature of justice as fairness is to think of the parties in the initial situation as rational and mutually disinterested'."[8]
Searle: "Roughly speaking, power is the ability to make people do something whether they want to do it or not."[9]
Wilkerson: "The friend showed him what to do, and Pershing worked beside him. He looked up and saw the foreman watching him. Pershing pretended not to see him, worked even harder. The foreman left, and, when he came back, Pershing was still at work. At the end of the day, the foreman hired him. Pershing finished out the summer stacking staves, not minding the hard work and not finding it demeaning. 'Sometimes,' he said, 'You have to stoop to conquer'." [10]
[1] Lewis, C. S. "Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages." Chapter 3 from The Discarded Image: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge UP. 1966. Originally delivered in 1956 as a pair of lectures to an audience of scientists in Cambridge. Reprinted in Chaucer and His Contemporaries: Essays on Medieval Literature and Thought. Edited and Introduced by Helaine Newstead. NY: Fawcet. 1968. 46–66 at 61. Compare Lewis later: "The motions of the universe are to be conceived not as those of a machine or even an army, but rather as a dance, a festival, a symphony, a ritual, a carnival, or all these in one," (64). And compare C. S. Peirce:
Every thought, however artificial and complex, is, so far as it is immediately present, a mere sensation without parts, and therefore, in itself, without similarity to any other, but incomparable with any other and absolutely sui generis [its own kind]. Whatever is wholly incomparable with anything else is wholly inexplicable, because explanation consists in bringing things under general laws or under natural classes. ("Some Consequences of Four Incapacities." Journal of Speculative Philosophy. No. 2. 1868. 140–57.)
And compare Paul Valéry:
Do not search for 'truth'*—But seek to develop those forces which make and unmake truths. Seek to think of a greater number of simultaneous things,—to think longer and more rigorously of the same one—to catch yourself in the very act—to suspend your hesitations,—to give new momentum to what is clogged up. Suggest co-ordinations to yourself. Try out your ideas as functions and means…. [Editor's note:] *Cf. the later comment of 1940, 'I am searching for the truth of thought and not for truth by thought.' Cahiers = Notebooks. Vol. I. Translated by Paul Gifford et al. Edited by Brian Stimpson. Based on the French Cahiers edited by Judith Robinson-Valéry. (1912, I 12, IV, 783.) [pp. 264-65] and (C, XXIV, 168) [p. 617])
[2] Caesar, Gallic War, III, x.
[3] Machiavelli, Il Principe, IX.
[4] Vico, The Third New Science, "Idea of the Work" [¶ 2] 2 and I, § 2, xciv, [¶ 290], p. 109.
[5] Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France.
[6] Anscombe, G. E. M. "On the Source of the Authority of the State." From Ratio 20 (1), 1978. Anscombe Vol. III: Ethics, Religion and Politics. Oxford: Blackwell. 1981. p. 131.
[7] Anscombe, "You Can have Sex without Children: Christianity and the New Offer." From Renewal of Religious Structures: Proceedings of the Canadian Centenary Theological Congress. Toronto. 1968. Anscombe Vol. III: Ethics, Religion and Politics p. 82.
[8] Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. (Revised Edition.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. 1999. § 3, p. 12.
[9] Searle, John. Freedom and Neurobiology. NY: Columbia UP. 2007. p.104.
[10] Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns. NY: Random House/Vintage Books. 2010. p. 117.
Rereading Ruthie Leming – Part II: Beyond Democracy Lies Caritas'cracy
July 27th, 2016 — reading
Theory of Caritas
The will of a community reflects the collective intentionality of its members.[1]
The will of a community is often, but not always, expressed in the language of the community.[2]
Through language, a community treats its members sometimes as individuals, sometimes as objects.[3]
An institution is realized when a community uses language in an organized pattern with precedence (such as an established tradition) to achieve, express, and reflect the will of the community.[4]
When a community, through its language, treats its members as individuals (as with memorializing veterans, first-responders,[5] and athletes, or raising money for a kid with cancer), the community practices an I–You mode of discourse and establishes an institution that treats its members as individuals.
When a community, through its language, treats its members as objects (as with voting lists and tax rolls and redlining), the community practices the I–It mode of discourse and establishes an institution that treats its members as objects.
A community needs institutions that both treat its members as individuals and treats them as objects.
Practice of Caritas
In The Little Way of Ruthie Leming (2014), Rod Dreher writes about a conversation with his brother-in-law where they discussed the community institution of caritas, the caritas demonstrated by Dreher's parents:
"Your mom and dad never meet a stranger," [Mike Leming] said. "Once they get to know you, you become family right off, especially if you help them with something. Whatever's theirs is yours."[6]
For the Drehers, the charity received from a stranger grants that stranger automatic entry into the Drehers' community—so that the stranger becomes no longer a stranger but a familiar. The cost of entry into this community is neither an indulgence to pay for prior debts, nor a bribe to pay for present greed, nor a desert to satisfy modern members of the meritocracy. Perhaps the institution of the Drehers caritas could be called a caritas'cracy.
This institutional mechanism of caritas'cracy functions in the I–You mode of language. It is achieved when one individual charitably encounters another. It occurs when we speak and listen to each other rather than over or at each other.
No matter the neologism, the institution of the Drehers charity (and their response to the charity of others), confronts one of principle anxieties of C. S. Lewis's life: the resentment that comes with any in-group/out-group dynamic. As Lewis lectured his students:
When you had climbed up to somewhere near it by the end of your second year, perhaps you discovered that within the Ring there was a Ring yet more inner, which in its turn was the fringe of the great school Ring to which the house Rings were only satellites. It is even possible that the School Ring was almost in touch with a Masters' Ring. You were beginning, in fact, to pierce through the skins of the onion….
One of the most dominant elements [of Life] is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside…. This desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action…. [But] As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left….
You were not looking for virtue or kindness or loyalty or humour or learning or wit or any of the things that can be really enjoyed. You merely wanted to be "in". And that is a pleasure than [sic., that] cannot last. As soon as your new associates have been stalled to you by custom, you will be looking for another Ring. The rainbow's end will still be ahead of you. The old Ring will now be only the drab background for your endeavour to enter the new one.[7]
When the Dreher's daughter Ruthie dies, the wonderful life she lived as an individual made her death from terminal illness all the more meaningful to the community:
It was an evening of beer drinking, country dancing, and merrymaking, the likes of which there had been far too little of since that awful day in February. For Ruthie this was an It's a Wonderful Life moment as the people of the parish took the opportunity to show her and tell her what a difference she had made in their lives. At the end of the evening, over a thousand people had come through the gates, and the people of our little country parish had raised forty-three thousand dollars for Ruthie Leming. "This is how it's supposed to be," an old friend said to me that night, looking out over the crowd. "This is what folk are supposed to do for each other."[8]
This is what Buber was getting at when he realized the common joy of the soul is the foundation of genuine community.[9]
How must a community thrive if it must use institutions to achieve its intentions—when to use institutions means encountering and engaging with the inherent resentment of all in-group/out-group dynamics? As Dreher reminds us, we cannot recreate Eden,[10] but the caritas'cracy of the elder Drehers may point us the way forward.
[1] For philosopher John Searle, meaning is derived intentionality (Freedom and Neurobiology NY: Columbia UP. 2007. p. 8). And: "Intentionality essentially involves the representation of conditions of satisfaction," ("Language and Social Ontology," Theory and Society. Vol. 37. No. 5. (October 2008.) 443–59 at 445).
[2] See Peirce:
Finally, as what anything really is, is what it may finally come to be known to be in the ideal state of complete information, so that reality depends on the ultimate decision of the community; so thought is what it is, only by virtue of its addressing a future thought which is in its value as thought identical with it, though more developed. In this way, the existence of thought now depends on what is to be hereafter; so that it has only a potential existence, dependent on the future thought of the community. ("Some Consequences of Four Incapacities." Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Vol. 2. 1868. 140–157. (http://www.peirce.org/writings/p27.html.))
Compare de Saussure:
The signal, in relation to the idea it represents, may seem to be freely chosen. However, from the point of view of the linguistic community, the signal is imposed rather than freely chosen. Speakers are not consulted about its choice. Once the language has selected a signal, it cannot be freely replaced by any other. There appears to be something rather contradictory about this. It is a kind of linguistic Hobson's choice. What can be chosen is already determined in advance. No individual is able, even if he wished, to modify in any way a choice already established in the language. Nor can the linguistic community exercise its authority to change even a single word. The community, as much as the individual, is bound in its language. (Course in General Linguistics. edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye with the collaboration of Albert Riedlinger; translated and annotated by Roy Harris. London: G. Duckworth. 1983. p. 71.)
And compare Searle:
A way to come to see this point is to ask oneself, what is the difference between regarding an object as an instance of linguistic communication and not so regarding it? One crucial difference is this. When I take a noise or a mark on a piece of paper to be an instance of linguistic communication, as a message, one of the things I must assume is that the noise or mark as a natural phenomenon like the wind in the trees or a stain on the paper, I exclude it from the class of linguistic communication, even though the noise or mark may be indistinguishable from spoken or written words. Furthermore, not only must I assume the noise or mark to have been produced as a result of intentional behavior, but I must also assume that the intentions are of a very special kind peculiar to speech acts. (Speech Acts: an Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge UP. 1969§ 1.4, pp. 16–17.)
[3] Based on the work of Martin Buber. Buber's I–You and I–It modes of linguistic discourse are two examples of collective intentionality. According to Buber, the world itself is not twofold but the human world is twofold for humans. Con artists hook their victims by speaking to the mark as if in I–You mode, when all along they were playing the language game of the I–It mode on the victim (Ich und Du. (I and Thou.) 1923. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Scribner: NY. 1970. I § 1).
The I–You mode of discourse marks a relation between two humans being; this mode expresses the ratio between two individuals. One human does not divide the other, but the two humans stand in dynamic reciprocity to one another (I and Thou I § 5).
Genuine conversation, and therefore every actual fulfillment of relation between men, means acceptance of otherness (Buber, The Knowledge of Man: a Philosophy of the Interhuman. Translated by Maurice Friedman and Ronald Gregor Smith. Harper & Row: NY. 1966. p. 69). Buber points out how we speak over each other rather than to each other—we must practice directness rather than "speechifying" and placating to "a fictitious court of appeal," (Knowledge of Man 78–79). Moreover:
Man exists anthropologically not in his isolation, but in the completeness of the relation between man and man; what humanity is can be properly grasped only in vital reciprocity. (Knowledge of Man 84)
A person becomes an I through the You mode of discourse (I and Thou I § 28). Or as Gregory Bateson once put it, "It takes two to know one," (Nachmanovitch, Stephen. "Gregory Bateson: Old Men Ought to be Explorers." Leonardo, Vol. 17. No. 2. (1984.) 113–118 at 113).
[4] Compare Searle:
Institutions always consist in constitutive rules (practices, procedures) that have the form X counts as Y in context C… The Y term imposes a new status on the phenomenon named by the X term, and the new status carries with it a function that cannot be performed just by virtue of the intrinsic physical features named by the X term. The function requires the status in order that it be performed, and the status requires collective intentionality, including a continued acceptance of the status with its corresponding function. (The Construction of Social Reality. NY: Simon and Schuster. 1995. p. 114).
Compare Searle critic Philia Mfundo Msimang:
Whereas singular intentionality is generally construed as a unidirectional force from the agent to the world (viz., imposing one's will on a state of affairs), collective intentionality is a bidirectional force from the point of view of any participating agent because it both guides and restricts each agent's action while, at the same time, being bolstered and influenced by each respective agent's own actions. In this context, individual intentionality is derivative of the group or collective intentionality….
All social institutions are founded on a symmetrical agreement (by which I mean mutual recognition), and this entails not only that people have to hold the same intentionality but that they must hold this intentionality fundamentally in relation to one another's intentionality. What I mean by this is that there is no sense to collective intentionality outside its relation to, and satisfaction by, another individual's intentionality. Collective intentionality cannot be satisfied by respective individual intentionalities but has its conditions of satisfaction defined by a symmetrical relationship between intentionalities. ("Living in One World: Searle's Social Ontology and Semiotics." Signs and Society. Vol. 2. No. 2. (Fall 2014.) 173–202 at 181–82.)
[5] Dreher, Rod. The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life. NY: Grand Central Publishing. 2013.p. 45.
[6] Dreher, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming p. 47.
[7] Lewis, C.S. "The Inner Ring – Memorial oration at King's College, London, 1944." They Asked for a Paper. London: G. Bles. 1962." pp. 141–142, 145, 147, and 148.
[8] Dreher, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming p. 135. See also later (200–03) when Ruthie's piety prevented her funeral from becoming a dreary affair and instead rendered it into a celebration.
[9] Buber, Meetings: Martin Buber. Edited by Maurice Friedman. La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Co. 1973. p. 39.
[10] Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: the Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem. NY: Regan Arts. 2015. p. 265.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
City faces fines, hefty compliance costs for water issues
State investigators found at least eight violations within Corpus Christi's water system during a review of the infrastructure after the two 2015 boil water notices, and the city may face stiff corrective costs and fines as a result.
City faces fines, hefty compliance costs for water issues State investigators found at least eight violations within Corpus Christi's water system during a review of the infrastructure after the two 2015 boil water notices, and the city may face stiff corrective costs and fines as a result. Check out this story on caller.com: http://www.caller.com/story/news/special-reports/energy-effects/water/2016/07/06/city-faces-fines-hefty-compliance-costs-for-water-issues/91529200/
Corpus Christi Caller-Times Published 1:52 p.m. CT July 6, 2016
State investigators found at least eight violations within Corpus Christi's water system during a review of the infrastructure after the two 2015 boil water notices, and the city may face stiff corrective costs and fines as a result.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has proposed compliance initiatives estimated to cost more than $503,000, and an additional $6,000 in penalties, according to more than 1,000 pages of communications between the agency and city that were released to the Caller-Times.
City spokeswoman Kim Womack said those corrective requirements and penalties, which were delivered to the city in April, are being negotiated and the final costs are not yet known.
The agency is expected to levy more mandates on the city when its investigation into the May boil water notice concludes, but it's not known when that will be released or what it could contain, she added.
'We know there will be (a violation) for the low chlorine residuals, but they may have additional findings their investigators want fixed,' Womack said. 'We won't know until the report comes out.'
The lion's share of those corrective costs ($500,000) stem from one violation — a failure to 'initiate maintenance and housekeeping practices to ensure the good working condition and general appearance of the Facility and its equipment.'
Those alleged offenses pertain to the Alameda, Morgan and Flour Bluff elevated water storage tanks. The Alameda tank has interior corrosion issues; the Morgan tank has a hole in the side wall plate; and the Flour Bluff facility has a 'significant amount' of corrosion on the interior and exterior as well as holes in the roof plates, according to the report.
Smaller violations include not testing certain infrastructure as frequently as required, leaks at three pump stations, low disinfectant levels, records not being adequately maintained for state inspection and other monitoring issues, the documents show.
In recent months city officials have stressed the importance of improvements to the water system, and some studies and initiatives are underway.
It's possible the city won't have to pay the full costs or fulfill all the corrective mandates.
State regulators told City Hall in a September letter that 'prompt corrective actions' could minimize looming compliance and penalty costs stemming from last year's boil water notices.
There is not a timeline on when the city and state negotiations will conclude, Womack said.
Twitter: @reportermatt
Read or Share this story: http://www.caller.com/story/news/special-reports/energy-effects/water/2016/07/06/city-faces-fines-hefty-compliance-costs-for-water-issues/91529200/


Traveler19712665806 hat am Heute eine Bewertung geschrieben.
Ein hochklassiges Frühstück mit enormer Auswahl. Alles liebevoll in kleinen Portionen angeboten. An der Rezeption waren alle ausgenommen freundlich. Die Zimmer sind super sauber und schön. Die Lage ist sehr günstig.
Dear Paul, Thank you for staying with us, and for your warm comments. We are happy to hear that you enjoyed your stay and love the breakfast which made by our chef in dining room Be.zen! We will keep and make better of our equipment and service. Looking forward to see you again in Osaka! Vielen Dank. Schoenen Tag noch!
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Thank you for staying with us and for your nice review! We are glad you enjoyed your room, our service and our location. We will always do our best to satisfy our clients and we are happy to know you had a great time in Osaka. We hope to see you again!
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Danke, dass Sie bei uns bleiben! We are glad you enjoyed your time in Osaka.We will be happy to welcome you back anytime. Hope to see you again in the future!
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Thank you for staying with us at HOTEL THE FLAG! We are happy to know that you enjoyed our lounge and breakfast and friendly staff. Some people may find the standard category of rooms to be a little small. But we are happy to know that you enjoyed the Deluxe room! We hope you will come visit again in the future.
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minibaby24 hat am März 2019 eine Frage gestellt.
We are coming by Shinkansen with a 4 year old - what is the best way to get to the hotel? Thanks!
Thank you for your inquiry. If you are coming by Shinkansen, you should arrive at Shin-Osaka station. From there, you can switch to the Osaka Metro Midosuji line and take it to Shinsaibashi station. We are about a 5min walk from exit 4 of the station.
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Thank you for your inquiry. Our restaurant opens from 7:00am to 10:00am. We look forward to your stay. Thank you!
Veronica hat am Jän. 2019 eine Frage gestellt.
Hi, May I Know how much it is going to get to ITM airport by taxi from your hotel? Is there a fixed rate taxi?
SYYP hat am Jän. 2019 eine Frage gestellt.
Hi, we want to stay here with 2 children. 7 and 11. According to several booking sites a twin room is ok. Is that so? How big are the beds in a twin room?
Thank you for your inquiry. Children can stay in the same bed as an adult for free of charge. (One child per one adult) We do not supply amenities for children who stay free of charge. Breakfast is free for children 6 years and younger. It costs 1,000JPY tax included for children 7 to 12 years old.The size of 1 bed is 110x200cm in a standard twin room.


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