Sunday/Form and Substance

A privately built spacecraft has successfully landed on the moon, a feat only one other company has accomplished in spaceflight history.

The robotic lander, dubbed Blue Ghost, has been in orbit around the moon for roughly two weeks, preparing for its daring descent. Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace developed the spacecraft.

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A VAT is a consumption tax, not a tariff. It applies equally to all goods sold in a country – domestically produced or imported. If a country has a 20 percent VAT, both a domestically made car and an imported car sold within that country pay the same VAT. There is no built-in preference for local producers; in that sense, it is not discriminatory.--de Rugy

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Sunday/Form and Substance

Today's gospel is the fruit of the tree gospel, the nature of the individual will be shown in his deeds, not his words. This is such a known gospel that it may be fatigued. Yet the wheel always turns.

Our world today values the gesture. We punish the wrong opinion more firmly than the wrong action. In a sense, it is a version of the old "form vs. substance" discussion. And it is powerful. The international problems we face now in Europe scream it. Russia invades Ukraine, the strength of the act being the West's dependency on cartel oil. The solution to the energy threat, unleashing the U.S. energy resources, is captive to the green-world gesture.

So we wear the badge of social concern when the true problems hide in plain sight with their solutions.

And the fruit is revealing. Sometimes startling.

New York City's Abel Meeropol wrote a poem called "Strange Fruit" in the 1930s after seeing a photograph of a lynching. He later put it to music and it eventually found its way to Billie Holliday, who recorded it. It was called by Time magazine the "Song of the Century" in 1999.

Strange Fruit

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Meeropol's son, Robert Meeropol, and his older brother, Michael, were raised by Abel Meeropol and his wife, Anne Meeropol after the boys' real parents — Ethel and Julius Rosenberg — were executed for espionage in 1953. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death for conspiring to give atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.