Sunday/Fear

 On this day: 

217 BC
The Romans, led by Gaius Flaminius, are ambushed and defeated by Hannibal at the Battle of Lake Trasimene.
1734
In Montreal in New France, a slave known by the French name of Marie-Joseph Angélique is put to death, having been convicted of setting the fire that destroyed much of the city.
1791
King Louis XVI of France and his immediate family begin the Flight to Varennes during the French Revolution.
1798
Irish Rebellion of 1798: The British Army defeats Irish rebels at the Battle of Vinegar Hill.
1877
The Molly Maguires, ten Irish immigrants convicted of murder, are hanged at the Schuylkill County and Carbon County, Pennsylvania prisons.
1900
Boxer Rebellion. China formally declared war on the United States, Britain, Germany, France, and Japan, as an edict issued from the Dowager Empress Cixi.
1942
World War II: A Japanese submarine surfaces near the Columbia River in Oregon, firing 17 shells at nearby Fort Stevens in one of only a handful of attacks by the Japanese against the United States mainland.
1964
Three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner, are murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi, United States, by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
2001
A federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, indicts 13 Saudis and a Lebanese in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 American servicemen.
2004
SpaceShipOne becomes the first privately funded spaceplane to achieve spaceflight.

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“We no longer have business cycles, we have credit cycles.” --Boockvar


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There is a book called Dark Money, about the Koch brothers. It is an awkward topic. The Kochs are generally seen as the bankers of the "Radical Right." But they are pro-gay marriage. They favor liberal immigration policies. They are passionate non-interventionists when it comes to foreign policy. They are against the drug war and are spending a bundle on dismantling so-called “mass incarceration” policies. So, how are they the Radical Right? The answer is probably that they are outspoken opponents of top-down government-mandated change. Real enemy of the powers-that-be. 

Let's call them "Elitist deniers." And such are always high-priority targets in any hierarchy.

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Brendan Sorsby is withdrawing his lawsuit against the NCAA and will enter the NFL Supplemental Draft later this Summer.

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Researchers at Beijing's Tsinghua University have designed a new 3D printing method that prints in 0.6 seconds.

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There are said to be 600,000 homeless in the U.S., 37% are Black, 27% are Hispanic, and 90% are men.

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Sunday/Fear

"Have no fear" appears, in some form, 365 times in the New and Old Testaments. One of those entrees opens today's "birds of the air" sermon.  

Indeed, the sheep's weakness does not allow for many enemies, but each one generates an ancestry of close or distant fears, trivial or crippling, to haunt his life.

Christ's offer of solace is startling.

Here are two views, Whitman's confident American anxiety before a challenge, Yeats much more grimly existential.

Long, too long America

By Walt Whitman

Long, too long America,

Traveling roads all even and peaceful you learn'd from joys and prosperity only,

But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not,

And now to conceive and show to the world what your children en-masse really are,

(For who except myself has yet conceiv'd what your children en-masse really are?)

 

The Second Coming
By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?