Parts of Speaking Publishing

Truth 1: Venezuela is in terrible shape economically; 8 million Venezuelans are refugees; there is great hardship there.  Truth 2: Maduro caused this and had stolen two elections. (Ironically, Trump tried to do so.) Truth 3: Venezuela does not have the financial, governmental, legal, and cultural  infrastructure the U.S. does to support democracy.  Truth 4: Venezuela benefited from massive investment by U.S. oil companies and those companies were forced out when the oil industry was socialized.  Truth 5: President Trump's legal authority to do this is tenuous at best. Yes, War Powers Act. Yes, lots of other presidents have done similar actions, such as Bush in 1989. That doesn't seem like rock solid justification.  Truth 6: President Trump says he's not into regime change but this is clearly regime change.  Truth 7: Since this was a covert, special forces operation, we don't know as much as we think we do.  Since I don't believe these truths are debata...

 My FaceBook feed now sends me everything that Jason Pargin posts. He is pretty interesting.  I like this one:   https://www.facebook.com/reel/866042226032381 If you think you are going to make money writing independently, it's a reality check.  Many of the famous writers of the past either: 1. were independent wealthy 2. were married to a wealthy person (Hemingway, I'm talking about you) or dependent on family 3. lived in penury 4. died young (Brontes, Austen) 4. had a day job A very minor percentage, or percentage of a percentage, made a living at it. Today that is even more impossible. Someone like Dickens wrote installments for magazines and made it work for him, but he made real money (as did Twain) on the lyceum or lecture circuit.  Pargin makes a case for how the "day job" actually makes one a better writer, anyway. 

A lot of people I listen to and admire, namely Russell Moore (although I have some questions for him) and a former colleague, really love Wendell Berry. On the website "Christians Who Don't Suck," Berry is listed as one of those Christians who don't offend the website's owner, an ex-evangelical, sensibilities.  And I have some of his books and am working through Life is a Miracle. He's a fine writer, especially his poetry (I did not find one of his novels I read that compelling, but I can try again).  But the admiration some have for him eludes me, especially some of his activism and advocacy.  He is all about the family farm and environmentalism, and therefore he is all about anti-industrialized farms. He is against coal-fired plants and nuclear energy.  I think he's living in the wrong century. In a country of 340 million people, how are we to feed them only on the basis of current family farms? And how do we provide energy for them solely on hydro-elec...

 So Donald Trump has decided to be the enforcer for Venezuela. I need to get into the weeds on this one; I didn't think a president could do what he's doing. Hey, that never stopped him before! However, if it's time to 25th amendment him, Vance sure ain't gonna lead the charge. Vance is stacking up as one of the most duplicitous people around. No surprise; his memoir was untruthful, so why stop there?  But . . .  hey, at home, (well, in the U.S.) the largest city now has a communist Muslim mayor whose first acts were to take away protections for Jews, shine a big light from the 9/11 site for Muslim American Heritage Month (who knew there was such a thing?), and give a speech about the "warmth of collectivism." And to top it off, he has to have the smarmiest, smuggest "smile" ever.  Warmth of collectivism?  Are you kidding me? I don't think the millions of Russians under Stalin and Chinese under Mao who died from starvation and cold knew about thi...

 This is from Jonathan Rodgers of the Habit, on reading the book The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel, a rabbi.  That phrase “realm of time” carries a lot of freight in Heschel’s book. We tend to think of time as a measurement rather than a realm. Around the new year, we see a lot of productivity tips and tricks, and they all seem to share the assumption that time is fungible. Time can be saved, time can be spent. An hour is simply a unit of productivity—or perhaps a unit of rest and recharge—but in any case a unit that is interchangeable with other units, the way one dollar is interchangeable with another dollar. Hence the saying “time is money.” But time isn’t money. Time is life. It is the realm in which we exist. Unlike the space-minded man to whom time is unvaried, iterative, homogeneous, to whom all hours are alike, qualitiless, empty shells, the Bible senses the diversified character of time. There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at ...

 I have noticed I'm getting a lot of social media input on "so-called" trauma, estranged families, adult children who have rejected their parents, and toxic therapy.  I remember in higher education circles, about six months to a year after March 13, 2020, we started to hear about 'trauma-informed pedagogy." It was all the rage. I hope it helped someone. I thought it was a bit much.  There is trauma perceived and trauma objectively experienced.  Physical assault, personal watching of physical assault and murder, injury from accidents or war, severe illness, psychological abuse - these are trauma. Those who saw, on site, Charlie Kirk's murder, yes.  Being contradicted, hearing about abuse, hearing bigotry when the person who spoke it is unaware or out of date on certain terminology. Those who watched the Charlie Kirk murder over and over on social media feeds, that is self-inflicted trauma.  Trauma is real, but like stress, it affects people differently. And ...