Archive for the ‘Heart and spirit’ Category

Good Point

Posted by Ron Coleman on August 12, 2009

Forbes ranks West Point as nation’s top college (via Insty):

A report released Wednesday by Forbes magazine ranked the U.S. Military Academy as the top college in the country in their America’s Best College review. “Marked by an intense work ethic and drive to succeed on all fronts, the West Point undergraduate experience also allows graduates to leave without a penny of tuition loans to repay,” Forbes stated in its release.

World War II Memorial -- Washington, DC

Yeah. You know, I’m on vacation this week — hence the lack of blogging, if you noticed — and I’m in Washington, where it’s hot and humid but priced perfectly for a family vacation. And at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum today we saw an IMAX film about the Air Force’s real-life “Top Gun” training and simulation program, Red Flag.

And, wow.

The flick is propaganda all the way, but, guess what, so are all films. But coming away from this, and having attended a number of highly-ranked educational institutions myself, I said to myself and a significant other, my, these guys — the U.S. military as a whole, notwithstanding sad notable exceptions– are the most competent people in the country, aren’t they?

I know. So many awful things do get done wrong by the military, it seems. It’s so easy to second guess them, though, given the scope of what they’re tasked with. But if you sensibly weigh the things they do right with proper consideration of the risks of doing it wrong, both locally and globally, extraordinary mastery of multiple arts and scientists required to execute their tasks, the discipline and focus, and —

Then there’s this.

The members of the military essentially do everything that is physically and technological possible in the pursuit of their missions. You and I look at, say, the way you would go about rescuing a downed pilot and say, well, if you could rappel down a rope and, uh, I guess…. oh never mind.

They rappel down the rope. They fly upside down. Anything a human can do, they find people brave enough and dedicated enough to go out there and DO.

For YOU.

How many Ivy Leaguers does that describe?

Posted in Americana, Heart and spirit, Packing heat | 1 Comment »

Season of woe

Posted by Ron Coleman on July 29, 2009

Jewish tradition teaches that on Tisha B’Av (the Ninth day of the month of Av) , five national calamities occurred:

During the time of Moses, Jews in the desert accepted the slanderous report of the ten spies, and the decree was issued by God forbidding them from entering the Land of Israel. (1312 BCE — traditional Jewish dating)
The First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians, led by Nebuchadnezzar. 100,000 Jews were slaughtered and millions more exiled. (586 BCE)
The Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans, led by Titus. Traditional sourcest teach that two million Jews died, and another one million were exiled. (70 CE)
The Bar Kochba revolt was crushed by Roman Emperor Hadrian. The city of Betar — the Jews’ last stand against the Romans — was captured and liquidated. Over 100,000 Jews were slaughtered. (135 CE)
The Temple area and its surroundings were plowed under by the Roman general Terentius Rufus. Jerusalem was rebuilt as a pagan city — renamed Aelia Capitolina — and access was forbidden to Jews.

Other grave misfortunes throughout Jewish history occurred on the Ninth of Av, including:

The Spanish Inquisition culminated with the expulsion of Jews from Spain on Tisha B’Av in 1492.
World War One broke out on the eve of Tisha B’Av in 1914 when Germany declared war on Russia. German resentment and the upheaval and instability that resulted set the stage for the Holocaust.
On the eve of Tisha B’Av 1942, the mass deportation began of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, en route to Treblinka.

More on the Ninth of Av, which begins tonight. Observant Jews will fast (a complete fast — no food, no water) until nightful Tuesday night. For us, this is the “hardest” day of the year. (Reposted from past years.)

Posted in Faith and Works, Heart and spirit, Orient, Past is prologue | Leave a Comment »

Shatnez Man

Posted by Ron Coleman on July 1, 2009

That’s Rabbi Avrohom Aronovitch of Passaic, regarding whom eventual turnabout is, I say, fair play.

(Just don’t believe everything you read — whether it suits you or not.)

Posted in Faith and Works, Heart and spirit | Leave a Comment »

Sky box

Posted by Ron Coleman on June 25, 2009

Posted in Heart and spirit, Metropolis, Style | Leave a Comment »

At the junction

Posted by Ron Coleman on June 24, 2009

My first reaction when I saw this post on a blog called Infrastructurist (looks very cool) (via Boing Boing) was just to link to it on my Facebook page. I also lament the loss of these great — well, in some cases very large and grandiose, if not necessarily actually great — civic works of sculpture. I come to work, in fact, through the new Penn Station every day, and work in One Penn Plaza (yeah, me and those buildings!), overlooking (actually, straddling) the non-entity of a transport hub that now bears the Pennsylvania Station name as well as the depressing Madison Square Garden.

Then I went ahead and wrote this comment, and decided to recycle and touch it up a little here, for the benefit of my larger other audience.

To a large extent the manner in which the loss of these temples of transit compels so many of us is a testament to what we really think about a world ruled solely by utilitarian concerns. That latter, callous attitude toward the spiritual importance of environment on human existence, in the cities as much as anywhere else, is displayed by Alon Levy in the comments at the original post.

God help us in the soulless, bottom-line libertarian future that so many think they want!

Ironically, the utilitarian worldview is incapable of accounting for the long-term utility and welfare (in the microeconomics sense of the word) that derive from civic pride — the decline of which, from the 1950’s on, along with the decline in the quality of inner city life, surely must be linked to the decline of the humane in urban architecture.

And yet: As the (not so godless?) Alon says in a subsequent comment, “Ron Coleman, you’re the first person I see use the word spirituality to mean ‘preserving train station facades.’” Indeed: Many of these buildings were and are obsolete, and the cost of their respective upkeep, utility expense, restoration or retrofit, relevance to modern transportation need or all of the above would constitute a preposterous budget item for almost any public entity saddled with such costs. Only religious dogma, and perhaps theocracy, could justify such devotion.

Rail transport, despite its highly romantic appeal, is great for everyday commuting but is seldom of the choice of travelers from afar, for whom flying — even in its own diminished state as a culture and a humane experience — is a clearly superior choice. Most other travel remains, in America, highway-based, because Americans want to go where they want, when they want and with whom they want, and they want to get back home that way, too.

In addition, the cheap labor and lax or nonexistent building, fire, safety and access standards of the nineteenth century, which made it possible to erect and use these behemoths, are truly relics of a different age. So who is going to foot the bills to maintain these buildings as obsolete white elephants? Or is someone here volunteering for a special tax assessment so Detroiters can stare at their irrelevant grand terminal?

There’s the facts, Jacks.

I sure wish we had the old Penn Station here, though.

UPDATE: There is hope, kind of — the new Penn Station.

Posted in Americana, Heart and spirit, Metropolis, Style | 4 Comments »

Jet fuel

Posted by Ron Coleman on June 3, 2009

This is what we white-knuckle passengers are always afraid of:

Military planes located new debris from Air France Flight 447 Wednesday while investigators focused on a nightmarish ordeal in which the jetliner broke up over the Atlantic as it flew through a violent storm. . . .

As the first Brazilian military ships neared the search area, investigators were relying heavily on the plane’s automated messages to help reconstruct what happened to the jet as it flew through towering thunderstorms. They detail a series of failures that end with its systems shutting down, suggesting the plane broke apart in the sky . . .

The pilot sent a manual signal at 11 p.m. local time saying he was flying through an area of “CBs” — black, electrically charged cumulonimbus clouds that come with violent winds and lightning. . . .

Ten minutes later, a cascade of problems began: Automatic messages indicate the autopilot had disengaged, a key computer system switched to alternative power, and controls needed to keep the plane stable had been damaged. An alarm sounded indicating the deterioration of flight systems.

Three minutes after that, more automatic messages reported the failure of systems to monitor air speed, altitude and direction. Control of the main flight computer and wing spoilers failed as well.

The last automatic message, at 11:14 p.m., signaled loss of cabin pressure and complete electrical failure — catastrophic events in a plane that was likely already plunging toward the ocean.

“Broke up…. failures… deterioration… plunging…”

I’m afraid of flying. The very smell of jet fuel, nauseating enough as it is, automatically makes me sweat because what it fuels is my total visceral and neurological recall of my fear.

I do fly, and do it all the time. And I am not the “nervous type.” But I do have a visceral fear of heights — it’s entirely hardwired — and I get motion sick. Also, as it turns out, most of my early “adventures in flight” were on the Chicago to New York route from when I was in law school. This can often be a very rocky route, and during some winter flights we did indeed take some very, very precipitous drops in altitude. These were taken entirely in stride by my fellow professional flier passengers, but I just turned into liquid and slunk lower and lower in my seat. This was over 20 years ago, mind you, back when you could actually move in a coach class seat.

So I get puh-ritty religious on the airplane, tucked right up there next to God and, what do you know — none too eager to get any closer just right now.

And when you have these instinctual fears, and you add a bunch of learned fears heaped onto them, and you know how to read and stuff, you become just like one of those neurotics, you know? You start thinking… of scenarios. And the flop sweat comes.

This Air France story describes the kind of thing that’s just not supposed to happen. Bad weather on a transatlantic flight? No problem; these pilots, these aircraft — that’s their meat, right?

Right?

Posted in Heart and spirit, Homo sapiens, Sisyphus | Leave a Comment »

Boy, you’re gonna carry that freight

Posted by Ron Coleman on June 3, 2009

Some days the weight just presses down, you know?

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Why we fight.

Posted by Ron Coleman on May 25, 2009

The greatest ever Memorial Day words were uttered not on the eve of summer, but in November:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.