Also about immigration, a lot of the “deplorables” accurately perceive that much of the college-educated pseudo-left would and does prioritize the well-being of immigrants and refugees over that of already-present lower-class Americans.

This does not justify the hatred and racism by any means, but there’s is not an inaccurate assessment of the situation. The reason Clinton called them “deplorables” isn’t really about racism but rather the accusation of racism as a proxy for ignoring and minimizing class privilege and neutralizing the possibility of class solidarity. (Hint, hint.)

Contempt and derision from those more powerful than you are and who are directly responsible at least in part for your immiseration does not bring on the most rational of reactions. See “Trump, Donald” and “Pence, Mike” for examples.

We saw two butterflies in North Carolina yesterday in the middle of winter while hiking.

Today it’s supposed to be nearly 80.

But yes, global climate change is not real. Sure.

BTW, in North Florida when I was a kid, there were no butterflies in winter. Am now 400 miles north and some appear. Couldn’t be related to anthropogenic climate change though. Of course not.

You can argue until your teeth fall out about the benefits or the drawbacks of immigration, but the fact is human nature (which in this case is probably fairly immutable IMO) is to not want a built community to shift violently in less than a single lifetime.

So whether mass immigration is a benefit, is harmful or is just neutral is irrelevant if the follow-on sociocultural effects are those that effectively tear your nation apart by electing a Trump or a le Pen.

Open Borders and pretty neoliberal pseudo-utopian hippie dreams won’t help you then. Not even a little bit.

Why Falling Home Prices Could Be a Good Thing.

Could be? Congratulations on some of the more affluent pulling off their blindfolds and taking out their earplugs I guess, but one of the factors destroying the hopes and finances of those under 40 is how crazy expensive housing has become.

As I’ve written before, in the mid-60s an ex-girlfriend’s father could and did afford an okay apartment working part-time at a minimum wage job. Buying a house proper itself was not much more dear than that, too.

Now there is nowhere in the country that is possible. Not only that, but in most places where the good jobs are concentrated and on a median salary, one could never afford any decent house with any financial cushion left over.

Housing prices falling significantly would be a great boon for the entire country and for the future. It might be (if it happened) the easiest way to make the most people immediately better off.

Better yet, we could follow the Singapore model for housing. Yes, it’s not ideal but nearly anything would be better for most and more importantly for the future than what we are doing now.

Sleep is a terrorist stealing my time
Neurotransmitters: yours is no victimless crime

If I could repose instead in a single eye blink
I’d have so much more time just to think

But until I am uploaded into a gleaming robot shell
My mind must at times occupy its thoughtless black cell

If ever my body is forged from titanium and steel
The tyrannical laws of Hypnos I will forever repeal

I object strongly to people arrogating to themselves the authority of telling me how I should read or understand something.

Here’s the thing: when an author casts a work loose into the world, it is no longer his or hers. It belongs to the mind of whoever reads it, or translates it. That is the only way it can be, really, if you ponder it even for a second. Words are not precise. Language is fluid. The word and the idea of the word “nice” for instance meant something different 20 years ago, 200 years ago, 500 years ago, than it means now. And more importantly, that word (and all words) means something slightly and sometimes something greatly different for every single person who uses it, hears it, or thinks about it.

I know liberal pieties regarding Islam are at play here, but one must understand that there is no “true” translation of any work. None. There just cannot be.

Before I could comprehend French, do you know how I read Rimbaud? Phonetically, because I thought the words were pretty even though I only understood one out of 10 of them. Was my reading invalid? Should I just not have read it at all? If not, I probably never would have been able to read and truly understand it more deeply at all. (If you disbelieve this, think about how a child learns to read.)

Should I not have read Moby Dick in third grade even though I didn’t know some of the words or the complete history of 19th century whaling?

You get the picture.

Don’t misunderstand me. I think the New Yorker article is worth a look. Understanding the history of something is better than not.

However, Rumi wrote in a different language in vastly different culture in an extremely different time in a place far away from where most people who read him dwell.

I’d argue that in most cases truly translating Rumi for a modern secular person must by needs significantly alter most of the religious imagery, or it just will not be comprehensible. A truer translation, in other words, for what Rumi meant us to feel must have less fidelity to his actual words.

I’m no great fan of Rumi, though I like certain of his observations, but that is beside the point.

Look at Rumi’s original language, even in translation, and you can see very clearly what Barks leaves out and how that omission impoverishes the verse. As Ali indicates in her article, Rumi says nothing about “rightdoing” and “wrongdoing.” Instead he talks about iman (religion) and kufr (infidelity), a very different and far more complex (and, to me at least, more interesting) opposition than right and wrong, one that would require a good deal of disciplined religious learning, as well as deeply experienced religious/spiritual feeling, fully to understand and grow beyond.

Most people — the vast, vast majority — who read Rumi aren’t going to spend the years studying philosophy, comparative religion, Persian, Sufism and epistemology to begin to understand the supposedly more accurate translation.

“Rightdoing” and “wrongdoing” is a perfectly valid rendering of what Rumi (likely) was getting at in that passage. Does it capture the full nuance of what he meant? Of course not. But the fact is, nothing ever could because you are not Rumi and neither are any of his living readers. Hell, I read things that I wrote only a few years ago and I am not even sure what I meant.

I find the article to which I linked annoyingly stupid, really. It presupposes one must be an expert in many topics to read and enjoy a work. It assumes that one must even care that Rumi was a 13th Century Sufist to get something meaningful from his words.

None of this is true. In fact, it is absurd. Just as one does not need to be a cosmologist to look at the Hubble Deep Field image and be awed and humbled, one does not need to be a scholar in eight different fields to read and get something meaningful from any writer, including Rumi.

The first ten in today’s playlist:

One day, I will write the complete North Florida stories.

All of the crazy, ridiculous things I seen done, done did, or had did to me.

That’ll dredge up some memories for sure. It’ll seem like fiction but some of the most fantastical-seeming will never be recounted; not too certain about that whole statute of limitations thing in some cases.

One of my biggest problems with Trump is that he is old.

The president should probably be older than 30 or so, but no older than 45. Honestly, I’d rather have a 25-year-old president than a 74-year-old one. (Yes, I know the president must be 35 by the time inauguration rolls around.)

Why is this? Well, because an old man or woman doesn’t have to live with the effects of their actions. Trump is 74 now, for instance. He won’t be around or at least won’t have to live for long with the consequences of his most deleterious antics.

I know it’d never happen, but I’d support a law that said the president could be no older than 50 when taking office, with no minimum age (this doesn’t matter because Americans would never vote for anyone very young anyway).