I'm now here: http://nsagraduate.wordpress.com/
Come see what's happnin'...
Monday, July 06, 2009
Monday, March 02, 2009
Resurfacing...
I'm going to pretend like I actually use this blog and keep up with it, and inform the world out there (that's you) that I have my thesis defense tomorrow night. Once that is over, I might actually return to the blogging world. We'll just have to see.
Thursday, November 06, 2008
An experiment...
Just an fyi...
I'm doing a little experiment, one which involves me actually posting some of the stuff that I read these days (as I'm keeping up with politics and the market). So I created *gasp* a new blog. And you can find it here:
Please feel free to give me any suggestions, concerns, thoughts...
-Daniel
Monday, November 03, 2008
Election time is here
All,
The time to vote is now. And I'm betting against the media. I think McCain has a real shot, although I think it's likely that we wake up on Wednesday to future President Obama. I'm praying that won't be the case.
In event of an Obomacracy, as my Dad says, I guess that means we must trust in God even more, and the plan that he has for our country. I think it's easier to be lax in our faith with a Republican president due to the fact that conservative policies are not nearly as openly pagan. Oh well.
There's an update.
-DA
Saturday, September 06, 2008
Against Green?
Check out this article! Quite impressive.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/7599810.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/7599810.stm
Friday, September 05, 2008
Thoughts on Politics...
I think I’m finally ready to make a statement (of sorts) about this presidential election. I have several different thoughts, so without being too random, I’ll just do a scatter-shot and see what happens.
Before anything else, I will admit to being blown out of the water by McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his Vice-Presidential candidate. I was surprised and impressed.
With that said, I want to address various “republican and Christian” voters out there who have a wide range of views about Sarah Palin and her legitimacy as a candidate. I have a big problem with the way many Christians deal with elections and how they think they should vote. So…
1) To Liberal Republicans/Conservatives: John McCain is still your man. He’s not as conservative as Palin, I promise. He also doesn’t have the guts to pull some of the stuff that she has already pulled and will pull. So don’t worry… McCain hasn’t changed.
2) To Conservative Republicans: Sarah Palin is your candidate. She’s everything you’ve dreamed of since the days of Ronald Reagan. She’s got the charisma, the drive, and the I-don’t-give-a-darn attitude that will allow her to look past the pressure of the media and accomplish what she feels is right. She can deliver a speech just as well as Obama and be funny on the side, something we’ve missed out on for 20 years. Even President Reagan’s son, Michael, admitted that when he saw Palin on the RNC stage Wednesday night, he saw his father standing there. “Wednesday night I watched the Republican National Convention on television and there, before my very eyes, I saw my Dad reborn; only this time he's a she.” – Michael Reagan (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/09/welcome_back_dad.html)
3) To Christians:
a. (For those of you who don’t think you should vote for the Republican party, but should vote for someone like Baldwin)… you’re terribly inconsistent. As Christians, we believe that our hope and our country’s salvation will come through the work of the church, so if we’re going to make a statement, then we shouldn’t vote at all. Voting for someone we know won’t get elected doesn’t make a statement – it merely makes you feel good about yourself and makes you feel like you did something. So just don’t vote.
b. (For those of you who don’t know if you should vote for McCain)… I agree that our government is corrupt and is full of problems that won’t get fixed by electing John McCain and Sarah Palin, but that doesn’t mean that I should stand by and watch it get worse. We are supposed to be responsible citizens, and that means that if we can keep our country from being led by even more corrupt men, then we should do so. So we’re basically stuck in the position of being defensive voters. We should vote for McCain/Palin because the situation will become much worse if Obama gets elected. Of course, if things improve while McCain/Palin are in office, then we should give thanks to God for sparing us and blessing us with good leaders.
c. (For Christians on a general level)… We often fail to remember, as Christians, that God is in control. We didn’t determine who the candidates were in this election. God did. God put it in the heart of McCain to select Palin as his Vice-Presidential candidate. Our job is to thank God for what He does in our lives and in our country, even if we can’t understand why. God never fails to bless His people, even if the blessings are a little while in coming. Sarah Palin is a Christian, a wife and a mother, pro-life, and not afraid to give God thanks for what He has done in her life. Now, the fact that God has placed a woman in a position to rule over us can be seen as a judgment, and should be seen in that way, but he’s been doing that for a long time. Most of us have had more local officials who are women lead us, and they have a much greater impact on our lives than the VP will. So this shouldn’t be a big surprise. What we should do, as Christians, is do our best to prevent someone from taking the office of President who will continue to tax us more and will continue to support abortion (as well as a plethora of other things…) This is the Democratic candidate, and if keeping him out of office means voting for the Republican party, then we should do so. It’s our Christian responsibility.
So there’s a few things I’ve been thinking about. Maybe I’m off my rocker, and maybe I’m not. I’d like to think not, but … we’ll see. :-)
Before anything else, I will admit to being blown out of the water by McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his Vice-Presidential candidate. I was surprised and impressed.
With that said, I want to address various “republican and Christian” voters out there who have a wide range of views about Sarah Palin and her legitimacy as a candidate. I have a big problem with the way many Christians deal with elections and how they think they should vote. So…
1) To Liberal Republicans/Conservatives: John McCain is still your man. He’s not as conservative as Palin, I promise. He also doesn’t have the guts to pull some of the stuff that she has already pulled and will pull. So don’t worry… McCain hasn’t changed.
2) To Conservative Republicans: Sarah Palin is your candidate. She’s everything you’ve dreamed of since the days of Ronald Reagan. She’s got the charisma, the drive, and the I-don’t-give-a-darn attitude that will allow her to look past the pressure of the media and accomplish what she feels is right. She can deliver a speech just as well as Obama and be funny on the side, something we’ve missed out on for 20 years. Even President Reagan’s son, Michael, admitted that when he saw Palin on the RNC stage Wednesday night, he saw his father standing there. “Wednesday night I watched the Republican National Convention on television and there, before my very eyes, I saw my Dad reborn; only this time he's a she.” – Michael Reagan (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/09/welcome_back_dad.html)
3) To Christians:
a. (For those of you who don’t think you should vote for the Republican party, but should vote for someone like Baldwin)… you’re terribly inconsistent. As Christians, we believe that our hope and our country’s salvation will come through the work of the church, so if we’re going to make a statement, then we shouldn’t vote at all. Voting for someone we know won’t get elected doesn’t make a statement – it merely makes you feel good about yourself and makes you feel like you did something. So just don’t vote.
b. (For those of you who don’t know if you should vote for McCain)… I agree that our government is corrupt and is full of problems that won’t get fixed by electing John McCain and Sarah Palin, but that doesn’t mean that I should stand by and watch it get worse. We are supposed to be responsible citizens, and that means that if we can keep our country from being led by even more corrupt men, then we should do so. So we’re basically stuck in the position of being defensive voters. We should vote for McCain/Palin because the situation will become much worse if Obama gets elected. Of course, if things improve while McCain/Palin are in office, then we should give thanks to God for sparing us and blessing us with good leaders.
c. (For Christians on a general level)… We often fail to remember, as Christians, that God is in control. We didn’t determine who the candidates were in this election. God did. God put it in the heart of McCain to select Palin as his Vice-Presidential candidate. Our job is to thank God for what He does in our lives and in our country, even if we can’t understand why. God never fails to bless His people, even if the blessings are a little while in coming. Sarah Palin is a Christian, a wife and a mother, pro-life, and not afraid to give God thanks for what He has done in her life. Now, the fact that God has placed a woman in a position to rule over us can be seen as a judgment, and should be seen in that way, but he’s been doing that for a long time. Most of us have had more local officials who are women lead us, and they have a much greater impact on our lives than the VP will. So this shouldn’t be a big surprise. What we should do, as Christians, is do our best to prevent someone from taking the office of President who will continue to tax us more and will continue to support abortion (as well as a plethora of other things…) This is the Democratic candidate, and if keeping him out of office means voting for the Republican party, then we should do so. It’s our Christian responsibility.
So there’s a few things I’ve been thinking about. Maybe I’m off my rocker, and maybe I’m not. I’d like to think not, but … we’ll see. :-)
Monday, August 04, 2008
Sir Walter Scott...
... yes, I'm still writing a thesis on him. I've just... neglected this bit of web-space for a while. I think I've averaged a post a month this year, or something terrible like that. In any case, here's a few more quotes on Scott. I've gotten about a 1/4 of my thesis finished (or something near that). We'll see how it continues. I officially leave for Moscow on Friday, but I'm leaving Nac on Thursday to hang out in DFW and see a Rangers game. :-)
From “Scott and the Corners of Time” by Edgar Johnson, City University of New York.
“Romanticism is a state of feeling, not a body of subject matter. Intrinsically there is nothing more romantic about portcullises than about plumbing, about wimples than about atomic warheads. Those who cannot see the difference between the past in Scott and the past in Dumas cannot tell a hawk from a handsaw, and I intend to waste no time on them. Certainly Scott, like almost all of us, had a romantic strain, but the fundamental nature of his mind and feeling was realistic, rationalistic, and stoic. What Francis Russell Hart calls the ‘arid debate over whether Scott was Romantic or anti-Romantic’ may well be transcended in the realization that for Scott the existence and power of romantic feeling was incorporated in his realistic vision of the totality of human experience.
Within that vision the past was not a refuge from the present, but the matrix in which the present had been formed. Its struggles were in fact the paradigms of the problems that still confront us; its fascination for Scott was not that it was remote but that it was relevant. History is the great public world in which we are all embroiled, and if we refuse to draw light from its past victories and defeats we condemn ourselves to repeat its disasters.
This, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is the dominant theme that runs through the entire body of Scott’s work… … That theme is the clash of loyalties battling on the stage of time, of men struggling in the torrent of history. More profoundly still, it is the collisions of history itself, the contention between different degrees of civilization and different stages of society, between a predatory tribalism and the establishment of an ordered society, between the endeavor to hold back – sometimes even to turn back – the clock of history and the forward movement of its hand, between the desire to hold on to ways of life rooted in the past and the forces making for progress, between the powers of stability and change.
The exploration was lifelong. The great struggle extends through all Scott’s work—Highlander and Lowlander, pastoral Scotland and commercial England, Catholicism and Protestantism, Established Church and Covenanter, freedom of conscience and orthodoxy, law and rebellion, tyranny and constitutional government, feudalism and nationalism, barbarism and culture, Europe and Byzantium, Christianity and Islam. These fell encounters of mighty opposites dominate Scott’s greatest work and provide his most exciting theme.
The corners of history—as men turn them, or half turn them, or fail to turn them—both through the contentious early nineteenth century in which Scott himself lived, with its tremendous political, social, and economic problems, and throughout the past from which it had descended—all these multiple corners of time were the cruces of Scott’s theme. And past and present are not discrete, but interconnected. Scott’s history, as Morse Peckham has pointed out, is an analogue for his vision of the present, which was a product of that history.” – pp. 26-28
----------------------
“The aspects of that past that Scott chooses for representation are those great watershed moments in history, those corners of time, that are pregnant for men’s lives. He does not sentimentalize his rendering of them; he shows the past as, like the present, full of ferocity, ignorance, prejudice, and suffering, but shot through, too, again like the present—his present and our present—by gleams of heroism and nobility. His work, therefore, in its meaning for the present, is not only still relevant—it is superbly luminous. ‘To be steeped in his books’, wrote one of my teachers, John Erskine, ‘is to be on familiar terms with the noble men and women who dwell in them, to share their courage, their zest in life, their self-reliance, their intellectual sincerity, until their outlook becomes our own—this would be a good protection against most of the romances which today it is our frailty rather than our fate to read…’
Scott’s great theme was always the struggle between the dying and the emerging, between spiritual stultification and spiritual fruition, between the life-denying and the life-fulfilling. That great theme he explored and developed with unexampled fertility. The courage with which he confronted the problems of his own time was clarified by his realization that the present is the child of the past. No novelist in his century saw life more sanely or portrayed it more lucidly. That is his heritage to us. Under his gaze the corners of time are not quaint and obscure crannies; they are light-filled openings into meaning and enlargements of understanding and the spirit.” – p. 37
From “Scott and the Corners of Time” by Edgar Johnson, City University of New York.
“Romanticism is a state of feeling, not a body of subject matter. Intrinsically there is nothing more romantic about portcullises than about plumbing, about wimples than about atomic warheads. Those who cannot see the difference between the past in Scott and the past in Dumas cannot tell a hawk from a handsaw, and I intend to waste no time on them. Certainly Scott, like almost all of us, had a romantic strain, but the fundamental nature of his mind and feeling was realistic, rationalistic, and stoic. What Francis Russell Hart calls the ‘arid debate over whether Scott was Romantic or anti-Romantic’ may well be transcended in the realization that for Scott the existence and power of romantic feeling was incorporated in his realistic vision of the totality of human experience.
Within that vision the past was not a refuge from the present, but the matrix in which the present had been formed. Its struggles were in fact the paradigms of the problems that still confront us; its fascination for Scott was not that it was remote but that it was relevant. History is the great public world in which we are all embroiled, and if we refuse to draw light from its past victories and defeats we condemn ourselves to repeat its disasters.
This, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is the dominant theme that runs through the entire body of Scott’s work… … That theme is the clash of loyalties battling on the stage of time, of men struggling in the torrent of history. More profoundly still, it is the collisions of history itself, the contention between different degrees of civilization and different stages of society, between a predatory tribalism and the establishment of an ordered society, between the endeavor to hold back – sometimes even to turn back – the clock of history and the forward movement of its hand, between the desire to hold on to ways of life rooted in the past and the forces making for progress, between the powers of stability and change.
The exploration was lifelong. The great struggle extends through all Scott’s work—Highlander and Lowlander, pastoral Scotland and commercial England, Catholicism and Protestantism, Established Church and Covenanter, freedom of conscience and orthodoxy, law and rebellion, tyranny and constitutional government, feudalism and nationalism, barbarism and culture, Europe and Byzantium, Christianity and Islam. These fell encounters of mighty opposites dominate Scott’s greatest work and provide his most exciting theme.
The corners of history—as men turn them, or half turn them, or fail to turn them—both through the contentious early nineteenth century in which Scott himself lived, with its tremendous political, social, and economic problems, and throughout the past from which it had descended—all these multiple corners of time were the cruces of Scott’s theme. And past and present are not discrete, but interconnected. Scott’s history, as Morse Peckham has pointed out, is an analogue for his vision of the present, which was a product of that history.” – pp. 26-28
----------------------
“The aspects of that past that Scott chooses for representation are those great watershed moments in history, those corners of time, that are pregnant for men’s lives. He does not sentimentalize his rendering of them; he shows the past as, like the present, full of ferocity, ignorance, prejudice, and suffering, but shot through, too, again like the present—his present and our present—by gleams of heroism and nobility. His work, therefore, in its meaning for the present, is not only still relevant—it is superbly luminous. ‘To be steeped in his books’, wrote one of my teachers, John Erskine, ‘is to be on familiar terms with the noble men and women who dwell in them, to share their courage, their zest in life, their self-reliance, their intellectual sincerity, until their outlook becomes our own—this would be a good protection against most of the romances which today it is our frailty rather than our fate to read…’
Scott’s great theme was always the struggle between the dying and the emerging, between spiritual stultification and spiritual fruition, between the life-denying and the life-fulfilling. That great theme he explored and developed with unexampled fertility. The courage with which he confronted the problems of his own time was clarified by his realization that the present is the child of the past. No novelist in his century saw life more sanely or portrayed it more lucidly. That is his heritage to us. Under his gaze the corners of time are not quaint and obscure crannies; they are light-filled openings into meaning and enlargements of understanding and the spirit.” – p. 37
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