Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Feb 8, 2012, 5:42 am
No, really, it is. In the 1999 film "American Beauty," Lester Burnham (played by Kevin Spacey) says: "Remember those posters that said, 'Today is the first day of the rest of your life'? Well, that's true of every day but one: the day you die." This is the day I did not die. This i...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Feb 7, 2012, 9:29 am
Superstition is a weird and crazy thing but ever since my father died I have been saying I would die at the same age, even though our lifestyles were quite different. This morning, at 6 am, I reached the age my father was when he died. Yet I'm alive with no signs (knock on wood) of imminent departur...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Oct 21, 2011, 11:06 am
Everyone who has heard of my change of mind concerning God is waiting to see what church I will start attending. Yet accepting the idea of God is not, in all honesty, identical to induction into religion. If I take a step toward religion, it will likely involve the Christian metaphors and stor...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Oct 16, 2011, 8:57 pm
A friend of mine who is a philosopher recently gave me an image that fits my present understanding of what traditionally has been called the "soul," that central part of us that animates our body and infuses life, self-understanding, a psyche: software. The metaphor is an idea that Umberto Eco...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Sep 14, 2011, 6:00 am
Who are these people reading my blog? A look at my stats shows that the top pageviews went to essentially humorous and (to my mind) largely trivial posts. I realize that to bloggers who get thousands of hits a day and tend or even hundreds of comments, my numbers are puny. But, still, they provide a...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Sep 12, 2011, 10:03 am
I mean, there's signatures such as "In Christ," "Peace" and "Cheers" (and now someone has sent me an email from "[sender]lovesyou@[isp].com") after put downs and insults. Then there's the sarky oblique comment by someone who think's he's being veddy, veddy clever. One person I have known for 3...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Sep 11, 2011, 12:30 pm
It was a week or two after the event many people are fixated on today, that I witnessed an Irish priest, a visitor at what was then my parish, state from the pulpit that forgiveness was fine and dandy (my words), but that what had happened demanded retribution (his word). No turning the other...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Sep 10, 2011, 10:07 am
I won't go into the economics, which I cover professionally. Nonetheless, after a few days I feel that politically the speech was brilliant; it threw the gauntlet to Republicans: "Come on, be obstructionist and make my day." They have to pass Obama's bill or get blamed for a double dip. The numbers,...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Sep 6, 2011, 8:53 am
"Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes." -William Gibson  The quote was passed on this morning and it summarizes my life perfectly. Upon conducting a mental census o...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Aug 28, 2011, 12:27 pm
Sounds odd to say that. After all, we find ourselves in the position of utter desolation, with no one caring, no one helping, no one really understanding. That is one of the forms that suffering takes. In suffering we occasionally find ourselves utterly alone. But we are not. The great human t...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Aug 23, 2011, 11:47 am
I'm coming to see the problem with both religious and anti-religious people. They think that either God exists so they can get something (salvation, heaven, happiness, a quick parking space downtown) or they deny God because they fail to get that something or avoid something else they didn't want (c...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Aug 22, 2011, 10:37 am
A friend from France writes to ask what changed my mind about God. I try to find an explanation. Belief is not a rational thing, otherwise everyone would believe. It's not knowledge, it's belief. Still, what changes profound, near-atheist agnosticism into faith in God? To regular followers of ...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Aug 15, 2011, 7:59 am
Remember Congressman Lowenstein (D-NY) from Nassau County? OK, how about the architect of the "Dump Johnson" movement in 1968 that ended the political career of one Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was then the sitting 37th president of the United States. That's the guy we need now. Some courageous...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Aug 11, 2011, 7:48 am
Somewhere between 1959 and 1979, the world changed for people who kept their noses clean and did what they were told. They were going to be Daddies and Mommies, make a living in some way similar to old Dad, buy a house, have two kids, a dog, a white picket fence and two cars, hopefully send the kids...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Aug 9, 2011, 6:14 pm
Upon reading 2083: a European Declaration of Independence, the online manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the July 22 Oslo murderer, I knew I had seen this movie before. I flashed back to my university research in the early 1970s on the political theory origins of Franco's Spain where — prest...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Jul 22, 2011, 3:17 pm
Today I came face to face with a paradox that has bedeviled me for years. There are two kinds of desirable or admirable people and it seems nearly impossible to be the best of both at the same time. Good people are attentive to the needs of others, kind to their neighbors, hard workers, hones...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Jul 15, 2011, 10:18 am
First I voted Republican in a municipal election, now I'm about to say "maybe Michele Bachmann is right." There. I've said it. OMG, what have I done? I've just sat back and accepted that the Republicans will hold their breath, stamp their feet and churlishly say, "No, Daddy, I don't wanna raise the ...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Jul 12, 2011, 11:22 am
Responses to my blog yesterday hinged mostly on my use of the feminine pronoun for God. I can explain that1, but this is not the point of this post. Here I am using the magic wand of the imagination to propose that instead of Jesus, or Joshua, of Nazareth, there was once a Jocelyn of Nazareth.2 ...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Jul 11, 2011, 12:11 pm
It takes going to a Sunday Eucharist after years of absence to notice with an unaccustomed clarity that the Christian God, by belief, is so particular so clearly "out there" and distinct from us, that this divinity could not easily fold into my admittedly diffuse notion of the Universal Echo (see he...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Jun 30, 2011, 10:50 am
Republicans in the default or no-default negotiations are now making noises that they're willing to contemplate getting rid of "loopholes" in the tax code to achieve what they will accept as deficit reduction. Of course, my loophole is your sacred cow and there ain't no such thing as deficit reducti...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Jun 21, 2011, 2:20 pm
Stardate 64935.8 Am clearing out my place so it can be renovated. I was persuaded to post something I thought trite and self-referential on this matter by Carol of Carol's Vault, a fantastic blog site on freeware and open source software (plus occasional excursions to other regions of the m...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Jun 10, 2011, 4:24 am
When my father turned 57, two years before he died, I composed a poem although there was no reason, other than my own inexperienced youth, to suppose his death was anywhere near. I laughed when people said "he died so young" two years later, yet surely he had no idea. I said for years that I w...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Jun 6, 2011, 8:46 am
Sarah Palin was right. That changey-hopey thing didn't really work out for us on the Left, after all. Of course not. To get the kind of destruction fierce enough to pull out capitalism by its very roots we needed a Republican, and not just any mild-mannered, Amtrak-hating former POW, but a Tea Parti...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Jun 3, 2011, 10:29 am
We interrupt the planned blogging with a question ...  What part of "buy low, sell high" does the Obama Administration not understand? An NPR "Morning Edition" announcer mused about White House cheering at the sale of the U.S. government's 8% stake in Chrysler. This is at a loss of $1.3 billi...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Jun 1, 2011, 7:42 pm
Yes, you read that right. I mean it. Presidential timidity in the face of an arrogant plutocracy convinces me that the only way to bring "change you can believe in" to capitalism is to destroy it. The Grand Old Party, not the Democratic Party, is the last best hope to achieve that goal, given that r...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - May 30, 2011, 3:54 pm
The first Christian statement of faith was simply "Jesus is Lord." One modern hearer gathered from this the meaning that "Jesus will care for me," much in the vein of the 23rd Psalm's "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want." Perhaps. But what did the ancients, the first century Christians, mean?...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - May 29, 2011, 11:06 am
All the shelves are empty, as are the kitchen cupboards. I realize I've taken on something monumental. In short, I'm transforming the museum of a life that no longer exists into my own abode. Redo the kitchen, floors, paint. The place is not for sale, but the process is almost as I were movin...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - May 25, 2011, 12:00 pm
The beauty of the statement is its detachment. The author, my friend K, said he'd spent most elections voting for anyone but the two main parties' candidates: Nader, etc. Then he got drawn in by Obama. But by now he's as disillusioned as so many of us (most of us?) who voted for change. And w...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - May 23, 2011, 10:36 am
Since I've already offered a plausible scenario showing that Dominique Strauss-Kahn could have raped the maid in the hotel (see here), it's only fair to consider the opposite. Again, this is speculation: I have no "inside" information and I have read the story mainly in The New York Times and a few ...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - May 18, 2011, 9:39 am
Dominique Strauss-Kahn's arrest and arraignment for allegedly raping a hotel maid, if based on fact, raise the ultimate question: Why? Here's a fact-free, but plausible, scenario that may explain it all, based on having grown up around people like DSK. The United Nations, World Bank, Internat...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - May 11, 2011, 9:39 am
A Facebook "friend" I thought was a sensible good lefty, reacted with the most petty bourgeois matron's bogus sentimentality when I suggested a better solution than spending thousands on a very sick dog: a shotgun. Of course, the coterie of "good girls" who think commenting consists only of saying i...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - May 9, 2011, 12:42 pm
In the 1970s there was an awful song "Caught Between Two Lovers" about a love triangle. More commonly there is a triangle, or many sided figure of loves that encompass the complex of feelings, thoughts, words and deeds between two people in a romantic couple. From the time in which I genuinely...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - May 4, 2011, 8:42 am
What's truly amazing about the response to the death of Osama bin Laden in the USA is the total absence of even a wisp of American self-appraisal in the face of the reality that people abroad hate the United States and everything they think we stand for. There's a total lack of intellectual curiosit...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - May 2, 2011, 1:06 pm
Before we bury the memory of Osama bin Laden, let's stop to recall that his 1996 and 1998 fatwas, or condemnatory curses, against America referred to grievances that had resonance. The average Arab and Muslim, from North Africa to Indonesia, has legitimate grievances against the rapacious West, its ...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Apr 27, 2011, 4:34 pm
The words "I voted Republican" sputter from my fingers with trepidation. I killed my mother. I lost my virginity. I gave away my dog. That's how it feels. But I was driven to it by the Democrats' penchant for disaster when mere setbacks can be had -- and I feel I'm not alone. Watch out, Barack Obama...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Apr 18, 2011, 1:47 pm
After all the debunking of the posts last week, perhaps it's time to take a good look at the spark that has set people dreaming for centuries: the myth of the United States, some call it the American Dream. Myths, like dreams, are neither true nor false, but simply wishful thinking. Some...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Apr 15, 2011, 9:15 am
See spot run. Run spot run. See the neighbors, store owners and policemen. They're all white, square jawed men, some have blue eyes, a few have freckles. They go to (Protestant-looking) church. They work. Let's parse this. The archetypal image of significant Americans as transplanted English,...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Apr 14, 2011, 10:30 am
Ever since the first propaganda films in the 1940s, we all learned that American GIs are originals who always win and their enemies, who often enough wore more finely tailored uniforms and had better manners, were stodgy and dull and dropped dead like flies. The Germans could never hear an Ame...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Apr 13, 2011, 8:03 am
Almost any discussion of what to do about the United States (or any number of similarly placed countries) ultimately devolves into education, with almost every national candidate claiming to want to become the "education president." Let's stop spinning our wheels. Behind all that lies the noti...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Apr 12, 2011, 9:50 am
A number of House lawmakers and misguided ordinary American citizens argue that their "Tea Party" represents a contemporary effort to re-awaken the spirit of the so-called American Revolution. It is, but not the way they think. As during the American Revolution, ordinary people are being led b...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Apr 11, 2011, 10:30 am
Last week the Republican House pouted, stamped its feet and held its breath until the Democratic Senate and White House agreed to serve a federal meal made mostly of ice cream. Who is to blame? The citizens are: we are in one of those moments in which the government comes close to representing a vec...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Mar 5, 2011, 1:38 pm
Every month at about this time, just a day before the Bureau of Labor Statistics unveils what it calls "The Employment Situation," we have a friendly office pool (we each bet 25 cents) on the unemployment rate and the net employment gain or loss figure. As a glass-half-empty kind of guy, I won a few...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Mar 3, 2011, 9:13 am
The Muslim world's dictators, kings, sheiks and other potentates are falling like dominoes not because of some CIA plot by Western infidels (as Libya's unspellable tyrant alleges), but because food prices have risen dramatically. In countries in which food is a large part of the consumer basket of g...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Feb 24, 2011, 8:55 am
The fluid developments in Libya remind one that political history runs on wheels bigger than the latest gossip about one telegenic American. History — and Machiavelli — teaches us that every ruler, democratic or otherwise, has a relationship with the ruled and faces a critical decision when ...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Feb 21, 2011, 4:19 pm
Lazybones that I always was, I cursed my luck when the city bus on which I was on was suddenly diverted from its familiar route barely two blocks before my stop. Then, as the bus actually made its 90-degree turn, I caught sight of a long line of tanks heading downtown. That night the government was ...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Feb 14, 2011, 8:00 am
Events have overtaken a variety of comments and posts. In lieu of outdated piecemeal commentary, I hereby offer a grand positive vision of what ought to be ... A specter is haunting the globe and it is the model of economic growth driven by consumption demand at prices, levels of production an...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Jan 24, 2011, 8:35 am
Just because Nancy Pelosi can't count votes and Harry Reid lacks the stomach to put the nutwing in its place and a part of the electorate thinks Glenn Beck is the new Aristotle, it doesn't mean that it's wrong to be partisan as an adherent to a cause. Granted, the Republicrats in Congress don...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Jan 11, 2011, 9:31 am
Imagine that you're an established professional of many years. You get nostalgic for the days of yore and go to your alma mater's Web site, find that unlike every other school, they don't sell bumperstickers and other alum stuff. Then you see an offer of a free alum card ... I can't resist a f...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Jan 9, 2011, 1:32 pm
For years grizzled old journalists bored cub reporters with the tale of the wire correspondent who became nearly incoherent one November Friday afternoon in Dallas. Yesterday, the French paper Le Monde offered an echo of what happens when the media megaphone tries to react to unexpected tragedy.
...
Comment - Like

Cecilieaux Bois de Murier posted an article on Antipodes - Jan 5, 2011, 10:59 am
A new year's clean slate and little happening forces the journalist to end up burrowing through piles of audits to find news. Here's my perennial beef about almost all of the investigating: it's all focused on penny-ante small-time pilfering by individuals, not the big money corporate ripoffs. ...
Comment - Like