Monday, December 26, 2005

And Then It Was Night

From "Parting the Waters", describing the
Hoover/FBI opportunism following the JFK assassination:

"... From the standpoint of personal injury to King, Robert Kennedy did perhaps his greatest disservice by remaining a caretaker Attorney General for another ten months, when the FBI ran unchecked.
"The Bureau wasted no time describing its target as "King's unholy alliance with the Communist Party, USA," and King as as "an unprincipled opportunistic individual." Sullivan summoned Agent Nichols and others to Washington for a nine hour war council, the result of which was a six point plan to "expose King as an immoral opportunist who is not a sincere person but is exploiting the racial situation for personal gain." All the top officials signed a ringing declaration of resolve laced with four of the usual pledges to proceed "without embarrassment ot the Bureau." The underlying hostility did not make the officials that unusual among Americans of their station. Nor was it unusual that an odd man such as Hoover would run aground in his obsession with normalcy. Race, like power, blinds before it corrupts, and Hoover saw not a shred of merit in either King or Levison. Most unforgivable was that a nation founded on Madisonian principles allowed secret police powers to accrue over fourty years, until real and imagined heresies alike could be punished by methods less open to correction than the Salem witch trials. The hidden spectacle owas the more grotesque because King and Levison both in fact were the rarest heroes of freedom, but the undercover state persecution would have violated democratic principles even if they had been common thieves."



Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Neeta Detta

I had a yoga class with Neeta Detta on Monday.
She's a teriffic teacher, and has an awesome
practice. Best downdog I've ever seen. We spent
10 minutes in wheel preps on the chair (ug) and over an hour in urdvha dhanurasana (ouch).
She had some great insights. I grip my neck in back bends, often leading to headaches. She helped with that. She also emphasized the difference between lifting only from your sternum and lifting with your entire side ribs. The latter felt much better.
We spent a lot of time talking about the internal rotation of the thighs, and outer rotation of the heels. Oh, and in the first pose,
supta virasana, she helped us get our pelvis
more aligned by pushing the butt flesh toward
the knees. Ooo, and I did the headstand version of wheel for the first time. It was an awesome class. I'm sore.



Friday, December 16, 2005

General Order No. 11

Check out General Grant's "General Order No. 11"
This was to expel all the Jews from Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky. Thankfully, this order was immediately repealed by Lincoln, with characteristic eloquence:

Lincoln expressed surprise that Grant had issued such a command and stated his conviction that “to condemn a class is, to say the least, to wrong the good with the bad.” He drew no distinction between Jew and Gentile, the president said, and would allow no American to be wronged because of his religious affiliation.

Grant later won the presidency, partly by winning the Jewish vote.