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Sunday morning, after chores, 66°

Barn News

Brindle had bunnies on Friday, only two, I think. The first was born on the wire floor of her cage, so I picked it up and put in the nest box and covered it with fur. It was kicking and squeaking, so I don't think it was chilled before I found it and put it in the box.

Shotgun has five kittens. I still haven't found their nest, but the kittens are now coming out and exploring a bit. They like to sit in the hayloft while I do chores and stare at me, at least four of them do. Pitiful, the first one I found, starts yowling as soon as he sees or hears me, and comes galloping out of the loft to receive some attention. Wednesday morning, after I had stepped on his toes twice, I picked him up and tucked him under my coat. He quieted right down and snuggled into an inside pocket in my coat.

I have been encouraging the young ducks to leave their stall and explore a bit of the world. They are terrified. They are even afraid of me, the person who has been giving them food and water for their entire lives. Something might be out there that could attack them, and they won't leave their stall. Runner ducks, the skinny ducks that stand more erect than other ducks, do not display any behavior that humans could classify as 'intelligent'.

The four young ducks generally go through two gallons of water every day, making their stall a nasty swamp. They don't drink the water, they just splash it out of the waterer, where they can mix it with mud and their feed. They actually consume less than two quarts of water and about one fourth of the feed they receive each day.

To Whom Who Said What?

What I wrote was, “Raymond, whom, please, is the Englishman? “ I should have said, “Raymond, who, please, is the Englishman?” according to two grammar experts, and I do not doubt but that they are completely correct.

The error arose because of an English teacher, working in the basement of a miserable, broken down elementary school in Waterloo, Iowa. She was old (an adult, she could have been 22, but she was 'old' to me) and she tried to teach English to a tough bunch of sixth graders. She was slender, I seem to recall a womanly build, and had black hair with a dramatic white streak starting at her forehead. For about three weeks I hated her, and then she walked by my desk and I received a sniff of pheromones; instantly, I was in love. Boys are susceptible to that sort of sudden love.

In that class I learned to diagram sentences, a skill only slightly more useful than integral calculus, but one which I learned, nevertheless, because I was in love. For years I automatically diagrammed, in my head, every sentence I wrote. Finally, after three years of college education, in the depths of symbolic logic, I discovered the escape from the curse of mental diagramming, when I understood that English was subject to Gödel's theorem, and thus one could construct true sentences in English which could not be diagrammed. Not only was it not necessary to diagram every sentence, there were sentences which could not be diagrammed. Such habits are hard to completely break, though.

[Notice in the next sentence, 'whom' is the object the preposition 'of', which modifies the subject of the sentence, I think.]

The English teacher, of whom I dreamt every night, I remember as having told us that, when diagramming questions, one places what seems to be the object as, instead, the subject of the sentence. So, my automatic, built-in diagrammer, which still functions occasionally, broke in with a structure in which 'whom' was the object and 'Englishman' the subject, with the verb 'is' intervening, the then normalized proper declarative form being “The Englishman is whom, please?” She probably never said any such thing, but, many years later, I still revisit diagramming and her scent.

“The Englishman is whom, please?” when spoken with rising inflection at the end, was still distinguishable as a question until a few decades ago. Now, rising inflection does not necessarily imply a question, but only indicates that the speaker is probably infected with Californiosis, a social disease spread through contact with shopping malls. “Like, you know?”

Fred Phelps

The Rev. Fred Phelps of Topeka is an interesting person. He is the pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church, and leads his flock in protesting at the funerals of soldiers who have died in Iraq. Fred says that God is causing our soldiers to be killed because we are tolerating homosexuality in this country. Fred says that God hates homosexuals; God does not hate them because they are homosexual, but rather they are homosexual because God hates them.

I think that most people would consider Fred's ideas a little nutty. What very few people understand is that Fred's ideas come straight from Plymouth Colony. The brave Pilgrims of the Mayflower were people who had the same religious fervor and beliefs as does Fred. They came here to live because no one in England could stand them.

I think Fred is the fairy's best friend, one can't help but sympathize with people who have an enemy like Fred.

Fred is not stupid. He was a lawyer, now disbarred, and several of his children, who are members of his church, are also lawyers. These people cannot be dismissed as brainless. I have worked with, met, and talked to several members of his church. One of those people suffered from severe depression, but he wasn't stupid, he was a good programmer. Another was an excellent computer systems analyst. They weren't stupid, nor, do I think, are any of Fred's followers.

Are they crazy? Well, yes, but aren't you crazy, too?

Let me postulate that 95% of the humans over age 35 want to be able to look at themselves in the mirror and say, “I'm trying to be a decent person. I love my children and want the best for them. I want to be honest, hard-working, just, and respected in my community.” Such people have integrity. The other 5% are not necessarily bad people, they simply are unable to see why anyone would think integrity is important in itself. They might be honest and hard-working, but they do it strictly to achieve goals, like making money. The 95%-5% division is based no more than just guesswork or dreams, there is some research to support all this. Oh, and the differences between the two groups are mostly genetic, they are born destined to be one way or the other.

Interestingly, if you go into a prison and, limiting your population to those over 35, talk to the inmates, you will find that most of them, perhaps 95%, want to consider themselves as having integrity. The reasons they are in prison may have to do with how they define, “honest, hard-working, just, and respected in my community,” or it may be the result of a stupid moment when they were young.

My point is that when you look at any fully adult segment of society, whether that segment is prison inmates, clergy, bartenders, lawyers, or candlestick makers, about 95% have integrity, and about 5% don't. You have to remember that any person with whom you are interacting might have a somewhat different definition of “honest, hard-working, just, and respected in my community,” and about 5% do not understand having such an ideal. Does that leave any way to decide that some of them are evil? I think not.

Of the 5% group, some of them must be locked away for the protection of society. The BTK killer from Wichita is a fine example of somebody who should be locked up. He was reputed to be hard-working and respected in his community, but I doubt if he cares one whit about being able to regard himself as honest or just. Those traits are only valuable inasmuch as they helped him achieve his goals, which included torturing and murdering people. Still, I can't regard him as evil. His acts were evil in that they injured others, but he wasn't born with the cognitive wiring necessary to feel that murder is the act of an evil person.

I always thought it was Jesus or one of his disciples who said, “Hate the sin and love the sinner,” but it was actually Ghandi who said that. Anyway, I think that it is a correct guide, both logically and morally. Are the members of Westboro Baptist Church of the 95% or the 5%? My guess is that 95% of them belong to the 95% group, and 5% of them belong to the 5% group. I don't agree with their doctrine and I think that demonstrating at a military funeral is an evil act, but I am unwilling to call the members evil people.

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