Regrets: I've Had a Few

I regret that I haven't done much blogging this week.

Too much auditing to really blog.

But not as much as I regret that I didn't write anything about the flower pear trees of Morehead, KY while they were still flowering.

Morehead had a really beautiful white bloom of flowering pear trees this year. It was especially great at twilight.

But now the flowers are wilting and the seemingly ordinary green leaves have taken over.

But they won't be ordinary forever.

The leaves of the flowering pear tree change to a distinctive blood red at the end of the fall and the leaves of the flowering pear tend to change more unevenly than other trees.

The result is rows of flowering pear trees with red and green leaf patterns from the unequal changes. I thought I saw Dick Cheney's smirk in one of the flowering pear trees last year--the same smirk he used when he said Iraq would have 1,000 years of Democracy--or was that war.

Iraq's Getting Worse

The testimony from Petraeus is in, but the verdict is still the same. Despite the ability of American troops to suppress much of the violence, the situation continues to deteriorate. The bottom line is that the actions of the Iraqi government against the Mahdi Army have driven Iraq toward a civil war between the American-backed Government and the Shiite population as a whole. This isn't to deny that the surge led to some progress, but the progress is coming at the expense of an ever bigger future explosion.

Charlton Heston's Ashes

Too bad about Charlton Heston's death. Dying's usually a hard thing and Heston has been deteriorating for a long time.

It just so happens that I watched the first Planet of the Apes on Saturday. Interestingly, it was the boundlesssness of human desire that led Heston to undertake his space flight as a way to seek something "better than man." It was that some boundlessness that Heston's ape antagonist viewed as being responsible for humankind's demise as a species.

But I don't think human desire is boundless. Outside of European societies of the last four or five hundred years, evidence of that kind of limitless desire is relatively scarce.

In today's "advanced" societies, it's more the case that social authorities actually "bind" us by stimulating our desires in consumerist directions.

In contemporary American the more we desire, the more constrained we are.

Auditing My Brains Out

It's spring, but blogging isn't really in the air at Red State Impressions. I'm working my brains out on the academic audit for the Government Program and haven't been able to think much about blogging. It's even worse with piano playing. I haven't looked at it for a week.