Snow Jobs

Reb and dogs on the Camino yesterday. Santiago is in the other direction.

NO SHIT

Ex-Guantanamo detainees resume terror fight: Pentagon
WASHINGTON (AFP) – The Pentagon said Tuesday that 61 former detainees are believed to have returned to terrorism since their release from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a big increase from its last count.

The above is the opening paragraph of a story from Tuesday. The story, which raises many questions, seems to indicate that these 61 are out of a total of 520 ex-inmates who have been released so far. If this is so, it implies that over 400 of them have not immediately gone back to the fray. I find this apparent restraint on their part astonishing. If I had done any time in "Gitmo," as we cozily call it, my first reaction after getting out would be to start killing Americans as soon as possible, regardless of whether I had done before or not.

UNRELATED POEM

After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics

If all a top physicist knows
About the Truth be true,
Then, for all the so-and-so's,
Futility and grime,
Our common world contains,
We have a better time
Than the Greater Nebulae do,
Or the atoms in our brains.

Marriage is rarely bliss
But, surely it would be worse
As particles to pelt
At thousands of miles per sec
About a universe
Wherein a lover's kiss
Would either not be felt
Or break the loved one's neck.

Though the face at which I stare
While shaving it be cruel
For, year after year, it repels
An ageing suitor, it has,
Thank God, sufficient mass
To be altogether there,
Not an indeterminate gruel
Which is partly somewhere else.

Our eyes prefer to suppose
That a habitable place
Has a geocentric view,
That architects enclose
A quiet Euclidian space:
Exploded myths - but who
Could feel at home astraddle
An ever expanding saddle?

This passion of our kind
For the process of finding out
Is a fact one can hardly doubt,
But I would rejoice in it more
If I knew more clearly what
We wanted the knowledge for,
Felt certain still that the mind
Is free to know or not.

It has chosen once, it seems,
And whether our concern
For magnitude's extremes
Really become a creature
Who comes in a median size,
Or politicizing Nature
Be altogether wise,
Is something we shall learn.

Auden