Some of this, some of that

֎ Strolling about on the search engine, as is mariner’s wont, he came across an infrequent word that took him back to college/preacher days when he was reading about religion, philosophy and logic and as a preacher, dealing with religious understanding as part of his job. The word is ‘theodicy’. Mariner had to search for a while but he found a post written in 2016 about this very topic. The subject of theodicy had been raised when one of his nonagenarian friends used the word. Mariner was surprised that someone actually knew this word and its context in theology. A discussion ensued about the goodness of God, whether goodness was derived from human experience and other obtuse considerations.

The next day mariner wrote the post in an effort to settle the meaning of the term theodicy. Mariner provides the reference if you are curious about theodicy; be forewarned that there definitely is no room for emoji and other iconery. [Go to the Home page and search “Theodicy and Secularism” posted March 19, 2016.]

֎ On a less esoteric front, March is upon us. Living on the 40th parallel, small thoughts of gardening, shrub pruning and weed killing poke into consciousness. This past winter was unusual in that there was significant snow cover for about three to four weeks. This snow just now is disappearing as the Sun’s rays melt it away.

Having the snow cover for so long has been hard on small wildlife. Mariner’s shrubbery has exceptional damage caused by hungry rabbits, eating some smaller shrubs to the ground. Rabbits are one of those creatures nature put in place so predators would have something to eat. In a town, there are no indigenous predators.

Sometimes a fox will take residence in town; they are excellent predators. Once in a while the few Redtail hawks will capture a young rabbit and sometimes one of the few feral cats will catch one. None of these predators, however, do enough damage to control rabbit population. In his defense, mariner has become a predator, too. But he isn’t any better at killing rabbits than all the other town predators. So it will be another year of cursing the rabbit in the yard because the rabbit is between mariner and his rifle.

֎ Moving on to more serious matters, mariner wrote in a few posts about the need to have multiple nations bond together administratively in order to manage global issues. An early, embryotic move in this direction is how nations are dividing chores among themselves to deal with China. Note this paragraph from Politico:

“COUNTERING CHINA WITH … MODULAR SECTORAL ALLIANCES? The Wall Street Journal reports progress within the Biden administration on how to organize containment of China. According to the report, alliances would be sectoral and the members would differ with each issue. The core alliance members would be the G-7 countries, with others added according to need: a modular model that avoids new bureaucratic institutions and resembles calls for a T-10 group of democratic tech allies. For example, Israel on tech and artificial intelligence, or India on trade issues. Don’t expect that every country will announce their participation.”

Ancient Mariner