Congress is best at doing nothing. "If you were to stroll by the House chamber today -- or tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that -- you would arrive at the ideal time to see what the lawmakers do best: absolutely nothing...By the time the Republican-led House returns next week, members will have been working in Washington on just 41 of the first 127 days of 2012 -- and that was the busy part of the year. They are planning to be on vacation -- er, doing 'constituent work' -- 17 of the year’s remaining 34 weeks, and even when they are in town the typical workweek is three days...To call this 112th Congress a do-nothing Congress would be an insult -- to the real Do-Nothing Congress of 1947-48. That Congress passed 908 laws. To date, this one has passed 106 public laws. Even if they triple that output in the rest of 2012 -- not a terribly likely proposition -- they will still be in last place going back at least 40 years." Dana Milbank in The Washington Post.
I hope you enjoy Part ll. It includes an incredible story of The little Sisters. There is a link to Part l if you missed it. Part ll is one of 7 parts to the interview.
The appearance of an all-white orca, or killer whale, off Russia's Kamchatka peninsula, would have delighted Herman Melville. In Moby-Dick, Melville dwells at great length, for an entire chapter, on the wickedness of whiteness, as opposed to blackness.The irony is that that which we see as beautiful is an aberration of nature and the natural order – a discrimination in which even animals are complicit. Albino animals are often the most vulnerable, precisely because they are so evident. Of course, killer whales such as Iceberg have no predators – apart from us.
Whiteness is a burden, too. In The Whiteness of the Whale, Melville makes reference to Coleridge's albatross, an emblem of "spiritual wonderment and pale dread" and the Ancient Mariner's curse for defying nature. In art or in reality, we cannot resist the anomalous, because it reassures us of our normality. It is little wonder that Ahab's demonic pursuit of the White Whale has become an arch metaphor for our distrust of the other, from racial purity to global terrorism. "Pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us like a leper," as Melville concludes, "and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?"
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