From this morning’s
New York Times:

Tim Weiner in today’s New York Times:

“Mr. Hunt was intelligent, erudite, suave and loyal to his friends….

Everette Howard Hunt Jr. was born in Hamburg, N.Y., on Oct. 9, 1918, the son of a lawyer and a classically trained pianist who played church organ. He graduated from Brown University in June 1940 and entered the United States Naval Academy as a midshipman in February 1941.

He worked as a wartime intelligence officer in China, a postwar spokesman for the Marshall Plan in Paris and a screenwriter in Hollywood. Warner Brothers had just bought his fourth novel, ‘Bimini Run,’ a thriller set in the Caribbean, when he joined the fledgling C.I.A. in April 1949.

Mr. Hunt was immediately assigned to train C.I.A. recruits…. He moved to Mexico City, where he became chief of station in 1950. He brought along another rookie C.I.A. officer, William F. Buckley Jr., later a prominent conservative author and publisher, who became godfather and guardian to the four children of Mr. Hunt and his wife, the former Dorothy L. Wetzel.

In 1954, Mr. Hunt helped plan the covert operation that overthrew the elected president of Guatemala….

By the time of the coup, Mr. Hunt had been removed from responsibility. He moved on to uneventful stints in Japan and Uruguay. Not until 1960 was Mr. Hunt involved in an operation that changed history.

The C.I.A. had received orders from both President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his successor, President John F. Kennedy, to alter or abolish the revolutionary government of Fidel in Cuba. Mr. Hunt’s assignment was to create a provisional Cuban government that would be ready to take power once the C.I.A.’s cadre of Cuban shock troops invaded the island…. 

He retired from the C.I.A. in 1970 and secured a job with an agency-connected public relations firm in Washington. Then, a year later, came a call from the White House….

Mr. Hunt’s last book, ‘American Spy: My Secret History in the C.I.A., Watergate and Beyond,’ written with Greg Aunapu, is to be published on March 16 with a foreword by his old friend William F. Buckley Jr.

Late in life, he said he had no regrets, beyond the Bay of Pigs.”

Related Material:

Game Boy,
Philosophy Wars,
and the following:

Photo from Miami University site

“The most prominent critic
of the modal notions is Quine.
Throughout his career, he has
argued against the use of notions
like necessity and possibility.”

— Michael J. Loux,
Note 1 of Chapter 5,
“The Necessary and the Possible,”
in Metaphysics:
A Contemporary Introduction
(Routledge, second edition,
January 1, 2002)

“Personality is a synthesis of
possibility and necessity.”

“Existentialism is not all gloom,
even if Heidegger looks pretty sour
in those photos. It’s a philosophy
that America needs now, says
the late Robert Solomon…
more … obit”

Related material:

An entry of
Dec. 29, 2006,
and entries of
Jan. 20, 2007.

As Tom Hanks might say,
“… and by ‘+’ I mean artistic vision.”

“What on earth is
a concrete universal?”
— Robert M. Pirsig  

“James Joyce meant Finnegans Wake to become a universal book. His universe was primarily Dublin, but Joyce believed that the universal can be found in the particular. ‘I always write about Dublin,’ he said to Arthur Power, ‘because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world’ (Ellmann 505). He achieved that goal in Ulysses by making Bloom a universal wanderer, the everyman trying to find his way in the labyrinth of the world.” —The Joyce of Science

Related material:

From A Shot at Redemption—

The Past as Prologue:
Grand Rapids Revisited

John Constantine,
cartoon character, and
Donald E. Knuth,
Lutheran mathematician

“…. recent books testify
further to Calvin College’s
unparalleled leadership
in the field of
Christian historiography….”

“I need a photo opportunity,
I want a shot at redemption.
Don’t want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard.”

A photo opportunity —

and a recent cartoon:

“History, said Stephen….“

From Calvin College,
today’s meditation:

Psalm 3,
Genesis 3,
Matthew 2:1-6,

Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening.
 

the Double Cross

This time slot, 7:00 AM EST,
Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2007,
was reserved earlier.

It now (mid-day Jan. 3)
seems an appropriate place
for the following
illustration —

Spider Jerusalem

For further details, click on the pictures.

Happy 007.