Tonight I am noodling on another slippery slope: shepherds. Instead of starting a new thread I am drawn to Sagan's gravity of thought. He hit on an event horizon.

Who is your local shepherd?

That question popped into my mind while talking with friends. We were discussing the value of hard work and it seemed that we agreed that hard work is good. At that moment I recalled a conversation with my uncle in Germany. He told me that his local shepherd is retiring and his son did not want the job. To me that was a normal conversation. Sheep maintain the grass in large areas around the village. They bleat and wear bell collars and are cute to look at. The shepherd is a nomadic character that lives in a trailer. I never knew him as well as my uncle does, but the notion of sheep around town along with their bells and their shephard are normal to me. I understood the value of the job and why his son did not want it. The mental equation was balanced.

Now, living in the U.S. , I could not even recall the word shepherd. I had to Google it. I struggled and used the phrase "sheep herder". How does an adult lose grasp of the concept of a shepherd? Then it hit me. Jesus was a shepherd. While living in the U.S. I lost my memory of animals and simple work. The word shepherd means nothing to me here so I forgot it.

The value of shepherding is deep enough to warrant an article in itself. Imagine the difference in noise levels between sheep and lawn mowers. Imagine the difference in lawn treatments between sheep grazing and chemical alternatives. Imagine the difference of smells between sheep and engines. Those are just the benefits that reach the senses. Shepherds bring benefits to society at large as well. Adam Smith describes the benefits of shepherds mental and physical faculties in his book "Wealth of Nations". That section deserves at least as much thought as the value of the invisible hand.

It's interesting that Smith discussed shepherds. He also wrote a book called 'The theory of Moral Sentiments' which I sometimes think I should read...

Consciousness of losing a word like 'shepherd' is outside my experience, but the limits and vagaries of my meat computer are becoming more obvious....

You hit me with "consciousness of losing a word".

Tonight I am reflecting on how long all of us have chatted on this forum and all the hairs that we tried to split. It is a wonderful dance.

Political tension started in my mind around the time I finished law school and read Seven Storey Mountain. Since then I have tried to distill fights to their essence. I think that my courage grew when I was in law school and tried to explain the value of interest rates to my professor. She did not understand me and I did not understand the law. We were professionals talking past each other.

How far has technology taken us since the beer summit or the kitchen debate, really? Whenever I noodle on a problem the solution seems to drill down to quietly talking to someone. It drills down to quiet.

An echo rings of a clergyman seeking the quiet of the countryside. He wrote that perhaps the church must admit some guilt for want of sprawl. His honesty is my conscious memory of quiet.

Peace is quiet.

Superstition and the darkness it generates always has and will be with us. It's part and parcel of the human condition.

the trick is to see this same-old , same-old (ref: Nixon, MacCarthy, Hoover...) in a new INTERNET lit stage....

The old information order culture (news editor mediated) had evolved to a functional if imperfect level. The new one hasn't evolved much yet, and has given opportunity to dishonest manipulators. Genies don't go back into bottles very well, though.

(I assume J. Edgar was the Hoover you had in mind for that list.)

As will religion. To my mind, the two are one and the same.

A more recent writer than Sagan weighs in:

From the novel The Nix by Nathan Hill

Interesting. There is a body of law regarding larceny by trick. Do kids still use the word trick? I dunno.