Why We're Broke

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The United States Thursday said a World Trade Organization ruling that Boeing received illegal subsidies backed up its claim that EU rival Airbus had benefited from overwhelming public support.
"The WTO has vindicated the view the United States has taken for the last 20 years -- that the subsidies the Europeans give to Airbus dwarf anything that the US government does for Boeing," Ron Kirk, the US trade representative, said at a news conference in Washington.
A panel of the Geneva-based WTO released its ruling Thursday on the European Union's complaint that Boeing benefited from subsidies in violation of international trade rules. The US and EU governments had received the confidential reports in January.

Yahoo News today.
I believe Boeing was one of the companies that paid no taxes. Instead they have a tax refund or something. It never ends in this country.

China the Lovely

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12666701

According to Damien Grammaticus of the BBC, China is now spending more on internal security than it is on the military. They seem to be very afraid. Wonder why? Maybe all those Tiger Mommies are paper tigers.

April Fool's Day

Gowk, or Common Cuckoo

a reprint; some old references to 2009
posted a day early by mistake... big, gawsie gowk that I am!

Today arrived with the morning milk, and like the morning milk, it sat a while upon the back door stoop - fresh, bedewed with beads of moisture, and cream at the top! - a big gawsie day, a day looking for love and trouble - a day of many colours: good, bad, and indifferent; a day of glycol and gristle, of candy and cinders...a harbinger of spring and summer and the early fall days to come, the great expansive kerry dance of days, lasting from Trinity until Michaelmas. Today is April 1: " This is the first day of April......  Hunt the gowk another mile. "

"Gowk" is a Scots word , meaning "cuckoo", and as unfamiliar as it probably sounds, I may safely say that I have actually used it in my writing, doing something about grackles and gowks at the time of about 40 plus years ago. My three nephews stopped by by in the A.M., soliciting three cups of tea ( courtesy the Grace Tea Company, New York, New York ). I thought it auspicious and ominous: three nephews, three cups of tea, three the kings, three the persons of the Trinity...and three the legs of Hephaestos' steam-powered......three...legged thingies that we read about in the Iliad, or at least would have read about had you been studying. So it was that, then: a day of wonders mechanical - Haephestos to Henry Ford - and perhaps our bitter herbs to eat after. We wondered at the markets dropping after Mr. Obama's remarks about the auto industry. To us, it seemed like CEO Obama was stepping up and clearing the decks and it was all business - good sign from our experience. However, markets, in their infinite wisdom and ability to act like frightened harlequins, saw it differently. I suppose Mr. Santelli was scrabbling about the floor of a mercantile exchange somewhere, yelling "Mene, mene, tekhel, up yer socialism!" - or the closest approximation thereto.

It was a good day today. The down market was followed by an up - somewhere. It was a day to take your car into the nearest auto hospice to have an evaluation of the damages of unrepaired potholes. We have had some potholes along the seam of tarmac and shoulder which resemble the Calebras Cut of the Panama Canal, and have been gaping like Ginnunga Gap for a couple of months. I saw a road grader once. As I passed, I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw it disappear down the void - another addition to the DPW of Hades! The bit of doggerel on April 1 quoted above - I tell you now, just as I told the boys, sitting and drinking the Earl Grey tea - was what passed for humor in the Gaelic community; i.e., the total discomfiture and embarrassment of another human being!

Back in the day, our druidical leaders had us give human sacrifice. With the Christian community moving into the neighborhood, we - the Gaels : in order of importance, the Scots, the Manx, the Bretons, the Welsh, the Cornish, and the Irish -we felt the necessity no longer of decapitating the odd Andy Thomson and using his eyeballs to play at mib, so we turned to incapacitating a scapegoat with practical jokes. It was that same Andy Thomson we asked to go to the Chemist's with a note, whereon was writ the above " This is the first day of April, Hunt the gowk another mile ". The Chemist, upon reading said note, would tell poor Andy that he did not have the medicament or whatever that I required, but so-and-so did. He would tell Andy then to proceed to Mr. So-and-so with his letter Andy did as directed, and the cycle went on. The verb "hunt" is taken to mean to chase game, to cause it to move and run, not merely to go looking for game, so everyone is causing Andy, the gowk - it also means a simpleton - to run on another mile or so. By the end of it, everyone was laughing, and Andy couldna show his face for a fortnight.
--

Dog teh Boonty Hooter

Hey! What's up with Dog, the Bounty Hunter?
He doesn't use the "N" word anymore.
Gadfrey, back in the old days, he used it even during those cozy little prayer sessions they had before setting off to collar the "jumper".

The Magic Garbage Bullet: Part Two

The Wizardry of Science!!
That could be an alternate name for this article, focusing on the absolutely keen affection we have for the High IQs and the Tiger Parent-Mind-Set to drive high IQs and the outcome of this paradise we call Earth.


Read this excerpt:

Could Einstein's Theory of Relativity be a few mathematical equations away from being disproved?  Jacob Barnett of Hamilton County, Ind., who is just weeks shy of his 13^th birthday, thinks so. And, he's got the solutions to prove it.

Barnett, who has an IQ of 170, explained his expanded theory of relativity — in a YouTube video. His mother Kristine Barnett, who admittedly flunked math, did what every other mother would do if her genius son started talking mathematical gibberish. She told him to explain the whole thing slowly while she taped her son explaining his take on the theory.

Read the entire story at:

http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/03/26/12-year-old-genius-expands-einsteins-theory-of-relativity/#ixzz1HvFA9JaT

That story is a very interesting narrative, and it is an ancient one. I can remember the story of Jesus discussing the Torah with the elders in the Temple, even though Jesus was but a kid. Nothing like a prodigy to whet our celebrity-seeking appetites! It's in the genes.

Now where are the Prodigies of Nursing and Care? Of Husbandry and Teaching? Where is the Big Media fascination with young prodigies in those arts which enrich our lives and our environment? Or are there no such prodigies? Are Great and Prodigious Things solely restricted to Mathematics?! 

I had a post on a religious order devoted to restoring the Chesapeake Watershed; does anyone care?
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2011/02/sinum-conservate-save-bay.html

The world's population is growing.
The climate is shifting.
For the most part, we are peoples that have not learned how to share back in first grade.
Until we reward and celebrate humanity's benefactors with at least as great acclaim and attention as we do to unusual abilities that have no direct connection with our welfare, this society will not endure.

BP Revisited

Remember when I said the story of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is not over?
There's been another UME.

.... Unusual Mortality Event, that is.

This quote will sum it up, and follow the link to the whole story:

We know there were at least 200 dolphin deaths this year, and about 90 others last year during the spill. Those numbers are much higher than what we normally see in a year on the Gulf. As for NOAA conducting “an investigation” into the dolphin deaths, that’s a joke – a complete farce. The agency has squandered its credibility over the last 10 months. There is nothing left for the public to trust. And for all intents and purposes, federal officials have already absolved their friends at BP of responsibility, although they did try to backtrack a bit when everyone laughed.

http://oilspillaction.com/more-transparency-woes-noaa-initiates-gag-order-on-dead-dolphin-investigation

The Magic Garbage Bullet: Part One

The title combines an old film title about "magically" effective medical treatment with the true story of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. At the time of May 27, 2010, when the idea of covering the outflow with a dome did not work due to ice crystal formation, the "magic bullet" of garbage was trotted out of the lockers of Research & Development back in the UK. (Probably from Q's laboratory in the basement of M6... or whatever; I can only dream of Sean Connery as 007 being lectured  by Q on the correct way to use the garbage bullet properly.)

And this is part of my fascination with my discovery of the inequity of Science: on one hand,  the cutting edge (and sometimes poorly understood!) Science that is daily changing and is the outcome of expensive R&D programs and is so enticingly alluring to be used for Profit! On the other hand, the Science used to clean up after the cutting-edge Science blows up, and that deals with the human cost after the "fall" from cutting-edge-hood.
For example, in the Gulf of Mexico, we had drilling down 5 miles below sea level - no minor accomplishment, followed a magic garbage shot to the well head. It did not work, by the way. Oil continued to pour out for a couple more months.
In Fukushima, we had all the bells and whistles of a GE nuclear plant, scientists and regulators all over the place, followed by local firetrucks trying to pump sea water on a nuclear pile!

For further examples, we look at Computation & Mathematics, and in particular at financial markets. The incredible increase in computation and the speed of computation eventuated in a financial "melt down" in 2008. There had been warnings before then. Seems to me I recall some rogue trader from Barclay's dropping a few billion back well before then. Everyone was rather aghast at "billions" - not "millions" - being flushed by one person and not plugging the darn drain. But it happened.
How did we fix the 2008 financial melt-down? We gave the people that caused it our money, and we did it not particularly at the speed of light, but almost. The fix for the situation was a legalized "theft" of assets from the innocent to the guilty, a bit of the old Robin Hood in reverse.

The human cost? The health of the people? Iodine tablets, get 'em at the local Chemists's, the corner Apothecary, the neighborhood Drug Store. In our country, a lot of the people affected by such a disaster would not even have health coverage.

How do we handle nuclear waste? So far, we ignore it and let it build up. We have absolutely no Science to address the situation. We have people studying it, and they periodically tell us things are getting desperate, but we have no application of Science to come up with a way to effectively handle it... because that would cost a good deal of money, and why - oh, why - would we make a billion generating power, and then spend a half billion cleaning up our nuclear cesspool? Not us. If things fall apart, I'm sure there are firetrucks nearby.... may not be water, though.
Then we turn around and feed antibiotics to millions of farm animals to fatten them up and increase profits, and immediately provide breeding grounds for "super bugs". There are pathogens that no drug company is trying to develop drugs for now.

The Science of Taking-Care-of-People-and-the-Earth needs to be as well funded and as up to date as the Science to extract and exploit. The Sciences must be made Human in this type of Capitalist economic system.

Libya

I hope the outcome in Libya is good, and I hope the fighting ends. I hope lives are saved. I do not like making snide comments, but when I look at pictures of the fighting, it looks an awful lot like Mad Max, The Road Warrior action segments.
I hope it ends soon, and Libya is free.

The Science of Fixing Corporate Disasters & Alien Invasions

As I mentioned earlier, the Science we have for fixing things is no where near the science for monitoring and regulating things, and that is light years away from the real SCIENCE we use for short-term profits.

When Fukushima had problems, we used good old-fashioned firemen, firetrucks, and we pumped sea water over the nuclear pile.
When millions of gallons of oil were gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, we had a big old wad of garbage ready to shove into the oil well. (Truth to tell, this sounds more like a cartoon cure for trouble than a "real world" cure.)

If the science we are using to make money is up to date, the science for regulatory services is 50 years behind, and the science for fixing screw-ups is at least 150 years behind.

So when there actually is an alien invasion, we will probably use Kryptonite to hold them back.

--

Exceptionalism

John Bolton believes in American Exceptionalism in the strong sense: there exists a quasi-supernatural force behind the USA and what it does to fulfill its mission in history.

I think it is nothing more than a sophomoric interest in paganism and idolatry, but a number of the brainy and rich types concur with him.

All I can say is that when it comes to quasi-supernatural - or even supernatural - forces to talk about, one might not wish to forget Justice and Retribution for the genocide of Native Americans.... for starts. Is there a debt there? Is there a debt for our years of slavery?
God reserves to Himself the right to pay the bill of vengeance. I think there will be an enormous tip, also.
--

Super Bugs

 Sibyl of Delphi in the Sistine Chapel

More resistant strains of "super bugs". Not only that, but now Iran seems to be getting into the nation-state hacker business as pay-back for the Stuxnet computer bug that the US and Israel gave them.

A bug  is something that cannot be easily anticipated in a complex environment. We have to let the "bug" appear, then we re-act.
This holds true whether the "bug" is a glitch in stock trading which causes the Dow Jones Industrial Average to pllummet 1,000 points in ten minutes, or whether it is a microbial infection.
As our systems become more complex, this threat increases: bugs are created and spread exponentially. If you add in some sort of natural disaster or environmental dislocation, you could have an unpleasant catastrophe.

The scenario of the Fukushima power plant is instructive:  the "bug" is the possibility of a tsunami which was apparently ignored. It would have required more expensive systems and structures to guard against. Now there is rumor of the electric company being nationalized by the government, because its financial outlook has become so burdened by the disaster.
The government can only nationalize so much, particularly now since governments themselves are on shaky financial footings.

The future belongs to super bugs.
It does so because there is way too much momentum dedicated to increasing the fragile complexity of the world. Nothing can slow down the surge to super-human complex systems which will profit in the short-term, but will cause disaster in the long-term. We have no regulators or monitors that have been proven to be able to function in the long-term, much less do we have any sufficient science to speedily meet the unexpected challenges thrown at us. Look at the SCIENCE we used in Fukushima:  fire trucks pumping sea water.

My predictions remain unchanged. Just like the Delphic Sibyl, I suddenly glance towards the the coming times, appalled by the News of the Future!
--

Ade Ileke 6: Gran Fauno Está Muerto

"Tengo muchos nombres, que sólo le viente y la lluvia pueden pronunciar."

I have many names that only the wind and the rain can pronounce.
--

The Fundamentalism of Rock

"All You Need Is Love"

Let it sink in for a moment; let the memories wash warmly over us, making us feel comfortable.

Now, what exactly is wrong with a mind-set that collapses the complexity of Life into a Universal Statement: "All you need is love"? It is similar to the problems I see with notions like "Absolute Truth": they are universals that give the appearance of infinity, but in actuality they have no anchor to the earth nor the heavens; they are silly testimonials to our urges, our obsessions, and our fears.

The view of Paul William Roberts ("Empire of the Soul") is that "All you need is Love" transformed into "All you need is Dope" which further transmuted into "All you need is Dough."

And that sums up where we are today.
Love is not all we need, for obviously we need to act in a proper way to ensure that our view of love is one that enriches and does not harm nor impoverish either ourselves or the beloved. It is an illusion to believe in the simplicity of Love being the answer for everything.
When I speak of simplicity, I refer to a simplicity which results from years spent searching for a singularity of faith, only to realize that the complexity of God is beyond comprehension, and my simplicity is an acceptance of a complex web of "good narratives"... my understanding is not one-thing, it is a Smithsonian Museum of all the names of God and Creation... and I just try to enjoy it in a humble manner.

You remember the game back in school where someone tells a story to a student, who then proceeds to tell the story to a second student, who then relates it to a third, and so on and so on. Then we compare the story heard by the last student to the original story, and see how greatly they have changed in transmission.
We expect change and transformation and losses through time, but if we start from an intolerable universal simplistic statement, we almost never escape from its prison into the light! It takes a revolution lasting hundreds of years to get from God's making the world in 6 days to the continuing creation of the universe over billions of years. And that fight is still going on in Tea Party legislatures!

Consider Christianity where one went from washing the feet of the apostles to the torture of the Inquisition. The Universal and Absolute Intent is unchanged, even though the particular interpretation has changed from 'holy service' to 'torture'.

Consider The Sermon on the Mount: not just one statement, but many. Jesus allows for the complexity of the world. Even the Golden Rule is not as absolute as it appears. Neither Jesus nor Rabbi Hillel, his contemporary, abolished the rest of the Law when they stated the Golden Rule, even though they dramatically indicated that the Rule is the Summation of all the Law.

In a recent poll, 44% of Americans believe (1) God is directly calling the shots in our physical world, and (2) it sure looks like the end of time.
That's like saying "All you need is God.... actually our idea of God... who is brutish when need be!"
Usually statements about God parade around as universal statements, so what we have is yet another absolute verity staring us in the face... again doing little more than summing up an urgent desire to believe and an urgent fear of the future.

God created diversity of Life and the Processes of Life. Complexity is innate in Creation. There are not only two sides to every question, there are a thousand or more!
--

NATO's Nursery of Drugs

Washington says the U.S. does not destroy drug crops in Afghanistan, because "the authorities of the country do not ask them to do so", said on Saturday Director of the U.S. Public Policy on Drug Control, Gil Kerlikowske.

"Every country has its sovereignty, and we do not impose such things as, for example, destruction of crops. Development and implementation of such plans is the task of each country. Obviously, president Karzai has decided not to resort to large-scale destruction of crops, although at the level of individual provinces, such work is carried out successfully", said Kerlikowske.

Mr. Kerlikowske is head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
NATO controls the skies in Afghanistan. We have drones that can go into coffeehouses in Yemen and Pakistan and pick up the check. Who controls the drugs? Who controls the billions that flow from them?
Guess.

Tsunami News

The NY Times today:

In a country that gave the world the word tsunami, the Japanese nuclear establishment largely disregarded the potentially destructive force of the walls of water...

 This is what amazed me at first: the bloody word is Japanese, but they did not provide for such an event!
It is a tale of Tokyo Electric and its way of doing business. Just last night I was reading that Tokyo Electric will probably have to switch to energy generated by other fuels, which will reduce their profit.
You know perfectly well the level of profit was what allowed intelligent business and regulatory people to ignore the dangers in the first place. Profits will make us rich... if they do not kill us first!

One Who Broke the "History Trap"..........فخ التاريخ

Muhammed Bouazizi, Tunisia

نخلق بحرية،
قباطنة سفننا،
و نسعى نجوم جديدة لتوجيه لنا،
و نسعى للأكل  خبزا جديدا

يسعى عطور الورد الجديد

--
freely we create;
we are captains of our ships.
we seek new stars to guide us,
we seek new bread to eat...
he seeks the perfumes of the new rose.

Free Creation and "History Trap"

In its essence, a "history trap" is the cycle of repeating history. The question is why do we keep on repeating history, especially a series of actions which are not conducive to our greater well-being.

A history trap is a symbolic construction, thus just as money is the basis of a "liquidity trap" in economics, symbols and our use of symbols is the basis of a history trap. A good example in the present day is the "End of Times" historical trap: throughout history people - being focused on the here and now - have thought that their times were the absolutely worst of all possible times, what with earthquakes - not a new phenomenon - volcanoes, meteor, and extinctions of various parts of the biosphere.
And today is no exception. A good proportion of the population thinks things are well on their way to the last trump and the Saints marching in. This is a repetition of a cycle of intelligent symbolism which has occurred probably millions of times over man's time on earth, not just the 2,000 years of Christianity and its eschatological bent concerning last things.

Or there is always the coming of the Messiah, or the Mahdi. The occurrence of false messiahs and mahdis are numerous,  and will continue to increase, since we always fall into the "historical trap" : it is a construct made from good and sturdy symbols that we feel comfortable with - just like the carrot greens under the box enticing the innocent rabbit - and we can settle right in with little or no effort. Particularly no effort. We have always preferred that the drudge work of Religion be done by someone else, preferably some charismatic figure from the deep past. They offer everything to us in the simplest manner: read a book, eat a wafer, affirm some dogmas, have a "personal" with God. Not much to it.

As part of Free Creation - Creation able to leap outside the barriers of Law-like Discipline - we are capable of denying the enormous stories of the past and free to go questing to find our own.

If we insist on the exact and precise symbolism of the Past, we shall find ourselves in the Past, living and breathing in the Past, and fighting the battles of the Past, and questing the visions of the Past. And our lives will be encapsulated and diminutive and become as logical as a treatise written with Absolute Truth, absolute truth being a creation of the past, not the future, for it cannot bear the light of volatile intelligence!
Battles of the Past are already won or lost!
Visions of the Past are already seen! Quests of the Past have already reached their goal! We shall only be repeating what has already been done, and we shall delude ourselves into thinking we have explored far shores, when all we have done is to stay at home and applaud the rote opinion-arias of oppressively bombastic operas.

How much of this present world strife is the fruit of ancient grudge and vendetta? The President of Libya invokes the terror of Crusaders; does it still resound after 500 years? The antiquity of the symbols are indicative of the weak-minded fear of the power of creation. My Creator did not create any lily-livered, weak-kneed knaves, fearful of encountering new things without an AK-47 in their hands.

Keep the ancient kernel, and throw away the ancient rind!
Create our new story around the Kernel of the story we received from the Past and our ancestors, and tell it anew! Go and discover it for ourselves! Captain the ship our forebears sent us, drop the old and moss-laden cargo, pump out the bilge and scrub it with caustic! Then let us set sail to the Future!

Ade Ileke 5: Guests in Pskov..........Гости в Пскове

Заморские гости,
Стая редких птиц
посадку на набережной.
золотые часы отсчитывать
время в наших сердцах
--
Guests from overseas,
a flock of rare birds alighting
on the waterfront.
Golden watches keep time
in our hearts


pic: Vladimir Smirnov

Ade Ileke 4: Children of Amazonia

 
Doces da Amazônia:
futebol e meninas;
meninas de amêndoa,
meninas de amêndoa!
meninos de cascas duras e
meninas de amêndoa!
--
sweets of the Amazon:
soccer and girls!
girls of almond,
girls of almond!
hard shell boys and
girls of almond!

Cause and Defect

The attorney general said after a two-year decline, officer deaths "spiked by nearly 40 percent" with the loss of 162 officers in 2010. In 2009, 117 officers were killed.

What did this nation of mental defectives expect when guns and ammo were selling like hotcakes? What in the world did we expect? A Peaceable Kingdom?

Well, I know; you expected all the gun-toting, law-abiding citizens who are gung-ho on their Second Amendment rights to march into every shoot-out and save the local police, right? To walk into every classroom where someone has pulled a gun and is shooting, and take out that wacko, right? You .were thinking Rambo and Die Hard. If this were the end of times, even Jesus would be shot at.

Stockholder Equity

Protecting, husbanding, and tending Stockholder Equity is not the same as trying to goose Stockholder Equity at the speed of light. The year 2008 demonstrated the difference between the two.
--

The State of White America

White, that is; not Latino, not Black, and not Asian. Strictly White. After all, the Aryans, being a race of their own, are certainly entitled to their own centers of Academe, their own Aryan Studies. I'm on board.

At the American Enterprise Institute:

April4, 2011

From: AEI Events event@aei.org
Date: March 23, 2011 12:10:37 PM PDT
To: XXXXX
Subject: AEI Bradley Lecture: The State of White America, April 4, 2011
Reply-To: event@aei.org

AEI Events is an unmonitored e-mail address. Please do not reply to this e-mail. See below for contact information.
The State of White America
Bradley Lecture by Charles Murray
Monday, April 4, 2011, 5:30-7:00 p.m.
AEI, Twelfth Floor
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
(Two blocks from Farragut North Metro)

 From Brad de Long's Blog,  http://j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/
The AEI itself is  http://www.aei.org/video/101414

--

Let the Land be Unplowed in the Seventh Year...

After writing a bit about frankincense yesterday, I see this today:

Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/12/061212213543.htm

Frankincense Trees Overexploited For Christmas Scent

ScienceDaily (Dec. 13, 2006) — Current rates of tapping frankincense - which according to the Bible was given to the baby Jesus by the three wise men at Christmas and which will feature in thousands of Nativity plays in coming days - are endangering the fragrant resin's sustained production, ecologists have warned. Writing in the December issue of Journal of Applied Ecology, ecologists from the Netherlands and Eritrea say that over tapping the trees results in them producing fewer, less viable seeds...

the way that frankincense is tapped needs to be changed. "In order to control the decline in fruit and seed production, less intensive tapping procedures should be developed. As our results show that six tapping points per tree are already having a negative impact, we suggest reducing the number of tapping points. New tapping regimes should include rest periods when there is no resin harvesting to allow the trees to recover," they say. ..

Since the time of Solomon frankincense has been grown and harvested.
When did the local farmers forget how to do it?
When and why did people who have been doing something successfully for over 2,000 years forget the basics of agriculture and husbandry?


Money and Profit, pure and simple. The Frankincense industry is a microcosm for our world economy and the things which infect it with its own destructive toxins. Frankincense is being over-harvested because the farmers or the governments have forgotten that trees are not industrial robots, and that husbandry demands that living things have "off-season" time to recuperate...
There are Powers in the world of life that are beyond the Power of Money. We ignore these powers at our own risk.

--

Tiger Mom and World of WIN

To the previous post about Doom, you may add:

Note to Tiger Mom:

Tiger,

Emphasis on WIN to the exclusion of all else might explain why tigers themselves are always on the verge of extinction. See you after the next financial disaster.

Doom.... de Doom, Doom.... Dooooooom!

The next crisis will occur in the interva1 2014 - 2017.
Remember May 6, 2010? I do. I'm doing my taxes, and reporting how my nice little stocks in Water Resources and Green things were all, all sold off that day when the stock market plunged 1,000 points in 10 minutes, driving the price of my stocks far below the triggers set for selling. I had set points for selling to lock in any small profits I might ever have gotten, and did not have to worry. If stocks went south for a while, a sale would kick in. Well, it kicked in. Everything went down, everything sold off, and then ended the day right back where they had started.

If you remember...

That's how it will start. It may be a bit of unrepaired infrastructure that causes it; the electric grid may fail, a trading android may run amok - no one can shut it down - and things just get out of hand. I know it's hard to believe. We really are right on top of the important stuff, like burning nuclear rods, like Bear Stearns, like asset bubbles.
We have the proverbial handle on it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12827752 22 March 2011 Last updated at 23:20 ET
Stock trades to exploit speed of light, says researcher
By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News, Dallas

Financial institutions may soon change what they trade or where they do their trading because of the speed of light.

"High-frequency trading" carried out by computers often depends on differing prices of a financial instrument in two geographically-separated markets.
Exactly how far the signals have to go can make a difference in such trades.

Alexander Wissner-Gross told the American Physical Society meeting that financial institutions are looking at ways to exploit the light-speed trick.
Dr Wissner-Gross, of Harvard University, said that the latencies - essentially, the time delay for a signal to wing its way from one global financial centre to another - advantaged some locations for some trades and different locations for others...

Once again, our dreams are beyond human scale, beyond the good of mankind or of the Earth: an overweening arrogance that cares little or nothing for human values. Or even economic values: we seek ways to increase wealth with no increase in actually goods provided for the world.

Once again, we shall lose control and our electronic world of dreams will collapse... ultimately. There is a Fibonacci sequence in reverse counting down from one financial crisis to another. 2008 + 5 = 2013, but I think the economic politics of election year 2012 will push it back a year or two. The reason that there is a reverse Fibonacci is due to the intervals getting closer, and they are getting closer due to the types of nonsense outlined in the BBC article above: Madness at the Speed of Light!
If you think this is crazy, I wish you could prove it crazy. As it is, we will either be grubbing for roots and berries somewhere, reciting books we have memorized, waiting for the future, or we will be continuing our present lives of the Rich and Famous. Either outcome is fine by me, because I do not really have any say in the matter.

--

 

Religion and Science

God is not a belief.
The Holy and the Quest for the Holy are innate. We cannot view the world without using the prism of the Spirit. Who taught mankind the science of agriculture? It was a visionary experience, re-enacted in Ritual, and re-told in Story and Song. Who taught our hands in the ways of mining and quarrying, to seek metals far beyond our sight and hidden within the earth?
Where there was at first no Science, the Vision of the Holy was our only guide.
Now we have two guides, and we ignore both of them.

Ade Ileke 3: Soul Spiles

 
         Spile or Spyle for Maple Syrup

Children are a blessing. They are the conduits to another life.
In the cold Icelandic language, they are spila sálarinnar:
soul pegs, the hollow spouts in trees conducting
the living sap and resin from our souls
to spill upon the snow like a maple confection.

Ade Ileke 2: Smile of Africa

O, Smile of Africa!
Yet still bitterly you weep
frankincense tears collected
from the trees of well-scarred
Somalya, cut with long knives!
The season of monsoon
rains a mighty river
of refugee ancestral water:
fleeing Guinea mountain,
trekking Timbuctoo
until at last one arrives
at the open arms of
Mama Patient Ocean.

At Large

 Cincinnatus accepting the whatever-it-is... fasces, I think... symbol of leadership and setting aside his ploughshare.

Spotted near the civilized areas, prowling near the garbage dump, are a number of opinion pieces that say that Congress must debate the new Libya War.
Well, that's a bit late. What and who authorized Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, etc? Too late, too late. Time and the tide and all that. The Office of the President  - just like Julius and his nephew Augustus - has received the imperium from the assemblies of the citizens. The various authorizations for wars we have seen since the 1960's are no declaration of war by Congress, but Congress will not force its will against the Imperium of the Presidency.
There is not one dictator, rather the Office itself has been allowed to exercise Dictatorship in War, and each holder of the office of President exercises the power. Thus, when people say that Libya is Obama's War, we sense that there is a real sense that we have come to expect the present holder of the Office of the Presidency to exercise that Dictator's Imperium.

Unlike old Rome, when Cincinnatus assumed the Imperium, then relinquished it and returned to his farm, we are more like Julian Rome. We desire the spectacle. We always speculate on the people running for president: will they have the nerve and guts to push the red button?! Will they be tough guys when confronted by whomever we dislike at the moment?!
We want to see some sabers rattle and missiles rain like hail.
Then we want our freedom.
Then we want drones killing kids in other countries, but not here. Not here. The Imperium shall never reign here!

FOX... News?

Apparently Jennifer Griffin at FOX is an idiot. Apparently FOX News in Libya sends bodyguards with cameras to cover events that might be risky. Is this a joke?
The only possible interpretation is that the Griff thinks that the other newsies are being so totally used and exploited by Gaddafi, whereas FOX is a box of cookies way too smart... although they do send their road crew into harm's way, just in case!
CNN's man on the scene called her a hypocrite. It seems a more opprobrious term might be in order.

Ade Ileke 1

by Egon Schiele

"Like, I used to eat licorice. But I don't so much anymore. I used ta eat King Dons for lunch. They're not as good as they used to be. Nothing is a s good as it used to be. Ha! Ya know, that sounds funny! I'm, like, 20 and I'm sounding like my old man, like, 'nothinz as good like the old days!'
Hey, gimme a piece of your licorice. Not the whole thing, just rip off a piece, see if it taste like I remember. My teeth and tongue used ta get black when I ate it.
I eat chocolate now. M&Ms, Hershey's... It supposed to be good for ya.
Ya catch Michigan's game last night? Like, I wuz born  when the Fab Five started at the Big, ya know, the  Big House. Fab-uuuu-lus 5. Team was better back then. Hmmm..
Later, man!"
--

Flash Fiction 2 : Ade Ileke

             Ade Ileke - A Beaded Crown

 
I rather like this "Flash Fiction" thing.... where an army of literate chaps sort of pop out of nowhere at the local mall, and jointly recite "Evangeline" while the shoppers look on in consternation. I was in one myself yesterday. We had chosen a section of script from The King's Speech to declaim to the masses, and I'm quite sure all thought us mad. I mean, it is one thing to set aside disbelief and watch the British Empire on the silver screen with Helena Bonham Carter guiding one through the mystic rites, but it is all rather trembling and aghast and "what ho!??" when actually confronted with the spectacle of HRH stuttering in front of all and sundry.
It was, however, better than the time we did Mussolini's speech of February 23, 1941 last week:

"The Ethiopian war was hardly finished when from the other shore of the Mediterranean there reached us appeals from General Franco, who had begun his national revolution. Could we Fascisti leave without answer that cry and remain indifferent in the face of the perpetuation of the bloody crimes of the so-called popular fronts? Could we refuse to give our aid to the movement of salvation that had found in Antonio Primo de Rivera its creator, ascetic and martyr? No. Thus our first squadron of airplanes left on July 27, 1936, and during the same day we had our first dead...."

 and people thought it was all about Libya, and came up and congratulated us "UN Firsters" and "One Worlders" for finally getting it right! Some thought the "New World Order" was getting a bit more like "New World Symphony", certainly high faluting and highly browed, but imbued with more of the common touch, and kicking ass in Africa was very much on the menu as Special of the Day!
Most odd. But, then, what could we have been expecting? The only thing worse could be next month's Flash The Tempest in the Mall of the Americas, when I shall be doing Caliban, and Tempestt from the Great Clips barber shop is doing the tempest itself! Brrr! Makes one reach for the old bumbershoot just thinking about it.

OK. Enough. That is not what Flash fiction is. It is actually mini-fiction: the impenetrable rain forest of wordy novels clear-cut and deforested down to a small verdant space. Miniatures, cameos, gems of Lit 101.

I like it. I need my own name for it. The future belongs to Funes the Memorious, where even the Numbers have individualized names: 20 is "archimedes" and 26 is "homeric hymns" so great is our blogospherical memory!
Mary Ellen had "Stones", which I tried. It reminds me of "lapidary" and the polished phrasings of Herakleitos. Ruth has "Nouvelle 55", stories in 55 words.
Hmm....  "ileke"  which is Yoruba for "bead"; a bead in a rosary of stones, a necklace, a bracelet... a continuum of small small.
A collection of ileke is an ade ileke, a beaded crown.

Flash Fiction

Kandinsky " The Blue Rider "

"I saw the Blue Rider go by today, up by the birch grove. He rode fast."

"He always rides fast in autumn," he said thoughtfully. "Spring and autumn, regular... regular... as a village square clockwork horse and rider tolling the hours."

She mused. "Hooves beating time like Magog 'n' Gog."

In autumn and in spring...

--

The Fab Five on ESPN

Controversy! There's gonna be a controversy! ESPN had a documentary on the University of Michigan basketball team, the Fab Five, from the early 90's coached by Steve Fisher!! Juwan Howard, Jalen Rose, Ray Jackson, Jimmy King, and Chris Weber!

Well, I saw it.
My take on the controversy is this:
I went to U of M, I love the maize and blue, and I loved and still love the Fab Five.
They rule! They do no wrong! They tried to bring the celebrity-crazed times up to their level, always fighting against the incessant force trying to pull them down. They took on the corruption and the racism that still exists and they did a darn good job when all is said and done. Not perfect, but a darn good job.

When we give someone five, it is an emblem for The Five!
--

2 Prodiges Manqués (Two Failed Prodigies)

I'm watching The Natural again, and I'm matching it up with the book in my memory, and I am also matching up Roy Hobbs and Noah, the two failed prodigies who blossomed as geniuses later in their lives, but missed their youthful years of prodigy....
They spent more than forty days in the desert, came back, and then they changed their lives, the lives of others, and sometimes the world and moral order.

What gives? Whaddya think?

Refer back to the previous post: The Illusion of God.
Bernard Malamud published his novel in 1952. World War II had ended only 7 years or less before. In the novel, Roy Hobbs is destroyed by his acquaintance with the gambler, Gus Sands. In the film, however, Roy Hobbs attains the pinnacle of fame and heroism.
After the Holocaust and the War, God - and by strict implication, the Hero - was dead in the West.
By the time the film was made, God and Hero were struggling to re-insert themselves into the narrative of the West. They still are.
We hit the old horsehide off the ball, lightning flashes... and there is not a dry eye in the house!
--

The Illusion of God

Bear with me as I try to get this down before it flits out of my head........

The Holocaust and World War II and the rise of Existentialism went arm in arm, for who indeed could doubt that God was dead? Or at least on extended vacation.
Horrors inflicted with human regularity and human attention, at the hands of fellow human beings whom our mirror neurons had led us to believe were "people" like us - these are the horrors and tortures that destroy the world and God and the entire universe. However we create our plays and scenarios and illusions of God - the projection into endless time and supernaturality that mirror and reflect our loves and hates - and this process breaks down in the face of human-hatred-by-design.

On the other hand, our intense depression, the cruel  witches dunking-stool of unending bipolarity, is a horror perpetrated by ourselves upon ourselves. There is really no illusion of others in depression. We suffer from no paranoia. The unending terror of a heedless universe threatens to suffocate us.... unless we endure until the end of our heroic quest...

...we are dropped down in the middle of some magic city where the hearts of angels beat beneath the pavement and above the skyscrapers. Suddenly we are no longer running away in fright down dark and foreboding alleyways; we slow down to a walk; we compose ourselves - jumpy still as a cat, yet intrepid; we straighten our tie...

... and God comes around the corner and smiles and shakes my hand in greeting.

The illusion of God depends upon human artifice and human acceptance of evil and the "evil narrative" which is the depressive play of The Iceman Cometh forever, when even what we think is our redemption is dispirited and leaves us and our loved ones worse off.

The reality of God only needs our hand reached out to say hello. We know and believe this not as some cumbersome "belief system", but in the marrow of our bones, because we have learned and favored the "good narrative" all the days of our lives...

When the time comes, we shall say, "Hi!"
There will not be any delusion.

--

President Evil of Resident Evil

Libya

As much as I am troubled by yet another military action in which the USA may be involved without as much as a by-your-leave from my elected representative, I am glad that the Monster of Lockerbie may soon be getting what is his due.
I think the international community is sick of him also. I am amazed that the UN is now stretching itself and extending itself in a way it has not done before, interceding in the internal events of a country. Maybe the time of the Monsters is actually going to end.

More on Earthquakes

 reprinted from 2008
--

Pix: http://cabinet-of-wonders.blogspot.com/

after the quake...........(神の子どもたちはみな踊る)

after the quake is a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami published in 2000 as a response to the 1995 quake in Kobe, Japan. On of these stories was Superfrog Saves Tokyo. There is a creature named Worm beneath Tokyo who is about to wake and cause the quake. Superfrog and Mr. Katagiri must prevent this.

Katagiri found a giant frog waiting for him in his apartment. It was powerfully built, standing over six feet tall on its hind legs. A skinny little man no more than five foot three, Katagiri was overwhelmed by the frog’s imposing bulk.

“Call me ‘Frog,’” said the frog in a clear, strong voice.

Katagiri stood rooted in the doorway, unable to speak.

--

pic: Edward Kwong

Made in the PRC

I have written the chorus, but I'm staying away from the verses. It is sung to "Born in the USA", and stands for Peoples' Republic of China. I was just cleaning various things, and I kept coming across the words.

Made in the PRC!
Made in the PRC!

I'm a long gone Daddy in the PRC!
Made in the PRC!
I'm a cool rocking Daddy in the PRC!
Made in the PRC!

--

What is a Symbol?

A symbol is a tool. 
It would sound rather odd for us to say that a hammer or a saw "stood" for something else. The meaning of the hammer is in being used and what it does and what it accomplishes. Construction or destruction using a hammer is similar to aggregation and disaggregation of things in the world, but the hammer's meaning does not somehow lie in its ability to put-together or take-apart. Those are its functions, those are what it is intended for, and that is what it is used for,  and if that is "meaning", well enough.

However, the hammer does not stand for something else.
Our interaction with a symbol is not the "meaning" of a symbol. It may be part of the symbol, but its meaning is elsewhere. 

A symbol does not stand for something else, something "beyond" itself. A symbol is a tool of a symbol-using being. A symbol-using being has a number of symbolic tools: language, art, music, ritual, etc. A symbol may be used to create things, whether designs for real machines and houses, or even other symbols. Just as a hammer may be used to create a lever, which we then use as a tool itself to move heavy items, so also may symbols create other symbols.

What about the picture? Is it a symbol for an ideology, or is it an emblem of an ideology. The ideology itself is a symbol created from other symbols. The picture is a mark, a depiction. If we react to it in a certain way, that does not make it a symbol, it makes our reaction a symbolic creation ( I would say it is a symbolic construction of emotion and memory of other symbolic encounters with that picture)... which we will probably use in the future to encourage or discourage the ideology.

Весна в Москве..........Spring in Moscow

 

Весна в Москве,
мое сердце подпрыгивает

--
Spring in Moscow,
my heart leaps!

Driver's Seat Philosophy

While writing a comment to Ben about this and that, I managed to summarize my approach to philosophy and religion.

I mentioned my first philosophy professor, Father Kennedy, under whom I read phil. in Canada. His approach was to introduce us to a philosopher, study the system, evaluate, and see where problems still remained. He pointed to to the future answers we would be shortly coming to in the next philosopher, and thus, made us anticipate those answers in our own thinking ahead of time. In short, before we left Plato, we were anticipating Aristotle's responses.
The best type of learning is that where the student makes his own discoveries. I always try to stop short of summing things up in dogmatic form, such as God is everywhere, or God is in all of us, or God is all-powerful! I do not actually know what those statements mean.

No one needs my insights, but people can always use a helping hand. My writing should always be a friend nearby: if you have your car in the repair shop, I am going to give you a lift to the corner mechanic so that you may pick up your car and drive it home.
I let you off. I do not follow you around and push you over into the passenger seat and drive your car myself!

Too many religions do exactly that: plunk their big butts into the driver's seat, and drive. Then when you get home, they want money for having done so.

Pop-Up Books: Where The Wild Things Are

 

other Pop-Up links:

http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2009/05/pop-up-books.html
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2011/02/pop-up-books-2.html

More Explanations

http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2011/03/japans-nuclear-plants.html

In the above post on Japan's nuclear power plants, I listed the Sendai Power Plant, about 12 miles south of Akune. Google Earth should pin-point it with ease.

Now we have reasons why design did not take into account tsunami such as were recently generated by the March quake:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12740649
15 March 2011 Last updated at 15:32 ET

Japan tsunami 'could be 1,000-year event'

By Paul Rincon Science reporter, BBC New

Tsunamis on the scale that hit north-east Japan last week may strike the region about once every 1,000 years, a leading seismologist has said.

Dr Roger Musson said there were similarities between the last week's event and another giant wave that hit the Sendai coast in 869AD.

It is not unusual for undersea earthquakes to generate tsunamis in this part of Japan. Offshore quakes in the 19th and 20th centuries also caused large walls of water to hit this area of coastline.

But previous research by a Japanese team shows that in the 869 "Jogan" disaster, tsunami waters moved some 4km inland, causing widespread flooding.

 Oh, well...
I guess someone figured the Sendai coast was due, not the area in north-east Japan.

--

Nuclear Weapons

Do we think we could actually cope with nuclear war and its aftermath?

Let's get rid of the nuclear weapons now.
--

Radiation?

I was born a year after the bombs on Japan. I've looked at the maps of wind patterns. It explains an awful lot about my generation.

Tsunami

They say the problem at Fukushima was mainly due to the tsunami overwhelming the generators providing power to the water pumps.
An oversight, perhaps, in the design?

I would accept it more easily if... if  tsunami were not a Japanese word!

Japan's Nuclear Plants

If you type it into Google Earth, you will get a map pin-pointing the nuclear plants in Japan. The following are Name of Plant, distance(s) from nearby Tectonic Plate Boundaries, other seismic info. All are located on the island Honshu, except Sendai which is on Kyushu.

1) Hamaoka Power Plant, located on the ocean on the Eastern coast
21 miles from a plate boundary to the east, 41 miles from a plate boundary to the north
53 miles from a quake measuring 6.1 March 15, 2011.

2) Tokai Nuclear Plant, located on the on the Eastern coast
117 miles from a plate boundary to the east
69 miles south of Fukushima

3)Takahama Plant, located on the ocean on the Western coast
144 miles from a plate boundary to the north-east

4)Onagawa Plant, located on the ocean on Eastern coast
47 miles from the Epicenter of the March 11 quake,
80 miles north of Fukushima

5) Fukushima I
6) Fukushima II

7) Shika Nuclear Plant, located on the ocean on the Western coast
66 miles from a plate boundary to the east.

8) The Japan Atomic Energy Agency  ( label in Japanese in Google Earth ) not a plant.

9) Ikata Nuclear Plant, located on the ocean on the southern coast
131 miles from plate boundary on the south, 151 miles from plate boundary on the east.

10) Sendai Nuclear Power Plant
12 miles from a plate boundary on the north by Akune.

There are other places and institutions listed , and I'm not sure whether there are more power plants; many are universities involved, associations and organizations (There is also a listing called "Naked Loft" which bears further plate boundary scrutiny!) The ones above give us an idea of the situation.

Memories...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/opinion/15marie.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Op-Ed Contributor

Memories, Washed Away

By MARIE MUTSUKI MOCKETT

ON Aug. 9, 1945, my great-uncle was out fishing in the Pacific, far enough away from Nagasaki, Japan, that he missed the immediate impact of the atomic bomb dropped by the Americans that day. My great-aunt was in their new house outside Nagasaki; the entire family had only a few days earlier fled the city because my great-uncle feared a repeat of the bombing of Hiroshima.

I heard this story many times during my childhood. Back then, it made me feel that my great-uncle was a clever man. As an adult, I realized he was also very lucky, because cleverness alone cannot keep you safe.

For 36 hours after the earthquake and tsunami that eviscerated the east coast of Japan on Friday, I was unable to get any word from my relatives who oversee and live in our family’s Buddhist temple in Iwaki City, south of Sendai, the biggest city near the epicenter. I wondered if they too were lucky and smart...

 Follow the link above to read more.

The Red Thread

The red and murderous thread that runs through our Technological and Globalized world is Profit in the Short-Term. This inhibits too much spending on back-up systems and safety; it works against good ecology and husbandry of the earth; and it encourages inhuman Giantism of scale in the creation of enormous institutions.

The enormous Giant institutions are familiar as companies too-big-to-fail, enormous government departments - such as all the intelligence gathering being paid for by us, and the globalized tentacles of capital stretching around the world.

Even though the power companies give us cheap power, was it worth what we see now? Should we have spent more money to guard against the 1 back-up system failing? Should we not have spent more time on oversight of the financial markets back in 2006-2008? Should we allow the continuing clearing of the rain forests?

As matters stand now, we are leaving the door open to bigger and bigger disasters, and just assume we will have the wherewithal to deal with them. We have to change the way we are, change to respect the earth and everything thing that grows, and allow them the respect due to fellow beings of Creation that are playing an important role in Life today.
Cheap power? You get what you pay for. Actually, when you go cheap, you get a lot more than you paid for,or ever wanted.

--

Le Nouveau Mysticisme [ The New Mysticism ]

 Monsieur Mystère et Madame Mysticisme

I woke up today wondering about mysticism. I did not actually focus onto le mysticisme until ten minutes into my caffeine...I had been reading a book about Paris before going to sleep, so my dreams were heavily tinged with Gallicisms and shrugs. And cheeses. (How drab is our universe of cheese compared to that of France! and does the eleventh dimension in String Theory cosmology actually account for it?)

Why is our image or stereotype of Mysticism so uniform?
Our lives are  - by definition! - mundane and uniform. Why do our stereotypes of Mysticism, of all things super and phenom, possess such cookie-cutter equivalences?
Why is everyone in solitude? Why do some experience the stigmata and bleed during Holy Week? Why do they tend to belonging to cloistered orders given to vows of silence?

We would answer: the world is the enemy of the Holy. Only by such radical withdrawal may the individual mystic remain focused on the Holy.

But this sounds too much like child's play, does it not? Superstitiously and magically, we fear that we might be contaminated by the words, the actions, the spirit and the feelings of the world, so we withdraw from the cities to the desert and immure ourselves away, far away from the madding crowd.

However, have we forgotten the religious geniuses who withdrew from the world, then came back to tell us about how things really are? They did not stay away forever. They immersed themselves in the most important matter of all: freeing Mankind from the iron grip of Sin, of Dukha, of Jahiliya.

The new understanding of mysticism should now be more like Mrs. Peel and Steed, The Avengers:  Chapeau Melon et Bottes de Cuir  (bowler hat and leather boots) as it is known in France. That is to say, laugh away the old obsessions of our race and time, free the spirit, and realize mysticism is not limited to the desert and the anchorite cell; it only needs that we free ourselves from the illusion of the World and thus, from the World's grasping hands and fingernails painted with the polish of suffering. There are as many ways to the Holy as there are People... times the speed of light... squared.
Everything now is a symbolic-cubicle built around us since we leapt into the world. Take it down. Find the proper habitation for a people created by God.

What We Have Lost...

All God's Children Got Guns...

... as the Marx Brothers sang with the cast in Duck Soup.

From The Daily Beast and Yahoo News:

All told, an estimated 2,405 Americans have been shot and killed since Tucson, adding to the grim toll of 400,000 felled by guns since Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated in 1968. (The estimate of gun murders and accidental deaths is based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.)

Power Plant Design

I have to apologize. I thought it was stupid to put power plants right on the ocean so that tsunami could batter them. Obviously, the placement is perfect since all the primary systems and back-up systems are going to fail in a major quake, so they have to have lots of water nearby to pump into the reactor container.
If the plants had been inland, there would have been not nearly enough water.
Look how many nuclear plants are on the water. Up front, it is explained by the ease of having the cooling water nearby. In actuality, it is designed that way for the inevitable threat of melt-down: Chernobyl, Three-Mile Island, now Fukushima... the chances of a major nuclear accident seem to be greater than once every ten years.

Latin and the Slave Empire Mentality

When people ask me "Why Latin?" there are a number of answers, but I like to throw in that fact that Latin (and ancient Greek) give us intimate access to the writings and minds of two great Slave Empires upon which our present Society is largely based.

O.K. Then what? I mean, what does this intimate knowledge show us?

It shows us that even after the articles of manumission, the ex-slave was a libertus, or a free man. In this, there is a parallel to our own history where such freed men existed after their liberation by their owners. Notice, however, that it is our habit, just as it was the Romans, to ever afterwards call them "freed men" or "liberti"; they are never merely "men" and "women"; they do not exist without the predication of "having been freed".
Their one time servitude is a mark of Cain that they never escape. Now matter how greatly they enjoy the delights of freedom, they still are not just men and women, but remain "liberti", and as such remain susceptible to being singled out bu that peculiar characteristic that they possess.
Nor was the passage from slave to free man so quick and precise as we tend to think of it: in various discussions of the laws of Rome, we see a scale of slave, inquilinus, tribute-paying subject, client, colonus, and plebeian, all different legal personalities. Succinctly, "Freed Men" were not "Free Men". Free men were born such.

One cannot legally deal with an ex-slave or freed-man the same way one deals with a free man; it is more complex. So it is with all our dealings: they are complex and not simple. The mentality of the Slave Empire leaves us divided in mind, in soul, and in body. It rarely is a laugh-riot like "A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum". It is more like "The Danaides"  where families are murderously turned against themselves.
--

Zombies

--
pic: x3nomik on Flickr

When I Go...

When I go, I shall be an acacia tree with thorns!
I am not going to mess around. Social Security will be gone, probably. The climate will be changing and the government will be penurious. All my friends, the Deciduous and the Conifers were gone, the last of them in hospices always prone to being clear cut by the mad men today.
I visited Rain Forest today in the Old Age home, and he did not recognize me at first. He sat in the common room where the thermostat was cranked up to 90+, and he did not have his teeth in, that picket fence of ivory was lost under the couch somewhere.
He said, "The bitch yells at me!"
I looked at him wondering. "Who yells at you? Someone here?"
He made a sad toothless grimace, "No. There!" He pointed at the TV screen hanging up in the corner... on the wall... and I thought of the expression "...like a fly on the wall". The TV was buzzing like a pissed-off horse-fly.

six o'clock we eat;
then play cards;
someone on the tv
screams at us.

They chanted. At least I thought so. Maybe it was the wind in the branches. A bleached blonde Fox News anchor woman was on, talking louder than Nancy Grace. I got up and went over to the TV, wondering if anyone would object to turning down the volume. I took it down a few light-years. No one seemed to notice.
Lots of dead trees... almost dead; trees in swamps, bleached trees, where even the vines have withered and wizened. Prey for woodpeckers, I thought. Woodpeckers on their wings of destiny.
I returned and sat down. Rain Forest was crying softly. I was putting my hand on his shoulder, when a sudden barking made me jump: someone on the TV was screaming at us!
--

Zimbabwe - Wisconsin

The corruption of the One Party rule in Zimbabwe-Wisconsin will not stand!!

Avatar Again

The Navi  are very much a composite of Native American and African cultures. Disturbingly so. I do not think the portrayal is demeaning, but it is so obvious it throws a spanner or monkey-wrench into my attention mill.

The woman priestess or shaman - the mother of the main female character - has an accent that distinctly sounds like she comes from Botswana, and the male chief sounds like Iron Eyes Cody.

Oh, How I Hate to Remember in the Morning

 Ruined Locker Rooms of Memory

Baysage said something - actually a combination of many things - which I immediately took apart, dissolved, precipitated from solution, mixed back together, and came up with something that forced me to remember something at 6:00 AM. And I hate to remember in the morning!
I get up at 3:00 AM that I may have a few blessed hours away from the madness of what we facetiously call "the real world". The real world depends heavily upon our memory of it: the things we have had beaten into us, the burdens of recall under which we faint, the ritual scarifications all over our bodies in that alien dark tattoo of Commandment!

Remember in the glare of the sun, in the heat of the day. Sweat your remembrances out as you run your treadmill! Then throw your sweats and shoes into the locker room of Archived History!
--

100 Bocce Balls Around a Nuclear Pallino !

Area around Fukushima Nuclear Plant. Large Yellow circle, right center, is the locus of the 8.9 earthquake, Power Plant is yellow Marking Pin in the lower left quadrant. Red circles are seismic events in the last hour, orange are events in the last 24 hours, yellow are events in the last week. The entire area is not represented in the confines of this picture.
  
--
Tohoku Electric Power (Co) thermal power plant Haramati Affairs Group
Japan, 〒 975-0021 54 Oohuna Sako S Minami Souma, Fukushima Prefecture, Kanazawa City, Haramachiku

This is translated from a label on Google Earth, marking what I believe to be is the nuclear power plant that is having a major unpleasantness occurring.

Real Time Earthquakes Add-in on Google Earth showed approximately 30 quakes occurred in that region  in the week before the big quake. You would think someone might have looked into extra generators for the nuclear plant, just in case... or asked for some big friends to stick around with nuclear bandages... but what actually happens is the usual dream-world of bureaucracy: nothing.
The Aftershocks are spread around the area like balls on a Bocce court, where the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant is the Pallino.  Measuring around the pallino, within the last 24 hours, the nearest aftershock was 14 miles away and measured 5.1 on the Richter scale.
Counting the events a week before and now after the 8.9 quake, there are more than a  hundred seismic events there.

This is the story of our times: two back-ups, neither work; two fail-safes, two failures.
When it was decided to build a nuclear plant close to a severe earthquake zone, I am sure all the best science went into it, but once again, we see that the system that exists of Science+Politics+Government+Maximum Profits is insufficient to meet the needs of a complex society.

At least the Japanese do not have newly elected legislators who are trying to remove Science from the classroom and cut funding for the Sciences.
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Exhausted Ideas

I just finished Alien Omnibus 6 yesterday; never was I so glad to escape from a library's sewn-binding clutches! Alien Omnibus 6 is the sixth volume of illustrated action stories which extend the original Alien story and keep it going.
I know how surprising that sounds. Surely you are thinking, "Gadfrey Daniels! I should have thought that the film 'Alien Versus Predator' would have been the epitaph on that artistic endeavour!"
I understand your consternation.
However, you can not keep a good gimmick down. Remember just how infinite are the permutations upon the idea "Vampire":  from the hideous Nosferatu of Max Shreck to the urbane Dracula of Christopher Lee, from the oddly interesting rendition of Jack Palance to the Gary Oldman portrayal; each one with their own quirks, yet each adding a small bit of novelty and interest - which small portion of delight justifies their existence at all! I mean, once you run through the theme and can not come up with anything, you are either dead or you are too imprisoned by the conventions already established for the theme.... or the powers that be have ruled that Aliens, even Aliens in an inter-stellar remake of Stagecoach, are out!

Try it yourself: find a topic and go through it. See how infinite are the possibilities; see how sometimes those possibilities are reduced and hardened into a few concrete nodules from which escape is impossible, or see how the possibilities keep extending.

The same process holds true for our Philosophies, our Cosmologies, even our Religious Discourse. Ideas are born, they grow, they transform and are transformed; some die, and some go on forever. For example, the iconic god who dies and then is re-born has had a very long lifetime.

Terry Pratchett's novels have shown us that even moribund concepts may take on new life in a universe slightly different from our own. I remember reading a Vampire novel where some of the Night Brood sat in the House of Commons, and the main discord between them and mankind was political and artistic. (I wish I could remember the name of the novel! It was quite good.)

As intelligent beings, we are as finite as our ideas. We are as infinite as our aspirations. Let us ask ourselves: the things we see today, our ideals, political and artistic and philosophical... will they be a branching tree to climb to freedom, or will they be a iron-jawed trap into whose steel-cold embrace we stumble?
Answers, my good friends, abound.

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