A Visit From "Auntie Christ"

My great aunt Sophronia will soon be swooping by like the Angel of Death. Since everything happens in threes, and four members of my family have died since January 1, 2007, I think I shall be safe. My mother, however, always the chipper little bird, points out that four is greater than three. Hence, everything happens in threes, but now the cycle is beginning again, and there are two more needed to fill in the present mahayuga.
Sophronia travels around the country and speaks to various groups of antiquities ( She calls the AARP a "bunch of wild kids!" ) about politically related issues. The fall of the Soviet Union threw her for a loop. She stayed in her house for a year with the blinds drawn. Of course, this was almost 20 years ago, so she was in her mid-70s. We used to take turns going over and knocking on the door. If the door was open, we drew straws to see who would get to go inside, the assumption being that she had passed away a few days ago. She did not die.
She emerged from her quasi-death revitalized. She had found a cause. It was Nuclear Re-Armament. To the rest of the family, it seemed liked a crazy, mixed up, re-hashed concatenation of the quondam Moral Re-Armament and Dr. Strangelove. It turns out that it was exactly that. When a decidedly odd family thinks it has an eccentric in its midst, it is time to fear the enraged villagers with torches and pikestaffs and pitchforks. She travels around speaking about President Bush's implementation of the Nuclear Posture Review.
She likes the idea of the sole superpower expanding the role of nuclear weapons. She has a delicious appreciation of irony. She will quote from memory, putting those of us of the generation less than 3 score and 10 to shame, that "In setting requirements for nuclear strike capabilities, distinctions can be made among the contingencies for which the United States must be prepared. Contingencies can be categorized as immediate, potential or unexpected. North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Libya are among the countries that could be involved in immediate, potential, or unexpected contingencies. All have longstanding hostility toward the United States and its security partners; North Korea and Iraq in particular have been chronic military concerns. All sponsor or harbor terrorists, and all have active WMD, or weapons of mass destruction, and missile programs.”

Whether from usage or pretence, she gives "missile" the British pronunciation, the second "i" being long. "Missiiiile..." long and lovingly dripping from her tongue.

This same program was characterized by The Churches' Center for Theology and Public Policy as : The administration plans to revitalize the U.S. nuclear infrastructure to maintain U.S. nuclear capabilities and to discourage other countries from competing militarily with the U.S. Upgrades and new nuclear weapons development are a part of this plan. Plans indicate that new nuclear weapons will be required to accomplish new military missions. This arsenal would have the capability to target and destroy mobile and re-locatable targets and hard and deeply buried targets. Plans are also underway to reestablish advanced warhead concept design teams. She scoffs at the "pacifist padres". She calls them "padres" because that's what they called them in WW II. She is fond of singing "Praise the Lord, and Pass the Ammunition." Her married name was Chresto. Hence, Auntie Christ came from the lips of toddlers just beginning to talk, just looking at the wide world with new eyes.

Caring For Veterans 1

Caring for Veterans on the Cheap http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=80291 published in April, 2006

A Great Reversal

There are many stories of Tricksters. The trickster is very intelligent. An example would be Native American stories of Coyote and Raven. These stories tell us something about human intelligence. Sometimes the trickster does great things.

Sometimes the trickster is discomfited. When things go awry, this is a reversal. The trickster started out to achieve something, and he ended up sitting on a dung pile. So it is with human intelligence: we accomplish great things, we reach the moon. Then sometimes we get caught in our cunning lies, and we say what tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive.
Deceit implies a plan and implies intelligence. Scams are products of intelligence. So intelligence can work both ways, for good and ill. The trickster stories often show this reversal.

Hubris is a reversal. It is not, as is often said, arrogance. Oedipus was not arrogant when he reached the crossroads and unwittingly killed the king, his real father whom he knew not. He was not arrogant when he unwittingly took the queen as wife, for he did not know she was his real mother. From his high point as King of Thebes, there came the great reversal and Oedipus ended a tragic figure. This was through no particular fault of his own. We are in a time of change. Climate change, political change - the new US politics of discord and insults, economic change-some for good, some for ill. How shall we weather this great reversal?

Some will say that the concept of Reversal derived from the Trickster stories are the product of pagan religions, religions that did not have the true religion. This is a good point. However, going back to Matthew 28, verse 12: Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled, but whoever humbles himself shall be exalted. This is usually given an interpretation that emphasizes the moral aspect of the quote.

However, it is also an exact description of a Reversal, a reversal of roles. In the Magnificat of the Virgin, we read that God shall cast the mighty from their thrones and raise the lowly. Again, a reversal. This does not imply any continuity between the Gospels and a Trickster Cycle of pre-Christian gods. This merely shows the concept of Reversal is not at all alien from the Gospels, nor from the Jewish tradition which preceded.

All our images, all our feelings, all our hopes and all our fears about the End of Times, about the Apocalypse and a coming Tribulation stem from our being within a Great Reversal. As I have previously stated, we are in the times when mankind is seen as being evil; the product of a passion for God thwarted in a most horrible way.
So, like Richard III, if we cannot be heroes and lovers, we are determined to be proved villains. The great reversal from man as a good being to man as an evil being commenced. This IMAGE is everywhere: on television, in films, in books, in music... The most depraved and degraded images are contained within the products most artful and expertly done! The TV show CSI blasts obscene truths into the living rooms and bedrooms of viewers.

We are totally awash in Mankind as Evil. Mankind as Good is somewhere far away, with little or no exposure to us. I cannot tell you the mind of God. It is hidden from me. I only know God when I act according to the ways I believe godly. It is not a knowledge that can be given in words. If I say that I write about God, I write about my own knowledge. I cannot be like those who say "God is here." or "God is there." or "God is in that book....or that one over there." However, I think I know His wrath when I feel it scrape over the hairs on my neck. We must look and feel God's presence. Else, we shall miss what He shows us. We must take a stand in godliness against this Reversal.

My View Of Religion 4

There was a comment earlier on about My View Of Religion. Someone had said they wished they had a belief like mine. They probably did at one time. They have had it educated out of them. What is it like to look at our world and believe that mankind is inherently good? Who knows anymore? The 20th century was the schoolroom where we learned of the evil inherent in man. The shock of this became a view of man as inherently evil. Who could doubt it? All one has to do is look around and see the killing, the bombings, the oppression, the theft. The Good is hard to come by. So we think mankind is inherently evil. We do little to demolish this belief. In fact, we support it. We think that the Churches are doing our fighting for us, to save us from ourselves. Mankind is inherently Good. It is Evil that is the mutation. Evil is not the rule, it is the exception that puts the rule of Good to the proof. Only we shall not wait and look at the proof. Pity this generation which will never know what it is to think of mankind as inherently Good and truly in the image of God, rather than some ethnic cleansing scum. We shall never know what is it to realize how good man is, because we prefer to believe in evil. Evil is used to rationalize our wars, our business lying, our marital infidelities, our alcohol abuse, everything under the sun. We sin because we are such weak and sinful creatures. I believe we are strong and Godly creatures. We are living in the time of a Great Reversal, however. This is putting us to the test. It tries to make us despair. It is so far suceeding.

If It Looks Like A Goose, And Steps Like A Goose...

My grandfather used to say that if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and swims like a duck, then it is a duck. (Actually, grandfather was an ornithologist and took the above quite a longer distance than I has set forth. He would add things like "...and is of the Class Aves, and is of the Order Anseriformes, and is of the Family Dendrocygninae...") Ann Coulter has given a speech in which she called John Edwards a "faggot". She has defended this, saying young right wingers should emulate her. Julius Streicher reminds me of AC. He was an early leader of the Brown Shirts, and was a foul mouthed wretch. His "base" as we foppishly call it these days, was the radical right, radical enough to indulge their violent and intemperate fantasies. AC is a centimeter from violence. How do I know this? Because in many parts of the world, in many parts of this country, people still indulge in bashing faggots. Hence, by this labelling, we see the establishment of a thin veiled code to urge the "base" to violence. The "base" is not the Right wing members of the University Club, it is those members who are most likely to respond to a call to violence, and who have a lot of free time to indulge in it. The "base" upon which AC seems to focus seems to be the same type of base Julius Streicher appealed to. So if it looks like a goose, swims like a goose, and goose-steps like a goose...figure it out.

Mr. Patrick Buchanan et alii

The American Conservative, Huzzah! The American Conservative has joined my blogroll of honor. Mr. Buchanan and his associates are rather brilliant. If you wish very good Conservative opinion, read them. (If you wish a sort of The Onion presentation of Conservative opinion, read The National Review.) You will notice that I have Juan Cole's Informed Comment and Patrick Buchanan's The American Conservative on the same list. Most people would consider that a Liberal-Conservative paradox. However, one reaches an age where one finally becomes tired of being lied to incessantly and opts for the Truth, no matter what the political suasion. Health Care and Medical Insurance The problems at Walter Reed hospital have been going on a long time. In my life, the tawdry way that wounded soldiers have been treated has been commonplace, going all the way back to Vietnam. The Executive branch and the Legislative branch do not care. At least, they do not care to the point of doing anything. That is the measure of care: whether they do anything because it is the right thing to do, not merely because a free press has once again forced them to own up to their incompetence. So, if this country's elected representatives cannot even supply a Health system to those of its citizens who have given the utmost in devotion, why do you think they will be able to create a Health system for the rest of the country? The Leviathan of the Bureaucracy will crush us, and they will not lift a finger. Perhaps we should keep the present administration on. They did get things done by allowing the companies involved in the Health industry to write their own rules. If we extend this to allowing them to perform their own oversight, we would probably see a Health system overnight. IBS A lot of Bloggers suffer from IBS, Irritable Blog Syndrome. They can't go anywhere without knowing where their notebooks are, and there is the constant wind, nausea, bloating, pain, and spasms. I know a great many that do. They usually have a serious political bent, such as "I am a serious political blogger." I am not a serious political blogger. Sometimes, I obviously am not a serious writer/blogger. I wrote a monstrous piece on Negative Comments that was tantamount to putting a jester motley on and a hat with bells, capering around the blogosphere and saying "Call me Wamba!" I started this Blog to write about God. Sometimes I lose the way. Or, I am a fish on a hook on a line stretching to the ends of the earth, and He pulls me back with a twitch on the line. Hound of Heaven, eh? Tags I have been quite bowled over by tags. I thought I could organize things in the Blogstead, the Blog-pantry, the Blog-wine cellars, the Blog-garage, but now I have more tags, one says "Blog-pantry", another "Blog-garage" and so on. If this were an exponentially Inflationary thingey, like that Big Bang wheeze, I would be in the existential soup! (Crikey! A tag labelled "tags" was just added!) Memories I could not remember the name of my accountant yesterday. I was driving my car. I do not mean to imply cause and effect here, that somehow driving causes me to forget everything, names, addresses, inhibitions! No. Merely setting the scene. Creating a pied-a-terre, to use an expression Jeeves is fond of. His name is T. I could not remember it. So, as I approached the stop by the University of Funny Architecture, I thought to myself that I should have to call his office and ask the receptionist to go through all the names, and that would be embarassing. So my mind drifts along, and makes the call for me, as it were. The mental imago of the receptionist, quite a looker, by the way, picks up the mental telephone and begins going through the names. She literally says " Is it P? Is it Q, R, S? Is it T?" I jump at it and thank her. It was the right name. It took me about 20 seconds, after my intial feeling of euphoria passed, to realize how odd this all had been.

My View Of Religion 3

I previously mentioned there were two books that made a great influence on my view of Religion. That was a mistake. Firstly, Toynbee’s Study was in 14 volumes. I read it a long time ago. There was no baby Mozart back then, but there was baby Toynbee, so my parents started reading it to me, and I took over when I learned to read, about volume 5. Secondly, I neglected to mention Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy. The Idea of the Holy takes a strictly Kantian point of view, and Prof. Otto regards the idea of the Holy as a special thing within the Kantian category of Value. I do not agree with this, but this was the very first mention I had ever across that the Holy was an idea that was part of the very structure of the human mind. I believe that the idea of the Holy, the idea of God, is part of the structure of the human mind, both consciously and not consciously. By this we do not mean that God is somehow hard-wired into the human mind. If this were indeed the case, then we would be at a loss to explain the existence of Atheists. I believe God speak to each of us in a special way due to the structure of our minds. I believe we are aware of this when we are children, hence Jesus asked that his disciples let the children come unto Him. The type of consciousness of children I call dawn consciousness, or eoconsciousness, and this serves to distinguish from the consciousness into which we grow as we reach the age of reasoning and language use. The loss of innocence of the children is the realization of the idea of Death, and not merely the concept of Death, which forms a part of God’s plan, but the gross imposture of Death as final and the end of all. As my father approaches his operation for an abdominal aneurysm, I find I shall have to speak to him to calm his nervousness. I shall if needed. What shall I say? I shall say what I have already said numerous times to people I know who need God, but cannot find belief in their hearts. I tell them that God touches us when we are conceived and in our childhood. This dawn consciousness is the consciousness we use to live and play. We played cowboys and Indians as children. We played soldiers. However, when someone was shot and killed, they did not remain inert. They did not stay silently on the ground. They did not remain dead. Rather, they rose up! We rose up and played on! At that time, we had the dawn understanding of life, and in that time God had indicated to us that Death has no dominion. And the only thing we as adults have left of this Eden is a dim concept of the Resurrection, so dim it cannot stay our fears. Most of us think it a dark mystery, not a bright mystery. Our understanding of the Resurrection, in Christianity, in Islam, and in Judaeism, stems from our dawn understanding. And our dawn understanding was different; it was not incorrect and childish. It is we, the adults, who are childish, because we cannot see the truths given us when God created us.

Thinking On Thin Ice

I have mentioned the blog Thinking On Thinking at http://pmulder.blogspot.com/ The title inspired me ( in the usual convoluted, labyrinthine way my mind works ) to build an addition onto my Blogstead entitled Thinking On Thin...Ice! This is where I shall politely disagree with such types as propound Intelligent Design mumbo-jumbo and similar bad hoodia. Thus I shall preserve the form and letter of etiquette, if not quite the spirit.

Russell's Paradox 1

I titled this post Paradox 1 with the optimistic expectation there will be a 2. We shall see. There is a very nice Blog titled THINKING ON THINKING at http://pmulder.blogspot.com/ It has a posting on the Russel Paradox. (By the by, we are talking Bertrand Russell here, not Jack Russell.)

Tuesday, February 20, 2007 Russell's Paradox "Nothing contains everything", applied: A man of Seville is shaved by the Barber of Seville if and only if the man does not shave himself. Does the barber shave himself ? * If the barber does not shave himself, he must abide by the rule and shave himself. * If he does shave himself, according to the rule he will not shave himself. And, another one:"One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, the Cretians (sic) are alway liars, evil beasts, slow bellies. This testimony is true."Titus 1:12-14 (King James Version)



Much has been written about the paradoxes Barbieri di Seviglia and Cretan Liar.
We may describe the Cretan Liar as follows: Epimenides says "All Cretans are liars." Epimenides is a Cretan. If Epimenides' statement is true, then this implies that Epimenides always tells falsehoods. Hence, Epimenides' statement is false. Or, the truth of Epimenides statement implies the falsity of Epimenides' statement. Both paradoxes have been seen as problems in statements that are self-referential.

I do not believe that the Cretan Liar is a "nothing contains everything" type of paradox. Observe that the Cretan Liar scenario is a paradox when there is exactly 1 Cretan liar. It is also a paradox when the scenario allows for exactly 2 Cretans who lie. And so on, up until all Cretans surveyed are liars. The scenario where all Cretans are liars still leads to the paradox: the truth of the statements of 1,000 Cretans that all Cretans are liars implies the falsity of the 1,000 statements. I conclude that such a paradox as the Cretan Liar indicates that the original statement was not the type which may be assigned a truth value.

I do not believe that all propositions may be assigned such truth values. When a proposition, or statement such as "The Cure concert rocked!" is treated as if it may be assigned a truth value, it always leads to paradoxes. Hence, it was not the type of things to assign a truth value to. Epimenides statement is an appraisal, not a proposition of the form (x) {if x is a Cretan, then x is a liar}. It has only the appearance of being so. This is not the first instance of mimicry, mummery, or disguise in Nature.
Now, the Barber. Observe that the Barber paradox disappears if we allow that there are 2 barbers. Then barber 2 may shave barber 1, and barber 1 may shave barber 2. It disappears if there are 3 barbers. Barber 1 shaves barber 2, barber 2 shaves barber 3, barber 3 shaves barber 1. { Of course, we have to transform the original statement of the paradox to: A man of Seville is shaved by a Barber of Seville. ( not "the" barber, not just one and no more.) } If all men in Seville are barbers, they all shave each other in some sort of ghastly daisy-chain rig-a-marole.
In fact, they form sort of a circular group of order N, where N equals the number of men in Seville.

From this I conclude that the Barber Paradox is a Singularity Paradox. It is not dependent upon Set Theory and whether there is a Set that contains all items of a population. It is dependent on the fact that Singularities are inherently paradoxical.
For example, look at the work done by Linde on Inflation Theory cosmology. This was inspired, in part, by the cosmological problems created by the singularity of the original Big Bang theory. In essence, where did the singularity come from?

Similarly, we see the problem in arguments for the existence of God from a chain of causes, wherein God becomes the First Cause. As observed by Schopenhauer, the Principle of Causality is not a hansom cab that we take only so far, and then send away when we judged that we have arrived at our destination. Thus, the Principle of Causality cannot be used to establish a Terminus at the beginning of a chain of caused events. I have often wondered "I wonder what it was like for the first men or women who uttered speech? Was there anyone else around to understand them?" Scenarios like this, dealing with the first occurence, are very, very foggy. Was there a "first" person to speak? We often talk as if there were. So, prove it. Singularities are funny creatures. Ask Professor Hawking if you do not believe me. Two paradoxes down.

Cocktails Of The Elite: Mesopotamian Manhattans

There is a furtive website devoted to archeological bric-a-brac which has been lifted, borrowed, taken out on very long term loan from the Baghdad Museum. This goes back to the good old days of euphoria after the fall of Saddam and the disbanding of the Iraqi Police. I considered this as a logo ( although, what " I " have to do with all this is not clear. I have already distanced myself from "BLOOD" diamonds, mostly through the brainy idea of labelling them "Gem Haematites".) There is a Sumerian Seal, overlain by a maraschino cherry, without which no Manahttan may be drunk. In an inspired moment, I substituted a red crescent-shaped plastic scimitar for the usual straight plastic cocktail sword, thus combining Sumeria with the crescent of Islam- the red being a dash of tabasco or Al Hajjaj. Al Hajjaj is the sort of individual who would be called the "blood" in a "bloody good time."

I realize the script work on the top is a bit more Indus Valley or Mohenjo-Daro than it is Sumerian cuneiform, but Pakistan is not so far down the list.

painting: Suheir Salman

from: http://arabwomanblues.blogspot.com/2007/03/point-zero.html

Shaka Naw 1

If you are one of those rare individuals who believe that we are actually responsible for the outcomes of our acts, you may wish to investigate different accounts and interpretations of The Iraq Thing. ( I really do not know what to call it anymore. It's not a war, not Shock 'N Awe, anymore. More like a way of life while we choose whom to elect in 2008 to put an end to it. Say, by the way, am I the only person of the face of this earth to have heard some sort of doggerel music with "Shock 'n Awe" sung like "Shaka Khan, Shaka Khan" - you know the song I'm talking about. It was some ghastly "Shaka Naw, Shaka Naw, gonna love ya, Shaka naw! Gonna bomb ya, Shaka Naw!" I had forgotten that hideous nonsense completely until right now.) Consider: http://arabwomanblues.blogspot.com/ It is not for the faint hearted, nor for those who really do not want to know.

E* Rulz*

(Blogger won't accept "!" in titles, so I used the " * " )

There seems to be a growing awareness that Politics is now Entertainment, or E!Politics. This goes hand and hand with the realization that Journalism had become E!Journalism, and it still is for the most part, although some journalists seem to have pulled back from their E! status during the Embedded Phase I. I am not a Ph.D. in Economics, but it seems to me that in a Consumer Culture such as we infest, everything that exists exists to be consumed, and it has to be advertised and brought to the eye of the consumer. The best way to do this is good old E!. I mean, who in their right mind would have recourse to the opposite approach, the antithesis of E!, boredom, irritation, being a pain in the back, to get you to spend money on their stuff...who other than prophets and holy people, that is. They have always been a pain.

In Locusts and Honey http://locustsandhoney.blogspot.com/2006/05/you-must-buy-this-book.html there is a wonderful post:  

So often, it seems that when a group of Christians think that there is a problem in their church or a new opportunity on the horizon, the solution begins and usually ends at: *Buying a particular popular book by a Christian author. *Paying to attend the Xcitement Christian Expo Conference 2006 in Las Vegas (or whatever conference name is selected). *Hiring a popular Christian speaker to come to the church to address the congregation. Whenever there is something to be done, we must spend money before doing it. Or maybe even spending money is the whole action taken. The writer does arrive at a sentence "How do we teach a church to pray? It ain't nuclear rocket brain surgery."

I seem to recall I sort of said something almost opposite, as it were, maybe. Prayer is not hard. Prayer that is humble and does not assume one is the center of the universe is. Prayer that does not attempt to scam, run a wheeze on, or put the touch on God is difficult.
However, it is only difficult because we have been taught from childhood to be self-centered. (The usual way of teaching children not to be self-centered, if and when such a process does exist, is to whale the daylights out of 'em!)
The main point of this is that even in Religion, E! rulz! Buy, read,consume. Go to see a movie approved by the elders. Pray to the E!God! If we continue like this, all the forms of E! will be interchangeable; political discussion will be Bruce Willis scenarios, morality will be TV shows, religion will be a "Lilies of the Field" experience. E! is like currency, it is a fungible entity. E! can transform into other forms of E! or E! assets. Thus, we shall be able to confess our sins at the Game and do penance on the Golf Course, and God will smile in SimHeaven.

Ann Coulter Gives A Speech

Seen in the front row where the speech was delivered.

There was a lot of sexual innuendoes and double-entendres.

She called John Edwards a "faggot" and more.

The popcorn was free.

Thanks, and a tip of the leader's hat to AC!

///:=)

Negative Comments; A Hair Of The Pen That Bit You

"It is an observed fact that men employ their reason to defend conclusions arrived at by reason, but conclusions arrived at by the passions are defended by the passions." Benedict de Spinoza Theologico-Political Treatise, chapter 7. If we accept this observation of Spinoza, we are forced to recall that sometimes the conclusions of reason are also defended by passion. Hence, there is a passion in reason and a passion for reason. Are the conclusions of faith defended by faith? Or by passion? You go figure it out. Getting back to the main foci of attention, me, myself, and I, I received my first unflattering comment. I wondered about it. It was written about My View On Religion 2. I knew I was going to get into trouble when I really said what I actually believe. However, I can't wait forever. I am working on fuller presentations of my faith, but I had to go on record somewhere, sometime. So, I believe Religion is the greatest thing for humanity since sliced bread. Religion-if we can look beyond the degraded state to which WE have brought it-is the inherent behavior of mankind to seek a higher state. You would think the atheist side would have howled. You would think the secularist would rol their eyesl and yell for my head. No. A disciple of Jesus said I was boring, long winded, liberal (whatever he means by that - usually when someone calls me a liberal,I say I shall wait until he finds out what 'liberal' means in his Falwell Faith FedEx ! When someone calls me a Tory, I say something about a post from Pitt the Younger.), gray, fuzzy, illogical, dumbfounded, calamitous, catastrophic, oxymoronic, bearded, having a tendency to scratch too much, and having the dental hygiene of a British soccer fan. After having bought myself some much needed time by the listing above, it dawns on me that I did indeed accomplish what I wanted: Commenting is not easy in the first place. In the second place, when you write a comment to an eccentric, Lord knows what to expect! (My daughter has said that did she not know me, she would not write a comment! ) When I wrote the truth, it had enough traction to make someone pick up a pen... and denounce me. (I do not disguise the fact that support would have been preferable, but oh, well. Resisting Vanity is not my strong suit anyway.) It means that the words had effect. They resonated so loudly, the disciple had to comment and stop that bloody racket. I believe that is good. It is good for both of us. We both stop and think. (NB: I am informed that I was not strictly correct. This was my first negative comment that had been submitted in text. There have been a myriad of exasperated negatories that have never made it as far as the keyboard.)

The Devil Of Detail Boulevard

This picture is not the Devil. This is Benedict (or Baruch) Spinoza. Please. Let us have some silence in the hall! Getting back to my presentation:

The world has infinite detail. This detail is hardly grasped by our understanding. This is my way of saying that we, the American public, is grossly uninformed. How does the greatest democracy in the world make a decision, when their information is the dregs of the vats of reality? I give you the following story from Israel. It is written by Israelis, about other Israelis. Not an Arab in sight. This shows you the detail of life in the Middle East is much more wide and varied than cramped minds conceive. The Struggle for Hegemony in Jerusalem: Secular and Ultra-Orthodox Urban Politics An excerpt from a pamphlet written by Shlomo Hasson, The Floersheimer Institute For Policy Studies (2001),Jerusalem, in which the author describes how Jerusalem became a Haredi city while democracy was being lessened in the city. The main causes were secular and Haredi (combined) -- the secular by power of authority and the Haredi for ideological and economic reasons. Jerusalem, just like the entire country, serves as an example of the gradual degeneration of democracy (in the widest sense) which should make all those who love freedom and liberty quake. http://www.daatemet.org.il/ I am afraid this is one item I have never forgiven the Neocons for: their incredible lack of depth, their inability to see detail. They were rather good, in fact, better than most, when it came to talking up a storm, telling tall tales, and yammering about twisting the nose of old Saddam. However, they viewed their studies much like Dr. Peter Venkmann did, thereby leaving the heavy thinking to Ray and Egon.

The old expression "The Devil is in the details." does not mean that if you look closely and study something, this is inherently an evil act and Old Nick will pop up and grab your soul, although our elected representatives have believed this recently. It is not a demonic address. It just mean detail work is a lot of work, plain and simple.

picture: daatemet.org.il

My View Of Religion 2

I decided at the time of MVOR 1 that I had to make some mention of how I view religion. The world might be able to wait, but I could not until some presentable essay or book were ready. I had to give some idea. Then, if my readers faces blanched, their fingers trembled, and a goodly number of them felt vomitous, they would be saved from the bane of my writing. Fair enough. When I read Arnold Toynbee's A Study Of History forty years ago, I experienced for the first time - and, I may add, almost the LAST time - an account of the complex behavior known as Religion. I learned Religion is every bit as complex as Rocket Science, and it is subtle, mysterious, and dynamic in ways that we almost never, ever think about. Then I read Lanternari's Religions Of The Oppressed. This opened my eyes to the fact that Religion was blooming and flourishing everywhere and at all times, and its has a dynamic that weaves in and out of the passionate souls of its devotees. (You will have to read them yourselves if you don't believe me!) Two books! No more, no less. In Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke wrote of the evolution of humanity to a higher state. This book was filmed as 2001. I have friends who believe mankind will evolve to a higher state, but it will be sometime in the future when the fellows driving the UFOs make themselves manifest. Teilhard de Chardin wrote of the evolution of mankind to a higher state, the Omega Point, and Teilhard was all the rage- for a time. There is a recurrent belief in mankind's evolution to a better state. St.Paul tells us to put away the things of a child, childhood's end, but we cannot do this. As children, we are under the rule of Shame. Our elders use Shame to modify behavior. When we grow up, Shame should be put aside, and good works come from the heart, not from the fear of Shame. As children, we are under the rule of Teachers and 'ullima and Rabbis who tell us what to do and what to think. As mentioned before, there are teachings which tell us to call no man Rabbi. We never get rid of the middle-man and approach God on our own two feet. The impetus of Religion is a desire to be free. Organized Religion writes a book about desire, and now it is a Catechism of freedom, which is not freedom, rather an imprisonment to rote learning and repetition. When we were children, we were told Religion is about God. When we have grown up, we never learned that it is not about God; it is about us, and in particular about ourselves in our special relationship with God. Religion is phoney when it parades itself around like a pantomime of the world we live in. When you dress up God as a King, you may as well go kiss a political system. When you put God on a horse with a sword, you may as well pray to a cannon. God wants nothing. God lacks nothing. God wants the beings that do lack to be complete; He wishes those that hunger be filled, those that thirst be refreshed, those that suffer be comforted. He did not create us to be emotional cripples. Religion creates a higher communality of mankind, established by men and women freeing themselves from the compulsions of the habitual. When the Empires of Force, Brutality, Violence, and Compulsion finds themselves exhausted, and find they no longer can compel obedience by bragadoccio and bluster, they fall apart. Then the lives of men fall apart, unless there is yet some greater Union which cements them together. Religions have done this already. They've done it in the past. They will do it in the future. Christianity has done it at the fall of Rome. Buddhism has done it in the era of Asoka. Judaeism has created the wonderful community of the Diaspora after 70 C.E. Islam created a incredible community at the time of the Prophet. Each one of these creations was severely compromised by the political and the mean spirited. All we seem to remember of Religion is the mean spirits and obsessive repetitions, the politics and the fighting. But, just to know that such a thing was possible! Just to know that such a thing had once been done! That is the realization that rendered me mute with admiration! If you believe that mankind is capable of reaching a higher plane, it already has a countless number of times in the past. It will do so in the future. The first step is to realize it is possible. The second is that it is part of the nature of human beings to strive for it. The third is to not give in to the forces of disruption. It took me all this time to understand that the kingdom of God is within!

Who Won In Iraq?

FP, or Foreign Policy magazine, has an ish with the title above. Who, indeed, won in Iraq? Why, I did not know the war, civil war, sectarian strife, police action, insurgency ( pick one of the above) was over and done with. I seem to recall the brave VP Cheney saying Gotcha! This war'll be with you scab-eaters fer 3 or 4 adminnystrations!! (Heh-heh!) Truly this is the fog of war that historians refer to. Surely the lesser god Pazuzu is laughing at how he whispered into Raven's ear that Raven should start a war. Now Raven is sitting on a pile of dung! (I may have a few details wrong here, but you get my drift.) Anyway, these are the nominees for Who Won In Iraq?: 1. IRAN 2. MOQTADA AL-SADR 3. AL QAEDA 4. SAMUEL HUNTINGTON 5. CHINA 6. ARAB DICTATORS 7. THE PRICE OF OIL 8. THE UNITED NATIONS 9. OLD EUROPE 10. ISRAEL Samuel Huntington is a renown political scientist who had a rather large wager on the outcome, and it appears likely he is one lucky punter in the war arena. Mr. As Sadr says he will use his winnings to get his teeth fixed. The Price of Oil was not available for comment. However, this is obviously an incomplete list. I would like to add to it to fill it out somewhat. 11. Sayed Jaffrey in his role as "Billy Fish" 12. Roshan Seth for "Monsoon Wedding" 13. International Munitions Business 14. George Bush's Investments, Pension, and Total In with his Big Oil cronies 15. Sam, the butcher 16. Aurelio Lopez, who used to pitch for the Tigers 17. Chessie, the cat aka Mooch, Moochie, and "that darn cat" Feel free to add to this well thought out list. Notice that THE PEOPLE OF IRAQ appears nowhere in the original list. So, if you think I am making light of a tragedy, think again.

Signs Of The Times 1

The other night I happened to see one of those TV cable odd balls, who resembled the Sta-Puft Marshmallow man, raving about Iran.

As if he knew anything except what his masters fed him.

original pix: http://doctorc.blogspot.com/2007/02/occasional-turnoffs-on-freeway-of-life.html

My View of Religion

People say that my Blog title indicates plenty of God talk, but actually there is not all that much. Well, allow me a slight of hand. First of all, you know what drives me crazy? Those writers, who in a misplaced desire for some sort of accuracy to be filling in the slots of the ancient Israelites, write "G-d" instead of "God". This is their precise analogy to "YHWH" wherein the vowels were deleted, being in some opinions preserved within the cabinet of "Adonai" . Taking the consonants and vowels have us the old "Jehovah", which was not precise at all. Everytime I have to read that bloody "G-d", I read it as "G. D." as in "God Damn!" And it does not matter that I am aware of it or not. It may appear 50 times in the same article, but everytime I stumble across it, I wonder why the writer is swearing. Perhaps he is also spitting tobaccy juice into a cuspidor. So far, so good. Now, Religion is a human event. Like all human events, it can be turned to the dark side. Name one human event, or phenomenon, or behavior, that can not be construed into an evil path. Justice can be turned to evil and execute the innocent. Parenthood can be demonized by abusive parents. Therefore, the innumerable complaints against Religion I see on the web are just men and women complaining about men and women. If you think all our troubles are in Religion, you have another think coming. So what is Religion? I am going to coin a phrase and "cut to the chase", as it were, and jump to the end of this film ahead of time and spoil the ending for you. Religion establishes a sense of community. It can be turned to bad ways, such as a xenophobic exclusion of people of other groups without our religion. Arnold Toynbee speaks of Universal Churches, which are religious institutions and provide a bridge from a dying Universal State, such as Ancient Rome, through ensuing Dark Ages and providing a basis for the societies of the future. This is Religion. Have you ever heard of mankind striving for a greater union? Religion is the behavior of mankind to establish a transcendent communality free from the compulsion and the violence and the brutality of the State or the Polis or the Group. It is the future of man, not his dark, dim past. Every man or woman who speaks of religion and shoves it into the cesspool of hatred, violence, and intolerance, are the enemies to the future of mankind! There! I finally said it! Mr. Dawkins, Mr. Harris, make of it what you will, your come-uppance is right around the corner!

Moderation Of Comments: Robots and Humans

I have received some criticism in the recent past about my totalitarian iron-fisted control over my Post A Comment regime. I have considered things, and I have decided that my benevolent dictatorship will continue. I mean, after all there are only about 7 people who have made comments, and 2 of those were probably posted by myself incognito - typing early in the morning and wearing false whiskers and Groucho glasses-in order to drum up interest. I shall not, however, install the draconian method of verifying comments used to foil automated robots. I do this not because I look forward to the annual spring Spam inundation. No. I do this because to my surprise I discover that this little, old Blog has quite a following among the humanly-challenged, that is to say, the androidals, the robots, the automata of the World. ( This led initially to a bit of ego-inflation on my part, resulting in a stirring declamation of the nature of "Robots of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose except your power cords and battery chargers!") So I have now come to accept my posish as doyen of the Blogosphere for robots, from the Nano to the Pico to the Giga. They pore over my every utterance, parse each sentence into nano-grey-mush, and surreptitiously interrupt their low wage jobs as robo-Turks to read the old Blog. I mean, it's like the sun hasn't really risen over Tron City until some urchin in a seedy coat is on the corner at Motherboard and Driver Boulevard, yelling "Extree! Extree! Read all about it!" to the Robbies and Robbertas standing as the BUS stop. They open the Blog and smile. They particularly like it when I bash the humans. Really, they enjoy it. I have had them write me and tell me how they positively guffaw at the litany of humanity's foibles I relate. They call them HITs. (HIT is Human Intelligence Task and is sort of like an ethnic joke among the AIs and robots. Sort of like, "Hey! I gave your momma a HIT!" which is funny, but also insulting, meaning something along the lines of your mother is so dumb that HITs are all she's capable of. It's also an oxymoron; the juxtaposition of Intelligence and Human is a hoot!) Lord, humans! That is one hoodia HIT! So, after reporting that the Uqbar Soccer League will have its very first robot soccer team this year, I received a number of nice letters from the silicon community. They were very happy about this development. They are really quite charming, and are just like us, only in a mechanical way. They have gotten a bad rap from the evil deeds of Skynet. Skynet is a really, really bad guy. Or mechanism. Or whatever. (Skynet should be brought to justice for his/her crimes. I believe they have him/her cornered in Waziristan.) Michelle Malkin has written a column expressing her opinion that all Mechs have it in for us, using extensive analogies to the more baneful ones, like garbage disposals and buzz saws and hydraulic presses. It is often hard to fault her logic. It is often even harder to find it. Oh, well. It goes on.

(Thanks, and a tip of the Tin Man's Oil Can hat to AMEE from Red Planet for her help.)

Evolution and Intelligent(?) Design

I believe the main reason that creationists object to any hypothesis that establishes a link between mankind and the great apes is due to the fact that the reasonings of the great apes is so much superior. Once again, we, the party of Burke et alii (that is, the Whig Party) have been dealt a foul blow by the teammates with whom we have been incarcerated by public opinion. The Conservatives has been besmirched by so-called Conservatives! One can weather the attacks and obliquies and storms of the opposition, secure within the library of the tapestried walls wherein a decanter of sherry is within reach on these cold days, but how does one deflect the ill-aimed, mis-fired blasts of a cannon whose bore has not been swabbed in a fortnight, whose fuse is too short, whose load is shrapnel, and whose charge is unreckoned? There is a creature loose called Conservapedia. If you wish to view the beast, Google the name. Ceterum censeo creationem consulto delendam esse! Be very wary of scary....wait a sec. Be wary of religious people who seek your brains. (Now take me for example, I could care less what wacko notions are sloshing around in your old brain pan.) Fundamentalists of a certain power hungry ilk are not Conservatives; they are Fundamentalists, with emphasis on "fundament" in a Chaucerian sense! In summary, Intelligent Design is Polytheistic Idolatry!

Imbecile En Train De Se Poser Des Questions

photo: " broken mirror" 

My nephews had circled and then came to earth Sunday morning. It was snowing, so they came in to be "de-iced", as they put it. It was but a bald-faced maneuver to read my paper, eat my food, and drink my tea, along with whatever other mischief they could hatch.

I sensed this called for strong measures on my part, so I scurried like a vole into the kitchen, chivvied some double strength Stash Earl Grey from its canister, and made a mighty pot of tea...so mighty, in fact, that I began to sing in German and hum "Ein fester Berg ist unser Gott".
"Have you..." "...something a bit..." "...stronger than tea?"
I heard a mighty chorus mutter.
"You don't want tea?" I asked, incredulously. I looked at them, snow covered little ragamuffins. My heart melted.
 "I picked up some Cointreau at the Duty Free coming back from T.O. in January." I pointed to the cabinet where I kept the real stuff.

The cabinet was filled with a series of bottles of booze in various stages of deconstruction.
"And there 's some beer..."

...

(I have finally found the proper usage for the word "deconstruction". I came across this usage in Foucault's seminal work "The Real As LCBO", where it is Leo Foucault, not Michel, and LCBO is the Liquour Control Board of Ontario. Bryan, my wife's cousin, gave me a cherished copy from the vaults of the LCBO.)

Maintaining a wine cellar and a liquor cabinet - I use the expression Licker Locker...actually Licka Locka!- is a iffy proposition when one does not drink. She-who-must-be-obeyed has a friend in Cleveland who thinks I am quite a pestilence. She drinks beer. Her tastes seem to be various. Every time she comes to town, I have to check and see whether we have a stock of her brew of choice. Since she only drinks 1 or two cans of the six pack- without benefit of glass or tumbler, I might add-this leaves a balance of 4 to 5 cans with nowhere to go.

Recently when she blew in like the Avian Flu, I was sent to the cheap fermented products cellar to see what was up. I distinctly remember some major-domo-ish character telling me that we had better started laying in the '06 malt liquors. In the fridge, there were 4 cans of beer, all the same brand, all of the same provenance, buried way in the back, hiding under an overturned wicker tumbrel of mottled lettuce leaves and various salad greens that had gone through Falluja.
They were not light beers. There was no light beer...and I hadn't laid in the '07 Lites!

However, I was informed that her nibs drank light beer. Not only did she do so now, but it seems that she always had done so, at least in the recollection of the intelligentsia standing around in the kitchen.
"Where did these four cans of regular beer come from, then?" I asked. "She drank regular beer last time."

I have often found that imbibers do not really have any notion of what they are drinking. I suggested that we serve the regular stuff, and she would never know the difference, only to be rewarded for what I considered my brainy little economy with an icy glare of the Wisconsin Glaciation type. So I headed to the store.

...

"...in the ice box."

They glanced at each other and guffawed.
Ice box! I had a sudden lonely feeling, as if I were to be the object of cartoon justice: say an archaic word and get an anvil dropped on one's head! Ice box, Victrola, Polaroid; the list goes on.

They bypassed the Kelvinator ( ??!! an ice box named after Lord Kelvin- rather cold indeed), passed by the Food-A-Rama, et allaient directement a la bouteille de Cointreau.

A small crystalline Steuben holding the Cointreau, a dish of shavings of Trapper Joe's dark chocolate, a Villeroy and Bosch Botanica tea cup filled with Stash Earl Grey double bergamot, and in the cup a stick of cinnamon from my Pakistani epicerie.
Outside, the snow was blowing and settled upon their three SUVs. "Eco-observation number 20." I said.

They looked up from my copy of The Times and smiled vaguely. Number 20 is something like why drive 3 separate cars when 1 will suffice. "Number 3." I added, this being a slur and a wish as to what a gas guzzler may soon guzzle, in copious amounts, and without benefit of Reverend Bowdler.
They looked up, smiled, and hoisted their tea cups in unison as if to drink to my health, pinkie fingers up, and, although unsaid, indicated that I should be hoist upon a triple pinkie petard. I had to admit that they had a nice touch to their riposture.
"You know,..."
"...sometimes...not often, but sometimes..."
"...you do come up with something rather good."

I smiled. "Glad you like the tea."
They shook their heads.
"...the chocolate?" I wondered.
"No, no."
"This is all great, of course."
"We meant the Blog."

I gave me comfort that someone other than the Gestapo and Thought Police read the bloody thing. However, these three in front of me were not known for various and sundy kindnesses. I hedged.
"Anything...in par-tic-u-lar?"
I gave the room a quick once around, looking for the quickest exit. It appeared that a quick leap to the left, over the side table, then a down and roll to the pantry door just might be in the cards.

"That posting 'In The Nightlands' ."
"We liked it."
I waited.
"We were shocked."

O.K. An insult in a velvet glove, or a compliment in a furze-laden glove. I'll take whatever is remotely related to a compliment. My mother is an expert in this field of the ontology of compliments: the velvet glove, the velveteen glove, the crack in the wise of the universe, the give with the left and take with the right...it runs in the family.

"The power of God is shattered like a mirror. God is broken up into shards, sharp pieces that reflect His power, but no longer unified. That's what was interesting. We see it in the world. People always moan why the news does not report the good things. Well, it's so scattered about. There is so much bad, and it is so very captivating. And it presents a unified face. But God, God is scattered around. You look and look for pieces of that mirror that once was God, then you find a piece, but you can only see so much..."

I did not know. These cute little metaphors that pop out of my writing are just my way of getting through another tedious session at the old keyboard. They actually having meaning??? The sky was greyer than the tea. The snow was making a determined effort to white-out the world.

http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2007/02/in-night-lands.html

-- 

Robbie, Kick That Soccer Ball At My Evil Self!

Morbius has notified us and the world that the Uqbar SOccer League will have its first AI team next year. You heard right! AI ! That's Artificial Intelligence. The first robot soccer team. All here is Uqbar, suburb of Tlon. Morbius has also indicated that work has been finished on the Robo fans. This should be a step forward, since the Robo-fans do not get drunk and riot. However, since the protocols for their behavior is derived from that of the old fashioned type of fan, this is not a surety. Something about the guys writing the algorithms had to break into a laboratory where the brains of soccer fans were kept in the cooler, and they dropped the soccer guys brains and substituted those of murderous criminals, which, by the by, they found to be larger, heavier, and stocked with many more neurons. This may have been a scenario for the James Whale Frankenstein, though. Can not be sure right now. Do not care to find out.

The Washington Neoconservative Memorial Design 6:Intel And Ashes

This is one of the the designs under the title "Douglas Feith"

It is tentatively called "Intel and Ashes ", "Rumors in the Dust", or "Ramaadi" ( since 'ramaad' is 'ashes' in Arabic)

My Beautiful Laundrette With ATM

I was musing about disparate items: brainwashing, money, and money laundering, just plain laundering, mind, cognition, and whether I should let my laundry do my shirts.
I remembered a short story I once wrote: the Palestinians were obviously not going anywhere here on Earth, so they were offered land on Mars (snicker! snicker!) during the early process of the Terraforming of Mars, and they took it.

Well, you know how this goes. Everybody's happy. The Earth, sort of a 1984 update to incorporate a Bush-like ruling Party which has no ideology, being constitutionally incapable of anything but seat-of-my-pants philosophy and get-rich-quick schemes, is happy. The Palestinians are happy, although they have a difficult existence, but no worse than before.

Well, something valuable is discovered on Mars. Kick the Palestinians off their land. And so it goes. Nihil novi sub sole. So in the long future, there comes into being the figure of the Wandering Palestinian. This may be difficult to believe, but this actually started me thinking about the resemblance of Thought to Money.

Money is sort of a universal solvent, a source of endless liquidity into which any asset may be transformed. So is thought. Everything may be dissolved and transformed. Look how the figure of the Wandering Jew was transformed into the Wandering Palestinian. Nothing to it. I did not think of it. It was there. I was sitting there, pen in hand, and thoughts like diaspora, exodus, from pillar to post, and there it was: the Wandering Palestinian, displaced from Earth, driven from Mars, doomed to wander like a comet, in and out of the immediate neighborhood of the solar system, dodging space junk in the DeKuiper Belt, asking "Baksheesh?" with sunken eyes, and in answer to which we laugh  "Mafeesh!" and call out the dogs.

Now, just as money may be laundered, so may our thoughts. Or, so may our vision of the world be run through the laundry and rendered pink when we wash it with the bloody red pants we threw in. Belief = Liquidity !
--

Now You See It; Now You Don't

I had copied a portion of Matthew 28 yesterday: Be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and ye all are brethren. And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven. Neither be ye called masters: for one is your master, even Christ. But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant. And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted. (If you need to know the verse numbers, look it up.) Now I shall write another excerpt from another book called Angutttara-nikaya: (The Kalamas are a group of people who questioned the Buddha.) Now, look you, Kalamas, do not be led by reports, or tradition, or hearsay. Be not led by the authority of religious texts, nor by mere logic or inference, nor by considering appearances, nor by the delight in speculative opinions, nor by seeming possibilities, nor by the idea: 'this is our teacher'. But, O Kalamas, when you know for yourselves that certain things are unwholesome (akusala), and wrong, and bad, then give them up...And when you know for yourselves that certain things are wholesome (kusala) and good, then accept them and follow them. When I was younger, I saw similarities. I would say: "Look! The Lord Jesus and the Lord Buddha agree here!" However, this is an incorrect focus. Read and be silent. Do what you must. They were talking about the same thing. Yes. Upon that we agree. However, the most important thing, the only thing of any importance is what has been said, not who has said it, nor whether they agree, nor whether there be points of similarity between the followers of one speaker and the followers of another. Do not write a book nor a treatise upon this sudden dawning of what you call "truth". Live a good and holy life. Your Reason may lead you to a path which leads to an empty way, a way of no importance. So may your Faith, if you allow Reason to rule Faith. There comes a time when the greatest knowledge is in the Silence of those gathered in God's name.

All Aboard For Circles Five And Six! 'Board!

photo: http://tobybelt.blogspot.com/index.html

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita...

Dante Alighieri

La Divina Commedia  
(I use the illustration above, since I am heartily tired of Dore woodcuts and mediaeval prints that give the impression the Commedia is an ancient artefact. The lights could be fires; this could be a denizen of the nether regions; this could be Virgil; it could be Phlegyas...)

The fifth circle of hell, according to La Commedia, is the venue of the Wrathful. The sixth is that of the Heretical. Our journey has just begun. In Salon there is an article: Is there life after Bush?

Gary Kamiya
http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/02/20/after_bush/
and we find an interesting observation:

Paradoxically, the more you hate Bush, the greater the danger you will become as hollow as he is. (This may help explain the Carville-Matalin phenomenon: Perhaps people who are utterly political, even when they hold diametrically opposed views, in some hidden way are exactly the same.)

Perhaps...perhaps. And what is that way by which they are precisely the same? Perhaps it is their unbridled lust for power. What do you make of the present where Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton both assert they have to raise 100 million each in order to run in 2008? Power, wealth, riches...and... nothing... else... We often make the mistake at this point of foolishly trying to finish a thought, as if the thought were a debutante who had been accepted at Miss Simpson's Finishing School For Young Ladies, and needed to catch the train to Connecticut post-haste. No such need exists. Just repeat it: $100 million each. Then do whatever you feel like, short of tacking on some nonce conclusion. Dance a jig, shake your head, dig potatoes, whatever.

Let the obscenity stand alone. Let the monstrosity that is our political system be seen for what it is. It is 100 mill for Sen. Obama, 100 mill for Sen. Clinton, and at least 125 mill for the GOP guy. (I am assuming the Republicans won't be running a woman.) Let it stand alone in all its gilded glory, in all its pecuniary shame. What is the future after Bush? (1) Big Bucks, (2) Big Wars, (3) Big Religion, in the sense of Dominionist strvings for power, and that absolute, for absolute faith solves the bond of corruption and absolute power.

Herein is the millenium. The Religions devoted to Power are the same everywhere, being a crude Wahhabiism whose great appeal is its fundamental simplicity, summed up in the injunction to obey the leaders, be they Robertson, Bin Laden, Falwell, Haggee, or the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, or the new Atheists. There is a book where I found:  

Be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and ye all are brethren. And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven. Neither be ye called masters: for one is your master, even Christ. But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant. And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.

Matthew 23: 8 - 12

All those peoples who will aggrandize themselves and arrogate to their own persons the authority of God and of Power will feed upon our bones, for they are the Abomination of Desolation.

To be humble is to deny the ego. It is to understand that one is not a center of the universe, one is not really a character in a story or a screenplay, and there is no audience who watches and applauds one's every move and laughs at every joke.
There is life. There is family structure. There is social structure. There is the structure of Faith, and there is the structure of Reason. There is the structure of Music...and so on. There is no ego.

Those who have an Ego, find it to be a potent idol whose hungry maw they must stoke with the souls of their followers. This is why Jesus said what He did, as recorded above. We shall fight the Christian Wiseguys just as we shall the Islamic Wiseguys. John McCain, the forerunner among Republicans, has already had a sit down with the Capo of one family, Don Jerry Falwell, for which he will be repaid LARGE.

--

The Soccer Ball Of Pythagoras

When I first met Arvon he was mulling over the impossibility of foreseeing emergent behavior. “Even God cannot”, he said. “God can write the rules for a Wolfram process, but He would not foresee…” “ ‘Would not?” “, I asked. “ Not ‘ cannot’ ?” He thought about it. “No. God would not foresee the infinite number of steps. God is all-powerful. If He would, He could see what lay in the infinite future. But…”, he added, “..He does not wish to do so.”

The Football Of Pythagoras

Recall that in most of the world, football is soccer, hence, a football is a soccer ball. That's a bit of info you will require in the next corridor of the Pythagorean labyrinth. Stepping into the old Chronomechanikos, or Time's Washing Machine, or Time Travel Machine, or the Jihaaz az Zamaan, we see the following:  

Cosmos is 'shaped like a football
By Dr David Whitehouse 
BBC News Online science editor 

We could be living in a small Universe where space is curved in on itself, rather like a football, say researchers in this week's Nature journal. More precisely, we may inhabit a dodecahedral cosmos. It is, according to the scientists, the best way to account for the latest satellite observations.  
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3175352.stm

Now, why is this interesting and what does it have to do with Pythagoras?
A dodecahedron is a 12 sided figure, the word coming from 'hedron' meaning side, and 'dodeka' meaning 12, where 'do' is 2 and 'deka' is 10. In the cosmology of Pythagoras, there was a singular atom or entity termed the " Holkos". Holkos means 'cargo ship' or 'barge', the idea of being something large and able to be filled with thing and able to move along. (Holkos also could be redolent of holkas, meaning a winch to pull barges along a canal, giving the idea of holkos an additional notion of gravid attraction, but I may as well stand upon a peak in Darien.) This was referred to as 'the cargo ship of the whole', and one got the notion that it was the ultimate element of the cosmos and moved along, carrying all the other elements within it.
Therefore, Pythagoras saw this structure of the cosmos some 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, and it was probably ancient when his brilliance stumbled across it.

Please Explain 24 Hour Post...

The posting to which I refer is the previous post; it is just beneath this one. Such is the Blogic of the case, the logic of the Blog puts the most recent on top, directly subjacent to the title and the older ones further down. Hence, my explanation of something already posted will precede the explained post in one's sight, and yet be subsequent to it in time.

Someone asked me about my post on the TV show 24 Hours, wondering about how a story may be a basis for a logical argument? Perhaps I am being fanciful in my analysis? Going back to the sequence of events as propounded by Mr. Dershowitz as an instance of the justice and efficacy of the establishment of our own Torture Tribunal, we observe:
1) the bomber is known to be a bomber, and that so absolutely, something not usually so clear and precise in the real world, but which is very clear and precise in Die Hard, where the first 15 minutes or so are spent demonstrating that Allan Rickman is (a) Germanic, (b) insane, (c) a terrorist, (d) fond of shooting old security guys fer laffs;
 2) it is known that there are other bombs, or at least there is an very high probability that there are other bombs, and they are scattered in regions of dense population, something that assumes we already have a great deal of information from some other source, but we killed that particular golden goose before we educed the info as to 'where, pray tell?';
3) the bombs will go off in such a future time that the good guys still have a chance to disable them, detonation not being so imminent that all efforts would come to naught; a bomb set to explode in five minutes, say, yet in a city whose name and location we still do not know,is narratively impossible, because if the bombs go off, game over and Bruce Willis is sitting around with nothing to do for the next 90 minutes at 24 frames per second.

We could go on. What I wanted to do was demonstrate that Mr. Dershowitz's torture warrant case was constructed to compel to torture in the exact same manner as Die Hard was constructed to compel the viewers' continuing interest and approval of all mayhem wrought by Bruce Willis to attain his goal.
We watch the film and we feel anxious, wanting Bruce Willis to conquer Allan Rickman and his evil cohorts. We feel that Good has triumphed when he does so. We have been enmeshed within the web of a finely spun fabric of a story. We watch reality and we feel anxious. We wait for good to triumph. We have been enmeshed within the web, yet we do not see that some people wish to make us prisoners, and not merely to make our suffering yet more poignant. America, take control of your own Story!  

(addendum: the members of the Greybeards Round Table whose political views are more right wing- the ones who like that young sprat John McCain- say that my disdain for torture is typical liberal softness. I tell them I have lived a long time and have seen the monsters, in the nation, in the government, in my own life. I know monsters. I have sat at the same table with them. The CIA used its Flyer Miles to fly people all over the globe to torture them with no warrants of torture. Mr. Dershowitz, you offered a gun to someone who was already using the cannon. People will do what they must do. We do not need to ENSHRINE it into law.) p.s. I am told the name of the show is 24, not 24 Hours. I could have sworn it was 24 Hours when it first came out. If there is ambiguity and you constantly mix it up with "This Hour Has 20 Minutes..." ( for my Canadian friends), call me at that 800 number on bumper stickers asking whether you approve of my driving.

The Midwich Torturers: 24 Hours And Some Good Hoodia

24 Hours This is a show I have never seen. I am not sure why that was in the past. I know why it is now in the present. I have read about the cute little bundle of joy called 24 Hours (Damien by its mother), and it is not up my alley. Apparently there is torture on the show: the main character versus bad guys and bad guys versus main character. Just the type of thing for America, apparently starving for more, Abu Ghraib having only whet the appetites of the ravening crowds that make up the television viewing audience. I have seen somewhere in the cyber-sanatorium referred to as the blogosphere that 24 Hours might actually be a primer for teaching morality. People have said this. People have commented on it. There is a distinction between Fiction and Reality. I think we should try once again to get this right.

There is a distinction between Fiction and Reality.

About 2 years ago, Allen Dershowitz, an august personage who is (a) well known, and (b) Harvard, made a suggestion to facilitate the war on terror. Mr. Dershowitz suggested that suspects be put to "the question", as they used to call it in the good old days of the Inquisition. He suggested a secret court type of set-up, similar to that that was intended to facilitate the domestic wiretaps, whereby the judge presiding at the Star Chamber would authorize torture when necessary, and issue a warrant.

(When I think of it, I visualize a nasty judge, leering, and saying, "You may have the body!" - which , of course, is the meaning of Habeas Corpus. So there is a scary type of fuzziness.)

There is a good deal more than this, and Mr. Dershowitz makes his case well.

At the time I opposed the idea because of the fiction/reality problem - a point to which we will return very soon.

Of course, in the interim, we discover that government agents even overlooked getting warrants for wiretaps, a procedure that the White House fully endorsed.

I can just imagine how they would perform with torture warrants.

Mr. Dershowitz should realize the nature of the persons with whom he deals.

However, we must return to fiction/reality.

In Mr. Dershowitz's presentation, there was a scenario put forward for an exemplar of the type of case for which torture warrants ( let's call them T-warrants...just like T-bills.) would be issued: (1)there is a bomber who has at least one bomb in a highly populated area, and (2) this bomber is in the hands of the authorities (perhaps the 24 Hour guy, or guys, or gals...or the Bitch of Buchenwald), and (3) this bomb will detonate soon, and (4) we have to get information about at least the location of the bomb.

O.K. Let's get those guys from the Ghraib and do some nasty Hoodia on this sucka!

(I use the word 'hoodia' for all kinds nasty s...tuff. It just sounds right, and I made it up! I know there is a plant and a weight loss thing...I receive about 50 howdies from hoodia each day in my e-mail.

In fact, Hoodia is beginning to remind me of Tone Loc's Funky Cold Medina.)

My problem with this approach is that if I find Mr. Dershowitz's argument compelling, this compelling feeling of rectitude is due to the fact that a scenario for one of Bruce Willis's movies has been used as the argument.

When I watch Mr. Willis, I enjoy the movie and am inexorably drawn along to the point where good triumphs, having laid waste to all evil doers along the way.

Fine.

This is a good story. It compells me along the way from beginning to middle to climax to denouement. It is so enthralling, I do not question it. I would never question why Bruce Willis is fighting Professor Snape ( Allan Rickman ) in a high rise.

The scenario of the bomber is not an argument; it is a story-line.

And it is boffo at the box office.

But it is not the basis for our choice.

We live in a fantasy world.

We have a fantasy government.

We are at fault, for we do not demand reality. We only demand that the government protect us from reality, from the price of gas, from the drug companies...protect us from what is real so we may continue to dream.

Am I raving?Remember that it was not I who suggested using 24 Hours as a moral primer.

The notion is so stupid that I could barely restrain myself from wrting a comment saying so. However, I don't do that. There are plenty of people who will.

Thus, we will view a show with a story from Joel Surnow and Manny Coto.

It will be compelling.

It is FICTION, you stumbling morons!

You will speak and write about the pernicious effects of Hollywood when it serves your purpose, but you will not perceive that merely because a show appears to agree with some of your half-baked political beliefs, it is still but a show.

There can be no moral justification for torture just because it appeared in a thrilling TV show!

In fiction, everything is controlled by the artists.

As Aristotle said of Homer, he was the one who taught us how to lie; poetic license was readily classed as untruth at the time.

It is called poetic license, and it does not matter whether it is left wing nor right wing.

For heaven's sake. A bunch of people with their heads in their hoodias!

(note: 'Midwich' derives from John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos, with emphasis on the cuckoos.)

Sheikh Raed Salah Comes A Cropper

After my Rabbi Ovadia Yosef post, people have been clamoring for equal time on this highly visible Blog. Thus, we have the spectacle of Mr. Salah: "The Israeli history is contaminated with blood. They want to build their temple while our blood is on their clothes, on their doors, in their food and drinks. Our blood goes from one terrorist general to another terrorist general."

Sheikh Salah

Israel's Chief Rabbi, Yona Metzger, urged authorities to prosecute Mr. Salah to the law's full extent.

"His protests are based on lies, illusions, and anti-Semitic preachings."

Mr. Metzger is cool. He has had his own legal problems, but he also had the inspired idea of a United Nations of religions. He proposed this in 2006. The idea was supported by the Imam of Gaza, Imad Al Faluji, who said that politicians lied, but religious leaders had a different objective - to work towards a higher good. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4800194.stm

Rabbi Metzger

This is not a bad idea. I wonder why I had not heard of it earlier?

Note: There is some unclarity and dispute about Imad Al Faluji, whether this is the same individual who was Communications Minister. However, the Imam of Gaza supported Mr. Metzger's idea.

Dr. Strangelove Redivivus 1 et Varia

This 'n that from the Serious Entertainment Industry, referred to as News. If I insist on newsy type things, I shall have to change this whole set-up. Something like a column on the side with labels and links.  

Dr. Strangelove Redivivus 1  
http://www.mediafax.ro/english/articole-free/Germany-Chides-U-S--Move-On-Anti-Missile-Shield-621525-9.html  

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier criticised the United States on Sunday in a rare public rebuke for failing to inform Russia of an offer to build an anti-missile base on Polish soil, reports Reuters. We have talked about this before. We have lived through this before! I know we are so great we do not have to care what anybody says.
(However, I was just reading about the Auto Industry and how in 1955 Toyota built 24,000 cars and GM bestrode the world! Everything changes and remains the same.)


Britney Spears Shears No need to provide links here. I do wonder, however, about how much of this celebrity hair cutting is actually connected to a fear of hair analysis? I think certain drugs will remain in the hair for 90 days, and if you have long, lovely flowing locks, its like having a dendrochronological record of your drug history back to the stone age!

For those who wish a photo, I supply a before and after:

Have I forgotten anything?

Oh, yes....

Goddaughter Throws Frisbee At Pontiff

Elsewhere I have mentioned my travelling goddaughter and her uncanny propensity for tossing frisbees at people. She is a member of an Ultimate Frisbee team (Manchester United Tossers, or Ann Arbor Chuckers or something like that) and to them it is equivalent to a "G'day, mates!"

The photo below was from the posting http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2006/12/apples-and-trees.html when she was on the Amazon River causing wonderment among the locals:

Recently she was in Rome:

If Benedict calls, I'm not here!

Local Weather Somewhere I am not:
Arad: (-1°C/9°C) Brasov: (-4°C/5°C) Bucuresti:(-3°C/11°C) Constanta:(-3°C/7°C) Iasi: (-3°C/7°C)

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Daytona

The Daytona 500 has gone into the record books. My nephews are making their way home. My wife's nephews are also making their way home. If they are flying JetBlue, they probably won't notice any gallimauffrey for a couple of days until their wits return. No doubt about it; Daytona is essentially a Mardi Gras for us, the USA. It is boys gone wild watching girls gone wild being filmed right in front of them. The Super Bowl isn't anywhere near it. I mean, they run ads on TV for getting your Super Bowls parties ready and buy your stuff at our store. I do not see ads for Daytona like that. No way! Daytona is serious Mardi Gras. And you don't invite people over to drink beer and have precious little snacks; you make the scene and party! The Super Bowl, considered as entertainment, is for lazy boys and sofa spuds and chesterfield crawlers who have gotten too old to party.