Land of the Long White Cloud

As seen at “Strange Maps“, photo taken in Costa Rica. Also featured are Mosstralia, Rustralia, Drown Under, Urinalia!

Smoke Walk on the Water

A recent thread at ETH reminded me of a fun alternative lyric (by a defunct metal band called the Highwaymen) to an old Deep Purple number… please correct/improve this in the comments!

We all came out to Capernaum
By the Lake Galilee shoreline
We had to feed five thousand,
We didn’t have much time
The Father Son and Holy Ghost
Were spreading lunch around
Then there arose a mighty storm
Our boat was going down
(then he)

Walked on the Water, and rose into the Sky
Walked on the Water … !!

Global Banking, Global Warming, Global Taxation

The following is an extract from The Distributist Review, a highly recommended economics blog.
The proper function of a bank is to put capital into the community. If x number of people have invested in a bank, and they find (as has always been the case) that people need only 10% of their money at a time, they make an investment on some kind of productive enterprise. This gains the bank a profit, and it was on a productive loan for something say such as mining or manufacturing. The fee they charge for the use of their money is just, it is a percentage of the profit earned with their productive loan. In that sense their money was capital, without which the productive venture could not have worked, and thus the bank has infused capital into the community.

Banking today by contrast takes capital out of the community, and then demands more from the government when they run out of money.

There is an interesting video produced by Alex Jones called “Fall of the Republic” that traces the work of globalism and the current globalist banking industry in creating the crises that grips us presently. The contributors to this documentary compare it to oligarchy, and demonstrate how the international elite function by that and force various policies to erode the rights of the general population.

The video also exposes the establishment of a world governing body of scientists who enforce the state doctrine of population control, family planning, social engineering and climate change.

The significance of global warming doctrine is that by identifying carbon dioxide as the evil which is “destroying the planet”, the world governing body will have the right to tax you and me for the right to breathe. This is essential to breaking down sovereignty and self government, which are so necessary to defending a society from control by an external force.

It also shows us many examples of how a police state is on the verge of being created, and (in my opinion) strongly makes the case for a hidden hand controlling Obama by demonstrating the numerous flip flops from his campaign promises of transparency and change and the reality of continuation of Bush policy, and has nothing at all to do with change.

The movie also has the benefit of not being partisan with respect to right and left, taking aim at both Obama and Bush and demonstrating continuity of Obama and Bush’s administrations. In reality of course (as it seems to me), there is total continuity of government since 1988.

The film, bringing us several contributors in the form of economists, climate scientists, researchers and bloggers, really hits the nail on the head of the present crisis. It is also aided by numerous video clips of the elites themselves telling us from their own mouths that accountability, sovereignty and freedom do not matter.

read more here…

Command Line = Good

Here’s a tongue-in-cheek presentation I did in defense of the trusty old CLI

also here : http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dfjgr58x_21fcmhtbcv

Although it’s pushing 40, the unix command line is still very much in use today, in the form of the modern (GNU) bash shell and a few proprietary implementations like ksh. An interesting story follows.. it matches my experiences with log analysis on a linux environment. Perl, Ruby etc have their advantages,but Unix tools are still a low friction way to solve bulk text processing problems.

Perl, sed, grep, gawk, uniq, host and dig: another look || kuro5hin.org
None of the above programs are sexy or buzzword compliant. Because of modern scripting languages they are largely ignored or at best under utilized. A number of years ago, I was mentored by a Unix guru who knew his way around the Unix command line to the point that years later I marvel at his ability to be productive on a command line while working with Unix.

I work at a large ISP with a mix of every operating system possible so most won’t find this useful. However, the following gave me an opportunity to revisit standard Unix/Linux command line tools and how to put them to good use. By doing so I remembered how important these tools are and how robust Unix/Linux is. In this regard, you might find this very useful as well. When nothing else will do the standard Unix tools are hard to beat.
(tags: geek)

Theist Bus Advert :)

There's probaby no Grand Unified Field. Now stop avoiding God, and read Godel's incompleteness!

Make your own here.

Flesh and Blood are GOOD

Flesh and Blood: Pomegranate seed veiled by membrane. Each seed is approximately 1/8th of an inch across. The pomegranate is the symbol of lost innocence, of condemnation and forgiveness, equated to the flesh of man it bears 613 seeds - the same number of nerves of the human body. It is a symbol of death, the price of knowledge and was often depicted in Biblical Medieval art as a symbol of salvation from sin in the left hand of the Christ child. In Roman mythology Persephone was bound to Hades and the Underworld 3 months of the year for partaking in the fruit. The seeds of the pomegranate are considered to assist with infertility. It is one of the blessed fruits of the Buddah. The Prophet Mohammed encouraged the fruit to rid envy and hate. It is often the symbol of human DNA and the heart in the medical field.

Christian history has grown increasingly divided and conflicted, flesh-hating, body-despising, woman-fearing, sexually neurotic, and earth ravaging – the litany of consequences of our failure to truly eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Humanity is too long and too tragic to bear at times.

[We have attempted to solve the mysteries of Christ] as a rational problem. And the effect of all this left-brained rationalising is to sever the Eucharist from its roots, from the ground in which it is nourished, to drive it higher and higher into a latter-day scholastic cloud. And that is where Eucharist, and for that matter the whole of the Christian gospel, has gotten lost – a critical factor in the widespread disillusion with institution-based faith. Like the disciples in Luke’s picturesque account of the Ascension, we are gazing upward, into the skies, looking in the wrong place. “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

I too have assumed that Spirit comes down into matter, after the fashion of the metaphor of the annunciation to Mary, to name just one of many such images. And if Spirit comes down, much as a person of high social status might condescend to visit underlings, it was inevitable that I would assume that the goal of religious life is elevation, ascent, an upwards movement, a rising higher and higher. And many scriptural texts seem to support this strictly one-way traffic in religious intercourse between the human and the Divine. Indeed, even John’s text paradoxically contains this strange little aside which has probably inspired much Christian flesh-hating: “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.”

Likewise, many of the church’s prayers, doctrines, rituals, and pious writings lend support to this rocket-ship spiritualising. And the inflating effect of all this is actually devastating, so I have finally recognised. And how I wish that I could undo some of the worst of its consequences in my own life! In fact, flesh is the vital element! Not up-high-in-the-clouds Spirit, but down on the ground flesh! Now I see that at precisely those moments when I have been ‘spiritual’, up high, flesh has invaded. For this is the necessary compensation for an inflated, one-sided, excessively spiritual religion. When our feet are off the ground it is flesh which will save us from ourselves, flesh which will make us whole and complete. This must be why Jesus says that unless we eat his flesh and drink his blood we have no life in us.

Kings X album cover depicting Bread and Wine

And that is precisely the gift and the mystery and the scandal of the Eucharistic sacrifice. We are offered salvation from our one-sidedness, by the eruption of flesh. And not merely the flesh of a 2000 year old historical legend, somehow preserved through memorialising and high piety. The communion Jesus undergoes with himself, eating his own flesh and blood at the last supper, as Saint John Chrysostom observed in the fourth century, is the communion which all humans are invited to undergo. Those who eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Humanity, which is all humanity, will indeed have eternal life 5 – because one-sided and excessive spirit is made whole through the medium of humbling and grounding flesh. In the Eucharist what each of us must eat is not a 2000 year old memorial – as the Book of Common Prayer tragically enshrines – but that part of our own despised fleshiness which we have excluded and rejected.

Extract from “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?“, Fr. David Moore, St Lukes in the City, 23 Aug 2009

Dark Energy is weird.

Dark secrets of the universe by Marilyn Head | New Zealand Listener

With each scientific discovery, the universe becomes even more shrouded in mystery.

One of the great recent surprises in science is the discovery by Kirshner and his colleagues that the expansion of the universe is accelerating under the influence of a mysterious dark energy. In a strange turn of events, the simplest form of the dark energy looks very much like a modern version of Einstein's cosmological constant – a theory which Einstein proposed but then retracted and has been dubbed ‘Einstein’s greatest blunder’. Warned by Einstein's blunder, and contradicted by the initial results of a competing research group, Kirshner and his team were reluctant to accept their own result. But, convinced by evidence built on their understanding of exploding stars, they announced their conclusion in February 1998 – the universe is speeding up! We live in an extravagant universe with a surprising number of essential ingredients: the real universe we measure is not the simplest one we could imagine.
(tags: cosmos)

ROBERT P KIRSHNER, Clowes Professor of Science at Harvard University, is one of the world’s leading astronomers, a popular public lecturer on science and author of “The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Cosmos.” Kirshner is described as a “raconteur of exceptional eloquence,” and by New Scientist as “one of the liveliest and most amusing lecturers in the world of astronomy”. His research has resulted in significant and surprising breakthroughs on the nature of our universe.

Rampaging Capitalism or Distributism for Romania?

The Distributist Review: Burn the Vineyard
Alas, "finance" now means something entirely different; it does not mean, as it should, the capitalizing of productive ventures in return for a share of the produce, but only of financing speculative schemes and government waste in return for a share of the plunder. A system of producer and marketing cooperatives, for example, would improve both the productivity and market power of the farms, and this would take very little investment, compared to that required by the grand and (usually) bankrupt schemes of the globalists.
(tags: distributism economy)

John Ralston Saul | The Collapse of Globalism and the Rebirth of Nationalism

Harpers Magazine 2004 | John Ralston Saul | The Collapse of Globalism
Grand economic theories rarely last more than a few decades. Some, if they are particularly in tune with technological or political events, may make it to half a century. Beyond that, little short of military force can keep them in place. The wild open-market theory that died in 1929 had a run of just over thirty years. Communism, a complete melding of religious, economic, and global theories, stretched to seventy years in Russia and forty-five years in central Europe, thanks precisely to the intensive use of military and police force. Keynesianism, if you add its flexible, muscular form during the Depression to its more rigid postwar version, lasted forty-five years. Our own Globalization, with its technocratic and technological determinism and market idolatry, had thirty years.
And now it, too, is dead.

Despite the almost religious certainty with which it was conceived, nation states have not become extinct, international trade has not created real wealth that has spread across society and many dictatorships have not changed into democracies. In this groundbreaking book, the distinguished philosopher John Ralston Saul examines where we go from here. As the hope of global prosperity fades and the problems of immigration, terrorism and the collapsing economy cause the world’s nations to rethink their relationships, Saul’s exhilarating investigation into the collapse of globalism is essential – and timely.
(tags: globalism economy)

Human Significance

Following my earlier post: Our Place in the Universe, here’s a thoughtful response from “And All These Things”:

And All These Things: The Vastness of the Cosmos and The Place of Man
"The dignity of the human person is rooted in his creation in the image and likeness of God" Catechism of the Catholic Church 1700

Questions and exhortations about the insignificance of man compared to the vastness of time and space are based on confusion of quantity and quality, between what we can quantify about a thing versus what a thing is "worth." For instance a single gold bar can buy an entire tract of land many times larger than itself, and a rock in your garden is immensely older than the house it sits beside yet you would not say the house was worth less. Indeed qualitatively speaking a single celled microbe is worth more than all the lifeless stars and planets in the Universe. With life comes information, ontologically superior to the mere matter of non-life, and with his spiritual intellect and freewill man is ontologically superior again.
(tags: life cosmos)