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Friday, December 30, 2016

Continuous Transportation: Ferries

Un État de Transport Continu
inspiré par le film Transperceneige


Ferry from Altwarp to Nowe Warpno


I believe this is the ferry running from Altwarp, Germany to Nowe Warpno, Poland.
The site had it tagged as "Stare Warpno", which - if Slavic memory serves - should be "Old-Timey Warpno" , or Altwarp as distinct from "Brand-New Warpno", or Nowe Warpno.
One gets the impression there was some national boundary re-location after one of our more memorable world conflagrations, and that movement set up Altwarp looking across the bay to Nowe Warpno. Maybe it was some more ancient war and grudge match.

I was looking for some info on my great-grandfather, Augustus, who came from the area, and I came across the beautiful bay on which both Altwarp and Nowe Warpno are located.

--

Thursday, December 29, 2016

When Is A Settlement Not An Entente

UN Security Council voted on more settlements on the West Bank, which is Netanyahu's push to the east. My position agrees with that of Albert Einstein's judgement on the future of Israel and Palestine.

We present the Jewish opinions of Netanyahu and the opposing one of the Neturei Karta -an anti-Zionist Jewish group.
Afterwards we have an article on John Kerry.



JTA
Netanyahu: UN Security Council resolution makes negotiations harder, drives peace further away
http://www.jta.org/2016/12/25/news-opinion/israel-middle-east/netanyahu-security-council-resolution-makes-negotiations-harder-drives-peace-further-away
JERUSALEM (JTA) — “Friends don’t take friends to the Security Council,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his government.

Netanyahu made the remark Sunday at the weekly Cabinet meeting two days after the United States abstained from a United Nations Security Council vote on a resolution condemning Israel for continued settlement building. In a break from the norm, Netanyahu offered some of his remarks in English, presumably in order to make sure they would be properly understood by the U.S.

“Over decades, American administrations and Israeli governments had disagreed about settlements, but we agreed that the Security Council was not the place to resolve this issue. We knew that going there would make negotiations harder and drive peace further away,” Netanyahu said.

“I’m encouraged by the statements of our friends in the United States, Republicans and Democrats alike. They understand how reckless and destructive this UN resolution was, they understand that the Western Wall isn’t occupied territory. I look forward to working with those friends and with the new administration when it takes office next month.”

In Hebrew, Netanyahu told the Cabinet that there is “no doubt” that in relation to the resolution passed Friday, the Obama administration “initiated it, stood behind it, coordinated on the wording and demanded that it be passed.”

Netanyahu called it a “complete contradiction of the traditional American policy that was committed to not trying to dictate terms for a permanent agreement … [and] the explicit commitment of President Obama himself, in 2011, to refrain from such steps.”

He called on the government ministers to “act prudently, responsibly and calmly, in both actions and words.”

Netanyahu ordered Israel’s ambassadors from Senegal and New Zealand, the two cosponsors of the resolution with which Israel has diplomatic relations, recalled for consultation. He also ordered a halt to Israeli assistance to Senegal and threatened more sanctions...

... Prior to the Cabinet meeting, Netanyahu reportedly told lawmakers from his Likud party that Obama may have other actions prepared to take against Israel on the Palestinian issue before he leaves office in three weeks, and called on them to not comment publicly on the issue.

**




Shafaqna News 

Statement in Reaction to U.N. Security Council Resolution Condemning Israeli Settlements – NETUREI KARTA


On behalf of anti-Zionist Jews worldwide, we of Neturei Karta International, Jews United Against Zionism, greet with enthusiasm the recent United Nations Security Council resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlements as illegal. For decades, the settlements have been a major cause for bloodshed and unrest in the Holy Land. Hundreds of innocent lives have been sacrificed on the altar of nationalism and lust for land.

We congratulate the countries in the Security Council for taking this long-overdue step toward justice and peace. And in particular, we congratulate the President of the State of Palestine, His Excllency Mahmoud Abbas, on his success in achieving the passage of this resolution. At the same time, we wish to reiterate the Torah position that it is not just the West Bank that is illegally occupied. Jews have been sent into exile by the Almighty, and any kind of Jewish sovereignty over any territory is a violation of that decree. Therefore the concept of the State of Israel is entirely illegitimate and forbidden. The crime is compounded when the creation of this homeland entails the occupation, oppression, subjugation and expulsion of another people.

Before the era of Zionism, Jews lived in Palestine in peace and security, side by side with the Palestinian Arab population. We fervently hope for the day when Jews return to abiding by the laws of the Torah and living in peace with all peoples. As Jews, we have always been especially pained by the actions of the State of Israel in general, and the radical settlers in particular, since they claim to be acting in our name. Predictably, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has reacted with anger to this clear demonstration of unanimous world opinion against his state’s crimes. Drawing on Jewish themes, he has cast himself in the role of the Maccabee fighters whose victories we celebrate on Chanukah, and the Security Council nations as their enemies. Let no one be fooled.

The State of Israel has nothing to do with Judaism, and on the contrary, it has consistently tried to extinguish Torah observance and values. The Torah values life and service of the Almighty, while Zionism values land conquest and secular culture. The Maccabees did not go to battle for freedom or independence; they wanted only the right to continue to practice Judaism. If any comparison is to be made to the Chanukah story, it is of Netanyahu and his fellow Zionists to the enemies of the Jewish people in the time of the Maccabees.

Netanyahu has vowed to continue building settlements, but we appeal to the world to realize that the Jewish people in general are not behind him. This show of defiance against the world community and the United States for taking up a just cause is completely against the Torah. American Orthodox Jews in particular, as loyal citizens enjoined by the Torah to respect their president, are embarrassed and completely disgusted by Netanyahu and his supporters’ vicious attacks on President Obama. We also wish to state that the Zionists have no right to control the Western Wall and other holy sites of Jerusalem. All claims the Israeli government makes to these places are baseless.

Furthermore, the recent U.N. General Assembly resolution that the State of Israel has no right to impose its laws on these places, in no way detracts from the holiness of these sites in the eyes of Jews. In these days of Chanukah, may the Almighty send a spirit of repentance into Jewish hearts, so that they look into the Torah and resolve to follow its guidance. And may we be privileged to see peace in the Middle East and the entire world. Amen.

**


The Guardian
Kerry defends US decision not to veto UN resolution against Israeli settlements
US secretary of state pushes two-state solution and criticises Netanyahu in toughest remarks on Israel by a US official in years
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/28/kerry-defends-us-decision-to-not-veto-un-condemnation-of-israeli-settlements
The US secretary of state, John Kerry, has offered a blistering defence of the US decision to allow a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements, saying if Washington had vetoed it, Israel would have been given a licence for “unfettered settlement construction” and the end of the peace process.

Framing a two-state solution as “the only way to achieve a just and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians”, Kerry took aim at the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for building a coalition that was “the most rightwing in Israeli history, with an agenda driven by the most extreme elements”...

... Pushing back at Israel’s fury over the US abstention , Kerry pointedly questioned Netanyahu’s commitment to Palestinian statehood , asking whether Israelis believed their interests were best served by the recent attacks on the Obama administration by Israeli leaders.

Kerry also offered a bleak vision of the risk of the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the two-state solution, describing the alternative one-state solution in the darkest terms.

“Today, there are a similar number of Jews and Palestinians living between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea,” Kerry told his audience of diplomats in Washington, out lining the demographic reality on the ground that would colour the future of a unitary state.

“[Israelis and Palestinians] have a choice. They can choose to live together in one state, or they can separate into two states.

“Despite our best efforts over the years, the two-state solution is now in serious jeopardy … We cannot, in good conscience, do nothing, and say nothing, when we see the hope of peace slipping away.

“If the choice is one state, Israel can either be Jewish or democratic, it cannot be both, and it won’t ever really be at peace. ”

Kerry also took the opportunity to forcefully deny Israeli accusations that the Obama administration had been behind the drafting of the resolution amid Israeli accusations that the US colluded with the Palestinians .

The US, insisted Kerry, “did not draft or originate” the UN resolution, adding : “ Nor did we put it forward [in the UN].”

“The United States did in fact vote in accordance with our values, just as previous administrations have done,” Kerry said during the speech at the US State Department. “The vote in the United Nations was about preserving the two-state solution. That’s what we were standing up for.”

Kerry outlined a series of principles he said should form the basis of a future peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians, with the likely participation of the U S, including a “secure and recognised border” between Israel and the new nation of Palestine...

--

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Gods Of Gun

I know I said I was too busy to write, but I have to jot this down.

The USS Gabrielle Giffords is set to enter service with the US Navy in 2017. There are some types that are complaining about the name of the vessel, saying that it promotes gun control.



There is a certain amount of irony in saying a battleship promotes some sort of weaponry control, but that is not my interest. What is interesting is the fact that the critics think that the magical name of a US Congressperson who had been shot in the face was an attack on one of their dogmas!

Some people believe in the Second Amendment as a right, but some believe in the Second Amendment as a dogma. In this sense, there is no difference between religion and politics, for each is a worldview that is intolerant of dissent.

Both religion and politics are often worldviews which are inflexible and intolerant of other worldviews.

Why?

When people talk religion and politics, the areas of the brain involved with the self and self-esteem and are at work. The majority of statements about politics and about religion are mainly statements about the speaker's sense and value of self within the speaker's worldview.
That is, for the most part, religious and political statements are not about facts, but are about one's beliefs and the importance of those beliefs in one's view of the world.


--

Christmastide 2016: Childermas and Newtown Childermas



Today is another fine day, Childermas, or the Feast of the Holy Innocents. I am re-printing two of my posts on Childermas from 2013; we arrived home last night just after midnight, struggled tragically with the luggage up the many steps, and collapsed.

I slept too long and have much to do, so I have little time to write, but there is - as always - so much to be said, especially when the writer thinks his words are so important for the future of mankind and the rest of the earthly biome.

Childermas is of great importance to me. It has been for a time.

The times since the turn of the century have been a bumper harvest of children shot, children displaced  by war, children bombed, childrens' bodies washed up on beaches around the Mediterranean. So far, the 21st century may be the Century of the Child, but if it were, we would have to pronounce it with ironic sarcasm.

Now more than ever I find children to  be wonderful... ever since my granddaughter came.
(See her photo in the post Christmas Morning Glory: http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2016/12/christmas-morning-glory.html )



**

Childermas 1

 Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchit


Since researching Saint Nicholas Day on the sixth of December, I have been drawn to the role Nicholas played in our civilization's conceptual understanding of children and society. In particular, the fact that this season we are in begins on Saint Nicholas Day and finds an ending near Childermas, or the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the children who were slaughtered by the order of King Herod.

So we have something I had never noticed before: a season that starts with the Saint who restored life to two brothers who had been murdered for their belongings, and extends through the birth of the Christ Child, and then celebrates the Holy Innocents, a feast which is a climax of gore as well as a celebration of martyrdom.

I begin to suspect that there was a distinct awareness of the abuse of children in the past, and that this season was instituted and modified over time with that awareness very much in the intuitive and the active minds of the peoples of the time: they created a sequence of holy days to celebrate children - to illustrate the horror of crimes against the young and to contrast that with their innocence and sinless natures - all of which makes them counterpoints against the sordidness and evil of the World.

I feel as if I had been blind, and now I see.

This is a time to remember the children now orphans in Bangladesh whose parents and relatives made clothes and childrens' toys made in the factory where 120 people were killed in a fire. This is the season when we must keep the sight of the children slaves in India recently freed from their evil masters who forced them to make Christmas toys and ornaments..., for us.

Scrooge Sees the Boy, Ignorance, and the Girl, Want

As we fight, claw, and gibber madly in the spiritual wasteland of Black Fridays, we fail to realize how black we really are; we are the inhumane processes of Dickensian London portrayed in A Christmas Carol that condemns its own children to poverty, disease, and despair:

"Oh, Man, look here! Look, look, down here!" exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
"Spirit, are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more.
"They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end.
"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.
"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"
The bell struck twelve.

Scrooge looked about him for the Ghost, and saw it not. As the last stroke ceased to vibrate, he remembered the prediction of old Jacob Marley, and lifting up his eyes, beheld a solemn Phantom, draped and hooded, coming, like a mist along the ground, towards him.

And this realization of mine that our past generations have tried to build walls of inspiration and holiness and faith to protect the innocent, and we ourselves have not received this gift without debasing it and making it a wretchedness of material excess, leads me to a deep distaste for our ways and times.


**

Childermas 2

Brueghel's Slaughter of the Innocents



In the post The Feasts of All Children  (or Childermas 1 above),  I spoke of how this season may have developed, beginning with the miracles of St. Nicholas of Myra, who discovered the crime of the young students being murdered for their wealth, urged the criminal responsible to confess his crime, and then restored the students to life.
All in all, a fine inspiration for a saint of innocent children.

With St. Nicholas on December 6 we have a narrative about Children being abused, Children being innocent victims, and Good triumphing over Evil.

Then with the Christ Child on December 25 we have a narrative of Good triumphing over evil and a Child of unsurpassed innocence and purity. This Child, however, has his own history inextricably linked with liturgies and holidays soon to come of Abuse and Violence, as this Christ Child will grow into an adult who will be violently killed - not by marauders and thieves - but in a social setting and by socially approved ways of justice.

Lastly we had The Holy Innocents, or Childermas, on December 28, and we have the narrative of those children killed by King Herod's order to slaughter new  borns, lest they be the King born to supplant his rule. Here again we have Innocence, Abuse and killing, and the fact that these children are martyrs or witnesses to the faith: Good triumphs over Evil.


What we have construed as some mad dash to the mall, it seems that our ancestors wove together with statements, hints, nuances, suggestions, story and fable to create a quilt-like story of the cycle of the miracle of renewed life as children are born into the world, the harsh environment into which they are born, and the moral responsibilities of all society to ensure one thing above all other things! Above ideologies, above politics, above retail shopping, above fiscal cliffs and other self-created stumbling blocks!!!...........
....
One thing the hearers and viewers of the stories are supposed to do is to ensure that Good triumphs over Evil.

We have turned away from the story of the Feasts of Children and created a diorama of our diseased souls. The trampling of shoppers at the mall and the fights and shooting over toys reflects our endless wars and threats of wars.

So we add to the season of Children, not by a triumph of Good over Evil, not by actions which our progeny will remember for centuries as great feats portrayed in icons, but by a new Childermas, a new slaughter of the Innocents:  December 14.


--



I missed the Feast of the Sandy Hook Innocents or the Newtown Childermas. It was 2 days after my mother's passing. I pray for all now.




Monday, December 26, 2016

Continuous Transportation: Bridges

Un État de Transport Continu
inspiré par le film Transperceneige


Storsezandetsky Bridge, Norway


 --

Sunday, December 25, 2016

Christmas Morning Glory





My mother passed thirteen days ago. I have not felt very much like doing any of the usual Christmas things: no tree, no gift shopping, no decorations. However, my grandson and I went to a Hallmark store two days ago to get some Christmas cards, I to get one for my wife, he to get one for his girl.

I usually make my own, printing them up and writing a poem to put inside. This year the poetic imagination was pretty arid.
This morning, however, I woke up with a glimmer of an idea which was related to our having seen the film Glory again about 4 days ago.

The poem was a metaphor likening the army to the trials of life.
I'm glad it came to me. It has been a full year, a very full year...




Christmas Glory

At the far ridge of a hard and hungry hill:
the distant brass of war, the piping furtive peace;
beneath the reeds of windy trees we advance
the colours of our love!



Today is also my granddaughter's first Christmas.






--



note: the last line of the poem is a quote from Shakespeare, hence the British spelling of "colour".


Saturday, December 24, 2016

Beethoven For Christmas




My son (actually my son-in-law, but I do not like the long form of kinship names, so everyone is son, brother, aunt, etc. I only do the great-great-thingie for the ancestors.) was watching an old TV series  named Revolution. It started in 2012 and ended in 2014. It had two statuesque blonds who always had their hair backlighted in order to emphasize the Aryan blond notion. There was also a younger blond who apparently was a "blond goddess in training".
They always seemed to have haloes around their heads. The brunettes did not, but the dark haired ones I saw were (1) villainesses, or (2) of Asian descent.

Giancarlo Esposito was a member of the cast - he was the evil drug lord Gus in Breaking Bad - and there was a scene in which he approached his house on the qui vive, and Beethoven Seventh, second movement, was playing on the soundtrack.
This immediately led to the question of what other movies used L v B's Seventh for audio, and which one in particular that seemed I had viewed recently. I had a memory that was marked into the "4 month or less" file, but I could not recall it.

Turns out it was The King's Speech, the scene being the one where King George VI gave his "speech" addressing the nation upon the outbreak of war. Very poignant. Very much a better usage than Mr. Esposito gingerly approaching his house, ready to draw his gun.

Then I remember the Reverend Mr. Beebe's remarks on Beethoven and Ms. Honeychurch's piano rendition of Beethoven in Room With A View.

Then, since it was Christmas Eve, I listened the the Ninth - the Lied an die Freude; it is the season, after all.

Then I read a great article on an orthodox council of Jewish rabbis in Israel banning Christmas tree displays in hotels.

Israeli rabbis launch war on Christmas tree
Jerusalem hotels receive warning letter noting that Jewish religious law forbids Christmas trees and new year's parties.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/12/israeli-rabbis-launch-war-christmas-tree-161223074207821.html
Nazareth - As tens of thousands of Christian pilgrims converge on the Holy Land this week to celebrate the birth of Jesus, senior Israeli rabbis have announced a war on the Christmas tree.

In Jerusalem, the rabbinate has issued a letter warning dozens of hotels in the city that it is "forbidden" by Jewish religious law to erect a tree or stage new year's parties.

Many hotel owners have taken the warning to heart, fearful that the rabbis may carry out previous threats to damage their businesses by denying them certificates declaring their premises to be "kosher".

In the coastal city of Haifa, in northern Israel, the rabbi of Israel's premier technology university has taken a similarly strict line. Elad Dokow, the Technion's rabbi, ordered that Jewish students boycott their students' union, after it installed for the first time a modest Christmas tree.

He called the tree "idolatry", warning that it was a "pagan" symbol that violated the kosher status of the building, including its food hall.

About a fifth of the Technion's students belong to Israel's large Palestinian minority.

While most of Israel's Palestinian citizens are Muslim, there are some 130,000 Christians, most of them living in Galilee. More Palestinian Christians live under occupation in East Jerusalem, which Israel has annexed in violation of international law.

"This is not about freedom of worship," Dokow told the Technion's students. "This is the world's only Jewish state. And it has a role to be a 'light unto the nations' and not to uncritically embrace every idea."

 Tannenbaum stengstens verboten!


Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch...
It somebody in power wants to compel some schlub who has no power, why not?

And this was, indeed, a much more heartening and uplifting article than the one about Trump and Putin both being in favor of increasing nuclear arsenals. I knew when crazed Reagan and Gorbachev went down that nuclear disarmament road - paved with good intentions! - that it would need some clearer minds to deal with it.



 Nuclear Crazies: Gorbachev and Reagan


That photo of Gorbachev and Reagan.... I think the soundtrack should be a dark and ominous Beethoven's Seventh, so play it while looking at those two old guys whacked out on peace!




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Friday, December 23, 2016

The Westernization Of Comrade Stalin






I do not mean Comrade Stalin is becoming more Westernized. That is obvious. Rather, I mean the West is learning some tricks from  дед сталин, Grandpa Stalin.

Democracies? Where Are Democracies?
16:37 18.12.2016 (updated 16:41 18.12.2016)
Dmitry Babich
https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201612181048710977-where-are-democracies/
...In the 1930s, Stalin gave an unofficial order to locate and punish (sometimes by death) all people who had ever had contact abroad with Leo Trotsky or his son, Vladimir Sedov, after their exile from the USSR in 1929. The mere instance of a talk, let alone a dinner, with Leo or Vladimir was seen as a "license to execution."

Nobody Expects the White House Inquisition! WH Claims Trump Aides Bankrolled by Kremlin
So, when I read articles in The Washington Post denouncing Michael Flynn for having attended a gala dinner with Putin in 2015, you can understand the historical parallels. And when senator Marco Rubio of Florida tweeted about Tillerson that "being a 'friend of Vladimir' is not an attribute I am hoping for a secretary of state," how is that different from the prohibition on unsanctioned encounters with foreigners the one the Soviet Union had for many years?

History seems to have come full circle. The dark pages of the USSR's past reveal themselves to be a lesson even more useful to modern Westerners than to modern Russians.
 --

Continuous Transportation: Animal Drawn

Un État de Transport Continu
inspiré par le film Transperceneige




photo: AskYakutia

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Thursday, December 22, 2016

Continuous Transportation: Air

Un État de Transport Continu
inspiré par le film Transperceneige







--

In The Future, We Shall All Be Brian Williams!




There was a tempest about a year and a half ago about Brian Williams, NBC's news anchorman on the NBC Evening News, having made statements about his time in a war zone that were not exactly correct. Eventually Brian Williams lost his job, NBC apparently thinking that his credibility had been compromised and no one would take him seriously... even when he was reading scripts for the TV cameras.

During this time, two other individuals' stories about reports from war zones or riot zones came up: that of Bill O'Reilly of Fox and that of Hillary Clinton. Both had related stories that seemed to be at variance with what had actually been possible in the place and time they were at.



I may be mistaken, but no one seemed to bring up PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome; not even merely how people react after traumatic stress, and personally I think being in a helicopter 2 miles away from where people are shooting rockets at other helicopters, or getting off an airplane and hearing automatic gun fire nearby, or being in a hotel in a foreign city in which a large riot is occurring, to be my definition of traumatic stress.

We are indifferent to how stress affects memory, yet we have mightily striven to change our world into a mill of stress where we are ground between the upper and nether millstones of trauma. So we shall not even recognize our own distress for what it is.
In case you don't know, traumatic stress was a major component in the fall of Ancient Rome. It froze people into social norms that were prisons, it gelled their thoughts into mediocre repetitions of the past, it enslaved them to a state religion that had betrayed its Galilean roots.

We have ignored the stress of people who had the dirty end of the stick during the financial crisis and thereafter, we have ignored the stress of people affected by the Iraq War, we have ignored the stress on those affected by Libya, Syria, and all the other little places we love to destabilize.



Liberals now as well as conservatives are buying guns in record numbers. Our president soon-to-be seems to be on the verge of declaring a Crusade to avenge Berlin's truck terror.  And the Wall Street Journal and the Rupert Murdochs of the world want more war, more instability, and more suffering to fight against the disorder caused by stress; they prescribe more trauma to cure trauma!

Soon our Futures will be as corrupted by trauma as the past of our memories are!

--

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Berlin: Judgement Day




The Wall Street Journal had an opinion piece on the use of a truck in a terrorist attack in Berlin:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-terrorist-truck-in-berlin-1482277893
 ... Europe continues to reap the bitter fruit of America’s unwillingness to lead a full-blown war against Islamic State in its Syrian and Iraqi heartland, and of Europe’s inability to provide its own leadership in the Obama Administration’s vacuum. The cost of that failure will be tragically measured this year in empty chairs at Christmas.

Sorry, Wall Street Journal.  What you are seeing is the karma, the pay-back for your gruesome support of the illegal war in Iraq. These attacks are the fruit of your own perfidy, your own lack of moral spine.
And you have learned nothing, proving that what goes around certain minds comes around again and again and again.

Is it the merest coincidence that the truck looks like the one driven by the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day? The one that was driven down into the ditch at the intersection of Plummer Street and Hayvenhurst Avenue:



--

Toxicology

I do not think I have ever seen the results of the autopsies that were inevitably done on terrorists who were killed during their attacks. I think it would be interesting to see what drugs were in the terrorists' bodies.
Why no toxicology reports? What reason is there for supressing that information?

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Sunday, December 18, 2016

Kind Hegel







Preface to the Phenomenology of Mind


Φ 40. Dogmatism as a way of thinking, whether in ordinary knowledge or in the study of philosophy, is nothing else but the view that truth consists in a proposition, which is a fixed and final result, or again which is directly known. To questions like, “When was Caesar born?”. “How many feet make a furlong?”, etc., a straight answer ought to be given; just as it is absolutely true that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides of a right-angled triangle. But the nature of a so-called truth of that sort is different from the nature of philosophical truth.


I think Hegel would agree that philosophical truth is a manner of dealing with the Coherence of the underlying philosophy.

Maybe not. 

--

Continuous Transportation: Boats

Un État de Transport Continu
inspiré par le film Transperceneige




Ted Kincaid, Stormy Sea 807, 2012, digital photograph on Hahnemühle photo rag pearl, 22x30"



--

Bright And Dark Gods



                            
 Hieronymus Bosch, A Garden Of Earthly Delights



There are bright gods as well as dark gods. There are good powers in the world as well as bad powers. There are good Tuatha and bad Tuatha (tu-e'-he).
So far I have only been talking about the dark ones, the evil powers in the world.

I have talked about the dark gods of weapons and war and the dark gods of drugs.

Yet there is a complementarity.

I went to a documentary on Hieronymus Bosch yesterday, A Garden of Earthly Delights. One of the people in the documentary spoke of the complementarity of symbols for the medieval mind, where Eve may be Mother and also temptress, gold may be pure richness or greed, and so on.

So also the powers of the world, the Tuatha, may be good or bad. The powers of drugs may enslave and kill or they may liberate. This has been amply demonstrated for us. Weapons may kill and maim, or they may protect and save us. We live in a time of both: our country is the world's biggest exporter of weapons, our country has frequent gun incidents from solitary victims to mass shootings, and we have developed a 2nd Amendment politico-religious dogmatism that borders on the fanaticism of the Skoptsy of tsarist Russia, yet we rely on weapons to protect us, too.

The Powers of the world do not exist on their own. The Powers emerge as intelligent life experience its environment. And these powers are real. They are not merely impressions of the environment.
When one hears the thunder, the ear-splitting impression and fear have an effect, but they do not causally lead to some belief in a god Thor, for example.
The beautiful sunrise does not prove the existence of any divinity, nor form a good base for belief.
But the interplay of intelligence and the world give rise to emergence, and these emergent properties are far more than the simple causes which we are able to describe. (For example, Thor, the Norse god of thunder, is more than the sum of the parts about which we may read about him.)

Mankind does not sum up its amazements and fears and surprises and say, "Gadfrey! Some sort of deity or deities must exist!"

An example of such might be the following:

Charon, the ferryman of the Dead, Escorting Eurydice to Hades with Offering of Hops


where the awe and fear of the Flood give rise to an new Orpheus legend!

photo: https://no-pc.blogspot.com/


The Hieronymus Bosch documentary made me think about this.
Bosch is a good example, for his paintings are so non-representational that they are a surrogate for a brand-new environment for the mind.

Afterwards I asked my fellows if they found the documentary "coherent".
That was a disaster, because they all acted as if I had sprung a pop quiz on them, and I had to explain myself, the question, and any real conversation disappeared.

However, no matter how non-representational Bosch's painting is, it is indeed coherent.

It is a Coherence.

Most good paintings are a Coherence. Most good stories are a Coherence.
Most films are a Coherence. They are more than the sum of their parts, and the parts form a small solar system of Rutherford's atomic structure wherein the planet-electron-parts swirl about each other pulled and flung by the "symbolic gravity" of a coherence. 
In fact, your can go in and edit films in a number of ways - even doing what is called "chaos editing" - yet... yet the films mostly remain "coherent".
The "Director's Cut" may have radical additions and subtractions, but it is still coherent, even though the story itself and the motivations of some characters may have changed.

Coherence emerges from a film. It requires the film and a viewer. The phenomenology of viewer and film is a description of the rise of a Coherence.

Yet, even though Coherence is emergent, we treat it as if it were the exactly same type of phenomenon as the film, viewer, and viewing that gave rise to it. We analyze Coherence as if we could take it all apart, talk about film techniques, discuss story-telling and writing, arguing about actors, etc.

Yet none of these things will affect Coherence, since Coherence is by definition greater than the sum of its parts.


We do not really know how to deal with truly Emergent Phenomena.
We try to reduce them back to the interplay from which they arose.

It does not seem to work

In the Bosch documentary, there was a singer who finally stopped talking and began to sing. Renee Fleming, the opera singer was also in the film, and she eventually sang also. There were some Downs Syndrome artists who had paintings of the painting, their own impressions.

These artists tried to create their own coherence from looking at a Coherence.
Most other people just chattered on, some were word-bound professionals, others were not, but every one sought to break it all down to language.


Thus, when I speak of the Tuatha, the Powers of the World, I am talking of emergent phenomena, things that emerge from the interplay of intelligent beings with their environment.
As emergent phenomena, we are usually at a loss as to how to deal with them, so we end up treating divine visions as prophesies of the end of the world, or some other scenario we have learned. When we are face to face with saintliness, we look for simpering faces and haloes! When we sense something we don't like, we yell, "Hitler!"

We cannot deal with emergent phenomena because we always want to break them back down.

--


Saturday, December 17, 2016

The Way We Speak

note: I came across an old post and it struck me that is describes a game that captures modern ways of talking in public, on TV, on the radio, and - most importantly - it sounds like the speech of politicians and people who run for president.

This game is the second game described - not the first game which I thought was a terrific hoot, but no one seemed to understand! - and involves finding posts with comment sections and just mixing up the two sets of comments.
----------------------------------



Truth or Comment
published 05/30/2015















The Last Of The Mohicans 
Russel Means and Wes Studi


New game.
Brilliant. Just made it up.

I hope it does better than my last one, which was based on guessing an individual and a movie, all based upon (1) a vague description of the individual and a (2) correlated something from a movie which had a connection, no matter how tenuous, to the individual.
 I do not think I even got so far as to have a name for it.

For example, I had a friend who did contract work in Kentucky for a while, so the clue was "guy who worked in Ken-tuck-eee".

Now all the syllables in "Ken-tuck-eee" had the same flat accent on them, and if we were really doing well, it would be delivered in the voice of Daniel Day Lewis. Then it is obvious that the film is The Last Of The Mohicans. (Many of the native American languages do not have the same type of accentuation that we may be used to.)
Assuming we guessed the guy who did the contract work, we got everything at that point.

The only problem was I tried this game out on the guy who himself did the contract work in Ken-tuck-eee, and who had seen the film The Last Of The Mohicans, and he drew a total blank. I mean, he did not have a clue.
I mean, he said he did not know anyone who did any work in Kentucky for a week, then came home for the weekend, then returned Mondays. Since this is what he himself had done, it was perplexing. I think the movie section frightened him.

I don't know exactly what his mental processes were, but apparently they were something like:

"These are not the way of the Huron. Magwa does not understand this nonsense."


**

This new game is much simpler.

Truth or Comment?

RULES
Just open up two or three different stories in newsie sites that let the readers comment.
Then take the comments and mix them up.

1)CNBC
West Coast drought: Why California water is so cheap
Jane Wells Thursday, 28 May 2015 | 11:29 AM ET
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102714268


2)CNBC
When it can be illegal to withdraw your own money
Zack Guzman 19 Hours Ago
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102717680


Thus, we have drought, water, rivers, blah-blah-blah, and money, banks, government, IRS, FBI, yadda-yadda-yadda...


This results in

Comments:
a) I seldom use my credit card unless I am buying something online or large like appliances, furnace, air conditioner. I usually pull out a $1000 to $5000 at the beginning of the month depending on what I intend to spend money on that month. Based on this article looks like I am going to have to keep records of how I spend every dime.
b)  Start by drinking your own pee..
c)  That's what your tax forms are for...

d)  bad idea.. pee is full of toxins that your body is excreting. urea is one. now if you had access to a still you could probably distill your pee and extract pure water from it....

e)  This is not freedom. It is close monitoring by a government who wants to know who you call, email, text, and how much money you have and where you spend it.
This is slavery, but the slaves don't know they are slaves.

f)  Hillbillies have a leg up on the competition....

The only problem with this game is that it begins to sound strangely like cable TV and radio talk shows.
Instead of being some sort of "Mad-libs" craziness, it reminds us of our TV shows and Government officials.

Scarey.

We weren't going for scarey, but it'll work.


You see? It is just like what passes for civil discourse in Oceania and Airstrip One.
--

Continuous Transportation: Walking

Un État de Transport Continu
inspiré par le film Transperceneige




Un Promeneur Solitaire sur le point de rêver de quelque chose...  n'importe quoi



photo: Karolina Trapp

A Lone Walker fixing to dream about something whatever... 
referring to Rousseau's book.
--

Falsies




The Syrian-Sarin ‘False Flag’ Lesson
December 11, 2016

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/12/11/the-syrian-sarin-false-flag-lesson/

Exclusive: Amid Official Washington’s desire to censor non-official news on the Internet, it’s worth remembering how the lack of mainstream skepticism almost led the U.S. into a war on Syria, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

By Ray McGovern
A review of events leading to the very edge of full-blown U.S. shock-and-awe on Syria three years ago provides a case study with important lessons for new policymakers as they begin to arrive in Washington.

It is high time to expose the whys and wherefores of the almost-successful attempt to mousetrap President Barack Obama into an open attack on Syria three years ago. Little-known and still less appreciated is the last-minute intervention of Russian President Vladimir Putin as deus ex machina rescuing Obama from the corner into which he had let himself be painted.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia welcomed President Barack Obama to the G20 Summit at Konstantinovsky Palace in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Sept. 5, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

President Vladimir Putin of Russia welcomed President Barack Obama to the G20 Summit at Konstantinovsky Palace in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Sept. 5, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Accumulating evidence offers persuasive proof that Syrian rebels supported by Turkish intelligence – not Syrian Army troops – bear responsibility for the infamous sarin nerve-gas attack killing hundreds of people on Aug. 21, 2013 in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. The incident bears all the earmarks of a false-flag attack.

But U.S. and other “rebel-friendly” media outlets wasted no time in offering “compelling” evidence from “social media” – which Secretary of State John Kerry described as an “extraordinary tool” – to place the onus on the Syrian government...

I believe we are referring to that red line which should not be crossed, yet it was crossed by our own allies, who tried to pin it on the Syrian government. It is a good story and one that should be read in this era of Fake News and Fake Facts and general fakery.

When we look at Aleppo, remember!  Only Death and Birth are real. Everything else is Politics.


note: we used to refer to padded bras as "falsies", but times change and fake news, false flags, and "bad" intel deserve the name.
--

WTR !!??




Washington (CNN)President Barack Obama on Thursday vowed retaliatory action against Russia for its meddling in the US presidential election.
"I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections that we need to take action and we will at a time and place of our own choosing," Obama told National Public Radio.

Describing potential countermeasures by the US, the President said "some of it may be explicit and publicized; some of it may not be."

It isn't fair that Russia should bully the US. The US is relatively new to the Internet and digital tech and this is really just Russia being a cyber-bully. Shame !

WTR !?
What The Rus!?

--

Friday, December 16, 2016

Continuous Transportation: Aero-Trollies

Un État de Transport Continu
inspiré par le film Transperceneige



Victorian Steampunk Transportation Terminal for Aero-Trollies




Close-up



Night View



http://www.yurdigital.com/catalog/10249-victorian-steampunk-transportation-terminal

--










The Power Of Santa!




The feeling of the season of Christmas emerges from the array of actions we all engage in during that time. Santa Claus and Grandfather Frost (Ded Moroz) and all the other symbols of the season emerge into complex creations of humanity.

I think the Christmas season is a good study of Powers in the world, the Tuatha.
I think it is a good study how what we call fiction becomes what we call fact. Of course, then we turn around and deny the complex emotions which stir us all, especially children, because we love what we think are "facts" more than we ever could love "love".

I am not going to say anymore about it now. I shall let you think about it: the Christmas and New Year season, the Twelve Days, as a coherence, a story which we create and then interact with, giving birth to even more story, emotion, and activity.



--

The 2 Rs




I am aware that my posts seem Repetitive.
I use this blog as a notebook. I call it my   ذكرى
My "thikra", my memory.

What you call repetitive, I call Refinement.
I work out my ideas here.

--

What Good Is The UN? And The Title Of This Blog

My wife says the question the use of the UN was posed on the television yesterday morning by some or all sitting around an oval table on The Morning Joe on MSNBC.


The hash and re-hash of it was what good is the UN?.. yadda-yadda-yadda. Kids are being killed in Aleppo, yadda-yadda-yadda. The UN doesn't even lift a finger, yadda-yadda-yadda.

I responded that the UN can do nothing that the permanent members of the Security Council do not want to happen. The US and Russia are not in agreement about Syria, so do not expect the UN to do anything. If you wish to assign blame, the clear targets are the US and Russia.

Further, if you remember Iraq, the US entirely ignored the UN.
The USA went to war, ignoring any protest from the member states of the UN, and arrogantly dismissing the findings of the UN weapons inspectors.
Hans Blix and the UN weapons inspectors found no evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). This finding was totally ignored by the Bush Administration, which relied upon fake news and false intelligence and outright lies.

Iraq.
Mistakes were made. Kids were killed. Lots of bad things happened. Were they asking then why the UN did not DO anything?

The bill for Iraq is coming due.
I remember my astonishment that some dark Power was able to get the entire population of the USA to march lockstep to that dubious battle. That is when I began to understand the Powers of the world, what I now call the Tuatha - the powers which not divine, unseen, unsubstantiated by modern rationality, yet which RULE the hearts of mankind... no matter what the UN may say, no matter what our consciences may say.... no matter what God may say.
The dark force controlled us.
Some people call it mob mentality and so did I for the longest time, until I saw that our surrender to the Mob was a vast and intense sacrifice and scarification of our indivduality which went far beyond following the crowd.



 Hans Blix, Head of the UN Iraq Weapons Inspection Team


I remember wrestling over the question of WMDs after the UN weapons team had turned in its report and the US was having nothing of it. I was truly upset by what was going on. I finally decided to pray on the matter.
I fell asleep soon in front of my computer. I recall that I awoke looking at an Excel spreadsheet of something.
At that point I knew that there were absolutely no weapons of mass destruction present in Iraq.

I did not like this one bit. There was a bit too much of Prayer and the Divine about it. I do not like putting God "to the test", as it were, for if there were to be found even some smallish WMDs, sort of like "appetizers for Armageddon" or some tantalizing "amuse-gueules"   (mon frère dit "amuse-bouche"... but I prefer more ancient and less polished expression)   for the Eve of Destruction, then my sudden insight and intuition - message from above, as it were - would be nothing but my own mental palaver.

And my intense feelings of the divine - like so many prophets who have foretold the end of the world, for example, and had the whole thing NOT blow up in their embarrassed faces  - would be the musings of an emotional dunce.

Of course, when it was proven true, it was a bit scary, too.

Anyway, that's why this blog has the title it does. I was so moved by the events of 2001 up to Iraq - and beyond - that I felt the earth was like the waters and I felt divinity mutely moving upon the face of the earth.
I thought it best to share with my daughter.

--


Continuous Transportation: Castles

Un État de Transport Continu
inspiré par le film Transperceneige




Howl's Moving Castle



From the Hayao Miyazaki film Howl's Moving Castle, one of my favorite films.

I wonder how many more examples I shall find of this genre of transport?

Thursday, December 15, 2016

Mom

Barton's Bonbonniere, Brighton Beach Avenue, Brooklyn

source: shorpy.com 


Bright city lights remind me of Christmas and Hanukkah when I was very young. I remember baking cookies and sweets with my mother. We had a cookie press with an array of different plates to create different forms upon the cookie baking sheet.

My mother passed away on December 12, 2016.

Bright lights and December remind me of her. That was before the city went dark and the great department stores closed; that was when immense toylands downtown beckoned everyone to come and be amazed.

The photograph above is dated March 10, 1952.
If you could see the detail (original at  http://www.shorpy.com/node/21457?size=_original#caption)  you would see a sign for  "Passover confections" and another for "gay Purim gifts".  In 1952, Purim started on the 14th Adar or March 11, and Passover - or Pesach - started on 15th Nisan, or April 10th.

Barton's Bonbonniere stood on the verge of the whole Megillah!
We are all on the edge of infinity.
When my Aunt Ann passed some years ago, I discovered that although I was sad, I did not feel as if she had passed forever from my life. Ever since, I do not feel my loved ones are irretrievably gone. I am saddened by my mother's death, but I do not feel the link has broken...

The day before she passed, my wife and I were visiting and I said the rosary with my mother, holding onto her arm, patting her arm, feeling the human skin between us... I suppose like when I was helpless and a babe...
Anyway, at about the third decade I could not remember what Glorious Mystery was applicable (I could never remember the Mysteries of the rosary. I never really tried to). I talked about resurrection.

Matthew 27 says that at the third hour when Jesus died on Good Friday:
51  Then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split, 52  and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; 53  and coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many.
So many rose from the dead. And not on the day of the Resurrection, but three days before. Of course, there was also Lazarus being restored to life even earlier than this.

I said that Resurrection is not focused on one point, but spreads widely in space and spreads widely in time. This is what Matthew 27 indicates. I said I believe that Resurrection already began when she was born. Birth and Death are conjoined in the act of Resurrection.
I do not believe in the Resurrection; I expect it minute to minute.

"Let's meditate on that mystery," I said.

--

Louis Malle And The Banality Of Incest

 Ave Ninchi as Augusta Serving Le Soufflé au Coeur!


I finished watching Le Souffe au Coeur (Murmur of the Heart) recently. I have never watched it in its entirety before. The beginning was good, the ending atrocious.

I had recorded it and I immediately erased it and bade it good riddance.

There is no point to anything in the last hour. We are teased along as to "Will they? Won't they?" ("They" being mom and son)  That's about all. The tension is totally ours; Malle does nothing except film interminable sequences of nothing-much-happening-at-all.

And it all ends up like a Tarzan movie when Cheetah the chimpanzee vaults into the scene and everyone laughs a lot. Literally. The family sits around laughing. And they do this for an uncomfortably long time.

Was more like a fallen Soufflé...

--

Powers In The World: Tuatha

 Hagia Pharmaka  -  Holy Drugs


I wrote a post about Powers in the world in which I sort of compared Drugs to ancient dark deities. I think that everyone of the 8 people who read it thought it was a metaphor, as if I were saying that drugs are like dark gods.

http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-powers-of-world-hagia-pharmaka.html

No-o-o...
It was not really a metaphor.
What I meant was that the same psychology and physical processes that led humanity at other times and at other places to conceive of a pantheon of gods were actively at work in the present day cobbling together a pastiche of gods and goddish things that go bump in the night.
Really.
I mean it literally.

I was going to use the name Lwa to refer to them, but the Haitian people already have a very good usage and claim on it, and I did not think it right to steal even that divine nomenclature from them.
So I decided to use the ancient Irish Tuatha, literally "gods", and which is pronounced pretty much like "Tu-e'-he" or "Tyu-e'-he".

 Riders of the Sidhe by John Duncan.  A depiction of the 
Tuatha De Danaan  the Divine Beings of the Goddess Danu
Wikipedia

This whole business of the Tuatha (Tu-e-he) within our modern world which prides itself on knowing the distinction between fact and fiction as well as that between Church and State came to me in a bloody hurry one morning - sort of boisterously and staggeringly like a noisy reveler coming home in the early morn - when I was reading the news at 5:00 AM during one of those unpleasant periods when there was a mass shooting every day.

The news article said that the US House of Representatives began their day with a moment of silence as an observance for those slain the day before.
There were a lot of these moments of silence. If they had an individual moment for each shooting victim they US House may not get any work done.

It was very unclear who were the objects of the moment's prayer: did they pray for the dead? did they pray to the gods of death who welcomed the dead into their domain?
It was suddenly very unclear, for these are the legislators who are building the Weapon Society and extending it through such stratagems as "Stand Your Ground" laws - a law of which type led to Treyvon Martin's death in Florida.

I thought they just might be praying to the god of death... even though I'm sure most of them were totally unaware that their prayers were to accompany the sacrificial victims to the underworld. 


Mayan Lords of Xibalba Underworld

In the center is the Death god. On the left is the Weapons god, making implements of violence upon his forge. On the right is the god of Force and Compulsion.

We who thought to have drained the divinity from the world are now feeling it come back in new forms to destroy!

Lastly, these Tuatha correspond to the Saints and the intercession of the Saints in the Roman Catholic Church's view. The Tuatha are not merely anthropomorphized entities; they are also acts and process. For example, in Islam the Sunni lords of Saudi Arabia denounced any observance of the Prophet's Birthday, whereas the Shi'a - and many Sunni Muslims - will offer respect. But the purists of Arabia believe all respect is due to God alone.
Following this creed, they have destroyed the ancient cemetery of Baqi'a years ago, wherein the first Muslims were buried.

In monotheistic cultures - such as Islam and this Judaeo-Christian one - there in one God.
This Holy emerges from personal human history.

Then there is often an intermediary layers of Saints, Powers, intercessions, images, goals of holy pilgrimage, etc. which form the Tuatha. In this layer of Tuatha lie the superstitions, the egoistic prayers, the Pascal wagers, the failed and re-failed prophecies of end of the world, etc.
These phenomena emerge as the individual opens themself to the world and the world opens itself to the individual.

Then there is the world itself at the bottom layer, and forms the environment for intelligent life.


I believe that the modern Western world tried to throw the Tuatha out the front door, only to discover they have re-entered through the window. Any thinking person knows that there are powers in the relationship between intelligence and the world.

--