[Written in response to all the crap like this in the media, in reaction to interviews like this, these days.]
On the hierarchy of needs sexual pleasure falls well behind prayer, love, friendship, clean air, good food, clean water, sleep, good sanitation, shelter, medical care and education. The West's current obsession with it is merely a sign of its decadence and spiritual bankruptcy. The pope is talking to us like babies- yes, you can masturbate and we will still love you. God still loves you when you wack off into someone's mouth or anus. That this is taken as big news here is hilarious.
I mean, the operative question here is - now and forever shall be - not whether God and his Church loves each of us, it's whether or not we love God and his Church. It's whether or not we love the Truth (who is a person) and one another..
The pope is a Jesuit and a Catholic priest. The things he has been saying about sodomy are not new. It's called moral casuistry, a.k.a. Catholic moral theology. See Molina, Escobar and Suarez; John the Baptist, John Vianney and Padre Pio. See in the Bible where it says "judge not lest you be judged" and "take the beam out of your own eye before you condemn your brother for the speck in his" and then again "love your enemy" and then "he loved me while I was still in sin, I, the foremost of sinners."
Love the sinner, not the sin. Forgive, and you shall be forgiven. Justice (being merely the consummation of mercy) is mine, says the LORD.
The pope cannot and will not declare sodomy sex, because it is not sex. That's just biological fact. And it isn't just those with same sex attraction who commit it. He cannot tell us the earth is the center of the universe in any other sense than it happens to be the center of our universe. The Roman inquisition once got itself balled up on that point, hewing incorrectly to Aristotelean and Ptolemaic scientific consensus, and the world has never let us forget it, has it?
So, this pope is saying nothing new. He isn't going to endorse the sexual revolution by abandoning Catholic anthropology. And sin is still sin - love of money, hatred of the immigrant amongst us, denial the worker of his just wage, the murder of innocents and (yes) sodomy are still - and shall forever be - sins that cry to heaven for vengeance. These are also sins that we, the people of the de-Christianizing West, commit with abandon.
The pope is waiting for us to confess, reminding many of us who call ourselves Christian that pride, perjury, wrath, envy, gluttony, sloth, avarice, murder, *as well as* hatred of the poor and sinful, are just as sinful as lust & sexual decadence is. If not more so..
---
Showing posts with label gnosticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gnosticism. Show all posts
Friday, September 20, 2013
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
"Everything in the World Can & Will Be Made Better, the Only Question is by Whom & How.."
Side by Side, review. A- , 4/5 *, 95% Tomato Meter.
This documentary is an interesting exploration of the current revolution in film making away from celluloid (photo chemical exposure) toward digital exposure. It treats the evolution of the technologies, their respective strengths and flaws, and includes interviews with many directors and other people involved in film making, discussing the trend.
"Filmaking" has always been a somewhat insubstantial exercise, the "projection" of light through a film of chemical gauze; casting light, color and shadow on a blank wall. The one substantial aspect of the experience has until now been the film itself, the alchemaic artefact that gave film it's material reality, gave it its "there, there."
Now, the industry is abandoning film for algorithmic traces on a silicon chip, fleeting ever further into insubstantiality, into ephemeral abstraction. There is more freedom to create greater fantasy there, they say. This is what progress is, in its lack of essence: slipping material bonds, consummating consciousness in a triumphant manipulation of and victory over matter, ultimately ascending to the point that we finally escape the constraints of matter altogether. Intellect and imagination slip their material bonds, and achieve gnostic transcendence.
So it is somehow oddly appropriate that Keanu Reeves - the star of Bill & Ted's Excellent Time Traveling Adventure (for isn't time travel one of the most fundamental subversions of this material space time continuum in which we are enmeshed?) and the Matrix Trilogy (one of perhaps the purest gnostic fantasies that Hollywood has yet graced us with) - is the auteur of this interesting documentary. Fantasy land is becoming even more fantastic, and even less substantial than ever before. And Ted is there to report back to us upon progress's inexorable march.
Until the 19th Century humanity kept its artistic and intellectual record on substantial matter such as paper, plaster, animal skin and canvas. Camera film is is different from these in that light is not reflected off it, but rather through it. It is also more delicate than most of these more ancient media, and it poses more difficult challenges to archivists who seek to preserve it. In 1902 there was an international congress of film makers, who in the spirit of the French Revolution and the positivist tradition, came together to set an international standard for film, guaranteeing that film making and projecting technology would be universal and standardized, ensuring that all film shot from then until now would all be accessible using the same tools, the same industrial paradigms. 35 mm film is always 35 mm film, and can be fed into any projector manufactured to that standard in the last century.
In the 1970's and 80's however, video tape and computer imaging was developed. In the rush of technological development there has been much that has been produced that no longer can be viewed, because in that short rush of evolutionary change we now no longer have the tools to access some of the things created only ten to thirty years ago. Imagine trying to access information stored on a floppy disc, an 8 track or VHS tape. Not so easy, these days. Such technology is all too quickly obsolete and the information recorded with it now inaccessible.
Because now rather than using film, or electromagnetic tape, or even paper, most imagery and text is being recorded on silicon chips, hard drives. What is the nature of this new medium? What are its weaknesses, its strengths? In this film Sad Keanu
has found his voice, and while he gives quite a bit of time to advocates of film and critics of the dawning digital age, it's ultimately pretty clear that Keanu is proselytizing for the new order. It's hard not to be impressed by the power of the new technology.. Still, nagging questions linger.
For while it is true that the rush of technological advance has given us in some ways greater freedom - we can now watch movies on four inch screens that we carry in out pockets - it may be also true that we could be simultaneously eradicating our relationship with the past. The great paper libraries, archives and museums that used to be the main way we accessed knowledge and art - which meant interacting with the past, the authors and artists who created that record - are now largely obsolete, in that the record has been impixelated, recorded in magnetic patterns of 1's and 0's on an electric grid. It is both more immediate and manipulatable, while verging utterly insubstantial.
Is this new network more resilient than thousands of paper libraries - which while they can be burnt, can also be turned into samzidat? Is this new modality easier to censor and track? Is knowledge and art now simply more accessible, or is it also more easily repressed, tracked and eradicated? Is this brave new world an electronic tyranny like that of Tron, or an anarchic paradise like that in Avatar? Or something else, utterly different or something in between?
I seems we are about to find out.
A few closing thoughts concerning Keanu: I remember when I used to dismiss guys like him (or Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, Leonardo DiCaprio, etc.) as being somehow unserious. Feminists complain about how women's voices and pov's tend to get discounted. Try being a very pretty boy. That seems to me an even harder row to hoe, in terms of being taken seriously, somehow. Handsome man is not the same as pretty boy - most of them get discounted, sneered at. If there's a Tiger Beat spread of you out there,
where you've been "lucky" enough to tap the collective libido of teenaged girls, you are finished. It's far, far worse than being a Playboy centerfold. No adult - male or female - is ever likely going to take you truly seriously again. Pity Justin Beeber and the Jonas Brothers, because when they hit their late twenties no one will ever pay attention to them again, and they won't know what to do about it. Expect to see them dishing to Dr. Drew on celebrity rehab in about a decade or so. That's how we treat our idols. Ours is a truly profane and irreligious society.
But wait.. Maybe not. Keanu is running counter the rule, here. Giving reviewers at venues such as the New York Times a reason to pay him respectful attention.. What is this? Perhaps beauty, character and intelligence are not mutually exclusive. As much as we ugly people may find it hard to accept, beautiful people may occasionally be serious and smart, too. Keanu has gone a proven it can be so, with this film.
Well done, Keanu. Bravo. Thanks for feeding my head. Now go do it again.
---
This documentary is an interesting exploration of the current revolution in film making away from celluloid (photo chemical exposure) toward digital exposure. It treats the evolution of the technologies, their respective strengths and flaws, and includes interviews with many directors and other people involved in film making, discussing the trend.
"Filmaking" has always been a somewhat insubstantial exercise, the "projection" of light through a film of chemical gauze; casting light, color and shadow on a blank wall. The one substantial aspect of the experience has until now been the film itself, the alchemaic artefact that gave film it's material reality, gave it its "there, there."
Now, the industry is abandoning film for algorithmic traces on a silicon chip, fleeting ever further into insubstantiality, into ephemeral abstraction. There is more freedom to create greater fantasy there, they say. This is what progress is, in its lack of essence: slipping material bonds, consummating consciousness in a triumphant manipulation of and victory over matter, ultimately ascending to the point that we finally escape the constraints of matter altogether. Intellect and imagination slip their material bonds, and achieve gnostic transcendence.
So it is somehow oddly appropriate that Keanu Reeves - the star of Bill & Ted's Excellent Time Traveling Adventure (for isn't time travel one of the most fundamental subversions of this material space time continuum in which we are enmeshed?) and the Matrix Trilogy (one of perhaps the purest gnostic fantasies that Hollywood has yet graced us with) - is the auteur of this interesting documentary. Fantasy land is becoming even more fantastic, and even less substantial than ever before. And Ted is there to report back to us upon progress's inexorable march.
Until the 19th Century humanity kept its artistic and intellectual record on substantial matter such as paper, plaster, animal skin and canvas. Camera film is is different from these in that light is not reflected off it, but rather through it. It is also more delicate than most of these more ancient media, and it poses more difficult challenges to archivists who seek to preserve it. In 1902 there was an international congress of film makers, who in the spirit of the French Revolution and the positivist tradition, came together to set an international standard for film, guaranteeing that film making and projecting technology would be universal and standardized, ensuring that all film shot from then until now would all be accessible using the same tools, the same industrial paradigms. 35 mm film is always 35 mm film, and can be fed into any projector manufactured to that standard in the last century.
In the 1970's and 80's however, video tape and computer imaging was developed. In the rush of technological development there has been much that has been produced that no longer can be viewed, because in that short rush of evolutionary change we now no longer have the tools to access some of the things created only ten to thirty years ago. Imagine trying to access information stored on a floppy disc, an 8 track or VHS tape. Not so easy, these days. Such technology is all too quickly obsolete and the information recorded with it now inaccessible.
Because now rather than using film, or electromagnetic tape, or even paper, most imagery and text is being recorded on silicon chips, hard drives. What is the nature of this new medium? What are its weaknesses, its strengths? In this film Sad Keanu
has found his voice, and while he gives quite a bit of time to advocates of film and critics of the dawning digital age, it's ultimately pretty clear that Keanu is proselytizing for the new order. It's hard not to be impressed by the power of the new technology.. Still, nagging questions linger.
For while it is true that the rush of technological advance has given us in some ways greater freedom - we can now watch movies on four inch screens that we carry in out pockets - it may be also true that we could be simultaneously eradicating our relationship with the past. The great paper libraries, archives and museums that used to be the main way we accessed knowledge and art - which meant interacting with the past, the authors and artists who created that record - are now largely obsolete, in that the record has been impixelated, recorded in magnetic patterns of 1's and 0's on an electric grid. It is both more immediate and manipulatable, while verging utterly insubstantial.
Is this new network more resilient than thousands of paper libraries - which while they can be burnt, can also be turned into samzidat? Is this new modality easier to censor and track? Is knowledge and art now simply more accessible, or is it also more easily repressed, tracked and eradicated? Is this brave new world an electronic tyranny like that of Tron, or an anarchic paradise like that in Avatar? Or something else, utterly different or something in between?
I seems we are about to find out.
A few closing thoughts concerning Keanu: I remember when I used to dismiss guys like him (or Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, Leonardo DiCaprio, etc.) as being somehow unserious. Feminists complain about how women's voices and pov's tend to get discounted. Try being a very pretty boy. That seems to me an even harder row to hoe, in terms of being taken seriously, somehow. Handsome man is not the same as pretty boy - most of them get discounted, sneered at. If there's a Tiger Beat spread of you out there,
where you've been "lucky" enough to tap the collective libido of teenaged girls, you are finished. It's far, far worse than being a Playboy centerfold. No adult - male or female - is ever likely going to take you truly seriously again. Pity Justin Beeber and the Jonas Brothers, because when they hit their late twenties no one will ever pay attention to them again, and they won't know what to do about it. Expect to see them dishing to Dr. Drew on celebrity rehab in about a decade or so. That's how we treat our idols. Ours is a truly profane and irreligious society.
But wait.. Maybe not. Keanu is running counter the rule, here. Giving reviewers at venues such as the New York Times a reason to pay him respectful attention.. What is this? Perhaps beauty, character and intelligence are not mutually exclusive. As much as we ugly people may find it hard to accept, beautiful people may occasionally be serious and smart, too. Keanu has gone a proven it can be so, with this film.
Well done, Keanu. Bravo. Thanks for feeding my head. Now go do it again.
---
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Martha, Mary, Magdelena..
I wrote a post last night that got partly swallowed by Blogsy, an ipad app I like, but that has its issues. I gave up re-writing because it was past midnight and I was meant to be up at 7 this morning to dive. When I got up this morning they told me that because I was the only one who'd booked diving, they were postponing 'til tomorrow.
I went out and walked about Santa Marta instead. The hostel is at the city center, just off the beach. There's a central square surrounded by a dozen banks, and a few casinos (and hardly anything else, scum collects) with a great equestrian statue of Simon Bolivar, the George Washington of South America, who died here at 47 in 1830.
There's a container port with one of those great hoist cranes to lift the containers off the boats on the waterfront, and a beach that verges into a breakwater.
The water seems relatively clean, and there were urchins diving and swimming all along the waterfront, looking for coins and seafood.
I was propositioned by this very talkative and friendly woman who wanted to give me a massage. Twenty five bucks, my choice of creams. Much more subtle come on than usual from the prostitutes down here, who usually are quite aggressive.. She left me the pretension that we could have been talking about shiatsu, which we in fact could have been, but I'm pretty sure weren't. I was grateful for this, because I can't stand aggressive whores. I listened to her, as she told me about her life and all about the coast about the city.
I left my camera in the room, so this evening after eating a forth time at the superb Mexican place that is owned by the hostel, I decided to go out and walk about getting pictures, including the two prior.
This time, I ran into a whole clutch of whores. Just as I was taking that picture of Bolivar, there. Four or five of them, a couple I think were transvestites. Now, to be honest, there's something venal about the Caribbean, that I dislike intensely. One of the reasons La Cieba, Honduras got so much on my nerves, and was so depressing was that you couldn't walk the waterfront in the evening without being harassed by streetwalkers. I've never noticed this type of aggressive pandering stateside. Granted, I never go where you'd probably encounter it. But the center of a city? Right next to city hall?
This is why I detest libertarianism. Like this crap is supposed to be legal? Leave me the f**K alone, please. Where are the cops? If you think prostitution should be legal, think about having our public spaces invaded like this. This type of thing makes me appreciate what it must be like for girls to be hit on and leered at. Not cool.
Still, there is in fact a certain nasty charm in being propositioned so blatantly. They're actually kind of funny, the things that they say, like "¡Que rrrr-ico!" (how yummy!) "¡Ay, papi!" - other stuff like that. Until they get down to groping (no respect for personal space, they try to feel you up) and flashing you (the girl - I think she's a girl - in the picture below actually has quite a nice ass, I know because she showed it to me several times) and asking to fellate you. I flatter myself, I think a few of them would have done it for free..
They wanted me to take photos of them, I obliged:
Yeah. So that's Santa Marta by night.
I then headed back to the hostel, which is quite happening. There's a bar upstairs where they blare the tunes until two-ish every night. Not so loud that it disturbs my sleep, so I don't mind. As I mentioned, there's a really, really good Mexican place in the same building, and the downstairs has a groovy swimming pool in the center courtyard, with a movie room where they have probably a few hundred films tevo'd and on constant rotation. The crowd is twenty-ish and international, but largely anglophone.
The hostel too, has an air of decadence about it. This picture is on the wall in the stairway to the bar area. It's pornographic and sacrilegious, so don't study this image too closely if you don't want to be offended:
That's just how we roll these days, eh. Penis jokes never get old, especially when they're blasphemous, right?
There's also a ram's skull on the wall of the barroom, which reminds me of this.
All of which leaves me ambivalent, in that while this town and hostel are once beautiful, they are also charged with a souspeçon of corruption. I've been of paranoid mind these past few years.. I've been getting over it lately, throwing myself more fully back into an emphatic life of prayer where I'm trying to avoid analyzing things and becoming judgmental (ergo prudentes sicut serpentes, et simplices sicut columbæ.. that in my case by grace alone, because I'm too much the fool to manage it by my own) and thereby jacking up my inner life with the idea that I understand anything or anyone, or that I am actually in control of anything or anyone beyond my own mind and heart, and even that is touch and go, most the time...
I went out and walked about Santa Marta instead. The hostel is at the city center, just off the beach. There's a central square surrounded by a dozen banks, and a few casinos (and hardly anything else, scum collects) with a great equestrian statue of Simon Bolivar, the George Washington of South America, who died here at 47 in 1830.
 |
| The Liberator |
There's a container port with one of those great hoist cranes to lift the containers off the boats on the waterfront, and a beach that verges into a breakwater.
 |
| Port lights at night |
The water seems relatively clean, and there were urchins diving and swimming all along the waterfront, looking for coins and seafood.
I was propositioned by this very talkative and friendly woman who wanted to give me a massage. Twenty five bucks, my choice of creams. Much more subtle come on than usual from the prostitutes down here, who usually are quite aggressive.. She left me the pretension that we could have been talking about shiatsu, which we in fact could have been, but I'm pretty sure weren't. I was grateful for this, because I can't stand aggressive whores. I listened to her, as she told me about her life and all about the coast about the city.
I left my camera in the room, so this evening after eating a forth time at the superb Mexican place that is owned by the hostel, I decided to go out and walk about getting pictures, including the two prior.
This is why I detest libertarianism. Like this crap is supposed to be legal? Leave me the f**K alone, please. Where are the cops? If you think prostitution should be legal, think about having our public spaces invaded like this. This type of thing makes me appreciate what it must be like for girls to be hit on and leered at. Not cool.
Still, there is in fact a certain nasty charm in being propositioned so blatantly. They're actually kind of funny, the things that they say, like "¡Que rrrr-ico!" (how yummy!) "¡Ay, papi!" - other stuff like that. Until they get down to groping (no respect for personal space, they try to feel you up) and flashing you (the girl - I think she's a girl - in the picture below actually has quite a nice ass, I know because she showed it to me several times) and asking to fellate you. I flatter myself, I think a few of them would have done it for free..
They wanted me to take photos of them, I obliged:
 |
| Que rico. |
Yeah. So that's Santa Marta by night.
I then headed back to the hostel, which is quite happening. There's a bar upstairs where they blare the tunes until two-ish every night. Not so loud that it disturbs my sleep, so I don't mind. As I mentioned, there's a really, really good Mexican place in the same building, and the downstairs has a groovy swimming pool in the center courtyard, with a movie room where they have probably a few hundred films tevo'd and on constant rotation. The crowd is twenty-ish and international, but largely anglophone.
The hostel too, has an air of decadence about it. This picture is on the wall in the stairway to the bar area. It's pornographic and sacrilegious, so don't study this image too closely if you don't want to be offended:
That's just how we roll these days, eh. Penis jokes never get old, especially when they're blasphemous, right?
 |
| Creepy. |
There's also a ram's skull on the wall of the barroom, which reminds me of this.
All of which leaves me ambivalent, in that while this town and hostel are once beautiful, they are also charged with a souspeçon of corruption. I've been of paranoid mind these past few years.. I've been getting over it lately, throwing myself more fully back into an emphatic life of prayer where I'm trying to avoid analyzing things and becoming judgmental (ergo prudentes sicut serpentes, et simplices sicut columbæ.. that in my case by grace alone, because I'm too much the fool to manage it by my own) and thereby jacking up my inner life with the idea that I understand anything or anyone, or that I am actually in control of anything or anyone beyond my own mind and heart, and even that is touch and go, most the time...
Anyhow, as I came back to catch some sleep before diving tommorow, I noticed that the hostel is right next door to this:
 |
| eis qui sine peccado.. |
Which made me smile. We're also right around the corner from another Paroquia de San Francisco here, as well. I took a couple crummy shots of the church, it's a humble little colonial structure, I like it quite a lot. I hope I can assist at mass there sometime before I leave here these next couple days..
 |
| He's always popping up, wherever I happen to go.. |
Tonight is the eve of our little brother's feast. Saint Francis, pray for us. I pray tonight especially for my little whores, may they come to no harm in the resurrection..
I think that's all I got for you guys tonight. Blessings on your heads. Sleep tight.
---
Oracion Simple
Senor, haz de mi un instremento de tu paz,
Que alla donde hay odio, yo pongo el amor.
Que alla donde hay ofensa, yo pongo el perdon.
Que alla donde hay discordia, yo pongo la union.
Que alla donde hay error, yo pongo la verdad.
Que alla donde hay duda, yo pongo la Fe.
Que alla donde hay desperacion, yo pongo la esperenza.
Que alla donde hay tiniebas, yo pongo luz.
Que alla donde hay tristessa, yo pongo alegria.
Oh Senor, que yo no busque tanto
Ser consolado, cuanto consolar.
Ser consolado, cuanto consolar.
Ser comprendido, cuanto comprendar.
Ser amado, cuanto amar.
Porque es dandose, como se recibe.
Es olvidanose de si mismo, como uno se encuentra a si mismo.
Es olvidanose de si mismo, como uno se encuentra a si mismo.
Es perdonando, como se es perdonado.
Es muriendo, como se resucita a la vida eterna.
Amen +
I think that's all I got for you guys tonight. Blessings on your heads. Sleep tight.
---
Sunday, May 6, 2012
La Cara Guatemalteca, Antigua Guatemala, the First Week of May, 2012
I couldn't choose between them. I like them too much not to post both. Maybe my two favorite of all the images I've taken here so far.
Note the delicious parody here of the all seeing eye. Magazines, third girl. Absolutely love it.
Take her gaze to heart..
I'd like to also point out that the older girl on the left is the same as the one in the picture I posted below on April 13th. Note too that she is wearing the very same green dress in both images. These kids often come by selling candy when I'm at my school being tutored in Spanish in the afternoon. I find the idigenous people here - they're apparently mostly K'iche' - to be fascinating, and beautiful. Inexplicably moving, actually..
---
Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala
------------
------------
Note the delicious parody here of the all seeing eye. Magazines, third girl. Absolutely love it.
Take her gaze to heart..
I'd like to also point out that the older girl on the left is the same as the one in the picture I posted below on April 13th. Note too that she is wearing the very same green dress in both images. These kids often come by selling candy when I'm at my school being tutored in Spanish in the afternoon. I find the idigenous people here - they're apparently mostly K'iche' - to be fascinating, and beautiful. Inexplicably moving, actually..
---
Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Further Thoughts on Humility & Knowledge
But let the Spirit of all lies with works of dazzling magic blind you. Then absolutely mine, I'll have and bind you.
- The Devil, Goethe's Faust
Gnosticism is the predominate heresy of our age. Gnosticism is belief in salvation by knowledge, belief in the (eventual) supremacy of the intellect over all. Essentially, belief in salvation through power. "Knowledge is power."
Gnosis is derived from the Greek for knowledge, just as science is derived from the Latin for the same. The conciet of the gnostic is that the spiritual (as with everything else) can be reduced to a science, that by understanding one can control things spiritual. Just as one can control the material, the physical through knowledge, one can also control the metaphysical by way of knowledge. Astrology births astronomy, alchemy births chemistry, both birth physics. Technology is as magic. We can be become like gods through knowledge. This is the Fall.
Christianity, in contrast is in this sense a practical agnosticism. We know nothing that can save us. Reality is ultimately mysterious, infinite when we are finite. We can never completely control it, which is to say never control reality's Creator, he who is the source of all that is. He is utterly ineffable, beyond all human power to control or even ultimately understand. The universe gives a hint of his transcendence, enough to inspire awe.
Thus just as we did not and cannot create ourselves, we cannot sustain or save ourselves. It is embrace of this abject need for the Other that saves. Salvation is love of him, and therefore love is the only thing we ultimately need. Again, salvation is through love and the humility and trust (faith) that love engenders. It is in our dependence, weakness, and ignorance that we are saved. It is not in pride, but humility that we are gathered in. "For God is love." Thanks be God forever.
Therefore, it is not knowledge as power that saves, but realtionship in the Divine Trinity, whose energies are grace born of love. And while love is animated by certain knowledge, understanding, it is not of the intellect. Rather, it is of the heart.
So it is then that the smallest shattered, diseased retard with a heart consumed with love is infinitely greater than the futile pride of all hell unbound.
My friend Dale is far greater than satan.
I.H.S.V.
A.M.D.G.
---
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Enola Gay, Are You Proud of Your Little Boy Today?
This is from Daniel Larison at Caelum & Terra, posted today. I quote it in full because I want to second everything he says there :
[ that post's address: http://caelumetterra.wordpress.com/2011/08/07/consequentialism-and-its-consequences/ ]
True, he ended with a call for disarmament, but that a man who personally knew innocent Catholics who were victims of atomic weaponry could not say that this act- the deliberate killing of tens of thousands of civilians- was simply wrong made it clear in a new way to me just how deep the infection of consequentialism runs in American Catholics, who of all people should know better.
Amen. Audrey Santo, pray for us.
Amen. Audrey Santo, pray for us.
---
Saturday, August 6, 2011
The Triumph of the Apes: All Bow Ye Before the Imminent Simian Singularity
The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, review. B - , 3.5/5* 80% Tomato Meter.
First, this is a good movie.
I've seen several big blockbusters this year, and haven't had the energy to give them the pannings they deserved here. They - Fast Five, Thor, Captain America, so forth - have been mostly crap. I've only bothered to review movies that really impressed me here. I decided the other day that I'm going to try to review everything I see from now on, keeping the less interesting stuff to a paragraph long review.. I need material for the blog (I feel your ravenous need, my public.. ) and the writing exercise will be good for me..
Anyway, I liked Thor mildly, because there was enough of the Eddas there to make it interesting to me, but the rest - I say "rest" because there were more than those other two, but I can't remember them since they were all such innocuous crap that I've purged them - were just awful. Captain America I had hopes for, but it was just a blur of mindless and uninteresting violence. There was never a second that the "good guys" seemed at all likely to be frustrated let alone defeated, and the "bad guys" were clownish, imitation Nazis that were totally uninteresting.
I've seen several big blockbusters this year, and haven't had the energy to give them the pannings they deserved here. They - Fast Five, Thor, Captain America, so forth - have been mostly crap. I've only bothered to review movies that really impressed me here. I decided the other day that I'm going to try to review everything I see from now on, keeping the less interesting stuff to a paragraph long review.. I need material for the blog (I feel your ravenous need, my public.. ) and the writing exercise will be good for me..
Anyway, I liked Thor mildly, because there was enough of the Eddas there to make it interesting to me, but the rest - I say "rest" because there were more than those other two, but I can't remember them since they were all such innocuous crap that I've purged them - were just awful. Captain America I had hopes for, but it was just a blur of mindless and uninteresting violence. There was never a second that the "good guys" seemed at all likely to be frustrated let alone defeated, and the "bad guys" were clownish, imitation Nazis that were totally uninteresting.
Captain America had certain salient thematic elements in common with Planet of the Apes though.. Very interesting ones, to my mind, these days.. I'll write about them soon.. I'll definitely get to drawing comparisons and all that in a later post.
Here I need to praise this film a little more. This movie was smart by Hollywood standards, and the computer effects were absolutely amazing. I usually dislike CGI effects, but the quality of the apes' depiction was superb, I occasionally even briefly thought that I could actually be looking at film of real hyper intelligent apes. The level of verisimilitude is becoming almost lifelike.
"Virtual reality" is making great strides, folks. The fantasy almost leaps off the screen into life..
The actor who played Gollum in LOTR, Andy Serkis, also played the lead ape in this film, Ceasar, and this performance was just as good as that one, but even more impressive as the computer effects are even better.
So, the story was above average for a blockbuster, it held my interest, and while there were few surprises in the story, but it was executed well, and did everything I came wanting it to do. It had moments of tension where there was true suspense (albeit all while knowing what was going to happen ultimately) ..
About the theme, now:
It's an old one in cinema. Basically, it's a gnostic dystopia. The main human character, played by
is a scientist whose father has Alzheimers. He is driven to find a cure. He is working on a viral treatment that he expects to cure brain damage caused by dementia. They test it on a dozen apes..
And discover that it works. But better than expected, in that it increases intelligence.
The only surprise here (I'm not going to tell you the rest of the plot, you can guess what happens) is that the only appealing human beings in the film are James Franco's character, his character's girlfriend, and his father (John Lithgow). All the other humans are assholes.
The apes - Ceasar, the main ape especially - seem at first to be all cruel.. But, as the plot unfolds, they are revealed to actually be quite noble, in that they only kill humans who are begging for it.
The rest of the human race is taken out .. Do not read the next sentence - I've written it backwards - if you want to be "surprised" :
.suriv eht yB
So, the stage is set for the triumph of the apes, and the arrival of Charleton Heston. His character is actually in the film, too, but referred to only tangentially. (There are a few media reports in the movie telling us that a Mars mission launches, but then disappears.. ) There are a whole slew of tribute lines and names to the earlier film series, of course. They're going to treat us to a new franchise, which I can't say I mind, so long as they keep doing it this well.
Now, the message here in philosophical terms is that nothing essentially separates apes and men but intelligence, that by attaining greater intelligence is essentially a technical problem itself "solved" by intelligence, and that the super intelligent product of that innovation benefits from the extermination of stupid humanity by means of a .. (backwards agin, don't look if you don't want to learn..)
suriv..
Yeah. Prophecy of the Illuminati, or just the rehash of really stale plot line?
You decide. One species of apes is done, long live the reign of the more evolved apes!
Evolution is inexorable, and you who are stupid cannot escape.
But the singularity isn't happening this week, in the meantime you get to go to the moves. Enjoy.
---
Thoughts on Luke 6:24
[concerning this blog's heading]
So, the big news is that Standard and Poor's has downgraded U.S. Federal debt from AAA to AA+ .
Two notes on this: first these are the same cretins who gave a AAA rating to bundled subprime mortgage debt, at the behest of their Wall Street masters. They served them then, and they serve them now.
Second, that lower debt rating means the government is now going to be expected to pay higher interest rates on the debt. This is how these bastards work: they downgrade your credit worthiness, and then charge you higher interest. The poor are thus inevitably screwed by high interest rates (because they have less money to repay loans, so banksters charge them more to cover all those poor people who fail to repay..)
Note, the lower credit rating will make those who hold the debt more money.
I guess I should try to explain my thinking about this in a bit broader fashion..
Ever since I've been to Mexico and Egypt I've been in reaction to the extreme poverty that I saw in those two places. I lived and taught in Mexico for a year in the mid- 90's in the immediate aftermath of the Mexican debt crisis and U.S. engineered bailout that devastated that country in the early nineties. They paid me 16k dollars, and gave me Mexican socialized health care benefits to work at one of the best (read wealthiest) prep school systems in the country. They paid "North Americans" (U.S. and Canadian citizens, never mind that Mexico is in North America too, they still called us Norte Americanos to distinguish us from citizens of los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, which is the official name of Mexico) there twice what they paid their Mexican staff, which was an uncomfortable reality..
The people living in dirt floored shacks with livestock, the crowds of kids flocking intersections begging while giving cars unsolicited windshield wipings in the brief interval between lights..
I didn't know how to process any of that - there were so many aspects of that experience that blew my mind's capacity to process sanely that the economic subtexts were left unanalyzed for a long while..
My year in Egypt five years ago brought these economic realities all to my mind's fore. Poverty there is if anything more extreme, and the landscape - both geographic and spiritual is far starker and more barren.
That extremity scarred me. I came home radicalized.
It suddenly became very clear to me that we in the United Sates (deliberate "misspelling" there) are at the center of a global network of wealth acquisition. A very highly tuned one.
We (this "we" includes all American citizens, no matter how much money they have) are all the beneficiaries of this system due to the fact that our leadership - the men of money and power in places like New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago and Miami (and so forth) - are the architects of this system. Further, our military is the "praetorian guard" (so to speak) of this class, who deploys American military force in such a way as to guarantee its integrity.
They will, and have, done anything necessary to maintain this flow of wealth toward themselves.
Now, I could say we will do anything necessary, because let's be perfectly clear here, anyone who supported either Iraq war, or the violent execution of the Cold War in places like Nicaragua or Vietnam (or any of the dozens of other places where that war became hot) is morally complicit in this system.
That's to say all of us, practically speaking, are guilty of advocating (which is tantamount to using) violence to maintain our bourgeois lifestyles.
To include myself.
Now, what we are witnessing - to put it clearly, in bald terms - in this global recession and all the "retrenchments" and "debt crises" - is the acceleration of the extent of debt servitude to the point that the masters of this system are now applying the same tactics of debt warfare that they have used against third world countries and their populations (so as to essentially enslave them with poverty, and then exploit their labor - and usually much more importantly - their natural resources ) to what until now we've called the First World.
Note that the "Second World" was the Communist Block. Now that that threat and alternative to the Neo-Liberal Capitalist order has been removed, they are going for the jugular. There is no socialist threat anymore to keep them in line. It's been subverted. They no longer have to share the wealth for fear that the masses will have them for lunch.
They are prescribing the same program for their First World populaces as they once did only for Third World satrapies. The government will be reduced to the point that it exists to guarantee contracts, and protect the rights of the wealthy. Courts, perhaps prisons. Police, armies, maybe. They can buy even those things, and privatize even the law. And that's what they are doing, right in front of our bovine eyes.
Note I'm not bullshitting you or making this up. I'm not babbling crazy. They've come out and said it very clearly. Google Milton Freedman, Grover Norquist, libertarian economics. These people have said there should be no public sphere, or only a minimal one, meaning that everything should be owned by someone. What they mean is that everything, and everyone that they deign to allow live will be owned (their time and services bought) by them. And that "them" is a very small number of people.
They do not care about anyone except themselves. They want to be rich, powerful - and ultimately transcendent - masters of the universe. They will do whatever they need to to achieve this.
I'm going to talk about this "transcendence" I think "they" hope for some more on the blog these coming weeks.
Now though, I'll conclude by saying this:
One of the main reasons I am a Catholic is that Catholicism is to my mind one of the very few coherent epistemologies and anthropologies that resoundingly rejects their worldview.
Islam is, incidentally, perhaps another one.
To be a Catholic is believe in the sacredness of every human person, even the poor, even the idiotic..
Even, note, the evil fascistic rich man. Even he deserves a dignified trial before he is thrown in jail.
Justice, which is Mercy Himself, demands it.
---
So, the big news is that Standard and Poor's has downgraded U.S. Federal debt from AAA to AA+ .
Two notes on this: first these are the same cretins who gave a AAA rating to bundled subprime mortgage debt, at the behest of their Wall Street masters. They served them then, and they serve them now.
Second, that lower debt rating means the government is now going to be expected to pay higher interest rates on the debt. This is how these bastards work: they downgrade your credit worthiness, and then charge you higher interest. The poor are thus inevitably screwed by high interest rates (because they have less money to repay loans, so banksters charge them more to cover all those poor people who fail to repay..)
Note, the lower credit rating will make those who hold the debt more money.
I guess I should try to explain my thinking about this in a bit broader fashion..
Ever since I've been to Mexico and Egypt I've been in reaction to the extreme poverty that I saw in those two places. I lived and taught in Mexico for a year in the mid- 90's in the immediate aftermath of the Mexican debt crisis and U.S. engineered bailout that devastated that country in the early nineties. They paid me 16k dollars, and gave me Mexican socialized health care benefits to work at one of the best (read wealthiest) prep school systems in the country. They paid "North Americans" (U.S. and Canadian citizens, never mind that Mexico is in North America too, they still called us Norte Americanos to distinguish us from citizens of los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, which is the official name of Mexico) there twice what they paid their Mexican staff, which was an uncomfortable reality..
The people living in dirt floored shacks with livestock, the crowds of kids flocking intersections begging while giving cars unsolicited windshield wipings in the brief interval between lights..
I didn't know how to process any of that - there were so many aspects of that experience that blew my mind's capacity to process sanely that the economic subtexts were left unanalyzed for a long while..
My year in Egypt five years ago brought these economic realities all to my mind's fore. Poverty there is if anything more extreme, and the landscape - both geographic and spiritual is far starker and more barren.
That extremity scarred me. I came home radicalized.
It suddenly became very clear to me that we in the United Sates (deliberate "misspelling" there) are at the center of a global network of wealth acquisition. A very highly tuned one.
We (this "we" includes all American citizens, no matter how much money they have) are all the beneficiaries of this system due to the fact that our leadership - the men of money and power in places like New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago and Miami (and so forth) - are the architects of this system. Further, our military is the "praetorian guard" (so to speak) of this class, who deploys American military force in such a way as to guarantee its integrity.
They will, and have, done anything necessary to maintain this flow of wealth toward themselves.
Now, I could say we will do anything necessary, because let's be perfectly clear here, anyone who supported either Iraq war, or the violent execution of the Cold War in places like Nicaragua or Vietnam (or any of the dozens of other places where that war became hot) is morally complicit in this system.
That's to say all of us, practically speaking, are guilty of advocating (which is tantamount to using) violence to maintain our bourgeois lifestyles.
To include myself.
Now, what we are witnessing - to put it clearly, in bald terms - in this global recession and all the "retrenchments" and "debt crises" - is the acceleration of the extent of debt servitude to the point that the masters of this system are now applying the same tactics of debt warfare that they have used against third world countries and their populations (so as to essentially enslave them with poverty, and then exploit their labor - and usually much more importantly - their natural resources ) to what until now we've called the First World.
Note that the "Second World" was the Communist Block. Now that that threat and alternative to the Neo-Liberal Capitalist order has been removed, they are going for the jugular. There is no socialist threat anymore to keep them in line. It's been subverted. They no longer have to share the wealth for fear that the masses will have them for lunch.
They are prescribing the same program for their First World populaces as they once did only for Third World satrapies. The government will be reduced to the point that it exists to guarantee contracts, and protect the rights of the wealthy. Courts, perhaps prisons. Police, armies, maybe. They can buy even those things, and privatize even the law. And that's what they are doing, right in front of our bovine eyes.
Note I'm not bullshitting you or making this up. I'm not babbling crazy. They've come out and said it very clearly. Google Milton Freedman, Grover Norquist, libertarian economics. These people have said there should be no public sphere, or only a minimal one, meaning that everything should be owned by someone. What they mean is that everything, and everyone that they deign to allow live will be owned (their time and services bought) by them. And that "them" is a very small number of people.
They do not care about anyone except themselves. They want to be rich, powerful - and ultimately transcendent - masters of the universe. They will do whatever they need to to achieve this.
I'm going to talk about this "transcendence" I think "they" hope for some more on the blog these coming weeks.
Now though, I'll conclude by saying this:
One of the main reasons I am a Catholic is that Catholicism is to my mind one of the very few coherent epistemologies and anthropologies that resoundingly rejects their worldview.
Islam is, incidentally, perhaps another one.
To be a Catholic is believe in the sacredness of every human person, even the poor, even the idiotic..
Even, note, the evil fascistic rich man. Even he deserves a dignified trial before he is thrown in jail.
Justice, which is Mercy Himself, demands it.
---
Monday, July 4, 2011
Further Thoughts Forth
Since I just let tear that last post, and the void remains impassive, let me kick it up another notch:
Otto von Hapsburg died at the age of 96, today. July 4th. A distinction he shares with both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. That's amusing.
Why? Because this is the birthday of the Great Masonic Republic, the Whore of the Enlightenment, the anti-thesis of nearly everything that the Hapsburg dynasty represents in historical, theological and political terms. The only thing less "American" in this sense would be the papacy itself.
Now, I never met his highness, who one time pretender to the now extinct throne of the Empire of Austria Hungary, and so also a hypothetical candidate for the post of Holy Roman Emperor if it were still extant. I do have the great honor and pleasure of knowing many of his relatives, personally, though. Indeed, I consider a few of them that I spent some time with to be friends, in that slight but distinct sense that you often develop with people whom you like and share many things in common with.
In common with. Funny. But it's true. I've shared meals and drinks with them, gone to mass and prayed the rosary with them, been to parties and dinners with them, all on a first name basis. Once in a while I would kid one of them, address them as archduke and then tell them with mock sorrow that it was a shame, but that I am a republican and revolutionary..
In a tone of mock sorrow, but not in complete jest. For it's emphatically true: I am a republican and revolutionary.
Because for as much as I like them..
Like them? Yeah. Because they are not at all like the vulgar "noble" house of Monaco, or the tawdry jet- setting Windsors. They're more like the family Von Trapp: very friendly, haute bourgeois in their manner, not at all ostentatious. If you didn't know who they were, you'd never guess.
Still, as much as I like them, I am not about to join the Black Yellow Alliance.
In fact, if we aren't going to bring back the Roman (note, Roman, not Spanish) Inquisition, and support the full triumph of the Gregorian Reform and strive for the fullblown global triumph of the Papal Imperium (see how I've gone Orthodox, and now have come full circle round: accept the authority of the See of Rome all ye schismatics, and repent), then I am with Jefferson, and for the freedoms articulated in the Bill of Rights.
What I'm trying to say is that I am a Guelph and no Ghibelline, then a republican and no monarchist.
Like any of that makes any sense in reality. These last few years I've been thinking about all of this, wondering if I have any politics left anymore.
If it is not time for me to turn inward, for good.
How come? Because in reality, we live in a world where the gnostics have triumphed, in which the nominalists have won full sway. It's all extrapolated numerology and elaborated alchemy, now. The faustians have made their bargain and seized their mess of pottage, in the moment victorious.
Personhood - human dignity - is now held to be synonymous with will and consciousness. The mind is held to be independent of the body, which is to be transcended in the algorithmic triumph of the mind over matter.
The software can be extracted from the hardware, and set loose as a type of "angelic" intelligence to live eternally. The end of the human race, the master stroke of our evolution: transcendence through trans-humanism.
As has always been the case with them, gnostics never tell the truth. They are always hiding their intent, allowing the great mass to wallow, rut and forage, while they seek their transcendence through gnosis.
In terms of this scheme to be a Christian is to be agnostic. For faith is an embrace of powerlessness, a profound humility that recognizes the face of the Lord in that of the retarded, the ignorant, the sinful, the poor. Oneself, and every other human being no matter who they be. It is to renounce any pretension to salvific power over creation, it is to admit our own utter dependance upon and ignorance before God.
For we know nothing about Him that he does not reveal to us Himself. That is to say that all such knowledge is only had by grace.
And grace is not to be had by force, either of intellect or will: It is never coerced but always gratuitously given; like friendship, like love.
Which is to say that a human social order informed by grace would be like a great family in which the weak are borne by the strong.
Not some sort of bizarre hermetic hieratic order in which the masters of numerology lord over everyone else, enslave and force them to do their bidding in return for some contrived unreal abstraction like money.
You know how Orthodox Jews wrap the words of God around their head and right forearm? The will of the One they worship is always before them.
Today, in this culture most of us would put our portfolio and paycheck in the phylacteries if we were to wear tefillin.
That's what you could call a prophecy partially fulfilled. Can I get an amen?
Again, Happy Independence Day Y'all.
---
Otto von Hapsburg died at the age of 96, today. July 4th. A distinction he shares with both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. That's amusing.
Why? Because this is the birthday of the Great Masonic Republic, the Whore of the Enlightenment, the anti-thesis of nearly everything that the Hapsburg dynasty represents in historical, theological and political terms. The only thing less "American" in this sense would be the papacy itself.
Now, I never met his highness, who one time pretender to the now extinct throne of the Empire of Austria Hungary, and so also a hypothetical candidate for the post of Holy Roman Emperor if it were still extant. I do have the great honor and pleasure of knowing many of his relatives, personally, though. Indeed, I consider a few of them that I spent some time with to be friends, in that slight but distinct sense that you often develop with people whom you like and share many things in common with.
In common with. Funny. But it's true. I've shared meals and drinks with them, gone to mass and prayed the rosary with them, been to parties and dinners with them, all on a first name basis. Once in a while I would kid one of them, address them as archduke and then tell them with mock sorrow that it was a shame, but that I am a republican and revolutionary..
In a tone of mock sorrow, but not in complete jest. For it's emphatically true: I am a republican and revolutionary.
Because for as much as I like them..
Like them? Yeah. Because they are not at all like the vulgar "noble" house of Monaco, or the tawdry jet- setting Windsors. They're more like the family Von Trapp: very friendly, haute bourgeois in their manner, not at all ostentatious. If you didn't know who they were, you'd never guess.
Still, as much as I like them, I am not about to join the Black Yellow Alliance.
In fact, if we aren't going to bring back the Roman (note, Roman, not Spanish) Inquisition, and support the full triumph of the Gregorian Reform and strive for the fullblown global triumph of the Papal Imperium (see how I've gone Orthodox, and now have come full circle round: accept the authority of the See of Rome all ye schismatics, and repent), then I am with Jefferson, and for the freedoms articulated in the Bill of Rights.
What I'm trying to say is that I am a Guelph and no Ghibelline, then a republican and no monarchist.
Like any of that makes any sense in reality. These last few years I've been thinking about all of this, wondering if I have any politics left anymore.
If it is not time for me to turn inward, for good.
How come? Because in reality, we live in a world where the gnostics have triumphed, in which the nominalists have won full sway. It's all extrapolated numerology and elaborated alchemy, now. The faustians have made their bargain and seized their mess of pottage, in the moment victorious.
Personhood - human dignity - is now held to be synonymous with will and consciousness. The mind is held to be independent of the body, which is to be transcended in the algorithmic triumph of the mind over matter.
The software can be extracted from the hardware, and set loose as a type of "angelic" intelligence to live eternally. The end of the human race, the master stroke of our evolution: transcendence through trans-humanism.
As has always been the case with them, gnostics never tell the truth. They are always hiding their intent, allowing the great mass to wallow, rut and forage, while they seek their transcendence through gnosis.
In terms of this scheme to be a Christian is to be agnostic. For faith is an embrace of powerlessness, a profound humility that recognizes the face of the Lord in that of the retarded, the ignorant, the sinful, the poor. Oneself, and every other human being no matter who they be. It is to renounce any pretension to salvific power over creation, it is to admit our own utter dependance upon and ignorance before God.
For we know nothing about Him that he does not reveal to us Himself. That is to say that all such knowledge is only had by grace.
And grace is not to be had by force, either of intellect or will: It is never coerced but always gratuitously given; like friendship, like love.
Which is to say that a human social order informed by grace would be like a great family in which the weak are borne by the strong.
Not some sort of bizarre hermetic hieratic order in which the masters of numerology lord over everyone else, enslave and force them to do their bidding in return for some contrived unreal abstraction like money.
You know how Orthodox Jews wrap the words of God around their head and right forearm? The will of the One they worship is always before them.
Today, in this culture most of us would put our portfolio and paycheck in the phylacteries if we were to wear tefillin.
That's what you could call a prophecy partially fulfilled. Can I get an amen?
Again, Happy Independence Day Y'all.
---
Friday, May 13, 2011
This is My Lucky Day. [revised]
The lunatic ... doesn't concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.
— Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum **
On Friday, October 13, 1307, King Philip IV the Fair had all the Knights Templar headquartered in France simultaneously arrested, interrogated and in many cases executed.
Why did he do this?
The rumor is that they were fabulously rich due to their having become international bankers funding the Crusades, and Philip wanted their lucre.. They were also rumored to have become rank heretics through their contacts with the Mussulman and other exotic and even more esoteric creeds in the East. They furthermore were reputed and charged with practicing unnatural vices..
The further rumor is that the Templars introduced Masonry and other forms of practical gnosticism like Catharism to the West..
I for one do not care.*** I am going to write about Philip the Fair at least once more on this blog in relation to his conflict with Boniface VIII and the bull Unam Sanctam.
I only mention the Templars here for one reason: the fact that Friday the 13th is an unlucky day is often associated with their suppression on this date. I used to buy into it a little, myself..
Until I began thinking about it.. Sodomitical bankers practicing black arts..
Fire up the pyre, I say. Line the usurers, counterfeiters and moneychangers up. I'll stoke while they form their queue..
For Christ plus the twelve made for 13, didn't they?
Yeah. I think they did. Judas was subtracted, Christ ascended, then Paul and Matthias were later added. Still 13 in all.
Tolkien's caving aside (Bilbo was the lucky 14th? Why did the dwarves take 13 to be unlucky?) I now declare ..
13 to be my very most lucky number. And this day shall now until forevermore be a holiday to me.
That's right! Burn, baby burn! Screw the Templars!
Or, uh, not.
Seinfeld holds an auto, auto-da-fé.. Burns himself eating soup, solipsistically,
Or something..
[**I found that quote on Wikipedia's article on the Templars while verifying the content of this post. It made me laugh. This is the only time you will hear of the Templars on this here blog.. Still. They did come up..]
[*** Nous nous en foutons. Fecondez-vous. ]
---
— Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum **
On Friday, October 13, 1307, King Philip IV the Fair had all the Knights Templar headquartered in France simultaneously arrested, interrogated and in many cases executed.
Why did he do this?
The rumor is that they were fabulously rich due to their having become international bankers funding the Crusades, and Philip wanted their lucre.. They were also rumored to have become rank heretics through their contacts with the Mussulman and other exotic and even more esoteric creeds in the East. They furthermore were reputed and charged with practicing unnatural vices..
The further rumor is that the Templars introduced Masonry and other forms of practical gnosticism like Catharism to the West..
I for one do not care.*** I am going to write about Philip the Fair at least once more on this blog in relation to his conflict with Boniface VIII and the bull Unam Sanctam.
I only mention the Templars here for one reason: the fact that Friday the 13th is an unlucky day is often associated with their suppression on this date. I used to buy into it a little, myself..
Until I began thinking about it.. Sodomitical bankers practicing black arts..
Fire up the pyre, I say. Line the usurers, counterfeiters and moneychangers up. I'll stoke while they form their queue..
For Christ plus the twelve made for 13, didn't they?
Yeah. I think they did. Judas was subtracted, Christ ascended, then Paul and Matthias were later added. Still 13 in all.
Tolkien's caving aside (Bilbo was the lucky 14th? Why did the dwarves take 13 to be unlucky?) I now declare ..
13 to be my very most lucky number. And this day shall now until forevermore be a holiday to me.
That's right! Burn, baby burn! Screw the Templars!
Or, uh, not.
Seinfeld holds an auto, auto-da-fé.. Burns himself eating soup, solipsistically,
Or something..
[**I found that quote on Wikipedia's article on the Templars while verifying the content of this post. It made me laugh. This is the only time you will hear of the Templars on this here blog.. Still. They did come up..]
[*** Nous nous en foutons. Fecondez-vous. ]
---
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
On the Utility of Occam's Razor
So, the simplest explanation is almost always the correct one, aye?
I was just watching the Zaphruder film of JFK's assassination:
(this is graphic, and is appropriately enough preceded by a *Target* commercial)
JFK Kennedy Assassination - Zapruder film - high... by virveli
It's really amusing stuff, actually, because it's very clear that the bullet that kills him by blowing his skull open is definitely coming from his front. The vicinity of the "grassy knoll" and the overpass in front of the car, in other words. The Texas Schoolbook "Suppository" where Oswald supposedly is shooting from is behind the vehicle.
It's simple physics. A body hit by a bullet doesn't blow toward the bullet, but away from it. Kennedy was blown toward Oswald's putative location, and away from the knoll and the overpass. The exit wound on Kennedy's head is in the back, not the front of his head.
The fact that the Keystone cops of the Dallas PD and FBI (who along with the Secret Service so scandalously failed to protect the President that day) immediately get Oswald's description, then arrest him, is also amusing. That Oswald - whose curriculum vitae screams CIA plant - claims to be a patsy to his dying breath, and is immediately off'ed by a mob hitman claiming to be acting from motives of vigilante patriotism, just seals the case.
Who benefits from Kennedy's death? LBJ and his Texas cronies, the mob, the cold warriors who want to escalate the war in Vietnam and action against Cuba.
Kennedy apparently was undergoing a change of heart on all of that stuff, and wanted to undo the CIA, and ratchet down the Cold War, or so rumor has it. Bobby Kennedy was also an activist against the mob, and was becoming a heretic on the Cold War, too. The Boston Irish Brahmin, not a great friend to the Southern establishment Texas oilmen..
That this is some sort of scandalous "conspiracy theory" frowned upon by the powers that be (the lone nut gunman did it! it's always the lone nut who's to blame..) is simply hilarious. Sure, dudes. It was Oswald acting alone. Sure.
I'll note that George H. W. Bush is an Eastern Banking Brahmin, but of old English and Dutch Yalie stock, who gets in bed deep with the Tejas oilmen.
He is serendipitously appointed head of the CIA "out of nowhere" in 1976. Just a Texas congressman who lucked out, see.
I say that the simpler explanation is that he had been involved in the intelligence community since his days in navy intelligence photography as a pilot during WW II. Yale, George's alma mater, has been at the forefront of providing leadership in the intelligence community since before WW I.
I'll also note that George was apparently in Fort Worth the day of the JFK assassination.
Odd fact, that. Well, everyone who was anyone in Texas politics was in the vicinity that day, right?
Anyway, I say that the assassination fits easily into the larger Machiavellian drama, in which Texas is at the epicenter of power in which oil, weapons and cheap labor as well as drugs like cocaine and heroine are the essential commodities.
Illegal immigration of cheap labor, sex trafficking, drugs and weapons. And oil.
Texas. Mexico. Columbia and Venezuela. Oil, drugs, weapons. Money laundering.
The mob and cartels meld into our intelligence community and "legitimate" business in banking, oil and weapons.
Our foreign policy can only be understood in terms of all that money.
Confused as to why we are going to remain in Afghanistan even now that Osama and "al-Qaeda" are gone? That we are going to stay in Iraq, even now that the place is stable and we've "restored democracy" there?
One thing explains our presence in Iraq: one forth of the world's remaining proven petroleum reserves are there.
Two things explain our presence in Central Asia: Afghan heroin and oil in the Caspian Sea and Central Asia.
Heroin, you say? But we're squeaky clean, we don't have anything to do with that.
Yeah. Okeedokee. In 2000 the Taliban put a ban on production of opium poppies, causing world production of heroin to drop 95%.
The very next year, we've taken them out, and have planted an army there. Opium production soars back up to pre- Taliban ban levels.
This, like every nefarious thing we do, is just an "accident." We can't stop it, see?
I'll spell it out, and paint a quick picture for you:
The Afghan trade in opiates (92 percent of total World production of opiates) constitutes a large share of the worldwide annual turnover of narcotics, which was estimated by the United Nations to be of the order of $400-500 billion.
(Douglas Keh, Drug Money in a Changing World, Technical document No. 4, 1998, Vienna UNDCP, p. 4. See also United Nations Drug Control Program, Report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 1999, E/INCB/1999/1 United Nations, Vienna 1999, p. 49-51, and Richard Lapper, UN Fears Growth of Heroin Trade, Financial Times, 24 February 2000).
Based on 2003 figures, drug trafficking constitutes "the third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade." (The Independent, 29 February 2004).
Afghanistan and Colombia are the largest drug producing economies in the world, which feed a flourishing criminal economy. These countries are heavily militarized. The drug trade is protected. It is well and amply documented the CIA has played a central role in the development of both the Latin American and Asian drug triangles.
The IMF estimated global money laundering to be between 590 billion and 1.5 trillion dollars a year, representing 2-5 percent of global GDP. (Asian Banker, 15 August 2003). A large share of global money laundering as estimated by the IMF is linked to the trade in narcotics.
The Great Game is always on, and having that chit on the central Asian land mass, against the Iranians, Russians, Chinese and Indians is the key.
As for the death of Osama, I say that the evidence says he never ceased being an ISI asset.
I also say that the CIA is allied with the ISI, and that our intelligence community and political elite are engaged in a huge Machiavellian game involving money, drugs, oil, weapons and cheap labor.
Guns and money, drugs and oil. (I'm repeating myself for effect. Chant it like a mantra, throw sex in there once in a while for added zest and frisson..)
They hop gladly into bed with anyone who will give them power over these things.
The Saudis, the Paki ruling class.
The average American, who gets all riled up over religion and patriotism and stuff like gender issues (them dang femanazis!) is a chump.
They keep their Praetorians obsessed with Kim Kardashian's boob job, flush with just enough porn, corn syrup and cash to keep us dumb and happy.
God bless America!
And with that, I need to go make more tea.
---
I was just watching the Zaphruder film of JFK's assassination:
(this is graphic, and is appropriately enough preceded by a *Target* commercial)
JFK Kennedy Assassination - Zapruder film - high... by virveli
It's really amusing stuff, actually, because it's very clear that the bullet that kills him by blowing his skull open is definitely coming from his front. The vicinity of the "grassy knoll" and the overpass in front of the car, in other words. The Texas Schoolbook "Suppository" where Oswald supposedly is shooting from is behind the vehicle.
It's simple physics. A body hit by a bullet doesn't blow toward the bullet, but away from it. Kennedy was blown toward Oswald's putative location, and away from the knoll and the overpass. The exit wound on Kennedy's head is in the back, not the front of his head.
The fact that the Keystone cops of the Dallas PD and FBI (who along with the Secret Service so scandalously failed to protect the President that day) immediately get Oswald's description, then arrest him, is also amusing. That Oswald - whose curriculum vitae screams CIA plant - claims to be a patsy to his dying breath, and is immediately off'ed by a mob hitman claiming to be acting from motives of vigilante patriotism, just seals the case.
Who benefits from Kennedy's death? LBJ and his Texas cronies, the mob, the cold warriors who want to escalate the war in Vietnam and action against Cuba.
Kennedy apparently was undergoing a change of heart on all of that stuff, and wanted to undo the CIA, and ratchet down the Cold War, or so rumor has it. Bobby Kennedy was also an activist against the mob, and was becoming a heretic on the Cold War, too. The Boston Irish Brahmin, not a great friend to the Southern establishment Texas oilmen..
That this is some sort of scandalous "conspiracy theory" frowned upon by the powers that be (the lone nut gunman did it! it's always the lone nut who's to blame..) is simply hilarious. Sure, dudes. It was Oswald acting alone. Sure.
I'll note that George H. W. Bush is an Eastern Banking Brahmin, but of old English and Dutch Yalie stock, who gets in bed deep with the Tejas oilmen.
He is serendipitously appointed head of the CIA "out of nowhere" in 1976. Just a Texas congressman who lucked out, see.
I say that the simpler explanation is that he had been involved in the intelligence community since his days in navy intelligence photography as a pilot during WW II. Yale, George's alma mater, has been at the forefront of providing leadership in the intelligence community since before WW I.
I'll also note that George was apparently in Fort Worth the day of the JFK assassination.
Odd fact, that. Well, everyone who was anyone in Texas politics was in the vicinity that day, right?
Anyway, I say that the assassination fits easily into the larger Machiavellian drama, in which Texas is at the epicenter of power in which oil, weapons and cheap labor as well as drugs like cocaine and heroine are the essential commodities.
Illegal immigration of cheap labor, sex trafficking, drugs and weapons. And oil.
Texas. Mexico. Columbia and Venezuela. Oil, drugs, weapons. Money laundering.
The mob and cartels meld into our intelligence community and "legitimate" business in banking, oil and weapons.
Our foreign policy can only be understood in terms of all that money.
Confused as to why we are going to remain in Afghanistan even now that Osama and "al-Qaeda" are gone? That we are going to stay in Iraq, even now that the place is stable and we've "restored democracy" there?
One thing explains our presence in Iraq: one forth of the world's remaining proven petroleum reserves are there.
Two things explain our presence in Central Asia: Afghan heroin and oil in the Caspian Sea and Central Asia.
Heroin, you say? But we're squeaky clean, we don't have anything to do with that.
Yeah. Okeedokee. In 2000 the Taliban put a ban on production of opium poppies, causing world production of heroin to drop 95%.
The very next year, we've taken them out, and have planted an army there. Opium production soars back up to pre- Taliban ban levels.
This, like every nefarious thing we do, is just an "accident." We can't stop it, see?
I'll spell it out, and paint a quick picture for you:
The Afghan trade in opiates (92 percent of total World production of opiates) constitutes a large share of the worldwide annual turnover of narcotics, which was estimated by the United Nations to be of the order of $400-500 billion.
(Douglas Keh, Drug Money in a Changing World, Technical document No. 4, 1998, Vienna UNDCP, p. 4. See also United Nations Drug Control Program, Report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 1999, E/INCB/1999/1 United Nations, Vienna 1999, p. 49-51, and Richard Lapper, UN Fears Growth of Heroin Trade, Financial Times, 24 February 2000).
Based on 2003 figures, drug trafficking constitutes "the third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade." (The Independent, 29 February 2004).
Afghanistan and Colombia are the largest drug producing economies in the world, which feed a flourishing criminal economy. These countries are heavily militarized. The drug trade is protected. It is well and amply documented the CIA has played a central role in the development of both the Latin American and Asian drug triangles.
The IMF estimated global money laundering to be between 590 billion and 1.5 trillion dollars a year, representing 2-5 percent of global GDP. (Asian Banker, 15 August 2003). A large share of global money laundering as estimated by the IMF is linked to the trade in narcotics.
The Great Game is always on, and having that chit on the central Asian land mass, against the Iranians, Russians, Chinese and Indians is the key.
As for the death of Osama, I say that the evidence says he never ceased being an ISI asset.
I also say that the CIA is allied with the ISI, and that our intelligence community and political elite are engaged in a huge Machiavellian game involving money, drugs, oil, weapons and cheap labor.
Guns and money, drugs and oil. (I'm repeating myself for effect. Chant it like a mantra, throw sex in there once in a while for added zest and frisson..)
They hop gladly into bed with anyone who will give them power over these things.
The Saudis, the Paki ruling class.
The average American, who gets all riled up over religion and patriotism and stuff like gender issues (them dang femanazis!) is a chump.
They keep their Praetorians obsessed with Kim Kardashian's boob job, flush with just enough porn, corn syrup and cash to keep us dumb and happy.
God bless America!
And with that, I need to go make more tea.
---
Monday, April 25, 2011
Film Review: Source Code
Review: Source Code. Liked it. Thumbs up, B+. 4 Stars out of 5.
This is like the Matrix crossed with the Bourne movies, but better, in that the "matrixy" aspect of this film doesn't suck, and is actually almost coherent and mildly intriguing, as opposed to merely unspooling into puerile stupidity like the Matrix trilogy does.
(I saw only one and a half of those three films, by the way. Mildly enjoyed the first one, but then fell asleep in the theater during the second, an honor I think is only shared by that Vanilla Ice film that came out back in 1991 - I saw it in Izmir, and fell asleep after 15 minutes.. )
The basic plot of the film is this: they've developed technology called the "source code" that allows us to project the mind of someone with similar biological parameters back upon "the halo" left in time of that person's consciousness for eight minutes before their death.
Or something like that.
If you accept this conceit, and are able to suspend disbelief that much, the rest of film is pretty straight forward.
Jake Gyllenhaal's character is sent back to inhabit the mind of a man on a train about to be destroyed by a terrorist bombing. In the beginning he doesn't understand what is happening to him, and is repeatedly blown up, each time to again be re-sent into that same eight minute time frame to investigate and discover who left the bomb, and what his plans for future mayhem are.. He's a detective feeding information to his handlers who control the "source code" and who interrogate him at the end of each of his subsequent missions into the code.
Like Jason Bourne, he's an almost clean slate within the immediate narrative arc. He knows his name, remembers that he's a captain in the Army who last he can remember was in Afghanistan flying helicopters.. He has no idea how he ended up in the situation he's in, getting sent back repeatedly onto this train.
Each time he gets set into the source code, he is in the same moment, but is able to use knowledge acquired in previous sorties to delve deeper into the situation, and further understand what is happening. He not only figures out what is happening on the train, but also starts to piece together the larger context, and understand things about himself he didn't know before.
Storytelling 101. Nicely done.
Jake's character's mind is able to retain memories of his previous experiences in the "source code" and in this the narrative emerges.
There's a nice twist at the end of the movie that I did not expect, that knocks it all up a level and makes the entire plot even a little more interesting.
In sum, this film, like the Matrix, is a gnostic fantasy, in which the material world is reduced to a numerical "matrix," the "source code." In this the mind is more real than matter, and in fact the mind eventually escapes matter altogether, becoming an angelic intelligence. The self is also reduced to consciousness, to thought and memory, and is in a perfect Cartesian fashion ontologically and existentially alienated from the body, which is finally understood to be a passing illusion like all other matter.
The real is knowledge and numbers. The "code" or "program." The material is a passing and imperfect illusion to be manipulated by the mind through accumulated knowledge and understanding.
The fact that each time he reenters the source code he has only eight minutes of halo to work with before the source code resets, is of course a numerological trope.
The shape of the number 8 is itself the infinity sign. The snake eating itself, time folding back in itself. The Resurrection of Christ occurs on the first day of the week, which is to say the day after the end of the beginning, the renewal after death.. The seventh day consummates time in rest, which is death, but is recapitulated in the the first of the new week which is also eighth day. There were also eight people on Noah's Ark, when God "reset" creation. I think there is much more esoteric meaning to that number, but can't be bothered to delve into that now.
If you stop the film at the beginning of the preview clip I post here above on the part around the 20 second mark where his watch is shown, you'll notice that he "comes to" at 8:40 am. Forty is 8 times 5. 5 is death. Friday (the day of the Crucifixion) is the Christian fifth or Jewish sixth day. Christ bore five wounds (each hand, each foot, the spear in his side. My blog thematically commemorates his head being left alone, and only crowned with thorns..)
His release comes at 8:48 am. 8 6 times 8.
It also occurs to me that Jake's character's name "Captain Stevens" which may possibly be a reference to the proto-martyr St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr whose feast is the day after Christmas. The man whose body he inhabits is named Sean, which is a Gaelic corruption of the French Jean or English John, which comes from the Hebrew "God is Gracious," and is of course the name of the "Forerunner" John the Baptist who baptizes with water (symbolizing death and rebirth) as well as John the Apostle, the only apostle who did not run away during the Crucifixion, but who stayed at the foot of the Cross. The Apostle John is also the only one of the apostles to die a natural death, the only one not to be finally martyred..
Furthermore, the girl Captain Stevens wants to "save" is named "Christina.."
(Christina being played by the very foxy Michelle Monaghan.. Note also that Vera Farmiga, playing the air force officer running the source code computer is also beautiful as always..)
The bomb is a release in fire, pentecostal (by 10 by 5) or something like that..
All of these details may take on a certain symbolic resonance after you've seen the film.
I'm a neophyte at all of this, fill in the punchlines for me, please.
My point is that the filmmaker's clearly a clever fellow, and I appreciate that.
So, the entire film is mildly entertaining, as well as another testament to our cultural fascination with computers and faith in progress.
Worth seeing, in other words.
---
This is like the Matrix crossed with the Bourne movies, but better, in that the "matrixy" aspect of this film doesn't suck, and is actually almost coherent and mildly intriguing, as opposed to merely unspooling into puerile stupidity like the Matrix trilogy does.
(I saw only one and a half of those three films, by the way. Mildly enjoyed the first one, but then fell asleep in the theater during the second, an honor I think is only shared by that Vanilla Ice film that came out back in 1991 - I saw it in Izmir, and fell asleep after 15 minutes.. )
The basic plot of the film is this: they've developed technology called the "source code" that allows us to project the mind of someone with similar biological parameters back upon "the halo" left in time of that person's consciousness for eight minutes before their death.
Or something like that.
If you accept this conceit, and are able to suspend disbelief that much, the rest of film is pretty straight forward.
Jake Gyllenhaal's character is sent back to inhabit the mind of a man on a train about to be destroyed by a terrorist bombing. In the beginning he doesn't understand what is happening to him, and is repeatedly blown up, each time to again be re-sent into that same eight minute time frame to investigate and discover who left the bomb, and what his plans for future mayhem are.. He's a detective feeding information to his handlers who control the "source code" and who interrogate him at the end of each of his subsequent missions into the code.
Like Jason Bourne, he's an almost clean slate within the immediate narrative arc. He knows his name, remembers that he's a captain in the Army who last he can remember was in Afghanistan flying helicopters.. He has no idea how he ended up in the situation he's in, getting sent back repeatedly onto this train.
Each time he gets set into the source code, he is in the same moment, but is able to use knowledge acquired in previous sorties to delve deeper into the situation, and further understand what is happening. He not only figures out what is happening on the train, but also starts to piece together the larger context, and understand things about himself he didn't know before.
Storytelling 101. Nicely done.
Jake's character's mind is able to retain memories of his previous experiences in the "source code" and in this the narrative emerges.
There's a nice twist at the end of the movie that I did not expect, that knocks it all up a level and makes the entire plot even a little more interesting.
In sum, this film, like the Matrix, is a gnostic fantasy, in which the material world is reduced to a numerical "matrix," the "source code." In this the mind is more real than matter, and in fact the mind eventually escapes matter altogether, becoming an angelic intelligence. The self is also reduced to consciousness, to thought and memory, and is in a perfect Cartesian fashion ontologically and existentially alienated from the body, which is finally understood to be a passing illusion like all other matter.
The real is knowledge and numbers. The "code" or "program." The material is a passing and imperfect illusion to be manipulated by the mind through accumulated knowledge and understanding.
The fact that each time he reenters the source code he has only eight minutes of halo to work with before the source code resets, is of course a numerological trope.
The shape of the number 8 is itself the infinity sign. The snake eating itself, time folding back in itself. The Resurrection of Christ occurs on the first day of the week, which is to say the day after the end of the beginning, the renewal after death.. The seventh day consummates time in rest, which is death, but is recapitulated in the the first of the new week which is also eighth day. There were also eight people on Noah's Ark, when God "reset" creation. I think there is much more esoteric meaning to that number, but can't be bothered to delve into that now.
If you stop the film at the beginning of the preview clip I post here above on the part around the 20 second mark where his watch is shown, you'll notice that he "comes to" at 8:40 am. Forty is 8 times 5. 5 is death. Friday (the day of the Crucifixion) is the Christian fifth or Jewish sixth day. Christ bore five wounds (each hand, each foot, the spear in his side. My blog thematically commemorates his head being left alone, and only crowned with thorns..)
His release comes at 8:48 am. 8 6 times 8.
It also occurs to me that Jake's character's name "Captain Stevens" which may possibly be a reference to the proto-martyr St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr whose feast is the day after Christmas. The man whose body he inhabits is named Sean, which is a Gaelic corruption of the French Jean or English John, which comes from the Hebrew "God is Gracious," and is of course the name of the "Forerunner" John the Baptist who baptizes with water (symbolizing death and rebirth) as well as John the Apostle, the only apostle who did not run away during the Crucifixion, but who stayed at the foot of the Cross. The Apostle John is also the only one of the apostles to die a natural death, the only one not to be finally martyred..
Furthermore, the girl Captain Stevens wants to "save" is named "Christina.."
(Christina being played by the very foxy Michelle Monaghan.. Note also that Vera Farmiga, playing the air force officer running the source code computer is also beautiful as always..)
The bomb is a release in fire, pentecostal (by 10 by 5) or something like that..
All of these details may take on a certain symbolic resonance after you've seen the film.
I'm a neophyte at all of this, fill in the punchlines for me, please.
My point is that the filmmaker's clearly a clever fellow, and I appreciate that.
So, the entire film is mildly entertaining, as well as another testament to our cultural fascination with computers and faith in progress.
Worth seeing, in other words.
---
Thursday, April 14, 2011
The Masons & Me: Moloch, Mammon & American Gnostic Messianism
Arturo Vasquez, whose blog I admire, yesterday posted this video:
Commenting that he "found this guy’s approach oddly refreshing, in a masochistic sort of way. Hey, other people are thinking it, this guy just says it's allowed.."
I responded in the comments. I share the thread as is now stands, because I want to broach these themes sooner than later. I've been being chary, uncertain of how to begin. There's a lot to be said, and I want to say it as level and eloquently as I can.
No more hesitation, then. I'm just going to jump:
[The comments are ordered by time-stamp over the last 18 or so hours. The timestamps on Arturo's blog are 3 hours behind EST, so my initial post was 11 pm/2300 last night, and my last about a half hour ago, about 5pm/1700 EST. I've made a few small corrections here to mine and my interlocutors' prose. Click through to visit Arturo's site if you want to follow the discussion, assuming it continues..]
Charles Curtis (02:07:40) :
“I was head of the CIA’s Latin American Bureau and I had major role in overthrowing what’s his name.” British interviewer dude: “Salvadore Allende? That’s his name.”
Love it. God Bless America.
Just like I love it when the liberal (to clarify, nearly all of us are liberals, the libertarian capitalist is the arch-liberal) runs up against the scandalous reality that the state does in fact sacralize violence. That’s its entire raison d’etre. All the sanctimonious handwringing over abortion, war, capital punishment – all of it is effete decadent childishness. The Catholic Church has never shrunk from that reality, and that’s one of the reasons I am and will remain a Catholic. God has allowed it, it is thus. And he will finally judge babylon, not us.
Christ said give unto Ceasar, and then went willingly to Jerusalem to face judgment by the Sanhedrin, Herod and the Emperor’s duly appointed governor. Paul, Augustine, and Aquinas – not to mention our pope and all the current hierarchy, the Senhedrin’s heirs in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple cult – have all approved his act.
Christ’s submission in this, and rejection of satan’s offer of power after his fast, only highlight the fact that the state has every right to execute whomever ceasar wills.
Tomas de Torquemada, pray for us.
Deus vult. QED.
--
James O'Malley (04:31:12) :
“the state has every right to execute whomever ceasar wills.”
IMHO, that’s a pretty creepy (as well as false) statement. Even the Roman Catechism’s statement on capital punishment doesn’t say the government can kill whomever it pleases.
--
Charles Curtis (04:44:17) :
Hyperbolic excess. I’m amusing myself. Arturo always provokes me. Whatever I say is his fault.
It’s like when Cardinal Newman said it would be better for the whole universe to be destroyed than the least venial sin committed. Or when Luther said sin boldly.
Who’s right? God is. He let all this happen, and governments do indeed kill who they will. The bishops say abortion is homicide. Then we drop bombs on little brown people, salute the flag of a masonic republic, assassinate foreign heads of state, and then go back to our coffee.
It’s funny, is all I’m saying. Rock on.
--
The Singular Observer (20:06:13) :
Context:
Luther’s famous “sin boldly” quote is rarely given within context. The context was in a letter to Melanchthon, who was “hand wringing” over the question whether he’d be doing the wrong thing if he got married. So Luther advised him to “sin boldly”, i.e. make a decision and do it, and stop obsessing if it is sinful or not. Melanchthon was worried over the vow-breaking that marriage would entail.
Just thought I’d mention it. Here’s the full quote: “If you are a preacher of Grace, then preach a true, not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly. For he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here we have to sin. This life in not the dwelling place of righteousness but, as Peter says [2 Pet 3:13], we look for a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. . . . Pray boldly-you too are a mighty sinner.
--
Charles Curtis (20:28:25) :
Which is to say that Luther resorted to hyperbole, to make a point.
Just as what I wrote is ad absurdum, from a rational point of view. Even if the gist of what Christ did is pretty clear. What he said was clear, too: “My Kingdom is not of this world,” He also uses a lot of Semitic hyperbole, to get people’s attention. That’s one of the reasons scripture is so challenging, and we need tradition’s context to understand it.
I’ll put my own take unambiguously: we tend to warp our pieties together, and turn patriotism into a religion. “In God We Trust,” “One Nation Under God,” and all that nonsense. The god on the dollar bill is not Jesus. It’s mammon, and that’s anti-christ. I’m sick of this imbecilic self-satisfied tribalism, especially when it leads to these howling inconsistent standards when it comes to killing. 60 years ago people demonized Jews, even normal Catholics and Americans. Now, we’re doing it to Muslims, and that’s leading us to act in hideous ways. Why don’t we put images of all the children in Afghanistan and Iraq that we’ve blown to viscera up next to those obscene photos of abortion effluent? Why not? I’ll tell you: Because those shredded children condemn us all. Everyone one. Not just the fags and abortionists.
You howl when Obama speaks at Notre Dame, but stay silent when that masonic clown (“Jesus is my favorite philosopher”) Bush pretends to be “one of us” and “pro-life?” I’m nauseous. What a joke.
One of the reasons I love Arturo, is that all his intellectual pretensions aside, he knows how to write good satire, and for that I thank him. Thus spake Vasquez. Skewer away, Arturo. Keep slapping us in our bovine mugs.
Christ said something about reading the signs of the times. Feel the way the wind is blowing? Notice how the gnostics have overrun the culture, and even our bishops have fallen oddly silent?
Arturo isn’t half scathing enough.
---
Commenting that he "found this guy’s approach oddly refreshing, in a masochistic sort of way. Hey, other people are thinking it, this guy just says it's allowed.."
I responded in the comments. I share the thread as is now stands, because I want to broach these themes sooner than later. I've been being chary, uncertain of how to begin. There's a lot to be said, and I want to say it as level and eloquently as I can.
No more hesitation, then. I'm just going to jump:
[The comments are ordered by time-stamp over the last 18 or so hours. The timestamps on Arturo's blog are 3 hours behind EST, so my initial post was 11 pm/2300 last night, and my last about a half hour ago, about 5pm/1700 EST. I've made a few small corrections here to mine and my interlocutors' prose. Click through to visit Arturo's site if you want to follow the discussion, assuming it continues..]
Charles Curtis (02:07:40) :
“I was head of the CIA’s Latin American Bureau and I had major role in overthrowing what’s his name.” British interviewer dude: “Salvadore Allende? That’s his name.”
Love it. God Bless America.
Just like I love it when the liberal (to clarify, nearly all of us are liberals, the libertarian capitalist is the arch-liberal) runs up against the scandalous reality that the state does in fact sacralize violence. That’s its entire raison d’etre. All the sanctimonious handwringing over abortion, war, capital punishment – all of it is effete decadent childishness. The Catholic Church has never shrunk from that reality, and that’s one of the reasons I am and will remain a Catholic. God has allowed it, it is thus. And he will finally judge babylon, not us.
Christ said give unto Ceasar, and then went willingly to Jerusalem to face judgment by the Sanhedrin, Herod and the Emperor’s duly appointed governor. Paul, Augustine, and Aquinas – not to mention our pope and all the current hierarchy, the Senhedrin’s heirs in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple cult – have all approved his act.
Christ’s submission in this, and rejection of satan’s offer of power after his fast, only highlight the fact that the state has every right to execute whomever ceasar wills.
Tomas de Torquemada, pray for us.
Deus vult. QED.
--
James O'Malley (04:31:12) :
“the state has every right to execute whomever ceasar wills.”
IMHO, that’s a pretty creepy (as well as false) statement. Even the Roman Catechism’s statement on capital punishment doesn’t say the government can kill whomever it pleases.
--
Charles Curtis (04:44:17) :
Hyperbolic excess. I’m amusing myself. Arturo always provokes me. Whatever I say is his fault.
It’s like when Cardinal Newman said it would be better for the whole universe to be destroyed than the least venial sin committed. Or when Luther said sin boldly.
Who’s right? God is. He let all this happen, and governments do indeed kill who they will. The bishops say abortion is homicide. Then we drop bombs on little brown people, salute the flag of a masonic republic, assassinate foreign heads of state, and then go back to our coffee.
It’s funny, is all I’m saying. Rock on.
--
The Singular Observer (20:06:13) :
Context:
Luther’s famous “sin boldly” quote is rarely given within context. The context was in a letter to Melanchthon, who was “hand wringing” over the question whether he’d be doing the wrong thing if he got married. So Luther advised him to “sin boldly”, i.e. make a decision and do it, and stop obsessing if it is sinful or not. Melanchthon was worried over the vow-breaking that marriage would entail.
Just thought I’d mention it. Here’s the full quote: “If you are a preacher of Grace, then preach a true, not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly. For he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here we have to sin. This life in not the dwelling place of righteousness but, as Peter says [2 Pet 3:13], we look for a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. . . . Pray boldly-you too are a mighty sinner.
--
Charles Curtis (20:28:25) :
Which is to say that Luther resorted to hyperbole, to make a point.
Just as what I wrote is ad absurdum, from a rational point of view. Even if the gist of what Christ did is pretty clear. What he said was clear, too: “My Kingdom is not of this world,” He also uses a lot of Semitic hyperbole, to get people’s attention. That’s one of the reasons scripture is so challenging, and we need tradition’s context to understand it.
I’ll put my own take unambiguously: we tend to warp our pieties together, and turn patriotism into a religion. “In God We Trust,” “One Nation Under God,” and all that nonsense. The god on the dollar bill is not Jesus. It’s mammon, and that’s anti-christ. I’m sick of this imbecilic self-satisfied tribalism, especially when it leads to these howling inconsistent standards when it comes to killing. 60 years ago people demonized Jews, even normal Catholics and Americans. Now, we’re doing it to Muslims, and that’s leading us to act in hideous ways. Why don’t we put images of all the children in Afghanistan and Iraq that we’ve blown to viscera up next to those obscene photos of abortion effluent? Why not? I’ll tell you: Because those shredded children condemn us all. Everyone one. Not just the fags and abortionists.
You howl when Obama speaks at Notre Dame, but stay silent when that masonic clown (“Jesus is my favorite philosopher”) Bush pretends to be “one of us” and “pro-life?” I’m nauseous. What a joke.
One of the reasons I love Arturo, is that all his intellectual pretensions aside, he knows how to write good satire, and for that I thank him. Thus spake Vasquez. Skewer away, Arturo. Keep slapping us in our bovine mugs.
Christ said something about reading the signs of the times. Feel the way the wind is blowing? Notice how the gnostics have overrun the culture, and even our bishops have fallen oddly silent?
Arturo isn’t half scathing enough.
---
Friday, March 4, 2011
Say, Who's the Enemy? [edited]
Not that Bradley Manning isn't a jackass and a twerp who deserves to be dishonorably discharged if proven guilty, and not that virtually all the information he is alleged to have released isn't of little interest and value, from what I've read it's mostly ho-hum we already guessed that that's what they were saying..
It's that the National Security aparatus has become a state within the state, and their penchant for overweening secrecy has no remaining legitimate purpose to continue now that the Cold War is over. None.
Compare Manning's story with that of Daniel Ellsberg, whose revelations of the Pentagon Papers did matter, and went a long way toward ending another cruel useless war in Asia, one that cost the lives of thousands of Americans (58,267 KIA, 1,711 MIA, over 300,000 WIA) and killed hundreds of thousands of locals.
Ellsberg's case went to trial, but was undone by the furor of Watergate and the government's inability to muster proper evidence.
Kissinger, that mass-murderer and assassin, had the gall to call him "the Most Dangerous Man in America:"
Note that the material Ellsberg released is still classified, despite having now been public knowledge for over forty years.
Ellsberg never served a day in prison, and neither should Manning.
All this violence, death and lying, all this secrecy, all this vicious stupidity for nothing. Absolutely nothing. Vietnam was ultimately meaningless, just as is our continued occupation of random valleys in Afghanistan.
Mr. Obama, what's the purpose? Why are our troops still in harms way?
The executive branch and its putative subordinate the Pentagon are out of control, all of this militarism and secrecy needs to end. Now.
This from Antiwar.com:
Having held Private First Class Bradley Manning prisoner for nine months, under conditions tantamount to torture and beyond doubt intended to break his will, the US Army recombobulated its allegations against him on Wednesday, adding 22 counts to an already lengthy charge sheet.
As a practical matter, these changes probably don’t make a lot of difference to Manning. He’s faced a likely life sentence for nearly a year now. Since the Army’s prosecutors claim they won’t seek the death penalty provided for in one of the new counts, the consequences for him, if convicted, remain pretty much the same.
That new count – "aiding the enemy" per Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice — is really directed not at Manning, but at an assortment of other persons and parties: Wikileaks, Julian Assange, every foreign government and individual on earth … and you. And the act of filing that charge is, oddly enough, tantamount to insurrection against the United States itself.
Let’s unpack this "enemy" thing.
The power to declare war — and thereby to legally categorize a group of persons (historically on, but not necessarily constrained to, the basis of their allegiance to a particular state) as "the enemy" — is exclusively reserved, per the US Constitution, to Congress. Congress hasn’t exercised that power since 1941, and the wars it declared then have long since ended. The United States is not, legally speaking, at war. Thus the US has, legally speaking, no "enemy" to aid.
By charging Manning with "aiding the enemy," the US Army is, in effect, attempting a coup d’etat. It is usurping Congress’s authority and claiming that authority for itself. Since the President of the United States is also Commander in Chief of the US armed forces, the Army is presumably merely the President’s instrument in this matter.
[...]
Who is the "enemy?" Certainly not the (now long-deposed) regime of Saddam’s Iraq, nor the Taliban who ran (and mostly still run) Afghanistan. We can exclude these two as the designated "enemies" for two reasons.
First, not only did Congress (to the extent that the executive branch bothers even formally acknowledging that institution’s authority these days) not declare war on either of them, it specifically declared that it was not declaring war on them. If you don’t believe me, look at the "authorizations for use of force" yourself and read the "war powers reservations" sections. Recall that bills were introduced to declare war on both, and rejected.
Secondly, no one has said, with a straight face at least, that Manning intended his alleged releases of information for the eyes and ears of the Taliban, or of al-Qaeda, or of whatever ragged remnant of the Ba’ath Party persists in Iraq.
On the contrary: The intended recipients seem to have been an Iceland-hosted web site, an Australian transparency activist, and the world (including the American) media and public. They (You! Me!) are the "enemy" to whom Manning allegedly disclosed the state’s embarrassing secrets.
QED, the US government considers you — whoever you are, wherever you may live, and to whatever extent you aren’t its active agent — its enemy and intends to treat you as such. Your freedom, perhaps even your very survival, depends on you recognizing this fact and acting accordingly.
---
Side note: Not that the entire Watergate and Ellsberg story doesn't deserve critical scrutiny in it's own right. I think that Nixon did have powerful enemies within the elite that wanted to destroy him, and that there were things going on behind the scenes within the power elite from the Kennedy assassination to the rise of Reagan that were very fishy. Ellsberg may have gotten off the hook because he was meant to.. That's a conjecture, but I think an utterly obvious one. He certainly had very powerful allies the likes of which Pfc. Manning does not.
===
It's that the National Security aparatus has become a state within the state, and their penchant for overweening secrecy has no remaining legitimate purpose to continue now that the Cold War is over. None.
Compare Manning's story with that of Daniel Ellsberg, whose revelations of the Pentagon Papers did matter, and went a long way toward ending another cruel useless war in Asia, one that cost the lives of thousands of Americans (58,267 KIA, 1,711 MIA, over 300,000 WIA) and killed hundreds of thousands of locals.
Ellsberg's case went to trial, but was undone by the furor of Watergate and the government's inability to muster proper evidence.
Kissinger, that mass-murderer and assassin, had the gall to call him "the Most Dangerous Man in America:"
Note that the material Ellsberg released is still classified, despite having now been public knowledge for over forty years.
Ellsberg never served a day in prison, and neither should Manning.
All this violence, death and lying, all this secrecy, all this vicious stupidity for nothing. Absolutely nothing. Vietnam was ultimately meaningless, just as is our continued occupation of random valleys in Afghanistan.
Mr. Obama, what's the purpose? Why are our troops still in harms way?
The executive branch and its putative subordinate the Pentagon are out of control, all of this militarism and secrecy needs to end. Now.
This from Antiwar.com:
Having held Private First Class Bradley Manning prisoner for nine months, under conditions tantamount to torture and beyond doubt intended to break his will, the US Army recombobulated its allegations against him on Wednesday, adding 22 counts to an already lengthy charge sheet.
As a practical matter, these changes probably don’t make a lot of difference to Manning. He’s faced a likely life sentence for nearly a year now. Since the Army’s prosecutors claim they won’t seek the death penalty provided for in one of the new counts, the consequences for him, if convicted, remain pretty much the same.
That new count – "aiding the enemy" per Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice — is really directed not at Manning, but at an assortment of other persons and parties: Wikileaks, Julian Assange, every foreign government and individual on earth … and you. And the act of filing that charge is, oddly enough, tantamount to insurrection against the United States itself.
Let’s unpack this "enemy" thing.
The power to declare war — and thereby to legally categorize a group of persons (historically on, but not necessarily constrained to, the basis of their allegiance to a particular state) as "the enemy" — is exclusively reserved, per the US Constitution, to Congress. Congress hasn’t exercised that power since 1941, and the wars it declared then have long since ended. The United States is not, legally speaking, at war. Thus the US has, legally speaking, no "enemy" to aid.
By charging Manning with "aiding the enemy," the US Army is, in effect, attempting a coup d’etat. It is usurping Congress’s authority and claiming that authority for itself. Since the President of the United States is also Commander in Chief of the US armed forces, the Army is presumably merely the President’s instrument in this matter.
[...]
Who is the "enemy?" Certainly not the (now long-deposed) regime of Saddam’s Iraq, nor the Taliban who ran (and mostly still run) Afghanistan. We can exclude these two as the designated "enemies" for two reasons.
First, not only did Congress (to the extent that the executive branch bothers even formally acknowledging that institution’s authority these days) not declare war on either of them, it specifically declared that it was not declaring war on them. If you don’t believe me, look at the "authorizations for use of force" yourself and read the "war powers reservations" sections. Recall that bills were introduced to declare war on both, and rejected.
Secondly, no one has said, with a straight face at least, that Manning intended his alleged releases of information for the eyes and ears of the Taliban, or of al-Qaeda, or of whatever ragged remnant of the Ba’ath Party persists in Iraq.
On the contrary: The intended recipients seem to have been an Iceland-hosted web site, an Australian transparency activist, and the world (including the American) media and public. They (You! Me!) are the "enemy" to whom Manning allegedly disclosed the state’s embarrassing secrets.
QED, the US government considers you — whoever you are, wherever you may live, and to whatever extent you aren’t its active agent — its enemy and intends to treat you as such. Your freedom, perhaps even your very survival, depends on you recognizing this fact and acting accordingly.
---
Side note: Not that the entire Watergate and Ellsberg story doesn't deserve critical scrutiny in it's own right. I think that Nixon did have powerful enemies within the elite that wanted to destroy him, and that there were things going on behind the scenes within the power elite from the Kennedy assassination to the rise of Reagan that were very fishy. Ellsberg may have gotten off the hook because he was meant to.. That's a conjecture, but I think an utterly obvious one. He certainly had very powerful allies the likes of which Pfc. Manning does not.
===
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