Way Out East in Ukraine, the Rush Was On

I am late getting to the topic of the next triple seven throw of the aircraft to roll for the media. Way out east in the Ukraine the rush was on to get the first pictures of the bodies that are worth their weight in gold. Probably ground guides were hired and satellite photos scanned to find the body fields where the tragic corpses were located like casualties of a Napoleonic battle.

It’s not my fault I’m late-I was trying to figure out how to get MSWord’s speech-to-text stuff to work. I didn’t know it existed. Evidently one can just talk to one’s pc and make a book get written down.  I like the idea a lot. It will be easier to get natural sounding writing. (mmm-hmmm, neva staat a song-ya- wrote with well I)

So fist things first; the bodies in the Eastern Ukraine. Will they be held for ransom or auctioned off on EBay so President Vladimir Putin can prove to the west that he is not a closet commie?  Those bodies have value and have already disappeared in sealed train cars for Moscow maybe, or perhaps the long way round to the Netherlands via Upper Skype and a Journey from Petersburg to Rome. The media will have a field month following the money.

My civilized world college professor Rurhwin Gory, said that Russians must never forget they owe us big time for liberating Eastern Europe form Volk-Nazis in the Second World War. Why are they biting that hand that feeds them risking the pollution of precious bodily fluids all around? Electronic cars are cleaner than dinosaur-mobiles.

Four scorned decades ago Elvis Presley might have twitted like a jailbird canary singin for the dough about being a-hunk-a- hunk of burnin aircraft yet wisely he didn’t. In the golden age of the 60s burning aircraft and the paparrizzi had a less volatile relationship in the pool of propaganda and publicity. Investigators soberly sought proximal rather than political causes for made-for-television events staged in the theatre of the absurd.

So today we can speculate about Malaysian Air sending a 777 loaded with citizens of their former colonial power gotten rid of only through protracted, bloody war repeatedly through a war zone and wonder why they would do that?

Death is tragic yet let the dead bury the dead has good practical meaning. The saved are in the kingdom of God already.

We wonder why defenders of Mother Russia in the Ukraine are called terrorists pejoratively by the Western media, and why the Nobel Prize committee gave President Obama a Nobel Peace Prize for what would be the foundation of the protracted unintentional development of terrorist organizations across North Africa and the Middle East and creation of a Caliphate in parts of Syria and Iraq where Christians were expelled on pain of death? Perhaps it was for supporting theft of the Russian Ukraine by the Clinton administration boozing up Boris Yeltsin?

Irregular military forces perpetrate the most war crimes because they haven’t got the military discipline. Stuff such as that is well known and predictably in the fog of war if one sends aircraft into areas defended with anti-aircraft missiles some will get shot down. Rebels don’t have good VACR training and probably have bad vision for seeing at 30,000 feet where the bombers like to hang out above-it-all. Homeland security defenders of the Eastern Ukraine also don’t have electronic technology in their missiles to identify friend or foe e-prints to avoid hitting friendly aircraft as U.S. and N.A.T.O. missiles have. It’s not that the average gay-pot smoking, hip hopping N.A.T.O. cadre with a stinger is a more responsible shooter of aircraft than a rebel-he, she or transgender it has better idiot-proof rockets in his/her or its bag of tricks to eradicate the sky of perpetrators and make the world safe for the innocents ready to buy up the country at bargain prices, package and resell it on EBay or in Shanghai.

There is an ancient Zen koan that originated in West Texas that goes ‘What goes around, comes around’. Correctly interpreted the right answer is; a circle. Squaring the circle only makes the answer better and worth more.

Plainly I have probably written enough on this uninteresting topic already. I will leave off the efforts of the administration to increase Muslim terror organization in the Eastern Ukraine since Russia is no longer our ally in the war against resistance to development of a Caliphate since it already exist. There is lots of kitsch to add to the borscht of cabbage patch consumer stew that has to be omitted for due to time limitations. Remember though, Russia is the biggest geographically Christian country on Earth. Russians could be concerned about the rise of the Caliphate- the U.S.A. isn’t. So the administration says; sanction you!

Tri-Chess; Third Party Interventionists

Chess traditionally is the ultimate two-party board game. In the present computing age it is possible to introduce a third opponent to the game, possibly as a mysterious alien power that interpolates its pieces into ongoing games to attack or defend whosoever it will. Players would need to determine if they should attack or defend the new pieces of uncertain purpose, or if they continue to attack each other or adopt cooperative strategies against the mysterious appearing extra-dimensional pawns, bishops, knights, king and queen. Obviously there are innumerable contexts and quantities in which the pieces might be made to appear by the operating system program.

If someone hasn't written the program for Tri-chess, if might be fun to create. 

Evolution Theory Pedagogues Raising Ethical Vegetables?

Evolution theory in the moral sphere seems to lead to retreat from morality with Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil as a guide to a renormative condition. With the abandonment of any sort of philosophical realism and with an amoral ideal of intellectual meaninglessness presiding anti-moral authorities make it possible for society to drift into meaninglessness as the right way of being. Evolving genes and pragmatic personal egoism are the nuevo shining path vacating even the concept of natural selection as too cruel. Nothing matters better than nothing. The center for disease control is a pragmatic survivor of the culling of what is regarded as empirically meaninglessness objective realism governing evolutionary ethical vegetables.

Reading moral relativism into any social circumstance as an evolutionary exercise of phenomenal diplomacy stimulated amoral lying and dissimulation evolved to high art. Inertially moving forward like a vast social amoeba the evolutionary market favoring corporate and government collectivism with same-sexed do-oozing of evolution is regarded as the highest personification of Hegel's dialectical evolution of the state devolved to a material, atheist formlessness ethically void of need for theory, description, management or correction.

I believe that some sort of Platonic or neo-Platonic realism of forms and categories is necessary for sentient thought without too much analogue computer dyslexia with the cursor skipping mid-sentence anyplace at all-even to an alternative paragraph. At the social and media level the social attention follows the day's headline as if that were the important political issue. If a border needs to be adjusted for corporate market strategies the right stories will emerge. News stories on demand to sate the zeitgeist of the spiritless evolving social collective blob.

One might move beyond any sort of Platonic realism theoretically, perhaps with Barth and Tillich as theological inspirations, and with Quine, Kripke, Sartre, Plato and contemporary cosmological paradigms of physics in mind without letting the temporal phenomenalities of evolution mechanics overwhelm reason.

Educating Americans effectively in a condition of unethical evolutionary thought seems a direct consequence of the paradigm of evolving and ethics for evolution theory parameter renormalization. Evolution theory, the preeminent educational instruction in public schools, without accompanying philosophical education about where temporal biophysical mechanics fit into subjective and social epistemology and even the sentient capacity for cognition and reasoning leads to a social acceptance of ethical death and epistemological meaninglessness with mind explained as a meaningless phenomena interpreting just atoms.

Even within a purely physical cosmology there is more to the steady-state field in which the material Universe and evolutionary history occurs. That metaphysics or meta-evolutionary research is transformative from the meaninglessness of ethical vegetation and spiritual death that too many elites believe is a necessary strict inference being informed by evolution theory. Nothing could be farther from the truth of course, and truth does exist in several contexts-not only that of disquotation theory.

Administration policy in the Middle East and the Ukraine seems informed by the vegetative ethics ending at the death of soul following evolution theory. Lawlessness-what the ancient Greeks called anomia - developed with administration policy in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Iraq with the vacuum filled in by ad hoc terrorists and strong men. It appears that the same drift toward anomia may be developing with administration policy implementation in Ukraine. In the absence of U.S. interference Ukraine would naturally be in the Russian sphere of influence and move through history without the breaks of violence and political contentiousness that have occurred with loss of life.

There are real social consequence to taking up and promulgating globally a vegetable ethics of evolution and no-mind-you that matters. Anomia may be the consequence of organic corporatism and government collective efforts to glom up territory and power in vulnerable regions- bullying them in to submission . Chaos and protracted civil wars may arise, local leadership may find global patrons providing weapons and financial assistance for their allegiance to a new ethics beyond good and evil. The race to the top of education may become a race and gender policy of class redistribution of power in replacement of discredited intellectual enterprise and high ability for creative thought. In such an era might the Nietzschian supermen of transcendent political effectiveness arise.

Fracking Up Slope & Down Below the Ocean

Alaska’s oil fields are running down. The state has cut oil corporation taxes in order to stimulate production. Voters will have an opportunity to repeal that tax. It’s a controversial issue especially since oil corporations will one day probably frack the existing fields and return oil production to the original levels. Fracking the North Slope and Cook inlet oil and gas fields are more controversial issues.

The state government collective for mutual prosperity relies on oil taxes for the majority of income. It has obligations of billions in pensions.  The government has reliance of oil sales taxes/royalties for funding. It has conflicts of interests in environmental conservation affairs all the time. Development is usually decided in favor of development. More roads, more oil drilling, more logging, more fishing, more hunting-less diversity of life in Alaska and decrease of environmental health.

Probably no one has done a study of potential effects of fracking on Alaska groundwater or of fracking below permafrost subject to global warming melting. It’s an interesting concept though. Oil corporations might find fracking cheaper than exploring and drilling new holes in the ground on and/or offshore. I suppose they will like tax cuts regardless.

Administration Should Use Restraint in Criticism of Russia/Ukraine

American support for separation of Ukraine from Russia is something like Russia supporting a Canadian annexation of New England. Ukraine is the place Russia started. Only in the confusion of the gentlemanly end of the Soviet Union did a brave yet drunken Boris Yeltsin found wandering in a stupor around the White House lawn sign away Ukraine to a particular band of rebels. America has a post-Korean history of becoming rather swollen with military power on political affairs internationally yet short on intellect, diplomacy and understanding of real politics. Richard Nixon had an abundance of that, yet flamed out domestically with Watergate.

I do not understand the American trait of choosing belligerence over friendliness. Some believe one needs to be mean to be wealthy, or that the wealthy are not lambs. If that is so, neither does intelligence find its natural occurrence within the characteristics of cruel or predatory behavior. Perhaps the stupid and cruel or treacherous and deceptive are the scum that rise to the top of politics? Well, we will leave that philosophical question and consider the real-world potential for creating a long-term bellicosity with Russia a little later in this essay.  Russia could just launch some nukes on the U.S.A. and vice versa I suppose, yet there is a plethora of adverse elements that could arise even if it is just not sharing intelligence with the U.S.A. about Muslim terrorists.

The Obama administration has completely misunderstood the Muslim world and its ability or interest in democracy. It continues to view the world as if everyone wanted and American style democracy while losing much of America's ability for moral suasion. While the United States still has much wealth it also has much debt. The present administration fiscal policy seems likely to build up Chinese industry more so than that of the U.S.A. and transfer American investment into China though the stock market is at a record high with the surge of Chinese growth preponderantly. That policy won't necessarily be of benefit to ordinary Americans down the road with political and economic leverage transferring to the Chinese side of the Pacific.

When Ronald Reagan enabled the Soviets to choose free enterprise America and the world averted a potential nuclear conflict of vast scale. Follow up Democrats of course became rather swollen about American power and continue to do so. Russians were not militarily defeated any more than the Taliban, Al Qaeda, the Viet Cong or Iran. American leadership has often started large conflicts with second and third world nations bringing about the death of millions altogether without competence in understanding the potential for building a peace in case a military victory does not end the political cancer perceived by Washington physicians of war. Russia resisted Napoleon and Hitler and may be recalcitrant about yielding to a gayed-up Washington D.C. democrat party. Neither was it a good idea to fail to treat Russia as a peer and business partner and get really involved while accepting Russia's right to its own values. Formerly the French became protective about their culture from Americanisms and we learned to accept that. Not everyone wants a global plutocracy or Washington D.C.-Wall Street axis of corporatism determining the composition of their culture, people or economic structure.

Russia post cold war with America's failure to get enthusiastically involved failed to secure its plutonium and highly enriched uranium. As late as 1999 shoppers could walk into a warehouse in Kazakhstan and evidently bid on the latter material. Iranians visited shortly before American inspectors. It is impossible to say what they got.

Within thirty miles of Moscow plutonium was stored in a building anyone could drive a truck up to secured only by an ordinary locked door. In the Soviet Union internal security wasn't considered necessary because of the draconian power of the K.G.B. Very likely the mafias and others seeking materials of value that plundered the entire nation spirited away some. No one will ever know.

Additionally biological war materials were developed at the Caspian Sea site and through Biopreparat. Much of the materials were destroyed eventually however tons were simply buried in Siberia. The Soviets had worked on making two-part biotoxins such as a pneumonic plague that would be followed up for survivors with an attack on the immune system. Russia has a host of great scientists and can sell whatever it invents to China too I suppose if America sanctions it too much. Russia's ability to drive up American defense costs by selling technology to China is very high. While Russia won't afford to build a blue water navy able to challenge the U.S. Navy it can sell 1000 mile per hour torpedo schematics, advise on building nuclear submarines and drone submarines and provide technical assistance for construction of stealthy drone aircraft carriers-perhaps even submersible ones, and help with the Chinese Space program or even that of Qatar that seems determined to fly a craft to Mars.

Traditional American political belligerence doesn't always work nor is it always the right approach. Now and them discretion and cooperation is advised and skipping the repress the rivals path should be avoided. The administration should be careful about being international martinets, and do so only with caution if at all remembering the real-world public debt, unsecured Mexican border and further advance of transportation and communications of the rest of the world to America borders and interests. At some point China alone could shut down the U.S. economy just by stopping exports to the U.S.A. for a few months. D.C. isn't looking ahead.

New and Old Issues For Israel & the Middle East

The great commission given Jesus resurrected described by Matthew begins this little trek.

“Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations.”

It was given to the eleven disciples apparently, and in Galilee, away from the cosmopolitan center of Jerusalem and some doubted. The author of a lecture I read considers the places where the word doubt (in translation of course) is used in the gospel of Matthew and the way it indicates that Matthew understood the issue of doubt about the resurrection. It is notable that one additional place where the word doubt is used is in regard to the fig tree. Jesus knew about the issue of doubt too. In spite of everything he had done people would doubt-even with remedial help (fertilizer) given.

The lecture moved on to consider the authority of Jesus expressed in the gospel according to Matthew, since (Matthew 28:18), “Then Jesus came to them and said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.’” The next few paragraphs are an interesting bit of exegesis and illustration made by a scholar with decades of Bible learning. Find such if you have the time-it is time well spent.

Besides the Fertile Crescent running through Israel as a trade route from Babylon there is the historical issue of Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies, Seleucids and Maccabees leading to the Roman invasion of Jerusalem. The Jews had already had an apprenticeship in captivity in Egypt and Babylon.

 Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned from the Jewish times in captivity. They have also been made captives by Soviets, Germans and Thessalonica was depopulated of them largely by the Nazis after Jews gathered there centuries before after expulsion from Spain. Christians as spiritual Jews, or the new and improved nation of Israel (remember Jacob/Yiśrāʾēl-'perservere with God), may have something to learn from that-don’t return to the spiritual bondage of the laws, Sharia or whathaveyou and carnality in which there is no forgiveness of sin possible-for only the Lord was perfectly free from sin and only through faith in Jesus Christ may one be set free.

The Persians were better rulers of conquered peoples than the Babylonians-Cyrus the Great is an example. The Romans have Ptolemy tramping through the Temple as of he were Antiochus Epiphanes (I believe I read about the succession of good and bad Jewish rulers in a book at the Houston Graduate School of Theology long ago). Eventually a non-Jewish King Herod only married into Jewish royalty marginally builds a lot. He may be have been something like an evil Donald Trump, except Trump didn’t have his heirs killed and a generation of babies slaughtered to pre-empt a rival ‘King of the Jews’. Democrats do that with support for abortion getting rid of potential Republican voters while they arrange for the illegal immigration of Latinos so they can vote Democrat and take back Texas from Republicans locking up the electoral college (sort of joking a little about that yet not too much).

Investigating the common perceptions about Pilate as a Governor (good guy vs. bad guy), the crucifixion and the Jewish revolt of 66-73 brings one rocketing through the first century of history through an important local periscope with global consequences. The importance of the revolt can be explained in an informative way. In one year the Romans had four emperors and the son of the General who destroyed Jerusalem-Vespasian is made Emperor. That Emperor-Titus was the patron of Josephus the writer. I’ve been doing some historical reading-I did not invent that observation myself.

Quite a bit of time passed from the crucifixion of Jesus to the writing by Josephus of the Jewish War. Obviously he needed to be very careful about what he wrote. There were thousands of crucifixions made by Romans then as they amused themselves finding novel ways to nail ‘em up finally running out of space for crosses (probably no fun crucifying squirming wretches for a living either). Plainly Josephus didn’t want to write too much about a ‘king of the Jews’ that wasn’t appointed by Rome and was already regarded by some of the Roman leadership as the source of trouble-making.

In 135 A.D. the Bar Kokokba revolt occurred-Emperor Hadrian suppressed it and built a temple of Zeus on the temple mount. Jews were given the death penalty if they were found in Jerusalem. In 200 A.D. the Mishnah was put together codifying rabbinic law. This little historical excursion allows a better idea of some of the reasons why history developed the way it did-and also provides some of the irony of history. The parable of the fig tree did warn that the tree would be cut down if it wasn’t productive. Unintentional Roman payback for Jewish leadership choice to crucify the Lord was mass crucifixions of Jewish survivors. History had only then started along the wrong selection corrections course for the decision of the elitist Sanhedrin.

The Jews have had a tough role as God’s chosen people being a blessing to all nations. One considers Einstein and Yassir Arafat; one can point out Omar Khayyam as a Muslim yet he was really Persian rather than Arab. The Arabs as Ishmaels sons seem to have been a little cursed-with the Ottoman Empire and abundant fossil fuels contributing to global warming and a dinosaur like death originating in a now desertified former Eden.

Some Jews have been saved through the Lord, and all Christians are spiritual Jews. They still have an important role in history and it seems evident that the Muslims –persecuting the Jews- are cursed. How could Muslim leadership be unaware that terrorist political leadership worst cases Palestinian and Muslim political development? Terrorists don’t operate along lines of Kant’s moral imperative. They don’t seek objective improvement for all human beings first nationally then globally in accord with the will of the governed. Instead political relativism elevates any silly political plank a candidate has to canonized status once he/she/it is in power instead of finding candidates with good ideas who are elected because they have good ideas. Cult over competence and mind over matter are dialectically opposite sides of e-coin.

Terrorist political leadership seeking to bring chunks of Israel into a recrudescent Caliphate conflict continues today. The Temple of Zeus or the Dome of the Rock on the temple mount symbolizes the realm of the lost. The media report from both sides of everything and invent some of their own cube roots. Rush Limbaugh as a populist like Ronald Reagan has driven the ecospheric and creative intelligentsia from the Republican Party while a succession of Democrat-like candidates has been elected pursing cult interests.

American political leadership is devoid of competence on macro-social issues except for Marko Rubio, Joe Miller, Rand Paul and eminence grilse Ralph Nadir. Even so President Bush II was correct about Al Qaeda seeking to establish a caliphate in Iraq and Syria. He had that report in 2006 I guess when ISIS got its start in Iraq.  Unintentionally perhaps, President Obama has loosened up the Middle East for terrorist organizing as he has U.S. national border security. The nation of Israel will need to persist even while the world is run by the lost pursuing ways of eternal death without God.

Post-Subjectivist Analysis & Biblical Criticism

Cutting the Gordian knot of Anecdotal Thought

Developing a systematic method of historical thought reading the major works of history and forming an innate composite historical paradigm can accompany reading in translation all of the major works of western philosophy and of world religion. One can read Toynbee’s Study of History, Treadgold’s works on Byzantium, Procopius and other classical and neo-classical historians and yet read systematic works of history such as a History of Salt and pre-histories of science, archaeology, evolutionary biology, geology, cosmology etc. and build an intellectual objectivity that is not skeptical. Instead one places human knowledge within the temporal, contingent parameters of created, temporal space-time phenomena. Christians in the kingdom of God are I think comparable to prime numbers within an infinite series of numbers though they are given that status through grace. The kingdom of God is within you, and that is faith in the Lord. Jesus is Lord transcending the temporal creation-actually he created it- hence the last supper. Like sentient program code in a partitioned operating system Universe people of faith with Jesus as their Lord transcend the partition and exist concurrently within the meta-operating system of God.

The danger for the users of specialized literary tools for analysis I suppose is that they may restrict their own theory of knowledge to a particular methodology such as regarding the Bible from a purely literary perspective, from a deconstructionist viewpoint, solely as a work of history etc. It seems that one should have that archetypal left-right brain integration firing on all cylinders to understand all of the individual viewpoints on the Bible and regard the literary methods as special reading analysis tools instead of as ends-in-themselves.

I think perhaps one of the main lessons to draw from reading about particular theological methods of interpretation of and for drawing out the meaning of the Bible accurately is that human beings just don’t know it all, and that it takes an incredible amount of time and work to learn of what was provided in the Bible. Even so the brilliantly interesting concepts ontologically of ideas such as the Kingdom of God and the live presence of the Lord surrounding the temporal steady-state Universe make the reading of an historical text much more than reading say, The Civil War by Julius Caesar.

Elements of interpretation of different historical cultures show how people had different customs and meanings than today, or of one’s own if an author was writing in the past. The assumptions and operative beliefs of people in various historical periods differ. I would use the flood story of Genesis as an illustration. After the discovery that the world is round people interpreted Genesis to mean that the entire round world was flooded. Yet in the age of the proximal assembly of the book of Genesis in the court of Solomon or Rehoboam no one thought of the world as round. In Abraham’s time the whole world was probably just the region where the people lived, and earlier, in the flood era perhaps on the Persian Gulf shore thousands of years earlier, the reference term of the world that made it through oral tradition and later cuneiform to Abraham/AVRM was probably the first civilization-something a reader today naturally assumes if not putting a retro-cultural interpolated meaning of Urth/Earth world in to the book.

Scholars found the Donation of Constantine-a fraud-that influenced European history in the cultural interpretation context. It was subsequent literary-historical analysis that enfiladed the bogus origin of the document. Immanuel Kant and sapere aude as a symbol of the 19^th century age of reason was an abstract high ground approach to cutting through the Gordian know of anecdotal thought.

I think many people misunderstand Kant though. Kant was developing reason formally-like Descartes and that is fine-people don’t need to be stupid or have muddled thinking especially about the Bible. David Hume earlier recognized there was a lot of verbiage in pseudo-scientific publications of little merit. There was also philosophy that didn’t have much merit, so Hume besides being a friend of Adam Smith wrote on philosophy clarifying causality and other topics so far as he could. Readers of the Bible ought not be troubled by reason for they are not at all in conflict. There are categories of thought useful for classifying knowledge, yet not all knowledge is given equal importance to individual obviously.

Hume was said by Kant to have awoke him from a dogmatic slumber. Kant was for intelligent thought and reason for-oneself rather than reliance upon social programming from authorities. Protestants especially should be untroubled by that approach since Martin Luther was not unwilling to use his own reason for interpreting scripture himself rather than to rely on the Catholic Church authorities on matters such as the sale of indulgences.

It is not a matter of refuting all knowledge and reinventing the wheel though Descartes sought to think from ‘first principles’ of thought while taking solitary saunas as a mercenary in Bavaria composing in mind content such as cogito ergo sum. Instead it is about personal intellectual liberty to consider for-oneself knowledge, scripture and the manifest Universe and experience in order to decide what one believes instead of reliance upon authorities historically upon pain of torture or death for dissent.

Kant in a sense was the second Aristotle bringing logic to a new level on the border of epistemology. Leibnitz of course wrote the first mathematical symbolic logic treatise yet never published it. I think that especially in light of the interpretation fallacy it is useful to have a formal understanding of the philosophical problems of empiricism and subjectivity. Quine transcended the criterion of empiricism in The Two Dogmas of Empiricism and later in Word and Object delineated the relationship between knower and known, and word and object in a sharp technical epistemology. P.F. Strawson-a contemporary of Quine, wrote a similar book titled ‘Individuals’.

Kant in writing his Critique of Pure Reason, a book that is summarized in a smaller, useful text named A Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, developed the knower-known epistemology. It is not a simple subjectivity and more than that of Tillich or Barth. The basic difference is that some things are phenomenal and others noumenal.  Like Socrates one tries to know what it is one knows and what one doesn’t. These are occupational concerns with real applications at a certain point. If the Universe has a holographic component it would be helpful to learn that, or if time can be reconstructed like points in a pointillist painting placed wherever the artist wishes it might be useful to find that out.

As technology and knowledge increase it is worth knowing what is as brief and meaningless later as a dead computer language and what things are of value. Finding eternal values in the kingdom of God amidst a world with a dangerous level of social subjectivity neurotic about Wall Street investments, networking, globalism and foreign investments, a world that disregards the objective ecospheric health and the transcendent values of the kingdom of God that is a light in the darkness of temporal materiality (solid-state waveform or string-membrane entanglement) is challenging for some. I believe reason can lead one to the revealed word of God-if the Holy Spirit wills it so.

Some things are knowable and some things are unknowable. That is, of the world and of knowledge we see through a glass darkly and only know it part. I believe that one of the fallacies of science is that everything can be known directly, and there are too many reasons to state here why that is unlikely. It is reasonable however to pursue knowledge so far as possible so long as one keeps that occupation in perspective as a temporal,  contingent pursuit useful while waiting upon the Lord.

Scholars have reviewed ‘the quest for the historical Jesus’, Ferdinand Christian Baur and The Tubingen School. Baur wrote ‘Orthodoxy and Heresy’.

The idea of Orthodoxy and Heresy is apparently that over the history of the church there were both and of course winners write history and there values won, yet even so the losers were good people to with good Christian theology. Maybe the gnostic heresies weren’t really off, or the Arian heresy either? The approach of Baur seems to be presented as one of the rising tide of post-renaissance humanism and subjectivism. I tend to view that as a result of the printing press and opportunities for everyone to write continuing today.  With so many opinions the politically harmonious thing to say may be that each opinion is as important as another.  A purely democratic opinion about religious equal opportunity and tolerance may prevent conflict socially yet be implicitly accurate. Consider if aircraft designs were all considered to be equal and subjective-things would crash a lot more.

Karl Barth and others have felt that except for revelation humanity could no nothing of God. In Jeremiah God did say that everyone knows him and they just forget who He is-an example of what Sartre called false consciousness. Yet God probably intended the knowledge to exist and revealed it. Unlike aircraft designs that can be empirically verified, revealed religious truths are self-standing and transcendent yet not subject to temporal verification. Thus arises a paradox that though religious truth is subjective it is founded on an objective revelation of the word of God and the Lord Jesus Christ. The subjective perception of revealed truth of God  is heterodox and objective. It is somewhat like a subjective way to transcendence of the temporal steady-state Universe in a relationship to the operating system administrator-creator who issued a Universe/Multiverse and Earth.

Perhaps there is counter-networking social phenomenon that conforms individual analytical methods, convenient use-truths and represses creative independent scholarly expression existing in unionized academia to while an ad hoc neo-monopoly  has arisen in finance and trade with people buying mutual funds and owning shares in rival corporations stifling competition. History bumps along with ecosphere and the revealed word of God in the Bible as externalities to be unconcerned about. The Anthropocene era of mass extinction of life may include the loss of much human spiritual life from entry in to the kingdom of God as well. The meaning of life for some is all about getting e-dollars issued by the Federal Reserve.

Federal Judges Bungling Same-Sex Marriage Oxymoron

U.S. Appeals Court decisions to overturn state’s bans on homosexual marriage exemplify legislating language, morals and law from the bench. Same sexes can’t marry; to marry means to join to different things together. Same-sex marriage is an oxymoron.

 

Social epistemology arising from the swamp of philosophical subjectivity to the point of solipsism flexing perquisites of aloof power can force redefinitions of social reality on the many. Yet language use and judging have objective as well as subjective components. Marriage refers not only to social and legal concepts built up by legislators and custom over centuries that are being torn down presently by federal judges, it has a physical referent as well.

 

W.V.O. Quine wrote a good philosophical-linguistic primer on analytic philosophy titled Word and Object.  I won’t venture into the field of what comprises a real object here, nevertheless there are real objectives or event-processes that exist in-the-world objectively perceptible to others and oneself socially, and that is also the realm where political issues occur. The mass media exist broadly in the realm of social language use with tremendous power to corrupt social reality in language content.

 

 Real objects and event-process(s) rather than entirely subjective-intentional ideas are the business of politics. Judges may make factual decisions in that realm generally instead of events comprising the subjective psychology or thoughts of citizens thinking-for-themselves. Marriage has a subjective social language component with traditional meaning yet also an objective material component. Word and object or material event-process concurs. Federal judges have detached from reality the word-meaning of marriage from the objective material fact of marriage.

 

Two different substances marry to create a new, third substance. To marry means to join to different substances making something new. What and flour combined make dough. In some substances such as color the union of two different colors produce a third color. Two different numbers multiplied together create another. Water of two temperatures added together make a different temperature, yet the adding together of two of the same of anything creates nothing new. There is an essential thermodynamic change in marriage that is hopefully for humans a way of developing better, more intelligent sentient beings capable of recognizing their Lord and host Jesus Christ-God (to much to hope for in Federal Appeals Court Judges perhaps).

 

I suppose a proper Socratic dialogue would look into that last point and look for an exception-there might be something witty to say; ‘Adding more public debt onto public debt creates a bigger mess than is imaginable’ or ‘adding more of the same sort of explosive will make a qualitatively different event’. Fortunately I don’t need to be so clever here in just describing the objective referent that the word marriage refers to at its core.

 

 Human beings-mammals-joined together in the social bonds called marriage are of two different sexes (substances) capable of making a third person. Human marriage is a codification of a monogamous procreative process. I would think that is why the 2012 Presidential contest was between a homosexual marriage organizer and a candidate from the historical church of polygamy-the elites of New England want to terminate marriage as a codification of monogamous procreation because of global over-population and resource depletion challenges. I would say that converting the truth to falsehood in legal language isn’t a good way to put it over on the demos.

 

The kingdom of God is as a mustard seed that started very small and grew to include very many Christians. Over the course of history since the ascension of the Lord the kingdom has simultaneously encountered the rise and fall of many nations. The U.S. Court of Appeals alumni association ought to stay right with God and the rational relationship of words and objects-event processes and forego further adulteration of the concept of marriage.

Do Republics Collapse into Plutocracy (video)

I read the post I wrote about the political transformation of Republics into the tyranny of the rich (plutocracy) that may result in an emperor (Caesar).  Either the rich may concentrate wealth and phase out Congress perhaps making the President an imperial stooge, or the public may demand a Caesar to counteract rich oligarchic Republicans. A depraved plebian set (democrats) may enjoy soma (dope) , bread, circuses and so worth with occasional military adventures in the empire. Maybe something like that happened in ancient Rome and will occur in the U.S.A.

Stuffed Chinese Dumplings for a Simple Low-cost Snack

Making a quick simple food in the field requires little more than flour, water, a can of spam and some seasoning. Chinese dumplings take advantage of the protein gluten in flower to form a wrappings for a little chunk of meat that will get dropped into boiling water for five minutes or so into a pot of boiling water until the meat is cooked varying of course upon how much meat is used.

http://culinaryarts.about.com/od/bakingdesserts/p/gluten.htm

Make a dough out of the flour adding a pinch of salt water to consistency, kneed it with hands and then flatten it with the heel of the hand, fold it over and repeat several times.  The dough could be the size of a softball.

Roll the dough into a lengthy shape then roll it out in two directions with a rolling pin until very thin. Take a cookie cutter or a glass at cut out little round pieces of dough onto which a piece of diced spa is placed in the center. Fold the dough over like fold a circle in half. Seal the dough without leaving air pockets and voila-drop the wrapped meat in the dough into thee boiling water.

It is possible to experiment with seasoning with the basic dough, and of course with different kinds of meat filling. Flour is affordable as is spam,  salt and water in first world nations. If one has chives or onion that too can be a good additive. Ketchup works great on this sort of thing too. Be careful about eating the dumpling before it cools.