O, Children: the day is here. :o)
I am vanishing from this blog—from easy access by external forces, to be more-precise—for at least three months. I will be back, just not until three months are over. The day is here. Every verse of the poem has arrived. Every hair of the head has grown. So the day is here.

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On lightweight, minimalist design: Minimalissimo. Now, it must be remembered that the rigours of real life do not permit all the sections/parts of a system worth the label “system” to be minimalist. They do not permit all the nodes of a network to be minimalist.

The work, in design, is not to attempt minimalist design all the way, but rather to create minimalism where the interaction happens, and move the complexity “inside”. This is how the human body is made, and beautifully-so.
The total amount of complexity that will end up in a system is constant; all you can do, if you are a good designer, is move as much of it “inside” as you can, while retaining usefulness.

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In many ways, Silhouette is to glasses what Apple is to personal computers.
They put so much time into the experience and minimalistic beauty, making their things first of all cool, and then making them look good enough to actually be that cool. (It seems to be a matter of convincing themselves, first, that the product is cool, and then they convince everybody, and then they end up living up to it. A case of faith influencing works? Eh.)

Consider the SPX-ART range. There is so much that is marvelous about them, it is hard to not be impressed.

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Grow balls. Instead of writing long whinges of the order of this one and this one, just stop using a shit tool. When I know that I do not want to use something, I do not. Simple as that. Before I was my own boss, I complained about tools, because I was forced to endure them. These days, I do not. This is a good thing. Some thoughts make me shudder. I remembered these links because I have put them in a previous post.

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Slaves facing down an imperial army: we know, from the history of the Maroons, that this is more-often a game that ends with the run-away slaves getting defeated. In spite of this, God tells the Jews to stand still, and then proceeds to drown the imperial army.

90-year-old women having babies: we know from the fate of the modern Western women that this is a losing bet. In spite of this, Isaac, Sarah’s son.

Blessings, in so far as they are the stuff of God, are in spite of something. Otherwise why would we call it a blessing?

So when you see things like Psalms 1 saying “He succeeds in whatsoever he does”, they do not mean as part of normalcy, if this is understood (and correctly so) as a blessing. They mean in spite. (If you succeed in whatever you do, it will have to be in spite.)

Even the blessing of justification is in spite. The justified live under righteousness, not because they do what the Law commands, but in spite of not doing what the Law commands.

(Somewhere in here, I am supposed to note that many successful websites—Wikipedia, Facebook—are written in a mistake called PHP about which cries for redemption never stop. Normally, you should not be able to build anything with a turd. But in spite … In fact, over-preparation and over-competence and the anxiety to be prepared and competent would nullify the blessing, having also nullified the in spite. I will leave that in the paranthetical.)

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From the tent-maker’s mouth, Romans 11:6:

And if by grace, then it cannot be based on works; if it were, grace would no longer be grace.

In all the noise-making that passes for deep theological debate, nobody asks why, in the first place, Paul felt it necessary to oppose faith and works at all. If it were not understood that you use one or the other to attain to righteousness, he would never have bothered. If, in fact, works had not been the obvious first choice, Paul would have been known as a tent-maker, rather than an apostle.

But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify.

There it is again. Why bother specifying the irrelevance of works in this case, had it not been the thing one thinks of regarding righteousness? And if it were not a contest between works and grace, as the modern Christian fools say, why would it occur so often in so many places where the chant is “by Grace, through faith, not works”? That is why “by faith alone” is valid, because we know the alternatives to justification by faith—i.e., works—and we are counting that out. We are not opposing “by faith and canned soda”; we are dealing with whether it is by faith alone or by works alone, or by both faith and works; and we say that it is by faith alone. Sola fide. Get used to it.

For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!

There again, if you haven’t got it yet. Why would Paul keep throwing up the conflict between grace and works, if the two were capable of co-existing in peace?

Tell me, you who want to be under the law, are you not aware of what the law says? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and the other by the free woman. … Now you, brothers and sisters, like Isaac, are children of promise. At that time the son born according to the flesh persecuted the son born by the power of the Spirit. It is the same now. But what does Scripture say? “Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman’s son.” Therefore, brothers and sisters, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman.

That, too, would be unnecessary if works could co-exist with faith in this justification. Paul would never have brought up the figure of Isaac and Ishmael, taut as it is with conflict, if the conflict between works and faith in justification were merely a matter of misunderstanding on the part of some people.
More conflict:

If, in fact, Abraham was justified by works, he had something to boast about—but not before God. What does Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”

Now to the one who works, wages are not credited as a gift but as an obligation. However, to the one who does not work but trusts God who justifies the ungodly, their faith is credited as righteousness.

This is not illusory. If it were okay, even, for one to share the space out between works and faith, as the Catholics wrongly teach (and very many non-Catholics believe), this would never have been written:

What then shall we say? That the Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have obtained it, a righteousness that is by faith; but the people of Israel, who pursued the law as the way of righteousness, have not attained their goal. Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith but as if it were by works. They stumbled over the stumbling stone.

Let us, then, say all of us together:

Brothers and sisters, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved. For I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge. Since they did not know the righteousness of God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. Christ is the culmination of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes.

If you are zealous, but not according to knowledge, such that you seek for your righteous to be linked in any way to the things you do or do not do, you do not know the righteousness of God.
And if you are into justification by grace alone through faith alone, then you are going to have many of these fools trying to educate you out of their ignorance—the blind trying to lead the sighted—as though their over-zealousness makes up for the ignorant pursuit and defence of a lie.
We are justified before God by Grace alone, through Faith alone, in Christ alone, apart from works of the Law.

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When the Bubonic Plague washed over Europe in the 1400s, many people scratched on their doorposts “God have pity on us”. They most-likely died anyway.
Most traditions say that, if God gets someone out of trouble, or into success, He has had mercy on that person. Hence the cries for mercy or pity from God whenever there is trouble. This tradition is old, and it is common. (For example, the Roman Catholics teach it as the main way to relate to God, hence everything between their rosary and the confessional, inclusive.) It is common, popular, and wrong.

People do not understand. God does not have mercy on those who are in trouble. God has mercy on those who are under mercy. “Mercy” is Grace. (The Luganda Bible uses one word for both: ekisa, which also means “pity”.)

That is why Paul says things like “We are not under the Law, but under Grace.”
Mercy—that is, Grace—is a way in which God relates to people, not an event that happens between God and people. The other way He relates to them is the Law. If you are under Grace, you get what those whom God has mercy on get. Crying out for mercy is not going to be efficacious, because God has mercy on those under mercy. God has (continuous tense: is having) mercy on those who are under Grace. It says so right here:

And the LORD said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the LORD, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”

Apparently the condition for God having mercy on one is that God is unilaterally disposed to have mercy on that person. This thing of God being disposed to have mercy on one is being under Grace. The condition for God having mercy on one is that that person be under mercy—under Grace. This point is driven home hardest in Paul’s letters.
See things like Romans 5:1-2:

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God.

So you see, we stand in the mercy/grace that God has given us in Christ. It is not a fix we call upon periodically; it is a state under which we are when we are believers in Jesus Christ. So we stand there. We do not invoke God’s mercy. We are in it. “You are under mercy,” to quote Paul.

These things, to a generation like ours, are best-explained with machines. When you turn the key in a car’s ignition, you fire an event—sparking the fuel—and the car enters a state of being “on”. If you press the switch on the wall, that is an event, which moves the lightbulb to a state “on”.
So, mercy is not an event. It is a state. The traditional—and wrong—idea is that mercy is an event, hence “Lord have mercy on us,” while the correct, Gospel idea is that mercy is a state. The state that they “stand in”, those on whom God has mercy—those who are under Grace. The Gospel uses faith as the event that starts the state of Grace, mercy (hence why it emphasises “faith” in order that people may become made to come “under Grace”); while the legalistic stand uses works—deservingness—as the state that triggers the event of mercy (hence why they emphasise “holy living” if you want to get help from God in your “hour of need”).

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God has shown His power in many ways.
But some things put Him in trouble. For example, within the six short verses that it takes Psalms 1 to go from start to finish, He makes promises that seem impossible to keep. I have written about Psalms 1 before, and that subject—the crazy promise—is dealt with a bit there, and I am going to take up that Psalm again here, for a different (but related) reason.

This is the first Psalm of them all. It begins “Blessed is the one …”
It speaks in the singular, in other words, of “the man”. This man is neither you nor me, as I explained in the older post about this.
The Psalm bothers to use the plural when it speaks of the opposite of this man: “Not so the wicked! They are like chaff that the wind blows away.”

The important thing to take away from here is that the singular man is Jesus. He is not even just the Righteous One; He is also the Righteousness of God. Only He has earned, by merit of fulfilling what the first two verses require, the right—not a privilege that may be revoked, but a right that is inalienable—to be called the Righteous One. It is important that God is not giving the Righteous One these benefits in the third and sixth verses out of mercy or pity. They are the right, having been earned, of the Righteous One. To quote Paul, “Now to the one who works, wages are not credited as a gift but as an obligation.” It is the works of this Righteous One—what the Righteous One has done or not done—that make it God’s inescapable obligation to give the Righteous One what is spoken of in verse 3 and 6.

That is the groundwork required for what I am to discuss here.

What happens on Calvary is that the Righteous One gives up what He had earned, so that we who did not earn it, but believe in this swap, may be deemed, each of us, the Righteous One. Look here:

God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

God made Him who was the Righteous One to be wickedness for us, so that in Him we can become the Righteousness of God.

The Righteous One was just made, so are we. We are just made. He is made sin, we are made Righteousness.
The thing spoken of there, in 2 Corinthians 5:21 is probably the most-offensive thing about the Gospel. That the totally undeserving wicked are made the Righteousness of God. The thing itself. Not to have the righteousness of God, but to be the Righteousness of God. By faith, not by works. Not based on works at all. Not because of what they did or did not do. They are—in spite of their works—made to be. Just as Jesus Christ was made to be sin, so are we made to be the Righteousness of God.

The depth of that—the ridiculous extent of the implications of what happened at Calvary—are almost universally ignored. Whenever there has been a group of people who truly believed it, they have been too dangerous to leave alive. But it is the truth all the same.
Many people go around insisting they, oh, they are believers in the Gospel, of course! But they deny this implication—the one implication of this Gospel they claim to love—even to the point of denouncing the Truth as a lie. And then you wonder why the religious men of His time wanted Jesus killed, while the ones with the loosest morals found a hope in Him. We who “put no faith in the flesh” [1, 2] are the ones who glory the offensive implications of Calvary—offensive to religious people, who nevertheless are cursed by their reliance on their own capacity for good, who glory in their capacity, and foolishly think that God is like them in His judgements, by-passing the perfect sacrifice on Calvary to dwell longingly on their feeble attempts to be break-dancing chimpanzees.

Calvary means that the wicked of Psalms 1 are made the Righteous One of Psalms 1, while the Righteous One of Psalms 1 is made the wicked of Psalms 1.
Anything else? Yes: everything.

That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither—whatever he does prospers.

Whatever he does. This is a ridiculous position for God to be in, and it implies that the Righteous One will be successful in whatever He does. Jesus even went as far as telling a storm to fold its tail and go into hiding. For all I know, that storm has not yet come out of hiding. (The disciples were surprised, and they recorded this surprise. This is one of those things that show that they are reporting the truth. If they were lying, miracles of this kind, done by Jesus, would have been something that the characters of the story expect. In real life, however, we know that miracles are, by definition, surprising to those who behold them. In fairy tales, nobody is surprised at the powers of whatever character it is that does miracles. In real historical events, such as the ones recorded in the gospels, people are surprised.)
While Jesus reached that point, it is ripe question why none of the made-Righteous have not bothered to reach even there. It is not for not being able to—after all, they qualify—but rather, it seems, for not knowing that God owes them success in whatever they do. Not in whatever they do that is cool, useful, well-done. In fact, competence tends to get in the way of trusting. They, these who are made the Righteousness of God, have, as their right, success in whatever they do.

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There is no reason—try and find one—to consider a less-than-two as being on the same level of deserving life as a man of thirty, short of resorting to very stupid reasons like “They are all children of God” (which the ancient Hebrew goatherds said as “made in the image of God”). If a society has no room for the kind of foolish nonsense you find believers in God saying everyday, then it has no room for the kind of foolish nonsense that translates in practice as caring for babies.

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O Children, something is brewing. I am in the ghettos again. In my head. The mood—the disposition—I have waited for all this time, for about three years, is now here. And I can even tell, because even the music matches. Wasn’t it back then that I wrote this?

Me, jazz for love and heartbreak. Reggae for a creative burst. Rock for geographical changes.
As it were, I'm playing lots of rock, and I'm shifting soon. The rock came first. I'm playing much reggae—and I'm having rebelliously-creative moments. The reggae was here before.
And now there is this time my player let fly with twelve—I kid you not, twelve—jazz songs, back-to-back, on random. And George Benson is a particularly-bad omen. Love and heartbreak. Behold, I stand ready, armed. Gimme some lov'.

The music is identical, the mood is identical. Give me some … creative. Something is brewing.

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One of the greatest things that God gave to our people, the many races found south of the Sahara, is a divine mastery over music. Only the angels, in all of creation, dare play after we have.

Now, the greatest of subjects is Jesus Christ. If you hate Him, that is a big-enough sign that He is so important in your life that you preserve an emotion for Him, even if that emotion is hate. In fact, that I did not explain who this Jesus Christ is, yet you know Him, is a sign that Jesus Christ is the greatest of subjects. No greater matter can be treated.

Now, of all the greatest things ever sang by the children of Cush, the greatest thereof is about Jesus Christ.
Among those who have sung—among these greatest of singers—the greatest of these generations are well-known.

Kirk Franklin’s The Rebirth was the greatest choral assembly to ever sing about Jesus Christ.
Fred Hammond, also, has surpassed the greatest and made his place among the greater-than-the-greatest of the sons of Cush, in singing of the greatest subject. Songs like You are the Living Word and Please Don’t Pass Me By.
The greatest album, perhaps, for the sheer unexpectedness of the vibrancy, variety, and nuggets of truth therein, is Donnie McClurkin’s Again. This one had the compressed New Testament, to an Afro-originated beat, in the title track, in All I Ever Wanted, Holy, Heart to Soul, and So in Love. I even brought it out and put it on repeat when I remembered. A classic of nigger Christianity.

Something that beautiful had to be the work of our people, singing about Jesus Christ.

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Some days ago, I ended up showing down with an American who essentially was saying that Obama was not right to tell the American Supreme Court to not engage in “judicial activism” by deeming unconstitutional something that has been ostensibly chosen by the people, namely the healthcare bill. So the American was saying that Obama should not have said that, because their Supreme Court has, as a job, deciding whether such bills are constitutional in the first place. This is what I said back, in three different comments, where the things I am addressing can be determined from what I wrote (since I quoted my interlocutor).

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Trust Apple to do the sane, sensible thing, once the opportunity is there, and introduce an actually usable way to draw Chinese characters, with the trackpad writing input method. I cannot get it to obey yet, but I assume that those who are good appreciate such a good thing immensely.

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I am currently reading the PDF about Elian Script. It may be an efficient way to write, but even if it is not, we should always have an alternative to everything, for use in cases (as the coming period) when the old methods that have served very well for very long are no longer usable. I will be trying to see what positives it has to it (legible even in degraded media? requires less space? easily extensible to cover tonal languages?) so that I can know if it is a tool worth adding to my extended toolbox.

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Someone sent me a link to this article, today: After-Birth Abortion: The Pro-Choice Case for Infanticide. Because she knew my position on this, she said she was inviting me to have a long rant about the matter. This was my reply, which barely stayed on course.

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In all this talk about violence, I may have successfully shown that I do not think that violence is merely raising a hand a striking someone, but I have probably not made it clear how much I take to be under the despicable banner of violence.
I already said I practice violence. However, that does not necessarily mean I strike other people across the jaw. If anything, the worst type of violence is not the animal tendency to wound others. Worse forms of violence include drawn-out ostracism. For example, the modern prison system is a worse form of violence than strokes of the cane; and yet you hear faux-bleeding-heart Whites, whose countries jail like crazy, pointing a self-righteous finger at countries like Singapore where caning is part of the penal code of the country, forgetting that they do an even worse thing, on a scale barely believable.

So, violence is anything that one does to another to increase the cost of disobedience to the former by the latter.
Most such things are done without more than raising an eyebrow, or raising the voice. That does not register in many minds as violence—for we are used, are we not, to extreme physical violence, both in the news and in the movies, that common violence goes unremarked—but it is violence nonetheless. Many devastating cases of violence are of this kind. The kind of violence that makes people commit suicide, for example, say due to debts, is the persistent raised eyebrow of “Where is my money?” which eventually wears a man down in a way that living on the run—in fear of physical violence—rarely does. Perhaps we have been so conditioned ourselves for physical violence by watching everything between WWE and Iron Man 2, inclusive, that we can deal well even with the perpetual presence of physical violence, yet we are ready to give up life when the violence is merely a case of sustained poverty at the hand of a well-engineered debt-slavery system.

The boss attitudes that keep people tired unto death of their jobs, yet incapable of leaving the jobs, is also violence. Essentially, “give your poorly-compensated obedience, or lose your livelihood.”

And, of course, for people like me who snap and then have to go all the way before the violence ends, when such violence—even non-physical violence—is encountered and is supposed to be answered with violence, you can see how it can become an endurance sport that leads to wearing down of the proud fools who thought that they could attack and still get away with it, because they did not know that violence is a deep matter. And because they did not know this, yet insisted on violence, now their folly has thrown them into a hole from which they will not rise. Perhaps whom the gods seek to destroy they first make opt for violence at the wrong time.

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Now that Azawad belongs to its owners (one, two), and their southern former countrymen do not have a coherent answer to Gaddhafi’s arms and training, it seems war may end if the losers acknowledge that they have lost.
Or, again, it could be the beginning of a lot of suffering—as indeed it is, regardless of who does what.

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Once, some guy I read on the subject of peak oil had this to say:

The core concept that has to be grasped to make sense of the future looming up before us, it seems to me, is the concept of limits. Central to ecology, and indeed all the sciences, this concept has failed so far to find any wider place in the mindscape of industrial society. The recent real estate bubble is simply another example of our culture’s cult of limitlessness at work, as real estate investors insisted that housing prices were destined to keep on rising forever. Of course those claims proved to be dead wrong, as they always are, but the fact that they keep on being made – it’s been only a few years, after all, since the same rhetoric was disproven just as dramatically in the tech stock bubble of the late 1990s – shows just how allergic most modern people are to the idea that there’s an upper limit to anything.

It’s this same sort of thinking that drives the common belief that limits on industrial society’s access to energy can be overcome by technological innovations. This claim looks plausible at first glance, since the soaring curve of energy use that defines recent human history can be credited to technological innovations that allowed human societies to get at the huge reserves of fossil fuels stored inside the planet. The seemingly logical corollary is that we can just repeat the process, coming up with innovations that will give us ever increasing supplies of energy forever.

Most current notions about the future are based on some version of this belief. The problem, and it’s not a small one, is that the belief itself is based on a logical fallacy.

One way to see how this works – or, more precisely, doesn’t work – is to trace the same process in a setting less loaded with emotions and mythic narratives than the future of industrial society. Imagine for a moment, then, that we’re discussing an experiment involving microbes in a petri dish. The culture medium in the dish contains 5% of a simple sugar that the microbes can eat, and 95% of a more complex sugar they don’t have the right enzymes to metabolize. We put a drop of fluid containing microbes into the dish, close the lid, and watch. Over the next few days, a colony of microbes spreads through the culture medium, feeding on the simple sugar.

Then a mutation happens, and one microbe starts producing an enzyme that lets it feed on the more abundant complex sugar. Drawing on this new food supply, the mutant microbe and its progeny spread rapidly, outcompeting the original strain, until finally the culture medium is full of mutant microbes. At this point, though, the growth of the microbes is within hailing distance of the limits of the supply of complex sugar. As we watch the microbes through our microscopes, we might begin to wonder whether they can produce a second mutation that will let them continue to thrive. Yet this obvious question misleads, because there is no third sugar in the culture medium for another mutation to exploit.

The point that has to be grasped here is as crucial as it is easy to miss. The mutation gave the microbes access to an existing supply of highly concentrated food; it didn’t create the food out of thin air. If the complex sugar hadn’t existed, the mutation would have yielded no benefit at all. As the complex sugar runs out, further mutations are possible – some microbes might end up living on microbial waste products; others might kill and eat other microbes; still others might develop some form of photosynthesis and start creating sugars from sunlight – but all these possibilities draw on resources much less concentrated and abundant than the complex sugar that made the first mutation succeed so spectacularly. Nothing available to the microbes will allow them to continue to flourish as they did in the heyday of the first mutation.

What he does not note, and probably misses, is that this process of microbes running out of resources, in spite of having mutations galore, is exactly how oil was formed. The microbes that we now burn were basically lucky to be in the oceans with so much supply, so they experienced a bubble. They over-shot their resource base, and died a messy cataclysmic death. Today, we burn them for sport, not realising the prophecy in every single utterance of “fossil fuel”.

I must note, also, that the author of the above—who I read with huge amounts of scepticism, even though I find him greatly entertaining and educational—is also a poor subscriber to the pathetic cult of limitlessness. Why else would he be so into sustainable living? Why, if not because he thinks that humans are supposed to be here without limit? Yet since we are not going to be here, let’s eat and drink—and burn petrol, for that matter—for tomorrow we die. (His main problem, actually, is that he is a heathen, and that is the cause of all this his confusion, this his foolishness in the midst of wisdom. He is a proud heathen, and that is also the main reason why I never link to him, even though he is so, so instructive.)

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Perhaps because I grew up the smallest kid in my class—not one of the smallest; I said the smallest—I learnt early on not to opt for violence. Even as I grew bigger past some of my classmates, I retained the tendency to prefer non-violent resolutions even to the most-stressful of cases. I have looked in retrospect at many cases of my going to extreme lengths to avoid violence and shaken my head, wondering where such self-control came from. Those who know me well know that I am always armed with something or other, but I have never even brandished an arm of any sort at any of the many people who richly deserved it. I have too often refused to issue last warnings because I knew that they would be tested, and then I would have to turn to violence just as a matter of principle. I have on occasion avoided terrible situations because I refused to opt for violence, and yet I have on occasion ended up in bad situations because I refused to use violence. My personal history shaped me to look at violence the way I see drinking my own piss: something I will do in a life-or-death situation, but probably not until it is really a life-or-death situation (in which case I gladly do it). Many times, violence was the common-sense thing, the simplest, cheapest solution, and I nevertheless did not find it in myself to use violence.
This is both a curse and a blessing.

It is a blessing because you learn so much about the mad and, frankly, very unintelligent drives that make people (usually men) prefer violence. I have learnt, for example, that it is about ten times more likely that a man will fight another man, if there is a disinterested woman somewhere around than if there is either no woman at all, or if there is a woman who is rooting for one side. So, when I see people go for violence, I see people reduced to simple sexual posturing and other more ape-level mating dances.

It is a curse because when—in my case, when, not if—the violence option has to be chosen, it is chosen very deliberately. Violent people can act violently and then afterwards they are genuinely repentant, because they acted in the foolishness of the moment; often they look with disbelief at what they wrought in their fit of violence, sure that they had been posessed. People like me, however, simply do not do violence, such that when it arrives, it has been carefully selected as the option.
And when we do choose violence—when I do choose violence—nothing (so far) will stop me. Often times, when I use violence it is in exactly the opposite of the cases where violence would be used by saner people.
Even worse, for the recipient thereof, those who end up facing such violence as mine never quite know what to do with it. For example, since my own violence option is chosen deliberately, it has a large and ready philosophy behind it, such that even after years, it will not have faded away: it is a matter of principle, not the heat of the moment. It often takes me months to complete an iteration of violence once I start it.

As you may have noticed at this point, by “violence” I do not mean blows, or a fight, or the like. For a good explanation, read Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. For while he never once raised a hand, what he did was nevertheless violent. That book, by the way, was my favourite novel when I was the smallest kid in class; it may have shaped me, or I may have chosen it because of what I was already shaped like. The only difference I can see between me and the Count of Monte Cristo is that I tend to use violence to establish patterns of relationship with other people, rather than to get back at people for past wrongs.
Myself, I know when I am getting posessed by the urge for violence. I get a persistent frown, and I talk to myself, audibly. I have been doing these things of late. Woe to whoever it is that has been put in the wrong place this time. I even noticed myself remain with my urge for violence undiminished while very good music played; this implies that I am not angry, but rather getting violent. It is sad when you, like me, take your time meting out violence, because it drags the terrible process on for long. Unlike normal people for whom violence is a simple, primitive reaction, those of us who have compartmentalised violence and reduced it to an endurance sport have to sit through the motions of doing for long what we do not resort to normally, what we do not agree with or like, even, while being both unable and unwilling to alter course until violence is accomplished.

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Holy chanting schmoly, I agree with a phylactery-wearing rabbi on something!
Watching Rabbi Menachem Froman on Global Oneness Project, I liked that he is stupid enough to say certain truths that all sensible people know not to mention (on camera!), namely: the Israeli-Arab conflict is a religious matter, not a political matter. That is why no American president—or any president, for that matter—has ever succeeded in nearing a solution (photo opportunities notwithstanding). I like that the Jew quotes the Arabs he has discussed with, assuring him that with a guy like him, peace is a five minute matter. Yet here we stand.

But while we talk of truths that are too true to ever be adopted as policy by the World, we stand at the cusp of Israel and Iran going to war. Everybody is sweating over whether Israel should attack Iran, rather over whether Israel should not attack Iran.
As someone who is not a stranger to deliberate and long-premeditated violence myself, I know exactly how Israel is thinking, and I know that, just as would be the case for me, if the decision for violence has been taken, it will remain taken until the violence is meted out. For people like me, the decision to use violence—because it comes slowly and very deliberately—once it is taken can itself be sufficient reason and justification for itself: doing violence because we decided that we should do violence.

By the way, I woke up not long ago with a problem: should we use violence? Even in cases of unintentional evil?
And I thought: violence is evil, and the upright and laudable thing is to never curse (“use violence”) those who curse you, but instead to always bless them (“make peace”), and to never slap back, but turn the other cheek. That is the right thing.
Yet at some point the requirement to use violence is asked of some of us. Now, for everyone there is a limit to how much we can stomach violence without turning violent. To expect that you will never resort to violence is abberant of me, since I believe (as I strongly do) that you are not altogether upright, and so you can never consistently turn the other cheek. You are, in short, not Jesus.
So: the one who resorts to violence does well, but the one who does not resort to violence does even better.

Do not be fooled: things in this life will require that you turn to violence. Should you use it sparingly, because it is the less-salutary thing? No. If you choose violence, go all the way. At least I do. It is, for me, not a matter of what is good or bad. It is a matter of what I have decided, what mode I am in. And my arms are made strong by the hand of the Almighty.
That is a weird thing, that my less-preferred answer to conflict—violence—be just as blessed and be wielded just as committedly as my preferred answer. But that is how it is, because the blessing is for the hands, regardless of what they do.

I suspect that the currently-hawkish Binyamin Netanyahu is a lot like me in cold, pre-planned violence. And for this reason he deserves to be denounced no end. If someone can stop him, someone stop him! (Also, for this reason, it is unlikely that he will stop or be stopped until he has meted out violence.)

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Back then, I learnt about the West African script N’ko. After I saw a sample text, it became apparent that, under this phonetic script, created by one Solomana Kante, the letter for “n” (ߒ) was almost the same as the letter for “l” (ߟ). This would be because the languages for which the script was created do not make a strong distinction between the two.
But that was just a theory.
Then I went and found that, apparently, the word “Senamou” in Angelique Kidjo’s song is a deliberate variant on the French “C’est l’amour”. All the phonetics keep their place and stature, save for the French “l” which becomes “n” in the West Africans’ language. (Kidjo was in that song with Amadou & Mariam, and they all speak languages that the N’ko script was created for.)
But then I thought: “l” and “n” are basically the same sound with a few millimetres of separation, so that N’ko is actually quite a clever system for realising this. (The Latin script gambled on this one, despite appearances.)

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In reaction to some recent article recommending circumcision for some reason or other, She went and penned a long and angry screed in response, and She sent it into the Daily Monitor for publication, but it probably was cast aside. Even so, behold the first guest post from Her, and also the first guest post ever. You would think that this kind of irritated screaming is a preserve of me and those as demented as myself. But alas, She too.

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I have been reading about the Muqaddimah on Wikipedia, and it turns out that he is yet another person writing in Arabic who said the gist of evolution in biology long before Darwin—nearly half a millenium, in this case. His treatment is closer to Darwin that was that of al-Jahiz, and yet … he was a fervent believer in God as creator. As I have said in numerous places before, the atheistic mandate in neo-Darwinian evolution is there in spite of the observations—such as they are—not because of them.

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I believe that World population is nothing to worry about. At some point, all the savings (in the financial sense) that we have made, and which are evident as “many people” will be spent (in the financial sense) to pad the collective whole of humanity from catastrophe in the by-and-by.

Even so, quoth this article:

If I were going to describe the perfect contraceptive, it would go something like this: no babies, no latex, no daily pill to remember, no hormones to interfere with mood or sex drive, no negative health effects whatsoever, and 100 percent effectiveness. The funny thing is, something like that currently exists.

Apparently, when the Medical Hypotheses Journal was still worth the name, the guy behind this contraceptive also noted that, perhaps, this thing helps prevent HIV transmission.

Would I take it? Probably not.

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I spouted this in anger, in an e-mail, to someone, and in retrospect, because it captures a lot of my stance without saying too much, here it is.

… absence of cheap oil is something most humans have neither the resistance to, nor the effective medicine for. Even my food path has six barrels of cheap oil in it, and I have a view of the Lake. How much more the Westerners? (In the same way that Steve Fosset would not have died if he had never been rich enough to afford a private plane, these vast numbers of humanity would never have died if they had never been energy-rich enough to afford to re-model their World around tarmac roads and the burning of dead dinosaurs.)

There you go.

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The Church Software Project, from which I got certain important files, has moved of late to http://www.churchsw.org/.

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In light of the forceful advent of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, the World is worried. (One, two, three. Bonus.) The assumption, well-founded, seems to be that we may end up with totally-drug-resistant TB.

Short of breaking a law of nature, this has only one ending. TB is too virulent to live with us, the way worms and other gentler invaders do. So, either we die, or it dies. That the bacterium evolves over time means that either we are in perpetual war, or we are dead.

It seems that mass vaccination was one of those things that you do to live now, and die later. It is a quintesential sample of the twentieth century in action: oil, nuclear, relaxation of sexual mores, mass legalisation of abortion, reduction of seed variety … all of them things done for a profit now in exchange for extinction later, or even for life for those who are alive now, in exchange for their being the last generation to live life in any recognisable form.

So, either we make TB extinct, or it makes us extinct. It does not seem open to discussion. The hope, of course, is that we can develop resistance. But that can only happen when many who do not have resistance die off. Which is why I have bad news for you: TB will kill us all.
By “us” I do not mean “humans”. I mean “city-dwelling humans”. Quoth:

The probability of transmission from one person to another depends upon the number of infectious droplets expelled by a carrier, the effectiveness of ventilation, the duration of exposure, and the virulence of the M. tuberculosis strain.

Emphasis mine. Well, essentially, TB is spread by common city conditions. Now, modern science never exerts itself in the direction of “should we even be solving this problem?” They just exert themselves in the direction of “What is the solution to this problem?” They have a hammer—an efficient and powerful question-answering protocol called “Baconian Science”—and now everything looks like the nail of a question in search of an answer.

So, in response to tuberculosis, science gave us many anti-biotics and their attendant problems, once their use goes from theory and interfaces with humans; for humans, unlike theoretical models, miss pills, run out of supplies, confuse words, and so on. But nevertheless, we are grateful to science. But non-science—such as what I suggest, in response to tuberculosis—gives us: leave the places where tuberculosis is likely to get you, and make civilisation get used to not depending on unsustainably-crowded madness.

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