W: LP: GRP: CSL: Till We Have Faces

I had read the novel, "Till We Have Faces", many decades ago, but I think it got lost in the 10's of thousands of pages of other fantasy reading imbibed at the time. I am now re-reading the story via audio format, and despite the plainness of the prose, there is a poignancy in how that prose is used that is just amazing. Here following is a quote from the story:

But in the reality (not in the dreams), with the horror came the inconsolable grief. For the world had broken to pieces and Psyche and I were not in the same piece. Seas, mountains, madness, death itself, could not have removed her from me to such a hopeless distance as this. Gods, and again gods, always gods...they had stolen her. They would leave us nothing. A thought pierced up through the crust of my mind like a crocus coming up in the early year. Was she not worthy of the gods? Ought they not to have her? But instantly great, choking, blinding waves of sorrow swept it away and, "Oh!" I cried. "It's not right. It's not right. Oh, Psyche, come back! Where are you? Come back, come back."

She had me in her arms at once. "Maia--sister," she said. "I'm here. Maia, don't. I can't bear it. I'll--"

"Yes...oh, my own child--I do feel you--I hold you. But oh--it's only like holding you in a dream. You are leagues away. And I..."

She led me a few paces further and made me sit down on a mossy bank and sat beside me. With words and touch she comforted me all she could. And as, in the center of a storm or even of a battle, I have known sudden stillness for a moment, so now for a little I let her comfort me. Not that I took any heed of what she was saying. It was her voice, and her love in her voice, that counted. Her voice was very deep for a woman's. Sometimes even now the way she used to say this or that word comes back to me as warm and real as if she were beside me in the room--the softness of it, the richness as of corn grown from a deep soil.

What was she saying?..."And perhaps, Maia, you too will learn how to see."

Twitterama Technos: Open Mesh

"Join Open Mesh and help Egypt build one."

W: LP: GRP: NS: The Diamond Age: a few final words

I finished this novel yesterday; I had forgotten how good the story was. Beyond the extreme coolness of Neal's vision of the possibilities of nano-tech and all the other nifty ideas, can be found a sensitivity to how all this might have it's effect in the social realm. The characters were well fleshed out, and there were moments of poignancy that only a good writer can pull off. The story also has an epic aspect to it that makes this an excellent entertainment value.

When the buzz about nano-tech was all the fashion in the late 1990's, this was the first story I had read which explored these concepts. I have read many other stories since then exploring these concepts, but now I see that this story became in my mind the standard to which I unconsciously compared all the other stories.

I definitely recommend this novel to anyone who can read.
(All the usual caveats apply when reading anything modern of course.)

Technos: Airships: US Air Force deployment

Another twitter-like post viz airships. Thanks to my brother for this link.

And here is the comment I made:

I have to say, having been in air defense artillery in the US Army, that hitting a stationary airborne target is trivial--all you need is a missile with enough thrust to make it to the correct altitude. I don't see the airship lasting very long on station.

--unless the existing air defense coverage is going to be beefed up.

W: LP: GRP: NS: The Diamond Age: another passage

In the story, we have the following:

He turned and left the room; none of the girls noticed, which was just as well, as they might have seen a quiver in his lip and a tear in his eye. As he made his way through the corridors toward the upper deck where his airship awaited him, he reviewed for the thousandth time the Great Learning, the kernel of the Master's thought:

The ancients who wished to demonstrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things....From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides.

Ephemera: On the Peace Corps

My son, Sam, shared this link to a youtube video with me, so I thought I'd post it here for tertiary edification.

W: LP: GRP: NS: The Diamond Age

I'm re-reading another Neal Stephenson book via audio. You can find way too much information about this story by looking at the innumerable "write-ups" about the story, so I am just mentioning this story, because Neal has predicted another technology. The novel was published in 1995 and the first advent of peer to peer file sharing was Napster in 1999. In the novel the world's communication system has been rebuilt using peer to peer file sharing. We can say that Neal anticipated this idea at least four years before it's actual advent.

This is one of the things I like about science fiction--the forward thinking and the imagination.

And if I come across someone who hates science fiction, I have to ask myself if the person is even intelligent. Perhaps such a person doesn't like to think for themselves. What is wrong with speculating about the future or thinking about things from a different perspective?

Daguerrotype: W: LP: GRP: NS: Snow Crash

Here is nClaire's rendition of Hiro Protagonist (or his Avatar):

Ephemera: Next phase in anti-liberty narrative

I was wondering how long it would take before the Gun Control nuts would jump on the AZ shooting. Sure enough, today's TNT had an AP article questioning Arizona's gun laws.

W: LP: GRP: NS: Snow Crash

I've decided to "re-read" (via audio version) the novel by Neal Stephenson entitled "Snow Crash." Reading a book by listening is an interestingly different way to experience literature. I find that I pay more attention to the texture of the words.

In this story (I'll not go into a very deep analysis of the book, the internet has a huge amount of people who've done this already.), we have what is categorized as a cyberpunk type story. The language of this story is indeed textured to achieve the feeling of cyberpunk. But the story goes beyond a simple trippy tale and explores the possibility of an information virus that can affect the human mind as well as computers. We get ancient Sumerian mythology and many interesting technology predictions.

One example of technological prediction is Google Earth. In the virtual office where Hiro Protagonist has received some free killer software, one of the programs is called Earth. And it's a mapping software of the Earth with hyperlinks, streetview; just about everything that Google Earth does is very much like the description given in the story. The novel was published in 1991, fully 14 years before the Google Earth beta.

I like the various descriptions the author uses that also make a sly comment on present society. Check this out:

Once she gets over the shock of it and settles into a routine, she starts looking around her, watching the other fish-cutting dames, and realizes that this is just like life must be for about 99 percent of the people in the world. You're in this place. There's other people all around you, but they don't understand you and you don't understand them, but people do a lot of pointless babbling anyway. In order to stay alive, you have to spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again.

W: LP: GRP: picture of authors

Here is a picture of three of the authors whose works I devoured when in elementary through early high school.



From left to right Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague deCamp, & Isaac Asimov at a shipyard (helping out in WWII). These are just the writers I started with in my fiction reading. Many others count as favorites also. Check out my GoodReads(TM).

Ephemera: Twitter-style viz AZ rampage

It's good that I am on a voluntary MSM blackout, because now we get to experience an avalanche of propaganda used to attack our Right to keep and bear arms.

Ephemera: Excerpt from analysis viz the murderous leftist in AZ

The following is a rebroadcast, but the analysis is valid:

"The first, most heinous act, occurred when six people were slaughtered (including a federal judge and a nine-year old little girl born on 9/11/01) and multiple others that were gunned down in Tuscon, AZ.

The second atrocity occurred within minutes after the violence in Tucson, when the nation’s hardcore Leftists and mainstream media tried—and failed—to convince America that Emma Goldman killed President William McKinley. By the logic of the Left, Emma Goldman, whose vitriolic rhetoric against the government, her opposition to Christianity, and general anarchist preachings was, from hundreds of miles away, somehow responsible for the death of President McKinley as surely as if her hand was on the gun and her finger pulled the trigger.

Flashback - 1901:
While extending in friendly greeting his hand of fellowship, in the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition, William McKinley, President of the United States, was shot down at the hands of either an Anarchist or a lunatic, a few minutes after 4 o’clock yesterday afternoon.

The assassin, in a confession made to the District Attorney, court officials and the police at midnight, said that his name was Leon Czolgosz, that he was 28 years old, a blacksmith, and that he had come to Buffalo from from his home in Cleveland three days ago with the express intention of assassinating the President. He said he had been a student of Emma Goldberg, the Anarchist, had approved her doctrines and did not believe in this form of government. He described with accuracy and with seeming pride the preparations he had made to kill the President, how he had practiced in folding the handkerchief about his hand so as to conceal the revolver, and described how he had shot the President.

Despite the fact that Leon Czolgosz—and not Emma Goldman—assassinated President McKinley, by the Left’s logic on Saturday, it was as Emma Goldman, through her anarchist preaching that killed President McKinley. According to the Left’s logic, martial law should have been declared and Emma Goldman (and all anarchists) should have been rounded up*.

In other words, claims were made on Saturday, within minutes and before the facts had even been established, that the evil that occurred in Tuscon was directly associated with “right-wing rhetoric.” Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the whole Tea Party movement were all responsible for the actions of the gunman in Arizona.

As Erick Erickson pointed out, ”the tea party movement won in November. Winners don’t go on shooting sprees.” The Left’s attack on Saturday, however, was not an impromptu misguided attempt to assign blame, it was nothing more and nothing less than an Alinsky-style lynching of the Right. The ends justify the means—even if those means are based on a lie. The fact that the ‘guilt by association’ argument (a well-used propaganda technique) may have even been planned or coordinated, as the facts became more clear, the Left’s rush to judgment was not only evil, it was also flat-out wrong. Facts do not matter to the Left if it fits their narrative.

On Saturday, within minutes of the reports that Congresswoman Giffords had been shot in the head at point blank range, because she is a Democrat who was on Sarah Palin’s 2010 “Target List” for the mid-term elections, much of the Left on social media began accusing Sarah Palin and Tea Party activists of being responsible for the shooting. The Pima County Sheriff jumped into the blame game. Markos Moulitsas, founder of the far-left Daily Kos, who had (himself) listed Congresswoman Giffords on his own “Target List” for the Democratic primaries was tweeting for hours on the topic.

The use of Sarah Palin’s target list is made even more hypocritical in view of the DLC’s use of targets on their own “target list” [via Verum Serum]:




The Left-wing hate rhetoric even extended to Jane Fonda, who had this to say on her blog:

But today, my heart and mind is full of the horriffic news of the shooting in Arizona of Rep Gabrielle Giffords and others by, I am sure, right wing fanatics who have been repeatedly harassing and threatening Giffords, egged on by Sarah Palin and Glen Beck and Tea Party members.

We must stop this madness, this violent rhetoric which media exploits!!

Before information was even in on the actual shooter, Left-wing haters were shouting from the rooftops (from their keyboards, actually) that racist “Teabaggers” were responsible for the shooting. These are just a few of the Tweets:



The Left’s sheer hypocrisy at claiming the Right engages in vitriolic rhetoric is even more diabolical when all they have to do is look in the mirror (or listen to Barack Obama). However, one can only imagine how deeply disappointed they became when they learned that their accusations were wrong. You see, in their demented rush to heap blame on the Right, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement, the hard-core Left and their sycophantic followers in the media forgot to do something really important…check the facts.

As in other cases, the facts don’t really matter to the vile and vitriolic Left because the ends justify the means. They were so certain that the shooter was going to turn out to be a Tea Party activist, some right-wing nut job, that their giddiness at being able to paint the brush could not contain itself long enough for the facts. [And, yes, the Leftists appeared giddy at the shooting and their ability to blame the Right at something so heinous.]

Through the day on Saturday, as more information became known about the shooter, Jared Loughner, it turned out the killer appears to be, as are most assassins throughout history, just a plain whack-job loser. If anything, it could be made (with vitriolic rhetoric) that the killer is more aligned with the Left as his listing of Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Hitler’s Mein Kampf among his favorite books, as well as his flag-burning video are not something that any rational Lefty could associate with the beliefs of Palin, Beck, Limbaugh or most Tea Party activists.

Claiming that a Left-wing whack job is the one who killed a little girl and five others would be stooping to the gutter-level lows of the Left though. Instead, it appears that Jared Loughner has more in common with Leon Czolgosz, the whack-job loser who shot President McKinley in 1901.

* In 1901, Emma Goldman, was in fact arrested by police in Chicago who detained her believing she might be part of a conspiracy to kill the President. She was later released though as it became clear that she could not be blamed for the actions of a madman.

Just as anarchist Emma Goldman could not be held responsible for the actions of a madman, for the Left to try to destroy the Tea Party movement at all costs, including assigning Jared Loughman’s actions to Sarah Palin, Beck or anyone else’s rhetoric is insidiously evil.

Lastly, for all the hyperbole that will be heaped on by the Left over the coming days and weeks ahead about toning down the rhetoric, they need to clean out their own mouths first."

_________________

“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.” Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776

Ephemera: Soviet of Washington's very own anti-christ viz education

“I think we ought to talk about what’s good for the student from the day they’re born to the day they get the degree they want to get.”
This centralization of education in the state of Washington is ideal for our mega-statists to make sure none of that pesky Christian world-view gets through. The hook is perfect for our particular psycho-social moment what with the appeal to Pragmatism. It'll be more efficient and remove inequities, right?

All this busy kingdom building on Epiphany. But I confess that Jesus is building His Kingdom, not-withstanding my failures as bit, one each, in the fabric of God's Church.

Historia: Protostatism

When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. Then the LORD said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.
(Genesis 6:1-4 ESV)

Jim's Commentary:

Humanity expands into the earth; the normative default for the various communities being small villages engaged in free enterprise economics.

As the covenant people (children of Seth, or "Sons of God") intermarry with unbelievers ("children of men"), there arise warlords or proto-statists called Nephilim who are not afraid to use coercion (murder) to achieve their ends. Which ends usually include some sort of economic exploitation or control of others distorting or destroying the free enterprise market.

With the moral fabric of these small villages destroyed by the betrayal of the Sethites, and with the rapid growth of the cancer of statism, in short order, nearly everyone had forgotten God except Noah.

Twitter style post: Neue Jahr

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained.
(Philippians 3:12-16 ESV)