If this linked video could be shown to be some sort of Saturday-Night-Live parody, I would want to laugh at it for being completely over the top. Then, as things developed, I'd want to put in a good word for the lady if she pointed out that they had defamed her character (though satire of a public figure is, properly, defensible as free speech, which I support).
That is, IF it were a parody. Apparently it is not. Apparently she actually said these things, as reported here, here, and here.
That makes it the very opposite of "funny."
The woman is quoted as saying (in the context of throwing red meat to be eagerly devoured by an approving public audience, and anticipating wide reportage), "If I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists."
I was going to say that this is a blasphemy against the Mind of Christ, but I will not: the Lord of All Worlds can speak for Himself, and needs no impulsive help from me. (Besides, He has assured us in the Gospels that even some blasphemies are forgiven). But I will say, for myself, that these words are a direct and substantial affront to the Mind of Christ as I understand Him.
What is beyond doubt is that she has insulted the best teachings and best practices of historical Christianity. She has converted the sacrament of Baptism, which introduces the believer into Eternal Life, into a mocking taunt, justifying torturous death and punishment upon our supposed "enemies" which, if they are indeed enemies, Christ has most firmly commanded us to love. She has given doubters, skeptics, unbelievers, and participants in other religious traditions plenty of mental ammunition and excuse to revile the Christian gospel. They are justified in questioning the sincerity of Christian evangelists around the world, at least if their Christian witness is tied to anything American. This is terribly consequential.
After that, her insult and betrayal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is quite secondary in my mind, but that does not make it of no importance. The Preamble declares that to "establish justice" is one of the primary intentions of the Constitution and the Framers; and Congress and the People added the first Ten Amendments with the purpose of elaborating the essentials of justice, as they conceived it, and secured this in writing (so far as writing can secure anything). The Bill of Rights, both in spirit and in letter, absolutely precludes such an attitude as she exhibited, and such behavior as she recommended. You know this already, and don't even need to look it up.
I absolutely believe in free speech -- for myself, for you, and for Mrs. Palin. But having exercised our free speech, we must expect to stand by our words; and may be called out for our words; and of course may, so far as is possible, retract our words and apologize for them.
I hope that Christian people, leaders and otherwise, will call her out on this, and help her to apologize and make amends.
I hope that people who are truly committed to the Constitution, or to the Natural Law, or to the Golden Rule, will do likewise.
This was absolutely beyond the pale.
Monday, April 28, 2014
Saturday, April 26, 2014
Google and Blog Stats
I hate to descend into mere technicalities, especially in public. Especially, when I must confess that I do not understand those technicalities -- it leads directly to uncertainty, and this is an uncertain post. But here goes.
I have had, and have enjoyed using, the platform of this blog for a little more than three years. It has been totally free, both to me and to those who happen by here, and for that I am grateful. Grateful to Google, I guess, and to the larger world of the Internet, of which the former Vice President, Mr. Albert Gore, is reputed to be the founding father. So, special thanks to Google and Gore.
However, I would like to mention a concern, or several concerns, that I, and presumably other independent bloggers, continually face. The first concern is the fact that I -- we -- are at the mercy of the common software and "infrastructure." A second concern is that we are at the (very arbitrary) mercy of the controllers of that infrastructure.
Now it is certainly true that a system as valuable, effective, and global as the Internet, and even the small subset of that system that is familiarly called "the blogosphere," exists only because it was carefully developed, and is carefully maintained, by an army of dedicated specialists -- and this implies, indeed rquires, some degree of control. I fully recognize that, and I salute them here: Technicians and communications visionaries, I salute you.
But a problem arises when, and because, that system, both ideal and practical, is -- simply by virtue of being a sort of "communications commons" -- subject to the vagaries and troubles that any "commons" faces. Such public commons (as happened in the case of the the old common grounds that were popular in the planning of early American towns and cities) may be more or less ruined by such simple human inevitabilities as ignorance, disregard, overuse, and continual carelessness. Or that ruin may be hastened by the more intentional (and not, therefore, "inevitable") factors of greed, grabbing for attention, or exercise of obscured power -- psychological, financial, or legal -- "whether sought or unsought," to use the famous phrase of President Eisenhower in his farewell address of January, 1961, in which he warned the American people of the dangerous rise of what he called a "military-industrial complex."
The sober fact is, that the Internet is older than the existence of Google or the influence of Mr. Gore. Despite its free and free-wheeling appearance (which I appreciate), with its popularity and sense of democracy, it was developed by an entity called "DARPA" (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). This "Agency" has always been as much a part of the military-industrial complex as the supposedly "civilian" National Aeronautics and Space Administration (whose acronym, NASA, was said by some of its appointed overseers in Congress, in the 1960s, to stand for "Never A Straight Answer"), or the also "civilian" National Defense Interstate Highway System, which can be legally converted to strict military use by the drop of an Executive Order upon the "finding" of a national emergency.
What, you may fairly ask, does this have to do with the technicalities of "blog stats" that were mentioned in my title? (Meaning simply my blog stats, since they are the only ones I know.)
This: the numbers don't add up, and never have. Also this: they are un-natural, and getting worse.
First of all, the numbers don't add up. On an average day, my blog receives a very modest 30 or so "hits," from several countries around the world. I know this because my blog-statistics page tells me so. Of these 30 or so hits, only a part -- a fraction, maybe 10 to 20 -- are identified as to where they come from, and to what post or page they linked. What about the other hits? How am I to know what posts are popular, and where? I don't know; and as far as I know, I can't know; and furthermore, I don't know why I don't know.
Some of the numbers are credible. Throughout the history of this blog, monthly totals have consistently ranged from as high as 1500 or more on three or four occasions,to as low as 500 on two others, and this seems to me natural, meaning pleasantly random and to be expected. (It is a separate matter, which I find odd, that Google thinks that I started my blog in 2007, when I actually started it in 2010. It makes up for this by "skipping years" on its graph displaying my reported monthly activity. Okay, just a glitch.)
But is this natural? Three years ago, back in January of 2011, I wrote a forgettable little post called, "You've Got To Check Out This Site." (Don't bother to check it out.) In the following three years, Google reported about 500 hits to this post, which would average less than 20 per month. Suddenly, in the present month of April, 2014, Google has registered over 3200 hits to this post in one month.
Oh, really. Random folks from around the world suddenly found my site and are profoundly interested (about 160 times as interested as before) in this one old very-difficult-to-randomly-find post, while not particularly caring about any of the 200 others. Amazing. But hey, what's not to like? My hit-count is up, from the usual thousand or less, to a marvellous over 4,000!! I'm so excited! I'm popular now! I'm having an impact!
I have no idea what is causing the appearance of these bogus statistics. Do you? Maybe this is only what Benjamin Disraeli, or Mark Twain, or whoever it was, was referring to when he talked about the three kinds of lies -- "lies, damned lies, and statistics." Maybe it's just another Google glitch. (A very persistent and patterned glitch.) Maybe Google wants to ramp up my numbers to encourage me to keep blogging. (Clumsy effort at encouragement: I don't believe it.) Maybe they want to tell me that now that my bandwidth is up because I'm so popular, they need to start charging me for it. ($$$. Nice angle.) Or maybe it isn't Google.
The one thing I know is that I don't know, and this bothers me. As far as I can tell about my abillity to control the other end of the software, I could wake up tomorrow, check out my blog, and find out that "I" had written a post that advocated violence and revolution, or that "I" had "hacked" some secret website, or that "I" had posted links to kiddie porn. Or, more benignly, my site could simply be closed down.
As I have watched developments on the internet concerning you-tube, porn-sites, investigative reporters, and security sites, this is a real possibility. What with backdoors, trapdoors, hackers, false identities, NSA cyber-war, comment-moderation complaints, hate-crime accusations, intellectual-property claims, copyright "infringements," planted evidence, and the rest of the discrediting techniques perfected by our beloved media and our "national security interests," better people than I am have landed in prison.
This is a risk which any blogger takes, so be advised, whether you are a blogger, a reader, or a commenter.
Oh, and by the way, you might watch out what is happening on Facebook and Twitter. Just friendly advice.
I have had, and have enjoyed using, the platform of this blog for a little more than three years. It has been totally free, both to me and to those who happen by here, and for that I am grateful. Grateful to Google, I guess, and to the larger world of the Internet, of which the former Vice President, Mr. Albert Gore, is reputed to be the founding father. So, special thanks to Google and Gore.
However, I would like to mention a concern, or several concerns, that I, and presumably other independent bloggers, continually face. The first concern is the fact that I -- we -- are at the mercy of the common software and "infrastructure." A second concern is that we are at the (very arbitrary) mercy of the controllers of that infrastructure.
Now it is certainly true that a system as valuable, effective, and global as the Internet, and even the small subset of that system that is familiarly called "the blogosphere," exists only because it was carefully developed, and is carefully maintained, by an army of dedicated specialists -- and this implies, indeed rquires, some degree of control. I fully recognize that, and I salute them here: Technicians and communications visionaries, I salute you.
But a problem arises when, and because, that system, both ideal and practical, is -- simply by virtue of being a sort of "communications commons" -- subject to the vagaries and troubles that any "commons" faces. Such public commons (as happened in the case of the the old common grounds that were popular in the planning of early American towns and cities) may be more or less ruined by such simple human inevitabilities as ignorance, disregard, overuse, and continual carelessness. Or that ruin may be hastened by the more intentional (and not, therefore, "inevitable") factors of greed, grabbing for attention, or exercise of obscured power -- psychological, financial, or legal -- "whether sought or unsought," to use the famous phrase of President Eisenhower in his farewell address of January, 1961, in which he warned the American people of the dangerous rise of what he called a "military-industrial complex."
The sober fact is, that the Internet is older than the existence of Google or the influence of Mr. Gore. Despite its free and free-wheeling appearance (which I appreciate), with its popularity and sense of democracy, it was developed by an entity called "DARPA" (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). This "Agency" has always been as much a part of the military-industrial complex as the supposedly "civilian" National Aeronautics and Space Administration (whose acronym, NASA, was said by some of its appointed overseers in Congress, in the 1960s, to stand for "Never A Straight Answer"), or the also "civilian" National Defense Interstate Highway System, which can be legally converted to strict military use by the drop of an Executive Order upon the "finding" of a national emergency.
What, you may fairly ask, does this have to do with the technicalities of "blog stats" that were mentioned in my title? (Meaning simply my blog stats, since they are the only ones I know.)
This: the numbers don't add up, and never have. Also this: they are un-natural, and getting worse.
First of all, the numbers don't add up. On an average day, my blog receives a very modest 30 or so "hits," from several countries around the world. I know this because my blog-statistics page tells me so. Of these 30 or so hits, only a part -- a fraction, maybe 10 to 20 -- are identified as to where they come from, and to what post or page they linked. What about the other hits? How am I to know what posts are popular, and where? I don't know; and as far as I know, I can't know; and furthermore, I don't know why I don't know.
Some of the numbers are credible. Throughout the history of this blog, monthly totals have consistently ranged from as high as 1500 or more on three or four occasions,to as low as 500 on two others, and this seems to me natural, meaning pleasantly random and to be expected. (It is a separate matter, which I find odd, that Google thinks that I started my blog in 2007, when I actually started it in 2010. It makes up for this by "skipping years" on its graph displaying my reported monthly activity. Okay, just a glitch.)
But is this natural? Three years ago, back in January of 2011, I wrote a forgettable little post called, "You've Got To Check Out This Site." (Don't bother to check it out.) In the following three years, Google reported about 500 hits to this post, which would average less than 20 per month. Suddenly, in the present month of April, 2014, Google has registered over 3200 hits to this post in one month.
Oh, really. Random folks from around the world suddenly found my site and are profoundly interested (about 160 times as interested as before) in this one old very-difficult-to-randomly-find post, while not particularly caring about any of the 200 others. Amazing. But hey, what's not to like? My hit-count is up, from the usual thousand or less, to a marvellous over 4,000!! I'm so excited! I'm popular now! I'm having an impact!
I have no idea what is causing the appearance of these bogus statistics. Do you? Maybe this is only what Benjamin Disraeli, or Mark Twain, or whoever it was, was referring to when he talked about the three kinds of lies -- "lies, damned lies, and statistics." Maybe it's just another Google glitch. (A very persistent and patterned glitch.) Maybe Google wants to ramp up my numbers to encourage me to keep blogging. (Clumsy effort at encouragement: I don't believe it.) Maybe they want to tell me that now that my bandwidth is up because I'm so popular, they need to start charging me for it. ($$$. Nice angle.) Or maybe it isn't Google.
The one thing I know is that I don't know, and this bothers me. As far as I can tell about my abillity to control the other end of the software, I could wake up tomorrow, check out my blog, and find out that "I" had written a post that advocated violence and revolution, or that "I" had "hacked" some secret website, or that "I" had posted links to kiddie porn. Or, more benignly, my site could simply be closed down.
As I have watched developments on the internet concerning you-tube, porn-sites, investigative reporters, and security sites, this is a real possibility. What with backdoors, trapdoors, hackers, false identities, NSA cyber-war, comment-moderation complaints, hate-crime accusations, intellectual-property claims, copyright "infringements," planted evidence, and the rest of the discrediting techniques perfected by our beloved media and our "national security interests," better people than I am have landed in prison.
This is a risk which any blogger takes, so be advised, whether you are a blogger, a reader, or a commenter.
Oh, and by the way, you might watch out what is happening on Facebook and Twitter. Just friendly advice.
Thursday, April 10, 2014
Jonathan McCallum: A Poem And A Website
A few weeks ago I posted a brief commentary and a link to a poem by Jonathan McCallum. (From Basque Country.) I think I should follow up with a link to his more recent poem,
Then again, might as well link to the whole website. Enjoy.
Then again, might as well link to the whole website. Enjoy.
Saturday, March 22, 2014
Yotta Yotta Yotta
A yotta of anything is a lotta of anything. A septillion -- a trillion trillion. Ten to the 24th power -- 10e24. More commonly: 1, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000.
Scientists say that the mass of the earth is about 6 yotta kilograms, which is roughly equivalent to 13 yotta pounds. The number of luminous stars in the Universe is estimated to be on the order of a yotta, give or take.
It occurs to me that if the Book of Genesis were taken literally, then Abraham's descendants -- said by the Lord to be innumerable as the stars, or as the sands of the seashore -- might be expected, at some time, to be about a yotta. Personally, I'm good with that -- since that would suggest that Father Abraham still has a long way to go, and his kids still have a yotta-lotta spreading out to do. Lots of room out there for a whole yotta people.
But let us set aside heavenly speculations for more mundane considerations.
On a much smaller scale, thinking of nano-particles, nano-seconds, and computer miniaturization, a yotta-byte is still a lotta bytes.
Two years ago (in March 2012), Robert Tilford, writing at the Examiner website, reported that the new NSA world-spying facility in Utah (to have been completed in 2013 -- some problems have been reported) was anticipating a processing power of about a yottabyte. I have not been able to determine the time-frame -- are they talking about yotta-byte per second (unlikely)? Or a yotta-byte per year (more likely)?
Let's assume the slower rate of a yotta-byte per year (10e24 bytes per year). There are about 32 million seconds per year (32x10e6), so that would suggest a processing rate of about 3x10e16 bytes per second.
Given that kind of surveillance power, how would The Powers That Be parcel out that scrutiny in an equitable way? If we generously supposed that 3 billion human beings (3x10e9) were connected to cyberspace every second of every day, that would still allow 10 million bytes per second of processing power devoted to each cyber-connected human being -- continuously, all the time.
That surveillance power is there for me, for you, for every member of your family, for commerce, for law enforcement, for the total-security state, for everybody.
It occurs to me that Big Brother / Big Sister have very big eyes and ears. That's a yotta very close supervision being planned. Could we characterize this as cyber-slavery, anyone?
Or is it just the modern version of government "of the people, by the people, and for the people." Oh, yes. It's all for us.
Scientists say that the mass of the earth is about 6 yotta kilograms, which is roughly equivalent to 13 yotta pounds. The number of luminous stars in the Universe is estimated to be on the order of a yotta, give or take.
It occurs to me that if the Book of Genesis were taken literally, then Abraham's descendants -- said by the Lord to be innumerable as the stars, or as the sands of the seashore -- might be expected, at some time, to be about a yotta. Personally, I'm good with that -- since that would suggest that Father Abraham still has a long way to go, and his kids still have a yotta-lotta spreading out to do. Lots of room out there for a whole yotta people.
But let us set aside heavenly speculations for more mundane considerations.
On a much smaller scale, thinking of nano-particles, nano-seconds, and computer miniaturization, a yotta-byte is still a lotta bytes.
Two years ago (in March 2012), Robert Tilford, writing at the Examiner website, reported that the new NSA world-spying facility in Utah (to have been completed in 2013 -- some problems have been reported) was anticipating a processing power of about a yottabyte. I have not been able to determine the time-frame -- are they talking about yotta-byte per second (unlikely)? Or a yotta-byte per year (more likely)?
Let's assume the slower rate of a yotta-byte per year (10e24 bytes per year). There are about 32 million seconds per year (32x10e6), so that would suggest a processing rate of about 3x10e16 bytes per second.
Given that kind of surveillance power, how would The Powers That Be parcel out that scrutiny in an equitable way? If we generously supposed that 3 billion human beings (3x10e9) were connected to cyberspace every second of every day, that would still allow 10 million bytes per second of processing power devoted to each cyber-connected human being -- continuously, all the time.
That surveillance power is there for me, for you, for every member of your family, for commerce, for law enforcement, for the total-security state, for everybody.
It occurs to me that Big Brother / Big Sister have very big eyes and ears. That's a yotta very close supervision being planned. Could we characterize this as cyber-slavery, anyone?
Or is it just the modern version of government "of the people, by the people, and for the people." Oh, yes. It's all for us.
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
A Poem From Basque Country
I like finding good literature on the internet, and I think how unavailable most of it would have been twenty years ago. Today was a good day.
Carl Medearis, the author of the excellent book, Muslims, Christians, and Jesus, maintains a website and has recently posted "A Poem from my good friend in Basque Country." The poem is written by Jonathan McCallum and is titled, "Glass Shatters." It begins with these words:
Here is the link to Carl's website and the poem. You can follow the author, Jonathan McCallum, on Twitter, here.
Enjoy.
* * *
If the link to the poem is broken, a second link can be found here.
Carl Medearis, the author of the excellent book, Muslims, Christians, and Jesus, maintains a website and has recently posted "A Poem from my good friend in Basque Country." The poem is written by Jonathan McCallum and is titled, "Glass Shatters." It begins with these words:
"Glass shatters, sunlight flows, a biting wind awakes my soul."
Enjoy.
* * *
If the link to the poem is broken, a second link can be found here.
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Pachelbel Variations
I love the different interpretations that good artists give to good music.
Very full orchestra
5:01 minutes
4.30
Piccolo trmpet and organ
5.16
arranged by Kotaro Oshio
4.41
3.28
Saturday, February 22, 2014
Briefly On Robinson Jeffers
I only remembered his name vaguely; perhaps I had read something in an anthology once, a long time ago. (He was born in the 1880s and died in the early 1960s, before I came of age.)
In meandering around the blogosphere, I had just run across a commenter who posted a copy of Jeffers' poem, "Purse Seine," which I hope you will link to and enjoy. A poet this good, I thought, ought not to have been forgotten, so I decided to look him up: Wikipedia -- that flawed-but-helpful reference for the most of us (who are the great "uncredentialed") -- came through. What did it say?
Born in 1887 in a respected Presbyterian family; check. Child prodigy; check. University of Southern California; check. Brother became an eminent astronomer; check. Scandalous affair with wife of a lawyer; check. Lived in Carmel, California; check. Outdoorsman and poet; check. Favorable connections with D. H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams, and Jiddu Krishnamurti; check. Made cover of Time magazine; check.
Staunch opposition to U. S. entry into World War II; uncheck. Ah.
Wikipedia says:
"In fact, his book The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948), a volume of poems that was largely critical of U.S. policy, came with an extremely unconventional note from Random House that the views expressed by Jeffers were not those of the publishing company. Soon after, his work was received negatively by several influential literary critics. Several particularly scathing pieces were penned by Yvor Winters, as well as by Kenneth Roxroth, who had been very positive in his earlier commentary on Jeffers' work. Jeffers would publish poetry intermittently during the 1950s but his poetry never again attained the same degree of popularity that it had in the 1920s and the 1930s."
An "extremely unconventional note from Random House that the views expressed by Jeffers were not those of the publishing company." Hmm, what was Random House so afraid of? Maybe there really is, and has been, a media establishment that pretty well controls what shall be permitted to be popular, and what shall not. (Remember these three things -- the Narrative, the Narrative, and the Narrative.)
But thank you, Robinson Jeffers, for keeping your own voice. You did have something important to say -- there are sardines, and there are also other sardines. Point well taken; very well taken, all things considered. (If they read the poem.)
In meandering around the blogosphere, I had just run across a commenter who posted a copy of Jeffers' poem, "Purse Seine," which I hope you will link to and enjoy. A poet this good, I thought, ought not to have been forgotten, so I decided to look him up: Wikipedia -- that flawed-but-helpful reference for the most of us (who are the great "uncredentialed") -- came through. What did it say?
Born in 1887 in a respected Presbyterian family; check. Child prodigy; check. University of Southern California; check. Brother became an eminent astronomer; check. Scandalous affair with wife of a lawyer; check. Lived in Carmel, California; check. Outdoorsman and poet; check. Favorable connections with D. H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams, and Jiddu Krishnamurti; check. Made cover of Time magazine; check.
Staunch opposition to U. S. entry into World War II; uncheck. Ah.
Wikipedia says:
"In fact, his book The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948), a volume of poems that was largely critical of U.S. policy, came with an extremely unconventional note from Random House that the views expressed by Jeffers were not those of the publishing company. Soon after, his work was received negatively by several influential literary critics. Several particularly scathing pieces were penned by Yvor Winters, as well as by Kenneth Roxroth, who had been very positive in his earlier commentary on Jeffers' work. Jeffers would publish poetry intermittently during the 1950s but his poetry never again attained the same degree of popularity that it had in the 1920s and the 1930s."
An "extremely unconventional note from Random House that the views expressed by Jeffers were not those of the publishing company." Hmm, what was Random House so afraid of? Maybe there really is, and has been, a media establishment that pretty well controls what shall be permitted to be popular, and what shall not. (Remember these three things -- the Narrative, the Narrative, and the Narrative.)
But thank you, Robinson Jeffers, for keeping your own voice. You did have something important to say -- there are sardines, and there are also other sardines. Point well taken; very well taken, all things considered. (If they read the poem.)
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