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Human Equality?
One Israeli human life is worth no more and no less than one Palestinian human life. One-hundred to one is no prisoner swap, it’s a human rights catastrophe.
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Religion is an Artifact of Mortality
The impulse for religion comes directly from human mortality, as does much else in art and civilization. All religions contain an element of apocalypse because we need to project our finite state as individuals.
Apocalypse is a reflection of our mortality and a reaction to the frustration of death. If all the world or time ends, then we are not alone in our finitude. This thread appears to run through all world religions.
Religion is not only about answering moral questions or a desire for transcendence, it is a fulfillment of our wish to take the universe down with us when we go.
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If you want to make religion a constructive force in society, religions must begin with an honest admission of those moments when they haven’t been a constructive force, when they’ve been a destructive force. And the thing that frustrates me no end is when religious leaders get up and give the impression that religion has always been on the side of good and virtue. It hasn’t, let’s be honest.
Father John Pawlikowski
President, International Council of Christians and Jews -
I was surrounded by other business travelers…
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!- from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”
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The tea party?
Wow. This describes 100% of what comes out of the tea party and 99% of conservatives as a whole.
“I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
“Mother Night”
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Freedom
“The state can’t give you freedom, and the state can’t take it away. Freedom is something you’re born with, and then one day someone tries to deny it. The extent to which you resist is the extent to which you are free.” - Utah Phillips (1935-2008)
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Priority problem
I read yesterday that the first commercially available quantum computer was purchased by defense contractor Lockheed Martin. (http://bit.ly/m6XriN) This was pretty exciting at first, but then then I noticed that one of the unique capabilities of a quantum computer is its ability to break traditional encryption algorithms and create unbreakable methods of encryption. That seems to be the big draw for Lockheed, and I’m sure that we’ll all be paying plenty in taxes for our Government to have better encryption making and breaking than anyone else.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for secure computing, but is this really the best first commercial use of an incredible new technology? Not that the private sector will benefit from any encryption breakthroughs.
With all the complex and exciting problems facing our species, it’s saddening to think that we couldn’t come up with a better commercial use for a quantum computer.
#quantum #defensespending
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If one makes a blog post and has no followers, does it make a sound?
