Friday, January 21, 2011

Logophile or “Misologue”?

 Funnily enough misologue is NOT the antonym of logophile as I was expecting!

Hmmmm! I will have to create a few new words like misonewspeak or misospin J

If I could concentrate for more than 30 seconds I would write the modern newspeak dictionary.

The article of the day being

The newest term to describe the birth mother in a surrogacy arrangement is ''gestational carrier''.


Collateral Damage, Climate Change, Gentrification, Weasel Words and thousands of others I forgot or simply missed. Not mentioning the mindless corporate and business meeting jargon out there.

It is in everyday news absorbing us, swallowing us, destroying us by osmosis.

We might have been the salt of the earth whatever that means but the “salt” is slowly removed until we become pure INDUSTRIALLY produced H²O:  Liquefied Brains!

Also on the subject of words:
That FEAR word really puzzles me. 
In etymology quite often the opposite of philo is miso but also phobia showing that fear, hatred, dislike and disgust are so often intertwined.
And FEAR is a constant concept of many religions.  Go figure when LOVE is the “other” concept!

Well 30 seconds at a time I might be able to find an editor somewhere someday! J








Friday, January 14, 2011

a hill of beans

a hill of beans

1964 was an enlightened year.

The medium is the message ~ Marshall McLuhan
(1964)


More than 500 now dead in worst flood disaster in Brazil's history

Boobs and banality as the net gives the public what it wants

http://www.watoday.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/boobs-and-banality-as-the-net-gives-the-public-what-it-wants-20110103-19dqb.html

Misery unfortunately in this world is a CA$H COW for way too many people and that is the biggest and most underrated SIN in the world with many pillars of society Guilty as Charged.

‘Tis true that it is useless to blame the government, the army, the weapons manufacturers, the media and all those powerful corporations.

Bottom line is every individual is responsible for himself.

The reader is responsible for the banality of the media because that is what the reader WANTS and that is what the media give him. 

The individual soldier is responsible for his own killing and actions.

The big corporate and the little unknown trigger manufacturer are responsible also for being part of the death and blood poured because of their actions: from the CEO to the low paid punch press operator.

Some people would go as far as saying every taxpayer is responsible for its government spending trillions on killing people for profit and greed.

So altogether Buffy Sainte-Marie has been right too since 1964 as well!

Does this mean we’ve learned anything in the past 47 years now?

I think not, not in the past 47 years or the past 4700 years either.

But without him,
how would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone
He's the one who gives his body
as a weapon of the war.
And without him all this killing can't go on

He's the universal soldier
And he really is the blame
His orders comes from
far away no more.

They come from him.
And you and me.
And brothers can't you see.
This is not the way we put an end to war




My musing this week was about the media madness and bias on disaster reports.
For instance it is not by importance of disaster or the amount of victims but rather on the locality of what is happening. Apparently people in general are not quite bothered with what is going on outside of their countries and localities but they can’t get enough of the local stuff.

Considering the fact that 2 persons die every single second on this planet I suppose one has to prioritize which death he wants to bank on.  Plus some deaths are not profitable at all or encouraged to share like war casualties and other stuff like that that could only happen in CHINA of course.

One cannot just turn into Christ for one thing especially in this global village. One cannot physically and mentally bear all the sins and suffering of the world or one would go mad watching 10 minutes of news.  Genocide, innocent victims, endless list of horrors and chaos and mayhem, and so many other horrific news just HAVE to be filtered for our own survival.

But I find it quite revealing how we treat souls individually.  Well of course when one is your loved one, or a friend, or a relative, it does take priority in our affections naturally but once “nature” is out of the way how does the list go?

What is the order here? 

Nation? Religion? Creed? Colour? Distance from us? What souls are more precious than others? 

When does one stop to be collateral damage and becomes a betrayed and cheated mother of a small dead baby?

Personally this “Love Thy Neighbour” is getting quite complicated.
I sure hope he didn’t mean my next door neighbour cuz I am in deep shit then.
Demonise or Dehumanise comes to mind here when the word Bogan is mentioned. J

Hard to tell these days the fine line between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens.

But for whom does that bloody bell toll? For which soul does one cry? Hell I find myself crying at pure fiction and seem to become impervious to non fictional drama.

Love thy Neighbour and Compassion and Mercy are the very basis of any religion.

Entrails of Compassion as they used to call them.
Have a Heart! 
Always referring to some body part that will turn into dust one day.

O well putting this all down on “paper” or screen doesn’t seem to do much if not to make me even more vulnerable again but here it is though after having said all this, it’s all back to all about me again innit?

Not so sure, point is I am sad at just about ANY death, trying to remain also sane at the same time.  But I don’t consider the local death or the little Brazilian child who just died or the afghan child who just got blown by “accident” better or worse than any of the 15, 000 deaths that occur while I take 2 hours to write this and post it.

Soon enough there will be one more important death: MINE.
And I am a little concerned about this one yes.
To quote Bogie
Maybe not Now maybe not tomorrow but soon and for the rest of my life.

More Bogie wisdom here and maybe the answer to all this

I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that.

O well in the meanwhile I, (We), WILL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS! J

HAD IT TWICE ACTUALLY AND PLANNING TO HAVE IT A THIRD TIME BEFORE I KICK THE BUCKET. 

 We'll always have Paris. 










Thursday, January 6, 2011

When the Truth is Found to be Lies

WORDS

REDEMPTION
EXPIATION
ATONEMENT
SALVATION
SOTERIOLOGY
DELIVERANCE
LIBERATION
TRANSMUTATION from TRANSGRESSIONS and TRANSGRESSIVE NATURE
ENLIGHTENMENT NIRVANA to some
UNSPEAKABLE SIGHS AND GROANINGS
BURDENED
FREEDOM FROM BURDENS and “Enburdenment”
FREEDOM as in SET FREE
BLISS and ECSTASY
ATONEMENT
RECONCILIATION
PURGING
FORGIVENESS
EXPIATION
PACIFYING
APPEASING

Always a sense of
war and
enmity, a sense of
kowtowing,
grovelling,
begging, for
mercy and
grace. To save us from
ANGER and
WRATH
PUNISHMENT and
DEATH add to this a dimension of
ETERNITY and it is a big
SCARY PICTURE.
FEAR
ANXIETY

They are all highly valued universal concepts but are often either totally ignored by the new atheists or cheapened to their lowest level in trashy novels or movies.

YEARNINGS AND CRAVINGS for something BETTER, something STRONGER, something much HIGHER coupled with a Need for Healing for all the times we failed to live that yearning. 

Unfortunately that very deep human trait has also been preyed upon for eons.

Where there is a need there is a P.T. Barnum somewhere and a sucker is born every minute.


MORE WORDS

TRUTH
JUSTICE
PEACE above all INNERPEACE
LOVE (FAITH and HOPE since to have gone out of my dictionary)
JOY
HARMONY
UNDERSTANDING
KNOWLEDGE
RETRIBUTION
RIGHTEOUSNESS (hunger and thirst for)
BEAUTY
WISDOM
BOHEMIA and all that it represents from Jan Hus to Moulin Rouge
SERENITY way over courage and wisdom

For someone who has “lost” his “faith” I still have the lingo and the terminology for sure.

Fascinating also how our language is riddled with mythological and religious metaphors.

Even the staunchest atheistic scientists use expressions like the Holy Grail of this and of that or the Philosopher’s Stone even.  And we are all fighting our “demons” at times.  We get crucified over things and stuff becomes sacred.  We play Holier than thou and hypocrites are Pharisaic.  There is redemption everywhere even though Bon Jovi keeps telling us that we can’t buy back yesterday. J

Without the mythology and the religious words we would need a hundred or a thousand words to explain expression like Sisyphean or Herculean. Ariadne would just be a seamstress with her thread.

Myths are not bad in fact the biggest problem is when they are confused with Reality and enforced by some self established priesthood.  

Blood after all is a great imagery of myth for a reason.

They also have brought words that are long forgotten and the meaning lost and hidden somewhere.

Plus words are just not enough! For one thing many of them have lost so much in translation and overuse and misuse.  Especially when it comes to religious words I like to dig really deep down and decorticate to them to their finest and purest part.  I wish I had a deep knowledge of N.T. Koine Greek and also of Classic Greek to go down deep in the history and use of words.  The KJV which is well respected seems to me nothing short of a copy of previous brainwashed biased translations.

Who decides when the word means spirit or soul or simply wind and air? 

What about those old overused terms like repentance that seems to fall really short of the Greek meaning of Noia or the deeper meaning of Logos for that instance as well.

And so many other occasions where obviously the translators could absolutely not come to an OBJECTIVE view.
Bad enough that they are myths they also are poorly translated myths... leftovers of myths in fact.

In 5000 years of writing history and 500 short years of printed history the amount or written material that survived is highly unclean and only the tip of the iceberg too.  Most of it has been submerged or simply wilfully burnt rather a la Fahrenheit 411 by whoever thought they were the ultimate and final authority and inquisition at the time.

Anyway it is good that we still have a few words left, otherwise it would be quite difficult if not impossible to even conceive a thought and that is what differentiates us from monkeys and geraniums right?

I think Orwell was on to something here and politicians have certainly picked on it with newspeak now called spin and media being controlled by the state and big money down to the vocabulary they use.

One example in so many is reshaping global warming to climate change and being ordered to do so as well.  

Look at all the money invested now in training and paying PR 
people.  They are, after all, nothing but prestidigitators or rather “prestilinguatators” fooling you with their fast and clever tongues and pulling the wool over your eyes while the real deals are going on unaware. 

They are the modern Houdinis and David Copperfield but with words instead of images deceiving your ears instead of your eyes.

Finishing again with another portion of my favourite myth, another metaphorical source of inspiration for Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick, waiting for the dust to settle down so we can see a little:

1Co 13:12  For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

P.S. The more I study this and the more confused I get but an increasing line of thought is that

MOST OF OUR TROUBLES AND PROBLEMS are caused by someone else’s BRAIN DAMAGE.

It would seem like someone needs to really mess up his temporal lobes before seeing the light.

Moses, Jesus, Paul, Ellen White, Muhammad and so many more: seizures, 40 days of fasting or a fall from a horse or a stone to the head will NOT do you any good but it sure seems to make you a great leader at times, the leader more crazy people like to follow blindly.
 
From Gilgamesh to the last hero, one might as well “believe” in Little Red Riding Hood also and Cinderella and Snow White and PLEASE DON’T FORGET THE DWARVES.


A MYTH IS A MYTH IS A MYTH.  


Thrust one out, THRUST THEM ALL OUT.








Tuesday, January 4, 2011

for there shall no man see me, and live.

Exo 33:20 And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.

Though Zeus begged her not to ask this, she persisted and he agreed. Therefore he came to her wreathed in bolts of lightning; mortals, however, could not look upon an undisguised god without dying, and she perished in the ensuing blaze. 

I really like the mythical approach to this line. 
There is probably something similar in deep Hinduism about the essence of the Brahman being inaccessible to all of our senses, aethereal and if ever one of our sense would transgress its infirmity, our little heart and brain could not bear it or it would just be simply time to die, transmute, reincarnate, move on to a much higher level or burst into instantaneous combustion.

Auṃ- That supreme Brahman is infinite, and this conditioned Brahman is infinite. The infinite proceeds from infinite. Then through knowledge, realizing the infinitude of the infinite, it remains as infinite alone.
It is said to be eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and ultimately indescribable in human language. The sages of the Upanishads proclaim Brahman to be the reality behind everything in this universe. Later, Brahman was described as infinite Being, infinite Consciousness, and infinite Bliss

Plus also matters of the deep that is incomprehensible to us but Christianity says we don't want the bloody light to begin with  and Buddhism tells us we’re way too thick to get it. We are poisoned and our roots are just not right or righteous.  Buddhism thinks we can get cleaned up after one or one thousand lives of meditation. Christianity says don’t bother you’re hopeless but I have sent someone special to do the job for you, the job you could not do in a million years.

Joh 1:9  That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
Joh 1:10  He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.
Joh 1:11  He came unto his own, and his own received him not.
Joh 3:19  And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.
Joh 3:20  For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.
Joh 3:21  But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.

Greed, hatred and delusion are called the Three Poisons or Three Evil Roots.

One thing for certain it is UTTERLY and TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE for us orang-utans with guns to see any light of any kind, not en masse and I would tend to say not in the singular either.

Anymore that it is possible for a Mustang or a Ferrari in its present state to reach the speed of light for the same reason. 
We are defective, limited, and very primitive engineering. 
Light is beyond our grasp. 

In the same way that the light of the stars that you see is not its real light, it's an old "picture" of that light sent millions of years ago. As far as that star is concerned it might have died millions of years ago but we won’t know it, “see” it, for another million years or two.

Our little brains, our little hearts, our cumbersome and fragile bodies are not built for the ethereal.  At this moment in the space time continuum we are build to reproduce (unfortunately for so many) and to become manure for a very very short time on our passing on this planet, a planet who also is of very short consequences.  It has been here for barely five billion years and is at about half of its total life right now.

Nietzsche was unto something I am afraid. We are cannon fodder, the bungled and the botched.  Thanks to Terry Gilliam and Jeff Bridges for the education in The Fisher King! J

You ever read any Nietzsche?
                   
Nietzsche says there are two kinds
of people in the world.
         
People who are destined
for greatness...
              
...like Walt Disney...
           
...and Hitler.
                  
And then there's the rest of us.
                 
He called us
"the bungled and the botched."
                  
We get teased.
                 
We sometimes get close to greatness...
                  
...but we never get there.
              
We're the expendable masses.
      
We get pushed in front of trains,
take poison aspirin...
                  
...get gunned down in Dairy Queens.
                  
You want to hear the new title
of my biography...
                  
...my little Italian friend?
                  
" It Was No Fucking Picnic:
The Jack Lucas Story."

II No Va Esta Fuckin' Picnicko.
  
7000 years of written and known so-called civilisation and as a nation and as individual we keep repeating the same mistakes.  Madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result?

Why do I feel like listening to James Blunt now? J He’s done some of them mistakes and he is still doing some.  No light, no harmony, no peace, no Bravery! Not in human nature or human history ever.  Oh yes one might find some personal peace somewhere in a cave or in a very parochial and protected sheltered environment of some sort and then again but here I have to stand with Solomon Burke may he rest in peace.

None of us are free, one of is chained, none of us are free. 

I just can’t as a human being enjoy my own inner peace in the desert, at the top of a mountain, at the bottom of a cave while 7 billion of my brothers and sisters don’t have it, don’t know how to get it and have absolutely no access to light, or peace. Hell they hardly have access to water and forget about education for most which would save them an awful lot of hardship. 

Some crusader whose name is escaping me says he has tried education in poor countries but it didn’t work because the educated had no place or opportunity to apply their education in their own villages to they just had a brain drain as they were forced to move, Tony Campolo.

Education has greatly helped in Kerala, India where girls are highly educated  and go to school for a long time and get married late and are in control and in charge and DECIDE to have one child or two at most. 

At the root of it all is education. Thanks to a long tradition of compulsory schooling for boys and girls, Kerala has one of the highest literacy rates in the world.
Where women are well educated, they tend to choose to have smaller families. What Kerala shows is that you don't need aggressive policies or government incentives to persuade families to have fewer children.

But on the big scale we are coming with some highly exponential atomic fission problems soon with the overcrowding of our limited resources on this limited space planet:

problems which will not be solved unfortunately by considering that life is sacred but by rather considering the cost and profit that can be made or saved in each situation. 
Greed, despite what Gordon Gekko says, IS always one of our biggest poisons of the soul and mind.

Theseus and his Argonauts had it so easy. Enter a small maze where you can’t get lost thanks to Ariadne’s thread, kill a Minotaur and get out.

He actually is but a speckle in that immense maze of mythology for after all they are all mythologies aren’t they.
We are aware of our shortcomings and dire need of the “gods” and of salvation and redemption.

Here is ANOTHER fascinating TWISTED word; REDEMPTION, to REDEEM, to purchase back? To purchase back what? To erase what? The subject of a whole other chapter I am afraid.

But how does one overcome these shortcomings at a personal level and even more important at the race level without damaging our frail brains and falling into some control freak pitfall?  

All the new atheists are too busy fighting windmills to notice the wind.

Greed is the cause of many offences. 
The five greedy desires are:
 wealth, sex, fame, eating and sleeping.

Here is another problem or there’s the rub as Hamlet would say.

From what I “understand” now one cannot should not go the ascetic way or even in the abstention way as it just seems to be so unproductive and very conducive to a very dangerous road where brain damage is bound to occur and therefore can absolutely NOT be part of the solution especially when it leaves you prey to others too ready to profit from your mind damage. Even Paul who fell off his horse and on his head had something to say about that.

Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances,
Col 2:21  (Touch not; taste not; handle not;
Col 2:22  Which all are to perish with the using;) after the commandments and doctrines of men?
Col 2:23  Which things have indeed a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body; not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh.

I think he was on to something here despite my missing of the dead with Christ concept.  Some sort of non-responding to old urges and not adding new ones it would seem to say. And I do get the PRIDE that comes with this behaviour and the holier than thou it sometimes produce not forgetting again that all this behaviour is brain damaging and also almost always to the PROFIT of someone else, obviously much more clever than you on wealth and sex and food and booze.

Anyway I do hope that all this will clear up, at least in my mind, any day soon. I do know that Rilke said to cherish the questions but I am not so sure he ever got the answers himself now.

If anything in fact my questions might be published posthumously one day under the title 

Letters to a Young Poet (or Poetess) LOL

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke

1Co 13:12  For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.