#historically (scientifically? interestingly??) speaking | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

romans11920 · 2 years ago

Note

As a 'creation science' geek, how do you rationalize away all the actual scientific evidence about the age of the earth and the lack of evidence for a world wide flood? what do you tell yourself? all of science is wrong? Or maybe even a giant conspiracy to undermine the Faith?

For one, you are assuming I ignore all evidence instead of just having a different interpretation of it than you do. World views interpret evidence differently. I think people like @thescienceofapologetics (if they're ok with me tagging them) would also disagree with the above questions, whether or not we agree on all the details presented below. (They have much knowledge and info on this topic.)

For example, what secularists would interpret as "rock layers building up over millions of years", someone that has a younger view of the Earth, like I personally do, would see as remnants of a global flood. You know, all the dead things that are often well preserved (meaning they were buried quickly) or torn apart (meaning they were buried catastrophically) buried in rock layers, often laid down by water all over the earth? Yeah those layers. I don't ignore them, I interpret them differently. There's plenty of evidence that dating methods, while useful, can indeed be flawed as well. They aren't 100% reliable.

My interpretation has evidence for it as well. If there was a global flood, we'd indeed expect to find billions of dead things buried in sediments on all continents, and we do. There's marine fossils on top of Mount Everest, as well as mixed throughout the fossil record, alongside land animals and birds.

I actually collect fossils. I live no where near the ocean, but I have a sizable collection of marine shells and crinoid fossils. Including this closed clam shell I found in a creek:

You know what's so special about this little clam I found? Clams open when they die because the muscle holding their shell together deteriorates quickly. But you know what else? Clams can burrow. Meaning if they aren't buried deep enough while alive they can easily dig themselves out. No, this clam was buried so far down in sentiments that it could not burrow out, died and fossilized while it was still closed. There was no (or barely anytime at all) between it dying and it being quickly buried before deteriorating. I also forgot to mention that most of my fossils are limestone rocks containing various dead sea creatures, like this one:

(This one is huge btw) Again, I live in the middle of a continent. The fact that this area was once underwater is evidence for my beliefs. Interestingly, several cultures around the world have great (sometimes global) flood legends where divine retribution was the cause. Speaking of fossils being buried quickly and preserved, did you know there's several instances of soft tissues being preserved? There's dinosaur bones with blood vessels still in them, hadrosaur bones that aren't even fossilized. How does any of that even last for millions of years and not deteriorate?

This is not a "conspiracy theory" on why "scientists" are wrong, because good science makes testable and repeatable observations. We agree 100% on observable science, but Historical science (or ideas about the past that are not observable) is where we disagree. We have different worldviews, different conclusions about where we came from, and different assumptions about what happened in the past. This influences how we look at and explain evidence from the past. Has science proven that life arose naturally? Not at all, but people believe it as fact (Even though good science has proven that life does not spontaneously arise from non-life and that life is way too complicated. Being made up of something called DNA, that the body reads like a book. I don't have enough faith to believe non-life spontaneously became alive, wrote it's own complex language code, then continuously gained information out of nowhere to evolve with no plan in mind or intelligence. It doesn't make sense with what we know in science. That mutations not only work with existing DNA, but they can also make things worse because they can make the code unreadable as well. Just look at dog breeding as well as deformities as examples of this entropy.).

But isn't the resurrection of Jesus just as unconfirmable in science? Well, not only does Jesus tell us to accept Him by faith: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” (John 20:29) And it's not a blind faith either. We see wonderful design every where in nature. In fact the Bible tells us: "But now ask the beasts, and they will teach you; and the birds of the air, and they will tell you; Or speak to the earth, and it will teach you; and the fish of the sea will explain to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this in whose hand is the life of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind?” (Job 12:7-10) Ever heard of "Biomimicry"? It means humans have invented things based on designs they see in nature. These are well designed and efficient inventions too. Copied from what? Nature's accidents? Not only does nature give us clues that there is a Creator, but the Bible itself is full of Historical figures, places and events. It can be placed in history. People like the Hittites, who weren't believed to have actually existed until they were discovered are an example of this. People like the Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, Chaldeans, Egyptians, Moabites, Syrians, Persians, Romans, Ethiopians, etc are mentioned in these texts, with tie-ins to historical evens. These include:

King Esarhaddon: King of Assyria from about 681-669 BC.

King Sennacherib: King of Assyria from 705-681 BC. Whose “Taylor’s Prism” tells of how Sennacherib fought against King Hezekiah and Jerusalem.

King Mesha: A Moabite king that reigned in the 9th century BC. In fact the “Moabite stone (Mesha’s Stele)” mentions Israel, Yahweh (the God of Israel) and the House of David.

King Hazael: King of Syria/Aram from about 842-796 BC. The “Tel Dan Stele” tells of his victory. It also mentions “House of David”, “King of Israel”, and several Biblical names such as Ahab (the one whose son he went to war against), Jehoram/Joram (the one he went to war against), Ahaziah, Hadad, and Jehu.

King Shalmaneser III: King of Assyria from 859-824 BC. 9th predecessor before Sargon II. His Stela was discovered in 1861. It mentions Ahab and Israel at the “Qarqar” battle. It says Ahab had a huge number of chariots and soldiers that he gifted to him. This indicates that Israel was a large power at the time.

King Nebuchadnezzar II: King of Babylon from 605-562 BC.

Pharaoh Necho II: Pharaoh of Egypt from 610-595 BC.

Pharaoh Shishak/Sheshonq I: Pharaoh of Egypt from 943-922 BC.

The Caesars of Rome

Prefect of Judea, Pontius Pilate: The 5th prefect of Judea, served under Emperor Tiberius from 26/27-36/37 AD.

King Herod (Herod the Great): Roman King of Judea from 37-4 BC.

Even Jesus is confirmed to have existed by historians of the time, and that people worshiped Him "like a god".

I could keep going all day. The point is, the Bible is grounded in history, so I am more inclined to believe it over something no body saw happen millions of years ago. Not to mention the Bible is not just a single book, but a collection of books. The Old Testament is 39 books. Written by at least 50 authors, from the 1400s - 400s BC. The New Testament is 27 books. Written by at least 8 authors from around 40-100 AD. Yet it is coherent as a single book. It's incomplete at this time, but I've actually been putting together all the Biblical manuscripts and Biblical related writings I can find. Science tells us that, whether or not the supernatural aspects are true, the events in the Bible happened, and the fact that I can even look at the fossil record, for example, and say "a global flood actually could do that" gives me even more proof for my beliefs. The Bible also explains why we exist, why bad things happen, what happens when we die, etc. We exist to bring glory to God, bad things happen because of something called Sin, which all humans have (because Adam disobeyed God which led to the creation being cursed), and you either go to Heaven or Hell when you die. If you accept Jesus's sacrifice on the cross, you will be saved and be able to reunite with God. This is because the price of sin is death. Not just physical death, but spiritual death as well. When we accept Jesus's payment of our wages, we will not experience the 2nd death in Hell. And because Jesus defeated death, we will be one day resurrected like He was. Jesus is called the 2nd Adam for a reason, He gives us a new beginning, telling us to "be born again". I believe this with all my heart, but it doesn't mean I'm gullible. I've seen how the world is and I've experienced the love of God for myself. It all just makes sense together. Plus it's a much better moral belief system than nothing created us, we're born to die, we have no worth, we'll disappear when we die, doom doom doom.

God actually tells us that the world hates him several times. They're always looking for a replacement for God. Evolution, Technological advancements, other humans they look up to, etc. The Bible also says that:

"knowing this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.” For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly." (2 Peter 3:3-7)

"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen." (Romans 1:18-25 My namesake.)

Going back to your ask, you assumed a lot about my faith, and beliefs. No, I do not ignore science, I actually love science, and I'm not a conspiracy theorist either. I see evidence for my faith everywhere I look because I have been touched and loved by God. And it makes me very content, even in the worst of times. I pray you come to know the Truth about God one day and experience His love and peace. God bless you. <3

7 notes · View notes

watching-pictures-move · 3 years ago

Text

Movie Review | Cleopatra (Mankiewicz, 1963)

To be honest, I struggled with Cleopatra for the first half of its four hour runtime, finding much of the proceedings, if nice to look at, a little annoying, for lack of a better word. Only once I reached the midpoint did it start to click for me, and my problem with the earlier sections came into focus: Rex Harrison's performance as Julius Caesar. In scientific terms, he fucking sucks. Perhaps I hold some pent up resentment from being forced to watch out of context snippets of My Fair Lady in high school while my eleventh grade English teacher did an abominable job of teaching us Pygmalion. But even without relitigating teenage grievances, I think the true measure of his performance is what he gives his costars to work with. A good actor can elevate the work of their costars. Harrison sinks them. Ostensibly madly in love with Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra, his smug, self-satisfied demeanour conveys only infatuation with himself, and makes the attraction Taylor is supposed to feel for him and the grand gestures she makes in the name of love feel inexplicable. I understand some reviews at the time were unkind to her performance, but they should have looked elsewhere.

When Caesar is killed during the Ides of March (which I guess is a spoiler, but it's also a historical event, so not really), it's less the tragedy the movie positions it as than his murderers doing everybody a huge favour. For one thing, it means the arrival of Richard Burton as Marc Antony, who becomes Cleopatra's lover for the second half of the movie. The difference between Burton and Harrison is vast and illuminating. Both have an undeniable theatricality to their performances, but where Harrison seems mostly impressed by his ability to deliver the florid dialogue he's given, Burton can imbue it with real feeling. The attraction between him and Taylor have the intensity of two lovers who were having a torrid affair offscreen and got married, divorced, remarried and re-divorced. The grand, nutty gestures they make in the name of love feel a lot more convincing, is what I'm saying. It's also worth noting that Burton plays one of the more credible scenes of drunkenness I can recall, likely because he had a lot of practice himself. The other major performance in the movie belongs to Roddy McDowall as Octavian, who has an off-kilter energy that complements the intensity of the central relationship without being overshadowed.

Speaking of grand, nutty gestures, there's a scene where Cleopatra's arrival is marked by a grandiose ceremony, including a giant sphinx brought forward through the crowd, and you look at all those extras and the elaborate sets and props that have been constructed, and it's hard not to have your breath taken away, at least a little. This was made in an era when movies could have ungodly amounts of money sunk into them and it could bear tactile rewards like this, but beyond the level of pure spectacle, I think it colours the movie pretty interestingly. I understand this was a notoriously troubled production, and scenes like Antony deciding to wage a battle on sea despite its strategic imprudence or Caesar railing against the limitations imposed on him by the Senate play like a director trying to assert his will over a production and battle with the money men. (It goes without saying the sea-set battle is one of the movie's highlights.) And in the closing stretches, the cavernous sets the characters find themselves in seem to amplify their emotions. Which is appropriate because this is a movie about characters who are larger than life and can shape history on a whim, consequences be damned. Is that a very democratic message? Absolutely not, but it does make for compelling cinema.

#film #movie review #cleopatra #joseph l. mankiewicz

5 notes · View notes

fatehbaz · 5 years ago

Text

Sorry. This might be annoying and excessively long. Among people interested in psychogeography, ecology, folklore, bioregionalism, urban geography (and Empire, hegemony, anti-imperialism, to a lesser extent, I guess?) there is a quote that gets circulated from time to time. I’ve seen the quote in academic articles, sure, but also on the W0rdpress blogs of, like, birders, hikers, gardeners, “bioregional animists,” and “woods aesthetic” fans. But why do both academic authors and popular/mainstream writers and bloggers and such consistently remove the end of this sentence from Michel de Certeau’s memorable statement: “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in – and this inverts the schema of the panopticon.”

Gonna revel in the wonders of the garden, the forest, the landscape, the other-than-human lifeforms, and yet not willing to explicitly address the vulnerability, the cascading extinction, the tightening noose of imperial hegemony and carceral systems threatening it all, landscapes, lives, entire worlds? What de Certeau is referring to here is the way that imperial/dominant power structures (European modernity, Empire) try to subdue, erase, destroy smaller, alternate, and/or non-Western cosmologies, to make it seem like Empire is the only possible world that can be constructed. And so landscapes become sanitized, especially in cities, and de Certeau says that such sanitized places are “uninhabitable” because they are so cold, because Empire tries to standardize experience, rather than allowing localized connections tor regional landscape. But the alternative worldviews, the histories, have not been fully erased, and exist in the cracks and crevices of modernity, and so there are “ghosts” of alternative worlds which live on. And it is the remnants of other worlds, or the glimpses of other creatures (animals/plants/etc.) or other surviving worldviews (graffiti in the subway, which rejects order and control), or the hopes of possible better future worlds, crevices where the “failures” of modernity can be glimpsed, which make a place habitable. “Haunted geographies.”

Here’s a sentence fragment from a different author, writing about de Certeau:

“exotification and suppression, under a cloak of celebration”

This kinda thing.

This fragment comes from a criticism of early-20th-century Euro-American academia’s so-called “folklore studies” but I think it also describes much 21st-century academic interest in “ecological knowledge” and non-Western cultures. I have a feeling that this behavior is similar to what contemporary upper class careerist-academics in academic anthropology departments and those “studying the utility of traditional ecological knowledge” are doing when they superficially throw around words like “decolonial” or “Haraway’s Chthuluscene” in their article abstract for Cool Points without actually having given much through to the way they and their sponsoring institution, in their thirst for prestige or good optics or whatever, are in fact continuing to perpetuate dispossession and appropriation of Indigenous/non-Western knowledge. And on some level, it is deliberate and calculated, though not always a conscious act on the individual author/researcher’s part. Intentional power consolidation masked as passive chauvinism masked as benevolent paternalistic concern for “primitive peoples” masked as genuine respect. What’s happening is a recuperation, the subsuming of alternative cosmologies and ways of being. Hypothetical Nat/Geo article, variations of which you’ve probably seen before: “How can we utilize Indigenous knowledge? Can traditional knowledge help us battle climate change?” Empire, those in power, hegemonic institutions colonizing knowledge, thought, cosmology.

Plenty has been written, especially in recent years, of a “plurality/pluriverse of worlds in contrast to one imperial worldview/cosmology” and also the paternalistic attitudes of Euro-American anthropologists, but the mid-century work of Michel de Certeau, in my opinion, anticipated a lot of this disk horse. Here’s the fuller quote:

-----------------------

“In recent years, especially since 1960, scholarship in the service of popular culture has been of Marxist inspiration, or at least ‘populist’ in spirit,” de Certeau, Dominique Julia and Jacque Revel wrote in a 1980 essay, “but does the scientific operation it undertakes obey different laws than it did in the past? On the contrary, it seems to be dominated by the mechanisms of age-old excommunications…to conceal what it claims to show” (de Certeau 1986, 121). This opening statement encapsulates much of de Certeau’s thinking about the history of folklore studies. Tracing its development in successive stages from the late eighteenth century to the “heyday of folklore” in France’s Third Republic (1870-1940), the authors argue that the eighteenth century aristocratic vogue for “the popular” concealed a powerful movement toward the domination of the peasantry. This movement involved both exotification and suppression, under a cloak of celebration.“ The idealization of the “popular,” as they put it, “is made all the easier if it takes the form of a monologue. The people may not speak, but they can sing...The intent [of folklorists] is both to collect…and to reduce (de Certeau 1986, 122).[...] The governing ideologies driving the emergence of this obsession with the folk were not static, however, and therefore, in order to understand the development of the politics of culture in folklore studies, scholars must examine, at each point, its “subjacent postulates” (de Certeau 1986, 123). For instance, following the domination imbricated with the origins of folklore studies in the 18th century, by the mid-nineteenth century, the authors describe folklore as taking on a paternalist role vis-a-vis its subject. The collection of folklore by this time, embodied especially in the works of Charles Nisard (1808-1890), is not just a chronicle of its elimination by the elite, but a protective function executed by the elite on behalf of the incompetent peasant. In this view, de Certeau and his colleagues observe, “the people are children whose original purity it is befitting to preserve by guarding them against evil readings” (de Certeau 1986, 124, original emphasis). [...] This, then, is the basic outline of de Certeau’s historical critique of both the conceptualization of folklore and the discipline of folklore studies, as well as the core of his critique of cultural studies in the late 20th century. Interestingly, however, it is also the core of his larger understanding of the workings of modernity.

From: Anthony Bak Buccitelli. “Hybrid Tactics and Locative Legends: Re-reading de Certeau for the Future of Folkloristics.” Cultural Analysis, Volume 15.1. 2016.

--------------------------------

So there is a popular quote from Michel de Certeau (French interdisciplinary scholar, 1925-1986), which seems to have been yet more popular since, like:

(1) 2010-ish with elevation of Mark Fisher’s work; “object-oriented ontology”; “dark ecology”; apparent academic elevation of ontological turn in anthropology; and the white-washed Euro-American academic language of traditional ecological knowledge, “decolonization,” etc.,

And also since (2) 2014/2015 in “popular” media, with apparent mainstream-ing or “revival” of folk horror, alongside elevation of eco-horror, Anthropocene disk horse, etc.

(In my anecdotal experience, at least, reading about geography, folklore, psychogeography, etc. in online spaces from M.S.N chatroom days onwards.)

I’m of course very wary of de Certeau’s interest in and celebration of Freud (come on, bro) and also the implications of de Certeau’s Jesuit background and early interest in missionary stuff (gross). But de Certeau did write some thoughtful and nicely-phrased stuff (in my opinion) about the importance of subverting imperialist/hegemonic cosmologies; how Euro-American academic institutionalized knowledge reinforces power; imperative for combating hegemony/carceral thinking by connecting with landscape; the “memory” of places; the “hidden” histories of landscapes, etc. And he wrote this decades before academics started stealing from Indigenous people of Latin America and getting into pluriverse stuff.

Anyway, one quote in particular seems most popular. but almost every single instance where i’ve ever seen this quote shared, it always cuts out the last few words of the statement. The quote is from what might be his most widely-read work, the “Walking in the City” chapter of his 1984 book The Practice of Everyday Life. (it’s a pretty brief chapter which is available for free online; might take 30 minutes to read, if you’re interested.) The quote as translated by Steven Rendall: “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in – and this inverts the schema of the panopticon.”

The “inversion of the panopticon” portion is almost always left out of the quote. even in academic writing or in the writing/blogs/whatever of people who otherwise seem like they would be down with anti-imperialism or something.

So, it comes across to me as if contemporary (2005-2020) academics and activists interested in, like, folklore or local horticulture or psychogeography will like ... take the “cute” fragments of these excerpts, but don’t want to “stir the pot” by presenting these writings in their fuller context, a fuller context which calls-out knowledge appropriation and explicitly trash-talks Empire.

And de Certeau’s not just writing about folklore or geography. He’s writing about taking action, about practicing alternative ways to relate to landscape in direct contrast to imperial cosmologies, academic/institutionalized/gatekept knowledge, and carceral thinking. (He’s famous for this; he emphasized “tactics” and “action.”)

So this guy is, of course, human, and had disagreeable and/or outright problematique associations. You can argue with his writing extensively. his publications are a mix of great, cool, iffy, “meh” and “bad take bruh.” But de Certeau was ahead of the curve in anticipating the way ambitious US academics would see “the decolonial turn” happening in academic anthropology in the 1990s/2000s and then weaponize it in a way that preserved their power dynamic and institutional power while still paying lip-service to “decolonization.”

But besides dunking on the imperialist foundations of Western institutionalized knowledge systems and the cunning employment of geographic re-worlding and re-naming in creating propaganda and imperial cosmology, and besides being ahead of the curve in anticipating re-enchantment trends and folk horror ... One thing I like about de Certeau’s writing is the emphasis on action, practice, and doing things to counter dominant/powerful cosmology’s attempt to destroy folk/non-Western worldview. Encouraging something like:

Take action. Books are cool, but books are not a substitute for action. Girl, you wanna study landscape, place-based identity, folklore, and how to escape the panopticon? Gotta put the theory texts down occasionally. Please go walk around in the forest; if you’re in the major city, don’t despair, just look at the moss growing in crevices betwixt the cobblestones. Imagine the ghosts, the histories, the stories, who died, what was lost, what’s come before. Power is trying to subsume all, but Empire gets anxious and flails because they know that there are gaps in their cosmology, cracks and breakages where other worlds seep through or can be glimpsed, retrieved, renewed. They know their cosmology can’t account for the diversity of life, the plurality of experience. There is not one world, but many. Find the crevices, the cracks, in the dominant power structures, and break them further. You can help to escape the tightening noose, the planetary-scale plantation, by using your imagination, cooking a meal, taking a walk.

#whatever #sorry for all this

298 notes · View notes

derstheviking · 4 years ago

Text

The Critique of Ideology

Slavoj Zizek claims that “it seems easier to imagine the ‘end of the world’ than a far more modest change in the mode of production, as if liberal capitalism is the ‘real’ that will somehow survive even under conditions of a global ecological catastrophe”. Zizek asserts the existence of ideology as “the generative matrix that regulates the relationship between the visible and non-visible, between imaginable and non-imaginable, as well as the changes in this relationship.” Accordingly, this matrix can be seen when an event that represents a new dimension of politics is misperceived as the continuation of or a return to the past, and the opposite, when an event that is entirely inscribed in the existing order is misperceived as a radical rupture. “The supreme example of the latter, of course, is provided by those critics of Marxism who (mis)perceive our late-capitalist society as a new social formation no longer dominated by the dynamics of capitalism as it was described by Marx”.

Zizek writes in The Sublime Object of Ideology, “The most elementary definition of ideology is probably the well-known phrase from Marx's Capital 'sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es' - ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it’. The very concept of ideology implies a kind of basic, constitutive naivete: the misrecognition of its own presuppositions, of its own effective conditions, a distance, a divergence between so-called social reality and our distorted representation, our false consciousness of it. That is why such a 'naive consciousness' can be submitted to a critical-ideological procedure. The aim of this procedure is to lead the naive ideological consciousness to a point at which it can recognize its own effective conditions, the social reality that is distorting, and through this very act dissolve itself. In the more sophisticated versions of the critics of ideology - that developed by the Frankfurt School, for example - it is not just a question of seeing things (that is, social reality) as they 'really are', of throwing away the distorting spectacles of ideology; the main point is to see how the reality itself cannot reproduce itself without this so-called ideological mystification."

Rex Butler states in his essay “What is a Master-Signifier?”, “Thus, in the analysis of ideology, it is not a matter of seeing which account of reality best matches the ‘facts’, with the one that is closest to being least biased and therefore the best. As soon as the facts are determined, we have already - whether we know it or not - made our choice; we are already within one ideological system or another. The real dispute has already taken place over what is to count as the facts, which facts are relevant, and so on.” He goes on to explain that in 1930s Germany the Nazi narrative won out over the socialist-revolutionary narrative not because it could better explain the crisis of liberal-bourgeois ideology, but because it best insisted that there actually was a crisis, of which the socialist-revolutionary ideology was apart, and could be accounted for as a ‘Jewish conspiracy’.

Zizek, on the topic of liberal modernity’s ultimate lack of a “transcendent guarantee, of total jouissance” (in his discussion of fantasy), he lists three methods to cope politically with this negativity: utopian, democratic, and post-democratic. Democracy, according to Zizek, is the political equivalent of “traversing the fantasy” as it “institutionalizes the lack itself by creating the space for political antagonisms”. Post-Democracy, which is the postmodern condition of apolitical consumerist fantasy, tries to neutralize negativity. Finally, the utopian fantasy (which Zizek asserts is primarily totalitarian or fundamentalist) creates the conditions for the elimination of the negativity in absolute jouissance. Stavrakakis’ book ‘The Lacanian Left’ which criticizes Zizek as interpreting Lacanian psychoanalysis through the politics of disavowal, argues essentially that the category of “democratic freedom” is the solution to the negativity of jouissance in the political sphere, because it takes up the notion of Other jouissance, as the expression of antagonisms under liberal capitalism, operates “to detach the objet petit a from the signifier of the lack in the Other…to detach (anti-democratic and post-democratic) fantasy from the democratic institutionalization of lack, making possible the access to a partial enjoyment beyond fantasy.”

If “traversing the radical fantasy” is the ultimate ethical act, it remains viable only because of the ongoing practices and beliefs of the subject. The traversal of fantasy is an “active, practical intervention in the political world”. “Traversing the fantasy” is different from everyday speech and action in that it challenges the “framing sociopolitical parameters”, “touches the Real”, and as Foucault maintained, there is an ontology of utterances as pure language events, “not elements of a structure, not attributes of subjects who utter them, but events which emerge, function within a field, and disappear.” Foucault, like Deleuze, develops an immanent philosophy which is post-historicist, but time still plays a crucial role. Deleuze speaks of the micropolitics of ‘becoming’ rather than the usual transcendental ‘being’, following from Bergson the concepts of multiplicities and pure virtuality.

Zizek criticizes Hardt and Negri’s ‘Empire’ for not bringing out the line of argument that the proletarian revolution proceeds from the internal antagonisms of the capitalist mode of production; in this sense he calls their analysis of postmodern globalized finance capitalism to be short of the “space needed for such radical measures”. The reason Zizek is critical of ‘Empire’ precisely is because what is clearly needed in the critique of ideology today is “to repeat Marx’s critique of political economy”, to speak of his hypothesis that the key to social change resides in “the status of private property”, “without succeeding on the temptation of the ideologies of “postindustrial” societies”. Zizek while asking whether ‘Empire’ remains pre-Marxist, interestingly the argument continues that it is actually more of return to Lenin than a return to Marx - for Marx is loved on Wall Street, for he “provided perfect descriptions of capitalist dynamics”. But Lenin on the other hand, Zizek claims, embodies the “concrete analysis of the concrete [historical] situation”. However, unlike Lenin, they do not deplore the notion of “universal human rights”, speaking of a need for the recognition of global citizenship, a minimum basic income, and the reappropriation of the “new” means of production. So why does Zizek consider ‘Empire’ a return to Lenin? Is it because “Benevolent as it is, this will necessarily end in a new Gulag!”? Not exactly, and rather the demand for scientific objectivity means the moment one seriously questions the existing liberal consensus they are accused of “abandoning scientific objectivity for outdated ideological positions”. Furthermore, he accuses them of a “lack of concrete insight [which] is concealed in the Deleuzian jargon of multitude, deterritorialization, and so forth.” and calling their analysis “anticlimactic”.

In the now infamous Slavoj Zizek vs. Jordan Peterson debate, Zizek confronts the threat of a post-ideological postmodernity with the statement that Trump himself is a postmodernist, and is creating the ground for a new postmodern conservatism in which facts are rejected, truth is relative. He on the other hand calls Bernie Sanders an old-fashioned moralist. Zizek, however, is not a postmodernist or post-structuralist himself but builds on Lacan, Hegel and Marx to develop a diagnosis for the conditions of post-modernity that threaten rational discourse. In a lecture with Jean Baudrillard, a woman provides a geological metaphor of modernity and postmodernity riding over each other like tectonic plates. Modernity in this case represents the Marxist paradigm of class struggle, while what is taken up seriously in post-structuralist analyses is the notion of identity formation as opposed to class struggle.

2 notes · View notes

mobius-prime · 5 years ago

Text

216. Sonic the Hedgehog #148

Hey, nice cover art! For those who aren't familiar, it's drawn using the same style as the art from the little-appreciated Gameboy Advance game Sonic Battle. It's always interesting when the comics imitate the art style of one of the games for a little while as a kind of lowkey advertisement.

The Good, the Bad & the Unknown (Part Three): Genesis

Writer: Ken Penders Pencils: Steven Butler Colors: Jason Jensen

We open not in the underground facility where all the action is taking place, but in Knothole, as Dylan delivers a message to Sally about how the Freedom Fighters haven't been answering any communications for the past hour. Oh, hey, Dylan, long time no see! We haven't seen the members of the Substitute Freedom Fighters in a while, now that I think about it. Shame, I always liked them. Anyway, Sally is highly concerned upon hearing of the loss of contact, and orders Dylan to bring Sonic's father Jules to the court immediately. Back in the facility, Tommy rushes off to find a way to help Rotor, Bunnie, and Fiona while leaving Tails behind to man the monitor room. Tails finds Sonic on the monitors, who is currently lying winded on the ground where he fell after the floor dropped. He hears a loud rumbling, and hops up in time to dodge an incoming train car, since it turns out he landed on some tracks for an underground rail system. Shadow isn't far behind, approaching Sonic rapidly, but Sonic decides he's going to turn the tables and fight on his own terms, hopping onto one of the passing cars (which is really more like a high-tech mine cart than anything). Shadow stops, catching up to Metal Sonic and Isaac and wondering why Sonic would use the train car to travel if he can run faster than it at his highest speeds, and neither of the two robots have an explanation.

I think that's literally the first time anyone in the entirety of the comic so far has actually acknowledged out loud that Robotnik is just Kintobor backwards. I mean, it's kind of obvious if you look at the name for more than two seconds, but no one's ever actually said it. While this is going on, Tommy arrives at the corridor where the other three teammates are being electrocuted, and searches around frantically for a way to save them without getting caught in the electricity himself. After finding a random leather glove, he hits a circuit box, hoping it will help.

This is where things get a little jumbled. Tails finds Sonic on the monitors, as well as the two pursuing robots close behind him, and becomes fascinated by the conversation that Metal Sonic and Isaac get into. Their conversation continues in the background of the next several pages, so instead of trying to describe it interspersed with the rest of the action I'll just summarize it here. Isaac explains that he was created by one Dr. Ivan Kintobor, who was born in 2006 - yes, our 2006, only a few decades before the Xorda dropped the gene bombs on Earth. Ivan anticipated the Xorda's genocidal response to the capture and dissection of one of their own by the humans, so he designed Isaac to be able to function in a post-apocalyptic environment before sealing himself away in a stasis pod. Isaac bore firsthand witness to the results of the gene bombs, which, contrary to their intention to kill all humans without disturbing the planet's ecosystems, threw tons of volcanic ash and dust into the atmosphere, transforming the planet's surface forever. As mentioned before, this was the first "Day of Fury" recorded by the echidnas, and over the next thousand years, humans devolved into the Overlanders we know today (though how losing one finger and nothing else counts as "devolving" I have no clue), while their residual DNA mixed with that of various ordinary animals, who consequently had their own evolution accelerated into Mobiankind. When Ivan, from his pod, learned that societies were emerging from the newly-created Mobian species, he ordered Isaac to chronicle important historical events of the planet in addition to scientific data. Not long after the sun finally burned through the rest of the ash and dust in the air, the energy from the gene bombs, having finally absorbed deep into the planet's crust, reacted with beryl deposits to create… the Chaos Emeralds! Yes, interestingly enough, this is the backstory of the Chaos Emeralds in the comics. But wait, remember how Sonic encountered red Chaos Emeralds on another planet during Tossed in Space? All I can imagine from that is that Earth must not have been the first planet the Xorda used their gene bombs on - it makes sense, as the other species of the galaxy are clearly terrified of them for some reason - and thus, there are slightly different versions of Chaos Emeralds on other planets that the Xorda have targeted before.

Anyway, Isaac explains all this to Metal Sonic as Sonic continues to ride his train car to get away from Shadow and the two robots. He tries to contact Tails for help, but Tails is caught up in listening to the impromptu history lesson over the monitors, and thus Sonic is attacked from behind by Shadow. He manages to throw him off by abruptly stopping his car, and abandons the vehicle while Shadow is still stunned from the impact to run down another side corridor, shutting the door behind him. Rotor, also listening to the audio feed as he, Bunnie and Fiona race to meet up, asks Tails if he's recording this, but Tails doesn't have time to figure out if he can download a recording form the computers' systems, as Shadow is quickly approaching Sonic's hiding place.

The three finally meet up, and Shadow directs them to the door Sonic has taken refuge behind, trying to deadlift it open. Isaac says frankly that if Sonic has gone in that particular room, he's dead, but Shadow replies that Sonic tends not to die even in the face of otherwise-mortal danger, lifting the door and calling in that he just wants to talk. Wait, what? Shadow, this entire time you've been beating on Sonic for no good reason, and now you want to try to talk things out? Sonic is clearly as skeptical as I am, immediately darting out to hit Shadow in the face once his hiding place is discovered, but at that moment everyone is distracted by an ominous new sight - the room Sonic was hiding in is in fact a gigantic launch base for a missile, whose thrusters have just fired… Wait, now I'm even more confused! How the hell did Sonic hide in that room for a good minute without somehow noticing the huge flaming missile behind him?! Ah, whatever, this is Penders, we already know his stories don't make much sense.

Playing Around

Writer/Pencils: Nelson Ribeiro Colors: Jason Jensen

Time for some more silly stuff! Apparently, the Freedom Fighters (along with a few other of their allies) have decided to put on a play for some of the younger children of Knothole, about one of their missions against Eggman. Sally isn't in the play, leading Rosie to question who will be playing her if not, well, her, but Sally just giggles and tells her to wait and see as Sonic and Tails come out to welcome the kids to their play. Before Sonic can even get his final words out a spiked mitt emerges from behind the curtain to drag him backstage, and we see none other than Knuckles in an auburn wig and blue vest and boots, furiously reminding Sonic that the only reason he's doing this is for the kids, and otherwise he would be clobbering Sonic into the ground right now for even suggesting this crazy scheme. Oh, boy, this should be good…

So, who exactly is playing who in this production? It opens with Knuckles-Sally in "her" room in Knothole, when Geoffrey, played by Bunnie, arrives to warn of an impending attack on the castle. Knuckles-Sally, barely able to contain his disdain for this whole affair, uses Nicole, played by Archimedes, to call Uncle Chuck for help, but just then, Eggman, played by Big the Cat, and Snively, played by Tails, burst in and capture the two to roboticize them. Wait, if Tails is playing Snively, then who is playing Tails? Why, Rotor of course, being laboriously held aloft by ropes controlled by Jules, Mighty, and Espio from the rafters. He and Sonic (played by, well, Sonic - guess we know who got the most preferential treatment during casting) are relaxing in Knothole when Uncle Chuck, also played by himself but sporting various kitchenware all over his body to suggest a roboticized form, rushes in to warn them of Knuckles-Sally's capture. Rotor-Tails flies Sonic to Robotropolis, where the two prepare to attack Eggman, Snively, and a shadow-bot played by Vector. Also, we get some convenient sound effects, courtesy of Amy Rose!

With Knuckles-Sally rescued, Sonic embraces "her" and goes in for a kiss, and well, let's just say he's really in the spirit of the role, with Knuckles having to warn him away from actually kissing him through clenched teeth, that is unless he's ready to redeem that promise of a clobbering. Oh, come on Knuckles, we all remember how you said quite a few issues ago how you didn't want to have to deal with girls and would rather only hang around boys - accept your gay side, my dude! Smooch that 'hog!

Destiny's Child

Writer: Ken Penders Pencils: Tim Smith 3 Colors: Jason Jensen

Tim Smith… 3? I'm so confused by this name. Do they perhaps mean Tim Smith III, as in, he's the third person in his family named Tim Smith? Or is there just a hidden cloning facility in the back of the Archie Comics headquarters that occasionally churns out extra Tim Smiths to draw for random issues of their comics?

Tails is hanging out alone by a pond at the outskirts of Knothole Village one afternoon, and it turns out that though he's kept quiet about it, he's extremely frustrated at the knowledge that even though his parents are alive somewhere on the other side of the galaxy, no one seems to be rushing to actually go and rescue them. Suddenly, Athair's disembodied head appears floating in front of him, speaking cryptically about how the hour of the Chosen One draws near or whatever. Tails isn't impressed, and confronts him about the whole Chosen One thing, that by now multiple different people have talked to him about it and he was even kidnapped and held hostage for months by Mammoth Mogul over it, yet no one will actually tell him what this supposed prophecy even refers to. He asks if everyone knows about this but him, and honestly, I don't blame him one bit for being upset - not even us readers know what the hell the prophecy is all about, and we're normally given behind the scenes info like, all the time!

Oh, about time someone informs Tails that he has other family still left on the planet! Seriously, this kid has believed he was an orphan all his life, and yet Merlin never thought to, you know, contact him and reassure him he still had an uncle? Athair recounts the exact hostage situation with Mogul from before, how it occurred when Tails was in transit to help Knuckles back then, and Tails waves him off, saying that Sonic already told him everything that happened while he was captured. He demands an explanation, but Athair simply fades from view, leaving him frustrated and alone by the water once more. However, Athair's voice echoes back to him after a moment, urging him to be patient, as soon he'll finally know what all this is about… and about time, too, this has been going on since literally the first era of the comic with no resolution in sight.

#nala reads archie sonic preboot #archie sonic #archie sonic preboot #sonic the hedgehog #sth 148 #writer: ken penders #writer: nelson ribeiro #pencils: steven butler #pencils: nelson ribeiro #pencils: tim smith 3 #colors: jason jensen

9 notes · View notes

derbysilkmill · 4 years ago

Text

HEGEL’S TROWEL: working on the thing

Making changes everything. Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality

Soul is extra-scientific, outside of science, we will allow no scientific disproof of it. Maulana Karenga, Practice: Documents of Contemporary Art

Locked down by government guidelines designed to increase social distancing, the gap between oneself and the other, a space that can stop cross infection between us all, meant spending time watching the television. The daily BBC update reported how many more bodies have been, are still being, destroyed or attacked from the deadly Covid-19 virus. It might not be surprising then with so much biological and existential demolition on the go that I found myself watching TV programming to do with restoration and making things: Salvage Hunters, Escape to the Chateau DIY, Secrets of the Museum, The Restoration of Notre- Dame Cathedral. Kirsty Alsop reckons these days we should Keep Crafting and Carry on; making things as a form of therapy. The Repair Shop is a phenomena with craft experts restoring material stuff to how it was. Grayson Perry promoted art, and artisan making – he is a potter - as a great healer: ‘we are all wounded’ he said on channel four. Before the outbreak of this new threat to life I was working up this small general piece about the transformational potential of creative activity, in the main, making.

Lisa Tarbuck, was talking on radio 2. She’s a media celebrity and a fan of making things. Super mentioning a piece of weaving or needlework she’d completed that day, she told her Saturday night audience: ‘I just couldn’t stop bloomin’ looking at it…know wot I mean…? An old friend told me recently that I just had to get hold of a copy of Mathew Crawford’s The Case for Working with Your Hands (2011). He, the old friend, was the studio furniture designer-maker when I worked with him at Detail London; a young furniture makers. Together, we made bespoke furniture (for a beautiful stylish wealthy cool consuming clientele). Nowadays he works in academia, writing and lecturing to students about craft and making. His research has interrogated how human well-being is affected by undertaking craft activities, particular recreational making done by amateur practitioners. Crawford writes about well-being, too. The subtitle of his study is: or why office work is bad for us and fixing things feels good. In a recent email exchange the furniture designer turned academic communicated that he looked back with fondness to his making days. Perhaps with ‘rose-tinted glasses’ he qualified.

There is a growing group of western intellectuals who today theorise and promote the idea that there is a definite connection between the processes undertaken when crafting things from raw materials and human well-being. Often slow and protracted, acts of physical making are, they generally posit, a valid source and resource to increase self-esteem. Existential events such as technically planning how to make something from scratch, the selecting of appropriate materials, development and deployment of hand skills, constructing structures to a set standard, finishing worked-on material, just being in a practical workshop in extended time and space, are inter alia physically, intellectually, emotionally good for human life. Teaching craft skills in adult education and community workshop settings I have witnessed diverse learner makers achieve remarkable personal satisfaction, and that allied well-being a craft cognoscenti rightly identify, in going through the technical and material processes when constructing any crafted object. Contra this supra ideal of process, quotidian workshop life reveals that, in reality, it is not only the extended making of the final object that is beneficent to the maker of this newly-present thing – the temporal spatial physical crafting and grafting - but the now-made self-styled object- the present thing in itself the maker has made.

At the currently closed-for-restoration Silk Mill (soon to be transformed/remade as The Museum of Making) interested visitors come to Derby for a look around the modern workshop housed in the ‘world’s-first-factory’. Generally, but not always, these people are museum professionals, culture workers, creative artists or social activists. Nearly all are interested in delivering well-being because it matters. I like talking to these folks, often desk-bound and definitively (unavoidably?) over-digitalised in their daily office lives, they take a genuine interest in the practical making a workshop allows – the working we do with our hands - activities they see as critical to human holistic well-being. Sometime ago our executive director at Derby Museums was in the workshop standing by our CNC, talking with me. Next to Tony stood one of the inquisitive visitors; an interested (and interesting to me) culture-industry professional. Inevitably, the conversation made its way to mentions of well-being. I told them both how I see people who often do symbolically distinguished, but atomised or abstract, work -- practices with often unquantifiable or subjective outcomes (the negative work Crawford describes) -- come to a fresh and solider understanding of themselves after constructing a materially tangible piece of furniture out of plywood or turning out a curvy bowl from a rough brute blank of oak. Stood next to the idled CNC I remember saying something like this:

“In my working life I come across a lot of people who do highly complex engineering, but in a rather abstract or theoretical way, or others who live in a digital bubble I call ‘computer world’, modelling AutoCAD perfection but never getting to actually see or touch any material outcomes or be involved in making something from start to finish by their own hands… But when people make something here in the workshop they objectify themselves…….as they say “no one has ever taken a picture of the unconscious…or seen a picture of the self ”.

There followed a sort of embarrassed silence. Then inscrutable nods and smiles from the Executive Director and his guest. Then a “well thanks for that Steve….” -- as they left the workshop.

Specifically, a proud plagiarist, I had, of course, synthesized the ideas of literary critic Terry Eagleton and Arts and Craft sculptor Eric Gill. Generally speaking, I had just paraphrased a few ideas of the well-known German philosopher GWF Hegel (1770-1831) -- ideas lifted from the undecipherable, but well known, Phenomenology of Mind (1807).

Well, to be more honest, I was paraphrasing Alexandre Kojève’s partially more decipherable Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Compiled from Kojève’s lecture notes, and first published in 1969, the cult text explains Hegel’s theory of the dialectical (constant changing) progress of human history, in particular his well-known concept of the ‘Master and Slave’ conflict – the transformative phylogenetic and ontogenetic dialectic. For me the key passage in Introduction is how the text unmakes and then reconstitutes Hegel’s brutal concept of The Thing – raw given objective nature as unshaped material object – and how non-human Things (slaves/workers/makers) become Human. i.e. transform their selfhood from a raw physiological primordial brute unthinking thing by working on another thing (raw brute unshaped material reality – wood, stone, metal, wool, cotton, clay) and making it or, a key word, transforming it (as of themselves) - into something it wasn’t before, in its un-worked material given existence in the world, for another: The Master.

This is the actual Hegelian (Kojèvian) paragraph that refers to the experience of the creating maker- slave who makes for, and in place of, the consumer master:

‘The slave can work for the Master – that is, for another other than himself…he does not destroy the thing as it is given. He postpones the destruction of the thing by first trans-forming it through work; he prepares it for consumption-that is to say, he “forms” it. In his work, he trans-forms things and trans-forms himself at the same time: he forms things and the World by transforming himself, by educating himself; and he educates himself, he forms himself, by transforming things and the World. Thus, the negative-or-negating relation to the object becomes a form of this object and gains permanence, precisely because, for the worker, the object has autonomy. At the same time, the negative-or-negating middle-term—i.e., the forming activity [of work] – is the isolated particularity or the pure Being-for-itself of the Consciousness. And this Being-for-itself, through work, now passes into what is outside of the Consciousness, into the element of permanence. The working Consciousness thereby attains a contemplation of autonomous given-being such that it contemplates itself in it. [The product of work is the worker’s production. It is the realisation of his project, of his idea; hence, it is he that is realised in and by this product, and consequently he contemplates himself when he contemplates it. Now, this artificial product is at the same time just as “autonomous,” just as objective, just as independent of man, as is the natural thing. Therefore, it is by work, and only by work, that man realises himself objectively as man. Only after producing an artificial object is man himself really and objectively more than and different from a natural being; and only in this real and objective product does he become truly conscious of his subjective human reality. Therefore, it is only by work that man is a supernatural being that is conscious of its reality; by working, he is “incarnated” Spirit, he is historical “World”, he is “objectivised” History.’

Kojève concludes in the Intro that the dead German idealist philosopher (Hegel) ‘may well know much more than we do about things we need to know’.

Interestingly, a former US academic/intellectual, Crawford (he worked in a Washington ‘think tank’ before quitting to run a motorcycle repair shop) uses the same quote in his book The Case For Working With Your Hands – but misleadingly attributes the quote to the Kojève. Folksy Crawford expresses Hegel’s idea in a more homespun pragmatic manner, as is the way of practical American philosophy: ‘The satisfaction of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence has been known to make a man quiet and easy…he is proud of what has been made’

Crawford writes about a kind of ‘self-disclosing’ latent in creativity, work and making.Concurring with Crawford and Hegel the sociologist Richard Sennet in his study The Craftsman, rites about ‘the warm values of craft and creativity’ and a ‘zesty freedom crucial to well-being of society’.

_____________________________________

I worked for a time in a comprehensive school. The head of Design and Technology – a former skilled industrial toolmaker – had had the foresight not to sell off the capstan lathes, milling machines, welding kit, old-school woodwork benches and traditional hand tools bought and installed in the 1970s.

Painted out in dull lemon yellow, orthodox (vintage) wood-machinery apple green, the Design &Technology workshops looked like the past and so still played their part in 21st century life. You could smell old machine oil in the cold metal machines, bashed-up blue vices fitted to weathered beech workstations exuded a residual making aura. When the lathes were set running, rasping files shaped steel, sharp planes flattened pine, the space sounded like a real live workshop in the (ontogenetic) now, yet echoing the making culture of a phylogenetic past. In America, Crawford tells us that technical making and design is simply called ‘shop class’, or more accurately was called shop class because he bleakly observes, akin to the collapse of technical skills education in Britain, since the early 90s educational institutions have instituted a ‘big push’ to close shop class to open up digital and computer literacy. Any revival of shop class today is hindered for Crawford by the lack of skilled people competent to revive technical crafts and making in general.

Frustrated by the British school drift to digital D&T practices, a virtual curriculum (there is now virtual welding), and driven on by a shared ‘it wasn’t all computers in our day’ narcissistic nostalgia (manifested in everyday miserableness), me and the old toolmaker got our heads together and came up with project which harked back to the days of secondary-modern craft lessons in wood and metalwork; the saved machines made the scene believable.

It was only a small pot-planting trowel. It was made out of aluminium and wood. From tip to tip 200mm long. It had a curved blade and the cranked arm was cold-riveted to the blade in a traditional blacksmithing style; the students used ballpein hammers clanging metal on the workshop’s under-loved anvil. On the once-busy but no-longer-silent lathes we put a sharp point on the 6mm round bar that made the stem from handle to blade helping drive it into the softer wooden trowel handle. The serpentine bends were created on a small Groz metal folder designed for DIY artisan metalworkers. The hardwood handle was shaped with a selection of rough round and flat cutting rasps, before being sanded, with care, by glass-paper. The blade was formed with aero-industry tin snips before being worked into a symmetrical curve with metal files. To work the flat sheet aluminium into the required radius of the blade it was fed several passes through a small jewellery rolling machine – sort of a washing mangle meets pasta machine. The trowel looked impressive when made. Three hundred students made one. The test of success is always if young makers want to take what they make home to show to someone who they care cares; most did. They had worked on the thing, objectified themselves, could contemplate themselves in itself, the small trowel, a trowel designed to be used, a tool to work on the thing, transforming nature as soil to wit.

The now fired up ex-toolmaker pointed out to me that, before we could roll out the trowel project to the students, the NQTs (Newly Qualified Teachers) in the D&T department – the electronic, digital, laser engraving, 3D printing makers – and ESWs, (Educational Support Workers) who would assist students, had to be quickly trained up in the basic craft and hand skills required to create, then teach, the trowel. They would need teaching the basic historical making techniques for working on the thing.

We arranged an ‘after-school’ instruction session in the workshop classroom. Everyone arrived looking harassed with a mug of tea or coffee/mug of hot water; offered the usual banter; male teachers removed ties; everyone put on an apron. Each participant got a set of stock blanks: a length of aluminium bar, 150mm x 6mm ø; a rectangle of sheet aluminium, 1mm x 75mm x 120mm; a section of hardwood (beech, oak, ash, reclaimed teak or mahogany), 100mm x 25mm▫. The first task was to make a two-dimensional template – using 5mm graph card folded in half along a continuous grid line – to mark out the tapering and curved profile of the trowel’s blade. Sketching freehand they used the graph-paper squares for visual guidance. The pencilled line was cut with scissors and the pattern unfolded to reveal a symmetrical, if rough, outline. The next step was to show the trowel-makers how to transfer the profile, geometrically square, onto the shiny cropped aluminium by using a scribed (accurately-marked) centre line to align the centrefold of the paper along, thus ensuring the blade sat true, i.e. at 90° to the square back edge.

A metal scriber was then used to carefully score a visible line around the flimsy paper template into the soft aluminium. The workshop was quiet except for the soft ringing sound of metal on wood benchtop as, in deep concentration, teaching-staff students guided the hardened and sharpened steel marking tool around the curved card onto the aluminium.

(Still you could hear some light jokey banter, but of a kind, collaborative, encouraging type of joshing – ‘phatic’ communication, some dead continental philosopher of language would say.)

Aluminium can be cut easily - as card with scissors - when using inexpensive aero-industry shearing snips. Commonly used in hand tin-smith work and light commercial bespoke production these tools are designed to cut straight or with a left or right hand bias. (They are colour coded red, green and yellow and a good workshop needs the full set – an additional long-nosed straight-cutting pair is a great help for occasional extended profile cutting or internal corners.) I demonstrated how to cut the aluminium in short snips, neatly following the scribed line, shearing the material slowly and deftly the snips making the waste (swarf) curl upwards, away from the desired external blade line.

It was pointed out to the teacher-students that - novice maker or proficient craftsman - it is generally best practice when cutting stock materials to work ‘outside the line’ leaving a small margin of material for cleaning up post-cutting. Dead flat with fine teeth, hard because made from steel, metal-working files were used to remove the extraneous rough cut metal to the scribed line, scored into the aluminium, demarking the required final recognisable trowel-blade profile. Filing produces sharp burrs on metal which, in this instance, were removed with industrial emery paper. The blade smooth and symmetrical was now ready for the students to roll.

Metal rolling is the same process for a fine silver ring as a thick-walled boiler rolled out from, as it happens, 25 mm boiler plate. Basically, thin or thick factory-milled metal plate is passed through two calibrated parallel rollers which are adjusted to the required gauge of the material to be rolled. Sprung under high tension the front bars force the metal sheet towards a single back roller which is set higher than the underside of the passing steel or, in our case, aluminium. The metal is malleable and -- forced to climb over the higher spinning back roller -- begins to take on the required radius of the part required. This might be a shallow curve as the trowel needs, or a full circle, as in a delicate silver ring or a high pressure vessel such as a boiler whereby the seam is soldered or welded together and ground back. We were using a small jewellery-maker’s bench roller - no more than 300 mm in width - but the radius-forming mechanical principal remains the same.

Operating a bench metal roller is, as I sort of said before, a bit like passing dough through a pasta machine. But instead of making the metal thinner per pass – which, as is well known, is how the metal plate was produced in the forging mill in the first phase of ‘thing working’ - the radius is increased; the careful gradual adjustment – the increased un-alignment of the roller - in small increments forms the aluminium into the practical, and aesthetically pleasant crescent wanted. Students checked the curvature against a small accurate plywood template. They had to make three to four adjustments.

Before forming the 6mm bar into the distinctive kinked component joining the wooden handle to the blade of the trowel, it was necessary at this stage to turn a sharp point on the aluminium that would allow the bar to be driven into the end grain of the timber. The stock piece of rod was placed in a three-jaw chuck screwed onto the turning stock of one of the neglected Colchester lathes in the workshop, and the traverse tool slider bed set at 5°; a shallow machining angle, but correct for this operation. Each operative was informed of which was the correct tool to use for this operation – left hand cutting tool - and shown how to clamp and set the tool in the lathe tool holder to the dead-centre of the lathe and therefore the dead centre of the round stock material to achieve the optimum cutting angle and efficient waste removal. As a matter of maker education, head-stock turning-speed settings – coded in colour on the foundry-cast body of the Colchester – were demonstrated to, but set by, the learner turners.

The trowel project was designed/contrived to include several processes and employ a variety of tools and typical metalworking kit to introduce youngsters to some fundamental craft techniques and experience bench fitting, sheet metal working, capstan turning.

To secure the cranked arm to the blade two aluminium rivets were to be inserted through the stem and trowel blade and flattened into a pre-drilled countersunk hole so creating a secure fixing. But, the bar was round in section, so that only a small section of the stem would be in contact with the flattish blade. To achieve a better joint it was imperative, then, to flatten out the round bar by heating the end of the stem and bashing it while it was still plastic with heat, hammering it carefully into shape with a heavy ballpein hammer on the arm of a traditional forge anvil; a neat steer of the making process into the lost-world of blacksmithing.

(Hegel liked to walk in his home town of Heidelberg, and perhaps it was the sight of the town blacksmith toiling over a hot forge, hammering and twisting hot raw iron into shape, making some decorative gates for the local lordship, that inspired his ideas about masters and servants and the transformative effects of working on the thing? Today, most of us have seen similar images on TV: neo-blacksmiths heating metal in a forge until it glows orange-red with heat from the coals before working it to form, with that romantic ringing of hammer and anvil, before plunging the work into cold steaming water.)

The problem with aluminium is that, non-ferrous, it retains its silver-grey colour when heated, and, to boot, we didn’t have access to a traditional forge, but the old toolmaker had the answer. He produced a plumber’s Gaz blowtorch, “I nicked ‘im from construction cupboard”, and some Fairy Liquid. Go on then, he said, smirking, what’s the Washing-up liquid for? I put my bottom lip out, shrugged with a laugh, and said I had no idea. “Ally don’t glow”. “Oh…I see” I said. “Detergent turns black when metal’s ‘ot enuff…then you can work it on anvil…simple” he grabbed the collar of his white smock with both hands and gave them a tug, before firing up the blowtorch. I passed this tip on to the NQTs and ESWs before they flattened their trowel stems.

In old-school black and white ink, a technical drawing indicated to the trowel-makers where on the straight length of aluminium bar marks needed to be made to indicate where the handle section should be placed in the trapping tongue - moved by a simple rack gear - of the Groz bender. The top of the tooling was also marked ‘clock –face’ style to show how far the tommy bar handle should be moved (from 12 to 4 say) and so work the soft rod into the flattened S shaped crank required of the finished component. The makers were having fun using the different kit, especially, the Groz, - they became absorbed in the basic but fundamental metal-forming processes and traditional manufacturing techniques introduced to them - but had to fully concentrate on ensuring that the two bends were executed in the same plane of orientation to avoid twisting the stalk of the cranked trowel stem or out of line with the flattened riveted section.

[ The Groz metal bender is itself a thing – converted and worked and cast from material nature (mined raw iron ore -- made into steel and machine processed) - made by things – humanised thing makers (engineers) - to make small springs, fixing clips and rings - things for other things; tools, machine parts, which in their bending, twisting and forming offer a thing maker chance to transcend its objective thingness in working on this metal material stuff, and objectify its subjective self through the final thing made, which in the case of machinery and tools may make other things and so on. Such as clips on a motorcycle in for repair or customisation in Crawford’s American shop. ]

The cranked bar was then set in a machine vice on the pillar drill, and a 3mm hole was drilled to take the rivet stalk and slightly larger countersunk hole ( top side) into which the 3mm aluminium rivet stalk would, using a hammer and anvil, be flattened. The wider domed mushroom head of the round rivet traps the thin blade between the stem and blade. To avoid flattening the curvature of the rivet head a purpose-designed hollowed out steel tool -- an exact concaved inverse radius of the convex pip of the rivet fastening -- was used by the participants to protect it when hammering the soft aluminium into the bored out section on the reverse side. This was then also filed flat and finished smooth with emery paper. With this fine fettling the metal-working processes had been completed. Components had all been successfully marked out, cut, shaped, rolled and bent, riveted and finally filed into a recognisable small potting trowel. Everyone in the class (shop) looked dead pleased to have transformed the shapeless bits and pieces of metal into a tool that could be used; but they still had to make the handle out of wood.

In a small box were a selection of pre-cut handle blanks ready to be matched to the still-shiny trowel parts. There were short 25mm square sections of beech, ash, mahogany, maple, oak and reclaimed pine – all unwanted found offcuts lying around waiting to be made into something useful but beautiful. I explained how that the first task was to set out the curvature required of a rounded handle on the end sections. For example, a circle is created from a geometrically symmetrical combination of hexagonal flats filed at 45°, then refined further with 22.5° tangents which, if the section diameter was large enough, can be taken closer to a perfect mathematically round profile with 11.25° flats and so on, i.e. angles are halved until a finite circle is produced. People smile when I say a circle is made of infinite flats, but, in a way, it is.

The second operation was to drill a hole down the centre of the stock timber with a 6mm drill bit. The wood was set square in a vice on a pillar drill and a hole bored down its core to accommodate the aluminium.

To be honest with you, most of the teachers and ESWs went their own way, freestyling, shaping the wooden parts, integrating underside curves with small finger-shaped hand grips. After the tight discipline of the metal techniques, finishing of the handles with spoke-shaves and rough-sharp rasps into vernacular crafted forms offered the makers a sort of soft therapeutic warm-down. The workshop took on a quieter woody – less hard metallic - aspect; a fresh atmospheric with the room infused by the aroma of the freshly worked old dead growing thing: the trees.

The organic-looking handles were finished with glass paper, students instructed in how to work from the roughing grades, 60 grit through to 100 grit, fining down to 240 flour paper. The job was finished by oiling the timber with Danish oil which brings out the light and shade and twisting lines of wood grain; sealing the material from moisture, and ultimate rotting. The final operation was to cement the riveted trowel section into the completed handle with a small dob of epoxy resin adhesive and stand back and admire; take in what had been achieved in a short after-school making session.

We stood around chatting. People said they’d loved making something. One said it had de-stressed him. Another couldn’t wait to take it home to show others. Some said nothing, but admired their handiwork. A few critiqued their own trowel, then complimented other’s workmanship. Phone cameras came into play. After we all packed away and tidied the workshop up ready for the next D&T school day – vacuum forming plastic bugs for students to stick googly eyes onto – everybody rushed out of the door to get home for tea. But one person hung back. She said to me ‘I’ve really enjoyed making this. Being in the workshop was just what I needed’. Good, I thought, and said ‘I’m glad’. She said ‘No more than that Steve…I needed this’. She paused. Looked a bit upset. She told me she’d had a horrible day. Awful and terrible because she was in personal conflict with a co-worker. The situation was unbearable. The emotional pain almost tortuous, nearly breaking her, she reckoned. So upset, she just wanted to go home; get out of the place. She’d forced herself to stay on. But holding up the trowel said ‘I’m so glad I stuck it out – I’m dead proud of making this’. She waved about the trowel as if digging the earth. It might only be a small thing, she admitted, but the trowel had proved something, her soul was restored, she had something to use and show for herself. The Trowel project will feature in Museum of Making workshop programming 2021

_____________________________________________

1 note · View note

gumregrowth-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Gum Regrowth

Oil drawing insurance claims to become a secure, effective option to standard toothpaste and also mouth wash regimens. However at the moment, little documentation supports its own usage in oral care.

If you're a health-conscious individual, you perhaps reviewed labels. You inspect your food items for man-made components, chemicals, and also poisonous substances.

Regrow Gum Tissue

You might even be worried about the quality from your sky and water. Your household cleaning products. Cosmetics too. For more, visit us: Regrow Gums

You wish to know exactly what is actually in the stuff you're eating, alcohol consumption, breathing, and also placing on your physical body. You wish to lessen your exposure to fabricated components and also untried chemicals. Like toothpaste as well as mouthwash

For example, examine your toothpaste as well as mouth wash. Check out the ingredients on boob tube, container, or package deal.

You may find ingredients like:

tartrazine triclosan alcohol polysorbate 80 FD&C yellowish 5 sodium benzoate FD&C blue 1 benzoic acid cetylpyridinium chloride sodium saccharin domiphen bromide glycerin

Regrowing Gum Tissue

And also you're placing that stuff in your mouth.

You probably would not put up with these chemicals in your meals. However you're still placing them in your mouth. Most of these chemicals do not also operate as marketed.

Mouth wash is supposed to get rid of micro-organisms and freshen breath. But alcohol-based mouth wash could really dry out your mouth and counteract your oral mucus defense team.

This indicates that the more mouth wash you make use of, the extra you rely upon this. Your natural oral setting cannot perform its project. Ultimately you get more micro-organisms and even worse respiration.

As well as, while toothpaste components seem a bit much more safe, some varieties can easily contain things that's neutral at absolute best. And downright unsafe at worst.

A few of the substances to stay away from feature:

triclosan; FD&C colourings; and also carbomer.

How To Regrow Receding Gums?

Wondering exactly how your items stack up? Have a look at the EWG Skin Deep data bank. You could search for the brands you utilize and check out their protection scores.

As health-conscious consumers (or as people that are working with that), we're all trying to do away with dangerous chemicals from our atmospheres. We all attempt to bring in smarter choices concerning exactly what our experts eat, consume alcohol, put on our body, and inhibit our home.

Which is actually why, our team presume, oil pulling has actually seen an enormous rise from recognition. Properly, that, and that Gwyneth Paltrow has actually been actually speaking everything about this. Thus exactly what is actually oil drawing?

While that seems like some sort of labor-intensive work in the resource sector (sort of like grape stomping or cattle roping), oil drawing is fairly straightforward. It indicates swishing oil around in your mouth.

Initial thing in the early morning, before eating or brushing your teeth:

Take about a tablespoon from eatable oil (like olive, sesame, coconut, or even sunflower oil). Put it in your mouth without ingesting. Swish that around for 10-15 moments while doing your various other washroom service. In the end from the 10-15 mins, spit it out. Wash your mouth totally with warm water. Floss, brush, and also proceed with your day.

Regrowing Gums Tissue

While oil pulling has found a recent rise of popularity, it's been actually around for a long, number of years. Like, just before mouth wash, dental floss, as well as toothpaste.

In reality, the Ayurvedic content Charaka Samhita-- which mores than 2000 years of ages-- illustrates oil taking as a way to improve oral health and also protect against foul-smelling breath.

( Sesame or even sunflower oils were actually most frequently made use of.).

Naturally, even if something was around a long time ago, and discussed in a historical Ayurvedic text, doesn't automatically suggest this's a good idea (observe: bloodletting).

Therefore permit's view what modern-day scientific research must claim concerning this. How does oil drawing work?

Theoretically, oil taking could help reduce cavity enducing plaque as well as gingivitis.

When the body fat in oil satisfies certain materials in the mouth, this creates a "soap". Detergents emulsify and also create surfactants, which could cleanse the mouth by "scrubbing" out unsafe micro-organisms.

Oils likewise have lignans, which have antioxidant and also antimicrobial task.

Nonetheless, the analysis really isn't precisely effective. Most studies looking at oil taking are actually tiny, quick, or even insufficient.

However that doesn't imply that's useless. This merely means that the scientific research isn't really there certainly however. Exactly what performs the study mention? Halitosis (halitosis).

Regrow Gum Tissue Naturally

Regarding 85% from bad breath comes from the mouth.

( The remainder arises from the gastrointestinal system, as well as might indicate a health condition such as altered GI plants.).

Typical factors that make it worse consist of Gum disease, tooth disease, and tongue coating, as could constant health conditions like diabetes, GI disease, and liver disease.

Studies show that oil drawing is actually as successful as an usual component in non-prescription mouthwash in fighting foul-smelling breath. Reducing plaque as well as gingivitis.

Gingivitis is actually brought on by irritation from the gums.

It normally occurs when your immune system begins attacking the microorganisms current in dental cavity enducing plaques.

One study showed that oil drawing is as effective as a typical substance in non-prescription mouthwash in aiding with plaque-induced gingivitis. Whiter teeth.

While great deals of individuals state that oil drawing whitens teeth, there isn't really any type of published investigation on this. This is actually merely historical.

With that mentioned, this may be worth an initial try out if you're looking for whiter teeth.

Bleaching is very likely to destroy tooth nerves and gums. Stopping heart problem, diabetic issues & Alzheimer's.

Poor oral health has been connected to other severe health problems, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and also Alzheimer's.

Interestingly, dentists will usually find Type 2 diabetes in their patients just before the clients' medical professionals carry out.

Nevertheless, there are actually no information to propose oil drawing are going to assist with any one of these conditions.

Natural Gum Regrowth

Sjogren's disorder.

One dentist in Toronto did a casual try out 12 from her individuals and located that oil taking had some perks for those who have Sjogren's disorder, an autoimmune disorder that ruins salivary glandulars and also leads to completely dry mouth. Receding gums.

Imagine exactly what a turtleneck resembles. Currently, consider your gums as turtlenecks for your teeth. This "turtleneck" gum line supplies a barrier to microbes.

If tooth decay and also oral plaque buildup gather along the "turtleneck" gum collection, bacteria take deeper, resulting in gums may decline far from teeth.

Gum recession suggests the "turtleneck" gum collection is actually gone, and microorganisms can reach an aspect of the tooth without any preventive enamel. Those which possess braces could likewise experience gum recession.

Regrowing Gum Tissue Naturally

There is no records yet on just how oil taking impacts receding gums.

Ellie Phillips, DDS, often communicates positively regarding oil drawing. Nonetheless, she carries out caution against oil pulling for those along with gum recession or sensitiveness, as it could destroy biofilm and pellicle healthy proteins, which are essential for a healthy and balanced mouth.

Therefore, if you are actually utilizing oil pulling for receding gums, do it simply from time to time. Taking & removing toxins from the blood stream/ body.

Some suggest that oil taking will certainly "take pollutants" off the mouth as well as blood stream.

While that carries out seem to be to possess a light surfactant effect, oral mucosa don't seem to be to permit this kind of exit from the blood stream right into the mouth.

So any oil in your mouth won't enter into contact with blood stream, neither will this "extraction" anything coming from that.

1 note · View note

howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 6 years ago

Text

Why I Am Not A Unificationist

I’ve been a Unificationist since childhood. From then, until I was around 19, I had to eat all of the sadomasochism fed by Rev. Moon. My new Father. My new Messiah. I’ll take some time to go through them, but please be patient. I had been told that God was some sort of compulsive crybaby whose universe was forever torn asunder because two naked teenagers had pre-maritial sex in a garden. A step up from the apple and snake, I admit, but the Garden of Eden is still a myth no matter how you spin it.

Anyways, I was also told that human history was a convenient series of failures on behalf of the human race to understand the infinite sorrows of God. The Church painted said God, interestingly enough, as quite impotent. He was a servant to some pseudo-scientific law, called the Divine Principle: a lugubrious, confusing, absurd, and comical attempt to plaster Moon’s idiotic theology onto human history. Neon Genesis Evangelion’s myths made more sense.

I’m not quite sure if the Divine Principle was supposed to be a moral law or not, but I certainly was given that impression. I would be horrified and disgusted if the Principle was by any stretch of the imagination considered moral. This so-called morality dictated that again, because two naked teenagers had pre-marital sex in a garden, the Biblical wars against various tribes, the Crucifixion of Jesus, the Fall of Rome, both World Wars, the Holocaust, the Korean War, and numerous other tragedies, in the Bible and in history, were ordained by the Divine Principle to occur as payment for indemnity, or global karma. The Principle has weird ideas on proportionality. I don’t think that even Zeus, at the height of his maliciousness, would have approved of such a doctrine, so it would be doubly discouraging if a loving and compassionate God did.

Why then does Moon praise the Principle with such fervor? Even it was true, it should have been condemned and resisted, even if the effort was futile. Of course, there’s always the idea that the Principle is brutally objective, but then, I don’t recall Newton’s Three Laws of Motion or the Pythagorean Theorem bluntly putting persons into sides of God or Satan.

Again, I swallowed this nonsense in my elementary years – I didn’t know any better. I think that I was still watching Power Rangers. So all of this made me very terrified of sex. Moon had a cute obsession with sex. If you don’t believe me, just look up the instructions for the 3-day ceremony. It’s quite revealing. He also said that if a pretty woman attempts to touch your penis, you should kick her 1,000 miles and God will praise you for it, but I’ll touch on his sexism later.

He just could not stop going on about the sexual organs and how they were at the center of the universe, or something like that. Easy enough to pledge abstinence when you’re young, but after puberty, I felt like I was walking in a nightmare. No sex until after I married, and Lord knew when that was going to happen. No choking the chicken, either, but when I did get the occasional slip of the wrist, so-to-speak, my whole being filled with guilt, as if I had committed a crime against God and joined the ranks of Satan.

I realize that abstinence is quite common among many Christians and even Muslims in this country, but at least they are allowed to date! Yes, because God certainly doesn’t want His Children engaging in the evil of DATING. Okay, so women were off limits until I married. At least I got to choose my wife. Oh, what’s that? My wife could be chosen for me? We might barely know each other before getting married? She might not even speak English? There could be a waiting period before having SEX? You know, there’s a word for people who have a peculiar interest in other people’s sex lives, they’re called perverts, and Rev Moon was certainly among them. Lord knows the countless unintentional pregnancies, STI infections, and abortions his teachings may have prevented had he taught instead about the options of masturbation and birth control.

Speaking of sexuality, Rev Moon was diseased with homophobia. I am sorry to say that I caught this disease as well. Moon referred to homosexuals once as dung-eating dogs and homosexuality as an activity that attracts Satan. He also said that those who love dung eating dogs, ergo people who support gay rights, will produce that quality of life. I’ve heard some homophobic statements from Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, but Moon’s hate speech sounds like something you’d hear from Neo-Nazis. Yeah, I went there, but Moon’s words were straight up dehumanizing and condemnable. NO group of people deserve to be described in that fashion. Also, Moon himself said that Hitler and Stalin were reborn as new beings, and they declared him the messiah. So he seems to think quite a bit of their opinions.

In any case, many religions still have trouble with treating homosexuals as equals, and that’s a shame. I repeat, a shame. Moon could have learned a thing from Desmond Tutu. Even the 14th Dalai Lama supports gay marriage and Pope Francis, who does not like homosexuality, says that the Church has no right to interfere with the spiritual lives of gays and that he has no authority to judge gay Catholics. I grew out of homophobia after I grew out of Moon.

Then there’s this whole damned idea of Rev Moon being the Messiah. Hell, anyone can claim that. Just ask Father Divine, Marshall Applewhite, Elijah Muhammad, Jim Jones, or L. Ron Hubbard. We all know the story. Jesus asked Moon to take up the cross and suffer for humanity as the first True Parent. The whole idea being that Jesus was supposed to get married as opposed to being crucified. Now I wouldn’t force crucifixion on my worst enemy, but marriage on the other hand, should be a choice, not a requirement for joining heaven, as Moon teaches. I think that most people are comfortable with the parents that they already have, and don’t need fanatical ones from Korea.

What makes Moon so special that he should be the Messiah, anyways? It’s his word against mine. Surely, Jesus didn’t expect Moon to convince people on word alone. Except that he apparently did. To be honest, I believed that Moon was the Messiah out of pity. He does deserve some. His home country was torn apart before his eyes, and he had to suffer atrocious accommodations in a North Korean prison camp. No one should have to go through that. The pressure was all around me to convert. Certainly I wouldn’t turn against a man who suffered so much. Before I knew it, I was bowing before photographs and reading books I could hardly understand at six in the morning. For those who want a better idea of what I am talking about, check out the film, “Ticket To Heaven.” Moon, however, had a habit of romanticizing Korea as the center of the world. I don’t hate Korea. It’s a fine nation, but not a holy one. Since Moon cast North Korea as Satan and South Korea as God, he probably forgot to mention that “God’s” nation had brutal dictators like Park Chung-hee.

I could also go on about how, in face of separation of church and state, Moon crowned himself like a king in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, how he implored Americans to forgive Nixon who sabotaged the Vietnam Peace Talks in 1968, how he founded the Washington Times which spews climate change denial, and how he had at least one affair while dictating other people’s sex lives, but I think I’ve made my point. Moon is no more of a messiah than my dead goldfish. If you still want a Korean to admire, try Kim Dae-Jung.

In closing, you may wonder what exactly liberated me from my slave-masters? It was a woman named Nansook Hong, whose book I would implore all of you to read. She married Moon’s first son, Hyo Jin, and suffered unspeakable abuse, both mental and physical. When Moon was told of these things, he blamed her for not being a good wife. This is the sexism I was referring to earlier. Moon was more concerned about his magnanimous legacy than about the domestic abuse of his daughter-in-law. As I read her testimony and followed her journey, I found myself going through a similar one. By the last page, I left the church and freed myself from the depressing theology of Rev Moon. I live a happy life now. I’m not very religious, but I don’t hate religion.

Moon didn’t learn a lot from religion. Many Jewish scholars see the Old Testament stories as metaphors to learn from, not literal historical events representing the Cain and Abel dichotomy. If Moon really understood Jesus, he would have lived more like Gandhi, Tolstoy, or even Shaliene Woodley, as opposed to Donald Trump or John D. Rockefeller. The Qur’an opposes collective punishment for crimes done by others and would be disgusted with ideas like indemnity. While both Buddhism and Hinduism see atheism or agnosticism as acceptable spiritual paths, Buddhism more so. Moon denounced godlessness as Satanic.

I would like to thank HWDYKYM for giving me a healthy space to express these thoughts. As you can see by the length of this, they’ve been bubbling beneath the surface for some time now. I know that I may not have not have gotten everything right as far as Moon’s doctrine is concerned. I simply speak from my own experience – what I was taught, what I had believed. I hold no ill will towards current members, by the way. Many of them are still beloved members of my friends and family, just don’t expect me to go to workshops.

Sun Myung Moon’s theology used to control members

Divine Principle – Parallels of History

Sun Myung Moon – Restoration through Incest

Moon’s Theology of the Fall, Tamar, Jesus and Mary

Nansook Hong, transcripts of three interviews

Nansook Hong In The Shadow Of The Moons, part 1

#Nansook Hong #Divine Principle #Sun Myung Moon

5 notes · View notes

isaiahbie · 2 years ago

Text

The Problem of Historical Knowledge

It has been said that history is like “tsismis.” This brings us face-to-face to the problem of historical knowledge. On the popular level, this expresses itself in the attitude that history is uncertain and irrelevant to us today. On the scholarly level, this problem finds expression in the outlook of historical relativism, which denies the objectivity of historical facts.

The problem of historical knowledge has profound implications for the Christian faith. In Christian apologetics, for example, it would make it impossible to demonstrate the accuracy of the biblical narratives via the historical method, if the past cannot be objectively established. Likewise, in the area of biblical hermeneutics, one would be free to impose whatever meaning one chose upon the biblical narratives if historical facts have no meaning. And, finally, one could leave aside the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, since it would be meaningless to speak of “errors” if historical relativism were true. Therefore, it is important for Christians to get a handle on certain critical issues in the philosophy of history.

Objections to the Objectivity of History

The case against the objectivity of history may be summarized under two main points: first, we cannot know anything about the past as it actually happened because we cannot directly observe the past; and second, we cannot reconstruct the past objectively because we are not neutral observers, but rather products of our time, place, culture, circumstances, and so forth. Let us examine each of these objections in turn.

1. The Lack of Direct Access

The things and events of the past are obviously for the most part gone. Having slipped through our grasp, they are no longer available for direct inspection. How, then, can one avoid skepticism about the past? Even if one admits the reality of the past, of what relevance is it to the historian? Since past events and things are forever gone, the historian has no way to check if his reconstructions correspond to reality, that is to say, whether they are true.

Relativists often emphasize the contrast between history and science on this score. The scientist has the objects of his research right in front of him and is free to experiment repeatedly upon them in order to test his hypotheses. By contrast, the historian’s objects of research no longer exist and so are not subject to either observation or experiment. Historical knowledge thus fails to measure up to the standards of objectivity set by scientific knowledge.

Let me just say two things in response. First, it is naïve to think that the scientist always has direct access to his objects of study. Not only is the scientist largely dependent on the reports of others’ research (which, interestingly, constitute for him historical documents) for his own work, but furthermore, the objects of the scientist’s research are often only indirectly accessible, especially in the highly theoretical fields like physics. Such theoretical entities as black holes, quarks, and neutrinos are postulated as the best explanations for the observable data, but they themselves cannot be directly observed. Scientific theories also populate the world with very low-level theoretical entities whose real existence is far more difficult to deny, entities such as dinosaurs, Ice Age glaciers, and even galaxies! The relativist will have to swallow hard before denying that such things are real simply because they are not susceptible to direct observation.

Secondly, while the historian does not have direct access to the past, the residue of the past, things that have really existed, is directly accessible to him. As Old Testament scholar R. K. Harrison explains, modern historians are not so heavily dependent on subjective literary sources as before, because the sciences of linguistics, sociology, anthropology, numismatics, and archaeology have become so developed.¹ In fact, we can at this point draw a very instructive analogy: what history is to the humanities, geology is to the sciences. Whereas the subject matter of the geologist is the earth’s history, the subject matter of the historian is human history. Basically their task is the same. If this is the case, then the relativists’ argument based on the inaccessibility of the past loses all its punch. For the subject matter of the geologist is every bit as indirect as that of the historian, and yet geology is part of science, which is the model of objectivity to the relativist. Since lack of direct access cannot preclude geological knowledge, neither can it preclude historical knowledge.

2. The Lack of Neutrality

The second objection of historical relativists to knowledge of the past as it actually happened is that we cannot reconstruct the past objectively because we are not neutral observers, but are the products of our time, place, culture, language, and so forth. The historian cannot “stand back” and describe what has happened from a neutral perspective because the historian, too, is caught up in the historical flow of events. Henri Pirenne makes the point:

“Historical syntheses depend to a very large degree not only upon the personality of their authors, but upon all the social, religious, or national environments which surround them. It follows, therefore, that each historian will establish between the facts relationships determined by the convictions, the movements, and the prejudices that have molded his own point of view.”²

Again, let me just say two things in response. First, this objection confuses the content of knowledge and the process of attaining it. As the historian Maurice Mandelbaum explains, when we judge the truth of a historical work, it is not so important how the knowledge of the past was learned, as what the content of that knowledge is.³ Another way of putting this is that it is not so important how the historian comes to arrive at his hypothesis as how his hypothesis is tested. So long as it is tested by the objective facts, it is of secondary importance what factors influenced the historian to come up with his hypothesis in the first place. He could have learned it at his mother’s knee, for all that matters. So long as the hypothesis is tested by the facts, there is no danger of sacrificing objectivity.

Secondly, this objection fails to appreciate that the lack of neutrality can be mitigated in a number of ways. Michael Licona lists, for example, six factors which can help to mitigate the unavoidable absence of neutrality: (1) proper historical method, including the way in which data are viewed, weighed, and contextualized, correct criteria for testing the adequacy of hypotheses, and fair consideration of competing hypotheses; (2) public acknowledgment of one’s horizon and methodology; (3) peer pressure and review by the community of historians; (4) submitting hypotheses to hostile experts; (5) the presence of certain minimal facts which all contemporary historians regard as historical facts and may be taken for granted; and (6) a serious effort at detachment from one’s biases.⁴

Reasons to Believe in the Objectivity of History

In reality, relativists recognize that our knowledge of history is not awash in subjectivism. For although they deny historical objectivity, they do not really treat history in so roughshod a manner. This is evident in three ways.

1. A common core of indisputable historical facts exists.

Not even the most radical theorist is really prepared to abandon history as a hopeless bog of subjectivism. Even the relativist historian E. H. Carr confesses that “there are basic facts which are the same for all historians,” facts which it is “the duty” of the historian to present accurately.⁵ As historian Isaiah Berlin puts it, if someone were to tell us that Hamlet was written at the court of Genghis Khan in outer Mongolia, we would not think that he was merely wrong, but that he was out of his mind!⁶

But if there is a common, incontrovertible core of historical facts, then the relativist has surrendered his point that historical objectivity is vitiated. It is a simple truth that, in historian Christopher Blake’s words, there “is a very considerable part” of history that is “acceptable to the community of professional historians beyond all question,” be they Marxists or liberals, Catholics or Protestants, nineteenth-century Germans or twentieth-century Englishmen.⁷

2. It is possible to distinguish between history and propaganda.

According to historian Morton White, the most dangerous thing about historical relativism is the way it can be used to justify historical distortions.⁸ A good example of such distortion was when Stalin came to power, and had Russian history rewritten so that it was he and Lenin who led the Bolshevik Revolution instead of Lenin and Trotsky. The ultimate result of this totalitarian fiddling with the past is envisioned by George Orwell in 1984:

“There is a Party slogan dealing with control of the past,” he said.

“Repeat it, if you please.”

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,” repeated Winston obediently.

“Who controls the present controls the past,” said O’Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. . .

“I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.”⁹

If facts have no meaning and can be made to say whatever the historian wants, then there is no way to protest this propagandizing of history. On relativist grounds, there is no way to distinguish history from propaganda. But again, not even postmodern relativists can countenance such a notion. Brian Fay reports:

“Postmetaphysical metatheorists as much as any know the difference between propaganda and genuine history; they can recognize the ideological blindness which sanctions revisionist histories bent on denying the existence of the Holocaust, can identify the ways Soviet historiography was contaminated by Stalinist political correctness, can criticize not just the conclusions but the entire practice of racist historiography (such as Nazi Aryan history).”¹⁰

Relativists of all stripes want to say that the facts do make a difference and that propagandists cannot distort them at will. But the only way to do that is to acknowledge that historical objectivity is in some measure attainable.

3. It is possible to criticize poor history.

All historians distinguish good history from poor. A good illustration is the reaction to Immanuel Velikovsky’s attempt to rewrite ancient history on the basis of worldwide catastrophes caused by extraterrestrial forces in the fifteenth, eighth, and seventh centuries B.C. Velikovsky completely reconstructs ancient history, dismissing entire ancient kingdoms and languages as fictional. In a meticulously documented essay on Velikovsky’s theories, archaeologist Edwin Yamauchi incisively criticizes the proposed reconstruction, relentlessly plucking out one support after another by a detailed analysis of ancient documents, archaeology, and philology until the whole structure tumbles down in ruin. His conclusion is succinct: “Velikovsky’s reconstruction is a catastrophic history in a double sense. It is a history based on catastrophe, and it is a disastrous catastrophe of history.”¹¹

Now no relativist could make such a statement. If history is simply the subjective product of the historian’s own biases and background, then Velikovsky’s views are as good as anybody’s. Yet, as Yamauchi observes, the reaction of historians to Velikovsky’s proposals was “quite hostile.”¹² In saying that such a rewrite is poor history or biased or inaccurate, historians implicitly admit that the facts themselves do say something and are not like a waxen nose that can be pulled and twisted about to suit any historian’s whim. So in criticizing poor history the relativist acknowledges the objectivity of history.

One final point needs to be made. The goal of historical knowledge is to obtain probability, not mathematical certainty. An item can be regarded as a piece of historical knowledge when it is related to the evidence in such a way that any reasonable person ought to accept it. This is the situation with all of our inductive knowledge: we accept what has sufficient evidence to render it probable. Similarly, in a court of law, the verdict is awarded to the case that is made most probable by the evidence. Even in a criminal case, in which the burden of proof is highest, the judge is asked to decide if the accused is guilty—not “beyond all doubt,” which is impossible—but “beyond all reasonable doubt.”

Conclusion

In conclusion, then, neither the supposed problem of lack of direct access to the past nor the supposed problem of the lack of neutrality can prevent us from learning something from history. And if the religious claims of Christianity which are rooted in history are true, then historical knowledge may lead us to the knowledge of God Himself.

Notes:

¹ R. K. Harrison, Introduction to the Old Testament, 1969, p. 292. ² Henri Pirenne, “What Are Historians Trying to Do?” in The Philosophy of History in Our Time: An Anthology, edited by H. Meyerhoff, 1959, p. 97. ³ Maurice Mandelbaum, The Problem of Historical Knowledge, 1967, p. 184. ⁴ Michael Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach, 2010, pp. 52-62. ⁵ E. H. Carr, What Is History?, 1953, p. 8. ⁶ Isaiah Berlin, “The Concept of Scientific History,” in Philosophical Analysis and History, edited by W. H. Dray, 1966, p. 11. ⁷ Christopher Blake, “Can History Be Objective?” in Theories of History, edited by P. Gardiner, 1959, p. 331. ⁸ Morton White, Foundations of Historical Knowledge, p. 268 ⁹ George Orwell, 1984: A Novel, 1949, part 3, chapter 2. ¹⁰ Brian Fay, “Nothing but History?,” History and Theory 37 (1998): 84. ¹¹ Edwin Yamauchi, “Immanuel Velikovsky’s Catastrophic History,” Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation 25 (1973): 138, 134. ¹² Ibid.

0 notes

tastydregs · 3 years ago

Text

PolyCoder is an open source AI code-generator that researchers claim trumps Codex

Join today's leading executives online at the Data Summit on March 9th. Register here.

Code generation AI — AI systems that can write in different programming languages given a prompt — promise to cut development costs while allowing coders to focus on creative, less repetitive tasks. But while research labs like OpenAI and Alphabet-backed DeepMind have developed powerful code-generating AI, many of the most capable systems aren’t available in open source. For example, the training data for OpenAI’s Codex, which powers GitHub’s Copilot feature, hasn’t been made publicly available, preventing researchers from fine-tuning the AI model or studying aspects of it such as interpretability.

To remedy this, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University — Frank Xu, Uri Alon, Graham Neubig, and Vincent Hellendoorn — developed PolyCoder, a model based on OpenAI’s GPT-2 language model that was trained on a database of 249GB of code across 12 programming languages. While PolyCoder doesn’t match the performance of top code generators in every task, the researchers claim that PolyCoder is able to write in C with greater accuracy than all known models, including Codex.

“When GitHub’s Copilot came out last summer, it became clear that these very large language models of code can be very useful for helping developers and increasing their productivity. But no models even close to that scale were publicly available,” the researchers told VentureBeat via email. “So [PolyCoder] started with Vincent just trying to see what the biggest model was that could be trained on our lab server, which ended up being 2.7 billion parameters … and that model was a league ahead of other code-oriented models that were publicly available at the time.”

In machine learning, parameters are the part of the model that’s learned from historical training data. The correlation between the number of parameters and sophistication has held up remarkably well — generally speaking.

Investigating code generation

A growing number of organizations are exploring code-generating AI. During its Build developer conference in May 2021, Microsoft detailed a new feature in Power Apps that taps OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model to assist people in choosing formulas. Intel’s ControlFlag can autonomously detect errors in code. And Facebook’s TransCoder converts code from one programming language into another.

DeepMind more recently announced AlphaCode, which the lab claims is among the first code generation systems competitive with human programmers. In programming competitions hosted on Codeforces, a platform for programming contests, DeepMind says that AlphaCode achieved an average ranking within the top 54.3% across recent contests with more than 5,000 participants.

But the Carnegie Mellon researchers note that “nearly no one” outside of well-resourced companies can train models anywhere near the size of AlphaCode or Codex. A 2020 study from startup AI21 Labs pegged the cost of training a text-generating model with 1.5 billion parameters — about half the size of PolyCode — at between $80,000 to $1.6 million. Copilot has 12 billion parameters.

“Large tech companies aren’t publicly releasing their models, which is really holding back scientific research and democratization of such large language models of code,” the researchers said. “To some extent, we hope that our open-sourcing efforts will convince others to do the same. But the bigger picture is that the community should be able to train these models themselves. Our model pushed the limit of what you can train on a single server — anything bigger requires a cluster of servers, which dramatically increases the cost.”

Setbacks in code generation

In developing PolyCoder, the researchers also studied and compared the performance of different code-generating AI systems including Codex (through an API). Interestingly, they found that models mostly trained on English text and only on a bit of source code turned out to be very good at generating code — perhaps because they got code-related insights from resources like the developer Q&A website Stack Overflow that were included in the 249GB database

“A promising approach to building strong code-generating models seems to be to train on diverse sources of programming knowledge, including code in a broad mix of programming languages, but also text from around the web related to code,” the researchers said.

The researchers express concern that models like PolyCoder could be prompted to generate buggy programs, including ones with hard-to-detect security vulnerabilities. In the future, they fear that adversaries could “hide” malicious behavior in code-generating models that only shows up given the right prompt, like a keyword (e.g., a company or product name), or upload vulnerable code likely to be picked up by legitimate code-generating models.

They suggest open-sourcing Codex-sized models as one way to combat this, which could enable security researchers to look for failure modes in these models. As a side benefit, open-sourcing would allow developers to personalize the models or “teach” them new programming languages through a process known as fine-tuning, which less less cost-intensive than training the models from scratch.

“While industry currently has much more computational resources, there is still a lot of room for innovation from academia and the research community, including building smaller and faster personalized models that don’t rely on an internet connection, useful applications such as detecting and repairing bugs, automatic code reviewing, and more. Those are tasks where the research community has built promising prototypes that could really benefit from the power of these kinds of very large language models,” the researchers said. “Decentralized training, where multiple groups team up to train a large model jointly, could make a big difference here. Research grants and collaborations between companies and academia could also help.”

VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Learn More

0 notes

phgq · 4 years ago

Text

Climate change drove ethnic tribes to Philippines: study

#PHnews: Climate change drove ethnic tribes to Philippines: study

MANILA - A landmark study has revealed the complex shared origins, inter-relatedness, and genetic diversity of the Filipino people.

Taking advantage of the latest advances in genomics and computational biology, a team of researchers investigated into the Filipino DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).

They looked into 2.3 million molecular DNA markers that were known to differ between various populations.

The markers from more than 1,000 individuals, representing 115 Philippine cultural communities, were comprehensively analyzed.

“This finally gives us a clearer picture of who we are as Filipinos, where we came from, and our sense of relatedness.” Carlo Ebeo, Board of Trustee member of the National Museum that was involved in the study, said.

It was revealed that, through time, the Philippines was inhabited by at least five major waves of human migration, starting with Northern and Southern Negritos as the first Filipinos, then followed by Manobo, Sama, and Cordilleran-related populations.

It was previously thought that the search for new arable lands by expanding farmer populations was the main reason for driving population migrations, such as the dispersal Austronesian-speaking groups into the Philippines.

Role of climate change

However, Sweden-based Filipino scientist Dr. Maximilian Larena, who co-led the study, challenged this view.

“Our findings suggest that instead of farming, climate change may have played a more important role in driving the mass movement of populations in various directions,” he said.

The significant geographic changes may have prompted the migration of Manobo and Sama-related ancestral groups from Borneo into southern Philippines and Cordilleran-related ancestral groups from southern China-Taiwan area into the various islands of the Philippines.

The arrival of Manobo, Sama, and Cordilleran-related groups resulted in interbreeding with resident Negritos.

Interestingly, some Cordillerans remained to be the only Filipino ethnic group that did not show evidence of historical interbreeding with Negritos. They are the only ones in the world who remained to be the unadmixed descendants of Basal East Asians, the study showed.

“This affirms that Cordillerans were isolated for quite some time, which is evident on the retention of distinct indigenous cultural practices and presence of immense linguistic diversity in the region,” Dr. Adrian Albano, a Kalanguya Cordilleran from Ifugao State University and co-author of the study, said.

Additional minor genetic signals were also detected in some Filipino ethnic groups, including Papuan, South Asian, and European genetic ancestry.

The Papuan-related ancestry is found among the coastal ethnic groups of southeastern Philippines. This likely reflects a westward migration or gene flow of Papuan-related ancestry from Papua New Guinea or the Bismarck’s archipelago into eastern Indonesia and subsequently into southeastern Philippines.

The South Asian or Indian-related genetic signal was detected among the Sama Dilaut and other coastal Sama ethnic groups of southwestern Philippines.

The signal was dated to 500 to 1000 years ago, coinciding with the time when there was increased maritime trading activity between Island Southeast Asia and India.

The European genetic signal was only detected in one percent of all individuals investigated, indicating a limited genetic legacy of the Spanish Colonial Period.

Groundbreaking study

The study was made possible through the partnership between Uppsala University of Sweden, led by Prof. Mattias Jakobsson and Larena, and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), through the office of then chairperson Felipe Mendoza de Leon.

“This is a groundbreaking study that the commission heartily endorsed, and we should be thankful for this collaboration as it sheds some light on the longstanding question of our origins. It will certainly revise our understanding and appreciate that the story of the peopling of the Philippines from three waves of migration as proposed by Otley Beyer is not supported by archeological, genetic, or historical evidence,” says Prof. Felipe Mendoza de Leon of the NCCA.

Aside from the extensive network of cultural workers provided by the NCCA, the scientific endeavor was also implemented in collaboration with indigenous cultural communities, local universities, local government units, non-governmental organizations, and regional offices of the National Commission for Indigenous Peoples.

“We are proud to be part of this historical research. It revealed how interconnected we are to each other after all, and that we share a common ancestry. Recognizing this fact will hopefully carry a message of unity and peace among various ethnic groups, regardless of beliefs,” says Waway Saway of the Talaandig ethnic group of Bukidnon that was involved in the study. (PR)

***

References:

* Philippine News Agency. "Climate change drove ethnic tribes to Philippines: study." Philippine News Agency. https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1134522 (accessed March 23, 2021 at 04:00PM UTC+14).

* Philippine News Agency. "Climate change drove ethnic tribes to Philippines: study." Archive Today. https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1134522 (archived).

#Philippines #News #Filipino #Pinoy #Tourism #Politics #Culture #Editorial #Environment #Society #History

0 notes

lastcrystalwitch · 4 years ago

Photo

*Im not sure who this is, but this portrait reminds me of the Norse Goddess Hel, a woman who is half mortal like, and half dead? For lack of a better translation. She is able to walk between both the land of the dead as well as the land of the living, but is control of souls of the dead, and counsols those who have passed on. She is to always be respected, as one of the Most Important Goddesses, she should always be approached, and kindly thought of with reverence. (which means adoration and worship.) She knows quite a bit, and I'm definitely a fan of what she does, simply because she has probably been through unspeakable truths, and heavy burdens. She is the strength that we can all look up to. We can learn a lot from Hel.

Interestingly enough, this Pantheon of the Norse, came way before Christianity was made up by a cult. Christanity was created because at the time, people of different cultures, beliefs all came together in Rome, which was brand new culture, built in the same location or a with very high regard to an even OLDER culture, those of ancient Greece. The Greeks had many Goddesses and Gods, and even small villiages had thier own Goddess and Gods. ( I say Goddess first because as a woman, I feel closer to Goddesses as they can understand what I am feeling and sympathize with me because they are a female energy. Its just my own personal preference)

But with Christianity, it started out as a cult. A small group of people came together and were die hard on using the religion to mold and meld (forcibly transform) other people to shy away from their beliefs, and give up what they had believed in for thousands of years, with their families family passing down folk magic, strong bonds with the divine, some of which is hidden in Catholisism. (a Very new religion that was created to keep women viewed as property of men, removing any women from offices of imporantce, like law, millitary, and forced womens rights to be taken away.

I'm not okay with someone telling me that women are not as important as men. None of us would be here if it weren't for men as well as women. And I'm sensitive to the fact that everyone is unique. Like I said before, when we learn, no two people learn exactly alike. We are all products of our enviornment, who we were raised around, and respecting our elders, who should have our best interst in mind.

But as I got older, I started questioning everything.

I used to go to church 3 times a week, sometimes more, because the school that I went to in Elementary was a Catholic school. I was taught by nuns, and will always have a soft spot for nuns because my family is historically religious. My great grandfather came over to Poland from Russia, learned to speak and write the language, became a respected priest, and perhaps someday I will learn more about him.

But I was never happy with the fact that Christianity was created to control people. Just bear with me for a second. I realize this is upsetting, and please feel the need to defend yourself if the need arises, but you will quickly realize the truth if you pick up a history book. Historically, millions were slaughtered in the name of (GOD) I am referring to the Christian god, (they believe in mono-theism which means one god {male} as the creator of all) ((This also doesn't make sense to me because in nature, its a scientific fact that either the being, be it human plant or animal, needs to be able to reproduce in order to pass on its life, and continue its growth, carrying on its culture and (bear with me) spirit, into the future. To live again. So from a scientific way of thinking, that has been proved for the time being but always subject to change until proved incorrect, there are only a few ways of reproducing. Male and female, are genetically made up to combine their sex, to produce and offspring. That doesn't mean that a woman can't love a woman, or that a man can't love a man. That just means that to create more of us, and to pass on our genes and have babies and continue the growth of our families, humans need to have a male and female counterpart.

Now, this doesn't mean that babies cannot be made to be born without use of surrogacy, or invetral inseption? (I might be writing that wrong) But what I mean is, of course. If you break it down to science, it is possible to create life removing sperm and egg from one male and female to produce offspring in another person.

I appologise for the scattered mindedness, this is a lot to take in and think about, especially if you come from a Christian culture and it literally is against your religion to research older gods, and other religions. I've read so much about theology in college and highschool, I could have taken a test and minored in it in college. There's a big wide world out there. Grow, discover history and teach yourself to think for yourself! You'll find so much cool stuff!

Before I go, I just want to say, you do not need an organised religion in your life to help you decide to be a good person. Instead, form your own morals and values on how others

I have to wrap it up, but leave a comment if you found any of this interesting, and please let me know what you think! I love discussing theology, I think its so cool.

Miasma by Antonio J. Manzanedo

#Pagan culture #pagan community #Hel #theology

60 notes · View notes

bookken · 7 years ago

Photo

Since she was a baby, Aza has suffered from a mysterious lung disease that makes it ever harder for her to breathe, to speak - to live. So when Aza catches a glimpse of a ship in the sky, her family chalks it up to a cruel side effect of her medication. But Aza doesn’t think this is a hallucination. She can hear someone on the ship calling her name. Only her best friend, Jason, listens. Jason, who’s always been there. Jason, for whom she might have more-than-friendly feelings. But before Aza can consider that thrilling idea something goes terribly wrong. The sickness catches up with her. Aza is lost to our world - and found by another. Magonia. Above the clouds, in a land of trading ships, Aza is not the weak and dying thing she was. In Magonia, she can breathe for the first time. Better, she has immense power - and as she navigates her new life she discovers that war is coming. Magonia and Earth are on the cusp of a reckoning. In Aza’s hands lies the whole of humanity - including the boy who loves her. Where do her loyalties lie?

Okay… so this book wasn’t for me. That’s not to say it isn’t for everyone. Its highly original, and thats impressive. Most of the books I read, quite frankly, I feel like I’ve read them before. And the endings don’t often surprise me. But this was an entirely different sort of world to anything I’d read before. And very interestingly, based off true historical anecdotes of French sailors claiming to have come from Magonia, an aerial realm where its inhabitants traversed the clouds in ships.

I want a stethoscope. I want a doctor. I want her knocking at my chest, hunting for intruders, because this is INTRUDER CENTRAL. This is hallucinatus maximus.

I like Aza, the main character, the girl who nearly drowned in air. I enjoy her quirks and personality, and it shines right off the page. I think she takes herself seriously at the right moments, and for a teenager who has grown up believing she could die at any moment, she has a great sense of humor (a necessity, I believe). I LOVE Aza’s family; her mum, a scientific researcher who desperately tries to find a cure for her daughters unknown illness, her dad, and her younger sister, Eli. I love how much they obviously love each other, their easy camaraderie in the face of an uncertain future. The notes of apology they write one another for things that they cannot speak aloud. *sob*

I even like Jason.

Jason flips a note onto my desk. Mr Grimm is vigilant about phones buzzing, so we go low tech. Giant squid it says. Tomorrow, five o’clock. Your house.

Jason is different enough to be memorable among the hordes of ‘perfect’ love interests in young adult fiction. A genius with a few quirks. Most of them shared with Aza, which makes for a memorable relationship between the two of them. They also have been friends since the age of five, so the slipping into romance thing, whilst overdone (childhood friends don’t always become lovers, guys!), is more reasonable than insta-love. In fact, I like everything about Aza’s life on Earth - which was definitely intentional by the author.

My problem, however, is Magonia - I really dislike having to say that. I’ve never met a world I didn’t like, but this may be it. I didn’t like the canwr’s, or the singing. Which is sad, because I usually love singing. It just felt too odd for me to deal with. And difficult because reading about people singing power is not the same as hearing the song itself. Which I know isn’t possible in a book. I think my main problem with the world was the characters. There wasn’t a single character that I liked. Which was sad. I also didn’t particularly like Aza once she was in Magonia. This smart, discerning young woman suddenly decided to accept everything she was told, without seeking other opinions. It annoyed me that the only glimpse she got of this world was on a ship of highly polarised individuals - there was no one around to give an accurate potted history, or even to counsel against taking everything at face value. This was so frustrating as I really wanted to get into the heart of the world, and got only a very small amount of information, and Aza just seemed to accept this information and move on, no questions asked. Which shouldn’t happen if she is really as clever as portrayed, surely?

Having said this, I am still interested in this series, and would read the next book. If only to try to get a more balanced view of Magonia.

5/10 - Great characters on Earth, let down by the biased world view.

#reviews #book #book reviews #bookken #magonia #maria dahvana headley #young adult #ya #fantasy

1 note · View note

ebenvt · 5 years ago

Text

Introduction to Bacon & the Art of Living

The quest to understand how great bacon is made takes me around the world and through epic adventures. I tell the story by changing the setting from the 2000s to the late 1800s when much of the technology behind bacon curing was unraveled. I weave into the mix beautiful stories of Cape Town and use mostly my family as the other characters besides me and Oscar and Uncle Jeppe from Denmark, a good friend and someone to whom I owe much gratitude! A man who knows bacon! Most other characters have a real basis in history and I describe actual events and personal experiences set in a different historical context.

The cast I use to mould the story into is letters I wrote home during my travels.

Ice Cold Revolution

April 1892

Dear Children and Minette,

It is the third day in a row that I am writing to you about ice. I can not get it out of my mind. For refrigeration to work, we need electricity. In Cape Town, David de Villiers Graaff has a vision for Cape Town to turn it into a world-class city and I heard that he is planning to bring electricity to our city. The plan is to construct the first power station at the Molteno dam. The dam is named after the country’s first Prime Minister John Molteno. (1)

The Graaff Electrical lighting works at the Molteno Dam.

Electricity from Platteklip Stream

There is a river from Platteklip Gorge on Table Mountain, that used to flow above ground, all the way to the sea. Jan van Riebeek built the VOC Castle right next to the mountain river due to the strategic importance of the water. The reason for the creation of the VOC post at the Cape of Good Hope was to sell water and food to passing ships.

I remember that construction started on the dam in 1877 since the city fathers saw the water running into the sea from the mountain as a waste. Construction was completed in 1881. Ten years ago. (1) Both Minette and I have always disagreed with our city fathers on how they altered the landscape. We would prefer for things to have staid natural and wild. Recently they forced the glorious river underground. It would have been a much better plan to keep the river intact and undisturbed. I fear we have lost an important feature of the land forever. Then again, how is that different from loosing countless wild animals to mindless hunting. I long to see the unspoiled parts of Africa which were my home for all the years when I rode transport between Cape Town and Johannesburg.

I will bring up the matter of conserving our land for future generations with David when we meet again. I sent a letter to Oscar yesterday asking him to go out of his way to meet with David to discuss refrigeration for our bacon plant in Cape Town.

Waterfall that became the mountain stream that ran from Platteklip Gorge to the sea. Now, into the Malteno Dam.

I am glad that they will be discussing refrigeration since this single invention has the most profound impact on curing bacon as it has on all meat production, processing and trade.

The fact that meat can be frozen or chilled is of huge importance to the curing of bacon. The fact that we presently do not have electricity in Cape Town and therefore do not have refrigeration plants explains to me, on the one hand, the heavy salting that David has practiced at Combrink & Co and gives a time frame for the start of our own curing plant. We can not do it before David has constructed the electricity plant at the Molteno dam. That is, of course, if we can use some of its electricity. I have read that there is the possibility that he intends using it exclusively to power streetlights for Cape Town.

Refrigeration, as Oscar and I discovered, will allow us to cure bacon in warm climates such as we have at home of the same quality as it is done here in England, Denmark, in Germany, and Holland. The colder the meat and the brine, the better we will be able to control the growth of bacteria and the meat will not spoil before it has cured through.

Recent Scientific Discoveries

Scientists are identifying the effect on bacteria of not just temperature, but also of light rays from the violet range of the spectrum, food, oxygen, dilution, and antiseptic substances. These discoveries will impact on how meat is packaged and sold in the future.

It has been known since time immemorial that meat in a frozen state lasts a long time. At low temperatures, there is little bacterial growth. Scientists have identified three distinct phases in bacterial growth generally speaking. Slow acceleration, maximum acceleration, and reduced acceleration. (Winslow, CEA and Walker, HH. 1939) (2)

The fact that there is a lag time in bacterial action (slow acceleration) has by itself an important lesson for bacon processing apart from the consideration of temperature on bacterial activity. It means that meat must be progressed through the various stages of production at a well-controlled and pre-defined rate which will ensure that no stage takes any longer than it should in order to prevent bacteria from “settling in.” Any step must utilize the “lag time” fully and be progressed before maximum acceleration takes place.

From The Times (London), Thursday, 20 May 1920

The Harris family’s bacon empire from Great Britain saw the benefits of refrigeration even before refrigeration plants existed. They applied the principles and benefits of cold to bacon production since the time when ice houses existed.

From Cook County Herald, Friday, 29 Nov 1907.

The development of refrigeration and the subsequent revolution it brought about in the meat industry was in the air well before the end of the 1880s. In fact, so many experiments were being done in the 1870s and early ‘80s (Critchell, JT, 1912: 4) that it will take a long and cumbersome book to try and chronicle any more than what I have given you in my previous letter.

How to Transport Meat from the New World to the Old

What is of interest is that the supply of meat in England and on the continent has been overtaking supply during the mid-1800s that made the development of refrigeration a national priority for the English and for European countries. Not even refrigeration in particular, but the need for preservation that would allow meat to be transported over long distances. (Critchell, JT, 1912: 4) Among the many suggested ways to achieve this, refrigeration was only one of many options. Another option was, of course, curing and changing the meat into bacon, but this did not allow meat in its unprocessed form to be moved in large volumes between countries.

If a way could not be found, through whatever means, to economically supply England and Europe with meat from the new world of the Southern Hemisphere, the people of England and Europe either had to learn to be content with less meat or pay much higher prices for it. (Critchell, JT, 1912: 4) Losing frequent meals that included meat was not just the loss of desirable food, but would seriously hamper the efforts to combat starvation and hunger. Refrigeration was by no means the obvious solution.

In around 1860, the Privy Council, also known as His (or Her) Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council, a body of advisers to the sovereign of the Kingdom of England, started to discuss the matter of food supply to England. (3) Many societies and institutions followed their lead. (Critchell, JT, 1912: 4) This was undoubtedly the most important matter!

In 1863 the Privy Council laid down a rule “that, to avoid starvation diseases, the weekly food of an average adult must contain 28,600 grains of carbon and 1,300 grains of nitrogen.” Dr. Brown, in ” The Food of the People,” published in 1865, wrote that “the plague-spot, the skeleton in the closet of England, is that her people are underfed.”” (Critchell, JT, 1912: 4) A committee of the Society of Arts was established which first met on 21 December 1866 to give direction to the charge to find a way to increase the food supply to England. (3) (Critchell, JT, 1912: 4)

Hunger and starvation were a major threat to the population and nutritional values were tested to find food that will best prevent starvation. (Critchell, JT, 1912: 4) In 1876, Edward Smith writes about the value of bacon to the poor: “Dried bacon divides itself during the process of cooking into two parts, of which the labourer and his wife may have the solid and the children the liquid part, and thus both be in a degree pleased, if not satisfied.” (Smith, E, 1873: 65)

Smith continued that “so far, it may be said, that bacon is the poor man’s food, having a value to the masses which is appreciated in proportion to their poverty, and it is a duty to offer every facility for its production in the homes of the poor.” (Smith, E, 1873: 65) Many patents and methods were proposed to the committee of the Society of Arts. Each thoroughly investigated. Canned meat was just invented and on trial. Pemmican (4), and a certain Mr. Alexander’s powdered beef. (Critchell, JT, 1912: 4, 5)

Interestingly enough, the committee found that “weight for weight, the dried beef was four times more nutritious than ordinary beef”. (Critchell, JT, 1912: 4, 5)

In total, 200 patients were registered for the preservation of meat. (Critchell, JT, 1912: 5) I list some of the important ones here.

“Medlock and Bailey claimed that by dipping meat in their bisulphide of lime solution “anything of animal origin, from a beefsteak to a bullock, from a whitebait to a whale, can be preserved sweet for months. C. Nielson proposed to fix blood in the form of sausages, puddings, cakes, and so on. The Rev. M. J. Berkeley delivered a stirring address on fungi, but somehow the mushroom palliative failed to impress the committee as a substitute for the roast beef of Old England.” (5) “De la Peyrouse’s idea was to pack meat in barrels, and to pour in fat at a temperature of 300 F. all round the stored viands.” (Critchell, JT, 1912: 5)

“Professor Gamgee loomed large, and his method, though revealing a touch of Max Adeler, certainly possessed genius. He suggested that cattle should be happily dispatched by being made to inhale carbonic oxide gas, at a cost of 2s. to 3s. per animal. The flesh of oxen so slain was declared to retain its fresh and bright appearance, and the committee reluctantly and warily tasted chops from a sheep killed in this way, reporting, doubtless to the chagrin of the Professor, that the meat was ” slightly flat.” (Critchell, JT, 1912: 5) (6)

“A tin of meat forty-one years old, from the stores of H.M.S. Blonde, was tested and found sound. Professor Redwood advocated raw meat preserved in paraffin.” (Critchell, JT, 1912: 5)

“Scores of different processes for tinning meat were tested. Dr. Hassalts ” Flour of Meat,” Australian “mutton hams,” meat dried by sulphurous acid, and many other inventions, were put before this committee, evidence which contained the germs of many of the modern methods of preserving and handling animal substances for food. The work of the committee came to a sudden stop in 1881. After 15 years of focused and hard work, it has failed to produce a way to export meat successfully.” (Critchell, JT, 1912: 5, 6)

“In 1881 the committee delivered a gloomy report, and found itself unable to award the 100 prize which Sir Walter Trevelyan had presented for the best means of preserving fresh meat. This 100 was disposed of by being divided into five sums of 20 and granted to food and cooking exhibits at the 1884 Health Exhibition.” (Critchell, JT, 1912: 6)

“Without doubt, the introduction of frozen meat in 1880 settled the whole difficulty which the Society of Arts’ committee had spent so many years in trying to solve” (Critchell, JT, 1912: 6)

It was the United States of America who first exported meat in artificially cooled storage units when in 1874, beef was first exported to Great Britain. “Undoubtedly, the real genesis of the meat export trade under conditions of refrigeration is to be found in the shipments of chilled beef from the United States of America in the seventies. By the end of 1880, when only 400 carcasses of mutton had reached home from Australia, Great Britain had imported from North America 120,000 tons of fresh beef.” (Critchell, JT, 1912: 19)

Solving the refrigeration riddle

The photo on the right by Colin Beazley Hy wife works in the building previously occupied by Goldsborough, Mort & Co. on the Ultimo side of Darling Harbour.

Thomas Sutcliffe Mort from Australia is probably the most important name in the story of the frozen meat trade. (Critchell, JT, 1912: 19) Mr. Mort was born at Bolton, Lancashire, on December 23, 1816, and emigrating to Australia in 1838. He founded the great financial and wool-broking firm of Mort and Co..

His company amalgamated with that of R. Goldsbrough and Co., Ltd., under the name of Goldsbrough, Mort and Co., Ltd. In 1843 he turned his attention to meat matters and was introduced by Mr. Augustus Morris to the French engineer Nicolle. Together they took up the subject of freezing meat for export and started experimenting with it. Mort supplying the capital and Nicolle the engineering skill.

Partial freezing or “chilling,” which was Telh’er’s plan, was tried and rejected, as they realized that thorough congealing was required for the preservation of meat. Mr. Mort in 1861 established at Darling Harbour, Sydney, the first freezing works in the world. Thirteen years later Mr. Mort’s company became the New South Wales Fresh Food and Ice Co.. The original freezing process at these works was applied in two large apartments, each about 75 feet square and 9 feet 9 inches high, and enclosed by brick walls 4 feet 6 inches thick. The freezing room below was used for the treatment of meat for export. In 1875 the collateral enterprise, the slaughtering works at Lithgow Valley, Blue Mountains, was completed. The two establishments were intended to supply the Sydney market. Ammonia compression refrigerating machinery was used at these works.

At an inaugural lunch on September 2, 1875, at which 300 persons attended, Mr. Mort made his famous speech, the concluding part of which remains a jewel in the annals of the Australian meat trade. It portrays him as a man of imagination, noble aims, and high character. Mr. Mort in this speech said that Mr. Morris first suggested the “diabolical idea” of freezing meat to send to England. “I can tell you that not once but a thousand times have I wished that Mr. Morris, Mr. Nicolle, and myself had never been born.” Mr. Mort mentioned that the Sydney Chamber of Commerce about 1867 had put up a sum of money for him to provide meat for distribution in England, and to overcome the English prejudice against “frozen” meat. This is an interesting comment since, in 1867, not a single morsel of (mechanically) frozen meat had reached England! The that Mr. Mort served for his 300 guests was, of course, all frozen. He claimed that some of it had been kept since June 1874. In his speech, he said that Australia was to become “the great feeder of Europe.” (Critchell, JT, 1912: 19) With great pride, I give you the concluding remarks of Mr. Mort.

“I feel, as I have always felt, that there is no work on the world’s carpet greater than this in which I have been engaged. Yes, gentlemen, I now say that the time has arrived at all events, is not far distant when the various portions of the earth will each give forth their products for the use of each and of all; that the over-abundance of one country will make up for the deficiency of another; the superabundance of the year of plenty serving for the scant harvest of its successor; for cold arrests all change. Science has drawn aside the veil, and the plan stands revealed. Faraday’s magic hand gave the keynote, and invention has done the rest. Climate, seasons, plenty, scarcity, distance, will all shake hands, and out of the commingling will come enough for all, for ‘ the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof,’ and it certainly lies within the compass of man to ensure that all His people shall be partakers of that fulness. God provides enough and to spare for every creature He sends into the world, but the conditions are often not in accord. Where the food is, the people are not; and where the people are, the food is not. It is, however, as I have just stated, within the power of man to adjust these things, and I hope you will all join with me in believing that the first grand step towards the accomplishment of this great deed is in that of which you yourselves have this day been partakers and witnesses.” (Critchell, JT, 1912: 20)

These monumental developments would mark, not only the start of the frozen meat trade, but it would continue to impact the way bacon is being made and priced. Frozen meat will at some point be used as raw material. Freezing will alter the characteristics of bacon and add to the complexity of how bacon is created.

Freezing solved the matter of the long term preservation of meat but proved another point. In our effort to preserve meat we have developed products of such supreme quality and taste that it will be part of human culture for as long as humanity will prevail. Bacon, with its reddish/ pinkish fresh meat colour and distinct taste; its subtle saltiness in the case of mild cured and sweet cured bacon and smokiness in the case of smoked bacon; its inherent ability to withstand bacterial spoilage. Its meatiness. All work together as characteristics of one of the greatest products on earth.

There is one statement that I am not sure if I am in full agreement with Mr. Mort. It relates to his comment that “cold arrests all change.” This is a matter that “feels right”, but animal and human remains that have been discovered in places of extreme cold have been preserved remarkably well and seems to support his point, but in no way can it be said that the flesh is completely without any change. What exactly the changes are and how it will impact on bacon taste is something that must be investigated very carefully.

I keep his speech in front of the notebook I currently use and I refer to it often. It is almost Biblical in its tone. In the midst of all these matters that continue to flood my mind, I think of you, my dear children and Minette. How is the rugby going Mr. Tristan? I hear from Minette that you intend going to Rondebosch boys high for high school. It is an excellent suggestion even though I would have chosen Wynberg Boys High. The decision is, however, yours my son! I miss you, Lauren! You’re infectious laugh! Please remember that someone who laughs as effortlessly as you also feel sorrow in equal strong and unexpected measures! I miss you so much that it physically hurts and it helps to keep my mind occupied with quotes from old Australians.

I continue to miss all of you dearly!

Your Dad.