(no subject)

Of course we need extraordinary renditions, torture, secret prisions, suspension of habeas corpus, roving wiretaps, monitoring of library book activity, repeal of posse comitatus, cameras everywhere, infiltration of dissident or protest organizations, "sneak and peek", monitoring of email and web usage, domestic spying by the FBI and NSA (without warrants or judicial oversight, which 'takes too long'), the no-fly list, intrusive airline security, walls at the US borders with Mexico and Canada, racial profiling, and continuous encouragement of citizens to spy on their suspicious neighbors.

We need those things to PROTECT OUR FREEDOM!!

(no subject)

"Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again." -- From Glorious Appearing by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins

That is the sophisticated language and appeal of America's all-time best selling adult novels celebrating the ethnic cleansing of non-Christians at the hands of Christ. If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of the last book in the Left Behind series, Glorious Appearing, and publish it across the Middle East, Americans would go berserk.

Yet tens of millions of Christians eagerly await and celebrate an End Time when everyone who disagrees with them will be murdered in ways that make Islamic beheading look like a bridal shower. ... This may be some of the bloodiest hate fiction ever published, but it is also what tens of millions of Americans believe is God's will.

from What the "Left Behind" series really means(thanks to lady_babalon and jrfrench for the link)

(no subject)

( the long movie meme, because i might as well )

(no subject)

I've been working on the Rheomic project.

In my last post on the subject i asked, "[H]ow do I come up with a way to say a sentence like, "My dog is playing on the front lawn"? The problem is parsing this perception in a way that does not divide into subject-verb-object, which is the whole point of the endeavor to create a verb-based language that captures perception in terms of flow.

I have a start on an answer to that. The verb-flow at the center of the thought is play, in this case specifically the kind of play of a dog on the lawn. There is also a flow of interbeing between the playing dog and the observing speaker; the observer's amusement -- or lack thereof -- feeds back into the dog's enthusiasm and enjoyment -- or eventual lack thereof -- of his play. There is also an archetypal flow, the emotional and cultural flows of comfort and world-at-ease brought up by the experience in general of watching a dog at play. The last part is implied in the making of a statement and so does not have to be explicitly stated. The second part, the interbeing between playing dog and observer, i want to bring to mindfulness with at least a grammatical particle expressing, in a word, how the speaker feels about what she is describing.

So the sentence in Rheomic would have a literal translation of "Play 'dogly' flows, and mutual-amusement-comfort-affection flows." Or, alternately, if it entails a different emotional dynamic, "Play 'dogly' flows, then annoyance-impatience flows towards this flow to dampen the flow of play, then obstinance-disobedience characterizes the flow of play."

I don't know yet how to speak about where and only a vague idea of how to speak about when.

Edit. The implication of this linguistic style of parsing is that it downplays the notion of will and volition, where actors are seen as agents guiding the course of events. Rather, events are depicted as flows which sometimes occur via living beings (which are themselves flows). The implications of this kind of view are manyfold... The dog isn't even parsed out as a specific element; the statement is not about the dog but about the playing that's going on. Note also that there would be no way to translate "my" into Rheomic, at least easily. These are all things which were stated as desirable from the project's outset.