Friday 11th of October 2024

a little butterfly...

polites

I don’t know which is worse: the permanent smile of TeeVee presenters or the Jesuits’ grand hubris about soul cleansing.

 

It’s a difficult choice, till one realizes that the pretty female smiles that are like inverted coat-hangers with teeth the size of white piano keys are about a horse race, or a local international golf championship, while the Jesuit hubris is about flagellation, sadness, educating junior into the art of belief in sin, or something like that, by choice.

 

And no. I am not a pessimist. I enjoy life despite appearing grumpy. Grumpy is the privilege of old people who have passed their used-by date a long time ago and have a catalogue of accidental mistakes to their names, while seeing the up and coming idiots doing the same bad decisions by not wanting to know better from the previous idiot elders like me. We try to warn them about the quick sands of life, but they don’t hear us, as our spruiking platform is more like our next hole in the ground of life, six feet under.

 

But we cannot be stopped to try, unless our brains packs it in and we start to forget our own names — and end up being spoon-fed by Bupa.

 

As the book suggests in its blurb, in philosophy, as elsewhere, different people in different historical epochs and different cultures ask different big questions about these topics. And in philosophy, as elsewhere, big questions asked in the past have often been solved. When you think through exactly what philosophical problems are, and what it takes to solve them, the pattern of success and failure in philosophy is similar to that in other fields. In philosophy, as elsewhere, there is a series of overlapping topics that determine what the subject is about.

 

If you don’t know what this means, you’re welcome.

 

It seems that’s a lot of circular rubbish (I have inverted a couple of sentences to try to make more sense but it does not), because there is a great variety of answers to the same question. Some people will accept some answers over others because… Well, I don’t know. It seems that some beliefs tend to be easier to swallow, like placebo pills, than to investigate the meticulous “decorticage” (husking) of the fascinating seeds of life.

 

In the Jesuit manual there are a few doozies that show how these guys are completely out of reality, despite appearing practical in their processes of education. At least, should you be close to a horse you can smell the beast, the horseshit — or smell the hop in the beer in your hand, should you be in your living room watching the race or lonely men hitting a little white ball into a hole, on the flickering box.

 

A Franciscan, a Dominican and a Jesuit are arrested during the Russian revolution for spreading the Christian capitalist gospel, and are thrown into a dark prison cell. In a bid to restore the light, each man reflects on the traditions of his own order.

The Franciscan decides to wear his sackcloth and pray for light. Nothing happens. The Dominican delivers an hour-long lecture on the virtue of light. Nothing happens. Then the Jesuit gets up and mends the fuse. The light comes on — in his own mind. The only contretemps is that the fuse box is outside the prison cell and the three men remain in the dark.

 

The Jesuits, an order founded in 1534, devoted to poverty, chastity and obedience, are used to darkness. It’s part of their delusional training of the spiritual exercises of St Ignatius Loyola. They know how to pray in darkness for long hours and how to turn the candlelight on, to go piss and eat.

 

The order is exclusive to Aryan male-hood. One exception was made for a young female in 1555. She took a fake male name, Mateo Sánchez, to remain hidden.  She had been accepted because, as of royal blood, she could fill the coffers of the Jesuits with ease. Money buys you anything. Her real name was Joanna of Austria*. She was the daughter of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Aragon and of Castille — and of his wife, Isabella of Portugal, who died when Joanna was four years old...

 

Is cash an essential part of the philosophical ideal? Can a philosopher be a rich man like de Botton? Is de Botton a philosopher? So many questions with no answer…

 

So, the 16th century was full on. Many discoveries, styles invention and creations were made. The Renaissance and the Inquisition were plodding along.

 

On 1 November 1536, Cardinal Nikolaus von Schönberg, Archbishop of Capua, wrote to Copernicus from Rome:

 

Some years ago word reached me concerning your proficiency, of which everybody constantly spoke. At that time I began to have a very high regard for you... For I had learned that you had not merely mastered the discoveries of the ancient astronomers uncommonly well but had also formulated a new cosmology. In it you maintain that the earth moves; that the sun occupies the lowest, and thus the central, place in the universe... Therefore with the utmost earnestness I entreat you, most learned sir, unless I inconvenience you, to communicate this discovery of yours to scholars, and at the earliest possible moment to send me your writings on the sphere of the universe together with the tables and whatever else you have that is relevant to this subject ...

 

By then Copernicus's theory had reached many educated people in Europe. Despite urgings, Copernicus, a religious man, delayed publication of his book till he was on his death bed, perhaps from fear of criticism—a fear delicately expressed in the subsequent dedication of his masterpiece to Pope Paul III. Copernicus's concerns were either about astronomical errors in his observations, philosophical controversies, or religious objections.

 

It did not matter. At the time the Church controlled the philosophical high ground. And Copernicus’ idea was scuttled till Galileo Galilei pushed it again in the 17th century. Despite many scientists understanding the obvious then and now, the Church still held onto its stupid cum “flat earth theory” (Earth as the centre of the world) for a long time after this. Meanwhile the Jesuits who had supported Galileo in “his pursuit of knowledge” abandoned him like a smelly sock when he pushed for the acceptance of Copernicus’ theory.

 

Meanwhile, Martin Luther (1483- 1546), professor of theology, composer, priest, monk, and a seminal figure in the Protestant Reformation, rejected many teachings and practices of the Roman Catholic Church. For example, he opposed the cash practice of indulgences in his Ninety-five Theses of 1517. His refusal to renounce his views, resulted in his excommunication by the Pope — and be declared an outlaw by Charles V (the father of Joanna of Austria*). A long war of religion war started thereafter. The philosophical peasants had enough of being robbed by Charlie and sided against the emperor.

 

Luther and his main collaborator Philipp Melanchthon, also took issue with Copernicus’ theory. After receiving the first pages of De libris revolutionum Copernici narratio prima, written by Georg Joachim Rheticus to introduce Copernicanism, Melanchthon condemned it  and called for it to be repressed by governmental force, writing "certain people believe it is a marvelous achievement to extol so crazy a thing, like that Polish astronomer [Copernicus] who makes the earth move and the sun stand still.”

 

The science of observations and belief systems did not go too well together. God’s work was not to be messed up with. It was not until the 18th century with the invention of “Enlightenment” in which god was banished as a human created idea, that more scientific progress were made. The belief in god and the real world did not mesh. But this does not bother a lot of people these days… It did not bother the Jesuits then as one could change one’s mood by choice. Should you wish to be joyful, one Jesuit only had to think about the glorious resurrection of Christ — and should you wish to feel pain, all you had to do was to think of Jesus suffering on the cross. Piece of cake. Your prayers answered instantly like noodle soup. All this in relation to “sins” — bad deeds promoted by Lucifer-the anti-god. Philosophically speaking, we made bad choices that took our life along a certain path we wish we had not gone through. No regrets though...

 

 

The Jesuits were fairly anti-Semitic (against Jews and Arabs alike) with a 16th century “decree de genere” that was in force until 1946.

 

All this, to set the scene for further men of the cloth or believers like Copernicus, who discovered the complexity of the universe, in parallel with secular atheist scientists.

 

Some did some real scientific studies, others only assumed stuff or got the scientificum stuffum totally arse-up, like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin did.… As an anthropologist, the old Pierre could not avoid seeing “evolution” — a concept that still irks many a religious person, leading to “creationism” and that other fake stuff called “intelligent design” which our Mr Murdoch is fond of, not by being godly, but these cretinists idiots do not believe in global warming.

 

Prevented by the church to be published while he was alive, Teilhard's posthumously published book, The Phenomenon of Man, is his account of the unfolding of the material universe in the past, the development of the noosphere, including his vision of the Omega Point  (a point of universal convergence) in the future. All crap.

 

 

Pierre was a proponent of the idea that evolution occurs in a directional, goal driven way, a teleological view of evolution. However, his view did not deny the capacity of evolutionary processes to explain complexity, and thus differs from Intelligent Design. To Teilhard, evolution unfolded from cell to organism to planet to solar system and finally to whole universe.

 

This does not make any sense whatsoever. It’s arse up.

 

This is where another man of the cloth trying to unravel god’s work came up with the idea of the Big Bang, a concept other scientists were onto as well.

 

Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, (1894–1966) was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven. He proposed on theoretical grounds that the universe is expanding, which was confirmed soon afterwards by Edwin Hubble’s observations. Georges was the first to extract what is known as Hubble's law, now controversially known as the Hubble-Lemaître law, and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant, which he published in 1927. Two years later, American astronomer Edwin Hubble announced his discovery that galaxies, from all directions, appeared to be moving away from us. This phenomenon was observed as a displacement of known spectral lines towards the red-end of a galaxy's spectrum (when compared to the same spectral lines from a source on Earth). This redshift appeared to have a larger displacement for faint, presumably further, galaxies. Hence, the farther a galaxy, the faster it is receding from Earth.

 

Lemaître also proposed what became known as the "Big Bang theory" of the origin of the universe, originally calling it the "hypothesis of the primeval atom" or the "Cosmic Egg".

 

By then, Einstein had written his Relativity manuals and Neils Bohr had just captured the quantum theory with his “Copenhagen” views. Other theories have had a hard time getting heard.

 

We have already mentioned Lemaitre on this site, and I might contradict what I said about him before, but who cares. Contradiction is the privilege of grumpy old men.

 

Anyway, as mentioned, there is a controversy in the renaming of a hubble stuff, because Lemaître thought of it a few instant before. But should we fossick through the Greek, Roman and Aboriginal philosophers, we might find some parallel of the Big Bang idea to explain the universe. For a man of the cloth, Lemaître was quite on the ball, scientifically. Subsequent calculations/observations in the mid 1990s have shown that this expansion is ACCELERATING — and we don’t know why.

 

My own view on this is limited to the size of my small brain but I will bother you with it. It’s about the temperature (energy loading) of stuff. Matter and energy of the universe is cooling. Entropy. But there are many pockets where temperatures are still super hot. And pockets where gravity plays up by becoming too concentrated. There are pockets where temperatures are cooling but bracketed in a range that is sufficient to support the development of life — that is to say the way some molecules can assemble to duplicate themselves in a complexity that can increase or decrease, but not necessarily so. Billions of earth-like planets supporting life? Sure. It's what I call random specific. 

 

It’s like cooking: you can have your flame, if you don’t have your saucepan and water, you will end up singeing your ingredients. It can work as food, but it’s very basic and not prone to develop into “cuisine”...  Temperature control is the key to making a non-gluggy sauce. And there is still a lot of glug in the universe... 

And then there is a big occupied(?) void, in between these pockets, where temperature goes below the average temperature of the universe. This super low temperature could lead to super-fluidity of what we cannot see, that in turns accelerate the process of universal development into primeval nothingness. It’s the story of our life. We’re born, we live, we die. No god. Thank you.

 

 

If I want to become irate, all I have to do is think of all the dizzying number of religious groups ever invented to satisfy our despair at being human. We are told that there are about 4,300 religions and many sub-beliefs in the human world. The 20 largest religions according to their number of believers are:

 

Christianity (2.1 billion)

 

Islam (1.3 billion)

 

Nonreligious (Secular/Agnostic/Atheist) (1.1 billion).

Here we must confirm that Atheism ISN’T A RELIGION. Agnosticism? Not a religion, only a belief status. Secularity: not a religion either — it’s only a non-belief system of governing relationships.

 

Hinduism (900 million)

 

Chinese traditional religion (394 million)

 

Buddhism 376 million

 

Primal-indigenous (300 million)

 

African traditional and Diasporic (100 million)

 

Sikhism (23 million)

 

Juche (19 million)

 

Spiritism (15 million)

 

Judaism (14 million)

 

Bahai (7 million)

 

Jainism (4.2 million)

 

Shinto (4 million)

 

Cao Dai (4 million)

 

Zoroastrianism (2.6 million)

 

Tenrikyo (2 million)

 

Neo-Paganism (1 million)

 

Unitarian-Universalism (800,000)

 

 

Should I wish to feel elated, all I have to do is look at that little beast, a butterfly in my Sydney garden, Australia, wondering where did he come from (he is a male awaiting females) considering he is “native of North America”… This little creature, Polites themistocles, the tawny-edged skipper, has the ability to separate its wings while at rest, like Vulcans can separate their fingers. Some wings will be up, while others will be down. Observe, my friend, observe…

And unlike my Neanderthal days, I need to wear shoes, instead of walking barefoot.

 

Gus leonisky

 

Your local happy-grumpy kook...

back to the wind mills...

New financial data on the construction of ‘utility-scale' solar and wind farms show that costs have dropped significantly, to the point that keeping legacy coal-fired power plants active is now more expensive than building new sustainable-energy facilities.

 

According to a new report from Bermuda-based investment bank Lazard, the data does not include government energy incentives and tax breaks that, if factored in to the calculations, would put the cost of new sustainable energy plants even lower, according to CBSnews.com.

"In some parts of the US […] it is cheaper to build and operate wind and solar than keep a coal plant running," noted a Lazard spokesperson, who added, "You have seen coal plants shutting down because of this," cited by CBS News.

Founded in 1848, Lazard Ltd annually calculates the costs of the world's various utility-grade energy sources by means of a metric they term ‘levelized cost of energy' (LCOE), according to Marketwatch.com.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/business/201811171069901088-Wind-solar-cheaper-t...

a million suns and one more moon...

Chinese nuclear scientists have reached an important milestone in the global quest to harness energy from nuclear fusion, a process that occurs naturally in the sun.

Key points:
  • The "artificial sun" is designed to replicate the fusion process that occurs in the sun
  • Dr Matthew Hole said the achievement is significant for fusion science around the world
  • Fusion is seen as a solution for energy issues as it is clean, sustainable and powerful

 

The team of scientists from China's Institute of Plasma Physics announced this week that plasma in their Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) — dubbed the "artificial sun" — reached a whopping 100 million degrees Celsius, temperature required to maintain a fusion reaction that produces more power than it takes to run.

To put that in perspective, the temperature at the core of the sun is said to be about 15 million degrees Celsius, making the plasma in China's "artificial sun" more than six times hotter than the original.

The news comes after China shocked the science community last month with plans to launch an "artificial moon" bright enough to replace city streetlights by 2020.

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-15/china-attempts-to-create-an-artif...

hubble bubble trouble origins...

In an August 31st Discover magazine article titled “Big Bang Vote: IAU Debates Who Gets Credit for Expanding Universe”, Dr. Krzysztof Bolejko of the University of Sydney provided an historical sketch of how the resolution came about. “The rate at which the universe is currently expanding is described by the Hubble Law,” wrote Bolejko, “named after Edwin Hubble who in 1929 published an article reporting that astronomical data signify the expansion of the universe.” But Hubble was not, in fact, the first to publish on the same topic...

 

In 1927, Georges Lemaître had already published an article on the expansion of the universe. His article was written in French and published in a Belgian journal.

Lemaître presented a theoretical foundation for the expansion of the universe, and used the astronomical data (the very same data that Hubble used in his 1929 article) to infer the rate at which the universe is expanding.

Bolejko further notes that “Lemaître was apparently not concerned with establishing priority for his original discovery. Consequently, the formula that describes the present-day expansion rate bears the name of Hubble. The resolution of the executive committee of the IAU wants to change the name to the Hubble-Lemaître Law, to honour Lemaître and acknowledge his part in the discovery.”

Read more:

https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/10/10/prominent-catholic-astron...

 

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

 

More stuff from Dr. Krzysztof Bolejko:

The notion of an apparent horizon (AH) in a collapsing object can be carried over from the Lemaître-Tolman to the quasispherical Szekeres models in three ways: 1. Literally by the definition—the AH is the boundary of the region, in which every bundle of null geodesics has negative expansion scalar. 2. As the locus, at which null lines that are as nearly radial as possible are turned toward decreasing areal radius R. These lines are in general nongeodesic. The name “absolute apparent horizon” (AAH) is proposed for this locus. 3. As the boundary of a region, where null geodesics are turned toward decreasing R. The name “light collapse region” is proposed for this region (which is three-dimensional in every space of constant t); its boundary coincides with the AAH. The AH and AAH coincide in the Lemaître-Tolman models. In the quasispherical Szekeres models, the AH is different from (but not disjoint with) the AAH. Properties of the AAH and light collapse region are investigated, and the relations between the AAH and the AH are illustrated with diagrams using an explicit example of a Szekeres metric. It turns out that an observer who is already within the AH is, for some time, not yet within the AAH. Nevertheless, no light signal can be sent through the AH from the inside. The analogue of the AAH for massive particles is also considered.

 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235508578

 

Hubble was more accurate than Lemaître in his calculations though...

 

And by the way, should you wonder about the weirdo mind of Jesuits, go to this, and flick through (backwards/forwards) the pages, presently opened at page 64/65...

https://archive.org/stream/a588350800loyouoft#page/n113/mode/2up

when christ preached communism...

This is indecent. This is obscene. This is unspeakable. The Jesuit magazine America has published what it titles “The Catholic Case For Communism.” Author Dean Dettloff begins by criticizing a piece that Dorothy Day published in that same magazine in 1933, in which she talked about people being drawn to Communism out of admirable idealism, but failing to grasp that Communism wants to destroy the Church. Dettloff writes:

But in her attempt to create sympathy for the people attracted to communism and to overcome a knee-jerk prejudice against them, Day needlessly perpetuated two other prejudices against communism. First, she said that under all the goodness that draws people to communism, the movement is, in the final analysis, a program “with the distinct view of tearing down the church.”

Then, talking about a young communist in her neighborhood who was killed after being struck by a brick thrown by a Trotskyite, she concluded that young people who follow the goodness in their hearts that may lead them to communism are not fully aware of what it is they are participating in—even at the risk of their lives. In other words, we should hate the communism but love the communist.

Though Day’s sympathetic criticism of communism is in many ways commendable, nearly a century of history shows there is much more to the story than these two judgments suggest. Communist political movements the world over have been full of unexpected characters, strange developments and more complicated motivations than a desire to undo the church; and even through the challenges of the 20th century, Catholics and communists have found natural reasons to offer one another a sign of peace.

He goes on:

Christianity and communism have obviously had a complicated relationship. That adjective “complicated” will surely cause some readers to roll their eyes.

Dettloff is a Catholic — America‘s Toronto correspondent — and a member of the Communist Party of Canada. From the CPC’s Facebook page:

Jesuit priest Matt Malone, the magazine’s editor in chief, writes a companion essay explaining America’s reason for publishing this unapologetically pro-communist piece. Excerpts:

So, you might ask, after 110 years of opposition to communism, why are we publishing an article in this issue that is sympathetic to it? Well, for one thing, you should not assume that America’s editorial position on communism has changed very much. It has not. What has also not changed is our willingness to hear views with which we may disagree but that we nonetheless think are worth hearing.

More:

For what it’s worth, my general view of economics begins with the fact that markets, for all their downsides, are the greatest force for economic empowerment that the world has ever seen. But that is just my opinion and, therefore, not the point. Mr. Dettloff’s piece is in this issue not because I agree with it but because I think it is worth reading, just as I did with Arthur Brooks’s article in defense of free markets that we published in February 2017 and just as we did when we published Dorothy Day in 1934.

America, in other words, is not a journal of Father Matt’s opinions. Not even I would want to read such a magazine. This is a journal of Catholic opinion, and Catholics have differing opinions about many things. Our job is to host a conversation among Catholics and our friends in which people can respectfully and intelligently disagree. Accordingly, we publish something in almost every issue with which I personally disagree. I hope we publish something you disagree with, too. If not, we are not doing our job.

Wait a minute. No fair-minded and intellectually curious person could object to an essay in a Catholic magazine criticizing the excesses of capitalism. It’s also easy to see the justification for publishing an essay defending democratic socialism from a Catholic point of view. And nobody could reasonably complain about an essay like Dorothy Day wrote in 1933, explaining why some idealists are drawn to Communism.

But an essay defending Communism? Really? What to make of this?

My own views are very strong. A couple of weeks ago, I knelt in Warsaw at the grave of the Blessed Jerzy Popieluszko, the chaplain of the Solidarity labor union movement. He was beaten to death by agents of the Communist government for opposing them.

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/jesuits-rehabilitate-comm...

 

And you should see what the inquisition did to the non-believers... Or what god is going to do to us according to Folau... Meanwhile the USA and its people prefer terrorism to socialism. They hate socialism beyond the whitewash colour of pale because terrorism is an incidental event while communism and socialism are "systems" contrary to the good old teaching of Christ: "be greedy, become rich and kill commies."...

 

Read from top. Gus is a rabid atheist.