Ade Ileke 27: Linhas na Amazônia

linhas na Amazônia...

gravuras dos deuses antigos?

Do Rio Bravo à Boca do Acra

há enchentes e ameaças de dilúvios.

os deuses estão voltando para casa.

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Lines in the Amazon lands...

etchings of the ancient gods?

From Rio Bravo to Boca do Acra

there are floods and threats of deluge.

The gods are coming home.



pix: Google Earth

Does Mind Matter?

Do a thought experiment and imagine a Universe where there is no Intelligence: nothing to perceive the physical processes, nothing to record them, no narrative of the passage of time, no histories, no sciences; there is merely the "stuff" of Science if Intelligence were ever to exist.



Is such a Universe possible? Would Matter exist in that way without Mind or Intelligence?



The answer is actually No, it does not nor would not exist in such a way.



The Thought Experiment of a Material Universe without Mind is itself an element of the Universe that has Mind. The Universe without Intelligence is part now - since we have just made the thought experiment! - of our history of Intelligence. And Universe without Narrative is obviously part of the Universe of Narration.



In other words, the "Material Universe Without Mind" is a concept that cannot be conceptualized, else it disappears.

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Gold

Olaf Stapledon somewhere writes about a primate society of the future which exhausts itself in the frenzied pursuit of essentially useless bright and shiny metals, and they melt back into the undifferentiated mass of primates from which they sprang.



He also wrote in the same book about the frenzied use of fossil fuels by mankind, mostly in aeroplanes and ritual flying, but he was spot on about the eventual depletion of fuels and the baleful effects this would have on the present and the future.



Getting back to the apes and their pursuit of Gold and Shiny Metals: as much as we have inveighed against Wall Street working at phantom financial instruments that add nothing to the "real" economy, we do not seem to mind that Gold adds nothing to the economy, either.

We are so used to phoniness that real investment eludes the majority of us. Gold is a bright, shiny, and essentially worthless metal, unless you need its malleability or the fact that it does not tarnish.



This business of phony investment seems to be so ingrained that only a catastrophe may change it. When a society values economically worthless things over items that have real value and contribute to the betterment of society.... well. draw your own conclusions.

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The Other Side of Fear...

Wisdom is on the reverse side of Fear... it is the side B, the side rarely played.



This side is the side of Miracle.



I really cannot explain it beyond this.

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Pure Ideology is the Death of Democracy

The Club for Growth sez:



http://www.frumforum.com/lets-primary-this-rino-reagan



... America would be better off served by somebody like Michele Bachmann. She is ideologically pure. 





To be ideologically pure is to remain "chaste" in the face of differing opinions; it is to refuse to compromise and negotiate.



Any politics that does not listen, negotiate, and compromise, must by its very nature cycle between eras of violence and discontent, for the only way that parties "out of power" can make themselves heard is by acts of violence or separation and withdrawal.



Consider the Fascists, the Bolsheviks, the Nazis... all insisted on ideological purity and they all realized they were enemies of Democracy, and they made it plain that they were above and better than feeble Democracy that cannot accomplish anything because it was always locked in confrontation. Back after World War I, the democracy in Italy could not agree on things, so it needed Mussolini to effect even such mundane things as "making the trains run on time".



We are not viewing dysfunction in Washington, D.C.; we are viewing an alien ideology and philosophy which seeks to actively subvert a Democratic process. It seeks to destroy the Government by refusing to allow revenue increases in a sane long-term proposal to reduce deficits; the aim of this alien ideology is the death of the country as we know it and the introduction of some new version that is "cleansed" of the bad elements of a "promiscuous" Democracy.

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Reverse Darwinism

I has been pointed out that Tea Partiers are not Evolution deniers; they are proponents of "Reverse Evolution"; i.e., survival of the goofiest.



I'll be darned.

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Am I "Frum" Canada?

Someone asked me why I read FrumForum. And why, in the name of all that is holy, do I have a link to it? Why do I not have a link to a liberal outlet, for example, and balance things out?



Well, Frum is a conservative from Canada...



I was at University in Canada, and I spent 6 of my most formative years living in Canada for 9 months of the 12, and spending the remaining 3 visiting my Canadian girlfriends. All of my friends from that time (who still speak to me!) are Canadian, and my wife's family on the maternal side comes from Quebec. My brother-in-law Bill, God rest his soul, has a place on Lac Achegan, near St. Hippolyte, Quebec, that his boys still own - even though they now neglect to send me invites.



There is a Canadian way of looking at things that is extremely different from the American way, and is also quite different from the British way.



Everyone that has been touched by Canada experiences things differently, and they never lose their sense of Kaskeyihtamowin... their "nostalgia", their painful longing (and that is what 'nostalgia' means in Homer) for their home, for Canada.

Love America as I do, Canada is my Godfather and Godmother.



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note:   kaskeyihtamowin is a Cree language word.

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