Whilst the world falls apart, I'm actually enjoying myself.

[tcpip]

greylock informs us that if you're a fundamentalist Christian the latest invasion of Lebanon by Israel is cause for celebration because the Rapture is coming! zey provides this image of the special love that Israeli children are being enculturated with. Let's sort this out. Hezbollah kills eight and captures two Israeli soldiers. Israel responds with an invasion of Lebanon, killing almost three hundred civilians, wounding a thousand and displacing half a million. Strikes on Lebanon's civilian infrastructure include Beirut airport, ports, grain silos, bridges, roads, factories, medical and relief trucks, and the country's largest dairy farm Liban Lait. If Israel wants to deal with Hezbollah they should offer military and police support to the Lebanese government, not launch an invasion of a sovereign state that has a tenuous religious balance and semi-democracy. As Antony Lowenstein points out, this action will to generate more terrorists.

Back at home, Wealth gap in Australia. Latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that almost 60 per cent of Australian households' wealth is owned by the richest 20 per cent of households, while the bottom 20 per cent own just 1 per cent. I'd bet my meagre dollars it's even more disproportionate in land values too. Appropriately from the cream of society (the rich and thick) Young Liberals chant "We're racist, we're sexist, we're homophobic". Malcom Fraser's takes Trotsky's dictum of equating the head of a facist with the pavement. "Where people are being racist or discriminatory in their comments or policies, wherever they are, they ought to be clobbered," he said..

So whilst all these disasters are happening I've been having a great time. Work this week at both Borderlands and Naturelinks has been interesting; the former involving some great hardware repairs and the later required moving and re-establishing a network and associated remote desktop requirements and so forth - there's even a 80 metre trench being dug to connect two buildings. Further, I've been working on yet another website this time for a PR company who pay quite well indeed. Off-hours, The Norman Britian RetroAD&D game continues to be great fun and this Sunday we're playing Cybernoia, which imajica_lj has been saying very nice things about. Also on Sunday, a person of no less greatness than claudine_c is speaking at the Melbourne Unitarian Church on her rural health work in India. Finally, the bunny, Astaroth from the second summoning, is doing well. And whoever the anonymous stranger who sent me a dozen virtual red roses, thanks!

Comments

Re: Enjoying the destruction

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

There have been many events recently which, to an apocalypt of any persuasion, are quite suggestive. My favourite is the end-date of 2012. If certain theories are correct, over the next six years things should get much crazier. May you live in interesting times, eh?

Re: Enjoying the destruction

[cinematic.livejournal.com]

An apocalypt hey. I'm curious, is that a real word? 2012 is a myth. It wasn't an end date for the Mayans, it was just the end of a cycle - after which a new cycle would begin. The Earth will be here in 1000 years, even if our race is not.

Re: Enjoying the destruction

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

Whether the word apocalypt is in the dictionary or not, it stems from a 'real' word and conveys its own meaning, so yes, it is a word.

2012 is not just a myth, not in the way you seem to mean it anyway. You are correct that it is the end of a cycle. The Mayan calendar is full of cyclic predictions and events. The point is that 2012 is the end of the big cycle, the mama cycle. After this the whole process begins again.

It is also interesting to note that we are currently in the Kali Yuga. In, or just past according to a minority. So, pretty near the end. So there you have another ancient tradition calling attention to our current age with predictions of calamity.

There are many ancient cultures who have a sense of historical time based on very long periods of time. The Egyptians, the peoples who built Angkor Wat, the Mayans etc etc. All have massive monuments with architecture based on the movements of heavenly bodies, the precession of the sun in particular. All have very similar concepts of the creation and continuation of the world.

I'm interested in this kind of stuff because there is a whole lot of evidence indicating that ancient people knew of a cyclic phenomenon which caused great strife, in some cases the creation of the world, in some it's destruction. You recall the great flood and a dude called Noah? That flood is mentioned in thousands of native cultural traditions.

There is also the Spike theory. This is based on an extrapolative graph of human technology from the wheel on up to nanotechnology. In the next five to fifty years that graph hits an exponential curve and shoots off the page. Some think it will be the combination of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology which allows smart tech to design and manufacture itself. Whatever, it's an interesting notion.

So, the Mayan calendar does not predict the end of the world. But that is not what the word Apocalypse refers to either. Generally it is seen as the coming of heaven on earth, when the eschaton is fully emmanentised. Heaven, or hell. Regardless, the world is pretty fucked up right now. In the past we've never had the capability to kill everyone on the planet in a few hours, as we do now. All this 'coincidental' fulfilling of end-time prophecy is something to think about at least.

P.S Coincidental? It means two disparate events which seem to be connected. So it doesn't mean a damn thing. My birth and my death are coincidental. So is a knife in my hand and a bleeding corpse on the ground.

Re: Enjoying the destruction

[longhairedbum.livejournal.com]

The spike theory you describe is more commonly known as Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns, I believe, with the near-vertical section of the curve being referred to as the Technological Singularity.

Exciting times are in store for the younger generations alive today. I can't wait.