Voyeurism is the opium of the peephole.
“The Naz and Matt Foundation was announced at a special service held in London for Nazim, two weeks after his funeral. The service featured contributions from a gay Muslim, gay Hindu, a gay vicar, a trainee Rabbi and a lesbian interfaith minister.” — My boyfriend killed himself because his family couldn’t accept that he was gay, The Guardian, 21/iii/2015.
Proviously post-posted (please peruse):
• Oh My Guardian #2
Outgoing Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman dismissed the report. “This report is not true. Obviously Israel has security interests to defend and we have our own intelligence. But we do not spy on the United States. There are enough participants in these negotiations, including Iranians,” he said in Israel. “We got our intelligence from other sources, not from the United States. The instruction has been clear for decades now: you don’t spy on the United States, directly or indirectly.” — Israel spied on US over Iran nuclear talks, The Guardian, 24/iii/2015.
The quickest way to improve your life is to stop watching TV.
• White Dot — the International Campaign against Television
In Terms of My Natural Life
(a pome crafted by Les Patterson)
I am an Australian in terms of Nation
And a Public Servant in terms of vocation,
But there’s one thing amazes my critics and that’s
How many I wear in terms of hats:
I chair the Cheese Board, I front the Yartz
You could term me a man of many parts.
I’m a Renaissance type, if you know the term
And I’ve held long office in terms of term,
Yes, I’ve long served Australia in terms of years
And in terms of refreshment I like a few beers.
My opponents are mongrels, scum and worms
Who I bucket in no uncertain terms
And my rich vocabulary always features
Large in terms of my public speeches.
My favourite terms in terms of debate
Are: “broadbased package” and “orchestrate”.
But one term I never employ is “failure” —
Especially when talking in terms of Australia!
For in terms of lifestyle we’ve got the germs of
A ripper concept to think in terms of.
Yes, in terms of charisma I’ve got the game mastered
In anyone’s terms I’m a well-liked bastard.
From the Back With A Vengeance Tour Brochure © 1989 Sir Les Patterson.
Elsewhere Other-Engageable:
Vatican Clarification on Filioque
[…] We grant that the Holy Spirit proceeds principally from the Father, in the technical sense. That means, the Father is his principal without principal. It is not that the Spirit proceeds “less” from the Son. But that the Son, his principal, is himself from a principal. In short, the teaching here shores up the monarchy of the Father.
But it is odd to say that the HS proceeds from the Father alone in a “proper” manner. Is this opposed to an “improper” manner? Does it mean the term “proceeds” should not be linked to the Son? Does it mean that “proceeds” means only coming from an ultimate principal? Why then should the document include the expression “proceeds (ekporeuetai) from the Father through the Son?” Wouldn’t that be oxymoronic? Or is “proper” simply a redundant synonym for “principal”? These are questions. […]
• Vatican Clarification on Filioque, Thomistica.net, 7/xi/2014.
When the biologist E.O. Wilson was asked by a friend what to do about the ants that had invaded his kitchen, Wilson said: “Watch where you step.” — Christopher Potter, How to Make a Human Being: A Body of Evidence (2014), pg. 214
“What they will find is a clear look into the molten core of a certain mind-set, a place where conspiracies are legion, victims are portrayed as perpetrators and so-called news is a fig leaf on a far darker art.” — “Sowing Mayhem, One Click at a Time”, David Carr, The New York Times, 15/xii/2014, viâ Steve Sailer.
Poem XLIII of Housman’s More Poems (1936) runs like this:
I wake from dreams and turning
My vision on the height
I scan the beacons burning
About the fields of night.Each in its steadfast station
Inflaming heaven they flare;
They sign with conflagration
The empty moors of air.The signal-fires of warning
They blaze, but none regard;
And on through night to morning
The world runs ruinward. (MP, XLIII)
In his commentary on the poem, the Housman scholar Archie Burnett traces a parallel with these lines from Lucretius: …multosque per annos | sustenata ruet moles et machina mundi – “…and the mass and fabric of the world, upheld through many years, shall crash into ruins” (De Rerum Natura, V 95-6).
I like the phrase moles et machina mundi, “mass and fabric of the world”, but I didn’t understand the translation fully. I investigated and discovered that the Latin word machina, though taken from Doric Greek μαχανα, makhana, “mechanical device”,* developed an additional meaning of “frame” or “body”. So Latin has deus ex machina, “god from the machine”, with one meaning, and machina mundi, “fabric of the world”, with another.
This seems to make machina a good word to expand the motto of this bijou bloguette. At the moment, the motto is this:
• Mathematica (v) • Magistra (iij) • Mundi (ij) •
That means “Mathematics is Mistress of the World”. Now try this:
• Mathematica (v) • Machina (iij) • Mundi (ij) •
The syllabification doesn’t change, but now I assume that the central word is pleasingly ambiguous and the motto means variously “Mathematics is Mechanism of the World”, the “Fabric of the World”, the “Engine of the World”, the “Body of the World”, and so on.
In addition, all the letters of Machina are found in Mathematica and Mundi, so the words on left and right almost act as a matrix, generating what appears between them.
There are further possibilities, blending magistra and machina:
• Mathematica (v) • Machistra (iij) • Mundi (ij) •
• Mathematica (v) • Magina (iij) • Mundi (ij) •
*In Attic Greek, it’s μηχανη, mēkhanē, whence “mechanical”, etc.
I wish someone would translate Lord of the Rings into English.
Overlord In Terms of Core Issues Around Maximal Engagement with Key Notions of the Über-Feral 