Renewal
This is a placeholder.
2010 is a year of new beginnings - a decade of new beginnings. I think it's time to refocus this blog on something which is very dear to my heart: renewal in the Christian church.
It's not that the parapsychological outer-limits or computer theory stuff will go away. But the fire of Renewal is starting to hit, in all its pushing-people-over messy joy, and I need to work out where to put my energies. At the moment I'm spreading myself too thinly and it's starting to leave me weary.
Also, I've realised that it was a mistake to post my dream journal publically. I've now corrected that by erasing them. Some of these things are very personal to me and are nobody else's business.
Something wonderful is happening. I think I want to be more specific this year about what that wonderful thing is.
Dan Dare, Fascism and Punk
These are things that I think we've lost, Prime Minister. That Britain has lost. And ever since Space Fleet and the UN fell apart, and the very idea of international cooperation went under, that's exactly what our nation has done: lost.
I first encountered the British space comic icon Dan Dare briefly and late in its Eagle incarnation, the 1967 and 68 Eagle Annuals to be exact, when the stories were atypically short and both the writing and artwork poor quality (the 1968 Annual has one of the worst storylines ever committed to paper: space microbes destroy Earth's entire space fleet with invisible ships. They're invisible because they're so tiny! buttheyhavefullsizelaserbeamsohnevermind.) I never read either the 1950s Frank Hampton version, with the long storylines and the Mekon, or the 1977 2000AD version, or the 1980s Eagle version, or the 1990 Grant Morrison political spoof or ...
(Warning: spoilers for the Garth Ennis 2008 Dan Dare graphic novel)
UFOs in Pennsylvania?
What is happening in Murraysville, Pennsylvania?
They don't look like planes to me - especially if you catch some of the other videos of them being single orbs of light, both stationary and pulsing, then adding new lights.
They also don't look like the classic media 'UFO' - you know, solid disc-shaped craft, what Spielberg did - but they DO look and act like some of the early actual UFO reports - the 'constellation of lights which change' configuration.
A very elaborate Youtube hoax? If it is, I'm impressed by the attention to detail. It's got my attention.
pod bay doors open
New year, new decade, new blog name and look. Let's try starting this thing again.
Our Glorious Three Components
Simon Talbot from Kraft Foods said: "The name Vegemite iSnack2.0 was chosen based on its personal call to action, relevance to snacking and clear identification of a new and different Vegemite to the original. We believe these three components completely encapsulate the new brand."
The call to iSnack action
Resounds throughout the land
Our glorious three components
Encapsulate the brand
On darkest breakfast tables
Dank dusty Vegemite
Made snacking near-irrelevant
Until we joined the fight
To feed the millions craving
Difference and novelty
We prayed to Kraft for a miracle
And lo! Processed CREAM CHEESE!
No mortal mind conceived this snack
'Twere born in circuit's glow!
In awe we serve to you on crackers
iSnack Two - Point - Ohhhh!
(iSnack 2.0 will now be known as CheesyBite. It's cheesy... and it bites! Kraft Foods would like to remind you that it is no longer directly related to the Philip Morris tobacco empire, since a whole couple of years ago, and would all you people please just shut up about that.)
Addington Space (Mark IV)
An all-new look Addington Space website is up! Yay!
About four years ago I first tried setting up a neighbourhood website, based on pmwiki. It sort of worked but not so much. The frameworks just weren't there to do a full Social Network site, which is what I wanted. And I wasn't in the mood to write my own from scratch in PHP, even using Drupal/Joomla/et al. So I figured I ought to try simplifying it as a blog. When that didn't work, I figured I needed to give in and try a fully hosted cloud solution. But I wanted to stay in New Zealand.... but no.
Attempt 1: Pmwiki. Attempt 2: Wordpress. Attempt 3: PeoplesTimes.com. Attempt 4: Ning.com
And finally it looks like we might have a workable platform. Yay! The downsides are Google ads and being hosted in the States. The upsides are really easy setup, automatic self-serve registration, single sign-on across multiple Ning sites, users can post content (the most important bit).
If you live in Addington - or anywhere in Christchurch and interested in social work or community development - try the site out. It's possible we could set up a network of related Ning sites if this works.
Ultimately I still want to find a local, free software, OpenSocial compliant, self-maintaining, 100% organic solution, but getting something that works even as a demo is one small step forward.
Wtf, Maggie?
2009. 20 years after the biggest political event of my life.
Remember when the Berlin Wall came down? Remember how pushing the Soviets for German reunification was one of the top planks of the 1980s Reagan-Thatcher Cold War policy axis?
Remember how happy everyone was when the impossible happened and the Wall fell?
Yeah now it turns out - not so much actually, at least if you were that bastion of freedom and democracy, Margaret Thatcher.
"The Prime Minister's view is... we do not want to wake up one morning and find that events have moved entirely beyond our control and that German reunification is to all intents and purposes on us"
Wtf, Maggie. Just wtf.
With the Velocity of Thought
Oh! could I take you with me, and with the velocity of thought wend our way through space, looking down on worlds moving in their orbits, filled with spirits whose only thought is onward and upward! To point out to your ken the source of those things, the manifestations of which only, you are permitted to behold. Together to learn from the observation of his works, the nature and attributes of the Creator. Together to develop the germs of our own characters, and together to strive onward toward that sphere where the full conception of our yearnings shall be gratified.
When we should have at last arrived at the place of eternal rest, can you conceive the sensation which would pervade our spirits, freed from materiality, when in daily and hourly communion with the millions of millions of souls liberated from every thing which partakes of earth, we enter forever into the real joys of our eternal existence ?
No human heart can realize, no human mind grasp the thought which now fills my nature, and lifts my spirit even beyond the barriers of this world.
Oh! 'tis then I feel that there is in all the works and laws of God this one eternal principle of love. For what can exceed the love of that being who has prepared a heaven where mind can grasp the every thought of life and death! Yes, even you, toiling and laboring to obtain that which will satisfy your minds on earth, can you realize what that joy must be when there is no obstacle to the fulfillment of that desire?
'Francis Bacon', Spiritualism Volume 1, Edmonds/Dexter/Tallmage, 1853.
A Horror of Great Darkness
And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and, lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon him. And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years; And also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance.
-- Genesis 15
Monday finds you like a bomb
That's been left ticking there too long
You're bleeding
Somedays there's nothing left to learn
From the point of no return
You're leaving
-- Eurythmics, "I Saved The World Today"
Sustainability workshop today at work.
The Shorter Millennium Ecosystem Assesment: We're all screwed.
Five years ago, we had ten years to save the Earth. Assuming we had the political and economic will to even begin to try to do what is necessary - and assuming we agreed in the first place on just what *is* necessary - none of which we have.
Now it's 2009, we haven't fixed any of the big problems, we didn't succeed in stopping the war in Iraq, electing Obama didn't drawdown the military in Afghanistan, Peak Oil is upon us, we've heard two clicks from the Russian Roulette revolver of pandemic flu and we're still spinning the barrel, and deep ocean fish stocks are still being depleted. We're *really* screwed.
And I'm personally, physically and emotionally, exhausted just from trying to do the tiny, ineffectual things I've tried to do for the past two decades to try to fight this planetary death machine - or at least even just to acknowledge its existence and stay sane.
The magnitudes of the global problems we seem by any reasonable interpretation of science to face here at the dawn of the 21st century are so huge that it's really hard to even fit them into my brain. Except as a series of Dante-esque images: mass extinction, mass starvation, a world reduced to smoking desert. The drought in Australia feels like the harbinger of the dragon's breath, coming ever closer.
Visiting Brazil in January-February brought the depression further home. How the rest of the world lives is intolerable by Western standards, and yet still over the carrying capacity of the Earth by ecological standards.
The equations are simple. The world has a finite amount of stuff. The human race is on an exponential growth curve. Something has to give. We might be able to change, but it's probably too late and things have already broken beyond repair in the basement. We're locked into the internal combustion engine, into fossil fuels, sprawling suburbia, electric grids, fertiliser and pesticide dependent farming, strip mining and deforestation, a global food transport grid.
Compared with the ecological crisis, nuclear war seems trivial. At least to stop that we just had to get two superpowers to agree to not pull the trigger. To stop the death of the planet... we have to change our way of life. We have to choose to destroy everything we've spent the last century building. In the face of an economic system which rewards cutthroat competition and mercilessly slaughters anyone who achieves less than total productivity. At the same time as the entire Third World is climbing aboard, and we're trying to get off, but we don't want to lose our place in the sun either.
Common sense says it can't be done. We've built a death machine. What is there left except to decide the manner of our planet's burial?
How can you build any kind of movement on the assumption that our civilisation and probably our whole biosphere is already doomed and all we can do is accept our fate?
And yet. Against this is the spiritual view which says 'this world is actually only a shadow of a much more real world in which there is no limitation'.
How do these two apparent irreducible truths - the absoluteness of finite planetary resources, and the reality of an unlimited dimension of mind and spirit - go together?
How can we possibly fix things when we still don't agree as a society that they're broken? But if we do agree that they're broken - how do we bear the guilt, pain and anger?
How can I get up and go to work in the morning knowing that just by living, I'm bringing the Apocalypse one step closer?
How do you un-fuck a planet?
