Category: Uncategorized

The Pinellas County sheriff said his office would not charge Michael Drejka, who fatally shot another man, Markeis McGlockton, during a dispute about a parking space.
— Read on www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/us/florida-stand-your-ground.html

I don’t think the reporter or the editor grasps what this story says. The person is being referred to the district attorney, who determines whether a crime has been committed. The only role of the sheriff in this is to decide in the moment whether to arrest the shooter. That’s it. The legal results and process stay the same except the guy isn’t in custody. The state now investigates and decides whether the claim of self-defense is okay.

The Bible forbids gay sex. But an earlier version of the text permitted it.
— Read on www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/opinion/sunday/bible-prohibit-gay-sex.html

I read Leviticus 18 as a list. To me, the section which contains the famous prohibition consists of 3 pieces. I’m reading the prohibition against sex between men as the second of 3 related parts because the 1st and 3rd share a strong similarity, which is that the 1st refers to a Canaanite ritual practice and the 3rd appears to also refer to a Canaanite ritual practice. Put them together and it reads: don’t sacrifice your children to God, don’t engage in ritual homosexual sex as an offering to God, and don’t have sex with animals as an offering to God. These three connect forms of offering: God doesn’t want you to kill your children, have ritual homosexual sex or ritual sex with beasts. It doesn’t strictly say you can’t kill your children, but I think the idea is that you wouldn’t otherwise kill your child except as a sacrifice, assuming the child is healthy. This opens some dark doorways that lead to the expectation that children might be killed because they weren’t healthy, which I expect was normal then, so the concept is limited to those you wouldn’t otherwise kill, which fits with the concept of Cain and Abel and the quality of your sacrifice, with the implication that Cain offered God less than the best, less than a healthy lamb. It doesn’t say you can’t have homosexual sex or sex with animals unless you extend the prohibition in the same way you’ve extended ‘no child sacrifice’ to ‘no child killing’ – which again highlights the anti-Godly nature of ‘honor killing’. To me, the point of ‘no sex with’ as an offering is fascinating: it’s the male expression of God as the provider of the seeds of life – that fertilize an egg and any number of eggs in a woman and in a number of women – so the concept of that as an offering would be that man asserts sexual dominion over man and over beast as a devotional act. This contrasts with the relationship of man and woman in Judaism, in which neither has dominion but instead each has obligations to the other, and the fulfillment of those obligations is a devotional act. It’s interesting then that sex between man and woman or woman and woman is not excluded as a devotional act. That may be because it was common in so many ancient societies. It may also be because sexuality was eventually channeled into the ‘covenant’ of marriage and the like.

Why ban these devotional acts? Look back at the easy one: no child sacrifice. It only matters because God says ‘me no like, so don’t do’, and that occurs only because God is saying ‘don’t act like me, don’t pretend that you’re in my place as taker of life, as spreader of life, as maker of the animals, and so on.’ Why? Because God is becoming more abstracted from the literal, so instead of taking life because God takes life and so on, we should recognize that we aren’t going to be like God that way, that we can’t be like God doing that. To me, the act of homosexuality is not the same as offering that act as a ritual before God. That is why I pointed out the prohibition isn’t against child killing but ritual child killing: it’s the performance of acts before God as the audience for those acts. I can imagine the people of that time thinking it was perfectly normal to leave malformed babies out to die – or killing them in some way – but they had begun to differentiate between what they were and what God is so that imitation of God’s ways changes. Hidden in there is what I think is a deeper meaning: these are imitations of God’s ways, which makes sense when you realize that of course God has sex with beasts and sex with men because God infuses our thoughts and flows through us into new life. God’s ways are not the ways of people, nor are the ways of people the ways of beasts. These bans are ways of marking a growth in awareness.

But if imitation of God doesn’t make us holy, then what the heck are we doing? We try to offer the best, most heartfelt prayers, but does God pray? If God prays to us, it’s that we do better and that, apparently, does not include getting better at sacrifices that are enactments of God’s own behavior as life force and life taker. You can understand child sacrifice: here is this precious gift, a healthy child, which I now give to you, God, in fire. It is: I assert your dominion by asserting the power of death you have over this life through my hand. You see the same thing in ritual sex: you assert dominion over beasts and over men in a literalized fashion. It is that form of submission which is being prohibited.

President Trump suggested Saturday that there could be legal consequences for Michael Cohen, who recorded a discussion about paying a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Trump.
— Read on www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2018/07/21/existence-recording-revealed-trump-lashes-out-his-longtime-lawyer/sClMoYytUglWCZyupuGL9N/story.html

I can’t imagine a lawyer recording a client without permission. Attorney-client privilege is supposed to be a two-way street.

Paul Heroux, the mayor of Attleboro, appears regularly as a “Middle East expert” on Russia’s government-funded television network.
— Read on www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/07/20/this-massachusetts-mayor-has-unusual-side-gig-middle-east-expert-russian-state/ST00OFjbiOXKAkqyBfsYyK/story.html

Guy does commentary for Russian tv and this article almost calls him a traitor. The portrait of Russia as mortal enemy is Orwellian

The essence is that it’s public but I do nothing to publicize its existence, as if that matters. I’m not happy today. But before getting into that, I should describe where I’m at:

1. Physically, other than some knee pain that appears to be directly related to continuing tightness in my right calf, which appears directly related to the hallux rigidus, I’m in ridiculous condition. Ran 5.7 miles yesterday, much if not most of it uphill. I’m not a distance runner and I’ve been running nearly every day. I weigh just under 150lbs. I’m still losing visible fat – there’s a small amount on my stomach – but I’m not dieting. I haven’t been lifting weight much lately but I did 60 reps of dead lifting a few days ago when it was pouring rain, concentrating on connecting my feet to the ground and doing the entire move with my knees only. If I didn’t see myself in the mirror, I could say my body is pretty much like a kid in his 20’s. I almost said except for the pains but my body has always hurt. Even my fingers are working better: I’ve twisted and stretched my hands and arms so much that outside of occasional stiffness they now flow freely. Weird.

2. Mentally. I vacillate between being high and low. The realization that I can actually explain extremely large scale phenomena coherently is starting to sink in. I put a lot of effort into it, if you judge effort by the number of web pages on a topic I’ve left open on my phone. I was worried about my ability to say this material in a clear and concise manner but the layerings of meanings are working themselves out. That’s all pretty good. The negative is that I’m completely worn out, that I feel absurdly obsessed with, well, I guess it has to be fear that I’m reading signs that aren’t there, that I must have missed something obvious which clarifies the meaning in a different, unfavorable direction, or that the signs are there and I read them correctly but they have nothing to do with me. As an aside, I’m fascinated by the current irrationalities. People actually believe – or rather, want to believe – that the President in a private meeting with the Russian leader betrayed America … through a translator who is a US government employee. I’m an extremely forgiving person but I’m tempted to vote Republican just because of the way the Democratic Party has been acting.

3. Emotionally. Today is difficult. Yesterday was incredibly intense mentally and emotionally. If something hits me now, I may be unable to control my impulses. I never thought I’d ever be at this kind of risk but I feel it now. And at the same time, I feel like my existence is less mine, more stage-managed than ever, and that of course I have even less of a clue than usual. If I keep typing in this vein, I won’t get anything done today so I’m stopping.

Attracted by lax regulations, industrial agriculture has descended on a remote valley, depleting its aquifer — leaving many residents with no water at all.
— Read on www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/magazine/the-water-wars-of-arizona.html

They need to adopt Israeli water practices.

The Palestinian constitution says Palestine is Islamic and Arab, Jerusalem its capital, Arabic its official language. No one cares. ~ Elder Of Ziyon – Israel News
— Read on elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-palestinian-constitution-says.html

Humorous. I’ve read the Basic Law passed in Israel. It’s mostly ‘basic’ stuff. The big oddity is that Arabic is treated in two ways, one apparently to appease those who want Hebrew to be the only official language, and then a statement that says the status of Arabic hasn’t changed, apparently to make sure the appeasement is only superficial. They say a unified Jerusalem is the capital. I don’t see why that means it can’t also be the capital of Palestine but the law is just a law and can be changed by a vote. (And Palestine claims all Jerusalem, as the link makes clear.) There’s a big fight over the sentence regarding ‘Jewish settlement’ but the line doesn’t say what ‘Jewish settlement’ means. It could be another way of saying ‘ingathering’. But pretty much anything having to do with Israel or with Jews becomes a bigger story than it should be.

Read an in-depth Free Press analysis of the city’s financial history back to the 1950s.
— Read on www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2013/09/15/how-detroit-went-broke-the-answers-may-surprise-you-and/77152028/

This is well done but I don’t agree with much of the commentary. That is, sure they could have cut staff in the 1960’s but that’s equivalent to saying you didn’t believe then that the city could recover, and believing that then was considered bluntly racist because Detroit was becoming a black city and people who said that had no faith in a black American city. And there would be no way you could sell that idea to a city council, that you needed to renegotiate contracts because the city was going down. At that time, the emerging black city had hope. I’m not sure exactly why the borrowing binge started. By that point in time, Detroit was a total mess, so I assume they wrongly believe that sinking more money in could reverse the course. You could say that’s a classic sunk costs problem but it has many other overtones: the overlay of it being a black run city, of the potential for industrial reinvention, and as a comparison to more expensive coastal cities.

The Legendary Seymour Stein Talks About Madonna, The Ramones, and 55 Years of Rock – Tablet Magazine
— Read on www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/music/138874/seymour-stein-interview

My favorite story is that he wanted to sign a band he heard at a festival but the other two guys talked him out of it because they had a flautist and hit wrong notes: Jethro Tull. It’s nice to read nice things about Madonna, especially the comments about how the death of her mom affected her.

Charged EVs | Chakratec raises $4.4 million for flywheel storage technology for DC fast charging
— Read on chargedevs.com/newswire/chakratec-raises-4-4-million-for-flywheel-storage-technology-for-dc-fast-charging/

This seems like the right kind of idea, but I’m unclear about how it charges a car fast. I understand the storage idea: if these kinetic batteries work, they could be very useful. I don’t know how efficient they are. I think in terms of potential and kinetic mechanical energy like an old-time cartoon, so it’s like the flywheel has been spun to a point where it can return energy, which takes energy to get there, which I assume comes from the power grid and/or solar cells, and then that energy has to be suspended, which could be a mechanical stop (which takes some energy to put in place and remove, but that’s true in equipment generally), and then it has to flow out, which means it has to be converted into power.