Long hours of work have kept me far from blogging.

BUT

the gospel and hymns at holy Mass on Saturday night re-invigorated my faith and belief.

The final chapter of St Johns gospel and the hymns "make me a channel of your peace" and "the lord is my shepherd" brought back memories of yesteryear and restored my commitment.

A commitment slightly shaken by the ongoing media feeding frenzy on the Catholic Church.

It's five years since I posted this @ agonist. And remember gentle reader that the media is focusing on the sins of yesteryear.

The sins of today are blithely ignored. It's easier to have a scapegoat, than to confront the sexualisation of todays children that is increasingly driven by the internet.

Maranatha! Come Lord Jesus! is the mantra I and many others use in Christian Meditation. A call that is more heartfelt than ever with all the tragedy of earthquakes, murders and suffering that daily occurs.

Some good things: love the new Dr Who, love the colour of the autumn leaves around Canberra, love the laughter in a group house i visit, love the memories of times gone by when life was expectant, forgiving and accepting.

shalom gentle reader. God is Great!

Compassion, Wisdom and Love.

five years ago: Compassion, Wisdom and Love.

'twas the end of an era, in so many ways!

Oh dear, time has flown gentle readers since my last post.

Long but wonderful days, showering, dressing, feeding, providing respite care, cleaning, putting folk to bed, have caused me to neglect brain dumps here.

At 51 my new employment as a personal carer, is exhilirating. Total care, no responsibility! Skills I learnt as an 18 year old have re-surfaced and my satisfaction and the satisfaction of clients and their families is awesome!

Caribdude, an agonist m8 has posted this, I repost it to get the word out!

---

For some time now we in St. Maarten have been following the efforts of Sean Paton, former BBC reporter and environmental friend, in Bonaire to stop the Scientology 'training ship' Freewinds from dumping it's raw waste water into the ditches and bush lands of Bonaire. For several years now he has been campaigning and posting videos on Youtube on the issue, one of the most recent reports confirmed his predictions and warnings that the practice would contaminate the island's ground water. The fear now is that in the long term, these contaminants will leach through the largely limestone and porous rocks of the island into the sea, last year studies were launched into the possible connections with a die off of spotted moray eels in the coastal waters.

What is truly amazing and astounding is that after Sean reported that wells are now contaminated, the island government of Bonaire have decided to let Freewinds continue the practice for at least another 6 months until a treatment facility can be built. Knowing how slow things move in these Caribbean islands, we have our doubts that this will happen in this time frame. Knowing too how corrupt and self interested most of these island politicians are, I, and many others down this way have some very strong suspicions that Scientology has most likely used it's influence and money to obtain this permission, in fact we believe it has been going on for years. Freewinds, for those who are unfamiliar with the ship, is based in the Caribbean because if it entered US waters it would most likely be seized and condemned because of asbestos.

Scientology as we all know, does not like bad press, so it is our hope that by exposing this story here to all you Agonists, that maybe you can help us give them some. I will be sending this story to Huff, C&L and OGM, but we would really appreciate any help from you all to give it more exposure wherever you can.

Note : It seems that Sean(Paton) removed the two videos, he did inform us that he has been under a great deal of pressure from authorities and that vague threats have been made against him and others. I have reposted them both myself with the expectation they will come after me next to remove them, or request Youtube to, so watch them while you can.

Bonaire-State of emergency Part 1
Bonaire-State of emergency Part 2

---

scientology makes me a sad panda :(

Sean Paul posts:

and my recent favorite, chasing the dragon, which is defined as: Originally in reference to feeding an opium addiction, this can refer to ploughing through any task past the point of diminishing returns, with disregard to one's own health, sanity or well-being.

yup, I can identify with that.

found @ http://glennfriedman.blogspot.com/

HOT DAYS.

It's like late January, early February in Canberra at present.

Life continues to call me onto new endeavours.

After three months leave and a wonderful semester at uni, I was made redundant from the bookshop.

I jumped on jobseek and a home care/nursing agency advert grabbed my immediate attention.

I rocked up for the interview and have begun personal care work.

It's a different pace of life, and personally rewarding.

There is so much suffering in the world in war and famine but the hidden suffering in the suburbs from illness and aging is not exposed much.

I have come full circle in many ways in my life. God is good!

surfacing from study...

re-visited old posts @ agonist:

let me take off my patriarchial hat for a moment, and note that for maybe 50-60,000 years, the womb not the phallus was the predominant cultural metaphor.
Sex therefore served as an icon of the self becoming itself, a very different representational value, relating to erotic desire of divine becoming itself. We are made from stardust and we seek to return to the stars.. We are all neighbours, sharing in the cosmic dance.
The symbol of the womb is not a thrusting, pulsating overwhelming power representation. Rather the womb prefigures the whole human being, a being to be inclusive, embracing, nurturing, intimate - a gentle energy but more overwhelming than the brief pulse of the penis.
The long oppressive history of patriarchal dominance and interference, instilled by male models of philosophy initially and then male led medical practice, debased and decreased a holistic understanding of sexuality that included the female perspective.
As humanity settled into the city lifestyle and war became male dominated, the very idea of neighbour changed.
Today, as in Jesus' day neighbour is someone who lives nearby and implicity has the same value system.
Hence love your enemies became a profound metaphor for early christians. By the middle ages the dictum became personified and thus legitimised warfare between cities/states and countries.
Tolstoy railed against militant nationalism, and used the injunction to love thy enemy as his primary text.
I am continuall amazed by customers who come in and abuse me for stocking books on Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism; truly we have a long way to go in understanding who our neighbour is.

Peter Kreeft writes a reflection as Jesus: So the universe was a womb for humanity, and humanity was a womb for Israel, and Israel was a womb for Mary, and Mary was a womb for me. Thus, Mary is the point of the universe, and I am the point of that point but I have not got the book so cannot check if he is quoting someone else.

turns out the book in question was

Peter Kreeft,The Philosophy of Jesus(South Bend: St. Augustine Press, 2007), 90.

nailed it at last!...

Re-reading Kreeft, I realise with 12 lectures on Pauline literature under my belt, that Kreeft's attempt to write 'The Philosophy of Jesus' was flawed from the start. The gospels are not first hand sources for Jesus' philosophy, rather are edited constructs to re-present his thoughts at the end of the 1stCenturyCE. Ah well I've learnt something...

Well its back to the cold, wet canberra winter, after a very relaxing week in Fiji.

Too many emails whilst I was gone, but one struck a chord, leading me to an interesting poem, that resonates within me:

Deeper cultures called it SPIRIT
pulled from first breath
to a hushed pivot of wingspan, a high point
of recovery over each life, a threshold of faith
in the heart's final treasure, holding its own truth,
its own measure of meaning: urgent, vivid as a myth
or a cave mural: the voice we fell from grace with. . .
it finally happened then: so much splendor went
to waste in us that eternity called collect (imagine,
the richest force in the universe!)
Who knew what to do or say? a pittance of awe
to pay attention with, & we still expected change!
Change came. An age passed, dust settled:
The first were last; a Bell went off
and there came to our senses
only shadows. . .

Michael Masley

Michael, the self styled Artist General and Berkeley street musician is better known for his posters stuck on power poles, but this poem surpasses any of them.

Day 2 of ~123 days leave.

Day 1 started with a sleep in, then time with daughters, and then the d i v o r c e paper arrived. Unexpectedly I was taken out for a wonderful Indian meal by a dear friend, and the pain was numbed by the great meal: perch, potato and spinach, garlic naan and hyderabad lamb mmmmm, and being with a beautiful woman. God always picks me up when I least expect it. Then some computer work, copying over tunes to a friends ipod.

Day 2 another sleep in, then helping out a m8 with some graphical design issues.
Off to university to get my ID card for Semester II - yep I'm returning to the theology study. Daughter time, getting expert at cooking kale/redcabbage boiled in fried cumin!Took advantage of a student deal to grab ultimate office 2007 and wiled away the late evening with some serious newsposting @ agonist.org. I haven't visited Mauberly for a while, I'm glad I did: breaking open Euthyphro and Socrates discussion on piety, the hooting of the unwise owl got me cogitating.

testing out windows 7 and excel 2010
Top 20 countries increase in confirmed swine flu cases:

and using wolframalpha for population figures to produce table of percent of confirmed cases:

This picture keeps entering my consciousness, not sure why but still I'm hoping for a miracle.

Commonsense, statistics and reality all tell me that life has moved on, has changed not ended, but there are no easy explanations.

So I pick up one foot drag it forward and keep moving forward!

I'm taking a leap into the unknown over the next few weeks.

I'll keep on riding the dragon, high or low!

Australia confirms first swine flu case

Australia confirms first swine flu case: "Australia has its first confirmed case of swine flu.
But the NSW woman who arrived in Brisbane on Thursday on flight QF16 from Los Angeles is no longer infectious and had a weak strain of the virus, authorities say.
Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon said the woman, who cannot be identified for privacy reasons, contracted the disease in late April while overseas and had recovered before returning to Australia"

SICK of garlic and wed rine? hic burp

try Oinksip!

It's a real worry! The Australian Department of Health and Ageing has issued a press release that states inter alia that "unlike bird flu, strains of swine influenza do not usually cause illness in humans, and in developed countries like Australia, relatively few people are regularly exposed to pigs."


Sheesh, the issue is that a H1N1 infection is killing people in Mexico, and has also been diagnosed in the USA, whilst closer to home twenty-two students from Auckland's Rangitoto College, may have been infected with the Swine Flu.

Someone at the DHA is blissfully ignorant of what is actually happening.

This nasty may mash up with avian flu components, or may burn itself out...

Latest updates http://agonist.org/topic/bird_flu





Reference: bird flu swine flu agonist H1N1 pandemic WHO

from The Australian

IAN Plimer calls himself an old-fashioned scientist. That means you question what others won't. You marry yourself to the data; you buck the received wisdom and political correctness of your colleagues.

When it comes to climate change, you say: "I was trained to be sceptical."

This is not exactly the view de jour when the great and the good, from Kevin Rudd to 2007 Australian of the Year Tim Flannery and former US vice-president Al Gore, are singing from the same hymn sheet about the hydra-headed menace of global warming.

Australia's top earth scientist has inserted a typically discordant note into the chorus. In his latest book, Heaven and Earth, Plimer sets out the "missing science" of climate change and challenges the assumption that the world's warming is down to human activity.

Far from heating up to dangerous levels, the planet is in a lull in an ice age that began 37million years ago, he says.

True, the climate is changing within these cyclical parameters, but less dramatically than it has at other times in Earth's history and with none of the catastrophic consequences talked up by the doom-and-gloom merchants.

"There is always change going on," he tells Inquirer. "I don't dispute that. The extent and origin of it are another matter."

Plimer puts forward the case, in 485 closely argued pages, that far too much emphasis has been given to the level of atmospheric carbondioxide in the scientific modelling of climate change.

Contrary to what the Prime Minister may say in spruiking the carbon pollution reduction scheme, Plimer's position is that CO2 is not a pollutant but a necessity of life. For a start, it is food for plants. "Global warming and a high CO2 content bring prosperity and lengthen your life ... without CO2 there would be no complex life on Earth," he writes.

While an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide theoretically may contribute to temperature rise, Plimer says there is no evidence to show this and plenty of proof, if you choose to look for it, to the contrary.

He accepts that people can alter the weather: the "urban heat island effect" has proved towns and cities are warmer than thesurrounding countryside, and in Europe there is evidence that weekends tend to be cooler and wetter because of the drop in human activity.

But that is not the same as changing the climate of the planet as a whole; Plimer takes a very long view of the forces at play here.

By his reasoning, climate changes are cyclical and driven by the Earth's position in the galaxy, the sun, wobbles in the planet's orbit, ocean currents and plate tectonics. When he peers back in time, there were periods when atmospheric CO2 was much higher than it is now yet produced no disastrous shift in the climate.

To reduce climate change to the single variable of carbon emissions abandons "all we know about planet Earth, the sun and the cosmos", Plimer says, and that is a leap of faith no self-respecting scientist should take.

"Global warming has become the secular religion of today," he writes in the powerful conclusion to his book. Logic, questioning or contrary data are not permitted. To thumb your nose at the prevailing orthodoxy is to risk being branded a climate-change denier, a scientific knuckle-dragger, or worse. Plimer doesn't let it worry him. "My job is to profess my discipline and, if people don't like that, bad luck," he says.

WE'RE talking in a borrowed office at the back of the printing works where his new book is being packed. Plimer has been here since 6.30am signing copies. It is a cool morning, overcast outside, with rain spitting from the sky. A nice change for dry-as-a-bone Adelaide, his home for the past three years.

If climate change is biting, this is where the hurt could be most acute. When the PM toured the Murray River's dying lower lakes last winter, he said the parched expanse of exposed soilbed, southeast of the city, testified to the reach of global warming.

Adelaide's water supply is in serious trouble. Despite the state Government's insistence that water for households is guaranteed, the boss of the new Murray-Darling Basin Authority, Rob Freeman, blew the whistle this week when he told The Australian there might not be sufficient "carry" water to offset evaporation and seepage losses of moving supplies to the city's reservoirs.

This after a summer where up to 80 Adelaideans died in a record-setting heatwave and 173 Victorians died in the Black Saturday bushfires. Queensland and northern NSW were inundated with the worst flooding in years; a powerful cyclone threatened coastal communities between Townsville and Gladstone but spun out to sea. More frequent and fierce weather-related disasters, wasn't that what the global warmers were predicting?

Plimer agrees people are right to worry about what's next. Nature, however, has always shown a fierce face in Australia and the destructive summer of 2008-09 should be kept in perspective.

"We should be concerned about bushfires, cyclones," he says. "But they are natural disasters and this is a dry continent prone to them. Things come to pass."

Plimer knows a thing or two about taking on powerful interests. He is not a man to be dismissed easily; his impressive academic and publishing record attests to that.

In addition to his day job at the University of Adelaide's school of environmental sciences, he is emeritus professor of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne and the author of seven books and 120 scholarly papers.

He is Australia's best-known academic geologist and certainly one of the most outspoken. Plimer has never backed away from a fight. In Telling Lies for God, he took on the creationists. When a group of them from Sydney, claiming to have evidence the wreck of Noah's Ark reposed on a mountain in Turkey, sued him for alleged defamation, Plimer hit straight back by mortgaging his house to cross-litigate in the Federal Court.

In part, he alleged that the creationists had breached the Trade Practices Act by engaging in misleading and deceptive conduct. The court disagreed but upheld an aspect of his case over copyright; the German Geological Society made him the first Australian to receive its Leopold von Buch medal.

Plimer went on to win one of Australia's top science awards, the Eureka prize, for his first book on global warming, A Short History of Planet Earth.

Plimer, 62, see parallels with his fight with the Christian fundamentalists. "The creationists were trying to teach a religious fundamentalism dressed up as science ... and they totally changed the nature science," he says.

"The science is now based on consensus, and we have thousands of scientists who have got everything to gain by saying the world is going to end. We have lost the tie to evidence. So I make great comparison ... between the way creationists operate and the way some of the rabid environmentalists and global warmers operate. The parallels are quite similar."

Plimer reserves his sharpest criticism for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has driven the international debate. Very much for the worse, in the professor's judgment. "The IPCC process is related to environmental activism, politics and opportunism," he writes in Heaven and Earth.

Plimer argues that the IPCC is dominated by atmospheric scientists, who in turn are obsessed by carbon dioxide emissions, skewing the process. The problems are compounded by primitive computer modelling. He reviewed five computer predictions of climate made in 2000, underpinning IPCC findings, and found there was no relationship between predicted future temperature and actual measured temperature even during a short period. Ditto for a link between temperature and the atmospheric CO2 content.

"To get a complete view of the planet, you need to have far more than atmospheric scientists on the IPCC," Plimer says. "What they have done is separate the atmosphere from the way the world works ... you need solar physicists, you need cosmologists, you need astronomers, you need geologists, bacterial specialists and on you go ... we don't hear anything about those things from the IPCC."

But what about this ice age business? How does that square with melting polar ice, rising sea levels and 40C summers in northern Europe? Well, taking the last point first, Plimer says none of the temperature variations in the 20th century was outside the range of normal variability. There was alarm in the 1970s that the decreasing temperature was heralding another ice age, he says. After 1976, when temperatures started to rise again, the clamour broke out over the greenhouse effect and global warming. Yet since 1998 temperatures have been falling, to profound scientific silence, he says. "It is not possible to make computer model forecasts of climate change for the year 2040, 2100 or 2300 based on a few decades of data," he says.

The history of the planet is etched in rock, and Plimer says it shows that for half of the past six million years the Earth was warmer than it is now. The ice caps are geologically unusual; people were growing barley and wheat in Greenland 1000 years ago. Ice ages come and go, yet no one knows precisely why. Sea levels rise and fall. It was ever thus, Plimer says. The planet is in a constant state of flux. Why would that dynamic suddenly change?

buy a copy here: Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science

Susan Boyle from 1999 Cry me a river charity CD

hattip sandyd

Fastest rise to fame of anybody ever? 28 million you tube hits when you add up the different tubes.



From emails, blogs, twitters, bbs, newspapers, tv shows, phone texts, Susan Boyle is the name on everyones lips.

24 48 72 96 120 144 168 hours of increasing exposure to the world.

I’ve read countless posts and reports of people moved to tears and joy, revelling in the sound of music sung with such joy regardless of the cynical audience.

It’s a long way to the semi-final, and Susan is having some time-out from the media frenzy.

Time will tell if Susan can be someone to unite people in caring again about all folk, maybe too much too expect of her, but she sure has made some folk take a second look at what is important, and to top it all off she sang one of my all time fav songs. w00t!

A song I love, and a version that brings a tear to the eye and joy to the heart:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY
embedding disabled by request

Without a doubt that is the biggest surprise I have had in three years on this show! HQ version.