Sunday, November 10, 2019

Sunday/Resurrection

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.--H. L.  Mencken

Binney and Soudi brought the kids over last night and we had pizza. The kids are active, good-looking and very kind to each other. Nice time. Those kids can eat a lot of pizza.

Here's a little technology with some terrifying potential: Shachihata, a company that sells personal seals, has developed a stamp that allows victims to mark their attackers with invisible ink, which can be detected under ultraviolet light. A trial run of 500 anti-groping stamps, priced at ¥2,500 ($23), sold out within 30 minutes.

Don brought over an article by Kessler from the WSJ that is profound. And pithy, hard to summarize. Somehow I have copied it and I hope it will link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/follow-michael-crichtons-rule-11572814056


But what I also want to suggest is that immigration control is the danger to freedom. It’s not immigration that’s the worry, it’s the control. The basic message of the talk I want to present is to suggest that it’s the attempt to control outsiders that is the danger because you can’t control outsiders without controlling insiders. What immigration control is about, ultimately, is not the control of immigrants — it’s the control of citizens and residents. It’s about the control that’s exercised over ourselves..--from the transcript of Chandran Kukathas’s October 2017 F.A. Hayek lecture and I'm not sure I agree with it. The integrity of a culture is not necessarily spiritual. And the anxiety of libertarians seems not to be able to confront that.
Why are Left states in the U.S. called "Blue" and not "Red?" Why do people who hate elites defer to elites to run their lives through government?                        
There are some astonishing numbers in this little bit about facial recognition: The child labor activist, who works for Indian NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan, had launched a pilot program 15 months prior to match a police database containing photos of all of India’s missing children with another one comprising shots of all the minors living in the country’s childcare institutions. He had just found out the results. “We were able to match 10,561 missing children with those living in institutions,” he told CNN. “They are currently in the process of being reunited with their families.” Most of them were victims of trafficking, forced to work in the fields, in garment factories or in brothels, according to Ribhu. This momentous undertaking was made possible by facial recognition technology provided by New Delhi’s police. “There are over 300,000 missing children in India and over 100,000 living in institutions,” he explained. “We couldn’t possibly have matched them all manually.”Locating thousands of missing children is just one of the challenges faced by India’s overstretched police force in a nation of 1.37 billion people.

The world is now 188 trillion dollars in debt...
A whithering article recently discussed income inequality. One sensible nugget: Wealth inequality data tell us nothing about levels of poverty or prosperity and thus are not useful for guiding public policy. And a summary: wealth inequality has increased modestly but mainly because of general economic growth and entrepreneurs creating innovations that are broadly beneficial. Nonetheless, policymakers should aim to reduce inequality by ending cronyism programs and reducing barriers to wealth-building by moderate-income households.
The essence of the anxiety over wealth inequality is envy.

                                 Resurrection

John, in revelations, calls Christ "firstborn of the dead." In The Last Temptation of Christ, Lazarus is raised from the dead but wanders about smelling like death. Ressurection has its creepy side.

In today's gospel resurrection would be funny except for the reverberation in the Old Testament. A Sadducee approaches Christ with a question: Seven brothers, following Jewish law, successively marry the same woman after each preceding brother/husband dies; who is her husband in the afterlife? In essence, when they all are dead, who has conjugal rights? This is a distillation of materialism presented to the spiritual Christ and would be very funny except for the Old Testament story it is based upon in Maccabees where seven brothers and their mother are tortured to death over their adherence to the law and their belief in the afterlife.
Sadducees were one of the three main Jewish political and religious movements in the years between c.150 BCE and 70 CE. (The other movements were the Essenes and the Pharisees.) They had a conservative, materialist outlook and accepted only the written Law of Moses,  (i.e., the five first books of the Bible, the Torah,) which did not include the resurrection of the body. (Maccabees came later and is itself controversial.) The name Sadducees may be derived from the word Tsaddîq ('righteous') or the name Zadok, who was high priest in the age of King Solomon. As a group, they held a narrow, earthbound religious creed.

Christ uses this as an opportunity to be quite specific about the spiritual nature of the afterlife and anyone who believed he was speaking figuratively would be stunned.


Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
-- JOHN DONNE

And the British Coronation theme, Zadok the Priest:

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