natural theology

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vol VII: Notes

2017

Notes

Sunday 23 April 2017 - Saturday 29 April 2017

[Notebook: DB 81: Scientific theology]

[page 1]

Sunday 23 April 2017

Trump has radicalized science and scientists and they are on the march against the fake news cooked up by people in power. One of the planet's greatest sources of power is the Gospel or Good News preached by Christianity. It is also fake news, based on an ancient misconception of the nature of God. In a nutshell, traditional religions make their gods invisible so that they can say what they like about them and no one is in a position to collect visible evidence to test their assertions, by definition.

The truth is that the Universe as we are coming to know it fulfills all the roles traditionally attributed to God and so can fittingly be called divine. If the Universe is divine, we can see all experience as experience of God, that is divine revelation. If this is so, theology can become a genuine modern science based on evidence. Since theology is the traditional theory of everything, we can see that it embodies all the sciences which study different aspects of the divine whole.

Then deal with the objections, properties of the traditional God.
a) consistent
b) actual - dynamic
c) simplicity
d) fixed points

Op ed submission to Washington Post

Scientific theology

Trump has radicalized scientists and they are on the march against the fake news cooked up by people in power. One of the planet's greatest sources of power is the Gospel or Good News preached by Christianity. It is also fake news, based on an ancient misconception of the nature of God. In a nutshell, traditional religions make their gods invisible so that they can say what they like about them and no one is in a position to collect visible evidence to test their assertions, by definition. Fake news - Wikipedia, The gospel - Wikipedia

The truth is that the Universe, as we are coming to know it, fulfills all the roles traditionally attributed to God and so can fittingly be called divine. If the Universe is divine, we can see all experience as experience of God, that is divine revelation. If this is so, theology can become a genuine modern science based on evidence. Since theology is the traditional theory of everything, we can see that it embodies all the sciences which study different aspects of the divine whole.

Such a radical revision of the foundations of Western Christianity may meet some opposition. From a scientific point of view, the propositions 'the Universe is divine' and 'the Universe is not divine' are equally hypotheses for testing, and we shall not concern ourselves here with refuting traditional religious politics.

We still face a serious theoretical obstacle if we want to make the 'material' world divine. Almost all the mystics and theologians of ancient times have held that God is completely simple, pure act, pure being, something that could be approached only by the purely empty mind created by a lifetime of training. Yet we are proposing this world of countless complexities as a vision of the absolutely simple divinity.

The formal answer to this conundrum may lie in mathematical fixed point theories. We often use mathematical structures to model the world. The whole of our trade, banking and engineering industry could not proceed without the help if arithmetic. More generally we describe the world with mathematical functions that mimic the behaviour of the world. Galileo found that the velocity of a falling object depended on how long it has been falling, and physicists use thousands of other functions to describe other features of the observable world.

A function maps one set of symbols onto another. We may model model motion by mapping a certain set of points onto itself, so that here becomes there and so on. Mathematics shows that under certain conditions such mappings are logically bound to have a point which is unchanged by the mapping, f(x) = x. So mathematically we should expect to find fixed points in a Universe of pure action pictured as mapping itself onto itself, because there is, by definition, nothing outside to map to.

So we have two enabling conditions for the establishment of scientific theology: 1. Set aside the ancient beliefs and open our minds to new possibility; and 2. Mathematical fixed point theory shows is that the existence of fixed points is consistent with a God of pure dynamism. The fixed points are not outside the life of the Universe (like the Christian God) but part of the dynamics. We, insofar as we live,  are fixed points in the human subset of divine space, parts of God.


 This hypothesis flies in the face of much tradition. The traditional model of God represents a being utterly unlike the world we experience. From a scientific view, this simply suggests that the model needs fixing. Natural theology will begin to find acceptance when it can produce a model of God that is consistent with the world of experience and provides a new interpretation of the ancient models. We have seen a similar process often in so called scientific revolutions.

The Papacy depends for its power on the hypothesis that the Universe is not divine. Canon Law says that the Pope ‘enjoys supreme, full, immediate and universal ordinary power in the Church, which he can always freely exercise’. In other words, the Pope is the epitome of dictators. Experience shows that dictators do not give up power easily.

Natural theology and the corresponding religions are embedded in the world and are slowly entering our consciousness through science, democracy and the rule of law. We might hope that the Pope eventually accepts the fate awaiting all dictators and becomes a constitutional monarch whose powers are defined by a scientific and democratic Church.

Autoeroticism was my original sin and my theological career has proceeded from there, finally coming to see myself my body and its pleasures and pains as divine and in no way a sinful source of evil as the Catholic Church taught me. [Now it has become (rather late in life) the physical embodiment of my divine consciousness]

[page 2]

Monday 24 April 2017

One of the principal inducers of randomness in the transfinite network is the connections made by each particle which are in may cases under limited control [ie already somewhat random]. You will only meet your future patner if you connect with them and these connections are guided to some extent by context, eg the local public houses.

Every theologian begins with their own experience. In the network model my life history is a sequence of permutations constrained by the environment in which I find myself.

Sensual communication with myself.

These days the Pope does not so much imprison, torture and kill his enemies as proscribe their works and take their jobs away from them because his main task is to incarcerate the minds of his flock using the walls built by the magisterium, the integrated thought of a lot of old powerful white men with imperial tendencies.

Populism: Ultimately a failure of education to integrate our more animal instincts into the prevailing social contract. We join societies when the benefit outweighs the cost. If the government is non-responsive to the real needs of the people, the cost goes up and the benefit goes down [until we reach the point of revolution]. I am well placed socioeconomically, owning a house and a car and living comfortably on an old age pension, although I hope my real working life is just beginning.

Tuesday 25 April 2017

Fogelsong page 2: 'As they thought about changing Russia, many Americans were influenced by ideas rooted in the religious

[page 3]

traditions of the United States. In particular Americans exhibited a duty to spread their creed, a belief that a benighted foreign people yearned for the enlightenment they could bring, a belief in the possibility of inducing a sudden conversion from the old way of life, a belief that religion is central to the virtue or depravity and progress or backwardness of societies, a belief in a single ultimate destiny for humanity, and a belief that opposition to the dissemination of their gospel is evil.' Fogelsong: The American Mission and the "Evil Empire"

page 6: . . . more enduringly than any other country, Russia can be seen as a object of the American mission and the opposite of American virtues.

page 7: . . . a movement for a "free Russia" developed in the United States in the last two decades of the [19th] century.'

Wednesday 26 April 2017

Becoming more aware of the critical importance of religion in international relations where we have a 4-way split between Muslim, Christian, Orthodox and Communist. These tensions and many more exist within nations, leading to a number of civil wars. Scientific theological and religious unity forms the only basis for reconciliation, beginning from one species and human rights. Camilleri Joseph Camilleri: The US, Russia and China: a twisted tale of personal ego, profound mistrust and foolish nationalism

A Church, and instantiation of religion, is a cooperative political unity, a set of people who lok our for eachother, formally and informally.

Some times I do not want to touch the bok,others it seems a necessary and valuable contribution to the human noosphere and well worth doing for the payoff at the end For me this line of thought has been a big investment in intellectual

[page 4]

property and sometimes I look forward to the harvest. At other times I just enjoy the work because it does seem to be getting somewhere, an interesting journey pushed along by the attempt to write the travelogue.

If every experience is experience of God, pop culture is part of religion for many people.

In research and development one is continually on the lookout for good ideas. With design finalized we go into production and there the standard is uniformity, repeating the same thing again and again.

Thursday 27 April
The Trumps want remove the regulations that make the business world confirm to the needs of the planet and the human spirit, reducing all value to market assigned quantities of money. The fact that the creative divine Universe move in the opposite direction must be the central part of the book.

Evil is in some way finite in that it is the failure of an existing computable system through lack of resources, that is an etror free physical representation of the good failed by the evil. The process of evolution tends in general to increase the good / evil ratio by selecting for more optimal exploitation of resources in each generation.

We are all in some way seeking enlightenment, the key to successful living, The great religions each embody a vision of this, Christianity opts for love, Buddhism opts for insight.

[page 5]

Olcott: 'Q 107: How does [a Buddha] proceed? A. Throughout that birth and every succeeding one he strives to subdue his passions, to gain wisdom by experience and to develop his higher faculties. He this becomes by degrees wiser, nobler in character, and stronger in virtue, until finally, after numberless re-births, he reaches the state which he can become Perfected, Enlightened, All-wise, the ideal Teacher of the human race.' Olcott: The Buddhist Catechism , Henry Steel Olcott - Wikipedia

You wish.

'114 Q. When our Bodhisattva became Buddha, what did he see was the cause of human misery? Tell me in one word. A. Ignorance (Avidya).'

'117 Q. And what is that which is most valuable? A. To know the whole secret of man's existence and destiny, so that we may estimate at no more than their actual value this life and its relations, so that we may live in a way to ensure the greatest happiness and the least suffering for our fellow men and ourselves [women?].'

No linear heaven, but cyclic spiral of reincarnation [seen in the evolution of 'the genome of the Universe'].

'119 Q. Name the four Noble Truths. A. 1. The miseries of evolutionary existence resulting in births and deaths, life after life. 2. The cause productive of misery, which is selfish desire, ever renewed . . . 3. The destruction of that desire . . . . 4. The means of obtaining this destruction of desire.'

So what of the desire to become Buddha [which seems to involve a lot of self-imposed hardship]?

Am I satisfied with what I am doing? Yes, all my desires are being met at an adequate rate as I work toward expressing my dream: the transfinite computer network is the backbone of my buddha.

[page 6]

Benefit outweighs the cost. Value is equivalent to mass which is equivalent to rate of internal processing in actions per second equals energy. Democracy by mass = count = entropy.

Reproduction - copying. As Aristotle would have it, putting a form into some new matter, the principle of individuation. When did individuation begin in the evolution of the Universe? Does individuation create matter or does matter create individuation, or are they a pair of duals that taken together are something new made out of nothing, like potential and kinetic energy? What we see emerging are fixed points in the dynamics. An individual is a fixed point.

We complexify by copying and individualizing the copies to work in parallel as elements of a more complex system.

The important feature of the transfinite computer network is the hierarchical (position dependent) counting of entropy, beginning with simple thermydynamic entropy and increasing asymptotically to the entropy of God / the Universe.

We recognize the complexity of the system by banning bad behaviour (which is relatively finite and self-defeating) rather than trying to specify perfecion (buddahood).

Friday 28 April 2017

Soak the sticky dishes in water and let those eternally moving molecules gradually break down the clotted food and reveal the steel or ceramic surface beneath. Minute details of God.

Tense before dawn: what do I have to do today? Relaxed

[page 7]

now I am up and making progress, ie executing chores.

A nation is not a business but a personality. Do kinetic and potential energy have different personalities? They are algebraic duals, insofar as KE -PE = 0, the stationary point of the Lagrangian of a conservative system. Lagrangian mechanics - Wikipedia

Saturday 29 April 2017

The lost feature of quantum mechanics. It was on the tip of my fingers as I moved to a new paragraph and now it is lost in the labyrinth of my mind. It was, I think, that quantum mechanics enables us to describe the nature of the traffic on the universal network and the frequency of that traffic.

Many world hypothesis is buit on the same tacit assumption that underlies the Catholic idea that an absolutely simple God can contain a transfinite set of formal detail about the whole of the past, present and future without any marks to define information, A mark is a computed conclusion, one of the fixed points yielded by a quantum mechanical model of a physical system like the precise energies of the photons emitted and absorbed by an stom.

Network model gives us a new entropy scale: fermion, boson, classical = observable, with no limit on classical (systematic) complexity.

The network nature of the Universe is reflected in the use of Feynman diagrams in quantum field theory. To get a precise estimate of any physical value, we have to evaluate an ever expanding network of contributory processes, and ultimately we might have to consider the entre universe, although influences (communications) are localized by the finite velocity of light.

[page 8]

On the internet, enthusiastically propagating my as yet obscure vision of the world.

The beauty of invested wealth is that we obtain in income with no actual work by renting our wealth to others who do the work, which may be renting out their rented worth to others who . . . who finally do the actual work that yields the return on the money.

[page 9]

[page 10]

The dual of symmetry with respect to complexity is the scale of entropy or complexity inherent in the layered structure of the network. These features are complementary in the quantum mechanical sense [like distance and momentum or energy and time]. If we concentrate on the symmetry we have no detail and complete simplicity. If we concentrate on the detail, we completely lose sight of the symmetry. The hierarchy of addressing gives logical processes [control] over transfinite subsets of the network by addressing them as a countable unit [as my conscious mind controls my unconscious transfinite body All control requires countability].

The attempt to apply it gradually brings out more features of the transfinite network and the match between the world and the model is enriched by this process of exploration and discovery, a form of abstract geography. Dope from my own garden facilitated the above insights.

Note from 12 January 2016: Next step: spin / statistics theorem. This related to addition of amplitudes with same or 180 degree phase. How do we understand this in computational terms. Spin ½ reverses, because it takes 2 steps to progress 360 degrees.

Feynman on 2 state systems: Most of the quantum mechanical understanding to be found in this book has been derived, or misderived, from Feynman.

Another forgotten thought!

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Further reading

Books

Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)

Fogelsong, David S., The American Mission and the "Evil Empire": The Crusade for a "Free Russia" since 1881, Cambridge University Press 2007 Jacket: 'DF tells the fascinating story of American efforts to liberate and remake Russia since the 1880s. He analyzes the involvement of journalists, political activists, diplomats, engineers, and others in this grand crusade, with special sttention to the influence of religious beliefson Americans' sense of duty to emancipate, convert or reform Russia. . . . ' 
Amazon
  back
John, and Alexander Jones (editor), in The Jerusalem Bible, Darton Longman and Todd 1966 Introduction to Saint John: '[This] gospel has a complex literary form: it is akin to the earliest Christian preaching, and yet at the same time it gives the final results of a quest ... for a deeper and more rewarding apprehension of the mystery of Jesus. Each of the evangelists has his own approach to Christ's person and mission. For St John, he is the Word made flesh, come to give life to men, 1:14,and this, the mystery of the Incarnation, dominates the whole of John's thought.' p 140.  
Amazon
  back
Olcott, Henry Steel, The Buddhist Catechism, Theosophical Publishing House 1970 Preface to 36th edition: '. . . I only consented to write THE BUDDHIST CATECHISM after I had found that no bhikkhu would undertake it. Whatever its demerits, I can at least say that the work contains the essence of some 15,000 pages of Buddhist teachings that I have real in connexion with my work.' 
Amazon
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Owen, Wilfred, The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, New Directions 1965 Jacket: 'Wilfred Owen's death in World War I was an irreparable loss to English poetry, His war poems, most of which were composed in a thirteen-month period on the front line, have kept their originality and force through the past seventy years. The best of them are considered the finest poems about war in the English language. This definitive edition of Owen's poetry, based on a close study of the ms. sources in the British Museum and elsewhere, contains a selection of the poet's juvenilia and several other unpublished poems, as well as those which have appeared in the editions edited by Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Bunden.' 
Amazon
  back
Sabatini, Raphael, Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition: A History, Kessinger Publishing 2003 Editorial Reviews Book Description "With 16 halftone illustrations, including a map. Partial contents: Early persecutions; Inquisition canonically established; Order of St. Dominic; Isabella the Catholic; Jews in Spain; New-Christians; Prior of Holy Cross; Holy Office in Seville; Supreme Council; Jurisprudence of the Holy Office; Pedra Arbues de Epila; Torquemada's further "instructions"; Inquisition in Toledo; Torquemada and the Jews.' 
Amazon
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Links
Alex Wodak, Matt Noffs and Toni Makkai, Allowing pill testing at the Spilt Milk festival would be a big win for public health, back
Amy B Wang, 'LGBTQ people were born perfect': a new bill would ban conversion therapy nationwide, ' “The bill is very simple,” Lieu told The Washington Post. “It says it is fraud if you treat someone for a condition that doesn’t exist and there’s no medical condition known as being gay. LGBTQ people were born perfect; there is nothing to treat them for. And by calling this what it should be, which is fraud, it would effectively shut down most of the organizations.” ' back
Aquinas 13, Summa: I 2 3: Does God exist?, I answer that the existence of God can be proved in five ways. The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. . . . The second way is from the nature of the efficient cause. . . . The third way is taken from possibility and necessity . . . The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. . . . The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. back
Aquinas 13 (Latin), Summa: I 2 3: Whether God exists?, 'Respondeo dicendum quod Deum esse quinque viis probari potest. Prima autem et manifestior via est, quae sumitur ex parte motus. Certum est enim, et sensu constat, aliqua moveri in hoc mundo. Omne autem quod movetur, ab alio movetur. Nihil enim movetur, nisi secundum quod est in potentia ad illud ad quod movetur, movet autem aliquid secundum quod est actu. Movere enim nihil aliud est quam educere aliquid de potentia in actum, de potentia autem non potest aliquid reduci in actum, nisi per aliquod ens in actu, sicut calidum in actu, ut ignis, facit lignum, quod est calidum in potentia, esse actu calidum, et per hoc movet et alterat ipsum. Non autem est possibile ut idem sit simul in actu et potentia secundum idem, sed solum secundum diversa, quod enim est calidum in actu, non potest simul esse calidum in potentia, sed est simul frigidum in potentia. Impossibile est ergo quod, secundum idem et eodem modo, aliquid sit movens et motum, vel quod moveat seipsum. Omne ergo quod movetur, oportet ab alio moveri. Si ergo id a quo movetur, moveatur, oportet et ipsum ab alio moveri et illud ab alio. Hic autem non est procedere in infinitum, quia sic non esset aliquod primum movens; et per consequens nec aliquod aliud movens, quia moventia secunda non movent nisi per hoc quod sunt mota a primo movente, sicut baculus non movet nisi per hoc quod est motus a manu. Ergo necesse est devenire ad aliquod primum movens, quod a nullo movetur, et hoc omnes intelligunt Deum.' back
Bryant Harris, Dobbie Gramer ad Emily Tamkin, End of Foreign Aid As We know It, ' “That will end the technical expertise of USAID, and in my view, it will be an unmitigated disaster for the longer term,” said Andrew Natsios, the former USAID Administrator under President George W. Bush. “I predict we will pay the price. We will pay the price for the poorly thought out and ill-considered organization changes that we’re making, and cuts in spending as well.” ' back
Chris Mooney and Juliet Eilperin, EPA website removes climate science site from pubic view after two decades, 'The change was approved by Pruitt, according to an individual familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, to avoid a conflict between the site’s content and the policies the administration is now pursuing. The staffer described the process of reviewing the site as “a work in progress, but we can’t have information which contradicts the actions we have taken in the last two months,” adding that Pruitt’s aides had “found a number of instances of that so far” while surveying the site.' back
Derek Hawkins, Sanctuary cities ruling: When a judge quotes Sean Spicer, its not a sood sign for the White House, 'Just like the judges who ruled on Trump’s travel ban, Orrick homed in on the vast discrepancies between what government lawyers defending the sanctuary cities order argued in court and what administration officials said about it in public.' back
Fake news - Wikipedia, Fake news - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Fake news is a type of yellow journalism that consists of deliberate misinformation or hoaxes spread via the traditional print, broadcasting news media, or via Internet-based social media. Fake news is written and published with the intent to mislead in order to gain financially or politically, often with sensationalist, exaggerated, or patently false headlines that grab attention.[1] As such, intentionally misleading and deceptive fake news is different from obviously satirical or parody articles or papers such as The Onion.' back
Farhad Manjoo, How ruthless Mark Zuckerberg keeps Facebook king, 'Five years ago, after more or less cementing Facebook's status as the world's largest social network, he began to buy up and build future networks. He bought Instagram, which now has 600 million users. Then he bought WhatsApp, which has more than 1 billion users. Then he turned Facebook's baked-in chat feature into its own chat app, Messenger, and now that, too, has 1 billion users.' back
Frank Bruni, Food, Sex and Silence, 'But there was nothing in those remembrances about his 30-year relationship — at first romantic, then less so — with Gino Cofacci, who was provided for in Beard’s will. Nothing about Beard’s expulsion from Reed College in the 1920s because of his involvements with other men. This newspaper’s obituary simply called him a “college dropout.” It was published in 1985. The world has changed. And that progress is reflected in a new documentary, “James Beard: America’s First Foodie,” that PBS will air next month as part of its American Masters series.' back
Henry Steel Olcott - Wikipedia, Henry Steel Olcott - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Colonel Henry Steel Olcott ( (2 August 1832 – 17 February 1907) was an American military officer, journalist, lawyer and the co-founder and first President of the Theosophical Society. Olcott was the first well-known American of European ancestry to make a formal conversion to Buddhism. His subsequent actions as president of the Theosophical Society helped create a renaissance in the study of Buddhism. Olcott is considered a Buddhist modernist for his efforts in interpreting Buddhism through a Westernized lens.' back
Joel Achenbach, Here are some of the best signs from March for Science in Washingon and around the world, 'Providing further evidence that the Earth spins on its axis, the March for Science has already happened in some places, even as the rally-goers are just now showing up in Washington. In Sydney, thousands of people marched, carrying signs with messages such as “Science, not silence” and “Basic science, NOT B.S.!!," according to the Sydney Morning Herald.' back
John Burnet, Parmenides of Elea: The Poem, 'The Poem Parmenides was the first philosopher to expound his system in metrical language. His predecessors, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Herakleitos, wrote in prose, and the only Greeks who ever wrote philosophy in verse at all were just these two, Parmenides and Empedokles; for Xenophanes was not a philosopher any more than Epicharmos. Empedokles copied Parmenides; and he, no doubt, was influenced by the Orphics. But the thing was an innovation, and one that did not maintain itself. The fragments of Parmenides are preserved for the most part by Simplicius, who fortunately inserted them in his commentary, because in his time the original work was already rare. I follow the arrangement of Diels.' back
Jon Sharman, Domald Trump to strip all funding from State Department team promoting women's rights around the world, 'Donald Trump plans to strip all funding from a State Department bureau that promotes the rights of women around the world, it has emerged. Oxfam America led criticism of the move, saying said cutting funds for the Office of Global Women’s Issues would have “dire consequences for millions of people, as well as our global standing”.' back
Joseph Camilleri, The US, Russia and China: a twisted tale of personal ego, profound mistrust and foolish nationalism, 'A more profitable course for these three centres of power is to recognise each other’s legitimate interests, expand the opportunities for economic and diplomatic co-operation, and develop a co-ordinated approach in the management of actual and potential flashpoints. To bear fruit, such efforts need to have solid foundations – in particular decisive steps to eliminate nuclear weapons, enhance the effectiveness of international law, and strengthen the UN’s capacity for conflict management and peace-building.' back
Kayfabe - Wikipedia, Kayfabe - Wikipedia, the fee encyclopedia, 'In professional wrestling, kayfabe /ˈkeɪfeɪb/ is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as "real" or "true," specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not of a staged or pre-determined nature of any kind. Kayfabe has also evolved to become a code word of sorts for maintaining this "reality" within the direct or indirect presence of the general public.' back
Lagrangian mechanics - Wikipedia, Lagrangian mechanics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Lagrangian mechanics is important not just for its broad applications, but also for its role in advancing deep understanding of physics. Although Lagrange only sought to describe classical mechanics in his treatise Mécanique analytique,[6][7]William Rowan Hamilton later developed Hamilton's principle that can be used to derive the Lagrange equation and was later recognized to be applicable to much of fundamental theoretical physics as well, particularly quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. It can also be applied to other systems by analogy, for instance to coupled electric circuits with inductances and capacitances.' back
Lenny Bernstein, Surgeon general is removed by Trump administratin, replaced by deputy for now., 'A physician, Murthy, 39, is a longtime believer that gun violence is a public-health issue, a view that stalled his nomination in the Senate for more than a year and probably did not align him well with the current administration. He took office in December 2014, and in an interview with The Washington Post four months later, he did not back off those views. “The statements I've made in the past about gun violence being a public health issue, I stand by those comments because they're a fact,” he said then. “They're a fact that nearly every medical professional who's ever cared for a patient can attest to.” ' back
Michael West, Dark Money: Chevron: a game changer for multinational tax avoiders, 'The Australian Tax Office had a superb win against Chevron in the Federal Court last week, but there is something everyone is missing, something that will turn the art of tax avoidance on its head; a game-changer for multinationals. Put simply, Chevron borrowed US$2.5 billion in the US at less than 2% and on-lent it to Chevron Australia at 9%. The full bench of the Federal Court found the interest rate was too high.' back
Nicholas Kristof, Trump Thinks This Is Pro-ife, 'PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — When President Trump and his (male) aides sit at a conference table deciding to cut off money to women’s health programs abroad, they call it a “pro-life” move. Yet here in Haiti, I’ll tell you the result: Impoverished women suffer ghastly injuries and excruciating deaths. Washington’s new women’s health policies should be called “pro-death.” ' back
Nichols Fandos, Climate March Dras Thousands of Protestors Alarmed b y Trumps Environmental Agenda, 'WASHINGTON — Tens of thousands of demonstrators, alarmed at what they see as a dangerous assault on the environment by the Trump administration, poured into the streets here on Saturday to sound warnings both planetary and political about the Earth’s warming climate.' back
Nick Rogers, How Wrestling Exlains Alex Jones and Donald Trump, 'Although the etymology of the word is a matter of debate, for at least 50 years “kayfabe” has referred to the unspoken contract between wrestlers and spectators: We’ll present you something clearly fake under the insistence that it’s real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined.' back
Paul Krugman, Zombies of Voodoo Economics, 'In other words, supply-side economics is a classic example of a zombie doctrine: a view that should have been killed by the evidence long ago, but just keeps shambling along, eating politicians’ brains. Why, then, does it persist? Because it offers a rationale for lower taxes on the wealthy — and as Upton Sinclair noted long ago, it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.' back
The gospel - Wikipedia, The gospel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In Christianity, the Gospel (Greek: εὐαγγέλιον euangélion; Old English: gospel), or the Good News, is the news of the coming of the Kingdom of God (Mark 1:14-15), and of Jesus's death on the cross and resurrection to restore people's relationship with God. It may also include the descent of the Holy Spirit upon believers and the second coming of Jesus.' back
Thomas Baker, Why We Need am Entrepreneurial Church, 'People tell themselves a story that it can turn around, it’s going to turn around, we’re doing all the right things, and then that story lasts until it’s literally no longer sustainable or believable. Take an example like Sears, where something has been sliding for years and then one morning we wake up and boom, we’re in a deep crisis because we’ve been telling each other or telling the public a story that is sort of plausible but doesn’t quite incorporate all the difficult but undeniable facts. In the church, you can sustain this kind of pattern even longer. In the corporate world you get a report card every quarter and have to talk about it, whereas the church can drip, drip through bad trends for decades and decades.' back
Tim Arango, 'Sherlock Holmes of Armenian Genocide; Uncovers Lost Evidence, ' . . . Taner Akcam, a Turkish historian at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., who has studied the genocide for decades by piecing together documents from around the world to establish state complicity in the killings, says he has unearthed an original telegram from the trials, in an archive held by the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem.' back

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