February 14th, 2009 — lying, evil, sin, Bible, media, graphic arts, political correctness
Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.
Matthew 15:11 KJV
Dark art
As those who follow me on deviantART may have noticed, I seldom upload dark art, but there are times when I feel the need to communicate something about the dark side of life.
This is one of those times.
Perhaps it is because of the commercialization of Valentine’s Day and the desperation that some people feel as a result of past and present romantic deception. Perhaps it is merely because of my ongoing frustration at the nonsense that seems to pervade so much of the media.
Or perhaps it is because I saw the movie “Sophie’s Choice” last night before going to sleep.
The machinery of evil
There is a reason why lying is deemed to be a sin, a violation of one of the Ten Commandments. Lying is the lubricant that keeps the machinery of evil in motion, and the lubricant that allows it to start. How far would evildoers get without the opportunity to lie to themselves and to others?
A relationship in which one or both parties is a liar, is no relationship at all. If someone lies to you, how much do you really know about that person, other than the fact that they have lied to you?
But there’s more.
As Homer Simpson said, “It takes two people to lie. One to lie, and one to believe.”
After the fashion of Yogi Berra or Casey Stengel, Homer Simpson conveys a truth, seen from an unusual angle. If the rest of us would be less gullible, if we would stop being so ready to believe gossip, slander, propaganda, and politically correct cant, then the liars who bedevil this world would get far less traction.
One can only hope.
Tech notes:
- To see a full-size rendition of the above image, please click on the image once to get to the page on deviantART, and then click on the thumbnail again.
- Thanks to cavia for suggestions made on my previous attempt on this theme, Pierced Lips.
- Image was rendered in Apophysis 2.08 3D Hack using GlynnSim plugin by ___Share This
January 9th, 2009 — economic collapse, corruption, graphic arts, FAIL, India, crime, IT profession, U.S. law, fraud, tech industry, Sarbanes-Oxley, humor
Click thumbnail to view original, then click again to view full size. The text is worth a closer look.
What a tragic irony!
In case you haven’t heard, Satyam was the fourth-largest IT outsourcing company in India, with 55,000 employees (or so they claimed). The CEO, Ramalinga Raju, recently resigned after admitting massive financial fraud. As of this writing, the company is almost out of cash.
Here we go again…
Satyam has done business with companies and governments in over 60 countries, including the U.S. This scandal appears to be even larger in scope than the Enron/Arthur Andersen scandal of late 2001. Price Waterhouse, the Indian subsidiary of PricewaterhouseCoopers, is facing close scrutiny over having signed off on Satyam’s audits.
Obviously, the much-touted Sarbanes-Oxley law enacted after the Enron/Arthur Andersen debacle did nothing to prevent the recent collapse of the U.S. real estate, stock market, and financial sector. The take-home lesson is that once any corporation becomes multinational in scope, and politically well-connected, no laws, no regulations, no bureaucratic restructuring can possibly keep it honest if its management chooses to do otherwise.
Another reason why outsourcing is wrong
Outsourcing and offshoring are always and everywhere the enemies of accountability. The further away one’s trading partners are located, the harder it is to comprehend what they are up to, and that will never change.
Why corporate cheating is contagious
Whenever one major company in an industry has been “cooking the books” to promote or exaggerate its own success, what effect do you suppose that has? Think about it! Every other executive, every other company in that industry will be pressured to match or exceed the cheater’s inflated results, by fair means or foul, or face the wrath of board members and stockholders.
Some news links and other sources:
Perhaps some of this would be funny if it were not so sad.
Note: The screen capture was taken by 1389AD from www.satyam.com, shortly after the announcement. The pixelated area was blurred in the original.
December 12th, 2008 — graphic arts, Christmas, humor
Untangle this!
Click on the above image to view the original.
When the image gallery page appears, click again on the thumbnail to see the full-size image.
A large collection of art by 1389, including photography, digital art, and some new fractal images, is available at my online gallery.
Look for free desktop wallpaper, and free tools and textures for Photoshop and GIMP!
December 9th, 2008 — 2008 US Elections, economic collapse, graphic arts, FAIL, Photoshop, MSM corruption, humor, politics, Europe, photos
…the sun is about to set.
As you already know, I had little to say about the 2008 US presidential election because, then as now, I regarded both of the candidates, and all their pomps and all their works, as beneath comment.
Even before the election, it was obvious to me that the winning candidate would someday deeply regret having run for that office. Let me go on record that I stand by that prediction.
It has often been claimed that no one can win a thermonuclear war. Be that as it may, there is no question that it is easy enough to lose one! In similar fashion, becoming president of the US at this time is just as clearly a no-win scenario for the perpetrator and all his retinue.
Despite all the empty promises from both sides, there is simply nothing that any US president could do at this point to effect a recovery. A recovery would have to happen on its own, and every day that goes by, it seems that we have less and less to build on, in terms of civil and industrial infrastructure, a functioning civil society, and an informed citizenry.
The mass media and what we call our educational system seem to be doing everything they can to keep the citizenry from figuring out what their supposed betters are about. Oh, and by the way, everything I have just said about the plight of the US goes double for the EU.
The scope of the problem
See for yourself what already happened to a part of the US that lost its productive capacity:
With trees growing up through abandoned buildings, large parts of Detroit have already come to resemble scenes from the grim speculative documentary Life After People.
By now, the US economic decline has spread far beyond Detroit and the Rust Belt.
Think about it: When was the last time you saw the label “Made in USA” on any product, good or bad?
And no, it is not possible to sustain a “service economy” without a viable manufacturing infrastructure. Not that there is a service economy to sustain - the real estate bubble has already burst, the remains of our financial sector are being artificially propped up with money that we do not have and cannot earn, and much of our service sector employment has already been outsourced! It should surprise no one that the unemployment picture is considerably worse than the official figures would lead us to believe (see The really, really bad news about the unemployment rate). Newspapers throughout the US report that state and local tax revenues are shrinking due to declining income and property values.
What is left?
I recently heard yet another self-styled pundit of the US employment scene recommending three areas where there still seem to be some jobs for Americans. The only available jobs are in health care, education, and government work - because they cannot be outsourced.
Wow.
Will someone please explain to me who is going to pay for this health care, education, and government work? Does anyone care to predict what will happen after we go into debt to educate the next generation, knowing that there will be no jobs for them after they finish school?
Where do we go from here?
Good question.
And yes, I do have an answer! My point in posting this is that we need to understand exactly what our problems are, and the true extent of our difficulties, before we can even begin to address them.
What’s the next step? We need to stop wasting tax dollars on bailing out Wall Street. Instead, we need to bring our industrial base back to the US. We need to repeal the tax laws and ever-proliferating regulations that have been strangling US businesses or driving them overseas. We need to make it much simpler and more cost-effective for businesses, especially smaller businesses, to provide jobs for US citizens. That’s the only government “stimulus package” that will work.
No, it is not all under our control. But we can keep the faith and do our best to help each other. As Bishop Antoun of the Antiochian Orthodox Church recently told us, “The Lord will provide.”
Click on any of the above thumbnail images to view the original.
When the image gallery page appears, click again on the thumbnail to see the full-size image.
A large collection of art by 1389, including photography, digital art, and some new fractal images, is available at my online gallery.
Look for free desktop wallpaper, and free tools and textures for Photoshop and GIMP!
October 16th, 2008 — blogging
Blogrolling.com still experiencing outages
Problems being worked on as of 9:30pm EST 10/16/08
1389 Blog reported earlier that the popular Blogrolling.com link list server site was hacked by Islamists. Since that time, the site’s home page has gone offline repeatedly, and the blogrolls hosted on the site are being served only intermittently.
Because Blogrolling obviously can’t use its own site to provide status updates, the Blogrolling staff has set up a blogrolling user ID on Twitter. As long as the main Blogrolling.com site is down, it will redirect automatically to the Twitter page, which will display status updates. You can follow it from your own Twitter user ID if you wish.
H/T to Texas Fred for this information.
October 16th, 2008 — 2008 US Elections, Doctor Bulldog, blog censorship, censorship, blogging
Doctor Bulldog reports pro-Obama censorship on BlogTalkRadio, and explains what you can do about it:
Obama’s Truth Squads Censor Free Speech on BlogTalkRadio
October 8th, 2008 — e-jihadis, 1389 Blog - Antijihadist Tech, 1389, tech tips, blogging, security, Blogrolling.com
An unpleasant surprise
Earlier today, I accessed Blogrolling to add some entries to “1389’s Links.” This list appears in the 1389 Blog sidebar, and it offers a whole variety of links to sites that I find interesting, informative, or entertaining, and that readers might like to see also.
This is what came up:
Needless to say, I made no effort to contact ejder2121@windowslive.com.
How you can use it
Many bloggers and blog readers have seen lists of links to other blogs that are hosted and maintained through a service called Blogrolling. This service offers a home page that lets you open an account, set up and populate your own blogrolls and link lists, and generate Javascript code to display the link lists on your blog or website. You can distribute this Javascript code so that others can display shared blogrolls on their sites. For example, 1389 Blog maintains a shared blogroll for the Stop Blog Censorship campaign, which you can see in the sidebar.
Advantages and disadvantages
Blogrolling has its advantages and disadvantages, but overall, I’m a big fan of it, because of its convenience, stability, and ease of use. It has features for sorting blogrolls by most recent blog update, for searching blogrolls, for finding out who has blogrolled you, and for backing up blogroll links. On the other hand, because Blogrolling uses Javascript to build the link lists for display on your page, Google will not index the the links, and will not use the links to raise the page rank of the blogs on the list. And if you put too many blogrolls on the same page, it will introduce delays in loading the page, especially for readers without broadband service. That is why most of our blogrolls have been moved to the Links resource page.
Why would anybody hack Blogrolling?
That’s a good question.
Blogrolling is simply a hosting service for link lists, open to both commercial and noncommercial sites. To the best of my knowledge, Blogrolling takes no political, religious, or ideological stance.
Yes, it’s true that some conservative, antijihadist, pro-Christian, and pro-Jewish blogs and blog groups use Blogrolling - to name a few: Center for Vigilant Freedom, Bear Flag League, The Hillbilly Ecosystem, Screw the UN, International Zionist Web, The Tennessee ConserVOLiance, Christian Blogosphere, Right Truth, and the Crescent of Betrayal Blogburst.
So is that why the Blogrolling site was hacked? Most unlikely! Not only are there plenty of sites on Blogrolling that hold views that oppose ours, but also, it is clear that the vast majority of sites that use Blogrolling are commercial blogs that express no particular point of view either for or against the Islamist agenda.
So what would be the point of hacking Blogrolling?
Maybe there was no real point, or at least no point that would make any sense. Maybe the miscreant(s) were motivated simply by a desire to prove that they have the ability to make nuisances of themselves by interfering with a site that many people use. To be sure, that’s not much of an accomplishment. It takes a lot less talent and ability to break in and mess up a web page than it takes to create and run a good site. Blogrolling will most likely notify the authorities and then get their site up and running again with enhanced security. And what will people think who happen to see the hacked site? They’ll most likely be inclined to feel more negatively toward jihadism, Islam, and Muslims in general than they already do.
October 7th, 2008 — Geert Wilders, Orthodox Christianity, 1389, hate, Christianity
We all have them…
Being on the receiving end of anger and hate seems to be an inescapable part of the human condition. At any moment, somebody out there may harbor ill will toward us. Sometimes it is for reasons we can understand, sometimes not.
I remember a classmate in college telling me that he had sat down at a table to study, and a girl, with whom he was not acquainted, had scowled at him and moved away. His complaint was that he wanted everybody to like him, and he was bothered by the fact that a complete stranger had turned up her nose at him. I told him, “Well, that’s too bad, but it’s impossible to get everyone in the whole world to like you. That’s just the way life is!”
Sometimes the hostility is expected. We got a death threat or two from the articles about Geert Wilders’ Fitna movie, but we figure that just goes with the territory. Anybody who expresses an opinion or takes a stand is liable to stir up some anger and hatred. On the other hand, those who never express an opinion may be accused of spinelessness, sloth, or stupidity. So it’s impossible to make a favorable impression on everybody.
Enemies versus the human spirit
We cannot afford to let our enemies define who we are.
Whether we choose our enemies or they choose us, we can still be in a boatload of spiritual trouble, often without realizing it. I was unable to determine where the following quotation comes from; it may perhaps be from Lao Tzu. Be that as it may, its truth is all too often borne out by the record of human history:
Choose your enemies carefully, because you will become more and more like them.
Spiritual survival
This may surprise many readers, but the traditions of the Orthodox Christian Church include prayer “for those who hate us.” The following is from page 23 of A Manual of Eastern Orthodox Prayers, published by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood, NY 1991.
Prayers for Our Enemies
Troparion
Thou who didst pray for them that crucified thee, O Lord, lover of the souls of men, and who didst command thy servants to pray for their enemies, forgive those who hate and maltreat us, and turn our lives from all harm and evil to brotherly love and good works: for this we humbly bring our prayer, that with one accord and one heart we may glorify thee who alone lovest mankind.
Kontakion
As thy first martyr Stephen prayed to thee for his murderers, O Lord, so we fall before thee and pray: forgive all who hate and maltreat us and let not one of them perish because of us, but all be saved by thy grace, O God the all-bountiful.
