The ways of “secular humanism” are like a membrane surrounding religious aggregates, lol, but also from which the same more (apparently) satisfying beliefs about man and the universe may be hung. The helpfulness of the moderate outlook is to blunt the power of a narcissistic drive attached to any convenient existing “ism”, including humanism, and then muddle through in an uncomfortable (to all) but reliable (for all) equilibrium.
It’s okay in the boxing ring and for entertainment, but in public office, much less high and highest offices, it’s best to know that “God is greater” or “Master of the Universe” and humanity is just guessing, passionately, but guessing, in any case.
The Facebook chat veered toward refusing endorsement of any “fundamentalist” for office.
That’s fine.
I wouldn’t want a First Family handling rattlers to prove to itself on a recurring basis its own favor in the sight of God in exchange for its fervent beliefs.
However, how available is what is opposite the religious zealot, i.e., the irreligious “secular humanist”?
The quest for that right-for-president guy or gal may be impractical, especially if “secular humanism” is either positioned or seen as debunking all religious faith and thereby becoming a faith in itself. Intuition suggests that the better framework in which to place a “godless humanism” is as a method — not a faith — designed to manage the separateness of differing beliefs and drives: we want to be free, and to be free means to be as we believe God wanted us to be, or to be as we believe we were fashioned by fate or nature, and doing that means “being ourselves” while also keeping out of one another’s way as a matter devolving to custom and law.
That faith — any — which would fail to recognize political, religious, and social boundaries forged in both the forming processes of communal and personal identity, would seem here to doom itself to perpetual conflict and defeat.
IT is a given, almost akin to a “holy grail” within Israel – particularly, in the political sphere – that Israel’s “best friend” is America. Yes and no. Regardless, a basic backgrounder is in order to understand what’s what.
YES, due to inherent common values and worldviews, the two nations are bound by mutual underpinnings. While a majority of Americans and Congressional Republicans overwhelmingly support Israel (and Israel’s majority Jewish public returns the sentiment towards America), the increasingly hostile Demster machine is on the warpath. Indeed, yesteryear’s Democratic operatives no longer even maintain the pretense of being pro-Israel, nor are they pro-American. But let’s not digress.
ON the other hand, the Executive Branch, for the most part, has been a fair-weather friend, dependent upon who is POTUS. However, no one, least of all Israel’s politicians, should have been shocked by HUSSEIN Obama’s overt hostility. That’s a vast understatement. In reality…
In some parts of the world, a loyal lie trumps an inconvenient truth; however, the United States of America, among other nations, is not one of those geopolitical spaces. It will pick up the tools of good old British Empiricism — reverse engineering everything; recapitulating the building of the clock — and apply them, and I believe it will take that tool kit into the social realm and the realm of language and language behavior.
There may be more to this story than has surfaced, but where there is additional data to be found, it probably will be found — and where permitted by long-standing custom and law, it will be reported.
Ahmed’s father Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, who is originally from Sudan, said his son had been mistreated because of his name “and because of 11 September”.
The Mysterious Clock Case
On the surface, it doesn’t look too bad: an intellectually precocious kid builds a kit clock or timer, puts the works in a box, and brings it to school to show off to a science teacher, who, I’ve heard, suggests it would have been better left at home. It beeps in an English class, and that teacher has a look.
Alarums!
Police.
Bomb squad.
Arrest.
Back home: media attention. Big time.
Unasked, perhaps, unanswered, so far as one might glean from the news: how was the electronics education acquired? How was the parts list developed? Why a clock? How was the box chosen? Why?
“I made a clock. I wanted to show her something small at first, but I took a wrong point of [entry?],” says Ahmed Mohamed (0:17 to 0:20).
So there were or are bigger things to come?
And from whence comes that language, ” . . . a wrong point of . . . .”?
Police thinking as expressed through The Daily Dot:
“He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation,” police spokesperson James McLellan said.
McLellan added: “It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car. The concern was, what was this thing built for? Do we take him into custody?”
“We’re not afraid of Islam. We’re afraid of bombs.”
Posted to YouTube September 19, 2015.
“He did not invent the clock or build it, and I’m going to show you why” (333,882 views as of 9/20/2015/1448 EST)
Posted to YouTube September 18, 2015
“And the people at the school thought it might be a bomb, perhaps because it looks exactly like a fuckin’ bomb.” (203,210 view as of 9/20/2015/1515 EST)
Posted to YouTube September 18, 2015
Haunting: ” . . . his sister [listening] over his shoulder, giving him the answers . . . .” (1:06 – 1:15).
Replication (Posted to YouTube September 18, 2015)
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian military helicopters dropped barrels packed with explosives in the government’s latest air raids on rebel-held areas of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on Saturday, killing at least 23 people, including a family trapped in a burning car, activists said.
In neighboring Lebanon, a car bomb blew up near a gas station in a Shiite town, killing at least three people, in the latest attack linked to the war in Syria.
Ahmad al-Hamoud, Vice Commander of Ahfad Hamza Battalion for Special Missions, al-Sultan al-Fatih Brigade, told VDC that many kinds of the barrel bombs used by the regime forces had been recognizable. These included:
1- Regular Russian-made Barrels. These are believed to have been used by the Russian Army in the middle of the previous century. They were brought from Russia ‘ready to use’. The regime has owned them for decades. Their weight ranges between 300 to 500 kg and they’re filled with TNT and metallic scraps. There’re extremely destructive, yet their range is more limited than that of the other kinds.
2- Medium Destruction Barrels. These are believed to be made by the regime in ‘Defense Factories’ in al-Safira, in the Valley of al-Waha. Most of the helicopters taking off from this valley dropped these barrels on the districts of Aleppo. The weight of these barrels ranges from 400 to 500 kg.
3- Highly Destructive Barrels. These are the most dangerous and destructive of all. Weighing more than 600 kg, they take many shapes like containers, cisterns and, in some cases, green rubbish containers.
Barrel bombs are improvised weapons: oil drums or similar canisters filled with explosives and metal fragments. They are dropped without guidance from helicopters hovering just above antiaircraft range, typically hitting the ground with huge explosions and the widespread diffusion of deadly shrapnel. They pulverize neighborhoods, destroy entire buildings and leave broad strips of death and destruction.
Footage has emerged showing the Syrian regime using explosive “barrel bombs” on civilian neighbourhoods, killing hundreds, while its representatives attended peace talks at Geneva.
Filmed by activists in the southern Damascus suburb of Daraya, the ten minute video is a compilation of footage showing barrels, loaded with TNT, being dropped on the neighbourhood during the week the Geneva II conference was convened.
Nongovernmental organizations researching and working in Syria, including Human Rights Watch and the Syrian Civil Defense, testified during the meeting. Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special envoy on Syria, said in a video message that the Syrian government is responsible for the use of barrel bombs and that at the rate the weapons are being used, there won’t be any civilians left in Syria.
Government forces and pro-government militia continue to conduct widespread attacks on civilians, systematically committing murder, torture, rape and enforced disappearance as crimes against humanity. Government forces have committed gross violations of human rights and the war crimes of murder, hostage-taking, torture, rape and sexual violence, recruiting and using children in hostilities and targeting civilians in sniper attacks. Government forces disregarded the special protection accorded to hospitals, medical and humanitarian personnel and cultural property. Aleppo was subjected to a campaign of barrel bombing that targeted entire areas and spread terror among civilians. Government forces used incendiary weapons, causing superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering, in violation of international humanitarian law. Indiscriminate and disproportionate aerial bombardment and shelling caused large-scale arbitrary displacement. Government forces and pro-government militia perpetrated massacres.
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. “Report of the independent international commission of inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic.” Human Rights Council, 25th Session, Agenda Item 4, February 12, 2014.
While the Assad opposition masks off its own excesses, and, as always in the Islamic Small Wars, it’s hard “seeing” who is fighting exactly for what and how they’re doing it, warrior band by band, and sometimes person by person, there are no doubts as regards the smashing of large business, education, religious, and residential areas packed with noncombatant Syrians.
As Syrian Muslim and Jewish relationships develop — a perhaps “unheard of” now heard of — and Syrian anti-Semitism and anti-westernism comes more into focus as one impediment among several to western intercession, the scales may tip in the direction of the cosmopolitan and modern and therefore away from the medieval worldview that forms the basis for the despotism displayed by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei on the Shiite axis and al-Nusra and ISIS and others on the Sunni complement that serves the former as foils for the cooked up theatrical “Assad vs The Terrorists”.
In Syria, the center could not hold and the rough beast rose to savage the land.
Moscow’s action were in line with the strategy it had used to defeat the separatist movement in Chechnya, infiltrating the insurgency, driving it into extremism, and facilitating the arrival of al-Qaeda jihadists who displaced the Chechen nationalists. In Syria, Russia’s actions accord with the strategy adopted by the regime and its Iranian masters to present Assad as the last line of defence against a terrorist takeover of Syria and a genocide against the minorities. New evidence has emerged to underline these points.
Washington (CNN) Democrats on Tuesday gave President Barack Obama the votes he needs to prevent the Senate from passing a measure disapproving of the Iran nuclear deal.
MOSCOW — Signs of an ongoing Russian military buildup in Syria have drawn U.S. concerns and raised questions of whether Moscow plans to enter the conflict. President Vladimir Putin has been coy on the subject, saying Russia is weighing various options, a statement that has fueled suspicions about the Kremlin’s intentions.
Observers in Moscow say the Russian manoeuvring could be part of a plan to send troops to Syria to fight the Islamic State group in the hope of fixing fractured ties with the West.
Iran’s president has said his country is ready to hold talks with the United States and Saudi Arabia on ways to resolve the Syrian civil war.
Shia powerhouse Iran is a leading patron of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and accuses Sunni rival Saudi Arabia and the US of siding with anti-Assad rebels and fighters.
US and regional reports that Moscow’s diplomatic and logistical support for Assad is shifting into major military backing has raised the prospect of Israel and Russia accidentally coming to blows.
Could the Obama Administration have “offered” Syria — no resistance — as part of negotiations in exchange for the nuclear deal?
BackChannels cannot peek behind those curtains, but the shift from 2011 in which ordinary Syrians challenged the Assad regime’s absolute control of the state to this day in which the major media cannot help but promote the the theatrical “Assad vs The Terrorists” (as if every loose fighting brigade was born of al-Qaeda) appears to have invited increased Russian military support and presence benefiting the despots — Putin, Assad, Khamenei — all around.
Moscow is not planning to transform its logistics center in Syria’s Tartus into a full-format military base, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister and special presidential representative for the Middle East and African countries Mikhail Bogdanov told Interfax.
According to the New York Times, “Russia has sent a military advance team to Syria and has transported prefabricated housing units for hundreds of people to an airfield near Latakia, according to American intelligence analysts.” The Times adds that “Russia has also delivered a portable air traffic station to the airfield and has filed military overflight requests through September.” The reports follow closely on the heels of similar allegations in recent weeks, including reports of new arms, and even combat troops.
U.S. military officials said Tuesday that Russia has moved new personnel, planes and equipment into Syria in recent days.
Assad said: “The Russian presence in different parts of the world, including the Eastern Mediterranean and the Syrian port of Tartus, is very necessary, in order to create a sort of balance, which the world has lost after the dissolution of the Soviet Union more than 20 years ago.”
A report published on 27 June by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty says: “Russia’s greatest strategic and geopolitical interest in Syria is the use of a deep-water port at Tartus”.
That report goes on to say that Tartus can dock nuclear submarines, it is the receiving point for Russian weapons shipments to Syria and it is linked to a well-developed network of roads and railways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato It’s okay to indulge in pride but perhaps a little less exclusively, especially in the area of knowledge and culture, and that with the idea that every culture, however great or small, cosmopolitan or isolated, represents an adjustment among a gathered people to the exigencies of place at some point in time.
I think the world is done with “uncontacted people” — isolated primitive societies — at this point. All, probably, have been observed and brought under the protection of the more proficient states whose sovereignty claims responsibility for their land base. At the moment, Homo Sapiens sapiens enjoys about 7,000 living languages and about a fair number of major religions and their dozens of subcultures, schools, and rival factions, and every one of those languages and religions developed in time, and for some the origins have been lost in the mists of time and become the subjects of academic curiosity and exploration.
When Cleopatra was queen, Egypt had already a history ancient even to her.
The poem “Ozymandias” has had something to say about pride in accomplishments. In the western ethos and often a part of wisdom elsewhere, humility becomes a virtue. Not only God is greater but our own appearance and development species-wide may be a thing greater than we can comprehend, however we approach such knowledge about our own existence.
The stimulus: a rightly proud statement about the world’s first degree-granting university, but presented as simply the world’s first university, i.e., a center and repository for knowledge.
Revealed by the post-statement lookup:
The University of al-Qarawiyyin or al-Karaouine (Arabic: جامعة القرويين) is a university located in Fes, Morocco. It is the oldest existing, continually operating and the first degree awarding educational institution in the world according to UNESCO and Guinness World Records[5] and is sometimes referred to as the oldest university.
BackChannels 