19th of May, 2013
Nanibali

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvfKhSjgJTM


Try to imagine what his fingers must be doing to make her moan so longingly like that.
(There was no other way I was going to get you to listen to that.)

--
The 27th Comrade

19th of May, 2013
Racial Purity

Since a nation is born in an individual, and it takes two to make a baby, it follows necessarily that every nation is a mixture. There is every bit of every me in every you, and there is every bit of everybody in every me.

For this reason, when I speak of a nation, I mean an intuited average of all the people descended from the one after whom the nation is named. (Or, for that matter, the parent language-people-culture from which the uniting word comes, as is the case with the Bantu—a deeply mongrelised people from the start.)
The very idea of racial purity is absurd in the highest degree. Mix, people, mix.

--
The 27th Comrade

19th of May, 2013
Khalouni

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6nh3oQRPgA

Not quite Cush, but apparently Phut can also sing when he dedicates himself to it.

--
The 27th Comrade

19th of May, 2013
The Eternal Zoe

In many places where the NIV translates “eternal life”, as in Romans 6:23, the word in the Greek is aionios zoe. Eternal zoe. (aionios is where we get the “æon” as a name for a long period of time). Now zoe on the other hand, has the meaning of “life”, but with more than just the implication found in English.


The work of many translations is to move the Scripture to English; the work of the Colloquial Translation will not be any different, except in one thing: it will also anglicise Koiné Greek words for which no precise-enough equivalent in English exists. This way, we can have the effect of introducing a word, plus its semantic range, and it would be learnt just as a new and complex English word is learnt.
In doing that, of course, there would still be the attempt to bring the Greek into colloquial English.

This has two important implications, if achieved. Just as sub-dialects of English show up among immigrants and other recluse communities (“Jewish English” and Iyaric, for example), we would have Koiné Greek constructions as a strong linguistic stratum, probably as a substratum. The second thing that would be achieved would be a truly faithful bastardisation of religious language, such that the prostitute and the tax-collector alike can understand, once again, that “repent” doesn’t mean what the Roman Catholics have taught for centuries; that making apology and repenting are two different things (and, in the Bible, almost polar opposites). When, instead of saying “repent” (for that word has been damaged) we say “metanoia”—which means “change of mind” and is closer to “convert” in English—with a colloquial translation, we get this >< close to having the same effect today, that we had with the Gospel in the beginning.

I think the easiest way to introduce these gospelisms into English would be to try to a true translation, and put the Greek word (in Latin script) right next to any difficult translation. Only in extreme cases would the Greek word itself be left in without any attempt to subject it to an English equivalent.
This has already happened in an inchoate way. Mark 1:1 in the NIV says “The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah.” The word euagelion—literally meaning “good message”—is not left either as Greek or as official English. In official English, it would be “the gospel”. But most people think they know the gospel, and yet the message they know is not good. The message they know is the one of the law of sin and death (“the wages of sin is death”), and that is what they hear every Sunday. But that is not “the gospel”, because under the gospel Jesus gets a convicted criminal off the death sentence not once (the adulteress) not twice (Barabbas) not thrice, but … “for all who believe”. Now this is the gospel.
The NIV also goes through a lot of anguish, but finally uses “the Messiah”. The implication, in the original Greek, is that there is only one Christ, and that “Christ” is not a name but a title. So while “Jesus the Christ” would be fitting, it is decidedly not colloquial. So what better solution than to re-establish the Jewish context that mandates the the in the name; but if you re-establish the Jewish context, why do you not use the Jewish word for “the Christ”, which is “the Messiah”? And so they did, and now Mark looks more to us like it did to its readers on the day it was first read.


by The 27th Comrade, Internet Mystic, Scyfy Technologies www.1st.ug


18th of May, 2013
Faith and Science

It is only in our times that it has been generally believed that faith and science are at war. In past ages, the religious people were the custodians of science (“search for truth”). In Medieval Europe, theology was considered the queen of the sciences. Hence Aquinas. In Ancient Greece, the thinkers were killed over their thoughts concerning God. In Medieval-contemporary Africa, the Sankoré Madrassah—a religious school—was the centre of a university that spent more on buying books than it did on anything else (even buildings). In many pre-modern societies, the trustworthy knowledge is expected from a spiritual elder (shaman, priest, interpreter of dreams, whatever). This is a universal-enough phenomenon, like the long, recursive, comma-chopped, filled-with-hyphenated-words, self-referential sentence, that we didn’t fail at realising it in our times. It should be noted that the reason this pattern holds consistently is because it is true. Reliable knowledge only comes from priests; and in our times, all the reliable knowledge we have (the science) is from our priests.

Yet we think that there is a war on between faith and reason. Au contraire, faith is a way to reason, and the other way to reason is unfaith. Faith as a way to reason would be what is today called fideism. But it is otherwise just the normal state of play. So since we could say it is a war between faith and unfaith. Since it is the side of unfaith that has guided our thought—which is why our countries do not have official religions, a thing that would have been unthinkable a few generations ago—we find that we identify the intellectual results (science) with the religion that generated them (unfaith, “skepticism”, “age of reason”, whatever you call it). The two become interchangeable: faith versus unfaith, faith versus science. It has been the curse of our times that unfaith yields so much more than ever before, yet remains as wrong. When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

Better than me, Dr. Cornelius Hunter has done a great job to point out why, for instance, neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory is clashing with religions. Not because of science versus religion, but because of religion versus religion. Science has never had anything to do with it. All humans since before Darwin have been aware that all animals have red blood (the universal marker of brotherhood). The observations—the science—doesn’t shock any culture. What we call dinosaurs in our culture, they called dragons or monsters. And since every culture has an origins story, every culture believes in evolution (“change over time”) as the origin of humanity. But … but the religion contained in neo-Darwinism varies from the religion contained in the origins story, and so they fight.

In the times when we thought we had arrived at a method for divining all truth—Baconian science—we find that we have missed the most-obvious truth, which is then repeated and repeated at our civilisation by prophets of all types from all sorts of sects in this priesthood of knowledge:

The Incompleteness Theorems of Kurt Gödel.
The Halting Problem of Alan Turing.
The 70,000 Fathoms of Water that Søren Kierkegaard shouted about.
The tahafut al falsafa that al-Ghazali made plain.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The Bell Theorem.
The optimisations seen by William Bialek.
Muller’s Ratchet, for those who pretended that randomness could do anything.
The Disenchanted Naturalist’s Guide to Reality of Alex Rosenburg.
The Master and his Emissary, of the really great knowledge-priest Prof. Iain McGilchrist.
¿P = NP?
The anguished rumblings of Edsger Djikstra.
The failure (“so far”) of AI.
Zawinski’s Law of Software Development.
“The hard problem of consciousness.”
The placebo effect. Psi research. LSD. I’ll stop here. Maybe posterity will just be wondering why we couldn’t add two and two two-gether and just realise the obvious wrongness of our cock-sure madness. But doesn’t everything look easy in retrospect?

A theologian of this modern World, who also happened to be a mathematician (the most-mystical sect of the priesthood of knowledge) once said a prophecy and spent his life trying to disprove it. Lord Russell received what we call Russell’s Paradox, and destroyed an earlier priest—Georg Cantor—with it. It prophesied against a purely-logical existence. But Lord Russell never accepted his own prophecy, so he set out to write the carefully-titled Principia Mathematica. He later collapsed when his donkey, like Balaam’s, refused to move. Even the very incompleteness of the promised volumes of this Principia stands as a prophecy in itself, from pens no lesser than those of Russell and Whitehead’s. Well before Gödel had spoken against Lord Russell, Lord Russell himself had spoken against himself. It will not be clear to posterity why the man who recognised the set union operation pair as a returned multiplication application—a man who could recognise so obscure a relationship as that—could not follow that Russell’s Paradox was The Incompleteness Theorems.

And the curse was heavy in those days. Every man who looked to see what this “mind of God” looked like, he went mad. There is an interesting BBC documentary, Dangerous Knowledge, which showed them going mad one by one. Cantor, Turing, Gödel … One by one, the prophecy was fulfilled: has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

But perhaps the most-shocking prophecy there is, at present, of how wrong our thinking as a civilisation is, can be found in cannabis. It had to be a Jew as the top prophet in this regard. Dr. Raphael Mechoulam—and his many apprentices and collaborators.
In creating the ultimate bias-removing knowledge-generating process, science used peer-review. Peer-review, because it relied on humans, naturally failed. But since our age is spectacular, it succeeds and fails spectacularly. So the failure was this spectacular: well-attested common sense cannot get published in a peer review journal because of the same reasons that stifled the faith paradigm of generating knowledge—except worse. It turns out that faith is bad, but it is the best that an ape can do.

It is for these reasons that I ended up writing this in response to someone:

Alas, there is nothing that is accessible to one like your mother (or I would have given it to my mother).
With the possible exception of the videos on YouTube, which will suffer from legitimacy problems even as some of them would be hard to understand.
The important thing to note is that few people will see reason in this case. Even fewer will rebel against unreason (instinct, culture, bias) and stand in favour of weed. This is okay. What is not okay is that some person who should know better may stand up and speak so much nonsense about cannabis. The old ones, we will have to get them alternatives (Sativex and shit; but not Marinol). The data out there is mostly for those who would know that “delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol” is a molecule of the cannabinoid family. Most people will have to rely on someone they trust, short of which it is unlikely that they will accede to such a therapy as marijuana.

And basically this is why the tragedy of our times is that scientists, who we believe to be the seekers and finders of truth, act so much in opposition to the ideal they have taken titles for. Our smartest men have been stricken with madness, so that in that day we may be leaderless if we are “the one who trusts in man, who draws strength from mere flesh and whose heart turns away from the Lord.” The ones who have the truth—in the spirit, and in the World—also have Wisdom that comes from above. They will be guided, they will know who not to fight, and who to trust. They will end up using cannabis when they need to, rather than so dogmatically, and in such self-righteous indignation, throwing back at God a plant that could be the answer to their earnest prayers for help.



by The 27th Comrade, Internet Mystic, Scyfy Technologies www.1st.ug


18th of May, 2013
PBS: Slavery By Another Name

There is this historical documentary by PBS, Slavery By Another Name, which speaks of the Southern Nigger in the period between the end of their Civil War (and the end of formal slavery) and the start of World War I. Then it juxtaposes it with the current Prison-Industrial Complex, driven as it is by marijuana and apparent racism. And the minds goes trotting to the firearm control debate and the Django Unchained movie (“Who the fuck gave a nigger a goddamn gun?”) and I think to myself … what a wonderful World.

This is the perfect Americana. Pure idealism, pure corporatism, pure glory, pure wisdom, pure intelligence, pure sin, pure failure, pure evil, pure shame.
There may not have been anything so American since the mail-order Tommy Gun stood athwart the Saturday Night Special.

If you do not have a copy, get it. And watch it.

--
The 27th Comrade

17th of May, 2013
Bringing Out Weird

Henceforth, I am bringing out weird. On this blog, either I will be declared mad (even if “subtly-mad”), or I will emerge visionary. On this blog, and in my work. Full force ahead, like a man on a mission. You know, I have not felt like this since I was choosing to drop out of school in S5. And this time, I have a place to put the madness of the process, and record it in public. Hahahahaha.




by The 27th Comrade, Internet Mystic, Scyfy Technologies www.1st.ug


17th of May, 2013
Fununke Saya

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD8HSKOy2Hs


Let silence suffice. Go, Cush!

--
The 27th Comrade

16th of May, 2013
Allegorised Life #1

A wandering musician in the Sahel fell in love with a girl called Kankan. This is the “wordless groans” of love, to the tune of a meditation on Cuban slave history.


Kankan Diarabi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3gnzcYLrFI
I could never have predicted that, waking up today, I would be pulled by the hair through the Three-Three-Three:

Sing joyfully to the Lord, you righteous; it is fitting for the upright to praise him. Praise the Lord with the harp; make music to him on the ten-stringed lyre. Sing to him a new song; play skillfully, and shout for joy.

Over-emphasis mine.
I noted that Moses burst into song when finally he could hand over the Israelites to Yehoshua son of the Eternal, since Moses—“for the Law was given by Moses”—could not cross the Jordan. There is a slave people today, and they will lead the World in its own song of redemption, when the Law gives way to God (Alone) is Salvation.
The Lord has said to me, “You shall not cross the Jordan.” The Lord your God himself will cross over ahead of you.
“Grace and Truth came by Jesus Christ.”
Watch the music of these people, wherever they are. “I will make them envious by those who are not a people; I will make them angry by a nation that has no understanding.”

--
The 27th Comrade


15th of May, 2013
Time on Mali Music

http://world.time.com/2013/05/08/the-day-the-music-died-malis-musicians-still-struggle-to-be-heard/


When TIME still tries to make sense, this is what it sounds like.

--
The 27th Comrade

14th of May, 2013
Kouroussa

Here is Amadou Sodia (a.k.a. Amadou Doumbouya) from Guinea, the other Mandé state.

This is Kouroussa, a song he sang about his home village of Kouroussa.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLFpO-MiYcI
I like that a conversation exploded in the comments between family members happened, as though in chat. And another man in comments says “At least I am sure there is some Black somewhere in my blood.”

This song is to the tune and spirit of Psalms 137. The harps that were used by the Jews were influenced by those of the Hamites—to such a degree that David’s prize harp was called gittith (“of the people of Gath”)—and those same harps the Hamites play today. On the other side, they were Canaanites, on this side they are Cushites. But the thing is the same.

So Psalms 137, to the string-governed tune of Kouroussa. I think the tension and the love and the hate born by the longing can all be carried very well on that tune.

--
The 27th Comrade

13th of May, 2013
Kabuangoyi

There is something very literally entrancing about this song, Kabuangoyi.


http://youtu.be/Fq520hcTOIU

--
The 27th Comrade

13th of May, 2013
Four Rooms

Watching Four Rooms, among whose makers was Quentin Tarantino, I realise that genius is not the same as skill. Genius is a tendency; a tendency to get truly mad, in the full faith that God is with you. Skill is what happens to make a genius a skilled genius. And such is Quentin Tarantino. He stands among shocking contemporaries and he shocks yet further than they.




by The 27th Comrade, Internet Mystic, Scyfy Technologies www.1st.ug


13th of May, 2013
Onesimus and the Colloquial Translation

It is said that Onesimus was the one who collected the letters that Paul wrote such that he started the New Testament as we have it now. You have got to wonder how that story went. Escaped slave ends up in jail, meets random other jailbird, they talk about strange new teachings from the East, Onesimus likes this “philosophy”, and he leaves jail … back to a life of crime. Because he never reformed, when he left jail; he went back to working for an under-ground, imprisoned movement of religious teachings from the East which, as it now turned out, his former master had also accepted as the Truth.


In all this, nobody is aware that the New Testament is being collected in dark alleys and copied over carefully in clear handwriting, in a small bedroom attached to the house of some random blacksmith whose name appears somewhere in these tightly-argued letters.  Letters from Paulos, letters from some guy who calls himself “Stone“.
And yet here we are: the Word of God on the Internet. http://word.1st.ug/

A Colloquial Translation is what we are doing here. By colloquial, I mean that young Onesimus there should have an experience similar to what an internaut would feel, reading a web page today of some fringe, non-mainstream cause or conspiracy theory. Everything from peak oil, HIV denialism, sedevacantists, 911-truthers, sceptics of the philosophical materialist worldview, marijuana legalisationists, whatever. The goal is to write out passages of the Bible with so much shared language with the common man that the words and phrases “nice”, “dumb”, “smart”, “OK”, “Well, …”, “… which is interesting, because …”, “basically”, “totally” get used at least once. I even dare say that it would be hard to take a contemporary version of the Bible seriously, if it doesn’t also use the f-word. But I hope it won’t get that desperate in this case.

This would start out with NIV 2010 and fork it with much more vulgarisation of what is written, so that it may sound more like a delivery than a record.



by The 27th Comrade, Internet Mystic, Scyfy Technologies www.1st.ug


13th of May, 2013
With a Clear Conscience

They must keep hold of the deep truths of the faith with a clear conscience.
1 Timothy 3:9

There is much to be shameful about in the Gospel. The severeness of God’s judgements against sinners: the judgement of Amalek, for instance, or the Deluge. But the most-shameful is Calvary, which is so revolting and so completely about Sin, that it remains a stumbling-stone for the Jews. Though God hates child sacrifice—and forbids all intercourse with worshippers of Moloch—He nevertheless tells Abraham to do It to Isaac, and stops him just short of the blow. The He does It when the time for Sin to be put on the same Man. (I have sometimes felt that Jesus was to live as a human and have the option to bail out of Calvary at any time, but that He chose to let the thing proceed to its completion so that even this sin of human sacrifice would be covered in the deal.)

At the beginning of Romans, Paul states from the get-go that he is not ashamed of the Gospel. Would this be necessary if the Gospel were what we are told today? When you talk of the Gospel over and over, you end up having to  repeat over and over (as Paul does) that you are not ashamed of this Message. The Message contains all the extremes, because it is about Jesus Christ. It contains mystery, it contains history, it contains God descending from prostitutes, it contains God as the definition of Holiness, it contains the Law of God, it is all about the Pardon of God.

In this one, there is need to emphasise that the deep truths of the faith are, to the humbled-greats of the Faith, matters that should be held to be true with a clear conscience. The most-serious matter about which we are supposed to maintain a clear conscience, if we seek to know the deep truths of the faith with a clear conscience, is the matter of: justification by Grace alone, which is given on the sole basis of Faith in Jesus Christ.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”


by The 27th Comrade, Internet Mystic, Scyfy Technologies www.1st.ug

10th of May, 2013
The Long Short Walk

http://www.makeroadssafe.org/longshortwalk/Pages/homepage.aspx


Those people held a short demo in Kampala some three, four days ago. I rode by them on a boda-boda, and I came back to Entebbe on the back of my motorbike. (Since then, me and the motorbike have been on each other like new lovers. She hasn’t killed me yet, either. God, motorbikes are fun. It’s insane how quick the addiction is, and how devastatingly dangerous it is.)

I support the message of Make Roads Safe. As transportation, I used to walk a little over 5 kilometres every day in 2004-2006, and about 20 kilometres every week in 2006-2008. I generally still walk a lot more than the average member of my class. In the last two years I have brought cycling back to my modes of transport, and as a result I bought vehicles in the last two years in the order of bicycle, bicycle, bicycle, bicycle, motorbike, car. The car was this month.

Being now able to consider myself a true pedestrian and a true getter-around of a World of oil, I can say that it is a definite disadvantage to be a pedestrian. You are weaker than everything else on the road, you are the one who pays if you make a mistake or if they make a mistake. The road is a frightful place, and the sweaty-faced world of the regular pedestrians is under stress.

Yet in the end, the roads will slowly normalise. In the wake of peak oil, first the motorbike will get big. Because with this the Dream can still be rescued! We are ten times more-efficient at living in the poorly-planned urban squalor we inhabit, but with our motorbikes we can still do forty kilometres to fetch a bun. And since that is the Dream, motorbikes will get popular. Then, of course, horses and donkeys, but I digress.

I am now in the car, and I do not know how the temptation of safe irresponsibility will change my ways of getting around. I already feel addicted to the motorbike; I cannot imagine waking up and not wanting to ride it (a decision I have done for the car many times already). In a sense, the increased safety of being one of the killers rather than one of the killed is what makes us ride, as it were, full speed into a dead-end tunnel. I know for sure that I would not put my family anywhere but in the car, if they are on the road, now that I have routinely experienced the comforts of the other side. And so we seem to be attended by a positive feedback loop that is working against a solution to road safety issues.

The good news, however, is that since it all depends on cheap oil to carry on—imagine that: oil is the fuel of a cultural phenomenon—it will unravel over time, such that the problem solves itself. On the grim road to maximum entropy.

by The 27th Comrade, Internet Mystic, Scyfy Technologies www.1st.ug

02nd of May, 2013
Prophet

I took my prophetic office yesterday. I think it was exactly seven years since I last cut my hair. Hahaha. It will be funny indeed if I gradually realise that my hair is the mark of the prophet. That will be very funny, because I always thought it was cool that, even though Bob Marley wasn’t a prophet of the Gospel of Grace, at least he had the “correct” look for a prophet.

This blog, at least for now, will be the main place I write.

01st of March, 2013
Don’t Let Them Penicillinise Marijuana

Less than 100 years after penicillin was discovered, the problem of anti-biotic resistance looms larger than most non-experts are able to fathom. But just to give you a simple metric for how serious the problem is: humanity has lost the battle against anti-biotic resistance and now no new anti-biotics are being made. The war was lost and we accepted defeat.

Why did this happen? Because the Western way of doing medicine is to isolate and purify, to target and calibrate, to specify and regulate. The little variations that naturally occur in everything in the universe are rather uncomfortable to a modern mind. These variations, although they seem to get in the way, keep the bacteria surprised and avoid the resistance. Synthesised chemicals and modern drugs are at their best when they do not vary at all; in other words, the good, resilient medicines are considered crude and stupid. The best treatment of this modern mental disposition, and the sheer extremes of its implications, can be found in the tome written by Prof. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary. It is possibly the greatest treatment of this subject that humans will ever create.

Anyway, long story short, we went mad for anti-biotics because they seemed to fix all our problems while themselves being a simple thing. Most of our problems were because of microbes. Penicillin, because it could do one thing (kill microbes) ended up doing many, many things. For example, most anti-biotics in use today are used in farms, to make animals gain weight. How does that work? Some bacteria prevent obesity, which is advantageous in food animals. (Ironically, these bacteria in question are Helicobacter pylori, which was once the target of an extermination campaign, but they got resistant.) It is because of massive feeding of anti-biotics to farm animals that you get the drug-resistant strains of E. coli that periodically ravage American consumers. Anyway, this is how you go from a drug that does one thing well, to a miracle drug that does all sorts of unexpected good things, then to a wasted opportunity.

Now we have marijuana. Like anti-biotics, it is very old. But modern attitudes towards it risk “penicillinising” it. Marijuana does one thing, which is to produce cannabinoids. This one thing fixes all sorts of diverse problems, because many of our problems are modulated by our naturally-occurring endocannabinoid system. This is how cannabis goes from reducing pain, to killing cancerous tumours, to relaxing people, to creating appetite. But, keeping to type, the Western mindset is now isolating particular single chemicals and breeding other things out or just chemically washing them away. The benign forms of this corruption are the breeding high-THC strains of marijuana, which got this close to having none of the extremely crucial cannabidiol, simply because it was not useful for the single, narrow, over-focussed purpose that the modern Western mind was pursuing. And yet it gets worse, with the market having pure, synthetic THC as the pill Marinol. Pure THC is not the best idea. The result is impossible to predict, except for one thing: such cannabinoid-based medicine will not be natural, and will therefore carry the huge burden of modern human’s ignorant hubris, and will be dangerous in the long run.

Please: have enough wisdom to understand the dangerous narrowness of your point of view. Trust the whole plant. Trust the natural system. Don’t use un-natural ratios of cannabinoids. Don’t let them penicillinise marijuana.

16th of February, 2013
Peak Hemp

In Uganda, a stick of hemp is 500 shillings. Google claims that, as I write it, that means $0.19. Well …

Many people when they have just bought a stash of them, as I have seen, will start off throwing away the roaches. The last ends that have some hemp in them but are too short to smoke practically. They throw them away.

Then, at some point, they have gone through most of their stash. They realise that roaches should not be wasted. At this point, they have passed “peak hemp”. Of course, peak hemp is as much a realisation as it is an event.

Peak hemp is for sure. But so is peak oil.

14th of February, 2013
Nokia Belle

I just installed Nokia Belle for the first time today, on my Nokia N8. A vast improvement on the original OS for most normal users. I am not one of those, though, so I am yet to certify that it is an improvement for me as well. I know, for instance, that I have already deleted most Microsoft Apps from the phone. And all social networking apps. And I limited my home screens to five (which is two more than previously, and one less than the six advertised for Nokia Belle).