Dragon’s Den

My post about Mabus was crossposted on The Blogmocracy (thanks, M!), and got several comments, one of which got me interested in what Nostradamus had to say about Islam and the Moslems. There are, unsurprisingly, a number of quatrains that deal with them, but two in particular caught my attention. First was 3-95:

The Moorish law will be seen to fail, followed by another that is more pleasing. The Dnieper will be the first to give way through gifts and tongues to another more appealing.

Since Russia (the land of the Dnieper) isn’t Moslem, this quatrain may refer to two separate but related events. I think this is likely, based on the second quatrain, since neither one seems even possible as things are currently. The other quatrain is 1-96:

A man will be charged with the destruction of temples and sects, altered by fantasy. He will harm the rocks rather than the living, ears filled with ornate speeches.

This is pretty clear, as there is only one fantasy-altered sect that could be destroyed by rocks being harmed, and again, this is Islam. The rocks, of course, are the Kaaba and the rock in the Dome of the Rock mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, both of which are (in Moslem belief) indestructible.

However, and it’s admittedly a very big problem, both quatrains require a major change in world circumstances. There are over a billion Moslems, and their sharia law is intruding into more and more places, not being pushed back, even though it’s so oppressive (especially to women) that it certainly deserves to fail.

Having someone put in charge of destroying the Moslems’ holy rocks, as things are now, is at least equally unlikely.

The disappearance of Islam would be a relief to those of us threatened with death by their Koran, and even though I’m a Pagan, I would be absolutely delighted at the destruction of the Dome of the Rock, which would leave the Temple Mount free for the Jews to reconstruct their Temple.

Am I biased? You betcha! And for good reason; the Jews have made too many contributions to humanity to list, where it’s difficult if not impossible to find anything beneficial that Islam is responsible for.

Hmm… I think I need to update and repost that Nostradamus/Terran Empire article I did a decade or so ago. That would definitely set up the conditions for the two quatrains above …

Yesterday the only new reading material I had was three library books … but I hit a jackpot at a yard sale this morning. I check all the books I see, being hopeful but not particularly optimistic since what I find is usually romances (yuck!) or old college textbooks. Today, though, I got an entire box of SF and fantasy paperbacks for $2! Twenty-three new adventures, a couple with old friends (filling in series, that is) and a bunch of whole new worlds to play in. I am a very happy camper this afternoon.

Obama’s Spill Recovery Chief Will Be Part-Time

The whole story is both good and interesting, but the first two paragraphs are what caught my attention and sent me to my copy of Nostradamus’ prophecies.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s point man charting a new future for the oil-poisoned Gulf Coast will do the job part-time. Some environmentalists said the job demands someone’s full attention.

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who oversees 900,000 Navy and Marine personnel, is inheriting an amorphous second job as the Obama administration’s leader of long-term environmental and economic planning. His task is no less than rebuilding a region still suffering after Hurricane Katrina and beset by decades of environmental problems.

Mabus is a well-known name to anyone familiar with Nostradamus, even though it appears only once, in Century 2, Quatrain 62:

Mabus will then soon die, there will come a terrible descruction of people and animals. Suddenly vengeance will be revealed, hundred, hands, thirst and hunger, when the comet passes.

There have been numerous attempts to identify the mysterious Mabus, ever since the Quatrains began coming out in 1555. About the only thing that wasn’t identified as Mabus (at least in anything I’ve read so far) is someone with that actual name! Anagrams, twistings of other names, any word game you can imagine, though, has been tried.

I will freely admit that I’m no better at interpreting Nostradamus in advance of the events than anyone else is, so take this with the proverbial shaker of salt. It’s hard, though, not to make a connection when you actually have someone with that name put in chrage of a large area’s recovery from a huge environmental devastation that could easily become even worse if, say, a hurricane hits.

As long as Mabus stays healthy and no comets show up, we should be okay prophetically, but if he dies and/or a comet is discovered, it looks like at least the Gulf area’s in a world of hurt. But cheer up, it isn’t the end of the world; Nostradamus himself, in the Preface to his Centuries (written to his son Cesar) that “The work comprises prophecies from today to the year 3797. ” And the end of the Mayan calendar on 21 December 2012 is the end of a cycle, not of the world or universe.

I just saw a show (well, part of it) about ancient aliens on the History Channel. Yeuch. Gimme a break!

I have nothing at all against the idea of aliens visiting this planet in the past, don’t get me wrong. I’m a long-time SF fan, and have been known to write it myself; the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence seems inevitable, to me, rather than strange. I’d dearly love to have real proof of it, and preferably meet an extraterrestrial myself … not some bacterium, at least sapient-level if not sentient.

But this show ticked me off. The thesis, at least as far as I got before turning it off, was that these ancient astronauts had come to Earth for our resources (specifically gold, in this case), and had bred or genetically engineered homo sapiens from homo erectus to use as slaves to mine it.

Excuse me? These aliens are intelligent enough to be capable of interstellar travel, probably at super-light speeds (since they want to take the gold home to improve their atmosphere [huh? again]). So why go to all the trouble of of breeding slaves instead of building robots, or doing their mining at the bottom of a planetary gravity well instead of taking advantage of a nice micro-gravity asteroid belt?

Sorry, History Channel … you need to do better than that. Hire a competent SF writer next time.

Oh, and by the way. Next time you do a Nostradamus piece, you might point out that in his Preface to the quatrains, he specifically says that his predictions run to the year 3797. So everything isn’t going to end in the next few years, though I do admit he doesn’t rule out major changes sometime soon. And the Mayan calendar only ends a cycle on 21 December 2012; that’s also when a new cycle starts.

We’ve had beautiful weather the last couple of days, and I’ve taken advantage of it to reset about half the stones around the strawberry mound. It’s more time-consuming than when I did the same around the cherry tree; that one just marks an area, so the stones weren’t set very deeply. This one has to hold a mound of dirt in place, so the stones were set more deeply, and are being a bit of a pain to dig out. But the finished section does look a lot better than the original; the stones had gotten shoved outward as the ground settled inside, and weren’t particularly even along the tops. The reset ones are now straight, and the tops are as level as you’re going to get natural slate. I’ve got another two or three days’ work to go on that, then I’ll start redoing the border around the fish pond/flowerbed, and redoing the mortar between the sidewalk stones.

And despite taking a few breaks to sit in the shade, cool off, and whittle on my current lesson/project, I seem to’ve come down with a bit of a sunburn. Ah, well … the weather’s been entirely too nice to waste sitting inside at the computer!

Oh, yes, and the older plants are starting to get strawberries — one looks like it should be ripe enough to eat in the next two or three days. About a week after that, it’ll be pick and eat or process every day — yum!

Quite a few years ago, during several discussions with a friend of mine at the Rec Center at Ramstein in Germany, I came to the conclusion that there were two basic forms of government, whatever the conventional name might be. Democracy, republic, monarchy, dictatorship, what have you — all can be categorized, depending on how it treats its people, as either an umbrella or an octopus.

To me, the categories are pretty self-evident. An umbrella government is one which is limited to the functions that the people can’t carry out at all, or can’t carry out efficiently, such as protection from foreign or domestic enemies (military and police) and large-scale infrastructure. An octopus government, on the other hand, is one that has its tentacles wrapped around the people and groping into their pocketbooks.

The octopus not only does the umbrella functions (though usually less well because its tentacles keep tangling up with each other), it continually grows, wrapping its tentacles more and more tightly about its people to control them in more and more ways.

Unfortunately, the umbrella can easily morph into an octopus unless the support ribs beginning to extend themselves can be trimmed back as soon as they start to go beyond their bounds. If this task is neglected, it’s only a matter of time until the tentacles begin encroaching on what the umbrella used to protect, and the octopus develops a head (bureaucracy) devoted to increasing the size of the beast and eventually suck the life out of what has become the host to a monstrous parasite. (My apologies here to real octopi, who are actually rather shy and retiring creatures, not at all parasitic.)

My friend argued that all governments covering a large area or population were, of necessity, octopus-types and Bad by definition. I held (and still hold) that the size of the governed area has no direct correlation on its intrusiveness, and that a larger area for a given population may very well correlate to less intrusiveness, simply as a matter of practicality.

A large population in a small area does need more laws than a small population in a large area, simply because something that won’t even be noticed from a neighbor a quarter mile away may be intolerable if that same neighbor is only a wall away. If the guy across the cornfield plays his radio at 100 decibels, who’s going to hear it? But if the guy less than two feet away, with only a thin wall between, does — it’s call the cops time.

And that’s assuming very similar external conditions. Make those as different as New York City’s and Los Angeles’s, and even two very densely populated areas will require different laws. Los Angeles snow and New York earthquakes are about equally rare, so making New York build to Los Angeles earthquake codes or Los Angeles have to have New York’s amount of snow removal equipment would be foolish. And a village in Siberia is going to have very different laws from a village in the Amazon jungle.

So even the worst octopus can’t have the same laws for everyone, at least not effectively. And the larger it gets in area and environmental variation, the less it will be able to control. One of the most prevalent government desires worldwide is to eliminate individual weapons, especially firearms. (Actually, eliminating anything a substantial number of people want is impossible, but just for the sake of argument …)

To the best of my knowledge, at this point Britain has the most draconic weapon control laws on the planet, eliminating not only guns but swords and sharp knives. (They also apparently outlaw any self-defense, which is totally against human nature, which means they won’t last long; most people aren’t suicidal. But I’m getting partially off the subject.)

Let’s say the UN takes global power, and tries to spread the British laws worldwide. It simply won’t work, even disregarding the U.S., where a lot of people will “lose” anything that’s being outlawed. There are a lot of places worldwide where weapons are a matter of life and death … and crude but very effective weapons are easy to make. Someone out to kill a feral pig (say in rural east Texas) may not be able to get a fancy rifle, but he can still make an effective boar spear, and train dogs to drive the boar.

Freedom under an octopus government will certainly become far more difficult to find or make, and a great many people won’t be able to achieve it again (including me, given my age and health), but eventually the octopus will be killed, and the survivors will recreate an umbrella.

Back, very briefly, to the discussions that brought this post about. My friend argued that there was no way to keep the octopus from taking over, once it got started, but I’m still convinced it can and has been done. Only once, and not until the octopus was robbed of ways to physically enforce its decrees, but it has happened, and this particular octopus indeed deserves credit for preserving Western civilzation. I am so convinced of this that I borrowed its top structure as the basic government of my Terran Empire.

I’ve been having trouble with my Sprint connection for about the last week — at random intervals, it’ll tell me that it either can’t find a server, or a site is taking too long to respond. If I hadn’t had to sign a two-year contract, I’d be looking for another provider … NuNet’s land-line connection was slower, granted, but it’s reliable! Mr. Empire is still using it upstairs, on the lovely laptop one of my sisters gave him.

So since I’ve finally managed to get on here, I’m going to take the opportunity to get up to date. Not that there’s been that much going on, but I did get my pathetic four tomato plants in the ground, and am conscientiously picking the blossoms off the new strawberry plants so they’ll put out runners. Fortunately, judging by the blossoms on the older plants, I’ll have plenty from them until I can let the new ones start bearing. I saw a grant total of three blossoms on the cherry tree I planted last year, but I don’t expect much from it for at least another three or four years; I’m delighted that it seems to be thriving, putting out a LOT more leaves than it did last year.

Tomorrow’s supposed to be perfect for outdoor work, so I’ve been clearing the decks on indoor necessities today, and tomorrow morning I’ll be getting some mortar to reset the stones around the strawberry hill and the pond/flowerbed. It’ll undoubtedly take me more than just tomorrow, but I’ve been looking forward to it ever since I did the resetting around the cherry tree last year. Talk about a distinct improvement!

And I’m working on more substantial posts, I promise. I’ve got notes for at least half a dozen, on stuff from word misuse to politics; it’s just getting them organized that’s slowing me down. That, and I’m being nagged by an idea for a story that shows a Ranger’s normal duty, which has somehow been slighted in the stories so far due to rebellion, war, contacting new cultures, and that sort of thing. But enforcing the Imperial Declaration of Rights is crucial, too, if normally far less dramatic.

I’ve been told a couple of times that I really ought to learn Spanish, so I can communicate with Spanish-speakers in this country. Sorry, that’s just plain not going to happen! English may not be this country’s official language (though I think it should be), but there’s no way in the Seven Hells that I will learn a foreign language just because people who want to live and work here are too lazy to learn our language!

When we were stationed in Germany for three years, I learned enough German to live and do most of our shopping off-base in their language, just as common courtesy. I wasn’t fluent; I had to carry a dictionary for words I didn’t use much, and I’m sure my grammar was … um, let’s be polite, and just say it wasn’t the best. But I made the effort, and except for the ones who wanted to practice their English with me, the Germans seemed to appreciate it.

I also speak some rudimentary Russian, and learned Esperanto just for the fun of it, so I obviously don’t have any problem with the idea of learning other languages. But Spanish isn’t going to be one of them, unless for some reason I have to go to a Spanish-speaking country long term.

Si la hispana-parorlantoj volas paroli al mi en livgvo alia ol la angla, ili povas uzi la Esperanton. Aŭ la germana.

This place has just been added to the Blogmocracy’s blog roll! If I knew how to do it, I’d set up a blogroll here, and that would be the first entry.

Welcome, andy Blogmocrats who show up! Sorry you have to register to comment, but I’ve seen too many horrid examples of what can happen when it’s a free-for-all, and that’s a situation I’d rather avoid.

I find it fascinating, in the “watching a slow-motion train wreck” sense of the phrase, to observe Obama’s attitude toward Israel. Historically speaking — never mind any religious angles — it’s a very bad idea to mistreat the Jews as a people. That’s been proven many times, from the Babylonians and Egyptians to the Nazis and Soviets. All of those have disappeared as major powers, even though the countries themselves still exist. Up until now, the U.S. has treated the Jews well, and been a friend to Israel since its creation. Obama’s changed that drastically, trying to give Israel orders that, if followed, would do it serious damage.

Being a panentheistic polytheist myself, I don’t worship the Jewish deity, but I certainly don’t deny that he exists, and it seems quite clear that his promise to bless those who blessed his people and curse those who cursed them is still operative and very effective. Given Obama’s treatment of Israel and its Prime Minister, that’s a very bad omen for the United States. If Israel has to launch a preemptive strike against Iran, and U.S. forces do indeed — as some sources say — attack the Israeli strike aircraft … well, I’m not sure what will happen. It won’t be good, that much I am sure of.

Obama’s already done a lot of damage to this country, possibly irreversible. If he manages to get HaShem upset enough at us, this country is totally toast.

Me, I like Israel, and think it ought to have its full territory, including Gaza and the West Bank, under its control. (Yes, the U.S. Empassy should be in Jerusalem!) But I’m quite sure I’ll get caught in whatever holocaust Obama brings down on our heads, considering how close I live to D.C.

Go, Israel!