a turn

the truly Self-sufficient is Infinite, not closed upon Itself.

with its converse:

the truly self-insufficient is finite, compact.

cool/undeserved things

1. unexpectedly being able to get bridesmaid dresses through a legitimate local store instead of through a big sketchy online question mark (and as you well know, question marks have small holes; making it hard to get things through them).
2a. finding an amazing caterer for much cheaper than everyone else.
2b. finding out today that we can get a different amazing caterer for even cheaper [!]
3. new boots. asolo even.
4a. getting to go out to leavenworth this weekend with the lovely sheena & my sister.
4b. being able to see phil in the process. plus being able to see him perform.
4c. aleida & david will be up at the same time, so we can see them too.
5. family getting together on sunday.
6. blessed assurance.

yuppers.

the "dude, you see that cult over there?" post; PLUS: wedding!

from the hordes of the perpetually hope-oppressed comes this piece of electoral magic: the obama salute

"Our goal is to see a crowd of 75,000 people at Obama's nomination speech holding their hands about their heads, fingers laced together in support of a new direction for this country, a renewed hope, and acceptance of responsibility for our future," says Rick Husong, owner of The Loyalty Inc. Husong tells me that he got the idea after seeing the famous Obama-progress poster by artist Shepherd Fairey. "We wanted to get involved some way," he says. So, the agency came up with their own a symbol of hope and progress that also plays off Obama's name. "We thought, 'Let's try and start a movement where even while walking down the street, people would hold up the O and you would know they were for Obama,' " says Husong. Much thought went into the relatively simple idea. "You interlace your hands in a circle, the interlacing being a symbol of different types of people coming together and the circle a symbol of unity," he says. Their design, unlike Fairey's, is free , and Husong is urging people to download it and print it on posters and T-shirts. "We want to see it everywhere, but more importantly we want this sign to take the world by storm."

"seriously?" I ask. "seriously."

but really, it's all quite alright. very smart people have informed me that the great O!'s hope-drive exhibits no cult-like characteristics and that anyone who thinks it does is just dumb. *therefore,* this cannot possibly be evidence of cultish affection.

I'm grateful that I was told that a while ago. otherwise, I would have been caught completely unprepared and just acted dumb. or maybe even racist.

which is ultimately why I rely on other people to tell me both how to interpret evidence and what I mean when I say things.

---

all sarcasm aside, my thoughts on the lightworker can be summarized by a simple quote:

As soon as politics, for the sake of politics, becomes a society’s principle passion — its object of hope, its pearl of great price — that society has already subjected itself to a type of totalitarianism. Unwittingly, it has relinquished a citizen’s and a people’s privilege and responsibility of self-determination. It has bet the outcome of the common pursuit of happiness on the eventual good actions of chosen elite.
- unknown

---

alrighty, my spleen is vented. which means on to happy awesome wedding glory [!]

1. it turns out that planning a wedding takes more than a day. in fact, it takes many days. as a result, I've done some things lately that I never imagined I'd do:
- help sheena search for bridesmaid dresses (if you know any good websites for cheap bridesmaid dresses, please let us know! we're looking for a light blue [not baby, royal, navy, etc] two-piece without too much flair)
- make informed decisions on colour choices ("I think that cornflower's a little more full-bodied than we want")
- go fabric shopping at multiple stores, multiple times
- and so much more
2. but we've gotten a ton done. sheena has a dress that she adores and supposedly will make me fall into seizures from its awesomeness (according to sarah coffey); pastor jon is confirmed to wed us; God's scheduled to stick around for the whole process; we have a church with a basement for the reception; photography - checkeroo; and just confirmed.. we will have the cutest flower girl/ringbearer couple EVER. no, seriously. let me prove it.

here's the flower girl (pekay, if you're watching this, smile!) & the ringbearer (yes, lukie is confirmed); also, that really hot smiling beauty on the left is sheena, in case you've been in a hole or something.



my personal fantasy is to set the two of them up before the reception's over. if you want to help, just step in and you can be a part of this matchmaking frenzy.

3. the official date is december 13th. the official place is seattle. the official spiritual state is exalted.
4. yeah, the whole thing is freaking awesome. I deserve neither sheena nor her love and yet I have both! what undeserved joy! [needless to say, I could go on for a reaaaallllllyyyy long time; apparently I nearly made my sister vomit from the sappiness several times in the last months; so watch out]

ok, to work. awesome.

a route to apocalypse

1. the continuing demystification of 'absolute' morality
2. the filling of that void with definition-by-consensus, aka the new morality (progressive, regressive, whatever)
3. the attempt to solidify the new definition with any means available
4. rinse & repeat

for lower-case morality is always an exercise in definition and choice.

viewed in this light, much of history is mankind's collective processing of this self-contradiction.

---

"there is nothing new under the sun."

this only reinforces a fact: the choice has been and is only between God and the devil.

africa

for those who haven't heard, sheena left seattle bound for southern africa this past tuesday. she will return late may 23rd (about 41.5 days from now). she is there to serve in a local church with kids as well as to help start an HIV home care/prevention program.

I'm grateful that I was able to speak with her last night: she arrived in the city where she'll be serving (rundu in the country of namibia - near the angolan border) safely. she's tired: she's been traveling almost constantly since she left tuesday afternoon.

I take solace and happiness in the knowledge that God knows her needs - I have little idea what is best for her right now and therefore what I should pray for, but He knows.

more to come soon.

---

[part of] faith is this: to submit hardship to God. and thereby turn pain to suffering and a little crucifixion.

in other words, pain can be passed by with business and a focus upon non-painful things. this is functional but it is a deliberate attempt to fool yourself by separating knowledge from the heart. "I will get through this hard time by not thinking about it and plugging away."

but this is a mistake for two reasons:
1. it is a lie, for it seeks to deal with pain/hardship by trying to create a psychological environment where that pain simply does not exist. "if I don't think about it, then it can't hurt me."
2. it does not treat God truthfully or lovingly.

the second reason is intimately tied with the first statement: that faith is submitting hardship to God.

- if I lie to myself, then when I submit myself to God I am lying to Him.
- if I do not know myself, then I do not know what I am submitting to Him.
- if I am not willing to submit my pain to God, then I am denying His strength to resolve it.

for the loving truth is this: God calls us to submit ourselves to Him. that is a spiritual and psychological act (that He assists and makes possible). in True submission (may I find it by His grace!), pain is transformed into suffering and thus something for the sake of the Gospel. for in suffering, I can no longer claim anything for myself - not a right, not offense, and certainly not a notion that I deserve a thing. in pain, I claim to have all of these things - the right not to be in pain, the offense at hardship in my life, and the idea that I don't deserve hardship (even if it's only for a time: "I just want one day of peace.").

it is in suffering - not in pain! - that we find True perspective. it is therefore in suffering - not in pain! - that God draws near to us (for all of my claims in pain blind my spirit so that I no longer allow myself to perceive God).

may He draw near to sheena and me now. and by that, may He take the distance between us and turn it into an object of glory before the Throne.

amen and glory.

clueless

from iran's mehr news agency:

Chomsky: Palestinians punished for not obeying Israel-U.S. orders

TEHRAN, Jan. 23 (MNA) - Noam Chomsky, a widely known intellectual and political activist, says an immediate punishment of Palestinians started “for the crime of not following orders” by Israel and U.S.

In an interview with the Mehr News Agency, Chomsky said, “Savage punishment of Palestinians by the U.S.-Israeli alliance” should come to an end.
Following is the text of the interview:

The major crisis in Gaza started immediately after Hamas won a free and fair election (ed: uh huh - on what planet?). The West, which despises democracy unless it comes out "the right way", immediately turned to punishment of the people for the crime of not following orders (ed: perhaps it was in response to rockets fired against civilian targets..?), Israel and the U.S. in the lead, Europe following timidly along as usual. The crisis has continued to escalate, and of course it is tied to U.S.-Israeli takever of whatever is of value in the West Bank (ed: wait, is he actually claiming that the israel fought back in an effort to acquire assets in the west bank?), often with considerable violence (ed: initiated and sustained by the palestianians; a.k.a. acts of war, a.k.a. casus belli).

The Annapolis conference was a joke in poor taste. It had almost nothing to do with Israel-Palestine. It was an effort by Bush and Rice to line up the "moderate" Arab states (ed: you mean those that aren't actively threatening nuclear holocaust?)-- that is, the extreme fundamentalist tyrannies that are expected to follow orders (ed: spoken in.. iran?)-- in an anti-Iran alliance. That's why it was held in Annapolis.

There should be efforts by the Islamic states, and everyone else, to put an end to the savage punishment of Palestinians by the U.S.-Israeli alliance (ed: presumably he's referring to iran's pledge to nuke israel).

spoken in iran no less.

(the factual vacuum there is high quality: don't walk too close or you'll get sucked into the same mode of reasoning that defines the conspiracy theorist)

two possibilities:
1. his words have been misconstrued by mehr to the point that what's written doesn't match his opinion (mehr clearly did a reduction job; the question is how much). this however seems unlikely, given that chomsky has an online mouthpiece and community to rebut an attempt by iran to put words in his mouth. or..
2. he means what's said above, even if he would consider it a gross simplification.

two consequences:
1. chomsky has placed himself in a position where he is used as a propaganda piece for a terrorist regime publicly committed to genocide and mass murder. or..
2. he has deliberately assisted said terrorist regime toward the goal of self-justification and internal consolidation.

---

the 20th century's version of irreligious 'morality' manifests itself as totalitarianism.

---

slightly related aside: the real idiocy with folks like chomsky is that they identify a narrative consistent with fact and then define the narrative as fact. denial of the narrative is then couched as denial of fact; if this inconsistency is noted, denial of the narrative is then couched as stemming from subversion by some hidden external (read: unverifiable) force (big business for the marxist, western imperialism for the chomskyite, &c), rather than careful observation of fact.

and so the attempt to fight imagined totalitarianism becomes the active support of existing totalitarianism.

chaotic

the list (before tuesday @ 12:30 pm):
1. passably understand and be familiar with the following:
- hep-th/0205236 - karch, katz: adding flavour
- hep-th/0201253 - d'hoker, freedman: review of ads/cft
- hep-th/0506184 - kovtun, starinets: qnm in finite-T ads/cft
- hep-th/0605158 - herzog, karch, et al: heavy quark in the plasma
- hep-ph/0602229 - karch, katz, et al: soft-wall model
- 0706.0368 - chesler, yaffe: heavy quark wake
- hep-th/0512125 - karch, o'bannon: holo. r.g. for probe branes*
- 0711.0736 - lin, shuryak: zero-T finite mass energy calc.*
- 0705.0994 - bak, karch, yaffe: debye screening in ads*
2. review the following topics:
- higgs mechanism in the standard model*
- [gauge] spontaneous symmetry breaking*
- basic BSM models (MSSM, mSUGRA, technicolor, little higgs)
- anomalies (and the rho meson)*
- beta function for yang-mills*
- effective potential
- helicity-phase-space decay*
- ward identities & conserved currents
- nuclear phenomenology*
- bag model
- qcd phase diagram*
- chiral lagrangian
- isospin constraints*
- wigner-eckhart thm. (savage is on my committee)*
- nucleon EFT*
- basic large N qcd
- fundamental particles
- CP violation & strong CP problem [a.k.a. axions]
- primary decay channels*
- basic jet phenomenology*
- collinear singularities*
- parton model*
- neutrinos & seesaw mechanism*
- flux tubes & regge trajectories
- basic lattice thy. (wilson action, domain-wall fermions, glueballs, wilson's sketch of confinement)
- review of anything the yaffe's ever assigned. ever.
- theta-vacua in qcd*
- tunneling in qft (instanton/soliton)
- lippmann-schwinger & born approximation*
- resonance and the t-matrix
- bound states in qft - hydrogen, non-rel. mesons (HQEFT)
- landau-ginzburg model for critical phenomena
- block-spinning the ising model (a.k.a. wilson r.g.)*
- anything else I think of along the way
3. for the talk:
- fix figures for new string initial conditions
- add extra slides:*
a. massive quark case
b. original i.c. & results
c. partons and parton reconstruction
d. finite-T
e. comments on quenched approx (Nc>>Nf)
f. eom's, eqn's, formal results
g. relation to son's real-time procedure
- give practice talk on monday afternoon*
- final revision monday night*

a * denotes some time needed to review. no * indicates completion.

oh, and a cool picture:
baryon charge density for a massless quark-antiquark production event in N=4 super yang-mills


---

"steven always loved a story
since he was a little boy
he’d grab a book and climb into his mother’s lap
but his mother, oh God bless her
she loved that little boy
and she'd only read the parts she thought were happy

and he grew to be a man
but he never understood
that there’s always something bad
between the good and the good

every night there by his bedside
he’d offer up his prayers
ask Jesus to keep his friends and family from harm
so when his dad came down with cancer
and mom, she wrecked the car
he knew that Jesus must have never really cared

cause he grew to be a man
and he never understood
that there’s always something bad
between the good and the good

and he fell in love
with a perfect girl
she smiled so pretty
it tore his world apart
when she left without saying goodbye

well, he always loved a story
since he was a little boy
he’d grab a book and climb into his mother’s lap
and if she’d read the parts where knees got skinned,
kids didn't share and the cheaters win
well, he might believe that Jesus really cared

but he grew to be a man
and he never understood
that there’s always something bad
between the good and the good"
- andrew osenga

snowy thoughts from a scattered mind

1. the general exam is flippin' scary man. 10 days.
2. something I want to do in the near future: take a charcoal grill and good beer out to a really snowy beach.
3. I've fallen in man-love with andrew osenga. he's got a free ep on his website that's pretty sweet; he reminds me of a quieter derek webb circa 2000ish. if you can, listen to 'priest and the iron rain.'
4. life's crazy; again: apologies for being largely incommunicado. 10 days folks.. probably a celebration that night too (december 11th). if not, then after liane's b-day stuff the next day.
5. the lovely sheena is amazing. and really sappy. and the rest is private. :)
6. soup is really cheap at safeway right now. like, the microwaveable ones are a buck each (instead of three!).
7. get to see my housemate phil perform tonight. awesome.
8. putting sin to death is necessary and only God accomplishes it. but we choose whether we will freely participate.
9. the word 'cute' has entered my vocabulary in a very limited sense. I don't know what this means.
10. it's interesting that in first thessalonians 4, paul talks about pleasing God and his first practical suggestion is to flee sexual immorality. that probably says something about the church he was writing to, but it's also a reminder of the fact that our sexual life is not a box separate from the rest: it is the most intimate and revealing expression of love and obedience on this earth (to God and in my case a woman) and therefore of our present being.
10a. connection to idolatry and unfaithfulness.
11. 'it is so hard to believe precisely because it is so hard to obey.' [!]
12. there are some things that can be known but most be set aside; a form of earthly (and perhaps even revealed) truth that would try to replace Authority.
13. quantum behaviour offers awesome metaphors for human interaction.
14. when people talk about separation of church and state, somehow it became common knowledge that personal religious belief should not (in our republic) affect or determine political persuasion. so, people that don't support abortion because of religious belief (like myself) are attempting to violate separation of church and state. but this is complete bullshit and people should know it! nowhere in the constitution or any legal document has it ever been written that people are allowed to support a political cause only for certain state-sanctioned reasons. if congress passes a law and people justified that law on religious grounds, that doesn't breach church and state. argh.
14a. gay marriage is another great example; so is stem-cell research. let congress pass laws! if you don't like those laws, elect new representatives who pledge to repeal those laws and pass new ones that you agree with! quit whining about 'unconstitutionality' when you really mean 'I disagree! hard!'
14b. by trying to make the constitution say a bunch of things it doesn't (and thereby substitute ill-founded judicial authority for representative government), we are in far more danger of having a pseudo-religious government than from a bunch of christians who want to pass policies in accordance with their beliefs.
14c. again, what audacity! 'you're only allowed to support a policy if you support it for certain reasons that I decide!' as though the act of deciding what's sanctioned isn't blatantly religious in nature.
15. this business in sudan with the british teacher is awful. savages.
16. similar with saudi arabia and the woman who was raped; and then sentenced to be whipped and go to prison.
17. multiculturalism has become state-supported dogma in some circles. or at least, folks are trying to make that happen. how else can we see human-rights-violation charges for an expression of free speech?
17a. like the folks crying out against european cartoonists a year ago for their 'hateful expression.' what about the christians/jews murdered by rioting crowds in the middle east?
18. this 'annapolis peace process' is a total fraud. as revealed by hamas coming out right after and talking about how there's no room for jews in the middle east. imagine if israel made an official statement that there was no room for palestinians in palestine.
18a. right up there with that nonsense a summer ago: hezbollah starts war with israel; israel responds to acts of war with [gasp!] acts of war; hezbollah targets israeli civilians and then operates from civilian zones in lebanon; israel fights back; world condemns israel for 'disproportionate' warfare in addition to deliberately targeting civilians; hezbollah fills rockets with shrapnel to maximize israeli civilian misery; followed by silence.
18b. once you make excuses for a person or group's choices ('they're oppressed!'), you've tried to strip them of their most fundamental human expression: responsibility for their freely chosen actions.
19. ok, enough self-righteousness from me. God willing.
20. why is it so hard to behold things that have factual basis without becoming self-righteous about it? why does observation suck in my pride so quickly? the judgment of others that I fall into is unacceptable.
20a. knowledge is a clanging cymbal in the face of love. just because something might be true doesn't make it supersede the call to love.
21. sheena's way too good for me: still too true. undeserved and rich love..
22. dinner. :)

eclectica superbia

the mentality of a seattle pedestrian: 'by law, I am entitled to inconvenience anyone within 100 yards; and if I should inconvenience you, ye shalt be delighted.'

you know what they say about gas in a vacuum.. [in the absence of true religion, man will substitute idolatry that soothes his conscience]
- and with every new idolatry comes a new inquisition! 'ye shalt inquire/think/travel as I mandate! and ye shalt be delighted!'

the modus operandi of governmental generosity: the provision of the grand inquisitor. 'let us unite under the earthly banner of bread and thereby fashion happiness for all! [for is not living slavery preferable to dying freedom?]'

where the 'definition' substitutes for argument and all applaud: for, if I obscure fact with language, what becomes of discourse? how can we inquire when the very words that enable inquiry are removed or rendered meaningless? [if 'acts of war' are merely an instance of 'irresponsibility' and, by this language, I enforce the personal ethic, I have destroyed - by definition - the question of casus belli. 'there is no need for discourse/inquiry because we already know the answer!']

generosity at the point of a societal sword: some words about 'living by the sword' come to mind..

---

say I generate a deductive program: I must begin with some set of hypotheses and criteria - chosen by me! the conclusion is the definition, but the definition was a choice. and who are you to criticize or demand my choice?

ahh, but I can be [must be!] held accountable here on one point, for no matter what definitions I choose, the following is definition-invariant:
'I cannot claim to not contradict myself when, in fact, I contradict myself.'

and so, yes, I can define whatever I choose; but if I step beyond the humility of the mathematician (who freely recognizes the hedonism of his act of definition), then I contradict myself before all.

an example: the conclusion of a definition justifying the choice of definition.
- this is the logical content of political rhetoric, whether from the 'old school' or its 'shining examples of purity and light,' hailed as the saviours of the modern age.
- it is the vacuum of reason that has inevitably followed from the degradation of language.

---

I just started reading karl barth; thus far, it's been as natural as washing in a stream.

the growth of love..

is a tender and fiery affair.

all things in their time under heaven: this is sovereignty.

true reconciliation is as simple as grace.

relationship is not ownership.

"seek ye first" and "all shall be added;" including perfect, covering righteousness.

to soar in love; and yet fresh!

and madness yet continues..