January 2012
9 posts
“There is no more powerful mechanism for the short-term amplification of...”
– George Cooper, The Origin of Financial Crises
WatchPhilip Goodchild on the Global Financial System. How I spent my Friday evening. Verdict: You shouldn’t just watch it. You should watch it twice. And take notes.
God is dead. And we have killed him -- you and I....
The essence of the power of finance capital is not the accumulation of past labour. To the contrary, the history of past monetary transactions merely determines one’s present accumulated stock — a quantity, not a power. When one turns to the power of capital, however, one steps into an entirely heterogeneous element: value of credit is determined by expectations of future interest. The...
“It is permissible, yes profitable, to call the mass a sacrifice; not on its own...”
– Martin Luther
December 2011
7 posts
Annual Analysis of My Top 20 Scrobbled Artists of...
I deleted all my old blogs along with all of the content and kept no backups, deliberately, so I have no means of comparison of this data with prior years. Oh well. I’ll just have to throw it up on Tumblr.
Anyhow, for what it’s worth, which is undoubtedly nothing, here are my Top 20 artists listened to this year (excluding the CDs I listen to in the car which would probably have put...
My Luddite Score
16% Luddite
As calculated from The Telegraph’s list of 50 things killed by technology. I’ve highlighted the ones which I personally still do: 8/50.
1. Ring the cinema to find out times
2. Going into the travel agents to research a holiday
3. Record things using VHS
4. Dial directory enquiries
5. Use public telephones
6. Book tickets for events over the phone
7. Print ...
November 2011
4 posts
The Astonishingly Individualistic Conception of...
“…by the end of the thirteenth century the sacrament of marriage had come to be defined in such a way that it was the two principals, the man and woman marrying, who made the marriage bond, rather than a priest. The sacramental bond was created by the mutual consent of the two parties, and the two parties alone. Marriage vows did not have to be exchanged in a church, nor was a...
Über-Enlightenment
In Hamann’s vocabulary, therefore, the word “enlightenment” is always loaded with irony, arising from the discrepancy between his contemporaries’ secular and his own theological understanding of the term. For his contemporaries it meant an awaken ing to the immanent, “natural light” of reason, typically conceived in univocal terms, i.e., in the absence of any analogical relation to, or dependence...
October 2011
1 post
Enlightenment
One day the Buddha told the story of the blind men and the elephant. A king ordered all of his subjects who were blind to be assembled into groups and he placed an elephant in their midst. He then asked them to describe what was in their midst. One group touched the head of an elephant and said “It’s a water-pot”. One group felt the ears of the elephant and said “It’s...
September 2011
4 posts
What I happened to be reading just now before I...
The Theodorus Nitz commercial squeaked, ‘In the presence of strangers do you feel you don’t quite exist? Do they seem not to notice you, as if you were invisible? On a bus or spaceship do you sometimes look around you and discover that no one, absolutely no one, recognizes you or cares about you and quite possibly may even—-‘
With his carbon dioxide-powered pellet rifle,...
“Our apostles knew through our Lord Jesus Christ that there would be strife over...”
– 1 Clement (ca. AD 90)
Score one point to Erasmus
Luther vs. Erasmus on the “perspicuity” of Scripture:
The notion that in Scripture some things are recondite and all is not plain was spread by the godless Sophists…
St. Peter on the Epistles of St. Paul:
He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand…
June 2011
2 posts
“Ignorant themselves of the forces of nature and wanting to have company in their...”
– William of Conches, c. 1090 – after 1154 —- de philosophia mundi
May 2011
6 posts
A poop too great for the gods.
shitmystudentswrite:
On the sacrilegious treatment of Hector’s corpse in The Iliad: “This defecation is of such magnitude that the gods have to intervene.”
The Scale of the Universe →
Canadians make me feel sick in my stomach also... →
April 2011
2 posts
http://twitpic.com/4jlorb →
March 2011
1 post
February 2011
3 posts
Some LCMS Inside Baseball...
Immensely enjoying (if that is the word) reading the Burkee book. And there are some hearty LOLs, in and amongst the carnage, along the way. I particularly liked this one early on in the read:
(Context: President Behnken, a gentlemen and “babe in Academe” convenes a meeting of Missouri theological “elites” way back in the early 60s. J.A.O. “Jack” Presus is one...
“A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland ;
showing...”
January 2011
2 posts
This -->
Financial markets severely restrict the freedom to determine policy held by national governments — by threatening capital flight, by imposing interest rates, and by moving to countries which offer the best package of interest rates, deregulation and security. The mobility of finance capital is already leading to competition among governments to reduce taxes, to deregulate and to reduce...
December 2010
8 posts
“Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of...”
– Jaroslav Pelikan
November 2010
9 posts
