Here we are at nobbies for breaky after the big move.

Just showing Graham how to use the wordpress android app.

From James 5:

Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming upon you.  Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days.  Look! The wages you failed to pay the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty.  You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter.  You have condemned and murdered innocent men, who were not opposing you.  Be patient, then, brothers, until the Lord’s coming. See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop and how patient he is for the autumn and spring rains.  You too, be patient and stand firm, because the Lord’s coming is near.

The bloke who wrote this nearly 2000 years ago was probably one of Jesus’ younger brothers. He saw what it is to be true and faithful and patient. Truth is patient.

He has a lot of other interesting things to say. I expect he saw a lot of interesting things.

In response to this:

The recent Occupy Wall Street protests have aimed their message at the income disparity between the 1% richest Americans and the rest of the country. But what happens when you expand that and look at the 1% richest of the entire world? Some really interesting numbers emerge. If there were a global Occupy Wall Street protest, people as well off as Linda Frakes might actually be the target.

In America, the top 1% earn more than $380,000 per year. We are, however, among the richest nations on Earth. How much do you need to earn to be among the top 1% of the world?

$34,000.

Why stop there? Why not go further?

Every human on the planet is no doubt part of the top 1% of privilege compared to the other 99% of life on our planet. And even pond slime has its privileged position as part of the minuscule proportion of matter manifesting life as compared to inanimate matter on our planet. And perhaps our whole life bearing planet is in turn part of an even smaller proportion of privileged happenstance in a vast beautiful but barren universe.

But where does that get us? Very far from the point.

Probably less than 1% of the occupy movement are actually motivated by base envy.

The point is that with privilege comes responsibility. The old word for it is stewardship.

From those to whom much has been given, much will be required.

If it is very clear that the 1% are fucking it up (and it is!) then it is not wrong – in fact we have a duty – to remind them (us) that they (we) are answerable for what is being done with what has been given. And it is in the nature of things that we are always answerable downwards as well as upwards. If the cry from below is not responded to, then the thunder from above will have to be.

They is we, but let that not be a means of diluting responsibility. There might be a certain nobility in that on the part of those who have less, but it would be utterly despicable cowardice and worse on the part of those who have more. From those to whom most has been given. most IS required.

Some thoughts prompted by this post… Thought Gadgets: A brief history of how you stopped being human

Tweaking a photo with Instagram does not make it artistic. Selective redefinition of terms like ‘creativity’ and ‘intelligence’ makes for category errors rather than creativity.

So – come to think of it – maybe iPhones DO enable artificial intelligence. (In which case we should stop playing with our digital appendages: even though its makes the logo bigger we really only need that because we’re going blind?) Forgive my grim wit please – but there IS something about AI coming which is self-deluding, profoundly unsatisfying, and a little narcissistic – not just a surplus of cognitive shallowness.

So there is more to us than what we think. Yep. Thank God. We are not men without chests – even though we have tried.

So we can be caught in our own traps. Yep. That has always been true too – thank God.

So the solution to the problem of making our own singular god which we then have to cringe before is to keep it pocket sized? Or eat it before it eats us? Become it before it becomes us?

With apology to Woody Allen and our mother who is the source of the dust from which we and our gadgets are born – ‘Artifice Wrecks’ might be the name of this story.

Which reminds me that we are children – not robots. Men – not mannequins. Children with a father – an artist who creates beyond our wildest imaginings – who gives us a hand in his creating.

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,
When our deep plots do pall: and that should teach us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will,–

I woke up one morning this week with these words on my mind:

Even in the darkest night
we walk through fields of blazing lights.
There is nothing hidden
that will not be revealed.

and I felt like it was the light which had penetrated my dreams and woken me up.

There are many of those blazing lights. They are all around us. My wife is one of them. It is good to be near her, beside her. Truth and love blaze within her, wake me up, make me warm,  keep me real. The light that leaks out of her reminds me that the best part of truth is lived out in flesh and blood. I’m deeply grateful that she is who she is.

It’s time to put my blogging hat on. (T)hats the one that keeps the sun out of my eyes while I’m sitting on our beautiful eastward facing veranda in the morning with my netbook on my knee. (The eastward facing is beautiful – not necessarily the veranda.) My blogging hat is also my walking hat and gardening hat, sometimes my climbing on the roof hat, sometimes my having a cup of tea and reading a book hat, at the moment my talking about my hat hat, but never my bike riding hat. And definitely not my driving hat – at least not yet – and I hope never. I’m not old enough for that yet – and anyway the hat doesn’t have a broad enough brim. Now my wife or one of the kids will say that I sometimes forget to take it off while I’m driving. I guess that’s how hats become driving hats – but I don’t want that to happen yet. If the hat fits, wear it. This one doesn’t quite – because like most hats its a little too small – but it does have a nice penguin on it and the words  linux.conf.au  Wellington 2010.

Pretty soon – if not already – it will be time to put spikey bits on my bike hat and get cranky at magpies again. Hopefully I’ll get a ride in later today and find out where the season is really hat.

Sorry -  I can’t resist this.

From an ABC news article:
(http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-10/society-role-in-london-riots/2833168)

But Ms Batmanghelidjh says many British youths have lived with that feeling of fear for their entire lives.

“This happened to the public for a few days. But many of these children are chronically frightened – they get attacked in their own homes, they get attacked on the estates,” she said.

“[To them] it feels like at that point civil society doesn’t step in to, for example, create a robust child protection structure to protect these children, or to protect them from attacks at street level.

What a good idea! It’s called family.

“So from a young people’s perspective, their conditions of fright have been chronically ignored.”

She says the way to counter the problem is to create communities which engage and support disadvantaged youth.

Yup. It’s called family.

“Sort out the civil structures around these young people, provide for them adults who are caring; who can provide a healthy counter culture to the perverse street culture that they are exposed to,” she said.

Yup! It was invented a long time ago. It’s called family.

“Then you have the beginnings of the making of a genuine community that includes these young people. And then you can legitimately hold them accountable.”

Absolutely! It’s called family.

The things that corrode family corrode society. Maggie thatcher was wrong – there IS such a thing as society. But the lefties and libertarians and free-love loonies are also wrong – society starts at home.

Remember all that rhetoric about the fabric of society? We’re all either letting it rip or making a stitch in time – or maybe nine. There isn’t any neutral ground.

Sorry -  I can’t resist this.

From an ABC news article:
(http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-10/society-role-in-london-riots/2833168)

But Ms Batmanghelidjh says many British youths have lived with that feeling of fear for their entire lives.

“This happened to the public for a few days. But many of these children are chronically frightened – they get attacked in their own homes, they get attacked on the estates,” she said.

“[To them] it feels like at that point civil society doesn’t step in to, for example, create a robust child protection structure to protect these children, or to protect them from attacks at street level.

What a good idea! It’s called family.

“So from a young people’s perspective, their conditions of fright have been chronically ignored.”

She says the way to counter the problem is to create communities which engage and support disadvantaged youth.

Yup. It’s called family.

“Sort out the civil structures around these young people, provide for them adults who are caring; who can provide a healthy counter culture to the perverse street culture that they are exposed to,” she said.

Yup! It was invented a long time ago. It’s called family.

“Then you have the beginnings of the making of a genuine community that includes these young people. And then you can legitimately hold them accountable.”

Absolutely! It’s called family.

The things that corrode family corrode society. Maggie thatcher was wrong – there IS such a thing as society. But the lefties and libertarians and free-love loonies are also wrong – society starts at home.

Remember all that rhetoric about the fabric of society? We’re all either letting it rip or making a stitch in time – or maybe nine. There isn’t any neutral ground.

I don’t know anything about the source of this article http://mondediplo.com/2011/08/02iceland on Iceland but it shows in microcosm what is actually going on in the world economy. Collapse is inevitable and has been for some time and the story in Iceland is typical of HOW the white-anting has occurred.

It may well be that we get a rise in the stock market before a much bigger drop – (a friend of mine who has a wave theory of market psychology has been predicting that – but he didn’t expect this drop to be as big as it has been) -  but up and down or just down we can still expect much bigger drops to come. The general economy (jobs, houses etc) will start to really feel the heat probably about 6 months after that. I don’t know anything about the ‘physics’ of crowd psychology but we all know about the physics of gravity, and Wiley coyote ran off the cliff quite some time ago.

The bigger question in my mind is what do we do about the social problems that will follow. The ‘arab spring’ has been largely a result of economic problems impacting the middle class. How do we make the best of what happens? I’m asking myself that question as a member of a Christian community / mission order as well as dad / family member / individual. We can’t all shout “We’ll all be rooned!” and head for the hills.

This is not a double-dip recession – it is a continuation of what started in 2007 and has been held off temporarily by making things very much worse by sending governments (tax payers) broke by bailing out banks that deserved to fail. Ordinary savings in those banks could have been safe-guarded for a very much lower cost.

At another level this is a continuation of what first showed itself in 1987 and would / should have been able to run its course back then with less damage than will now occur if the general public hadn’t been encouraged to take on so much debt to keep the bubble growing in the years since then. The things that we have been encouraged to put our hope in – housing and super – will now show themselves to be debt-fueled rather than savings based.

You could say you don’t get something for nothing – but that plays to the lower side of human nature and perversely avoids the core moral issues.

I think a more sensible way to say it is that if you are not actively doing something good then bad things will happen: and if you do good things and bad things still happen – at least you still got to do good. Another way I like to think about is this: Never under-estimate the power and value of being a servant – God is the servant of his entire creation.

(This is a slightly edited version of something I wrote over a couple of posts to a private e-mail list a few days ago.  It is edited just enough for it to make sense outside of the list context – nothing material is changed.)