Category Archives: Life style

Self determination and health

Just a brief note, as I haven’t yet reached certainty about some things I hope to write about in the future.

I was reading some literature about Scanian food-culture, books by Nils-Arvid Bringéus and Bo Swensson, and articles in the magazine Svenska Landsmål ock Svenskt Folkliv (Transl: Swedish Land-lects (or perhaps Regiolects) and Swedish Ethnology), kindly provided in PDF on-line by the government agency ISOF.

It looks like Scanian food-culture has been altered into its diametrical opposite over the last 300 years. So whereas old recipes often have the form of: mix two or three ingredients plus a herb, today’s food culture mixes a long list of ingredients plus sugar. Since ingredients are digested at different paces, when many of them get mixed, some of them will feed pathogens instead of feeding us.
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Progress and the Progressive

OPINION + CODE
Progress means a ‘moving forward’, something ‘getting better or worse (!)’ as opposed to remaining in a state.

An illustration of the word progressive could be progressive algorithms, for example Bubble sort is progressive whereas Insertion sort isn’t. Bubble sort iterates through a list comparing the current item with the next item and swapping them if they are in the wrong order. After a half run, we have a list which is almost correctly sorted. Insertion sort removes all items to a temporary storage, picks one item and inserts it in its proper place. After a half run, we have a list with only half of its entries in it. That is, a half run of Insertion sort creates more corruption and of a more serious kind, than Bubble sort, when it is interrupted midway. For this reason many engineers and hackers like progressive algorithms because of their progressiveness, which is a good quality because an engineer, it is assumed, would produce code that accomplished constructive things for a user, a product or a project.
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The “Christian country”

With this article, the older article 16 causes of Sweden’s migration crisis will drop out from the front page. A 17th cause would be: an attempt by Atheists, Humanists and Socialists to provoke a war between Christians and Muslims. If successful, they would be able to say “Look how much trouble religion causes! Let’s do away with it.” I am happy to observe that so far, neither Christians or Muslims have swallowed the bait, in Sweden.

An article by a Lawrence W Reed in the Washington Examiner, arguing that Jesus was not a socialist generated some debate. Socialism has many definitions. Reed focuses on the distribution and ownership of property.

I would like to add that another characteristic is Socialists are social. They have what they call “social competence” which makes them able to benefit from the presence of people around them. To the contrary, many Christians become ascetics, because if they are together with other people, it is usually the other people who benefit whereas the Christian him-/herself gets exhausted.

Men, of whom the world was not worthy, became as wanderers in the desert, and in mountains, and in dens, and in caverns of the earth. — Hebrews 11:38, Etheridge.

So then, given the undisputable subjective opinion that Christianity is almost diametrically opposite to Socialism, which some people claim is a “leftist” ideology, does that mean Christianity is right? Sure. Is it rightist? Not so sure.

Truth is holy. If you try to approach it you might become holey, because our adversaries often arrange ideological trenches on either side of truth, shooting at everyone who comes near. One arrangement of trenches is the division of people into leftists and rightists. It is very important for them that you learn and appreciate the fact that this division came about in the French parliament in 1789 because persons with the one extreme view were seated to the left and persons with the other extreme view were seated to the right. Otherwise, you might get weird ideas when you read Ecclesiastes 10:2:

A wise man’s heart is at his right hand; but a fool’s heart at his left.

Actually “hand” is supplied by the translator, whether from Hebrew, Syriac or Greek. If the left-right political dimension existed back then, then perhaps this is about it. However, we also have Jonah 4:11…

and shall not I spare Nineve, the great city, in which dwell more than twelve times 10,000 human beings, who don’t know their right hand or their left hand; and also much cattle?

They don’t know their hands. Um’kay. But if Nineve didn’t have the left-right division in its political establishment, that would actually be a pretty good reason for God to send a prophet and to protect the city for yet a little while. (It is reasonable to supply the word hand in these two passages, however compare the Greek text of Luke 6:6 where a hand is explicitly involved.)

Coincidentally, where I live, the left-right split is most vehementally defended by people who absolutely hate the Christian god. Why? It might be unsettling to a socialist if there are a lot of honest workers moving around in society who think for them selves and draw their own conclusions. The solution then, is to provide these people with a leader and with spiritual guides so that they act in predictable ways. Give them a little victory here and a little victory there, but maintain a society where the selfish liars will always come out on top.

But thou, when thou art doing thy alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth, that thine alms may be in secret; and thy Father, who seeth in secret, shall recompense thee in openness. — Matthew 6:3 .. again ‘hand’ is supplied.

In Socialist societies alms are handled by the state and the people cannot afford to give anything beyond what they pay in taxes.

Wheat and etiquette

Don’t tell anyone, but in an effort to find the most humble facts about weeds, I dived into a container and found a short writing which mentions a weed whose Scanian name had a prefix which might match the Hebrew קפא kʷafa as found in Zephaniah 1:12:

והיה בעת ההיא אחפש את ירושלם בנרות ופקדתי על האנשים הקפאים על שמעריהם

(And) it-will-happen in-time that I-search Jerusalem with-lamps and I-appoint over people the petrified [ones] upon dregs (lees – a rest of the fermentation of wines)
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Culture and Anticulture

When both sides of the political debate agree on something, it is often time to reconsider it with a contrarian spirit. Today everyone seem to agree that culture is good. Is it? It depends on what culture is. It is very easy to agree on something that can have lots of definitions.

The word `culture´stems from Latin cultura, meaning something that is cultivated. The farming-and-vegetables-sense can be unambigously expressed as `agriculture´, so that the culture without agri- could take a new meaning.

One reasonable definition is to say that the culture of a human society is that which humans within that society choose to do and produce spontaneously. This mirrors the agro- definition because, if you sow tomato seeds, add water and sunshine, you still don’t decide how that plant will look but the plant decides for it self based on its genes and what building blocks it finds in the soil.

People who don’t care to pick a definition tend to default to defining culture as that which government decides is culture. This is very much in contrast with the previous definition which required spontaneity on the part of individuals.

The figure below illustrates how two persons can misunderstand each other by using the two definitions above, respectively.

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With Lorries in Traffic — Q&A

Why did the lorry flash its high beams?
When a lorry passes another, it is usually hard for the passing driver to know when the rear end of his trailer has passed and it is safe to move back to the right lane. The one who gets passed will therefore often flash the high beams as a signal indicating when it is time to change lanes.
Other resons may include: salute a friend, signal to an oncoming to switch to low beams, mistake when fumbling for another control and a signal that something is wrong with the vehicle ahead.
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Maþetes describes the early Christians

OPINION In Ante-Nicene Fathers, we find this description of the early Christians from, probably, the 2nd century:

For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines.
But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly paradoxical method of life.
They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers.
They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not cast away fœtuses. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all.

So, the Cristians were not distinguished from other men by the customs which they observed. Why is this important? It is important because if your customs are incompatible with the customs of other men, you will not be able to communicate with them. If you can’t communicate with men who don’t belong to your group, you will not be able to see through lies about these people that someone from your own community wants to establish, or established as fact long ago. Such lies could even make you scared of these men.

Religious leaders know this, so they try to set you apart — holy in an unnecessary way — as so different from other people that you dare not talk to them lest you become contaminated by their unpious manners, and they dare not talk to you lest they get ensnared by pharisaic logic and dragged down into a black hole of cultic subjection under a god that always seems to decide according to the wishes of a group of men who also publish that god’s decrees, or perhaps interpret them.

It would seem that the best solution is to do like the early Christians did according to Mathetes — to be very much like everybody else and feel free to talk to any member of society. (Luke 5:30-32) However, what do we do when society itself embraces extreme customs?