Through the Looking Glass: Every hair is being numbered -- eBay has every grain of sand. eBay is serving this very, very powerful function which nobody ever intended for it. eBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It's like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement.
"For the Love of God": It's said that the only thing an auction record proves is the existence of two dumb rich guys, competing to pay more for something than anyone else on the planet has ever thought it was worth.
Johnny Cash's dream: I'm gonna kneel and pray everyday
Lest I should become vain along the way
I'm just an old chunk of coal, now Lord
But I'm gonna be a diamond some day
...
I'm gonna be the World's best friend
I'm gonna go around shaking everybody's hand
Hey, I'm gonna be the cotton-pickin' Rage of the Age
I'm gonna be a diamond some day
The impossible dream: Seeing my dream fade away, I did what any mature person does when faced with an uncomfortable reality: Search out someone who will tell you what you want to hear.
Math: Gift from God or Work of Man? Consider first a Baptist school in Texas whose description of a geometry course begins: Students will examine the nature of God as they progress in their understanding of mathematics. Students will understand the absolute consistency of mathematical principles and know that God was the inventor of that consistency. They will see God's nature revealed in the order and precision as they review foundational concepts while being able to demonstrate geometric thinking and spatial reasoning. The study of the basics of geometry through making and testing conjectures regarding mathematical and real-world patterns will allow the students to understand the absolute consistency of God as seen in the geometric principles he created.
Defender of the Faith? About two-thirds of the way into “Moses and Monotheism”, Freud makes a point that is simple and rather profound — the sort of point that Freud at his best excels in making. Judaism’s distinction as a faith, he says, comes from its commitment to belief in an invisible God, and from this commitment, many consequential things follow. Freud argues that taking God into the mind enriches the individual immeasurably. The ability to believe in an internal, invisible God vastly improves people’s capacity for abstraction. “The prohibition against making an image of God — the compulsion to worship a God whom one cannot see,” he says, meant that in Judaism “a sensory perception was given second place to what may be called an abstract idea — a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality.”
Original sine: From Precalculus for Christian Schools, a textbook published by Bob Jones University. The book is designed to help students “conform their thinking to biblical precepts.” The concept of limit can be used to illustrate an important truth. Suppose you lived eighty years and there was no life after death; your life on the earth would be 80⁄80 = 1 = 100% of your existence. Now, let’s assume that your life after death was eighty years long: your earthly life would be 80⁄160 = 1⁄2 = 50% of your entire existence. If life after death were 720 years, your life here would be only 80⁄(80+720) = 0.1 = 10%. Now extend it to eternity: [the limit as x approaches]∞80⁄(80+x) = 0. In other words, this life is very insignificant in light of eternity. It is no wonder James said, Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.
bin Laden feels your sub-prime pain: As for what comes after: Peace be upon he who follows the Guidance. People of America: I shall be speaking to you on important topics which concern you, so lend me your ears. ... The Jews are alive with us and we have not incinerated them, but we are a people who don't sleep under oppression and reject humiliation and disgrace, and we take revenge on the people of tyranny and aggression, and the blood of the Muslims will not be spilled with impunity, and the morrow is nigh for he who awaits. ... This is why I tell you: as you liberated yourselves before from the slavery of monks, kings, and feudalism, you should liberate yourselves from the deception, shackles and attrition of the capitalist system." "If you were to ponder it well, you would find that in the end, it is a system harsher and fiercer than your systems in the Middle Ages. The capitalist system seeks to turn the entire world into a fiefdom of the major corporations under the label of "globalization" in order to protect democracy." "And Iraq and Afghanistan and their tragedies; and the reeling of many of you under the burden of interest-related debts, insane taxes and real estate mortgages; global warming and its woes; and the abject poverty and tragic hunger in Africa: all of this is but one side of the grim face of this global system." "So it is imperative that you free yourselves from all of that and search for an alternative, upright methodology in which it is not the business of any class of humanity to lay down its own laws to its own advantage at the expense of the other classes as is the case with you, since the essence of man-made positive laws is that they serve the interests of those with the capital and thus make the rich richer and the poor poorer." "The infallible methodology is the methodology of Allah, the Most High, who created the heavens and earth and created the Creation and is the Most Kind and All-Informed and the Knower of the souls of His slaves and the methodology that best suits them." And if you would like to get to know some of the reasons for your losing of your war against us, then read the book of Michael Scheuer [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] in this regard.
Oddly, there is no mention of universal health care. Then again, who but a fool would invest so much to prolong the infinitesimal? A masochist. | 
