Now for something completely different. Here are YouTube videos of two Australian groups from the past, one singing about “the afternoon or evening arrival of a cold front” on the southeast coast, which is called the cool change. And another group, which came on the scene so long ago that maybe only a few readers will remember them, who sing about a popular subject of those days, the promised land of love which we all reach and pass before we know it.
PJ Media appreciates your comments that abide by the following guidelines:
1. Avoid profanities or foul language unless it is contained in a necessary quote or is relevant to the comment.
2. Stay on topic.
3. Disagree, but avoid ad hominem attacks.
4. Threats are treated seriously and reported to law enforcement.
5. Spam and advertising are not permitted in the comments area.
These guidelines are very general and cannot cover every possible situation. Please don't assume that PJ Media management agrees with or otherwise endorses any particular comment. We reserve the right to filter or delete comments or to deny posting privileges entirely at our discretion. Please note that comments are reviewed by the editorial staff and may not be posted immediately. If you feel your comment was filtered inappropriately, please email us at story@pjmedia.com.
I live in Melbourne Australia. No matter how many times I experience a “Cool Change”, it still freaks me out. Typically, the hot dry desert winds, blowing North to South off the land to the sea, are usually 40C+ and have been blowing for 2-3 days. It saps the City.
In oposition to this wind are the Roaring Fourties, blowing in from the Southern Ocean, and vectoring South to North.
The Southern Ocean wind always wins. From my office I can see the nature’s clash moving across Port Phillip Bay. A line of white horses indicates where the Cool Change is. The radio stations track its progress and give you a countdown when it will hit you.
And when it does, what a change. Temperatures drop 12C in a minute. Scantily-clad girls, once baking in the heat, suddenly find cardigans from nowhere. The dust in the air goes and you feel the glorious cool on the goose-pimples on your skin.
You’re alive.
But to extend my take on w‘s sub-text, overheating generates its own cooling process, and maybe takes us back to the Promised Land of reality, here’s my song.
However, even the Promised Land is not the same, second time around, as Missy Higgins (also Australian) tells us in Where I Stood.
ADE
Ah, the days when singers and bands wore coats and ties on stage…
Funny thing was, they could actually sing then.
You don’t suppose there is a connection…
I liked that Seekers song when I was a young blood and was naive. Then cynicism and realism grabbed my coattails. I preferred the Steely Dan
song from the early 70′s, “Only a Fool Would say That”
A world became one of salads and sun
Only a fool would say that
A boy with a plan, a natural man
Wearing a white stetson hat…
Naivity reigns in Obama land. There really is a new land coming called the Promised Land. Just be careful what you wish for. I am reading Martin Gilbert’s “First World War”. In turn of the twentieth century Europe, there was a clamor for change. The old regimes were passe, it was time to sweep out the old and sweep in the new. Several million casualties and a ruined continent later change came and it probably wasn’t one anyone hoped for except Lenin and Trotsky and soon Hitler.
Only a Fool Would Say That
Having recently read both the article and 25-20 posts on the return of the Fairness Doctrine. And having recently read the Obama platform and responses to it , the one striking thing is that nobody talks of revolution.
Is it that there exists such faith in a Marxist President and government bureaucracy that no one feels anything will change? Is it that as a people we have become so illiterate in history that we have forgotten what comes with Marxist rule?
I am truly in wonderment over the lack of discussion of the trouble this country faces with the degree of radicalism we are about to face with two, perhaps all three of the branches of government. I assure you all you have to do is read Russian history from 1917 onward to get a taste of what we are moving rapidly toward.
I fully expect “community organizers” to begin very quickly taking names of those who pose a threat to the state.
Is this not a synopsis of what Obama has in store?
“The degree of his slavery varies according to the ratio between that which he is forced to yield up and that which he is allowed to retain; and it matters not whether his master is a single person or a society. If, without option, he has to labour for the society, and receives from the general stock such portion as the society awards him, he becomes a slave to the society. Socialistic arrangements necessitate an enslavement of this kind; and towards such an enslavement many recent measures, and still more the measures advocated, are carrying us.”
That my friends is the direction we will be forced into taking,….
“and receives from the general stock such portion as the society awards him, he becomes a slave to the society.”
Herbert Spencer in Man versus the State
Most revolutions happen in a period of optimism under a cloud of imperfect information. There were genuine problems in Czarist Russia and the belief among the urbanites that Lenin and his magic formulas could solve them. Castro’s Revolution was like that too and so too were practically all the others. In every case the intelligensia later changed its mind, though the process sometimes took decades.
For many people, there is no vindication after a failed revolution, only survival. One of the Vietnamese priests in our parish is a refugee from the wonderful regime in Hanoi. The one Ayers bombed American targets to support. His homeland is lost to him. All that is left is his personal freedom and fugitive existence. That’s the price of losing to tyranny. Occasionally, people are lucky enough to get their freedoms back after a long struggle. It took 14 years to bring down Marcos. But he was only a little tinpot dictator.
But while individual vindication is usually out of the question, tyranny always falls in the end. Jose Rizal wrote “I die without seeing the dawn brighten over my native land! You, who have it to see, welcome it–and forget not those who have fallen during the night!” Later, he withdraws even the demand for remembrance, as those who can read Spanish will see from an excerpt from his last poem. It is enough for him, as he wrote those lines, that he kept the light alive. It never dies.
w,
“But while individual vindication is usually out of the question, tyranny always falls in the end.”
Not so sure about that, at least as it applies to life on earth. A particular tyrant may fall, but is almost always replaced by another.
When I lived in Sydney, listening to JJ and then Triple J, my favorite song of all was Mental as Anything’s “The Nips are Getting Bigger” –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HSsE-ZP5C0&feature=iv&annotation_id=event_731696
That’s Martin Plaza singing the lead, Greedy Smith on the organ, without a lit cigarette sticking out of his ear for a change (notice the whiskey bottle on his keyboard). I’d see these guys in packed beach bars, crowds of 800 to 1,000 sloshing through the beer-wet floors, ahhhh, that was heaven. Did I mention they have girls in Oz?
w,
“But while individual vindication is usually out of the question, tyranny always falls in the end.”
Not so sure about that, at least as it applies to life on earth. A particular tyrant may fall, but is almost always replaced by another.
One of the things a Theory of Everything is supposed to accomplish is obviate the necessity for God. Since that Theory already explains everything, the Universe is it’s own first cause and that’s that. I’ve wondered though, whether any real Theory of Everything has to have the property that it has to go on forever. If we think of the Theory of Everything as a kind of replacement for God, can it be the sort of God who will turn the light out on Himself? And if that Theory were “good” in itself and not tyranny, then tyranny must be a passing thing.
If you are disinclined to place a wager on the existence of God what about placing a wager on the existence of Freedom? Is Freedom an illusion and does tyranny win in the end? As Orwell said, “imagine a boot in the human face — forever!” Or is Freedom somehow indestructible because the Universe itself is free?
I confess that I don’t know. But I think, as with God, all of us as a practical matter must cast our lots at one point or the other in our lives just as if we believed or disbelieved in God; just as if we believed or disbelieved in Freedom. One of my favorite passages in Tolkien is when Sam makes his wager that the Ring is not so powerful as people believe.
Rizal stepped out across the void reaching for that star. How he fared, I do not know. But I would rather follow him and Sam than live in a world where tyranny was forever.
Freedom is not an illusion. It’s a permanent and inherent quality because the mind is free. It’s the physical world of action where freedom can be crushed. And it can be crushed as long as our physical life forms exist.
You can’t go home again, no matter how often history repeats itself, you can’t go home again.
I hope my children learn this one thing above all, you can’t go home again.
I have to admit I am torn between responding with billy holiday, here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IYTx60s07A&feature=related
or BST’s spinning wheels explored here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi9sLkyhhlE&feature=related
You decide which is an illusion.
Cool change. Always loved the song but had no idea it alluded to an actual meteorological event. Thanks, Wretchard. I think I’d love to see that one day; it sounds wild.
Wretchard said
“One of the things a Theory of Everything is supposed to accomplish is obviate the necessity for God.”
I’m not so sure about that. I am assuming that a “Theory of Everything” is a Grand Unification Theory (GUT). A GUT could only describe our universe from the moment of creation. Anything outside of time and space is by definition unobservable. If something can not be observed then it can not be a scientific fact and therefore not a basis for a scientific theory.
It maybe possible to perceive that the universe is an artifact, i.e. created by an intelligence. However perceiving that the universe is NOT an artifact is probably a logical impossibility. Note that there is a difference between the nonperception of an untruth and the actuality of a truth.
w,
“If you are disinclined to place a wager on the existence of God ”
Oh, I definitely believe in the Christian God, but that actually strenghens the point I made. Assuming that is a valid belief, the majority of people (most likely) will be doomed to perpetual tyranny after their life on earth is over.
Jeez,
Did I up and sleep through the election?
One of the things a Theory of Everything is supposed to accomplish is obviate the necessity for God. Since that Theory already explains everything, the Universe is it’s own first cause and that’s that.
………
I don’t think that you could have a math that did that.
One of the 20th centuries great mathmaticials was Kurt Gödel .The mathematician Godel proved that a system of axioms can never be based on itself: statements from outside the system must be used in order to prove its consistency.
http://www.miskatonic.org/godel.html
The implication is that all logical system of any complexity are, by definition, incomplete; each of them contains, at any given time, more true statements than it can possibly prove according to its own defining set of rules.
http://www.miskatonic.org/godel.html
It’s probably because I’m dense, but I don’t understand what Wretchard at #9 is getting at. Can it be that you’d like to think a philosophical Theory of Everything really will one day arrive at an all-encompassing explanation for the nature of reality; and it will be found to be eternally good; and therefore, the slings and arrows we suffer in this life can be borne because in the end we can now know (because of the T of E) it’ll all come right? Because, a boot in the face forever can’t possibly be true!
But nothing in this world is forever. Even Sam’s star won’t go on forever.
But, confining things to mere earthly time and realm, I see no reason to assume the inevitable demise of tyranny. I can think of no supporting arguments for that (again, maybe due to my denseness) other than an expectation of answers from this T of E itself. The Christian’s reliance is on reason, faith and revelation. I can understand why one wouldn’t believe in God, but where one is left after rejecting faith and revelation, I shudder to think. The more rejection of God Is and Is Good, the more likely and the more enduring is tyranny.
I can see a point to physicists working on a “Theory of Everything,” but for philosophers to borrow that idea does seem to be aimed at obviating the necessity of a belief in God.
It’s probably because I’m dense, but I don’t understand what Wretchard at #9 is getting at.
I actually don’t believe in a “Theory of Everything”. For rational and other reasons I believe in God. And though I’m not entirely sure what’s in store for me, I’m content to leave things in God’s hands. Besides I have no choice.
But a Theory of Everything is the philosophical alternative to God. Assuming you could construct a Theory of Everything, my conjecture is that any such Theory would have have to posit an eternal universe. It seems counterintuive to assume a Theory of Everything which has no beginning but programs its own end. Turns off its own light.
In the context of the argument of whether tyranny can be eternal, or if you prefer, whether evil will be triumphant, this condition will only obtain if the Theory of Everything turns itself off. If it “yields” to chaos or nothingness. If it doesn’t, then tyranny, by definition doesn’t triumph because the Theory of Everything is ipso facto good, in that it is the way things should be.
Though I skipped a few steps, what I was trying to get at was whether one believed in God, or at worst, in a Theory of Everything, Sam’s star would shine brightly. And when it went out, it would be renewed by whatever followed. But given that God or a Theory of Everything exists, the darkness cannot triumph. Tyranny cannot hold sway forever.
That may not mean much for us, whose lives are circumscribed by a few years. But what of it? As Frodo said, “I will bear the Ring, though I do not know the way.”
Change you can believe in.
OR
Change you can make believe in.
Sorry to be so tough, W, but one must distinguish belief from make believe.
Anyway, I believe that we must believe, otherwise the next generation will not exist to create the TOE that I failed to create. Yes, belief has a selfish gene-survival motivation, a motivation to bear the Ring, though we do not know the way.
ADE
Just as an after-thought, I used to think that one could believe in anything and it would achieve the same objective – get up in the morning and procreate that night.
Since 9-11, I’ve changed my view; content is important.
9-11 exposed the fault-line in my thinking – paganism, as exemplified in Europe, leads to Yeats’ Second Coming. What a slouch was Nazi Germany, Russia. A (for me, newly discover) vicious religion gave the lie to religion being cool (I refer here, of course, to the Aztecs).
So now, I must make choices. Content is important. Sorta back to Where I Stood.
W
Your just deleted comment was challenging, as was the babe .
Just added her to my Faves.
ADE
This one I keep coming back too lately: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZE4KGB6Wt4
Why must there be endless mental constructs? I just don’t get it.
Chatter mind is a buzz. I really enjoy it. I indulge in it for a living.
But at some level it’s self indulgent and it tends to create a mental projection, a construct that comes between the perceiver and what he or she perceives.
It is inherently dualist. It separates you.
I have lived in the bush for 11 or so years now and still write for a living but I spend a lot of time gardening, walking in the hills, meditating, reading, listening to music (everything from Gregorian Chant to rock ‘n roll.
One of the things I took time to do over the last 20 years was a number of 10 day Vipassana Meditation courses.
No talking. After the chatter stops (usually about 3 or 4 days for me) you become intensely aware and the mental projection stops. Utterly.(might be worth googling. Too esoteric to chatter about)
The stated purpose of Vipassana is “To see things as they really are”.
And you never mistake social consensus or chatter mind for ultimate reality again. Even if it is fun.
I personally found it hard to start speaking again after each course. I listened to people but had no desire to speak or get into it for a couple of days.
The bait to switch was, in my case, 60c a word for writing.:)
But words, rumination, talk, social consensus (or conflict)can all distract from direct perception of reality. It can turn infinitely subtle things into black and white cartoons.
Words can constantly distract so that most people never see past the illusion.
Back to a nifty quote from Sosan, one of the early Zen patriarchs.
“The struggle of what one likes,
and what one dislikes,
is the disease of the mind.”
He was speaking of chatter mind.
Does that sound weird? It’s hard to discuss an alternate non verbal way of awareness in words.
What fascinates me about a lot of the posts on BC is that that they encapsulate so much direct experience and such logical and perceptive concepts at such a high level that it is a huge buzz.
And the way Wretch conjurs up so many intriguing starting points for the threads is a hoot.
Perhaps my tendency to eschew words or look past them is partly due to hearing too many from people with little or nothing to say of interest.
The sound and the fury signifying nothing.
Assuming you could construct a Theory of Everything, my conjecture is that any such Theory would have have to posit an eternal universe.
………….
This was actually Einstein’s position. He believed in a steady state universe. He did not like the work Hubble which showed that the universe was expanding.
My impression of the scientific world today is that the scientific community is crowding up against a paradigm shift–maybe on the scale of the decade or so before einstein or newton.
The scientists joke that –in the Higgs Boson particle they’re looking for at CERN–they’re looking for the God particle–because this is the particle that gives the other particles their mass.
(The joke is that these folk are all materialists. As Ezra Pound put it–there are no ideas but in things. However, the standard model today hangs on nothing.)
imho things will change whether they find Higgs Boson or not–that’s just my wag because in the last couple years scientists have been talking about dark energy and dark mass.
scientists are perplexed. stuff doesn’t quite fit their model. if they find the higgs boson they will wind up with a complete model that doesn’t scale to fit the observed data on a macro scale. If they don’t find the higgs boson particle then their model is wrong.
Either way the standard model is wrong.
Here’s an informative and optimistic bit from zombietime:
http://www.zombietime.com/lefts_big_blunder/
Perhaps a Seekers soundtrack would be apt …
Just plain, Wonderful song that. I like it in more of a pop standard version, someone like Andy Williams or Jack Jones or Luther Van Dross.
The song though is a noble anthem for those who will cash in the tawdry shallow world of materialism and selfishness and give their lives to higher callings. Some of those folks are humping a light machine gun in the Hindu Kush. Some are building wells and preaching Christ in West Africa. Some are trying to rescue kids from the meat grinder of the Hood. Some are moms nurturing their kids at their knee to live fine lives. All one day can say it was worth it whether they ever reached that star.
Obama needs to cut his ties to ACORN and their nation-wide voter fraud actions!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pi0pG_SPSk
Here’s a story I like from India, where some religious traditions evoke a more direct experience of God.
A young man had just learned from his spiritual teacher that the young man is “god” – this an attempt, I think, to create an immediate experience of God, and empower that feeling. The young man, flush with a sense of his own godly power, leaves for the marketplace, where he sees life in all its raucous chaos. An elephant comes down the street, the man on his back warning, “Get out of the way! Get out of the way!” People scurry out of the way.
Well, in India, the elephant is a manifestation of God, and the young man thought that surely, this “God” would recognize him. As the elephant approached, the man on the elephant’s back shouting, “Get out of the way! Get out of the way!” the young man thought, “He is God, I am God, I will stand my ground and he will go around.”
Surprise, surprise, the elephant walks by, swings his trunk and sends the young man flying. Full of hurt anger, the young man returns to his spiritual teacher and tells him what happened, finishing with, “You lied to me!”
The teacher leans close, looks at the young man, and says, “You fool! Didn’t you hear God telling you to get out of the way?”
Konyok said:
Here’s an informative and optimistic bit from zombietime:
http://www.zombietime.com/lefts_big_blunder/
——————————————
I liked the last line from zombietime:
“Yet it may very well be that an army of glum, dispirited and pessimistic conservatives will reluctantly trudge to the polls on November 4, each one imagining they are the only remaining person in the entire country voting for McCain, and lo and behold — they’ll turn out to be a silent majority after all. ”
I’ll be one of those dispirited and pessimistic conservatives voting quixotically for McCain but I’m not optimistic about a suprise happy ending…
Wretchard: …what I was trying to get at was whether one believed in God, or at worst, in a Theory of Everything, Sam’s star would shine brightly.
Would Sam’s star shine just as brightly for one believing in a Theory of Everything? That’s what I’m doubting.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. 1 Cor. 13:12-13
Just as Frodo doesn’t know the way but will bear the ring nevertheless, we also don’t know everything now, but instead we have faith, hope, charity. Maybe the not-knowing is the precondition for the faith, hope, charity. Seekers after a Theory of Everything, not content with mere faith or hope or charity, I fear, would like to skip those prerequisites, leaving lots more room for tyranny.
Charles said:
“My impression of the scientific world today is that the scientific community is crowding up against a paradigm shift–maybe on the scale of the decade or so before einstein or newton.”
Something that I’ve learned from crunching algebra related to the Navier-Stokes equation and 6 DoF trajectory equations is that natural truth tends to be simple and elegant. For example, if while working some algebra I made a transcription error, the complexity of the resultant equations would grow exponentially until they became unworkable (this was a signal that I had made a mistake). However if I kept the algebra error-free then eventally there would be a collapse in complexity and I’d have a simple answer.
I’ve noticed that many of the latest physical theories have undergone an exposion in complexity, e.g. String Theory, etc. Normally this indicates that the theories are wrong.
Eggplant,
Like ptolemaic epicycles?
I think you’ve got you a real insight there.