The Ferrous Scrolls

Anytime someone wants to make you feel bad for being an oddball, remember what you’re about to see here:

Nothing like severe natural disaster to put things in perspective.  I don’t mean in just the sense of making one’s own problems seem small, but in being reminded of the ways the current system contributes to the scale of disasters.  If there was ever a good reason to chip in to the causes of alleviating needless poverty and increasing accountability in business and government, Haiti is it.

This is just one of the few times that some government officials have had to eat a little of the shite they helped to pile on the heads of the poor.  It’s a shame that the poor had to suffer too, as well as some who were helping them, but at least this time there was some Matthew 5:45 effect in that the rain did indeed fall on the just and the unjust this time.

Having lain in a pool of my own blood at one time, and been close to that at others, I know what it’s like to be okay with the end.  Having never sought to harm anyone without due cause at such a moment is, despite the circumstances, a pretty nice feeling.  It makes the pain seem more like a passage.  If it’s the end then so be it, but you keep breathing…focus your energy on drawing on breath at a time, because you’ve still got good stuff to do.  I’d really hate to come to that moment as a parasite on the arse of the world.  I wonder if they’d even learn anything from such an experience.

So far, it’s just a straight up nightmare there.  According to the Telegraph, the death toll could reach 200,000.  Streets are piled with bodies, and people are rioting because of the slow delivery of food, water, health care, and rescue.  Part of the problem is that there isn’t even enough space or security at the airport.  Since long, the situations at the sea ports has been bad.  Food was rotting on the ships because of corruption.  It was like they were keeping the poor starving on purpose.  Artificial inflation kept food prices rising for no good reason.

…and now this.  I hope it causes a revolution.  Until then though, I hope it puts a big magnifying glass up for the world to get a good look at what happens when you keep people down for so long, and then something happens that even the government can’t anticipate or insulate themselves from, and the rich can’t buy their way out of.

None of us is immune from Nature.  You can beat the system, and beat a slave, but you can’t beat the Earth.

I don’t know…I hope people learn from this.  I’m not holding my breath though.  If people with money understood the basic principles of life, they wouldn’t be so exploitive, and probably wouldn’t have as much money.  Maybe that’s just one of those “nature of the beast” things.  I suppose all those who don’t have so much money can do against their greed in the meantime is find ways around it.  Whoever can, should be prepared for the parasite based infrastructure to collapse in the event of a major disaster or war.  If it’s possible, this should be a community effort.

Don’t rely on a system that’s only built to exploit you.  If you do, then when you need help, it probably won’t be there.  Not pointing fingers, because this is just about every government on earth.  Some though, are worse than others, and the Haitian government was well known for its screwed upness.  I can’t help seeing this event as a kind of an illustration of what can happen elsewhere.

Today I got a call from Longstroke.  One of his coworkers attempted suicide this past Saturday.

She is a non Jewish, Phillipine woman whose Israeli boyfriend dumped her saying that it’s because she’s not Jewish.  He said he’s found someone Jewish, and has decided to go with her on that basis.

Much like me, the feeling that washed over her was fatal, but suicidal rather than homicidal.  She’s a much nicer person than me.  She didn’t have the requisite callous to consider the person speaking to her so utterly worthless that he wasn’t worth time in the hospital or jail.

Hearing her story makes me wonder if not murdering the guys who had the gaul to say those words to me was indeed the right thing to do.  Maybe if we did kill them when they did that, word would get out and they’d stop using non Jewish (or non Arab or non Druze, respectively) women on the pretense of a relationship.

Then again, the vast majority of people, men included, are stupid and shallow.  So the only real payoff in butchering a sheep is individual deterrent, unless one is in a visible enough leadership position to call it “making an example”.  Since we’re considered insignificant and disposable, cost/benefit has to be done on the spot.  I didn’t think it was worth incarceration, so I stayed my hand.

Her…I don’t know.  She’s already harmed herself, so she might think it’s worth it to harm him.  So before she wastes her life in a more externalized way, I’m going to try to have a talk with her to help her gain some perspective.

Now that I feel more at home here, I see people like this guy as people who poop in the public pool.  He and people like him do their dirt and expect the rest of us not to mind the mess they make.  Well I mind, and Longstroke minds.  Lots of people here mind, but we’re shouted down by the idiots.

I can’t honestly say what is the right thing to do under these circumstances.  So I’m not going to approach her with morality or the virtues of being a merciful martyr…just the cold, hard truth: she wasted 5 years of her life on Osama’s meat puppet.  He is a broken Jew.  He doesn’t have the nuts to either keep to his own or be honest about his intentions.  For people like that, harming a non Jew is some kind of mitzvah, so any pain that comes out of their cowardice is like a bonus.

She made a mistake in harming herself over that worthless individual who hates himself so much that he would stick his cock into someone he himself views as a farm animal.  He should never see a tear from her, much less blood.  If she had succeeded, he would probably be overjoyed…laugh about it with his new girlfriend and male friends.

So she has to live, and has to do well with her life, and give him nothing but the smell of her afterburn, surpassing him in every way.

In this case, living well is indeed the best revenge.

Down the road, when you’re the one who loved out of the box, and they’re the pathetic weakling who scurried back under the skirt of conformity, you find your life better than theirs in many ways.  You know what hard work and sacrifice is.  They don’t.  They will never be able to do anything that is truly difficult.  It’s like the glass ceiling for pussies.

They are forever limited by their inability to do what it takes to get anything that is truly worth having.  The most they can expect from their lives is the equivalent of mindless servitude in so many ways.

You do what you do based on your ambitions and abilities…not those imposed on you by people who convince you that it’s okay to live like a slave.  It must really suck to be such a slave that even one’s heart is up for auction.

Ah well…survival of the fittest.

I often think that most people who say that to justify what they believe to be their own cruelty, don’t realize that the fittest in the exchange is the one who survives their pathetic attempt at harm.

I hope this woman is a survivor.  If not, there’s nothing I can do for her.

Which Horrible Affliction are you?
A Rum and Monkey disease.

Years ago, one of the biggest motivators for my starting the Cornrows.co.uk project was that state governments were making it impossible to braid as a legally legitimate profession.  I wanted to render the laws that basically made braiding without a license illegal, but at the same time made getting a license impossible, obsolete.  Online and offline, we’re doing pretty good at making natural hairstyling education that meets and exceeds the U.S. federal standard, accessible to anyone who wants to put in the time and effort.

This sounded an alarm to others whose professions are currently unregulated or only mildly so because they are traditional practices: one day, your state government could arbitrarily decide that your job is illegal, and that you should have to go to a school that doesn’t exist for a license that they hope never exists.  The bell tolled on braiding, and now it seems that they’re going after Yoga instructors next.

Y’all better wake up.  It is happening in Virginia.  If the past is any teacher, somewhere in Texas, a Yoga instructor’s on her way to getting strip searched and jailed for telling people that stretching is good for them.

Okay, now you can imagine me doing the Sacred Geek Dance of Seven Whales.  I am now the proud owner of MoneysMama.com.  I have no idea what I’m going to do with it.  I thought of making it about home business and bling, but every spammer on Earth has already beat me to it.  My competition would be the loathesome hoards of MLM’ers.

I’d make it about frugality and resourcefulness, but the other, Money Mama already has books for kids on the subject.  I don’t want to be confused with her.

Another thought I had was making it fineschmecker porn.  A fineschmecker is a kind of Yiddish term for someone who is really into quality things…not the most expensive necessarily, but the truly best quality.  So porn for them would be photos and reviews of the best watches, shoes, pens, housewares, food, etc.

So I’m brainstorming.  We’ll see what comes out of it.  Hopefully something useful.

Since my decision to stop fighting open source software that doesn’t have some kind of business behind it, I’ve been having lots of fun (er workish fun) doing what I do best.  That’s living up to my reputation as a human encyclopedia.  My poor husband has had to endure hours of my obsessive prattling on one topic or another.  Lately I’ve been stuck on the social and ethical ramifications of new knowledge in the field of epigenetics.

Now, it appears that not only do we need to pass certain traditions down to our kids because it’s socially nice, but because if we don’t, it can mess up their gene expression.  This has definitely tweaked my approach to topics like cooking and relationships.  I’m much more hard core about it, and yet more joyful too.  So I added a little something to CookingSlim.org: a special section for kids.

I’m also working on the new learning center at Cornrows.co.uk.  It’s not finished yet, but this time I’m running it on Moodle.  It’s a bit confusing to use, but it works, and that’s what’s important.

About the Fort Hood Shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan, his imam, Faizul Khan says,

“On a form filled out by those seeking spouses through a program at the mosque, Hasan listed his birthplace as Arlington, Va., but his nationality as Palestinian, Khan said.

“I don’t know why he listed Palestinian,” Khan said, “He was not born in Palestine.”

Nothing stood out about Hasan as radical or extremist, Khan said.”

Oh really?

Okay, say I’m the preacher at the local church, and one of my parish lists his nationality as Dixie, and runs around praising the KKK as heroes.  If and probably when they do something insanely violent, when the media comes to me asking if he seemed like an extremist, what do you figure I’d say?

Yes.  Yes I knew the guy was a nutbar, and that it was probably only a matter of time before something happened.  I’m surprised that when he began his killing spree, he didn’t come to my office first, because I took him aside on numerous occasions and tried to explain to him the dark direction his beliefs were taking him in.

Imams, priests, preachers, study leaders, spiritual counselors, and nurturing laymen, we can do better than this.  We must do better than this.

I’ve been updating my online courses and websites.  The Cornrows.co.uk Learning Center was broken.  So I upgraded the courseware, and guess what?  It’s still broken.

Thing is, I know how to fix it.  I’m just not going to.

I’m just tired of fighting the software.

Thusfar, when I can, I use open source applications because they’re usually better.  I’m willing to pay when I need to, but I learned my lesson about that many years ago.  Companies stagnate, fall, and have a “works for me so it should work for you” mentality.  Communities are usually more stable…until recently anyway.

For the past few years, it’s like the geeks (of which I’m one and not ashamed) have forgotten that programming isn’t the only profession that requires a lot of attention.  Not everyone is doing that for a living, and even those who are, aren’t all into web development.  If I was just an artist, I would have no way of knowing how to fix the multitude of bugs and errors one by one.  Even though I can fix a good bit of what I come across, modifying them means I’m going to have issues on the next upgrade.  So I try to avoid that if possible.

It’s apparently too much to ask that people test something before releasing it as a stable version.  By test I mean hand it out to some people who aren’t developers.  I mean schoolteachers and other people who know how to use a computer, but don’t know php or how to do anything above changing file permissions or something.

So this time, I’m just done promoting stuff that breaks when you barely touch it by using it anymore.  I’m now leaning towards the happy medium between open source and buy-in-the-box: sponsored applications.  I can tell Google or Yahoo that something is broken, and they will fix it.  They pay people well people to do that, and yet can offer the services for free because some people are getting advertising every time they do the dang thing right.  People smile and buy stuff so I don’t have to break my brain and waste my time fixing something that’s just going to be broken again on the next “upgrade”.

So as of today, I’m putting my free educational content into a truly stable CMS, maybe blog style, and using already existing social networks to keep track of everybody.  I don’t really need more than that.

I didn’t want to say much about it until things were stable, but I have some incredible news.  Shai and I are now a couple again…a kinky one, but a couple.  I have to get back on the pill for awhile because of it, but it’s a small price to pay.  I only have a few years of fertility left anyway, and well, if I have a heart attack at 45, it’s okay because I’ll die happy.

Since I’ve been on the natural, nutrient dense diet, many things have changed.  I’ve returned to my old self, I’m losing weight slowly but surely, and my attitude is solidifying into a consistent Big Mama-ness in accordance with my age.

So when the time came that I could deal with things I’d put on the backburner, I basically gave Shai a report of the things I learned “out there” in Israel.  When we were deciding what to do about our relationship going platonic, I got some bad advice from him: find someone younger.  I don’t think he understood his own uniqueness, or what was wrong with him or with me at the time.

Five years down the road, we understand now that he did go through a change, and it is normal, but that it didn’t mean what we thought it did.  He’s had some time to think and figure himself out, so when I spoke to him about what I was going through, he told me what he was going through.  Some of the factors that came into play then aren’t there now, so the main problem has been solved.  Now we just have to iron out the details, like sleeping arrangements.

He lets the cats in his bed.  I can’t have cats in the bed.  So if I move back into his room, we have to keep the cats out of there.  Each of our stuff has also spread out a bit, so even if I do sleep in his room, I’m keeping my room as an office and backup for when his subs visit.

I’m not rushing into things.  I know how I am, and that it’s never easy for me to do any kind of back tracking.  However, this is a special case since we’re not talking about someone who doesn’t love me or took me for granted.  He’s just a formerly tired, retired cop who took awhile to get his life back.  Apparently, the Bibi budget took a lot more out of him than he realized.  Because things did get worse, he realizes now that he escaped just in time.

We still have some work to do about getting us back in sync, but now he’s much more open to what it’ll take on his end.  Part of that came with realizing the toll experiences with other people can take on one’s sexual development.  In order to have relationships, we often have to rearrange our priorities in ways that are, for us, a bit twisted.  We have to learn to separate sex from love even though sex is an expression of love.  We have to learn to not express love towards people who don’t or can’t reciprocate because those people don’t love, just find people useful and attach for practical reasons.  We have to wear masks and chop our behavioral profile into little pieces, but since we can’t do the same internally, it eats at us.  It’s like walking around with one hand tied behind your back.  You get used to it, and that hand atrophies.

Our sexual relationship short circuited mainly because we were both fragmented.  Now we’re in the process of defragmentation.