Newsletter

                                                                                                             



How are you ? What have been your highlights of 2014 ?
I am still celebrating that Scotland is still part of the U.K. after the 18th September referendum.
Near ideal weather for barley & hay here this year.
The autumn had plenty of warm sunny weather so I went windsurfing at  about 20 times. The best wind speed was on 1st & 2nd November with 20mph, it still was ok temperature. Quite amazing whizzing between the waves which look quite big up close but probably maximum 4ft.

Hope there will be some snow at Glenshee in January, it was good fun last year.

I have been enjoying Youtube & Wikipedia & Facebook & Twitter. Really amazing to be able to explore the ideas you want when you want. I am working my way through the endless music & soundtrack videos & astronomy etc.  Also super being able to catch up on music half heard on the car radio.

The free planetarium software Stellarium.org is amazing. It allows the user to set whatever location in the world they like & also fast forward and reverse time. This is great for watching the moons of Jupiter orbiting it.

some musical favourites, in no particular order

I heard on Radio 3 that the John William's theme tune for Star Wars may have been inspired by the theme for "Kings Row" ,a 1942 film which made Ronald Reagan a star, the music was by Erich Korngold.

Kosenko - Passacaglia in G minor

Dohnanyi - Passacaglia in E-flat minor

S.Prokofiev - Toccata in d minor 0p.11

Phamie Gow - Annandale

Megadeth - A Tout Le Monde 

The John Loftus tornado plucks house of God up & drops it on witch of east

Here is a symbolic photo of the works of John Loftus shown as a tornado somewhere over the rainbow in Kansas and with any luck it will pluck the farmhouse of God up off its sandy foundations and let it drop on the Wicked witch of the East.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap141123.html

Robert M.Price mentions,"The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" in his book,"The reason driven life" ( Temp job,chapter 27)

"The journey turns out to be the goal, though they did not know it at the time. Because in the process of overcoming all the obstacles that blocked their way to Oz, they brought forth from within themselves just the things they thought they lacked. The Lion defied danger to rescue his friends. The Scarecrow was the master strategist in outwitting the Wicked Witch. The Tin Man acted out of the very compassion he thought could never exist in his hollow shell."

I can't remember if it was another book where Price wrote that; like the Lion, if we have the courage to read through the kaleidoscope of views then we can walk up the yellow brick road to OZ and discover that the mighty Wizard (God) is just the voice of a human like ourselves. 

There are a lot of similarities between how Muslim apologists treat Coranic stories like,"The splitting of the moon" [see wikipedia article] and how Christian apologists try to excuse stories such as the three hours of darkness that Luke 23v44-45 says happened at Jesus crucifiction [see Jesusneverexistd youtube video,"Three most stupid verses in the gospels" where Ken explains how some try to explain the darkness as a solar eclipse"]

Why can't they just ask themselves,"Was the author just making stuff up?" Maybe they would then have to admit that there are lies in their holy book. What if the author had said,"These stories are just made up" would that allow them to be read as religious fiction ?

  The Islamic crescent is too wildly distorted to be a crescent moon but not so far off being like a solar eclipse where the moon is aphelion. Maybe this is symbolic of how Islam (as the dead moon) threatens to blot out the sunshine of liberty, intellectual freedom & democracy ? How can the moon be split in two ? Actually you would think that when a Muslim tries to research astronomy to find ways in which to defend the tale that the moon was split in two around 630AD that they would eventually conclude that it simply never happened. At least such a person had the curiosity to investigate but maybe their intelligence is too warped round a black hole to escape?