migrations

2nd hand quote

i found this provocative quote from The Theory of Moral Sentiments in a so-so book entitled Stumbling on Happiness:

The pleasures of wealth and greatness...strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it...It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence, and the great high road of communication to the different nations of the earth.

or to use jargon, wealth has declining marginal utility.

(slight return)

a long hiatus it's been to the blog. i'm now situated in a different geographical locale. i might discuss that in another post if requested. saw interesting set of short films today, generally on the topic of food. here's a list of topics covered; it won't mean much to anyone who wasn't at the showing tonight, i'm afraid. in not necessarily this order, it discussed West Oakland, CA, asparagus being outsourced to Peru & Chile, "profit cola" (a funny one), Sunny Delite, GMO tomatoes, water in michigan, confined livestock, Providence school gardens, Echo Park homeless recycler, and Nova Scotia hand-liner fishing. the feature film included Earl Butz, erstwhile Agriculture secretary, and an awful demonstration of the effects of grain feeding cattle.

Nan Madol, Pohnpei, Micronesia (uploading to a2k)

Bristlecone Pine

Mt. Whitney

Mono Lake

Rainbow Falls

beasts of Genesis

in the beginning, all were vegetarian:

1:30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

at some point, some of the beasts became carnivores. even answersingenesis can only guess how that happened:

Scripture simply does not provide enough information for Christians to insist dogmatically that one or another of these possible explanations is totally right or wrong. Several of them may apply together.
As fallen creatures in a fallen world, we have difficulty imagining what a pre-Fall world was really like. We are also finite creatures lacking all the information. We therefore need to be particularly careful about arguing from the present to the past.

source: http://answersingenesis.org/home/area/faq/bad_things.asp

rather atypically tentative for a creationist tract in my experience. in fact, this seems to be a can of worms for ID advocates, since all those marvelously designed attack & defense mechanisms of animals must have had a different function prior to the fall. for instance, consider the bombardier beetle:

The tiny bombardier beetle could not possibly have evolved. His defence mechanism is amazingly complicated, and could only have been created with all the parts working together perfectly. From twin ‘exhaust tubes’ at his tail, this beetle fires into the face of his enemies boiling-hot noxious gases with a loud pop.

source: http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v12/i1/bombardier.asp

what could be the function of this elaborate mechanism in the absence of a predatory threat? or if there was none, then God anticipated the fall, and that does not square in my mind with Adam & Eve being punished for disobeying a commandment God knew would be disobeyed.

in my next installment, i might discuss John Woodmorappe, creationist author of a Noah's Ark Feasibility Study. the impatient reader can jump ahead to this synopsis of his work, here: http://emporium.turnpike.net/C/cs/ark/index.htm

{an apology for not providing links, i still can't get them to work}