Photography: After the Rain

01oldtruckAs always, click on any image to see it full-sized. CTRL-click will open the image in a separate browser tab.

Storms blew in last night. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t be back before nightfall again, so I decided to visit some picturesque spots to see them with a higher water level. But whatever it started out to be, the whole thing was dampened (pun intended) by taking a spill early in the ride. Nothing major, but my right hand took the brunt of my fall. The heel of my hand was bruised pretty good and wrist became quite pressure sensitive. Nothing broken or damaged, but I decided I wouldn’t be going quite so far as I had hoped. (For those wondering, that’s a 1952 Ford pickup, I believe.)

04crutchocreekSoldier Creek was up somewhat in the park, but I didn’t want to disturb the lady contemplating at my favorite spot, so I rode by without taking pictures. With the south wind at my back, it was pretty quick getting down to the North Canadian River where it crosses Midwest Boulevard. Here was something a little odd: the river wasn’t up very high at that point. Apparently the upstream tributaries — Crooked Oak and Cherry Creeks — weren’t contributing all that much. However, Crutcho Creek (with the help of Soldier Creek) was a good bit higher than normal.

02ncanne63rd-aSo downstream a ways below Crutcho Creek, where the river crosses under NE 63rd, was much deeper. First I shot upstream next to the sand dredging operation. Then I shot downstream; on this north side of the bridge, the prominent sandbars were underwater.03ncanne63rd-a

So much more I wanted to see, but by this time I could barely put any pressure on my right hand. And I knew it was a headwind all the way home, so I started back and took my time. It was still a pretty good workout, but I’m disappointed with having to cut it off so soon. Ah, well; there should be more storms, maybe tonight, and for sure tomorrow, so I may not be able to ride much anyway.

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Bank On It

Deutsche Bank (DB) has been in the news recently. To summarize, it’s about the biggest banking outfit in Germany and operates in several other countries. This bank is struggling with keeping enough cash flow to serve all their various legal obligations. They invested way too much in the derivatives market and the investments are not paying off.

I suppose I need to explain that just a little. One of the dirty secrets is that banks can create as much money as they like. But that doesn’t pay the bills, because that money needs to get into the hands of all the little people. If you just give them the money, it won’t accomplish much because the money isn’t matched up with an increase in production of goods and services. What we all need is economic activity, exchanging all those goods and services.

So banks take actions to get folks to borrow that money. That’s how banks get rid of their excess cash reserves. But too many people are already in debt beyond their ability to pay; all their productivity is going to service those debts. Of course, part of the problem is government policies that restrict productivity, or policies that scalp too much of that productivity in various forms of taxation that is then wasted on programs that don’t make people more productive.

At any rate, the whole system is choked with excess debt. Derivatives are just another kind of debt, when you boil it down to the essence. So banks are holding too much debt and not enough of that debt is being paid back. The banks don’t mind holding debt when people are paying back their loans, but way too many of those loans were very risky, loaning money to people who were frankly unlikely to pay according to the terms. The banks that knew this looked for ways to spread the risk and make it less painful for themselves. They lied about the nature of the high risk loans and sold it as high-grade loans. So now almost every bank in every part of the world has some of this crappy derivative debt — some more than others.

The Greek banks had way too much of this junk and now they are generally insolvent. I won’t get into how they were suckered into this, just noting what it looks like when things go broke. Well, DB may go broke real soon. When they do, it will be somewhat like the thing with Lehman Brothers in 2008. It sort of cascaded across the whole banking system. Remember the bailouts, how the debt was transferred to the taxpayers without actually fixing the problems?

So now the taxpayers are mortgaged to the hilt via their governments. Individuals may not have any debts, but the effect of government debt is still there. As the government borrowing piles up, the amount of the budget required to pay the interest on the loans takes a bigger and bigger bite. Government ambition has never been known to shrink, so somebody has to take less. Governments haven’t been too smart about this. The next round of banking shocks will see the money stolen directly from all the little people investing in the banks, or just the hapless folks forced to choose one bank or another as a place to store their income. It’s called a “bail-in” — depositors and investors will take the hit for keeping the banks alive.

That’s what causes so much of the social unrest we see in Greece, along with the massive increase in government expenses for things like handling refugees. Greece’s elite allowed themselves to be suckered in multiple ways because of their own petty greed and now the people are on the verge of revolt. But if DB does a bail-in from their investors and depositors, it will involve a much bigger number of people and affect a much bigger economy than just that of Greece, because DB’s situation is much more complex.

We are starting to see the knives come out. I’ve often tried to warn people that the global banking elite are highly influenced by The Cult. They’ll work together when things are going well and mercilessly screw us little people, but they are fiercely competitive and won’t hesitate to skewer each other. The other banks will let DB fall if that costs less than trying to help. Now, the European Banking masters are trying to keep it afloat, but they can’t control the broader sentiment of market investors who are selling their DB stock. We can’t know how this will turn out because there are too many independent actors involved.

You can bet they’ll try to hide the facts from us, so don’t expect to get the news until it’s too late for victims to take action. For example, DB is lying about some kind of computer networking glitch is cutting off ATM withdrawals. DB is in panic mode.

As always, our Father is in control. We knew this stuff was coming a long time ago. I’ve done as much as I could up to now trying to help you all reduce your vulnerabilities. Not so much prepping for disaster like all the crazy Preppers, but preparing your lives by engaging your hearts with a different value system. We should rejoice that God is revealing Himself through wrath, because His wrath on sinners is blessing for His children. You just have to make a shift to an alternative system, a moral currency deposited in eternity in the Bank of Heaven.

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Cycling: Long River Ride

01lowerdamToday’s ride was intended more as a workout. I took along my wife’s little camera and grabbed only a few shots. I left the apartment and headed straight west on Reno Avenue to the entrance of Eagle Lake. The lake was nearly deserted as I rode the path that connects to the OKC trail system. Out on the backside, as I passed over the bridge over Crooked Oak Creek, I encountered a bike patrol officer. He was watching a rather large buck hopping around in the underbrush near the big loop and pointed it out to me.

02recreationOnce I got past the half-finished Indian Heritage Center, I spotted some very young joggers on the southern bank River Trail. Turns out they were from Mount Saint Mary High School, the first school were I subbed right after finishing teacher’s college back in 1996. They were a long way from the school house and I gather they were the actual cross country team. I spotted a second bike patrolman, which was quite rare in my experience.

It’s been more than six months since I was out on the river trails. I saw they had finally finished the initial phase of building a recreation facility on the site of the old Downtown Airpark. That ride was once the Santa Monica Pier ferris wheel (above left). There are a few buildings there and some parking set up, but it may be awhile before this place attracts any more investment.03bridge I stayed on the south bank all the way to Meridian Avenue. The crews have gotten the trail crossover open and the path fully restored on both sides now. There was no way I could have jumped over onto the Overholser Trail today, but it’s nice to know it’s open now.

I took SE 15th back to the Portland Avenue bridge and crossed over to the start of the north bank River Trail. By the time I got back as far as the other end at Bricktown, I had to stop and rest. From a bench in the back parking lot of Outdoor Sports, I could see the new overpass that connects the Interstates with the south entrance to Bricktown is almost finished. I would like to at least see the viewpoint from the apex of the overpass. After I recovered enough, I rode up to 4th Street and headed back home.

I noticed on the way that, while I was riding, my right knee looked almost normal with most of the residual swelling gone. It won’t stay like that, but it’s nice to see it while I’m using it that way. I can bend it almost normally, but the thigh muscles are still just a little tight. The oddest thing remains how my foot is always sore, as if I had been on a very long hike over rough ground. I’ll get there yet.

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Transparent Shepherd

My readers know that I favor transparency; it’s a moral element in Creation. It’s not for the brain to discern, though it may do so, but it’s first and foremost something for the heart to see. The phrase “Open Source” captures the essence.

So you have probably read plenty here about Open Source software because that’s what I use most. For example, you would think my laptop — designed to run Windows Vista — would work better with Windows, but it doesn’t. Believe me, I’ve tried both Vista and Win7 and it’s about as unstable as a raft at sea. I believe I’m pretty competent at researching the problems and there are no fixes because Microsoft won’t fix some things. And yet, Linux (some distributions of it) work just fine and the machine is stable, so I know it’s not the hardware.

Yet even Linux seems to be taking the wrong path on some things, by making it harder and harder for us ordinary folks to fix things in the kernel. Recent Linux OSes have offered a regression on this laptop, with suspend and resume not working correctly. Older stuff still works fine (prior to Linux kernel 4.0), but anything recent chokes on the hardware — older hardware that has been working well with Linux all along.

I’m thinking about switching over the BSD, something I played with an awful lot a decade ago. My point here is that Linux development has taken a turn in the path that takes too much control away from the user, and steadily grows worse about it (it’s all about a thing called “systemd”). I love it when elegant packaging makes fiddling unnecessary, but if the elegance excludes my hardware, I would prefer something that gives fiddling as a strong option, with guidance I can use — Linux is slowly taking that away. And the few distributions of Linux that don’t use systemd are wholly inelegant, designed for servers.

If I’m going to go the fiddling route, I think I would prefer something with a lot more options, something runs quick and light on the hardware, and that’s where BSD shines. It probably won’t be something I do right away, but it’s an idea whose light shines ever brighter in the gathering gloom over the computer technology landscape. I don’t like technology that enslaves the user.

We do the same with our religion here. Radix Fidem [PDF] is a DIY outline, an Open Source approach to religion. We try to make it elegant, to give it coherence so that you aren’t left starting totally from scratch, but we don’t foreclose a large number of decisions you can and should make for yourself.

We claim that our path will open up the fundamental essence of Creation as a reflection of God’s own moral character, which is what revelation is all about. But revelation is person-to-person, between you and God, not with some human high priest who seeks to restrict what you see and hear. Ours is a meta-religion; it’s an expression of faith that teaches you to construct your own religion. All we actually do is help you get your intellect out of the way, making it subservient to some higher faculty we all receive as a gift from God.

This is something you have to learn from the heart, and cerebral results as organization and implementation are between you and God. While this blog is currently the focus of this effort, it’s only because no one is doing it. Right now it’s almost totally virtual. I know how to lead a group of humans in meat-space, but I also know how to serve when leading isn’t possible. All of my fumbling around with technology is meant to save trouble; I share my explorations so you won’t have to reinvent your own wheel. I’ve also done a considerable amount of fumbling around religion in various types of clergy roles and I’m sharing the results of that miserable experience so you can avoid the misery.

The biblical cultural ideal is the shepherd. I’ll get you close enough to the pasture that you can find your own food; I’ll make the water lie still so you can drink; I’ll do what I can to keep the predators off of you. But I can’t produce sheep for you. That’s your mission. When you build up your faith into good moral action, it always bears fruit.

And as a prophet I will warn you that we are in a time of rising chaos. On the one hand, everyone is searching for an anchor in the storm. On the other hand, precious few will recognize what we have is that anchor, at least initially. We must remain resolute in the face of false appearances because the storm cannot really harm anything essential. What it destroys was not worth having. It’s time we recognize what really does matter. We are witnessing a major change in human perception, and this is our time to stake a claim on behalf of God’s glory. His glory is the truth about ultimate reality against this world of shadows. When we reap the fruit of blessing that comes from living His Law, we shine His glory.

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Psalm 119: Beth 9-16

This is the Path of Purity. The Hebrew word translated “cleanse” approaches the concept of moral transparency. How does a younger fellow allow others to see God through his life? In every generation, the young seldom give it much thought, and it requires developing strong habits — hedging his ways — with a heart-led awareness of God’s revelation. The psalmist claims that he is driven by a conviction, a personal commitment to please God.

To insure he reduces the opportunities for temptation, he hoards divine revelation in his heart. He finds Jehovah worthy of adoration, and waits for Him to goad him into obedience. How hard it is for the young!

With his own mouth he makes it a habit to affirm the moral judgments of God, talking often to himself about accountability. The Lord backs up His words; the psalmist delights in the moral wealth it brings him.

So finds himself pondering the message of revelation and how it makes so much sense of this crazy world. God keeps His own Word like a well-trodden path and the young man finds his own heart will not let him wander too far afield.

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Photography: Testing iPhone Ideas

01rrbridgeAs always, click on any image to see it full-sized. CTRL-click will open the image in a separate browser tab.

02old-n-newI’m reading some tutorials on iPhone camera features. For us old people, there is almost nothing intuitive about it, so I have to read the stuff “for dummies” to catch up with the kids who were born with these things in their hands. Today I tested ideas with light adjustments and composition. I’m a little disturbed at how wide open these electricity panels are, but that’s a sample of my old Military Police thinking. All the old stuff is still attached and the newer, more secure boxes are on the right.

03garageThe pictures were shot in the vicinity of the Uptown Center and the St. Phillip Neri Catholic Church. They don’t have to mean anything at all. For example, this was built as a shop, but I recall at one time it was a club, and now it’s just private storage.

05alleyI don’t think like a real photographer; I can’t. I’m too busy trying to engage the world around me on a heart level. While I’m sure there are photographers who do that, I doubt many of them are conscious of it.06wallsign For me, it’s the starting place. I have only a modicum of natural talent, but I wait for Creation itself to call out to me and tell me what deserves a shot. You have to decide what, if anything, it says to you.

07journalbldgI’m always impressed with the design of the old Oklahoma Journal Building. It’s still vacant, and I’ll bet the lease rate is astronomical, but it’s a lovely building and protected by the state’s historical commission.

08roserowThe gardener for the Catholic church does a pretty good job.

08watertank This last image is actually a giant water tank mostly underground. It’s part of a series of similar tanks used to prepare water for delivery to end users. I discovered that the iPhone does a crappy job of zooming; the picture has some noise.

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Recommended Music

Either one of these should do the job. This is an entirely different category of music. Most people get it because it is transcendent in the first place. However, if you hear it with your heart, you may not need the translation. Still, I highly recommend you go to YouTube for the first one to see the translation from Icelandic, because having the words confirmed will help you learn to trust your heart’s leadership. Just right-click and select the option to watch it at YouTube, then open the information by clicking the “show more” below the video frame.

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Variable Reality

Our good brother Jay DiNitto mentioned something in a recent post about Quantum Mechanics and how our conception of time is probably all wrong.

Well, duh.

We weren’t designed for this world. This world is not the original plan. To be honest, we really don’t have the words and concepts for describing it, never mind those esoteric scientific theories. This is why we warn you that ultimate truth is not transmitted by words. You can’t describe it. Our best hope is indicating something about it using parables (or parabolic language). So when I say that our world is not what God planned for us, that’s a parabolic expression. God was ready to handle the Fall; that’s His moral character. But what we now have is not what He wanted for us, and certainly nothing like Eden.

A primary element in the Curse of the Fall is the time-space constraints on our human existence. The story linked at Cosmic Scientist leans on a previous post about electrons and how they act like both waves and particles. The whole thing disembowels the concrete logic inherent in Western Civilization. The articles struggle to explain that, if these quantum particle observations mean anything at all, it means your choice in the here and now can affect the past, while at the same time, your choices don’t bind the future.

We who are heart-led are not in the least bit troubled by any of this. Science is restricted to the intellect, but our sense of self and awareness is not limited to intellect. There is a component of awareness that can choose to move the focus into the heart-mind and it changes everything. By leaving behind the limitations of what the intellect can handle, we begin to see that all of Creation itself is alive and sentient on some level. The particles are not inanimate matter, but are creatures in their own right. And so it is with the larger things we encounter every day — trees, birds, grass, rocks, dirt, and yes, houses.

One of those houses I shot with my camera today spoke to my heart. There’s not much I could write to tell you about the content, but it essentially asked me to take a picture so you could hear it, too. Just look at the two-story house with the empty glass windows and white board fence; if your awareness is in your heart, you’ll likely hear it.

Just as surely as we can commune directly with the material world around us, so also a part of us is designed to reach beyond that time-space barrier that defines what science is all about. They’ll keep poking and poking, but scientists will never discover the final answers because the answers aren’t available to the mind, but for the heart-mind. I can’t tell you what you’ll encounter on the other side, but I can tell you there is something there, and that we can reach across the boundary and touch that other realm.

Pray that your awareness can expand into your heart. Pray that God will allow you to believe what your heart knows, and that you can get used to the idea of ultimate reality beyond the Curse. When the end for each of us comes, we will leave behind the flesh and it’s intellect, but some other part of our awareness lives on to face God. He promised in His Law and in His Son (the Living Law) that we could ameliorate the Curse of the Fall while we yet live under that curse. He promised that we could taste the existence of the afterlife (see Hebrews 6) and that means warping our awareness past the limits of time-space boundaries.

Once you taste that, you suddenly recognize what quantum particle research encounters with time as variable forward and backward. We are able to say we know about that on some instinctive level of awareness. We realize that human history is not fixed, nor can it be. The whole thing is variable and iffy, and efforts to study it will yield inconsistent results because Creation itself cannot be nailed down like that.

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Photography: Akers Park

01newbegchurchAs always, click on any image to see it full-sized. CTRL-click will open the image in a separate browser tab.

Oh, the memories.

Akers Park is bounded by Reno Avenue on the north, Grand Boulevard on the east, SE 15th on the south, and Eastern Avenue on the west. I have no idea where the name came from. Fifty-five years ago, part of this was a new housing area, and folks called it Fairview because an ancient Baptist Church on the southern edge bore that name (not the church pictured here, which is almost as old). My uncle bought one of those houses and we used to visit from time to time.02abandonedhouse-a I’ll never forget they had a serious infestation of leeches in the yards all over this area; at night those critters crawled all over the yards.03abandonedhouse-b You had to watch your step. In more recent times, the place simply suffered neglect and a lower economic class took over. OKC Housing Authority has bulldozed some of these older homes and built their cookie-cutter stuff using corrupt contractors, so the old stuff is still in better shape sometimes.

04lonetreeIt’s part of the Crooked Oak School District, the Ruf-nex. Not so long ago the district was hammered by state auditors for outlandish fraud and waste. The district management is uppity and rich, but are just as low-class as the folks who live here.

The school district has made enemies in other ways. They used state laws to snatch the land out from under a few businesses to expand their campus. They’ve been threatening an ancient grocery store that has long since been occupied by the Old Paris Flea Market (they have a Facebook page, too). It’s run by, and popular with, the same “po’ white trash” in alliance with a lot of Hispanic immigrants.05vacanthouse-a This has been going on for at least the past decade, but too many outsiders with real political pull have an interest in keeping the flea market open.

Oddly enough, Old Paris is home to the primary retail outlet for a pair of rappers, Mike and Bone. It’s a pair of Native American boys who have been recording albums since their youth, and they even got on America’s Got Talent and featured in a few other TV shows. They keep a booth at the flea market and are there quite often, last time I checked.

06vacanthouse-bMy brother had a booth out there for awhile, and I helped out a couple of years. I understand those folks; that’s my family background. About the time I was born, my Dad didn’t work on the rigs themselves, but drove hotshot parts to the oil fields in New Mexico for awhile. We didn’t even approach middle class income until I was a teenager and we were living in Alaska. So the folks who hide out in Akers Park are a mixture of old rough-neck residents, plus a generous mixture of welfare queens.

So the images include a vacant building site and some houses further east in Del City. It wasn’t a long ride, just enough to keep my right knee on track for recovery.

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Photography: South of Trosper Park

01formeraptcomplexAs always, click on any image to see it full-sized. CTRL-click will open the image in a separate browser tab.

02okcskylineIf you understand walking through life by your heart, no one has to explain. I felt drawn to go back and revisit an area between Cherry and Crooked Oak Creeks. My heart told me there would be some rich imagery there, plus some on the way both directions. First up is the site of an apartment complex that was properly cleaned up.03oldshed This happens to look down toward Crooked Oak Creek. In the foreground the exposed soil shows the belated removal of a large concrete parking area. Second is a skyline shot of OKC overlooking a pipe yard. Third is an old garden shed near the Grand Boulevard Bike Trail.

04rattystablekennelGrand Boulevard actually splits the original Trosper Park. On the south side is an undeveloped woodland featuring horse trails. So you should not be surprised to find a riding club along with several private stables.05vacanthouse-a Some are in pretty rough shape. The image on the right includes several kennels between some old stables. The horses stirred and came out to gaze at me when the dogs started barking.

06vacanthouse-bThere are a lot vacant houses out in that area, as well. 07syro-malabarchOne thing I never expected to see in this neighborhood was a Syro-Malabar Catholic Church. It tells me something about the oldest residents still living out here. Most of the places were neat, but showed a character that wasn’t exactly your average suburban Americans.08frontshed This ancient vine-covered shed and garage were standing on the street side of the property and facing inward (image right). From what I could see through the gaps in the privacy fence, it was still in use.

09abandonedhouseOf course, there is always at least one abandoned house still standing in most neighborhoods. But the Syro-Malabar church was not the only religious surprise.10buddhistshrine Would you believe there is a Salvation Army worship center out here on SE 44th Street? Would you believe right across the street is a very large Buddhist Temple and gardens? The outdoor shrine has seen improvements over the years. This place has been around for a very long time.11buddhisttemple They once had a majestic gate entrance, but at some point reworked the driveway because of some kind of code enforcement about alignment with cross streets and such. The elaborate gate was left standing where it was, I suppose because of the high investment.12originalbuddhisttemple It seems to me that Buddhists have this thing about not discarding something that they once lavished with attention and offerings. On one corner of their extensive property is this old house; you can’t read the sign because of the angle of the sun, but it’s impossible to see the place from any other angle with all the vegetation. 13olderhomeThis is their original facility, obviously a former house that was already there. They added quite a bit on the rear. Older homes are common out here (image above left).

14drillingrigAlso common out here, as previously noted, is all sorts of petroleum drilling industries. This monster rig is visible all over the area, sitting in an equipment sales yard. This thing is all painted up and for sale; they actually move these massive beasts around on our roads.

15deadendA really good visual pun is this dead end barrier; beyond the fence is a graveyard. As I rode back through parts of Del City on my way home, I was reminded of how much had changed when I first saw this place back in 1973.16oldwarehouse I would have to ask around what was in this ancient warehouse, but I’m pretty sure someone remembers. Given the sun was still at an angle behind, it was a tricky thing getting this shaded face without glare, but the backside is covered by trees. At any rate, the perspective is a little odd from that angle.

Good workout because the temperatures are just about 66°F (19C).

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