Silence is Goldlist?

Just thought I had better drop a note to let my faithful subscribers know that there is no cause for alarm that I have fallen off the wagon for regular posting.

In fact it is all down to a major sea change in how my family and I are going to be be living, and where, from now on.

After many many years being based in Warsaw, 18 of which in our current home, we decided to go for a new phase of life further west in Poland, in fact almost as far west as it is possible to get without needing special permits for buying property as a foreigner in the zone near the German border, which is half and hour by car from where we are going.

More will be revealed as it happens, and regular updates about that project will be interspersed with the other streams of material, namely the categorisation of my YT channel and the re-purposing of my Quora stuff which they’ve been threatening me to remove. Certainly the most interesting of the content will be the new project.

I will not promise to do much on here before the 1st of July, as the move and also the year end at work is really a case of everything happning at once, but I do plan to get back to regular posting in the second half year with this new mix of content including regular updates on this new project and place that we will live.

Suffice it to say that the main part of this project for now is actually a hotel, so regular readers of this blog could, if they so wished, come and stay at our hotel near Zielona Gora and have discussions in person about any of the things on here that may have entertained you over the years. Anyone who is a follower of this blog will get a special deal.

So if anyone was thinking that my silence was all down to increased goldlisting, I am sorry to say that this is not the case, my average lines per week has also fallen right down to about 40% of usual, and will need to be resumed with renewed vigour later in the year.

 

Can I keep my aquarium in my bedroom?

The important thing is a nice even level service on something strong enough to take the weight, which could well be a chest of drawers in a bedroom.  Certainly you do have to check it will take the weight you want to put on it.

You will probably be OK sleeping with the noise of a quiet filter. One should never switch the filter off for the night and then switch it on again in the morning.  And neither can you do that to the heater. The light you do switch off, and then it is a question of either remembering to switch it on in the morning or having a timer switch.

Just make sure there’s still room for the bed!

There is nothing unhealthy about sleeping next to a fishtank, if that’s what you are worried about. As long as you keep it clean. The exception is if you keep an octopus as this will wait till you go to sleep and then lift the lid, sneak out and get on your face like that thing out of alien. Just kidding.

 

My own case

I personally have been sleeping with a tank filter in the room working all night for maybe twenty years or more as indeed I did as a boy. I rarely get disturbed by the filter noise – only if it is lying against something which reverberates. If you have this problem then either use suction pads or adjust the position of the filter vis a vis the hood.  This is actually a good argument for avoiding the kind of tank sets where everything is built together.
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Vladimir Khailo at Wem Baptist Church

01 March 2022

Original YT playout date: 23 September 2010
Duration: 1:20:45

A response to militant atheists who think it’s ok to fight religion by any means

 

The Amazing Atheist, an extreme anti-religious commentator on You Tube at the time this was originally

Vladimir and Maria Khailo during that trip to the UK.

posted, says that violence is sometimes the answer. Well, the recording in this video I’m appending is of Vladimir Khailo, a leader of the Independent (ie. unregistered with the state) Baptist Church in the Ukrainian SSR during the 1980s. Someone who knows all about what happened when the atheist regime of the Soviet Union decided to try to “heal” belief by the use of neuroleptic drugs and other psychological “treatments” – he was one of the more famous of their guinea pigs among the leaders of the persecuted Baptist Church. What happened to him and thousands more was violence perpetrated by a savagely zealous atheist state disguised and dressed up as medicine and social intervention.

A harrowing account

 

This is his harrowing story, well worth the listening. The guy in the high pitched voice translating for him was me. Thirty four years ago, I was his translator when he got out of the Soviet Union. This he obtained at the personal request to Gorbachev by Sakharov. One of the first things he did when he was freed was to come to Britain and thank the British churches for sticking up for him and remembering him when he was going through that hell. I had the great privilege of spending ten days in the company of this strong Christian leader who had faced the nastiest, cruellest things that communism had threatened believers with. Witness in his own skin to some of the worst systematic abuses perpetrated outside of wartime by a country on faultless citizens.

Everything changes, but anything can happen again

OK, in Russia, this tribulation pretty much stopped 34 years ago and the prayers of the church were answered. These days it is going strong in other parts of the world. And as long as atheists in America and other parts of the free world believe that violence is the answer, we can never be sure that it won’t be us in Vladimir’s position 34 years from now. Once again is it likely to be violence done to us in the guise of a moral State healing and having an ethical explanation for every piece of violence it will do to the believers.

Here we go again?

I am preparing this post on the day when Russia invaded Khailo’s country again, so we simply do not know what sorts of things now lie ahead for Ukrainians, including the believers of that country.  It looks like it is set to be a long conflict. And while this time it is not specifically Christians who are on the receiving end of the persecution, there are going to be the usual horrible effects that always happen when people place their political ideas above the Gospel truths of God.

Church details here: http://www.wembaptistchurch.co.uk/howtofindus.htm”
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My betta fish is making a bubble nest, but I have no other fish, he’s the only one. Why is he making it?

He doesn’t know that he is in captivity. He doesn’t know you don’t have any intention of giving him a female. He only wants to be ready if one turns up.

Either he has worked out that he depends on you for everything, and his internal monologue is as follows:

“This big monkey gives me my food, fresh water and everything else, so when he sees I am ready to breed, he will also provide the female”.

Or else he has gone through a kind of utilitarian monologue in his brain, saying to himself:

“The existence of a desire for something predicts that it exists. I desire food when I am hungry and food comes. I desire for there to be an existence of God, and then God comes to me in my dreams. Now I desire the existence of something else, I don’t know what it is yet, but I know it must be something to do with that thing up there I got strangely driven to build out of my sticky saliva, and air. And when the thing that it is for comes along, I’ll know what it is.”

 

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On foot from Podbaba – Prague Vlog #38

Original YT playout date: 16 September 2010
Duration: 1:03:57

On foot back home from Podbaba thinking about Creation and Evolution, among other topics.
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