New Job, Blog Leaving Facebook

I've started a new job and have decided that at some point in the next week or so I will stop cross-posting the blog to Facebook. If you want to keep following the blog, go to an entry and click on the "email new posts" on the left. It will have you do a "captcha" and then you will get a message in email to click the link and you will be set. The blog is at http://www.moosetracksblog.com/ now, so easier URL to use "whatever" to get at it.

I may or may not talk about the specifics of my new job at some point. It is supporting and providing assistance to people with mental illness and or substance abuse issues 20hrs a week. We live in an increasingly broken nation, I'd love to see us fix that, but in the meantime, I hope I can help a few of the "walking wounded" casualties of the loss of religion, family, community, morality, personal responsibility, etc, as well as those like me that happen to have a mental health challenge.

I've not been secretive on the blog about my own "long term recovery" from issues with depression and anxiety, but OTOH, I don't dwell on it -- it's part of the hand dealt to me, I try to play that hand as well as I can, and I hope that some of my experience can help others.

The Blog is a bit better organized than it used to be. If you go look at the AAAA entries, they are mostly entries that have had high readership, along with a few that I feel are especially good (there are AAA, etc also if you want to "dig deeper" in that manner). The labels are in general more up to date than they used to be -- if you want to go follow some thoughts on "religion", "philosophy" or "American Decline", I think over 50% of the 3,700+ blog entries are labeled at this point. "Life" is the label for "stuff that happens to me".

I'd expect that blog frequency will not change much, it will remain "choppy".

Yes, the reason for stopping the cross-posting is the potential that "someone would be offended" relative to the new job. We live in a time where Christian, conservative, Constitutional, etc views are offensive to many. While I believe in people in the United States being able to have any view they want short of "pledging allegiance to ISIS" as in the case of the shooter this week, our current nation seems OK with ISIS supporters, but often offended with those who support Christ or the Constitution.

Thanks for your attention, and I hope you make the move off the FB stream.

Kitty Lock Fever

This is "Cabbage", a poor kitty who had to be re-adopted from our son when his life situation changed. We call him "Cab" for short, but I typically call him "The Ferocious Cabadocious" because he still retains a tendency to suddenly bite or claw out of the blue while you are petting him. He has a complex personality, he can also be a real lover.

He has also become the "traveling kitty". He likes to sit on my knee right next to the drivers window as we are going to IA and back to watch the other vehicles -- he gets excited when we pass someone and gets unhappy when we are passed, although that behavior has settled down as he has gotten more used to road travel.

He tagged along last Friday - Saturday as we headed to IA and back to enjoy the cold and rainy weather with a view of the lake. About 10 min into the trip back on Saturday PM, the one side of the tailgate on our trailer popped off and drug in the pavement, so we had to pull over. A pin had come out, so we took care of that and went back to get going and .... the Avalanche was locked!

See, Cab likes to press the buttons on the armrest on the drivers side, when I'm driving I have to watch if he gets over there and cover up the buttons, or a window will soon go down at 75mph on I-90. The vehicle was running in park, Marla's purse was inside, and we were sunk. We coaxed him up to the drivers armrest position, but after about 10 min or trying to randomly get him to move around by waving at him and tapping on the window to press the lock button again, we were calling a locksmith.

I'm sure we looked like idiots as well, but Kitty Lock Fever tends to cause that.

Suddenly, while Marla was looking for a locksmith,  I noticed him heading toward the back seat passenger side and realized that he had opened that window! I got around to intercept him and Marla was able to crawl in with some help and save the day -- not all that dignified, but saved!

Thus ends the story of Kitty Lock Fever -- a story which will no doubt make Cab immortal in Kitty fame at our place for years to come!

34707 Island View Lane, Emmetsburg, IA 50536

That is the address of the lake place.

If you have the Google Maps application on at least Mac and type that address in, it will give you the satellite view of the IA property as of summer of 2014. You can see the neighbors house south of our lot with big "U" dock with lift and cover in center, our dock is in, and the brother in law's camper is on our lot and their is a camper on the lot to the north of us.  It looks MUCH different now, with a shed taking up the northern third of the lot!

For some reason, Google Earth and the web version seem to have older shots, so properties out in our area of the development don't show up everywhere.













If you have the right browser or IP camera viewer you can go to 69.66.197.8:83, enter "guest" for ID and "guest" for password, and you ought to see something like the following if everything works right. It's a little wet down there now and there seems to be some drops on the camera lens. This cam is a "temp", I'm playing with a higher resolution model that has zoom and remote panning to allow different things to be viewed. HOPE to get that installed the end of the week.

The place is MUCH more fun this year with the dock already in (thanks to the IA Bruellmans for getting that done!) and of course the shed operational from the summer get go.

Tenerife, Easter 2157

Ask the pilot - Salon.com:

2007 was the 30th anniversary of 583 people being killed when two 747s collided on the island of Tenerife on a foggy Sunday afternoon. Next year will be the 40th anniversary, but the 27th will be a Tuesday and Easter will be the 16th of April.

Easter fell on the 27th in the years 1622, 1633, 1644, 1701, 1712, 1785, 1796, 1842, 1853, 1864, 1910, 1921, 1932, 2005, 2016, and for those that are interested, the next time it will be on the 27th is 2157.  I have faith that Easter will be the most important day for all eternity to me on Easter 2157 -- but for those of no faith, time will have long ceased the next time Easter falls on this day -- as it did for 583 people on the non-Easter Sunday afternoon March 27, 1977 on a little island off the coast of Morocco.

It was the spring of my junior year at UWEC, a little over a year later in June of '78 I would start at IBM, but eternity started for those people that Sunday. Easter in '77 was April the 10th. I certainly remember the horror at the accident, but was affected more by American Airlines 191 Memorial Day 1979 losing an engine on takeoff from O'Hare in Chicago. The picture of the stricken jet rolling to the side and the loss of all 270 aboard was especially horrifying. I had and would fly out of O'Hare and would fly on a DC-10 a number of times -- they shook and flexed a lot on takeoff, usually a few of the overhead bins would pop open to add to the effect.

There is something odd about human thought relative to time. We feel emotionally quite different about dates prior to our birth, than we do about dates far enough in the future that they are certainly beyond our deaths. None of us existed for Easter in 1701 or 1712 either, but at least for me that feels differently from Easter 2157. Even my precious granddaughter who will turn 1 this year, would turn 101 in 2116 if she is so lucky -- her grandfather will be LONG gone!

We know we had a beginning, and things before our beginning when we did not exist don't bother us. But as we look into the future, we either sense or imagine that "we will be somewhere". Or is it just Christians that that feeling?

Over two thousand years ago we know that Christ died on the Cross and then appeared to over 500 after his resurrection. We separate time into BC and AD because of that event of all events. For Christians, it is THE EVENT of eternal significance.

It makes Easter 2157 a joyous prospect.

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My White Male Privilege (WMP)

Got in a discussion today with some other "Privileged White Males", and we decided that we DID have ONE rather large privilege.

We are the only remaining group in America that is not absolutely expected to think a specific way about politics. We are allowed to have some diversity of thought.

Nobody is going to tell us "There is a special place in Hell for white males who fail to help another white male" as Madeline Albright said about women and Hillary.

We aren't like blacks or hispanics who are expected to be universally Democrat or not be "REALLY members of their own race".

I'm being incomplete I know -- Indian (both Native and from India) and various orientals are not so pigeonholed, but they are small enough groups that "The Party" really doesn't care about them.

I also realize that for even a white male to hold a position as anti-social and intellectually unpopular as "Republican" or "Christian", or "Conservative" can easily prevent promotion at work, cause the loss of employment, or other things, but the fact remains that we are not considered "traitors to our own kind" for leaving the sanctity of "The Party" thought reservation!

Mille Lacs, Government In Action

Mille Lacs walleye season catch-and-release only in 2016 - Story | KMSP:

Mille Lacs, once the "Walleye Factory" will be catch and release only in 2016 with the use of live bait disallowed.

Back in 2006 I did a blog on how great a time it was fishing there, and recalling 2003 when I caught a 27", 28", 27" walleyes on consecutive days along with a good number of other walleyes over 20".

We used to fish over in NW WI before the indians started spearing and netting and those fisheries were destroyed. They started the same thing on Mille Lacs and of course ASSURED everyone that it was going to be "managed" and suitably maligned anyone who protested as "racists".

So Mille Lacs now has the same designation as Dallas-Fort Worth airport. DFW

Government is the fecal Midas -- what it touches turns to shit.

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PLEASE READ! ... The Reason for God, Belief in the Age of Skepticism

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594483493/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=53943455438&hvpos=1t1&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=7298185130422206397&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=b&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_7vqca73v59_b

This book, by Timothy Keller, Pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan may save a lot of souls, and possibly even provide a downpayment on saving America and Western civilization. It truly is THAT GOOD!

I tend to write direct and often "in your face". Quiet, reasoned, caring conversational style is not my natural mode in writing -- but I **DO** understand that it is important, and I **DO** very much respect it when I see it. Keller very much has that, plus he has an extremely well stocked brain coupled with the gift of writing both well and compactly with enough personal anecdotes to make this book more reachable than many of similar depth of content.

In part 1, called "the leap of doubt", he covers a series of objections to God with great insight and hard philosophical backing. They are:

1. There can't be just one true religion. 
2. How could a good God allow suffering? 
3. Christianity is a straightjacket
4. The church is responsible for so much injustice. 
5. How can a loving God send people to Hell? 
6. Science has disproved Christianity
7. You can't take the Bible literally. 

In an "intermission" between parts 1 and 2 he discusses the various arguments for and against -- "Strong Rationalism" -- essentially "proof of God", which is no more doable than proving our own existence. We then arrive at "critical rationality", the idea of "best fit". Evolution can't be "proven" in a strong rationalism sense given the time scales involved, yet most scientists find it compelling. 

"The view that there is a God, [Richard Swinburne] says leads us to expect the things that we observe -- that there is a universe at all, that scientific laws operate in it, that it contains human beings with consciousness and with an indelible moral sense. The theory there is no God he argues does not lead us to expect any of these things. Therefore, a belief in God provides a better empirical fit ..."

He then moves to Part 2, The Reasons for Faith

8. The clues of God.
9. The knowledge of God
10. The problem of sin
11. Religion and the Gospel 
12. The true story of the Cross
13. The reality of the Resurrection
14. The Dance of God 

At the end of chapter 9, which is basically my old belief that if you look in your heart, you already know there is a God, he summarizes: 

If you believe human rights are a reality, then it makes much more sense that God exists then that he does not. If you insist on a secular view of the world and yet you continue to pronounce some things right and some things wrong, then I hope you see the deep disharmony between the world as devised and the real world (and God) your heart knows exists. This leads us to a crucial questions. If a premise ("there is no God") leads to a conclusion you know isn't true ("Napalming babies is culturally relative") then why not change the premise? 

As frequent readers know, Nietzsche and a lot of other lesser philosophers have decided long ago that "God is dead, so power = morality" (might=right)".  The baby of morality goes out with the bathwater of God, and the world ends up arguing in strange gibberish that has been known to be gibberish since the Greeks. It seems to be getting clearer every day that our civilization is dying rapidly without God.

The review could go on forever -- the book is a treasure trove of understanding what the COSTS are for creating a God in our own image. How God is the sworn enemy of the smug -- both the smug because they believe that they "do a better job" of following rules, being successful, etc, AND of the smug that "have a more open and sophisticated mind than the unwashed masses". Christ came to comfort the "poor in spirit" (comfortable), and more-so to  make the comfortable UNcomfortable ! ... no matter what it is in this world that they believe is to their comfort other than serving the REAL Christ, not one of their imagination.

He makes it clear that ONLY in giving our WHOLE life to Christ is there a way out of our broken state.

"It is only Grace that frees us from the slavery of self that lurks even in the middle of morality and religion. Grace is only a threat to the illusion that we are free, autonomous selves, living lives as we choose". 

He quotes a lot of CS Lewis, who I love, he also is high on Jonathan Edwards who is now on my reading list. There are others. This book is a TREASURE to anyone who seeks God and restoration of our broken nation and world! I can't recommend it highly enough!!!

I'll close with this quote from Lewis on love that is oh so true:

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

AA, BOcare, Drugs

The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous - The Atlantic:

Reading through this I find a couple of threads:

1. BOcare has mandated that all insurance policies include 30 days of treatment for alcohol, so there is more money in the alcohol treatment bucket than ever before. Money as always is "good and bad". True, more people may get treatment -- OTOH, it is likely there will be a bunch of "standards" that may or may not be that helpful to people that need help -- but they will certainly direct money to "the right pockets" as determined by politics. 
2. Folks like the Atlantic HATE anything that smacks of "higher powers", so AA makes them VERY uncomfortable! 

That said, I can't imagine anything outside of God that can't be improved. It turns out there are a couple of drugs that are approved for treatment of alcohol abuse. 

I researched this article, I wondered what it would be like to try naltrexone, which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved for alcohol-abuse treatment in 1994.

Perhaps even worse is the pace of research on drugs to treat alcohol-use disorder. The FDA has approved just three: Antabuse, the drug twhat induces nausea and dizziness when taken with alcohol; acamprosate, which has been shown to be helpful in quelling cravings; and naltrexone. (There is also Vivitrol, the injectable form of naltrexone.)

AA, because of the "anonymous" part can at least seem somewhat secretive, and at least some of the AA people tend to be "anti-substance" -- as in "if you are taking ANY drug, that is "the same" as being addicted to alcohol". Of course, that is an oversimplification -- any relatively loose organization like AA is going to have SOMEBODY that says damned near anything.

I don't draw any conclusions from this. Alcohol is a drug, so it doesn't seem impossible that some drugs might help reduce cravings for it. As a fat guy, I noted with more than a little interest that naltrexone might curb cravings for food.

Personal aside. Apparently a guy that I have known for around a decade committed suicide over the weekend -- not local, not completely sure, friendship had been reduced to FB except for me seeing him on my long motorcycle trip in 2013. Few other things going on -- my Dad's issues being one.

Girl Scout Cookies were brought into the house. I resisted them for a couple of days, but in the presence of nice cold milk mid-afternoon, I succumbed. End damage, a row short of a whole box. I really had no intent of eating that many, it was purely "one more ... oh, there is some milk left ... oh, I need more milk ... and ... repeat".

The snake brain is a scary scary thing -- given the right circumstances I am DEFINITELY powerless against Girl Scout Cookies. I once heard of someone who could eat ONE -- she ought either be killed or put in  control of the universe,  I'm not qualified to state which!

Keep the damned things OUT OF THE HOUSE! ... there but for the grace of God!

Anyway, "addictive behavior" --- food, video games, drugs, alcohol, smoking, gambling --- is certainly part of the human condition. The drugs and alcohol are currently at epidemic proportions and killing over 50K people a YEAR.


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The Party Of Civil War

Will the Republican Party Survive the 2016 Election? - The Atlantic:

A very long but generally solid slog through some of the relatively recent history of the Republican party. I often like to read the perspective of those who are the enemy of a position -- they are more likely to be clear in their criticism! This paragraph does a good job of summarizing what has happened to being a middle class white without a college degree in America today -- I covered this here.

You can measure their pessimism in polls that ask about their expectations for their lives—and for those of their children. On both counts, whites without a college degree express the bleakest view. You can see the effects of their despair in the new statistics describing horrifying rates of suicide and substance-abuse fatality among this same group, in middle age.

Seems that the left wing Atlantic and the Republican establishment have a hard time understanding why people that are dying of substance abuse and their own hand would be willing to take a long shot on Trump. I guess I'm just not quite intellectually removed enough to be able to understand that level of dispassionate analysis.

These populists seek to defend what the French call “acquired rights”—health care, pensions, and other programs that benefit older people—against bankers and technocrats who endlessly demand austerity; against migrants who make new claims and challenge accustomed ways; against a globalized market that depresses wages and benefits. In the United States, they lean Republican because they fear the Democrats want to take from them and redistribute to Americans who are newer, poorer, and in their view less deserving—to “spread the wealth around,” in candidate Barack Obama’s words to “Joe the Plumber” back in 2008. Yet they have come to fear more and more strongly that their party does not have their best interests at heart.

I'm reading "Darwin's Cathedral", a discussion of how religion "evolved. For an evolutionist, it HAD TO, right? There is no God, so why in the world should there be anything as stupid as religion! BIG PROBLEM! One of the big items he covers is John Calvin -- "the work ethic", how it allowed each and ever worker to see their vocation as a "holy pursuit". Being hard working was a VIRTUE!

Along came FDR and sold Americans that EVERYONE has a "right" to get more out of the government than they put in via FICA. Not that FDR cared -- he knew he would be LONG gone before the payment for the Democrat votes bought with FICA came due, but he and everyone who initiated it knew it was a Ponzi scheme based on 1). Perpetual population growth 2). Perpetual economic growth 3). 2/3 of the people dying before they received any "benefits".

All three assumptions are FALSE today, but even those WITH college degrees are generally not educated well enough to grasp these basic facts. As recently as 2005, W was willing to talk about the truth and propose putting some money in ACTUAL investments rather than spending it and putting IOUs in a box, but he was soundly defeated. The Trump voters are right, NEITHER party has their best interests in mind!

The work ethic is dead, the country is broke,  over 50% of the population  receives the major part of their income from the government, and neither party is stating ANYTHING as a "plan" to recover!

Politics was becoming more central to Americans’ identities in the 21st century than it ever was in the 20th. Would you be upset if your child married a supporter of a different party from your own? In 1960, only 5 percent of Americans said yes. In 2010, a third of Democrats and half of Republicans did. Political identity has become so central because it has come to overlap with so many other aspects of identity: race, religion, lifestyle. In 1960, I wouldn’t have learned much about your politics if you told me that you hunted. Today, that hobby strongly suggests Republican loyalty. Unmarried? In 1960, that indicated little. Today, it predicts that you’re a Democrat, especially if you’re also a woman.

Politics ARE becoming more central because religion, family, work, community, friends and everything else was becoming LESS central to life -- and to the extent any of those elements are part of your life, you likely only associated with those who shared your political persuasion, especially if you were on the left. As the nation falls ever farther down the totalitarian socialist rat-hole, politics **IS** the most important thing in at least THIS life!

Basically "post Clinton", the Republican establishment has been uncertainly messing around with the following issues:

1). Reform FICA, Medicare and other government benefits so they are no longer targeted to the "most needy 100%" and hav some tiny wisp of hope of being there for the "bottom 60%".

2). "Triangulate" on SOME way to control immigration from Mexico, remove at least "some/most" illegals, WITHOUT losing 90% of the Hispanic vote for the future. Most likely impossible.

3). Maintain / extend SOME sort of tax relief for those of us that are or were in the low 5 figures and are fighting a losing battle paying the freight on the massive growth of government.

4). Struggling to have SOME sort of military capability without busting the budget. Try to prevent us from falling to the point where we were incapable of telling Mexico " Build the damn wall -- OR ELSE!"

It is easy to assert that they have done a TERRIBLE job of all of these -- however, the Democrat strategy contrast is rather amazing:

1).  Unlimited spending at increasing rates on existing programs with over $100 T in unfunded liability while adding new programs with abandon (BOcare) with no plan at all on paying for any of it or controlled the deficit spending. They continue to give drunken sailors a bad name!

2). Open borders for all -- adding Muslims to the list including terrorists if possible. "Win/Win" -- more Democrat voters, more strain on system, more violence -- increases chances for more totalitarian crackdown! Being a Democrat has to be FUN!

3). Tax the absolute crap out of anyone making over say "$75K", hammer any entrepreneur / corporation as hard as they can!  Get business to close or leave! The more people dependent on government and not working the BETTER! Class warfare is a WINNER for D -- fan the flames!

4). Make the military a social project -- more women, more gays, get busy on transgender in the military. Lose as ignominiously as possible in as many theaters as possible! Use the military to de-stabilize stable countries like Libya and hand them over to terrorists. Pull the military out of Iraq and hand that over to the terrorists. Screw up Syria and let that become a terrorist stronghold. Capitulate to Iran, Russia, China and ISIS -- make certain America is viewed as completely powerless! Today N Korea said they were going to nuke both the US and S Korea.  Everyone loves the scent of BO (at least BO burning).

The new strategy soon proved a total and utter failure. George W. Bush’s tax cuts for high earners expired in 2013, and Republicans could not renew them. The drive to cut the deficit ended in budget sequestration, whose harshest effect fell on the military. The Gang of Eight deal never came to a vote in the House. All the while, Republicans’ approval ratings slipped and slid. Instead of holding on to their base and adding Hispanics, Republicans alienated their base in return for no gains at all. By mid-2015, a majority of self-identified Republicans disapproved of their party’s congressional leadership—an intensity of disapproval never seen by the Republican majority of the 1990s nor by Democrats during their time in the majority after the 2006 midterm elections.

I think there is plenty to be angry about relative to the Republican establishment -- however, we are to some degree complaining about the few people at least ATTEMPTING to do some bailing while the Titanic of the US goes under with Democrats drinking, smoking weed, whooping it up and using the lifeboats for campfires on the tilting deck.

When Trump first erupted into the Republican race in June, he did so with a message of grim pessimism. “We got $18 trillion in debt. We got nothing but problems … We’re dying. We’re dying. We need money … We have losers. We have people that don’t have it. We have people that are morally corrupt. We have people that are selling this country down the drain … The American dream is dead.”


That message did not resonate with those who’d ridden the S&P 500 from less than 900 in 2009 to more than 2,000 in 2015.

Remember, this is a lefty magazine -- printing a bunch of money and having the stock market go up and calling it "BO success" makes sense to these guys. It really isn't too surprising it does NOT make sense to over half of the Republican party, and at least SHOULD NOT indicate success to even more of the Democrat party.  If Trump becomes the nominee, the BIG QUESTION is if he is going to be able to get at least the white Democrats to look at the "are you better off?" question like Reagan did.

**IF** he was able to pull that off -- and it SHOULD be possible, since it is CLEARLY true that the "bottom 80%" of the US population has done terribly under BO, he could win. If that is a "good thing" and if he can accomplish anything to keep the US Titanic from the long fast trip to the bottom is highly questionable -- Can anyone???

Trump promised to protect these voters’ pensions from their own party’s austerity. “We’ve got Social Security that’s going to be destroyed if somebody like me doesn’t bring money into the country. All these other people want to cut the hell out of it. I’m not going to cut it at all; I’m going to bring money in, and we’re going to save it.”

 The two biggest holes in the side of our ship are unfunded liabilities and the inability of the economy to grow. Can one be fixed without fixing the other? My personal belief is that W gave us our best chance to stay afloat in '05 and we blew it. We are going to go under -- the question now is "how far".

BUT, I do tend to be something of a pessimist -- the BEST thing going for Trump is OPTIMISM, and his ability to engender that in millions of people who are actually workers that WANT TO WORK! It is similar to Reagan, but Trump is no Reagan and our situation is MUCH more dire than it was in 1980.   To have any hope of rebirth now we likely have to go through some cross between the '82 recession, the sick 70's, the Great Recession and the Great Depression!

Triple digit inflation? Years of deflation? Stock market "2,000"? No FICA payments to anyone with an income over "$15K"? I don't know how bad it is likely to get, but any of those would be better than "total collapse".

The linked article ends with a bunch of bogus "options" for Republicans to remain "viable" in the way they were before Reagan -- a perpetual minority party that provided the fiction that America was not ruled by a single party. The Atlantic finds that a great option -- but then, they still think we have an operational country, while the bottom 50% knows that what we have is a rapidly sinking ship with a lot of booze, weed and people shooting themselves in their cabins.

Remember, the Republican Party presided over the Civil War that was ANYTHING but "civil" -- 600,000 dead in a country with about 1/10th of the population we have today! In 1964, the Republicans lost the presidential election by over 20%, the Democrats had 68 Senators and a wide margin in the House.

If there is a small hope for saving America, most likely SOMEBODY has to take MAJOR, costly and risky action! Reading through articles like this shows that the "establishment" on neither left or right has nary a clue of the situation.

For all they are maligned, I find the Trump voters to have a lot more sense than the establishments of either party. They at LEAST understand there is a CRITICAL problem -- they may have the wrong approach to dealing with it, but SOME approach other than "business as usual" is certainly required!

Again, I think Cruz recognizes the problem as well and has a FAR better chance of fixing it, but I think the R establishment hates him worse than Trump! Just possibly, this is the time for a "really futile and stupid gesture"!

It isn't a political party we ought be worried about, it is AMERICA!

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True Liberalism, Leaving The Establishment

Welcome To The Conservative Counterrevolution:

It was William F Buckley that was my early model of conservatism, or better yet, the TRADITIONAL "liberal" model  -- those that believed in the diversity that matters, the diversity of thought. Those that were willing to understand a broad range of ideas, discuss them reasonably, and held up "liberty of the individual" as the core value to be esteemed (thus "liberals"). Their name was stolen by the totalitarian statist left, and they never really fought. Maybe the problem started there.

I never saw WFB get flustered, but I did see him get VERY direct -- and I saw many "false modern liberal" statist, socialist, totalitarian guests decompose into gibbering fools in the face of the WFB verbal jousts on "Firing Line". WFB knew what he was about -- as did Reagan.

Now, the "Scribes and Pharisees" seem to have taken over.

Burn it down. Scorch the earth. Blow it up. If the GOP realigns itself behind Donald Trump and surrenders its alleged principles for a fleeting stab at power, it will almost certainly be blown up—by movement conservatives.

I do like that they said "alleged principles", what might those be? Smaller government? I've seen no evidence of that since Newt. Support for their own oath to the Constitution? If one cared a fig for the Constitution, would not articles of impeachment been introduced to the Senate over the BO "encyclicals" in immigration? Certainly they would have been voted down, but they should have shown up! Why bother with foolish oaths if they can be broken without result?

"Movement conservatives" -- constipation comes to mind. The Republican party has held both houses of congress since the start of '15, what "movement" has there been on any issue? Today is the one year anniversary of the failure to override the Keystone veto. On the big issue of the budget, the R congress handed BO unlimited debt authority and thereby unlimited spending authority so they didn't have to "shut down the government" or even fight about it!

There is still time to root for a brokered convention, where, with any luck, the GOP will pull off some highly undemocratic mischief and deny Trump and his many irrational supporters the nomination.

I would still MUCH prefer Cruz, but the same establishment that is now maligning Trump as the devil incarnate was saying they PREFERRED him to Ctuz as late as January 16! ... Because Cruz actually stood for something (which they hated) and they believed that Trump was a "player" (read, they could keep the corruption with Trump!)

I could go on -- the fact that the Republican Establishment has lost it's soul and has NO PRINCIPLES seems VERY clear. They would MUCH rather hand power to Hildebeast who DOES have both "principles and a plan" -- completely destroy the remaining tatters of the US and replace it with a totalitarian socialist state ala Saul Alinsky whose book she wrote her masters paper on!

For me though, the real bottom line is guys like Jonah Goldberg -- who I see as the heir to NRO mistakenly thinking that in going after Trump they are somehow repeating WFB's purging of the John Birch Society from the Republican party. Huh? Trump is populist chameleon using the husk of the Republican Party for whatever the hell his game is -- which I'm pretty sure that even HE doesn't know!

I thought it was only the left that did "loyalty oaths" -- you had to sign off on "abortion, gay "marriage", global warming, faking you were taxing the rich but killing the middle middle class, open borders, political correctness, no jail sentences for blacks, ... etc" ... AND you had to sign off on ALL of it ALL the time, or you were "no longer a member of The Party in good standing", and therefore they could go after you like Bill Cosby!

But **NO**, now you are supposed to be swearing on a stack of National Reviews that you will NEVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES vote for TRUMP!!! Sorry, no loyalty to the constipation version of "conservatism" for me!!

I am a proud TRADITIONAL Liberal in the Hayek sense! My only loyalty oath is to Jesus Christ -- all others make their case. As far as the new right wing version of the Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers go, they are not making a case that resonates with me at all!

I really don't think I've changed -- I'm still smaller government, strong Constitution, strong defense, strong moral values, BUT PRAGMATIC. I find cutting off your nose to spite your face to ALWAYS be a BAD IDEA.

It appears that a lot of the "conservatives" and "establishment Republicans" have lost sight of that maxim.

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Jimmy Buffett's Plain Plane Buffet

Jimmy Buffett's New Toy The ICON Aircraft | All Things Aero:

I'm not a Parrot Head, but I do like some Jimmy Buffett. He is a big airplane guy and a major league environmentalist. He feels the rest of us need to get rid of our SUVs. The video in the attached shows him trying out a new plane and lists the planes currently in his stable.

I DON'T hate the guy at all -- it helps me realize what dealing with liberals is all about. Many of them are talented very happy and well meaning people who have not one single wisp of the concept "consistency", let alone any interest in dealing in any of it. I'm convinced it is one of the ways to be happy -- at least if your brain lets you compartmentalize well enough.

I wrote about his book "A Pirate Looks at 50" on my 50th birthday a decade ago. My seemingly wonderful life was about to fall into the abyss in less than two years from that post.


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Revulsion for Scalia, Priceless!

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/29/antonin-scalia-looking-backward

I can imagine articles similar to the linked being written for Jesus after the crucifixion. "He mostly failed ...".  Given the direction of the country, I suspect they are right about Scalia, but God will provide the ultimate determination of that as well!

Antonin Scalia, who died this month, after nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy. Fortunately, he mostly failed.

I thought this was rich ...

His revulsion toward homosexuality, a touchstone of his world view, appeared straight out of his sheltered, nineteen-forties boyhood.

It turns out that when tested on a PET scan, even people that SWORE they were "perfectly OK" with homosexuality were betrayed by their own brains displaying "revulsion". From a Darwinian POV, it is hard to imagine something less "adaptive" to the species, so from a scientific POV, that our our brains would be  so wired is anything but a surprise. Not surprising from a created POV either! So Scalia was human -- and admitted it, which is VERY unpopular today! Lying about even what your basic cells believe is the price "honor in the modern moral cesspool

But it was in his jurisprudence that Scalia most self-consciously looked to the past. He pioneered “originalism,” a theory holding that the Constitution should be interpreted in line with the beliefs of the white men, many of them slave owners, who ratified it in the late eighteenth century.

Let's beat up on those dead white guys -- oh, and certainly trash what they bequeathed to us!  We are doing a hell of a job -- whatever they name the post-BO wasteland, it isn't "America"!

To be laid to rest after dying peacefully on a hunting trip at 79 and to have your Son preside at your funeral! It just doesn't get any better than that! I can think of nobody more richly deserving.

Oh, to have the kinds of enemies that wrote this column? PRICELESS!

Trust, Security, Apple

We cannot trust our government, so we must trust the technology | US news | The Guardian:

First of all, I don't believe that the NSA or other US government agency can't break the iPhone security. Interagency, they may have decided that they don't really care about these particular people so they are not going to break THIS ONE, but if the top security apparatus of the US can't break into an iPhone, the idiots at the top are even more incompetent than I thought. (and that is INCOMPETENT!)

I used to work with security stuff at IBM. We had a couple of guys that would "go missing" for a few weeks, "on business", but with nothing more official than that. The "over drinks / wink wink nod, nod, I really need to shoot you now was" ... NSA. It was VERY clear that they could break whatever was "secure", and were going to continue to do so.

Beyond that, consider this from John McAfee ...

With all due respect to Tim Cook and Apple, I work with a team of the best hackers on the planet. These hackers attend Defcon in Las Vegas, and they are legends in their local hacking groups, such as HackMiami. They are all prodigies, with talents that defy normal human comprehension. About 75% are social engineers. The remainder are hardcore coders. I would eat my shoe on the Neil Cavuto show if we could not break the encryption on the San Bernardino phone. This is a pure and simple fact. 

And why do the best hackers on the planet not work for the FBI? Because the FBI will not hire anyone with a 24-inch purple mohawk, 10-gauge ear piercings, and a tattooed face who demands to smoke weed while working and won't work for less than a half-million dollars a year. But you bet your ass that the Chinese and Russians are hiring similar people with similar demands and have been for many years. It's why we are decades behind in the cyber race.

If you don't know what "social engineers" are relative to computer security, they are "con men, grifters, pickpockets". If you want to get a little humility on how good such can be, take a look at this.   McAfee is VERY different ... he is running for president on the libertarian party this year ...

The top linked article is quite sad, but maybe the saddest part is this:

Perhaps most importantly, we need to end the culture of impunity that protects people who run illegal programs and continue to thrive in their careers after they are exposed, but vindictively pursues the whistleblowers who expose that illegality. 

Only such a system, that offers transparently meaningful oversight and real consequences for those who violate our trust, has any chance of being trustworthy enough to remove the persistent global demand for platforms that preserve user privacy and security even at the expense of weakening the capabilities of their policing and national security agencies.

Seriously? With BO in the White House and Hillary Clinton running for president? With the guys that exposed Planned Parenthood's  selling of body parts under indictment?  Why just a few years ago the MSM had a cow over tracking who was calling the cells of known terrorists! Now they want "more trust"?

What part of THERE IS NO TRUST are these people missing?  In order to have such a thing as trust, one would need shared values, say Christianity. A written Constitution that was actually followed would be good. Perhaps after a few decades of return to such, some level of "trust" in organizations and governments might recover.

Those are gone ... learn to be as untrusting and independent as you possibly can be, and then learn some more!

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Stealing Your Attention, Or Your Wallet

A Pickpocket’s Tale - The New Yorker:

One of the regular themes I return to is that one of the most dangerous of human  weaknesses is that ALL OF US look at things from a human perspective! It is a weakness that shows the old "how stupid could people be to assume the earth was the center of the universe" hubris ding to be an even worse hubris ding at a higher level!

Well, they used their natural brains, just as you are using yours now! What is it that you expected them to do?

Case in point, pickpockets. I love the opening of the linked article:

A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act Penn and Teller, was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has a reputation as a pickpocket of almost supernatural ability. Jillette, who ranks pickpockets, he says, “a few notches below hypnotists on the show-biz totem pole,” was holding court at a table of colleagues, and he asked Robbins for a demonstration, ready to be unimpressed. Robbins demurred, claiming that he felt uncomfortable working in front of other magicians. He pointed out that, since Jillette was wearing only shorts and a sports shirt, he wouldn’t have much to work with. 

“Come on,” Jillette said. “Steal something from me.” 

Again, Robbins begged off, but he offered to do a trick instead. He instructed Jillette to place a ring that he was wearing on a piece of paper and trace its outline with a pen. By now, a small crowd had gathered. Jillette removed his ring, put it down on the paper, unclipped a pen from his shirt, and leaned forward, preparing to draw. After a moment, he froze and looked up. His face was pale. 

“Fuck. You,” he said, and slumped into a chair.

Robbins held up a thin, cylindrical object: the cartridge from Jillette’s pen.

The whole deal is worth a read, but the bottom line is that our attention can be controlled -- advertisers know it, politicians know it, the media REALLY knows it, magicians obviously know it, and a world class pickpocket will take what he wants EVEN IF YOU KNOW WHAT HE IS DOING!

The absolute dumbest thing any of us have is confidence! It is true that we can't live without SOME, but it is also critical that we know our limitations! 

Those that are manipulating you know that your attention can be manipulated. You can't stop them ALL, but you can do MUCH better if you are aware!

"But physical technique, Robbins pointed out, is merely a tool. “It’s all about the choreography of people’s attention,” he said. “Attention is like water. It flows. It’s liquid. You create channels to divert it, and you hope that it flows the right way.”"

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MNsure, "Free" Still Not Free

Some shocked by estate claims after signing up with MNsure | Duluth News Tribune:

Since we live under the rule of bureaucracy, reading the whole linked article is probably worth it, though it is longer than it needs to be.

Bottom line, in the machinations of BOcare, MNsure and Minnesota Care, the "asset test" for MNsure was taken away because there is none for BOcare and you are REQUIRED to purchase health insurance by law now.

But Minnesota failed to add a form to the tall stack of forms that lets you know that they are putting a lien on any assets you have for the cost of your "free insurance".

My Dad is in a nursing home for at least awhile -- got to sit through a discharge from one facility under Medicare and into another where a "supplemental" was involved. Stacks of papers, lots and lots of questions -- the wheels of government grind the lives and fortunes of us all, but they make sure they gather a lot of data while they do it.

Freedom has never been free -- and the cost of tyranny is still infinite.

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The Spotted Cow Felony

Maple Tavern owner, manager charged with felonies for selling 'Spotted Cow' beer - Story | KMSP:

You may be thinking "Onion", but no, this is government reality.

A former Minnesota bar owner and manager are each being charged with a felony for running “Spotted Cow” beer out of Wisconsin and selling it at their restaurant, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office announced Wednesday.

"Why" you might legitimately ask ... here you go:

While there is humor to this story of beer-smuggling and a sense of state pride with New Glarus Brewery’s “Only in Wisconsin” sales stance, this is also a story of just how screwed up the alcohol wholesale market is. Since the repeal of prohibition most states have operated what is called a “Three-Tier Alcohol Distribution System.” Wisconsin is no different.

The REAL bottom line is "taxes and fees". The government makes A LOT of money from alcohol ... MN is #13 highest, WI is #40 ... bit of differential there!

I am a BIG believer in "States Rights" -- that one of the BIGGEST things our founders wanted to enable is the chance to have "50" (their number was less) separate laboratories of "what works and what doesn't" inside a very limited federal system.

SO ... I believe that states SHOULD be able to do different things. "Felony" sounds like wacko enforcement to me for CERTAIN ... make the punishment fit the crime. FINE them enough so it is cheaper for them to obey the law than not.

I believe states ought to have the right to regulate things like alcohol, drugs, commerce, etc in very different manners within their borders, and obviously, that means that there will be these kinds of issues. I consider that a reasonable price to pay to allow people to have choices beyond "leaving the country".

Oh, and BTW, you MIGHT look at that chart and assume liquor prices are cheaper in WI. You would not be wrong ... a case of Leinies runs like $13 a lot of places.

If you are not offended by the F word, and things that are "inappropriate" you might also check this out ... I'm embarrassed to find it funny, but it DOES have a good deal to say about WI. (you may want to enjoy it with a Brandy Old-Fashioned).

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Socialism, When Your Grandchild Dies

Drug Shortages Forcing Hard Decisions on Rationing Treatments - The New York Times:

If we were still a nation that was able to understand enough to self-govern, this is a story that ALL ought read and at least have the tradeoffs explained. In a conservative or engineering universe, EVERYTHING has a cost, and there are ALWAYS tradeoffs. When you vote in socialism you give up your ability to have any control in trying to make life better for those you hold most dear -- in my case, my granddaughter, but you can pick your own. You "outsource" your power and responsibility.

In a "liberal" or utopian universe, "all things are possible" -- perfection is always one more program, tax, regulation, law or "blue ribbon committee" away. The only thing really holding up nirvana are those damned reactionary conservatives!

“It was painful,” said Dr. Yoram Unguru, an oncologist at the Children’s Hospital at Sinai in Baltimore and a faculty member at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. “We kept coming back to wow, we’ve got that tragic choice: two kids in front of you, you only have enough for one. How do you choose?”

The article makes it clear that we are ALREADY at "triage" for even critical drugs for children in medicine. We have regulated, "negotiated", "optimized", drug manufacture to the point where profit margins are razor thin (at best).  Before the move to socialized medicine got it's first purchase in the US with the advent of Medicare in the '60s, the rest of the world could do socialized medicine and have the US as a "market driven backup". That backup is on life support at best now.

The canary is dead folks. (they used to use a canary in coal mines ... if the canary died, it was time to make like a priest and get the flock out of there!).

We have had AMPLE warnings on how socialized anything works. East / West Germany, USSR vs US, current Venezuela, current N vs S Korea. The US was the huge "backstop" that allowed Japan and Europe to go socialist without having to "go gulag". When "regulation" fails to produce what is required, shortages result, and there is no market operating anywhere, then the ONLY choice is "forced labor". The government must FORCE some company to produce the drug at some stated price (to start) ... but after a bit, why should they pay them anything? FORCE them to produce what has been declared as "required" by the centralized power. We KNOW how that "works" ... it doesn't.

When you see critical drugs being rationed for children HERE, then you have NO EXCUSE to not realize that the effects of socialism are not changed by some magic of being applied in this area of N America!

Vote BS, but hoard toilet paper!

In recent years, shortages of all sorts of drugs — anesthetics, painkillers,antibiotics, cancer treatments — have become the new normal in American medicine. The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists currently lists inadequate supplies of more than 150 drugs and therapeutics, for reasons ranging from manufacturing problems to federal safety crackdowns to drugmakers abandoning low-profit products. But while such shortages have periodically drawn attention, the rationing that results from them has been largely hidden from patients and the public.

The NY Times naturally LOVES socialism, they are not going to go ALL the way to making the connection for you, but that paragraph does pretty well. The next one adds a bit more ... "economic incentives" ... we are still more fascist than socialist, so those are still involved. Why not just FORCE them to produce what is required? That would get us to "real socialism", which is basically communism. Remember gas lines? Carter was going to "control the price" -- which naturally controls the SUPPLY as well!

Many drugs are made by only one manufacturer, so production or safety problems at a single plant can have big effects. For another company to begin making the products and getting them approved by regulators requires the right combination of manufacturing capabilities and economic incentives.

So, when socialism produces shortages, as it always does, then what is needed is "fairer / more expert / "enlightened" allocation of the now scarce resource. Oh, and they "advised" it ought to be "made public".  Potentially, while there is still enough private pharmaceutical industry left to blame things on, that might be a political winner, but when the last vestige of that is gone and we all KNOW that it is the government making all these production / rationing decisions? Hillary's e-mails are WAY more "public" than that information will be then!

The effort, led by Dr. Unguru, the Baltimore oncologist, recommended that the drugs be rationed based on the ability to save lives or years of life, including curability of a child’s cancer and the importance of the drug in improving the chances. It also recommended that children participating in clinical research should not get priority over those who are not, because of concerns about coercing families into trials. The group also advised that allocation decisions be public.

"The banality of evil" rears it's head again -- THIS is how socialism works! "The vagaries of distribution" indeed! Profit is the price paid for supply meeting demand! Regulate that away and numbers coursing their way through an endless myriad of bureaucratic "clearing houses", "agencies", "offices" and "czars" are supposed to match supply to demand, but never do. Eventually, those "numbers" are people, and they are dispensed with using the same cold logic and pseudo "efficiency" as mere numbers.

The vagaries in distribution and inconsistencies in rationing have led to calls for change. Doctors and others have suggested the creation of a clearinghouse of scarce drugs and voluntary sharing to promote equitable access for patients. Others argue that there should be a registry of patients given nonstandard treatments so the results can be tracked.

Dr. Lurie, the federal health official in charge of emergency preparedness and response, said that the government was working to encourage hospitals to conserve and substitute drugs to avoid a crisis and trying to fill gaps in manufacturing. Steps taken by the Food and Drug Administration have also helped reduce the number of shortages, she said.

IF any Sanders supporters have read this far, I'm sure they are saying, "yeah, sure ... and "capitalism", "freedom", etc are PERFECT!

NO, THEY ARE NOT! That is precisely the point -- they admit that they are NOT PERFECT, but at least they don't institutionalize evil! They KNOW and admit that. The market doesn't have to "wait 4 years to make a change" and you get to "vote" (by buying and selling) typically many times a day!

Gay Healthcare

It’s almost over for Hillary: This election is a mass insurrection against a rigged system - Salon.com:

Remember the "Vote No!" campaign on the marriage amendment in MN? We were assured over and over that "Nobody has any plans to make gay "marriage" legal in MN, that is simply a lie created by fearful and bigoted people".

They made gay "marriage" legal the year after the amendment failed. One of the advantages that evil has is that there are NO RESTRICTIONS on the methods you can use to win -- when there is no such thing as truth, what would a lie be?

Similarly, BOcare was "not socialized medicine", and "If you liked your healthcare, you could keep it". What it is is WEALTH TRANSFER!

Here we have a quote from this fine article:

As for the notion that voters can’t see that paying $1,000 in taxes beats paying $5,000 in health insurance premiums, it is an insult to the American people.

Note, this is AFTER those of us who managed to work long and hard to get some tiny chance of few years of a decent retirement have ALREADY suffered INCREASES in healthcare costs on the order of $5-$10K!!!!  BOcare has already increased our out of pocket costs by 5-10 TIMES, although a lot of that is due to it sitting in accounts as "pre-spent". Having been or currently being a "maker" vs a "taker" in the US is like being a Christian in a country that recently went Islamic -- you are getting a lot of raw deals, but there isn't any choice, and it only looks to get worse in the future. 

"American people" for Salon are the 50-60%  of Americans that already pay at most $1K in taxes TOTAL. In fact, the bottom 40% of the country already gets more than HALF of their income FROM the government!

So where do we go from here?

Twenty years on, Hillary still sees the world through the rose-colored glasses of that ’90s consensus. Not Bernie. He sees that in 2016 rising tides don’t even lift most boats, that growth comes at a steep price when it comes at all, and that new technology cost more jobs than it creates. He understands that when jobs flow to countries with weak governments and low wages, the American middle class can’t get a raise. He sees that public-private partnership meant pay-to-play politics, and that the whole system runs not on innovation but corruption. My guess is the middle class sees what he sees and wants what he wants: a revolution. If he can continue to drive the debate, they may get one.

Ah, "Revolution" ... ah, to WHAT?

Well, the Reagan - 2006 growth wasn't good enough! The "consensus" in the '90s wasn't right. Technology isn't the answer. "Public-private partnership" doesn't work. SO??

Well, it would seem to me that the "only choice" that folks like Salon can see is complete Socialism ... or Fascism. Either government takeover of the means of production, or leave the capital ostensively in the hands of "private", but completely regulate it and 100% state what salaries, benefits, "profits", etc are. So much for "partnerships" -- it would seem that FORCE is the "only answer".

Why is it again that anyone is supposed to somehow "trust" the left? They avow no morals, they claim that truth does not even exist.

Pretty much everything in this country seems to be heading to be as fecund as a gay "marriage"! 

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Cruz, Rubio, TP Zeitgeist

Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio Made History. Didn’t You Hear? - The New York Times:

Here we have the obvious being stated directly and openly by The New York Times:

With Senator Ted Cruz taking nearly 28 percent of the vote and Senator Marco Rubio getting 23 percent, each vastly surpassed the results for any other Latino candidate in any previous United States presidential contest. 

How is that not being celebrated as historic or at least worth a headline for a day or two? 

The answer is not that complicated: Neither Mr. Cruz nor Mr. Rubio meets conventional expectations of how Latino politicians are supposed to behave.

The phrase that flashes before brain is "the banality of evil" ... how natural it is for evil, in the form of oppressive groupthink, "just the way things are", "everyone thinks this way", or  "how else could it be"? Becomes as natural as the air we breathe.

"The Party" (TP-D) controls the definitions, the categories, the "zeitgeist"-- the spirit of the age, intellectual fashion, the school of thought.

Classical Liberalism -- the kind that valued independence of thought, rule of law, and economic freedom was the opposition of single party rule. The kind of rule that defines how people MUST think to even be identified as part of their own racial group.

Take Ben Carson -- one would be hard pressed to hear anything about his blackness, and indeed, like Cruz and Rubio, TP does not consider him to be black. Part of being black is voting TP and ascribing to the TP position on issues ... the zeitgeist. Bill Cosby lost his blackness when he dared comment that blacks needed to have some level of decent public behavior after riots like Ferguson. He was thus labeled an "Uncle Tom" and so lost the immunity that had allowed him to treat women like Bill Clinton has for decades with impunity.

TP decides! For the bulk of the population they decide much of "normal thought" every day  -- they ARE the "zeitgeist", so what they say and do on a daily basis is "just the way things are".

America was intended to be a country with freedom of speech and thought and diversity of IDEAS! As TP so calmly and "chillingly" (if you are not a sheep) points out, even the vaunted "diversity" today is ONLY "diversity as defined by TP"!

You think Rubio and Cruz are Hispanic and Cosby and Carson are Black? TP is in charge of that definition as they are of ALL definitions. TP defines what is black or white, good or evil, intelligent or backward, and the vast majority of your fellow citizens are VERY comfortable with that power being held by TP.

In fact, so are you and I unless we make CONSCIOUS effort to FORCE ourselves to look at reality outside the confines of the  TP controlled environment!

This is the way that freedom ends. All categories are subsumed to being only "Of the Party" or it's enemy! Racial, ethnic, geographical, religious, social, intellectual, family, gender and class distinctions become merely  "are they a member of THE PARTY, or are they not"? The party defines and administers all the old categories, which are only recognized and defined in relation to TP.

Are you "Hispanic"? TP decides. "Educated"? Whatever TP chooses is the answer. Is your group one that deserves special treatment in hiring, education or government largesse, or are you in a group that is "bitter, hateful, lagging, racist" or otherwise to be sanctioned, controlled and maligned in the daily news and scolded by BO?

The banality ... the "common feeling", the "resignation to what MUST be right because it is EVERYWHERE" ... this is where the Gulag and the Gas Chamber become a barely noticed element of "the way things are".

Evil always hides best in plain sight. True evil is always dressed up as "the good". It is in fact SO GOOD that any disagreement with it is by it's very nature "evil" -- don't worry. TP is happy to inform you of EVERYTHING ... your race, your religion, your intelligence and yes, most importantly, your MORALITY.

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Time Reborn: From The Crisis In Physics to the Future of the Universe

http://www.amazon.com/Time-Reborn-Crisis-Physics-Universe/dp/0544245598

Perhaps one of the best cases I'll ever see of someone passionately trying to escape from shadow of God and going to ANY lengths in an attempt to create a "completely new way of thought" in order to imagine that he is free from any transcendent concepts.

I had to go back and review my blog on "Reason And Analysis", because in many ways this book was more "attempted philosophy" than physics.

Smolin tells us what is bothering him on page 11:

There is a cheapness at the core of any claim that our universe is ultimately explained by another more perfect world standing apart from everything we perceive. If we succumb to that claim, we render the boundary between science and mysticism porous.  

Our desire for transcendence is at root a religious aspiration. The yearning to be liberated from death and from the pain and limitations of our lives is the fuel of religions and mysticism. Does the seeking of mathematical knowledge make one a kind of a priest with special access to an extraordinary form of knowledge? Should we simply recognize mathematics for the religious activity it is? 

He wants to explain the universe ONLY in terms of itself, and does a good job of pointing out how the incredible correlation of mathematics to the observable world in Newtonian Physics, Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and the fact that all those "models" are timeless -- in that the formulas work in any place and time and are even reversible in time, is a "cop out". WHY!!! Why do they work? Why THESE particular formulas and initial values? He must know WHY!

The standard model just assumes "it is" -- and this obviously smacks WAY too much of "god" to Smolin. So, he goes for the "other great idea" -- Darwin. "Natural" Selection -- we MUST have had a LOT of universes, so therefore, each black hole is creating yet another universe, and the fact that we see a lot of black holes in our universe "must mean" that there is "natural selection" of universes and the fact that we have a "large number" of black holes "must mean" that we are in an "adaptive universe".

Evolution (of universes) requires time ... "real time", not "relative time", so he especially hates the ideas of relative space-time, "the block universe" and the multiverse. I go into those here a bit if you have not been suitably exposed

A lot of his thinking is based Leibniz's "Principle of Sufficient Reason" ... Everything must have a reason (cause).  Smolin wants to go farther, and make the "cause" be randomness -- as in Darwin, "lots and lots of random tries" and EVENTUALLY you get ANYTHING, including in this case, the laws of physics and the initial conditions of the universe. Although Smolin no longer finds the "laws" to be "laws", but rather "precedents" that may well be "evolving" from our "current approximations".

My nasty brain wonders if the Principle of Sufficient Reason would be required to have a reason? Smolin apparently chooses to be nicer to himself than that.

He is not however so kind to non-believers in Global Warming, religious people, etc. He finds that:

"If our civilization is to thrive, it would be helpful to base our decision making on a coherent view of the world, in which to, to begin with, there is consilience between the natural and social sciences. The  reality of time can be the foundation of this new consilience, in which the future is open and novelty is possible on every scale from the fundamental laws of physics to the organization of economics and ecologies. " 

Oh, "consilience" ... all the knowledge of the universe fitting together and us understanding the implications for "ultimate meaning" ... whole book on it covered here. "Coherence" is a great idea, but while you are in the process of throwing out the standard model of physics for a new evolutionary "precedence model", it seems possible that there may be a "slight delay" in achieving such a "coherent / consilient" view!

I looked up Smolin on the web ... he is 60, so I'm thinking he is having a midlife crisis. In the epilog you get insightful quotes like "The problem of consciousness is an aspect of what the world really is. We don't know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron ..." ... so therefore, understanding MUST be "about relationships" ... oh, and "Consciousness, whatever it is, is an aspect of the intrinsic essence of brains". Hmmmm

He sums it up with "the only certainty is that we will know more in the future".

Well, assuming that we survive the scourge of Global Warming, there aren't any monster natural disasters, rogue gravity waves, epidemics, etc, we will LIKELY have "more data", but is that really "knowledge"? I'd argue that prior to Einstein and certainly prior to Quantum Mechanics, many people at least THOUGHT they "knew more".  Is consciousness being an intrinsic essence of brains somehow supposed to guide us to "a better world"? Oh, and what would "better" be? (hint ... science has no ideas)

I enjoyed his descriptions of the standard model of Physics. I think they were in some ways better because he was trying to be critical of  rather than just explaining. Ultimately though, it comes down to one of two basic beliefs as covered in the "Reason and Analysis" link:

1). "Something" (God) created what we see with order, timeless and laws DISCOVERABLE BY US -- and that "something" is the "root" ... the causeless cause.

2). OR, the "root" is chaos -- there "just was" a lot of "chaotic stuff", for "no reason". The "wind of time" kept blowing over that junkyard of "stuff" and EVENTUALLY, it just "happened" to arrive at  the 747 universe where I'm typing this.

What Smolin (and some others) add to #2 is that EVERYTHING is RANDOM -- including the laws of physics, the relation of matter / energy, the speed of light, "the wind of time", EVERYTHING!!!

On top of that entirely random EVERYTHING -- including "pre-universe", he adds the faith statement that (due to randomness we assume) that "everything MUST have a REASON" (oh, and randomly developed consciousnesses of unknown character is able to discern those reasons! Tidy!)

But, hey, people that believe in God, math, laws of physics, etc are "cheap mystical priests".

Some guys handle their midlife crisis by buying a convertible and chasing a younger women I'm told ... in a completely random universe, perhaps ????