Embracing the Multiverse

Why Some Scientists Embrace the 'Multiverse' | RealClearPolitics:

I reference this mostly because it showed up ... and I'm fascinated by physics, especially the quantum stuff and the multiverse theories.

My thinking in this is as follows:

1. One will have faith in either God or in randomness and there will never be a "proof" either way from a material perspective. As this article covers however, to ignore the evidence on the side of intelligence requires a HUGE level of randomness. Note also, that God may well do "creation" through the use of "genetic algorithms" ... directed randomness. It is hard to beat the human hubris of setting up "rules" as to the boundaries in which an all-powerful, eternal and all-knowing God can operate! You WILL have faith ... it is as innate (and I'd say MORE so, because it deals with your spirit) as your heart pumping and breath being drawn.
   
2. Humans are inherently untrustworthy and especially able to fool themselves into thinking they are not  -- maybe because of random evolution, maybe because of a fall to evil ala Genesis, again, no way to know that answer scientifically/philosophically, or to believe it can be "educated away". We DO all believe something, and we act on the basis of those beliefs.
   
3. We arrived where we are today in Western Civilization either because Judaism, Christianity and Greek thought were the ordained design of God to arrive at this point, or because they were the most successful "memes" (genetic and conscious)  relative to human life and civilization. Again, only faith can select.
   
4. Since the west has rejected it's prime roots -- both classical thought and Christianity, it has already committed suicide -- low birth rate, massive debt, soaring suicide rates, exploding corruption, loss of any future direction / shared cultural vision, etc, etc. In my view, whatever happens is STILL "God's Will" ... but if one is an atheist, it would seem a really good time to check the metaphysical compass, because the current results of your belief system are not looking good. 

So every once in awhile, a monkey somewhere in some multiverse randomly plays Beethoven's 5th on a randomly created piano, but even MORE amazing, sometimes Joe Biden utters something that makes sense ... "Gird your loins"!

Where do we go from here? God, guns, gold, canned food?  I think we we need at least a "remnant" that can survive and carry the few worthwhile artifacts of Western Civilization into the future -- AND I believe that God has a definite plan, even when it seems VERY unclear!


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"Skylines" vs Ice

xkcd: Ice Sheets:

This is a great little graphic to put just a TINY smudge on the patina of human hubris. Man, those "skyscrapers" are REALLY something ... er, well, maybe not so really magnificent when compared with the continental ice sheets of a mere 21K years ago ... less than a heartbeat in geological time!

Oh how man's imaginary majesty pales next to even the tiny scale of the earth, let alone an infinite and eternal God!!

No doubt the next glaciation will be W's fault ... although I kinda like "The Gore Ice Age" if future humans have a little better sense of irony and humor!

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Space, The Superpower Frontier

Chinese Astronauts Dock With Tiangong 1 Space Platform | News & Opinion | PCMag.com:

When I was a kid the USSR put Sputnik in orbit as the first manned satellite and people in the US were shocked, outraged, and DEMANDED that we keep pace and exceed the USSR on the "high frontier".

Today? We are barely aware that that the Chinese Space Program is moving forward while we have to hitch rides to the "Dying Western Civilization Station".

We are so out of touch and so in decline that we completely lack any sense at all of our condition.

Sad how quickly a great nation fades from the world stage.

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Yellow Cake, Meaningless Facts, Stained Glass

The WikiLeaks Vindication of George W. Bush - Larry Elder - Page 1:

This article goes through a topic that I've covered before with some new data. Saddam either had WMD, or everyone thought he did. This article says that Yellowcake was acquired and was there -- to which the left will say one of two things; 1). It's a lie 2). It doesn't matter, because it isn't severe enough to go to war (with hindsight).

To which Elder tries to say "But you SAID that talking about Yellowcake WAS the "lie" ... and we had a special prosecutor and everything based on the "proof" that was a lie!"

To which the left replies "Consistency is NOT an issue ... WINNING is the issue and we already WON! BO is in power, we spy on you at will, we target you when we want to for audits or other government harassment! W is long discredited as "Bush lied, people died", the America you fought for is history, SHUT the F UP!!!!

They are "right" in the sense that "might is right". Note how unpopular "speaking truth to power" is now! The rule of law has been destroyed, our poor bankrupt children have been brainwashed to servitude and each day we realize new revelations of how we now live in a new "changed" nation, no longer America. BOville.

We have been running down this road for a century now. First slowly ... "Progressive" became "liberal" because "progressive" was tied to "Socialists" and "National Socialism" didn't turn out very well. Fascism was identified as "right" (as in "libertarian fascists") ... so the people no longer knew the difference between political left and right (statism vs extreme liberty or 'anarchy").

The "New Deal" was the "Raw Deal" for what was America. FICA was a massive assault on future generations by the current -- a time bomb that only now is becoming somewhat visible.  The various government progroms  converted the once great engine of growth into a geriatric nation with hardening arteries and gout. We live today in that sad shadow.

WMD in Iraq is just one more in a long tired litany of these topics. The Alger Hiss / McCarthy smear was a big one -- Watergate was really the left just finally getting around to punishing Nixon for being right. The release of KGB papers after the end of the USSR proved that Hiss WAS a spy and Chambers was right -- but no matter, for 90%+ of Americans, the left still won.

The whole myth of the USSR was a huge left scam. Even in the early '80s I listened to NPR breathlessly describe their "free health care", their "full employment", their "state education" ... to listen to our own Public Media, one would have thought that the USSR was heaven on earth. In the early '80s, Reagan was a MADMAN for ever suggesting that the USSR had ANY potential of ending. By the end of the '80s, the lefty message was that it had been obvious for a long time the USSR was in real trouble, and the foolish Reagan likely slowed their demise with his bellicose posturing.

It **IS** true that the winners write history -- and the left has been writing and re-writing our history for nearly 100 years.

Such is the looking glass world we live in. Acid rain, DDT, impending global starvation, the ozone hole, Japan taking over the world economy and the planet being "out of oil" in the late '70s, an impending global ice age in the early '70s, are all examples of massive "total truths" that one was once a fool to not be in agreement with. What it takes many years to learn is that from the perspective of those that purveyed and believed in those "truths", "deniers" are STILL fools, or at least "weird scary odd ducks".

When your mother asked "If all your friends jumped over a cliff, would you just follow along?", it was a trick question! The right answer is that if it was "the whole school", then YES!!! You are a social animal, and since we have thrown religion and the constitution into "the ash heap of history", a current "smart person" WILL follow the crowd -- and if tomorrow it turns out that the crowd was "wrong", that view will be completely forgotten as if it never happens. It is part of what makes it VERY uncomfortable for members in good standing of the Dominant Party (Democrat / liberal) to even TALK to someone that might bring up heresy ... The Dominant Party Message has replaced both God, the Constitution, and "foolish reality".

It looks pretty obvious from both economic and climate data that two current liberal myths that are not going to survive reality are Progressive Economics and  Global Warming, **BUT** as in the elements above, one needs to realize that DOES NOT mean that "facts, the truth, common sense, reality, etc" are going to "win".

I'm no longer certain that there exists any level of reality breaking through on these people -- we could easily be down to a few thousand people in hemp clothes shivering and starving in a cave somewhere with the onset of the next ice age, blathering away about "Global Warming", "Overpopulation", and "excessive consumption".

It seems that the best we can do is have a nicer cave somewhere with some reactors, hydroponics, connection to the sea for ice fishing and maybe some cloned woolly mammoths on the surface for steaks!  Going to have to have a REALLY good library, computer systems, AND a very nice chapel with a lot of stained glass.

We will have a lot of history to write and re-write.

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IRS, Outing Enemies

The Information-Revealing Service | National Review Online:

For you Non-Dominant Party members out there, this is the sound of the ratchet of tyranny taking a few more clicks.

We have been told what to believe about traditional marriage. The marriage of Christianity, of thousands of years of human culture. The foundation of Western Civilization. Defending traditional marriage is WRONG!

So here we have The National Organization for Marriage (NOM). An organization that already has 501c3 status

Their donor list, taken off their tax form, shows up on the website of a competing organization. There are really only two scenarios outside of space aliens that account for this. Either the IRS just leaked it as an organization, or an IRS employee committed a felony and leaked it.

This is very bad for freedom, but what is WORSE is that it is obvious that the Democrats in congress thought "NOM deserves it" ... they are a "hate organization" after all, right?? By wanting to keep marriage between one man and one woman, they have failed to leap on the current "progressive" train that first left the station in the Netherlands on April 1, 2001. (note, the first thing to go once one goes "progressive" is your sense of irony. April Fools Day in the "NETHERlands" ... "A fool says there is no God")

Marriage was marriage for millennia, then the "progressives" decide that it isn't one fine April Fools Day, and then it is downright evil to not have gotten the new word from the nether regions.

Now it is legitimate for a government agency to actively work to see that you are punished for not having your mind right on this issue.

When I was a kid, Americans discussed how the ACLU protected the rights of Nazis to march in Skokie IL even though in those days, everyone hated the Nazis.The Skokie marches were so well known that they included IL Nazis in the 1980 "Blues Brothers" movie.  The standard "end of the discussion" in those days  was "well, freedom of speech means that the rights of UNpopular speech have to be strongly protected".

People often ask, "how could something like Hitler happen"? It is pretty easy from where we are now.

• Give away power to your government.
  
• Let your government control which groups are "in" and which are "out". It felt "right" ... morally justified to be anti-semetic in 1930's Germany. The Jews had too much money. The Jews had strange religious ideas. The Jews exploited others. The Jews were bad.
  
  In the US today, "the Jews" are "The 1%", "The Religious Right", "The NRA", "Climate Deniers" or in this case "NOM".
  
• Make sure your education, media and popular culture are all "on message". People need to be made to feel uncomfortable about discussing anything that is "off message". Eg, questioning climate change when it is cold out, talking about "scandals" like the IRS, being overtly Christian, owning guns, etc
  
  Probably even MORE important is to make people feel positive, part of the group, "moral and patriotic" when supporting the "proper" policies ... supporting gay "marriage", removing gun rights, sanctioning groups that are not "correctly patriotic" (eg Tea Party)
  
• Increase the dependence on the government for daily life. People need to feel that the government is their only real protector and they need to feel a strong sense of unease if they are not in alignment with the government thought. It is CRITICAL that this be an every day thing -- their food, their medical care, their education, their information. All aspects of their life need to be seen as being tied to the goodness and approval of their benevolent government. 

Be your own judge of where we are at right now. "It can't happen here"?? I'd argue that it already has ... the 2nd Amendment and gun owners being the chief stumbling block to a "final solution".



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Worst Economic Performance in North America!

How Bad Is Obama’s Record on the Economy? This Bad | Power Line:

It is hard to overstate how damning of BO policies the chart in the linked article is. The once great US is underperforming Canada and Mexico!!

What is even harder to take is that like the various BO scandals, the "Dominant Party" absolutely does not care! One doesn't need to listen to very many of them for very long to realize that they are just fine with these results -- providing at least that "The Koch Brothers", "The Rich", "The 1%", the "Bitter Clingers", the "Haters" or whatever the whipping boy of the day "gets hurt the worst"!

It will take real loss of power, water and sewer and some hungry bellies before todays fully indoctrinated Sheeple start to realize that it is time for the people to rise up and throw off the new shackles of Bad King BO!

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Converted to Progressive!!!!

http://www.progressivesuspension.com/metric/gwmonotube/index.html

Well, for front suspension on the Wing that is! I'm a big believer in technologies capability to improve TOOLS, I just think it is absolutely inept and worse than powerless at improving MAN!

Things that make you go "Holy < expletive >"!!! I put the Progressive Monotube cartridges on the Wing, along with the "All Balls" tapered steering bearings http://wingstuff.com/products/21578-all-balls-gold-wing-steering-bearings?context=all_balls and the result is handling heaven!!

2006 Wing, 52K miles on it, tires at "half tread". Night and day on the ride and handling! Turned the the front fork from a sloppy blunt instrument into a precision carving tool. Easy 10mph faster on a 40mph curve, feeling MORE comfortable than the previous slower pace. Better handling at all speeds, better ride at all speeds, INCLUDING over sharp bumps -- no "jiggle, rattle, stutter" over a nasty expansion joint, just a semi-pleasant and confident THUMP. Maybe Scotty was wrong when he said "they canna change the laws of physics"!

I think the All Balls helped, but my guess is that it is mostly the Progressives. At the price though, it seems very unlikely that tapered roller bearings could not help SOME over the stock crap little BBs (My GOD, why would they put that kind of wimpy bearings in a $25K+ bike???

All in all a VERY impressive upgrade! 

Models or Measurements?

Global Warming Alarmism In Twilight | Power Line:

Or, when the territory and the map don't agree, GO WITH THE TERRITORY!!

The chart in the article is pretty definitive relative to ALL the existing climate models. Their projections are not coming to pass, so their chief use is as a "learning exercise". The predictions of the sensitivity of the climate to CO2 have proven to be radically wrong, so now some actual scientists need to build new theories and new models.

They need to, but I'm much less convinced than PL that they will. My view is that we are firmly in Lysenko territory on warmism in the US and West. Much more damage will need to be done before science starts to win out over political power on climate.

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Stone Flavors

Fine Whining | Power Line:

A fun little article from PL poking a little fun at wine review pretensions -- "stone flavors". My suspicion is "stonED flavors" might be more to the point.

Anyway, it brought back memories of my dabbling in "High End Audio" ... sound stage, imaging, tubes, amps and cables better found on arc welders, insanely expensive everything, gigantic speakers with a "Wife Acceptance Factor (WAF) of 0.0 ... well, you get the picture.

The two main magazines were "The Absolute Sound (TAS)" and "Stereophile", which we christened "The OBSOLETE Sound" and "Stereo Pile".

TAS would brook no digital -- the sweet sound of vinyl and tubes were the only way to sound NERDvana. Digital and integrated circuits produced "a threadbare mid-range", "an emaciated mid-bass", and "lacked palpable presence".

None of us ever went completely whole hog, although a couple buds had very nice systems and there were certain songs that to this day remind me of us crowding together to try to get in "the sweet spot" ... "Riders on the Storm" by the Doors and "Fast Car" by Tracey Chapman leap to mind ... but there was a lot of Jennifer Warnes, some Pink Floyd and other interesting stuff as well.

Yes, there was pretension and quite a bit just imaginative posturing, but it was a lot of fun!!! Sometimes I think that my friends and I may have "grown up" just a bit too much!!

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Manufacturing Drops–Unexpectedly! | Power Line

Manufacturing Drops–Unexpectedly! | Power Line:

I've very much noticed the "unexpectedly" theme on NPR. When you believe that the BO policies are excellent and that government can solve all problems, how in the world can such a thing happen?? It continues to be AMAZING to these folks.

They were equally surprised when the economy did well after 2001 and during the '80s with Reagan.

How strange. It is like the USSR not turning out to work very well. An ongoing and forever unexplained SHOCK to the wise of the left.

Those of us who are fools see those things as "learning opportunities", the wise of this world see them as creation itself -- "unexplainable random happenings".

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Let's Civilly Murder the NRA

Left-wing journalism professor calls for mass slaughter of NRA | Human Events:

One of many of the common viewpoints of the "civil left", with this one just presented in print.

Those NRA guys are obviously completely nuts to suggest that there is support out there for the government to use violence to target people that make use of their Constitutional Right to Bear Arms. Oh wait, that is exactly what he is espousing -- he just has a very poor understanding of warfare.

One would REALLY think that after the Civil War, Vietnam, Mogadishu, Iraq, Afghanistan and a few others, that even the most daft of the US populace would get the picture that an armed populace is one of the LEAST desirable  things for any military to take on. (Check how well the French did in Indochina or the Soviets in Afghanistan).

My guess is that he would be much less sanguine about an F22 or M1A1 taking out his conservative neighbor if it were to happen, but then folks like him live in some universe that is very hard to capture the quantum shift zenith for.

Note how little we hear about "civility" these days. I actually like that part -- it is like the reprieve from "Global Warming" here in MN this spring. Oh, I know, like mosquitoes  the buzzing will be back, but those of us some small semblance of our own minds as free people need to find our small enjoyments when we can!

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The Ruling Party Punishes On

IRS may have targeted conservatives more broadly | McClatchy:

Could we just all be a tiny bit honest about this as a nation? The ruling party (Democrats) by virtue of owning education, media and government workers Federal, State, and Local, could care less if some "conservatives" suffer because of their views. The official Party position is "they deserve it" -- a lot. Some of them are even standing up and saying "Thanks IRS"!! They believe this is appropriate!!

As Reagan long pointed out, the left feels that "Free Speech" is the right to agree with them in lock step politically and to offend people with any sense of propriety or Christians as much as desired. Naturally, offending Muslims, Gays, Blacks, Hispanics, Women, or any other "special group" is "hate speech". Pick on Christians, white males or gun owners if you want to hate somebody legally.

Since BO is Black, the difference between "Political Speech" and "Hate Speech" is especially blurred right now.

There are a lot of very sad stories n the linked article about military veterans that decided to support a conservative cause being targeted, pro-life groups being told how they could speak, etc. For those that believe in the Rule of Law and the Constitution, these things are "chilling".

The MOST "chilling" however is that we now have actual admissions by the IRS that specific groups were targeted on the basis of political views, and the general level of outcry in the American public is minimal. The left is fine with this. The left sees this as "just". The left doesn't want to discuss it and simply labels it as "partisan politics" and a "Republican Issue".

This ought to be an AMERICAN ISSUE, with 80-90% of the population DEMANDING immediate and strong action to find out exactly who is responsible, how high it went, and doing strong prosecution + new government controls to insure this never happens again! This is WAY bigger than any scandal in my lifetime. Watergate was a burglary that really affected nobody. Iran / Contra was internal executive / legislative infighting. Monicagate was only bad in that Slick skated on actions in the workplace that would get anyone else in the country fired.

This is the government attacking American Citizens because of their political views. This is a core attack on the meaning of what America once was.

We have `crossed a line where behavior by government that is very clearly UNAMERICAN in the strongest terms is now completely acceptable to at least half of the population as long as it is "groups on the right" that are attacked by the government. They believe that it is right for them to benefit because of their political views and for others to be punished because of their political views!

This is how things operated relative to the Communist Party in the USSR and the National Socialist Party in Germany! Now we have it here!

THIS is why the 2nd Amendment is worth dying for. We are in extremely dangerous territory.

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Good News Statistics

Charts That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity - Business Insider:

I look through these charts and here are a few things that come to mind:

• A lot of the best trends in these charts were due to the '80s in the US and the end of the USSR in '91. (looking at the Wiki entry with "USSR 1922-1991" still brings a smile to my face! A well deserved trip to the ash heap of history!) 
• We were complete idiots to vote for "change" in '06 and beyond. We as a nation had no clue how good we had it. 
• It is absolutely obvious that the "progressive" fetish with "environmentalism" and "guns" is simply about CONTROL -- the results have been GREAT on both fronts, but that doesn't stop "progressives" from demanding more control. 
• We had it too good for too long and while needs are finite, wants never are. One doesn't need a Gulfstream jet, but one can certainly want one and even feel it is "unfair" that others have one. We killed the goose of productivity that was laying the golden eggs because we demanded more RIGHT NOW!
• The big missing things on these charts are birth rate, single parent families, % getting government assistance, % working and % regular church attendance. Those are all in trouble and they spell our doom.
• In 20 years, those of us still living will be able to look back at '06 as the year that we "chose poorly". Will we be able to talk about it without being incarcerated or worse? 

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Must Read, Solzhenitsyn at Harvard 1978

Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Address:

I'd just started at IBM a few days before this address. Fresh out of college, other than a moderate level of Christian faith, a poster child for the materialist decadence Solzhenitsyn calls out.

This was the last time that Harvard allowed anyone that wasn't a "liberal in good standing", and usually an intellectual lightweight as well (this year it is Oprah) to take their "pulpit".  In 1978 the "Iron Information Curtain" fell one more notch after this speech. It continued the trend from "God and Man At Yale"  by Buckley in the '50s, and "The Closing of the American Mind" by Bloom documenting the '60s. The trend that would continue as religion was ever removed from the public square, and the voices of those that would stand for the necessary connection of man to God would be silenced in the academy as the once great America became ever more ruled by "The Party" (D).

This is all WELL worth the 20min it takes to read it. Solzhenitsyn was a prophet. He foresaw that the USSR was so corrupt it would not stand, and he foresaw that the west would lack the courage and conviction to deal with the terrorist/Muslim scourge. He saw the shape of our decline and suspected as I do that the odds against the recovery of civilization, at least without hundreds or thousands of years of a "Dark Age" ruled by evil were very long.

This paragraph is just a teaser. I strongly recommend reading it all!

 "To such consciousness, man is the touchstone in judging and evaluating everything on earth. Imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes which had not been noticed at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis. The split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections."

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Why We Lost Western Civilization

Articles: Winning the Long War:

The simple answer is that the "progressives" incrementally turned public education into collectivist indoctrination. Allan Bloom sounded this alarm strongly and unequivocally with "The Closing of the American Mind", but the standards had already sunk so far that only a few could hope to begin to understand what he was saying.

This article is EXCELLENT and well worth the time to read it.

Some "cheat sheet" on the subsequent paragraph, the article is generally easy to read, don't be put off ...

• ethics -- right/wrong, What we would have learned in Sunday School, from our parents, and nursery rhymes in a free country. Today what is taught is environmentalism, political correctness, re-distribution (robbery, or "fairness") and the worship of man and the state. 
• epistemology  -- the study of knowledge, what is known and what is knowable. Western civilization arose on the idea of perfect and transcendent  forms (Plato) and a rational universe -- typically assumed so because it was created by a God that is reasonable (a God of order). "irrationalism" essentially says; "it all happened randomly, and except for being skeptical and possibly believing your senses when they are not in conflict with "progressive" dogma, whatever you think is as good as what anyone else thinks." 
• metaphysics -- religion/theology being the former name and what most readers of this blog will at least have heard of. If there is a God that is reasonable, he has a purpose for us, so our mission is to find that purpose and do it well as we worship him. It there isn't a God, this whole idea of "finding what you were intended to do" is rubbish. There is no "intention". Life has no meaning or purpose, which is nihilism".

I spent 16 years in state schools prior to ATTEMPTING to read "Closing of the American Mind", and then studying on my own, and then attempting again, then studying some more, and repeating a couple of times. I feel that I now understand a good deal of that book. My "cheat sheet" above would have not been possible without decades of self-study and hundreds of books and articles.

The state educational establishment relative to Western Civilization is much like the Catholic Church was prior to the reformation relative to the Bible. They really don't want you poking around on your own, you are likely to come up with some questions that are going to be VERY hard to answer!

The reason that I often come close to despair is that there are so few Americans that can even really read and understand well enough to even grasp the danger. The advancement of technology is a two edged sword. Will this descent into darkness be a millennium? Could it be shorter because the technology can empower renaissance  as the printing press once did? or will the technology enable "Big Brother" to lock the culturally lobotomized drones in a "Matrix" forever? I certainly don't know, but I know the danger is very real and very urgent. Read ... and maybe weep.

 "Civilization -- all of it -- is currently under the domination of progressive collectivism in ethics, authoritarianism in politics, irrationalism in epistemology, and nihilism in metaphysics. The architects of this calamity have paved the road to the devil's dominion over several generations. Their recent boldness, moving in for the kill on the last, crumbling bastion of principled resistance, America, shows that they believe ultimate victory is at hand, which, in human terms, means we face a thousand years of darkness."

and this gem is so on target it must be seen ... 

Men capable of living independent, confident and self-reliant lives grounded in their own skills, their own interests, and their own minds, are a threat to the authoritarians, mainly because what such men naturally crave -- more freedom -- is precisely the opposite of the desire progressivism seeks to foster in every child, namely the desire of a helpless dependent for perpetual security, to be provided by the all-knowing, all-caring über-parent, Government.

You OWE it to yourself to read this article. You are still alive in one of the brief flickers in history where the level of freedom for this to be seen is allowed! Savor that knowledge before the Gulag!

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