On the way up yesterday I heard a story on MPR (or maybe it was WI Public Radio) on "gender neutral clothing for children". The bottom line was that young parents these days are "sensitive" to dressing their children in clothing that might indicate gender, since they want it to be clear that they will support whatever gender their child turns out to be.
One of the leaders in this area is Ellen DeGeneres who received high praise on the show. I could not find the show, but I found the linked article which includes ...
"Yet despite all this, her personal brand remains authentic, says Ian Stephens, a managing partner at brand consultancy Saffron. And Ellen Show viewers seem to agree: According to a Nielsen report, she is 35% more likeable than the average talk show host, more than twice as likely to be considered both a trendsetter and funny, and 90% more likely to be considered a role model."
As I've covered many times, "progressive" requires that there ALWAYS be a new frontier of "progress", so todays "liberals" are quite possibly tomorrows "reactionaries".
It seems like they are heard at work making early age gender changes become one of the "important issues" going forward.
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.
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.
Haven't been able to do as much verification as I would like -- up in Barron, slow connection.
I certainly know that LOTS of the "rich and powerful" from BOTH parties want to stop Tump. At a minimum it seems certain he would "shake things up".
That is what the one "Washington Insider" that I saw face to face had to say -- "You have NO IDEA how corrupt DC has become. MAYBE the shock of Trump might "somehow" shake things up enough to give us a tiny chance".
I got a chance to listen to a good bit of NPR and a good bit of Glenn Beck (first time I've heard him on radio) on the way up to Barron today. "Educational and surreal", welcome to campaign 2016.
NPR is supposed to be "unbiased". Anyone that listens to them at all and believes that needs to be sure to get some gullibility defensive training and try to avoid Nigerians trying to repatriate money to the US with your help!
NPR knows they need to line up behind Hillary, and they generally do -- they DEFINITELY don't want to hear ANY more about her e-mail, and her "truthfulness" is gospel for them. They do however wistfully look at Bernie. Free everything! Lots of money for anything "public"! (almost certainly including "Public Media"). Maybe the Koch brothers could be imprisoned and the destabilizing nasty media like "Faux" and Talk Radio finally put back in the Pandoras box that flew out of after the "Fairness Doctrine" was removed. It would CERTAINLY be "fair" then!
They were in many ways "happy" that Bernie pulled out Michigan, but they know it is a proportional state and it was close, so it doesn't REALLY help him that much -- maybe it will help Hillary add more free stuff to her promises! They know they are stuck with Hillary -- sort of an "arranged marriage" to a "sturdy, plain and rumored to be reliable" woman.
They were of course DISTRAUGHT over Trump taking 3 contests! I had listened to them some yesterday and they were expecting Kasich to do VERY well in Michigan and MAYBE EVEN WIN! They were CERTAIN that the "Trump momentum" had been stopped over the weekend. Kasich would be a heavenly R candidate for them -- very much like McCain and Romney were -- "Democrat lite and easy to roll" -- and even better unlikely to win! Kasich came in 3rd, Trump won big. The despair was palpable.
In honor of the Trump win, they had "reports from foreign countries" about how horrible it is that Trump is even running, let along doing well and hard to even IMAGINE the disaster if he were elected!! We had a lot of these same reports of W back when he was in office, how TERRIBLE NPR felt about the rest of the world "laughing at us" over having W as president. I can still remember their horror at Reagan -- warmonger who INSANELY thought that the USSR would ever go away! How stupid can you be? They were CONVINCED he was an idiot.
The ability of the liberal mind to be totally wrong and not learn a single thing from the experience is their hallmark -- if Christians could live by faith that was 20% as unshakeable as that of the left, Christ would have returned by now because the whole planet would be converted!
The surrealistic part was switching over to Glenn Beck. He was APOCALYPTIC (that is the only mode he has) about the Trump wins. He has been running and continues running specific shows on various negative aspects of Trump each and every day! Business issues, statements he has made and changed his mind on, racist statements, statements against women, inaccurate statements -- Trump is THE END of all that is holy and conservative. The Republican party will not survive him as the nominee, and if by some miracle he is elected, the nation will not survive!
I'm trying to triangulate the horror here -- the assumption with Reagan was nuclear war and the end of the entire world. Students in the US and Europe as well as most of the media and Democrats signed up for the "nuclear freeze movement". The Soviets were all in favor of that as well. They had a huge made for TV move "The Day After" ... the film was shown on ABC with a lot of promotion in November of 1983, as an "early re-election gift" for Ronald Reagan. (for some reason, there was no outcry about "big money in politics".
I've not heard that Trump threatens the end of the world yet -- so maybe this is a lot less of a risk than Reagan was!
I'm still a Cruz guy, but if BOTH Glenn Beck and NPR hate someone as much as they do Trump, that certainly makes me like him a good deal more!
It is hard to imagine how many tears NPR would shed over "the destruction of the Republican Party"! (I'm thinking the party they would throw would require a LOT more beer than kleenex!)
Iran is firing missiles and the US is whimpering again -- oh, and Iran is threatening to just walk away from the "deal" if we do more than whimper.
In the past seven years we have become exceptionally good at whimpering -- perhaps "America, exceptional whimpering" as a motto? EVERY nation is exceptional at something! Even Greece has the gyro!
If Hillary gets in we can combine whimpering and whining! She whines exceptionally well I think.
After seeing the subject book by David Sloan Wilson referenced in a number of other books I've read, I finally got around to reading it. Certainly not a "page turner" -- lots of evolutionary terminology. "Group Selection" is the biggie -- the idea that when groups have characteristics that are more "adaptive", they will be "selected" -- meaning more babies, more babies that live, conversion of other groups, etc.
"Since Darwin's theory relies entirely on differences in survival and reproduction, it seems unable to explain groups as adaptive units. This can be called the fundamental problem of social life. Groups function best when their members provide benefits for each other, but it is difficult to convert this type of social organization into the currency of biological fitness".
The author is attempting to resurrect "group selection" by putting it on a continuum called "multi-level selection theory" ... genes, cells, organisms, groups -- selection happens across any and all, but what is most interesting to the author is clearly groups, and how religion is a core mechanism of that selection.
"Moral communities in larger than a few hundred individuals are "unnatural" as far as genetic evolution is concerned, because to the best of our knowledge they never existed prior to the advent of agriculture. This means that culturally evolved mechanisms are absolutely required for human society to hang together above the level of face to face groups.
At least if you reject any potential for "divine revelation" -- just where DID Newton or Einstein come up with their initial hypothesis? ... just kidding, mostly. The point is, for a pure atheist scientist, there had BETTER be SOME explanation why "unnatural things" are happening with human groups!
The other big evolutionary discussion is the "argument from design" and "functionalism". Naturally, an atheist scientist assumes that the "design" is "random", relative to some function that is adaptive (as opposed to there being a "designer") He uses the example of a can opener relative to functional design. "The design features that identify an object as a can opener provide such a strong argument that we don't even call it an argument, we call it self evident". He then points out that a specific religion "Calvinism" is DESIGNED to provide the function of allowing a group larger than "natural" to function -- interestingly, "designed" by Calvin.
On page 228 he really gets down to brass tacks.
" It is true that many religious beliefs are false as literal descriptions of the real world, but this merely forces us to recognize two forms of realism; a factual realism based on literal correspondence, and a practical realism based on behavioral adaptiveness."
"Rationality is not the gold standard on which all other forms of thought are to be judged. Adaptation is the gold standard against which rationality must be judged, along with all other forms of thought."
and then ... "... factual realists detached from practical reality were not among our ancestors. It is the person who elevates factual truth above practical truth who must be accused of mental weakness from an evolutionary perspective".
I could do a MUCH longer review, but I think this is the core. For those that assume there is no God, the fact that humans are able to function in groups larger than a couple hundred people at most is a HUGE problem. It clearly happened, but HOW did it happen?
The answer is just what I harp on -- religion. In the West, Judaism and Christianity -- which CLEARLY were the "most adaptive", or "divinely inspired" if you are a believer. If you are an evolutionist, they realize that they had damned well better figure out that "practical realism" is FAR superior to "factual realism" (or at least what the consciousness that we have no clue as to what it is THINKS is "factual") from an ADAPTIVE POV!
Having the "facts" right, but turning up dead (as in "our culture") -- meaning that you are NOT "among the ancestors" of the future doesn't fit well with having a "superior" brain -- even if you DO feel really great about gay "marriage"! "Superior" means staying in the gene pool in the evolutionary world!No matter how "good" something may be for your own moral reasoning, if you drop out of the gene pool, your "good" fails the test of survival.
Is it even POSSIBLE to have civilization as we know it without a huge majority of the people in that civilization fervently believing that the basis for their civilization is divine and sacred, or at the very least "exceptional"? From what we have seen to date, not without massive coercive force as in National Socialist Germany, USSR, China, North Korea, etc. It remains to be seen in a couple cases if brutal force can be a substitute for belief. Even if it CAN, is that REALLY what our "factual realist" scientists find to be a "good idea"?
All in all, a good book -- most could read the first 20 pages and the last 20 and get 80% of the value out of it. It is worth at least that effort.
Hillary has never lied and she never will. She is on tape saying that is true. If you believe her, you should vote for her, she is the only human to accomplish that feat since Jesus. If you don't believe her, then she is clearly delusional and/or a compulsive liar and under no circumstances should she serve in any leadership capacity whatsoever, let alone president.
I don't buy the George Washington and Honest Abe never told a lie myth, but AFAIK, neither personally made that claim, so there is a "ghost of a chance".
Is it possible to have greater hubris and than this? Outside of Lucifer himself, I don't believe that I've ever seen this level of mendacity.
Politicians, certainly including Donald Trump say all manner of things that they either know to be untrue when they say them, or simply turn out to be untrue as events come to light. But never having lied or never going to lie? We are in Jimmuh Carter delusion territory here -- although he did at least "lust in his heart" and defended himself from "murderous rabbits" ala Monty Python.
If only Hilly was a harmless bunny -- although having grown up in the 60's, and now applying the image of "Bunny" to Hillary, I'm afraid I can't unsee it! EEEEEEEK !!!!!!
Maybe this will suffice ...
Hmm ... mayhaps my neural connections have gone a little out of bounds for this nice warm MN March PM!
Deepak Chopra isn't really any more of a "nut" than me -- and he is a better educated nut in any case. It just rhymed well. I find his brand of spirituality to be too amorphous, "I'm OK, You're OK", "just be and it will all be OK" sort of the kind of spirituality that promises everything but demands nothing, and seems to have no real "there, there".
He is however fascinated with the interaction between things like the "Heisenberg Cut"(HC), the "boundary" between Newtonian and Quantum Physics, as am I. My analogy for that boundary is like the hardware / software interface in computing, although sort of the "reverse". Above hardware interface in computers (the instruction set), all is "software" or "data" -- software is just data in a special format that the hardware recognizes as instructions.
Above the HC in the world, all appears to be "matter", but we know that it is also "energy". Below the cut, our attempts to discover if things are waves or particles becomes probabilistic. The answer seems to be "both", which may mean "neither/something else", but we don't know what that is. We may figure that out, but my guess is that at the below the HC, we are getting at least very close to the "stuff" (or non-stuff) of God -- meaning "spirit". Software runs on hardware, matter and our world might run on "spirit". At least I like to imagine that. It has a weird symmetry.
Third, until reality is united into one whole, science cannot justify its claim to understand nature. This isn't simply a piece of grumpy skepticism. The Heisenberg cut raises a wall inside the human brain, because the brain is both a large object and totally dependent on quantum events taking place at the very most fundamental level of brain cells. Being unable to fuse the two domains of reality comes to a crunch every time you think a thought. At the large scale level of classical physics, your thought can be detected as increased neural activity that "lights up" on a brain scan. Yet this isn't the same as reading your mind. Only you know what your thought is.
Last I checked, there wasn't any real "evidence" that thought requires quantum effects, but there certainly are quantum effects taking place in each and every atom in the brain. Are there "special types" of quantum "operations" taking place in some of the specialized cells in the brain?
If you were watching the registers of a computer flit through millions of instructions manipulating millions/billions of bytes of data without access to a huge hunk of the software that was running and other programs which allowed you to trace the operations against source code, only a TINY number of people in the world would have any hope of discerning what was happening in the "big picture" of the program. Modern RISC instruction sets are hopelessly compressed and obscure from a human logical POV ... they are meant to run efficiently on specific hardware and rely on sophisticated optimizing compilers to generate streams that fit the specific hardware structure. That optimization makes the meaning of the instructions flitting through still more obscure from even an expert human POV.
How much more difficult is our situation in watching neurons "light up" under a "Positron Emission Tomography" (PET) or some other scan? For a computer CPU, we can look up the spec -- how many registers, what is the instruction set, etc -- for the brain? We are men blind from birth painting a picture of something that has never been described -- consciousness. "The feeling of knowing" indeed!
On the face of it, you'd never connect the fantastic achievement of LIGO with the utter confusion that exists when it comes down to how the brain works. Yet they are intimately connected, simply by the fact that doing science is a brain activity. If you don't know how such activity produces consciousness, and then how it goes on to produce the image of a four-dimensional world, you can't claim to understand what reality actually is. Instead, you're like someone in closed room who hears banging on the walls from outside. This banging can be measured in all kinds of ways, but everything you can say about it cannot be confirmed, because you'd have to escape the room to really find out what's going on.
There is a group of us in this closed room. We can all verify with each other that we are hearing, seeing, measuring a whole lot of stuff. We all have feelings, and we have verified that feelings are required for us to make any decisions (people that lose feelings / emotion are unable to make decisions). When it comes down to what all the measurements "mean" or "why" we see and feel the things we do, there is a lot of disagreement.
Mr Logic: "The data just IS, try to use what we learned to make us money, pleasure, more data, etc"
Mr Feeling: "There HAS to be a why! Think about what this might MEAN!"
Mr Logic: "Quit thinking about that! Try to use the data to help us LIVE LONGER, we are all going to DIE, even our children might die! We have to get BUSY, PLEASE get BUSY! "
Mr Feeling: "Why live longer if there is no purpose?"
Mr Logic: "Pleasure you fool! Pleasure will make you happy! Long life and pleasure, that HAS to be the reason we are here! Besides, why die? We can find ways to live FOREVER! "
Mr Feeling: "This work is hard and demanding. If pleasure is the answer I would rather spend time with my loved ones and watch the sun go down. Why even live one day longer if there is no meaning? ".
Mr Logic: "Damn you! I can't complete this work alone! Less and less people are willing to do the important work of making our lives more pleasurable and hopefully longer! I can't understand why this has happened!"
Mr Feeling: "Then you DO understand that "why" is an important question?"
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!
In the excellent note linked above (just before the end), Edmund Burke has this to say:
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
"Their passions forge their fetters".
The passion to be entirely free from moral strictures, free from work, free from a need to live within our means -- "free" in the sense of "free stuff", ignoring the facts of even science that "there is NO free lunch". Everything has a cost, and that which appears most "free" often has the highest cost!
The passion for an earthly savior -- "Hope and Change", with whatever imaginary policy or progrom one may choose to project on such vacuous words. "Make America Great Again" is "Yugely" specific in comparison -- it asserts a specific nation, with "greatness" for a goal, a specificity far beyond "Hope and Change", however it is still irrationally imprecise.
The slogans of BO and now of Trump are very thinly disguised appeals to hand over the nation to a "strong man". BO has already crossed the rubicon of usurping the Constitution on immigration and EPA regulation (stayed by the court for the moment). Trump. Hillary and Bernie have all declared they will do the same on various topics -- guns, income, jobs, walls, etc.
We are absolutely a nation that has lost the internal controlling power of religion -- as John Adams said, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other"!
So deeply in debt, morally corrupt, and in mass, totally unschooled as to the the requirements of what keeping the nation bequeathed to us operating, we stumble toward an election which might provide us with the most vile alternatives in American history. It is a situation we richly deserve -- these things have been TOTALLY KNOWABLE for at least centuries, and to a significant degree millennia!!
Not a bad article mostly covering old ground on the questionable nature of the whole warmist industry -- who it hurts (common people), who it benefits (folks like Al Gore, government bureaucracies, etc), how much it costs, how there is no way to square rapid growth in electrical demand with wind and solar. I covered the fact that in the US, solar can be counted for only 8% of maximum power need and wind for only 14% -- so there MUST be HUGE "backup" generation for night, cloudy and or calm days!
The incoherence of the policies spawned by the U.N.’s earlier Kyoto climate accord is increasingly undeniable. Germany is subsidizing the construction of coal-fired power plants as necessary backups to renewables, and Britain is burning wood imported from the United States to generate electricity on a massive scale. Renamed “biomass” and declared “carbon neutral,” wood is no less polluting than coal. Headlines in the Daily Mail excoriate the retrofit of Britain’s largest coal plant to burn wood as a “forest-destroying symbol of the shameful absurdity of European energy policies.”
"Progressivism" displaying it's true result as "regressivism" -- we once advanced forward from wood and wind to coal, gas and even nuclear, and now we are regressing back to ancient times. Wicca is even the fastest growing "religion" in N America!
When "liberals" claim that conservatives want to "turn back the clock", they are a very very black pot casting aspersions on the color of the kettle -- "liberalism" is an bullet train back to living in caves with no power!
They are going all medieval on us! ... although, perhaps is in may cases of "liberal thought" (the worlds greatest oxymoron), they should just reconsider a bit!
I have been devoting a good deal of time to making the 3,500+ blog posts more accessible to ME if nothing else.
Some fine day I shall write a bit on my "schemes" ... one example is using the label "AAAA" for what are either highly popular, or I believe to be critical posts for developing a transcendent world view, rooted in revelation, history, science and tradition, while remaining cognizant and sympathetic to our fallen human nature, and the needs of our fragile selves in this mortal coil.
This quote from Adams is one which I return to frequently in the present dark times.
Included here in text so I may clip it, and in a graphic form for inclusion in a more eye catching form.
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other" (John Adams)
This rather long intensely selfish article might be an appropriate parable for the elite of our lost age. It opens with dissolution of family, depression, anxiety, but passes through the "Satanic Rapture" that nothing has meaning save sensual pleasure, breaking of taboos, and "irrational exuberance". Ah, the pleasures of leaving behind the awful "irrationality of God" for the "irrationality of self". Or perhaps the ultimate Satanic rationality of denying the existence of all -- there is no creation, no self, only illusion as in the Buddhist philosophy.
The article ends with this:
"In 2010, Alvy and I got married—the future reinvented. Once again, I was an exceptionally fortunate and happy woman, full of irrational exuberance and everyday joy. But that’s not all I was. I’d discovered that I could love women as well as men, history as well as science, and that I could make my way through sadness and solitude, not just happiness. Like Dolu and Desideri, the gender-bending abbé and the Siamese astronomer-king, and, most of all, like Hume himself, I had found my salvation in the sheer endless curiosity of the human mind—and the sheer endless variety of human experience."
I enjoy the vanity of the atheistic -- unburdened with the sense that they might have an audience infinitely more aware and existing more "solidly" as the pure spirit and source of all than the Buddha ever conceived in losing his soul to dissolution, they wax excessive about all sorts of details, nearly always focused on lost souls like themselves. When one is focused on something of supposedly cosmic import, need "gender-bending" be involved?
But it must, it must! (apologies to "Blazing Saddles") The perversion of the sexual is at the core of the Satanic impulse -- a place where the inversion of the male and the female and Gods created sexuality can be perverted in a myriad of easy ways, sometimes even pleasurable for a short season.
Reproduction -- one of the low but necessary functions of the fallen physical world, barely above respiration, consumption, defecation, etc, torn from it's intended purpose and trumpted as "freedom" -- from order at least, but blissfully unaware of service to chaos. Certainly we die when respiration or reproduction are prevented -- rather quickly in the case of respiration, in a couple of largely missing generations as we are finding in the west with reproduction.
I did have another insight here. We are told in these times of few "truths" beyond "Climate Change" being certain and settled, that sexual preference (unlike gender) is fixed very early in life. In fact, it is already illegal in some states to even ATTEMPT to get a person to change their sexual preference from being gay to heterosexual. If the left has their way, it will be illegal nationally. While the left has extreme aversion to laws acting in the direction of nature to perversion, it is critical to get as many laws as possible operating to prevent the move from perversion to nature!
You see, if you are gay, THEN your "orientation is fixed" -- but if you are heterosexual, it is HIGHLY likely that you are actually at least bi, or maybe gay. "Nature" only made non-adaptive sexuality fixed. Non-adaptive sexuality can be changed at any point in life just like gender! Isn't that special?
See, at age 50, this former heterosexual spontaneously converted to being bi -- with no therapy at all (although I'm certain that such therapy is TOTALLY legal, likely encouraged, and probably required to be covered under BOcare!) -- if she had been homosexual, there may need to be an investigation to find out what horror could have instigated a shift to heterosexuality!
They were adventures with both women and men. In my period of crisis I had discovered that I could have deep, sustaining friendships with women, as well as romance. I had been wrong about that part of my identity, too.
It's a "secular miracle"! It's enough to make a person "leap for irrational exuberant joy"! Does this woman really think there is anything new under the sun here? I suppose the "new" part is that if she and folks like her have their way, my ability to write such sacrilege as this will be declared "illegal" just like the idea that sexual preference (or at least the perversion of it) is FAR more a "choice" than a "characteristic".
See how much better that is than the church making laws and banning texts?
The saddest part of all of this is that if you are a person of intelligence and education with connections -- who knows what kind of support she had from her ex husband and kids, as well as her brother ... "Blake, an art historian who knows Italian (and French, German, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon), and got him to translate for me", on top of meeting the man that she married in that last paragraph, who was one of the founders of Pixar.
See, this woman is part of the "1%" -- or certainly the "5 or 10%" ... she has connections in major universities and corporations, lots of education. She can live the life of a dissolute bohemian and not end up as one of the statistics of addiction, mental illness and suicide like vast swaths of white middle America. Her "adventurous journey" can be proudly chronicled in the Atlantic rather than on the obit page of nowhere flyover country!
In this world, the average schmo -- the "bitter clingers" REALLY needed those Bibles, patriotism, families, communities, jobs and stability to stay alive at all, let alone have a "good life", but those have all been flushed down the toilet of post modern deconstructionist tripe. "Without vision, the people perish" -- but without any meaning or structure at all, they die horrible lonely deaths, often at their own hands.
