End Of Moosetracks

In 2016, I quit cross posting the blog to Facebook when I started a new job -- here is that entry, and the key paragraph.

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.

I realize that when I started the blog in 2005, I never posted my reason for blogging, so I will now.

My father was and is a very capable debater. So were his brothers, and I gather his dad, my grandfather who died when I was like 3. One story of my grandpa that I heard from dad more than once was of him taking dad to a county or town board meeting as a kid maybe 12 years of age, Dad was disturbed by everyone arguing so loud and seemingly angrily that he thought they could not be friends.

When the meeting was over, everyone went out for pie and coffee with no problems -- his dad was on the board, and instilled in my dad that being able to discuss / argue / debate with passion and still shake hands afterward was an important part of living in a democracy.

So I learned that lesson well -- early on with some tears or stomping anger, however my dad assured me that "I would grow up", and so I did -- perhaps just a little too well, as is common with such lessons.

Cowgirls may well not cry, but this moose certainly does -- pretty much every time I listen to that song as one small case, as well as sometimes when I witness the wreckage of our nation in broken families, addiction, suicide, and meaninglessness.

The lesson of making my case with dispassionate debate would serve me well through my schooling in those days. In the 1970's America was still a place where diversity of thought was honored, and there were no such things as "safe spaces" where freedom of speech was not allowed, certainly not in universities. The ACLU in those times even defended Illinois Nazi's right to march through a Jewish neighborhood -- freedom of speech meant freedom of even (especially) very unpopular speech. The IBM of the late '70s and most of my career was also a place where it was critical to "get your ducks in a row" and put together the right "pitch" to get your ideas implemented in systems.

By 2005 however, the US was sliding rapidly away from honoring diversity of thought. W was a pariah to the elite and "progressives", and it was important to not speak up in most cases when people would make some statement about how stupid he was, how he ought to be impeached, how Iraq was lost, how he was a "war criminal", etc.

While I was always more than able to hold my own in a discussion, the net result was likely be anger from the anti-W speaker that anyone would dare stand up for W, and even more anger when the person who intiated the attack felt that they were not actually able to defend a position they thought was "obviously correct". One of the "values" of the left became that people that did not agree with them were uneducated, only listened to "Fox News and talk radio", not very intelligent, etc -- feeling that they "lost" a debate with such a low life was just plain embarrassing. It usually meant that in an odd return to a practice of religions like the Amish, they would "shun" the person who stood up for such a terrible person as W.

The blog allowed me to continue to listen to NPR, read the NY Times, WaPo, and even see clippings from Huffpo, Slate, New Yorker, and a broad range of media on both (or many) sides of issues and "talk about it in the blog" without having  other people be hurt, angry, or embarrassed. The assumption was that people that did not like what they read would just "change the channel" -- as Christians were to do with the NEA funded "Piss Christ" and many other things.

In the back of my mind, there was always the dream of "discovery" -- some folks would probably just be kind to me and say "you ought to have a column" or "you ought to be on the radio". Over the years, my readership went from none to a few thousand a month ...

It's always been a labor of love -- I enjoy writing, it comes easy to me, and the blog was a way for me to keep track of thoughts, articles, book reviews ( 185 was the final count), travel, etc with some good discussions from some people over the years as a bonus.

As I look back on Holy Week 2018, Good Friday 2005.  stands out as a post from the early days that I'm glad that I was able to share -- and go back and read.

The post from when I quit cross-posting to FB gives some hints on how the blog is organized if you want to poke around. As those of you that know me are well aware, the blog both is and is definitely NOT "me". It' was an "outlet" for instant reactions to events and media reactions to those events -- so those reactions were less likely to be discussed at work, family events, church, social events, etc. I read broadly and more the kind of person who knows "nothing about everything" as opposed to "everything about nothing" -- the sad choice required of we very finite humans and our limited minds.

The blog is less me since 2016. In 2016 I started my new career as a Certified Peer Support Specialist ... I learned about DBT, Motivational Interviewing, and that validation is not agreement. I learned both the Mindfulness skills to stay "in the moment" during discussions as well as a number of other skills that are critically important during "difficult conversations". Some of these skills are well sumarized in this post on an excellent book; "The High Conflict Couple".

If you liked the blog and miss it, send me an email (bilber99@gmail.com) with ideally your google mail -- my new blog is going to be limited to my approving your access, and since I'm using blogger to start,  I'm not sure the google id will work. Depending on interest, I may look for other solutions.

Thank you for those that have read over the years, and especially to those who have engaged in discussion with me on posts. I still firmly believe that freedom of thought and speech, as well as the willingness to engage with those who think differently from us, was at the very core of what once made America an exceptional country. It was a nation under God with a written Constitution that was honored, and a free nation where independence, especially of thought, was a primary value.

As I wrote when I largely left FB and quit watching the NFL, we now live in a nation where there is no value that is agreed on by supermajority of people within our geographic borders. Since America was a nation founded on ideas, NOT ethnicity, religion, or territory, I assert we really no longer have a nation.

It will certainly not be me that fixes that (if it is to be fixed), and the costs of having a semi-public opinion that is easily ignored have now gotten too high as the costs of speaking up in public did in 2005. There is no way to know who is reading, not interacting, and just becoming more and more angry as they do. There is no way to discern a reader in "Emotion Mind" so I can use validation skills rather than simply "making a case".  I'm not going to fix what has happened to America -- it is not worth the price to keep publicly speaking to all. The "desire to read" may be a desire primarily to be angered and justify attacks on myself or my family. Thinking differently is now something that needs to be done "in the closet" ... hopefully this move to a closet of only approved readers will work.

For ALL those who have or will read my blog or other writings, especially those who most strongly disagree with me, I believe that love and free will are the two sides of an ultimate eternal value. To love is to allow free will, and only in freedom can we return love. God is love and light -- only he can truly love even those that reject him with all their hearts, however I promise to do the best that I am able to follow his example.

 I pray that you let God's love work it's miracle in your life and we have eternity to work out the nuances of our differences.

May the Lord bless you,
and keep you;

the Lord make his face shine on you,
and be gracious to you;

the Lord turn his face toward you,
and give you peace

Snow / Cold Batters Europe

Heaviest Snow in Decades Batters U.K., Ireland and the Continent - The New York Times:

Europe is being battered by winter weather ... the UK, snow in Rome, cold on the French Riveara. This is of course WEATHER,

Naturally, this cold and snowy weather is due to ACC  (Anthropogenic Climate Change) the settled science formerly known as AGW ... as is all current weather according to the concept of "settled science".

The cold weather in Britain and northwestern Europe is to some extent a mirror image of the “sudden stratospheric warming” in the arctic, experts say, referring to a disturbance in the polar jet stream that has alarmed scientists and forced some to reconsider even the most pessimistic forecasts for climate change.

 The main science that has been settled relative to climate is that "carbon dioxide determines climate".

The cycles of CO2 in the atmosphere over the last 400K+ years have been determined through looking at air trapped in ice cores from Antarctica. ... you can spend the rest of your life studying ice core data if you are interested ... it all looks similar in some ways -- roughly 100K year cycles of lots of cold and glaciers  punctuated by relatively tiny warm interglacial periods of 10-20K years like the one that we and all of human history are in ... the Holocene.

The when coupled with temperature, the charts certainly show a CORRELATION between temperature and CO2, but as any High School statistician will tell you, correlation is NOT causality -- ice cream sales and drowning deaths are definitely correlated, but that is do to a common causal factor (warm days) rather than one causing the other. The correlation between CO2 and temperature could run either way -- warmer temps release more CO2 from oceans so number goes up, OR "something else" ... more animal life, termites, ocean life, fires, SOMETHING raises the CO2 levels to cause the temperature to rise.

Freeman Dyson and myself are the sort of idiots that point out that unless one postulates past human carbon burning civilizations at roughly 120K BC, 240K BC, etc, warming can clearly happen without human causes, so ACC is WAY short of an "explanation".

There is however one rather large object 93 million miles away that just possibly might have some effect on temperature cycles on earth. Strangely, that object ALSO appears to have variation in it's output and we are heading into a projected 500 year low in solar output.

From the linked article quote above, it is clear that climate scientists ASSUME that warm temps at the N pole show that we are still warming. Since the N pole is ocean, the best we can hope for as a proxy is cores from Greenland -- interestingly, it appears that the oldest core data from Greenland is only aout 150K years old  ... meaning that when it gets as warm as it did in the last interglacial, the ice on Greenland melts.

Since record keeping humans have never lived through the ending of a warm period, the LONG period of cold and continental glaciers, followed by the start of a new warm period in 100K years or so, my assertion is that the ONLY thing about climate that is actually "settled" is a lot like what is settled about the Stock Market ... "it fluctuates".

While everyone else is apocalyptic about the perils of a few degrees of extra warmth, I've long had a fascination with what it will be like the next time the planet leaves the interglacial we are in now and enters a new glacial. My best guess is that the  weather will fluctuate wildly and we will begin to see more events like what we see in Europe right now -- in my mind, solar output is likely a LARGE factor, along with ever greater and longer lasting snow cover on the continents. For a good long while, the oceans might actually remain or even increase in warmth -- thus keeping the N pole ice free while the continents start to develop larger and larger continental glaciers.

When I was in college in the '70s, concern about an upcoming ice age was the primary "climate issue", although it was much more a pure science discussion ... the ice core data shows that we SEEM to be "overdue" for an ice age, however, given the length of these cycles, we don't really know if the last "million years" are "typical" relative to frequency and length of glacials / interglacials. Geologists think we have been in an "ice age" for the last 60 million years or so, meaning that there is SOME ice on the planet, which there isn't in the truly warm periods.

Although it will no doubt make a LARGE change in human life on the planet, I must admit that even though it would certainly be WAY more challenging than warming, living through something like the "Little Ice Age" where lakes in this part of the world stayed mostly frozen year around ... back in 2014 we had ice floating around Lake Superior in the middle of June ... events like that and this one in Europe fit my idea of what early cooling might look like.

Other than my religious faith, I tend to enjoy things that are NOT "settled"!


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The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher

Link to The Benedict Option, "A strategy for Christians in a post-christian nation".

About 1/3 of the way through the book I realized that I had read another book by Rod Dreher, "How Dante Saved My Life". I enjoyed that book, and my wife actually enjoyed and made it through it as well, which is RARE for "Moose Books". I hope to blog on that book in the future as well, however this one is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL for anyone who believes that they are a Christian to read.

Rod agrees with me, and I think millions of Christians in the US that we are officially and totally in a post-Christian nation, as well as post Western civilization. This is a new "Dark Age", and as St Benedict, born in 480 decided sometime around 500 as he journeyed to the shadow of once great Rome, now ruled by barbarians, it was time to found a "remnant" to keep the core of the faith, which he did at Norica, and in his "Rule of St Benedict".

As Dreher says; "Professing orthodox biblical Christianity on sexual matters is now thought to be evidence of intolerable bogotry, Conservative Christians have been routed. We are living in a new country" ... one which I label as "BOistan", but the label makes no difference, it is a barbarian nation.

On page 154, Rod quotes from Phillip Reiff: "Barbarians are people without historical memory. Barbarism is the real meaning of contemporaneity. Released from all authoritative pasts, we progress towards barbarism, not away from it.".  I've covered this fact a number of times ... "Closing of the American Mind", "Ideas Have Consequences", and others. Technology is not "advancement", it is just giving monkeys nuclear weapons without theology, philosophy and history. The beginning of wisdom is humility ... and barbarians have none of that!

One of the topics that is explained very well in this book is nominalism, as opposd  to metaphysical realism (see pages 26-29). Metaphysical realism tells us that EVERYTHING that is created has MEANING -- as Charles Taylor would say "It is Enchanted" ... or in philosphical terms "teleological".

This ought not be so hard for us to understand today ... one by one, from phones, to watches, to locks on doors, to thermostats, to labels on products (RFID), more and more of our "objects" have built in "smarts", and are often even "connected". Does it REALLY seem so "magical" that an all powerful God can and does imbdue his creation with sacred meaning ?

Well, everyone thought that was reality up until William of Occam in the 1300s. Strangely, Occam thought he was "letting God off the hook" because being linked with his meaningful universe of laws "limited him" ... so Bill (William) decided that the Christian God was to be like the Muslim "god" ... able to call evil good and good evil at his whim -- an issue covered really well (and a bit ironically) in a great book based on a speech by Pope Benedict, "The Regensburg Lecture".

Occam convinced the west that "matter is just matter" -- it has no meaning except that imposed from outside it, so "parts is parts" ... matter (including life) only means whatever we decide -- and as we became atomized individuals, each supposedly "the measure of all things", we arrived at; "my view is just as good as yours" and of course I think BETTER, so I'll call it whatever I want -- cells, tissue, a baby, etc ... it's ALL UP TO ME!

This book is WAY too rich for me to cover the MANY great points that are well made, so a couple key points ...

• We are in a post-Christian, post-virtue post-civilization age. A "dark age", likely to be FAR worse than the previous one. The World Wars and the Holocaust are likely just "warm ups" -- the ONLY thing our "culture" worships is gratification of the self!, and that has never ended well.
• "To live "after virtue", then is to dwell in a society that not only can no longer agree on what constitutes virtuous belief and conduct, but also doubts that virtue exists. In a post-virtue society, individuals hold maximal freedom of thought and action, and society itself becomes a collection of strangers each pursuing his own interests under minimal constraints". (p16)
• People feel they MUST "do things" ... have an affair, have a same sex relationship, etc because they would not be "true to themselves" if they did not. "It is in carnal desire that the modern individual believes that he affirms his individuality. The body must be the true 'subject' of desire because the individual must be the author of his own desire". (p43) 

In the end, this book also gives us at least the start on a "blueprint" to save Western civilization. We don't need to worry about saving Christianity ... God will do that. It just may well not be in "the west' -- as I increasingly believe from books like "The Divine Conspiracy". 

God REALLY means that we have free will! He is NOT going to be giving this or any other generation any huge "signs" to save us -- he gave us Christ and the Bible, as well as his divine and teleological creation pregnant with meaning. If we seek him, we WILL find him -- because as long as we are not actively turning our back on him as our current civilization is, it is absolutely not his will that ANY should perish -- UNLESS THEY ABSOLUTELY WANT TO! ... and it seems abundantly clear that the bulk of the people in the west DEARLY want to perish on their own terms, and in many cases, as rapidly as possible! 

I'll reluctantly close with this from page 234 ... 

"The mind of technological man cannot resist his heart's desires, because he has been trained by his culture not to question them. .... The Christian must rebel against this. The only impregnable fortress is metaphysical, the conviction that meaning transcends ourselves and is grounded in God. There are boundaries beyond which we cannot go if we want to live." 

We Christians need to build a lot of small communities following something like the Rule of St Benedict. Please read this book, contact me, and let's try to be the leaven ... Dreher gives us many ideas on on existing heroes of God already doing this work. 

Beliefs Are Dark And Terrifying

An insider explains how rural Christian white America has a dark and terrifying underbelly:

In the eternal sense, my title is REALLY true. Every one of us carries a VERY fundamentalist belief that either:

1. We have an eternal soul, and the issue of eternity is far larger than whatever comes up in our short stay in this mortal coil.
2.  No soul, no god, no meaning -- whoever is smartest, most smug, gets the most votes, has the most fun, etc is "king". It really doesn't matter -- "grab for all the gusto you can". Most of all, be smug while doing it! If it starts to "feel bad", drug yourself, distract yourself, or kill yourself. "Without God, everything is permitted." 

The author of the linked column is clearly in the #2 option big time -- his belief is very strong, and there is no way he is buying into "the fear of God is the BEGINNING of wisdom". He has reversed the Biblical injunction that "a fool says there is no God" to be "a fool says there IS a God!".

Par for the course for human behaviour -- this guy doesn't say it, but I heard it again recently, "to think you have an immortal soul is the height of hubris". Possibly ... the "height of human hubris" is a big stinking pile, that is for sure. Thinking that YOU can define the "height of human hubris" doesn't really sound all that humble. Peak hubris? It certainly begins with "KNOWING" that "man is the measure of all things' -- and if that is so, why not make yourself "the man".

The column is all about those dangerous, racist, Christian Fundamentalist, angry rural whites, and their "closed systems". Certainly American university campuses that are creating rules to label anything that doesn't agree with them as "hate speech" are "open minded"? Again, "closed minded" people are really not a trick to find in any crowd -- they tend to be every bit as common as hubristic people.The norm is "anyone that doesn't agree with me is closed minded!"

The key is naturally LABELS ... your hubristic closed minded "whatevers" are of course "right" and "ok" ... "righteous even", while the other tribe ... well, not so good. Let's just say "deplorable".

I'm absolutely certain that the author can find white Christians in fly-over country that DO meet every single negative stereotype he has to pile on them. To the extent they are Christians, they would be less than perfect ones -- which is the unfortunate state of 100% of us, because loving our enemies is a REALLY high bar.  However, when it comes to seeking to be like the only divinely perfect human in history (Jesus), the height of the bar should be at least checked! We all fall far short, and making that bar MUCH higher, Christians are admonished not to judge!

Do not judge lest ye be judged, and love your enemies would be good places to start for Christians. For the column author, clearly he feels clear qualification to judge!

Let's use alcoholism vs being gay as an example ... sin is sin, it makes no difference. It is possible to love your alcoholic spouse, sibling or child and hate their sin?  It is even possible for realize that controlling their sin is HARD ... they have a strong desire of alcohol, however it is killing them. You DON'T have to judge their behavior ... you can just love them and do all you can to help (rather than enable) them.

Even if the alcoholic is your "worst enemy" ... the author of the column for example (I'm joking), or a jihadist wearing a bomb -- they are fellow humans with eternal souls and in light of eternity it is almost believable that they are possible to love (for Christians)! Without eternity, the author is right. Why would anyone even consider "loving" a deplorable that is obviously "wrong, evil, racist, etc"?

That's the bar for Christians on how to think about folks like the author of this column. What is the "bar" for his closed tribe? "Might is right" seems like the most real answer. I'm guessing he might say something like "commonly held standards of decency by reasonable, well educated, "woke" people ... naturally, if tomorrow, the "standard" of "woke" includes pedophia as a disorder vs a crime, a new group of people will become deplorable. (the ones that will then be deplorable are the ones that still see pedophia as criminal/punishable/wrong).

 I don't mean to be demeaning, ALL people are closed minded about their beliefs (including me)! I had some folks get REALLY nasty with me in the early '80s when I told them that I agreed with the then evil "Ronnie Raygun" and thought the USSR would be "consigned to the ash heap of history". Their certainly that I was completely insane was at least as certain as the column author of his rightness. The "experts" had all spoken, how dare I, a mere computer programmer question them!

In deep-red America, the white Christian god is king, figuratively and literally. Religious fundamentalism has shaped most of their belief systems. Systems built on a fundamentalist framework are not conducive to introspection, questioning, learning, or change. When you have a belief system built on fundamentalism, it isn’t open to outside criticism, especially by anyone not a member of your tribe and in a position of power. The problem isn’t that coastal elites don’t understand rural Americans. The problem is that rural America doesn’t understand itself and will never listen to anyone outside its bubble. It doesn’t matter how “understanding” you are, how well you listen, what language you use…if you are viewed as an outsider, your views will be automatically discounted. I’ve had hundreds of discussions with rural white Americans and whenever I present them any information that contradicts their entrenched beliefs, no matter how sound, how unquestionable, how obvious, they will not even entertain the possibility that it might be true. Their refusal is a result of the nature of their fundamentalist belief system and the fact that I’m the enemy because I’m an educated liberal.

'The author is too modest in his application of  "belief systems". ALL beliefs, held by ANYONE are resistant to change! His, mine, EVERYONES! Trying to convince an atheist there is a God is at least as hard as trying to convince a believer that there isn't. Trying to convince BO that fracking was drastically going to lower gas prices was just as hard in 2012 as trying to convince this guy that there are many Bible believing Christians that are every bit as "well informed" as he is! ALL of our belief systems are built on SOMETHING that we consider to be "fundamental".

Philosophy says that science MUST be falsifiable, or it isn't science (it can only be inductively true ... as fragile as the next experiment)  ... which means that if you are a true scientist, you can't use science to support ANY "belief" at all! (it is never "settled")

Oh, and BTW, if your belief system says that there is no meaning to the universe beyond pleasure, deciding that adultery is OK, gay sex is OK, transgenderism is OK ... and whatever they think of next is not "change", it is "more of the same". Much of what the left calls "progress" is the same as "I was drinking pint a day, now I'm drinking a 5th! See, I'm making PROGRESS!"

For us “coastal elites” who understand evolution, genetics and science, nothing we say to those in flyover country is going to be listened to because not only are we fighting against an anti-education belief system, we are arguing against god. You aren’t winning a battle of beliefs with these people if you are on one side of the argument and god is on the other. No degree of understanding this is going to suddenly make them less racist, more open to reason and facts. Telling “urban elites” they need to understand rural Americans isn’t going to lead to a damn thing because it misses the causes of the problem.

Nobody "wins" a "battle of beliefs" -- that is what we have elections and wars for. If you want to NOT have to have wars, having a shared set of transcendent beliefs that we all agree on, like "all men are created equal" (before God), endowed by their CREATOR with certain UNALIENABLE rights, and a written and FOLLOWED Constitution is what worked for 200 years.

Your "god" may be the sanctity of gay sex, killing babies in the womb, legal pot for all, or just "if it feels good do it", but it is YOUR GOD ... you are exactly as "open minded" to changing your view on those things as I am willing  to decide that a few thousand year old religion which billions have based their life on is "wrong". You have your pleasure to worship, I have my God to worship that I "bitterly cling to". In my system, I need to attempt to love you, in yours, however you run over me is A-ok ... as long as "it feels good". Those are very different belief systems, and it is very easy to see why they are in increasingly violent conflict.

No God, nothing "unalienable" ... all just POWER. Ballot box or bullets, take your pick -- and guys like this author are not very excited about accepting the outcome of elections that don't go their way these days!

When a 2,700-year-old book that was written by uneducated, pre-scientific people, subject to translation innumerable times, and edited with political and economic pressures from popes and kings, is given higher intellectual authority than facts arrived at from a rigorous, self-critical, constantly re-evaluating system that can and does correct mistakes, no amount of understanding, respect or evidence is going to change their minds and assuage their fears.

Yes, godless human systems have made a few "mistakes" (say 100-200 million killed by Communism), but hey, that is a FEATURE! All fixed now ... well, unless you are one of the 60 million aborted babies so far and counting.

Nazism did in 6 million nasty Jews that were one of those "old closed system" people ... one wonders if the column author sees that as a bug or a feature? Perhaps just something needing a "correction"?

Communism did in over 100 million in the last century ... many of those that had to be killed there were "closed minded", unwilling to see the brilliance of "the state" ... again, lots of Jews and Christians. If you read the whole column you really get the feeling that there just isn't much way to deal with people who won't bow to "science".  (Lysenkoism is a worthy remembrance of always listening to your state sponsored "experts") Perhaps forcing closed minded religious people to work on top notch state science projects like Chernobyl would open their minds?

Mao's "Great Leap Forward"? North Korea's nuke program? Godless humans have such a wonderful track record. Why in the world are  the hicks in fly over country so untrusting of the coastal elites expertise? Abortion is one of the current shining examples of how godless elites respect "the least of these".

Yes, beliefs CAN be "dark and terrifying". It is really a matter of what you see as a "nightmare".

Gulags, death camps, 60 million aborted, or some states not forcing everyone to celebrate gay "marriages" and celebrate 57 genders and counting?

Sadly, in a Godless world, it is all a question of power for those in power -- how many voters, divisions, state agencies, media pundits, dollars, etc.




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Scalia Speaks, Reflections on Law, Faith and Life Well Lived

https://www.amazon.com/Scalia-Speaks-Reflections-Faith-Lived/dp/0525573321/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?ie=UTF8&qid=1515721705&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=scalia+speaks&psc=1

If you care about ever returning to America, just want to understand why America was exceptional, have even a passing interest in the SCOTUS, or simply want to have a glimpse of a truly great man, read this book!

If you are or were a Christian, or simply know some of them, read "The Christian As Cretin" starting on page 107 ... his purpose "It has been my purpose to impart, to those already wise in Christ, the courage to have their wisdom reguarded as stupidity". He succeeded!

He makes the point expertly in a number of places that unless the written Constitution of the old United States is taken as a FIXED DOCUMENT that means what it was meant to mean when it was written, then we may as well have no Constitution at all! As he puts it on page 188; "Originalists believe that the provisions of the Constitution have a fixed meaning, which does not change: they mean today what they meant when they were adopted, nothing more and nothing less".

He makes the obvious point on page 153 that in 1920 when the 19th Amendment was ratified giving women the vote, everyone understood that adding such a new right REQUIRED a Constitutional Amendment, and so it was amended. "The Americans of 1920 understood what the Americans of 1992 seemingly do not, that the vague provisions of the Constituiton, such as the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause, are not invitations to constitutionalize our current desires from age to age, but rather bear a constant meaing that that accords with the meaning of those terms when they were adopted".

 It is that fixed meaning, and the separation of powers architected by it that allowed the enumerated rights to be maintained in the old US until the Warren Court. Scalia shows a number of enumerated "rights" from the Constitution of the old USSR -- not worth the paper they were printed on because the architecture of the government of the USSR did nothing to protect them!

On page 337, he states what I have tried to state a number of times far more eloquently than I could ever hope to do: "The issue is not wether there should be provision for the poor, but rather the degree to which that provision should be made through the coercive power of the state. Christ said after all, that you should give your goods to the poor, not that you should force someone else to give his".

Readers of this blog have heard me harp on all the things that Scalia elucidates with far more skill than I can ever muster ... the critical importance of faith, the fact that our founders (even Jefferson) wanted a government that favored religion over irreligion! As he says on page 71 "What I am saying is that it is contrary to our founding principles to inisist that government be hostile to religion, or even to insist (as my court, alas, has done in word though not in deed) that government cannot favor religion over irreligion. It is not a matter of believing that God exists (though personally I believe that); it is a matter of believing, as our Founders did, that belief is very conducive to a successful republic."

There is no reason for me to keep talking here -- anyone that wants some rememberance of America to be recovered from BOistan -- even if it is just a remnant to teach to future generations, needs to read this book. It is witty, wise, and very important. It is ALSO entertaining, and HOPEFUL ... Scalia's friendship with Justice Ginsburg is a model of how things ought operate in a nation which held many things much more sacred than politics!

Thanks be to God for allowing Judge Scalia to sit on the Supreme Court! Our loss is clearly Heaven's gain!

No Family, No Country, Identity Politics

The Primal Scream of Identity Politics | The Weekly Standard:

This one is definitely worth the read -- it falls one "parent" short, GOD, but it hits the earthly target very well. I'd argue that killing "god" in the Nietzchean sense was definitely on the road to killing daddy, mommy, and family in general. A people that still honored God could not have legalized abortion, dishonored their parents, and abandoned their children in the name of earthly sexual pleasure and other "progress".

I'm about 1/3 of the way through "The Secular Age" by Charles Taylor. It tells the story of how the west went from a fully enchanted world at the time of the Reformation, to the nearly totally DISenchanted world we live in today. Everyone believed that the Cosmos was ordered with a sacred purpose that included each of us -- embedded in our family, church, community, nation, and yes, an ordered cosmos where everything included elements of the spiritual, the sacred.

Today, we are DISembedded and disenchanted --

The legalization of same-sex marriage, as observers both for and against the 2015 Obergefell decision came to agree, owed most to one factor: empathy for the moral claim that attraction to one’s own sex is like pigmentation or DNA, immutable and immune to change. Yet a split cultural second later, exactly the opposite case has come to be made for the intersex, transgendered, and other sexual minorities: that identity is fluid, indeterminate, perhaps even recalcitrant, rather than born that way. 

In this head-on collision of purported creation stories about sexual and gender identity that cannot possibly both be true, we see once more that the question Who am I? is the most fraught of our time. It has become like a second skin: something that can’t be sloughed off, or even scratched, without excruciating pain to the subject—reason and logic and the rest of persuasion-as-usual be damned.

As we have attempted to make "meaning" a material thing, it is not all that surprising that we would have completely incompatable "required views" on one of the most basic elements of our identity, our gender. Science says there are two genders, society says there are 50 some and more every day.

So why have we become "tribal"?

It’s not that “America Wasn’t Built for Humans,” as the title of Sullivan’s piece has it. It’s rather that America, like other civilizations, was built for humans who learned community not from roving bands of unrelated nomads, but from those around them—beginning in the small civilization of the family.

Our macro-politics have gone tribal because our micro-politics are no longer familial. This, above all, is what’s happened during the five decades in which identity politics went from being unheard of to ubiquitous.

Pretty much all of us understand this at some level. Our "families" almost all now involved 2nd, 3rd, etc marriages, and often many sorts of other relations. In the Bible we hear "who is my neighbor", today we hear "Who is my Daddy? my Mommy? my Sister? my Grandparent ... etc, etc". Clearly, lots of the people we know have decided that "what THEIR heart says" is what must be truth.

Jerimiah 17:9 says "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?"

Naturally, when God was supposedly killed, such ancient wisdom became foolish. Today we "follow our hearts", and attack those who fail to agree with our own godlike view of "truth".

When a mob of young men attack a 74-year-old man and a middle-aged woman, as happened at Middlebury College in March in the case of Charles Murray and Allison Stanger, something deeper is afoot than American individualism run amok. When debate after campus debate is preemptively shut down due to social media threats of violence, reasoned talk of a “Reagan Dispensation” doesn’t begin to capture the menace there. Berkeley spent $600,000 on “security” for a visit by the conservative author and pundit Ben Shapiro. Non-progressive speakers who have nothing to do with racism or supremacism are regularly harassed, threatened, disinvited, and shouted down on campuses across the country. To ascribe these transgressions to identitarian narcissism alone is to miss what’s truly novel about them. And most chilling.

Many of the 4500 and rising posts in this blog call out the horror that we have (mostly) unwittingly unleashed. I could link you to MANY, however, I think "Darwin's Cathedral" is key ... a short excerpt from that post, all from page 228 of that book.

" 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". 

We pretty much all actually operate on a practical realism based on adaptiveness ... and we pretty much all think that OUR tribe really operates on a factual realism based on literal correspondence, and the other tribe is a bunch of evil lying "progressives", or "deploreables" depending on which tribe we identify with. The core problem is that without any transcendent meaning in our lives, "pleasure" tends to cloud our judgement, and any perceived threat to our determination of "truth" becomes ever harder for us to face with maturity.

Maybe that cultural scream of “mine!” is issuing from souls who did have something taken from them—only something more elemental than the totemic objects now functioning as figurative blankies for lost and angry former children. As of today, less than 65 percent of American children live with both biological parents, even as other familial boughs have broken via external forces like the opioid crisis, criminality and incarceration, and globalization. Maybe depression and anxiety have been rising steadily among children and teenagers for a reason. Maybe the furor over “appropriation” unveils the true foundation of identity politics, which is pathos.

The columns closing paragraph is powerful, and WAY too true in the world I see around me. I'll be reading some of the links and I'll continue to howl at the despair of our broken modern world with the only thing which I believe can save us individually or collectively -- The Grace of Jesus Christ through Faith Alone! On this 500th year of the Reformation, revive us again Lord Jesus!

Anyone who’s ever heard a coyote in the desert, separated at night from the pack, knows the sound. Maybe the otherwise-unexplained hysteria of today’s identity politics is just that: the collective human howl of our time, sent up by inescapably communal creatures who can no longer identify their own.

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Prayer, Gun Control, Articles of Faith

Right and Left React to the Las Vegas Shooting and the Gun Control Debate - The New York Times:

I find the article interesting in that it is a rare case where the NY Times actually provides both the view from the left and right on a subject, in this case Gun Control post Los Vegas shooting.

What does the Bible have to say?

4 Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

Man lives by faith. True faith is faith in Christ, false faith is faith in government, human nature, science,  people around you, that there is no God (atheism), your insurance company, retirement savings, your own "good sense" or intelligence, etc. Again, this is not to say that all the temporal forms of faith are ALWAYS false, only that they are temporal, limited, conditional and especially likely to fail you at times of crisis. (lots of prayers to God in foxholes)

So in the face of tragedy, those whose primary faith is in God, PRAY, because they realize that in the long run God is ALL that counts, and in the short run, he is the one with true power.

Increasingly, those on the left reject and even malign the faith of Christians in their prayers, increaseingly making their faith in government as their "god" more expicit. They are STILL "praying", however in their case their god is government, so it goes something like this:

Our government who is in DC, Hallowed be thy name,
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,
In every inch of this territory as it is in DC,
Give us this day our daily handouts, and forgive us our debts (especially the $20 trillion and rising)
As we forgive no-one, and want to see those that disagree with us punished
and give us our pleasures, and insure we are free from seing Christianity, so we are not bothered ...

The faiths are remarkably similar on Gun Control. No Christian is going to explain to you exactly HOW God will work increased safety from gun violence, only that we recognize that we live in a nation that deserves to have such incidents 24x7 in all corners, as we have strayed from God so far as to have killed 60 million of his most innocent children since Roe V Wade (and many other examples). Christians believe it is only by the God's Grace that we don't have a Vegas shooting every day -- as a nation, we have served Satan, and yet God has spared us from reaping the full carnage we deserve.

Likewise, no advocate of "common sense gun control" is honestly going to tell you that any measure that they would suggest is actually going to stop the Los Vegas tragedy. It is just that their faith in government is total, so that "somehow" government COULD achieve such control is an article of faith  -- a total ban on guns, metal detectors and surveillance everywhere, all public and private spaces equipped with sensors to detect gunfire and dispense some knockout gas? ... there is no need for any specifics. Government can do it, if all would only put their total faith in government voluntarily or by force, so that "proper measures" could be taken.

The service that could be provided by philosophy is for at least some significant "elite" to understand that we ALL live by faith. The question is always "in what"?  In theory it would be possible for enlightened people to realize that there are two poles on which to make society move in the direction of "improvement" ... culture or control, with chaos being the result if culture is destroyed and government is not made totalitarian. I'm not holding my breath for either theology or philosophy to be re-discovered in BOistan.

The American founders cast their lot with culture, and on the scale of total control on the far left, and total chaos on the far right, they desired "slightly right of center" as the goal. They believed that a God fearing people would respect life, liberty, etc. and continue to improve the culture as the main means of there being individidual morality and thus a peaceful society.

The USSR, Nazi Germany, China, North Korea, etc chose control ... they believe(d)  that people must be heavily controlled and regimented in order for the nation to be ordered and "successful".

The elite in BOistan apparently believe that religion, respect for life, sexual morality, respect for parents, police, history, the Constitution, etc can be removed and yet "somehow" the culture will "improve" ... although they are very vague in saying what "improvement" would entail beyond "equality, diversity, removal of personal responsibility, ever larger government, etc".

Their answers increasingly are "more government" in one form or another, and in the case of guns, they are more direct in saying that means more control. While they still mostly claim that does not really mean a repeal of the 2nd amendment, more and more of their voices now point out the obvious ... that while such a prohibition of private firearms to the level that a multi-millionaire with multiple homes and owning two aircraft could not obtain them is what they want. Again, this is a matter of faith  ... "how" such a prohibition would  prevent such a man from getting them is purely left to faith. Perhaps it would not be possible in China? I'd guess it would take control more at the level of North Korea to actually accomplish "safety" from such incidents -- but clearly it is a level of totalitarianism that would be fought in America. Will it be in BOistan?

So we live in a country where respect for human life has been destroyed by order of the SCOTUS in Roe V Wade. Respect for God,  Flag, Anthem, Elders, Founders, Military, Institutions, History, Tradition, Honor, Truth, Life,  ... really anything but personal choice, equality, diversity, "tolerance" (of those who bow to "progressivism") ... all quite ill-defined, is for most of the population, GONE.

And so I spend my 61st birthday in BOistan. Until 2006, I had faith that America would outlive me. I am so thankful that my Faith is in Christ Jesus, not in man! My Dad is 90, perhaps I have as much as 30 years left in this vale of tears ... and then eternity with Christ!

When a nation no longer respects life, why does it even mourn events like Los Vegas? If you are OK with killing the most innocent in the womb, why would you NOT applaud the slaughter of likely "deploreable" country music fans as was done by a legal VP of CBS?  Certainly if you are OK with the murder of a babe in the womb for convienience, the killing of country music fans that are largely "deploreables" anyway has to be seen as a positive, does it not?

My guess is that the Vegas shooting will be quickly forgotten even though the number of lives lost is large. It may seem to those that are taken in by the claims of the left that "they just want to save lives" that Vegas is a "perfect case" ... lots of lives lost, wealthy white male with no signs of mental illness doing the shooting, lots of premeditation, MANY "assault rifles", with even the "full auto" shibboleth given the "bump stocks".

We shall see ... I believe that the left is ONLY concerned about CONTROL and POWER, and "lives" are mere marketing. If they cared about lives, the 5-6 THOUSAND young black men killed in our large Democrat controlled cities each year would be a HORROR ... however, they care not at all for those lives. 

I believe that they will wait for another school shooting ... likely with a troubled young man with a lot of warning signs of mental illness. THEN, they will "blame the gun" ... not this time.

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Chappaquiddick Kopechne Kennedy BOistan

A Chappaquiddick Reckoning At Last? [With Comment by John] | Power Line:

There are lots of points that could be argued as the true point at which the decline of America into BOistan was sealed, but Chappaquiddick is certainly an obvious one. As Buckley foreshadowed with  "God and Man At Yale", the seeds were carefully sown -- it was just a matter of time before they bore their noxious fruit. The fact that the Moon Landing was happening as the essence of the corruption of the American system was playing out lends a Biblical cast to the events of that day. We reached our peak ... but we were falling as we reached it.

Forty-eight years later, let’s be clear on what the meaning of Chappaquiddick is. Ted Kennedy should, by all rights, have stood trial for involuntary manslaughter, which would likely have ended his political career. The fact that the Kennedy family — the original postwar dynasty of the one percent — possessed, and exerted, the influence to squash the case is the essence of what Chappaquiddick means. The Kennedy's lived outside the law; the one documented instance in American history of an illegally stolen presidential election was the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960. He lost the race to Richard Nixon, but his father sealed the presidency for him by manipulating the vote tallies in Illinois. That’s the meaning of Chappaquiddick. too.

The Kennedy Crime Family was a family founded on bootlegging. It gained power through stealing the presidency in the 1960 election, and it bore poisonous fruit on July 18th 1969.

The fact that the dominant political party in the old "United States", THE PARTY (TP-D) was able to allow a sitting US Senator to effectively murder a young woman in his employ and yet continue on as a Senator showed that morality was a dead issue for TP. POWER was the only coin that mattered, and it would be 30 years later before the Clinton Crime Family would make it clear that TP POWER was able to hold even the White House in the face of any breech of law, standards, or morality as Slick Wille stained the blue dress and the oval office with it.

TP established the death of morality, law, and even decency in the old "America", and the culmination of that "victory" was the ascension of BO to power. BO established the end of the Constitution and the Separation of Powers, ushering in BOistan and the age of Trump.

A good video explaining what may have happened :

https://youtu.be/mtP389IZ3TM

We still have no clue as to the direction which Trump may move this failed tribal state, however we ought to all understand how we got to this point.

I don’t say any of this as a right-wing troll. But those are the facts, and they are facts that liberals, too often, have been willing to shove under the carpet. And they have paid the price. Ted Kennedy became known as “the Lion of the Senate,” and did a lot of good, but when you try to build a governing philosophy on top of lies, one way or another those lies will come back to haunt you. (Hello, Donald Trump! He’s an incompetent bully, but his middle name might be “Liberal Karma.”) As a movie, “Chappaquiddick” doesn’t embellish the incidents it shows us, because it doesn’t have to. It simply delivers the truth of what happened: the logistical truth of the accident, and also the squirmy truth of what went on in Ted Kennedy’s soul. The result may play like avid prose rather than investigative cinema poetry, but it still adds up to a movie that achieves what too few American political dramas do: a reckoning.

I still hope that Trump may want to bring us back to "America" ... "greatness" is a long way off. That is very likely wishful thinking, but it was TP that took us down the path of lawlessness and amorality. That much is very clear to anyone that pays attention.

As a parent, and now a grandparent of the most beautiful granddaughter in the history of the universe, I can't imagine my anguish if she had died in the back of Teddy's car at Chappaquiddick. I strongly suspect my Christianity would not have been enough to have prevented my taking Teddy's life in as horrible a fashion as possible, but I am not proud of that sentiment ... it is just true.

We need to remember the name of Mary Jo Kopechne with honor and reverence. Her death was a greater loss to America than all the wars fought with honor. This was the moral 911 of America ... look, think, and imagine your daughter, wife, or granddaughter as Mary Jo. You know the truth, ACT! It is NEVER too late if you can swallow your pride and see the evil for what it is!

How can you run when you see her dead ....?

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Officer Shot On Camera, The Price of BLM

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/08/10/south-carolina-cop-survives-shooting-on-video-tell-my-family-love-them.html

Pretty much every story has at least two sides. For the past few years we have been being innundated on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) side of the story -- racist trigger happy cops shooting young black men for no reason whatever. "Murder", "assassination", "genocide" ... all sorts of nasty descriptions.

The police side of the story is is rarely told at all, and when it is, it is often tinged with "the officer panicked", "why did he even have his gun out", "he ought to have just tased him", etc, etc. We see often shown parts of videos that look especially incriminating relative to the officer involved. Videos like this tend to be FAR from universally seen.

Please take the time to watch this video and then imagine that you are the officer, or the officer is your husband, wife, son or daughter. When the shooter sees that all the officer has in his hands is a tazer, do you think that makes a difference to the shooter? If he was staring down the barrel of a .40 or .45, would he feel less "luckly"?

Consider this in comparison:

I strongly suspect that if you are looking at the business end of a major handgun vs a taser, your quick draw confidence is reduced due to the increased price of overestimating your speed.

Why did the officer select his taser rather than his handgun? Why did the shooter think it was acceptible to ignore the repeated commands of an officer of the law?

THIS is what BLM is building. Police are not in a "fair fight", they have no way of knowing why the person of interest has their hands in their pockets. They MUST consider it is for the reason we see in the video above. As a nation, we need to ALL understand that when you disobey direct orders from a police officer, you are RISKING YOUR LIFE! You are risking your life because you are risking the officers life!

You have a choice -- you can comply, and in many situations you made the choice to be there. Like Philandro Castile ... you got high and drove around, you decided to carry a weapon, you decided to yell out "I've got a gun!", you decided to keep reaching for whatever you were reaching for ...

The officer decided to be a police officer, and now it is part of his job to answer calls and enforce the law. The OFFICER deserves the benefit of the doubt when he chooses wrongly at the last instant -- in this case, a wrong choice in the other direction (taser vs gun) nearly cost his life.

Certainly police should be scrutinized, but BOTH sides of the story need to be told. There really is a risk to an officer when somebody will not take their hands out of their pockets. Now you have seen it -- quit denying it.

Making Sense of God, Timothy Keller

https://www.amazon.com/Making-Sense-God-Invitation-Skeptical/dp/0525954155

My love affair with the writings of Timothy Keller continues. I covet his level of intellect and especially his ability to lovingly yet strongly make significant philosophical and theological points with absolutely no regression to snark and put-downs. It is a level of intellectual maturity that I gaze in wonder at, and which puts me to such shame that I cry out for God's help to better emulate Reverend Doctor Keller's example.

For those familiar with how I read, this book now has a forest of tabs sticking out of it, and the inside is extensively marked. I find it to be nothing less than a potential basis for a igniting a new 21st century revival in the west to correlate with the rapid rise of Christianity in China, South America and Africa. The brokenness of North America and Western Europe in spirit, philosophy and community is glaringly obvious. This book provides a strong laymen's case for:
1). Why belief in God is rational as a basis for society
2). What happens when such belief wanes
3). Why the specific God -man Jesus Christ is the only basis for faith that works in our age (or any age)

The book is heavily sourced, so I'll try to give pages for specific quotes that will often have been sourced into the book ... I'll leave it up to the interested to run down the original authors.

p13 "The ideals of freedom ... of conscience, human rights and democracy are the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. ... To this day, there is no alternative to it". 

What we believe is always built on faith in SOMETHING. Morality must be based somewhere or it does not exist. What the west holds to be "self-evident" is only so because of our Judaeo Christian heritage.

Everyone needs to spend some quality thought time on the idea of the "Critique of Doubt" on page 38. Were this understood, everyone's level of smug would have to drop a ton, and that is ALWAYS great for the prospect of community!

"Polanyi agrues that doubt and belief are ultimately "equivalent". Why? "The Doubting of any explicit statement denies one belief in favor of other beliefs which are NOT doubted for the time being." You can't doubt belief A except on the basis of some belief B you are believing instead at the moment. So for example, you CANNOT say, "No one can know enough to be certain about God and religion," without assuming at that moment that YOU know enough about the nature of religious knowledge to be certain of your statement!

Page 74 reaches the following sad summary of current western culture than goes into a few pages of how it is that Christ is the "logos" (meaning) the Greeks intuited ... to which I would add "Man's Search For Meaning" as a worthy sourcebook.

"Western societies are perhaps the worst societies in the history of the world for preparing people for suffering and death, because created meaning is not only less rational and communal, but also less durable." 

Why is this the worst? Because without shared meaning, there is nothing to say to the suffering, dying, and bereaved. There is no shared community meaning of life, but rather the lack of shared meaning kills any sense of even real community. Thus, many suffer completely alone, bereft of even family as they struggle to seek blessing from the faceless government bureaucracy they realize they ended up worshiping by accident.

On page 105, in the midst of discussing why our attempt to make "freedom" the only moral value ... "Today, it is said, the only moral absolute should be freedom and the only sin should be intolerance of bigotry.", Keller points out  ... "Even in our supposedly relativistic culture, value judgements are made constantly, people and groups are daily lifted up in order to shame them, public moral umbrage is taken as much as ever. It is hypocritical to claim that today we grant people so much more freedom when we are actually fighting to press our moral beliefs about harm on everyone."

As Reagan put it, the secular left will "defend your right to AGREE with them to their dying breath". They will however not acquiesce to your right to DISagree with them, and will seek to silence you by any means including violence  -- because your lack of agreement is a threat to them and makes them feel moral umbrage. They have no admonition in their secular religion against judgement -- in fact, their judgement is one of the things they are most certain of.

On page 125, "We need someone we respect to respect us. We need someone we admire to admire us. Even when modern people claim to be validating themselves, the reality is always that they are socializing themselves into a new community of peers, of "cheerleaders", of people whose approval they crave."

Even more sadly, the requirements of conformance in your secular group are always increasing -- maybe you were fine with everything up to gay "marriage", or even transgender", however you were uncomfortable with that next step. Perhaps you are an atheist who finds Islam no more, and possibly less acceptible than Chritianity. You looked at it's tenets and see that as crusade era Chrisianity was, Islam can be violent, and you feel that it is obvious that a "progressives" should point that out.

You will likely run into this situation somewhere and find that compliance is NOT optional -- if you want to continue to be accepted by your group, sworn to the statement that  "individual freedom is all that matters",  you MUST comply with ALL their positions! Typically, you most often will shut up and comply, but at least subconciously you no longer really believe the group practices what they preach. (No Christian church or Christian does either -- that is why we repent and take communion over and over, we accept that perfect human consistency is impossible).

I'm getting long. The SUMMARY of this book is "simply":

1. It is every bit as "reasonable" to believe in God as it is to be an atheist. Increasingly, even MORE reasonable if one is bothered by the "anthropic argument" (we are here because we are here), or the latest physics asserting that there "must" be something like 10**500 UNIVERSES in order to support our existence being "likely".
2. If you want community and morals, there is scant basis for these elements of human existence outside of religion, and in the format we are familiar with in the west, outside of Christianity. Throwing the "baby" of shared values and community out with God/Christianity for the hope of "perfect freedom" is fraught with peril.
3. It's all about Christ. There is a really good reason that history is split into BC and AD. That difference is the divine person of Jesus Christ.

Outside of Christ, the world quickly descends into weeping and gnashing of teeth. It's going on all around us today -- families fall apart, people kill themselves to end meaningless lives, any tiny sense of community is trashed over smaller and smaller issues -- it is the politics that makes me cry when I look away from Christ. The Jim Jones cult of our age is the worship of the secular state. 

Christ is the BEST summary of the book -- keep looking at Christ and the Cross. Pray for your family, friends and community who have fallen into faith of the secular. 

Teaching The Eternal, Five Things

We don’t need to teach our kids to code, we need to teach them how to dream – Startup Grind – Medium:

 Trying to reduce what to pass on to the next generation to "5 things", or even one thing, is a time honored desire of mankind. At some point in our short lives, we realize that we won't be around long in any case, and usually realize through the death of a friend or family member that "short time" may be our next breath.

As in much of modern life, the author jumped right by meaning on the way to his list.

We’ve prioritized the acquisition of knowledge around what we assume society would deem most “worthy”. For much of history, knowledge was rooted in theology: it was about explaining the world in a supernatural way, seeing goodness as a tenet. The industrial revolution saw a vast shift away from this to a way of maximizing return on investment in a production-centric environment.

His list is:

1. Relationships
2. Curiosity
3. Agility
4. Creativity
5. Compassion 

I'd argue that for all of history -- past, present and future, a meaningful life is, has, and will be about MEANING. The core of all life in the past and all life in the future consists of birth, family and death. Some may want to remove family, however we are all born into one, and if a majority decides that having children and raising them well is not a priority, then their and our future history ceases. This fact has been lost on Western civilization today. 

My life is still based on "theology" in the sense of faith. All lives are -- including the list author, the only question is the realization of that fact. He has faith in a meaningless godless universe / world, and that his five items can make a life worth living. He chooses to either ignore philosophy or just lump it in with theology as no longer applicable to the world he believes he lives in. A scientific world that denies human consciousness, love and beauty because none of those are measurable. 

My list is as follows: 

1. Faith -- "The beginning of wisdom is the fear of God". The base of all meaning to is the tenet of a teleological universe that is created by a PERFECT God and fallen through misuse of the gift of free will. We all have a faith -- if you believe you don't, study some basic philosophy to understand what your faith is (solipsism, empiricism, determinism, positivism, etc)
   
   Faith and hope cover "agility" from the other list. By accepting our true place in the universe, the things of this world can be considered in the perspective of God's perfect love and the fact of eternity.
   
   It all has a purpose, and that purpose is greater than me. (although, God wants it to INCLUDE me!)
   
2. Hope -- Of redemption for me, redemption for those I love, and eventual redemption or re-perfection of the world and universe by a sovereign God. The story of life the universe and everything has a universal class happy ending, insured by God.
   
3. Love -- Love for God, love for family, love for others, and love for myself as I know God loves me. Relationships and compassion on the other list are covered by love.
   
   "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no account of wrongs ..."
   
   Christ (and the Beatles) tell is love is all we need. "Love the Lord thy God wIth all thy heart and soul, and thy neighbor as yourself" (even (especially?) if your neighbor is your "enemy").
   
4. Wisdom -- As I believe I live in a meaningful universe, God has provided me with a desire to know him and to grant me wisdom. Some now, much more in eternity. The pursuit of wisdom is one of my greatest joys.
   
5. Vocation -- God has given me a purpose, and if I seek him, that purpose is made clear to me. As I work at my purpose, God directs the universe to help me to "succeed" in achieving of that purpose.
   
   That purpose may be the bearing of great pain and suffering -- even unto death, or it may be ruling the world. To look at these and accept the sovereignty of God so that my ultimate purpose is the achievement of God's will, not mine, is the way to the most coveted prize of every life "Well done my good and faithful servant". 

It was an interesting exercise to try to do my list of five. Christ knows it best -- the greatest is love! ... and I'm obviously a work in progress since that came in 3rd on my list. 

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Davos, Eight Billionaires vs Half the World

Eight billionaires 'as rich as world's poorest half' - BBC News:

So 8 billionaires have as much wealth as the poorest half of the planet. They are:

1. Bill Gates (US): co-founder of Microsoft (net worth $75bn)
2. Amancio Ortega (Spain): founder of Zara owner Inditex (net worth $67bn)
3. Warren Buffett (US): largest shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway (net worth $60.8bn)
4. Carlos Slim Helu (Mexico): owner of Grupo Carso (net worth $50bn)
5. Jeff Bezos (US): founder and chief executive of Amazon (net worth $45.2bn)
6. Mark Zuckerberg (US): co-founder and chief executive of Facebook (net worth $44.6bn)
7. Larry Ellison (US): co-founder and chief executive of Oracle (net worth $43.6bn
8. Michael Bloomberg (US): owner of Bloomberg LP (net worth $40bn)

They are likely all at Davos this week, and in general, while the media might report the 8  having the same wealth as about 3.75 billion people, they are all pretty well liked. Ellison maybe not so much, but Gates, Buffett, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Bloomberg are seen as "decent progressives" that support "the right causes".

Bloomberg is kind of an interesting case. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about his wealth:

In March 2009, Forbes reported Bloomberg's wealth at $16 billion, a gain of $4.5 billion over the previous year, enjoying the world's biggest increase in wealth in 2009.[25] At that time, there were only four fortunes in the U.S. that were larger (although the Wal-Mart family fortune is split among four people). He had moved from 142nd to 17th in the Forbes list of the world's billionaires in only two years (March 2007 – March 2009).[26][27] In September 2013, Forbes reported Bloomberg's wealth as $33 billion and ranked him as the 13th richest person in the world. In March 2012, Forbes reported Bloomberg's wealth at $22 billion, ranking him 20th in the world and 11th in the United States.[14] In September 2015, his net worth was $43.3 billion, ranking him the 6th richest person in the United States

Bloomberg happened to be Mayor of NYC in 2009, which was NOT a very good year in the Stock Market, and he ALSO enjoyed the worlds largest increase in wealth in 2009.

I'm wondering if Trump enjoys the world's largest increase in wealth in any of the years of his presidency if it might hit the press at all? Probably not ... we know they are "fair and balanced". Strangely, I could find nothing on the business genius that Bloomberg had run all his businesses when he fully divested to be Mayor? They must have been a real financial wizard to have him enjoy the WORLDS biggest increase in wealth in '09!

This sort of thing is what knuckle dragging Trump supporters and stupid Brexit types get angry about. As I've mentioned before, Davos man wants to see the masses of Americans drastically "lower their expectations for life" as I've written of before.

See, our betters in TP ("The Party"(D)" and the MSM know what would be better for us, and they LOVE the Davos sorts. Those folks are "the right kind of rich" -- no need to put any taxes or controls on THEM!

Get right with TP and your heart is right! When your heart is right, you can be fabulously wealthy, have all sorts of women (or even children as evidenced by Jeffrey Epstein and Slick Willie) ... you "rule the world", and all you have to do is agree with TP!

Well, that, and realize the set of you that actually rules the world is EXCEEDINGLY small!

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A Party Typo, "The least of these"

Democrats' Religion Problem - The Atlantic: 

Some of the mouthpieces of "The Party" (TP-D) are still doing some navel gazing, and this column is an example. For any actual practicing Christian that pays attention, it has been obvious for a very long while that it is impossible to be politically associated with a party that considers the killing of 60+ million babies in their mothers wombs a sacrament which competes in secular holiness with only homosexuality. Quaint ideas of God creating heaven and earth are constantly derided as "backward" in TP, and any concept that religion might have an impact in a believers life outside of the walls of an appropriately leftist church for an hour on Sunday AM on rare occasions is beyond the imagination of TP.

Thus, it unsurprisingly happens that even what a leftist liberal "christian" might assume would be a very important scrap of scripture plucked from an otherwise abandoned Bible is totally unfamiliar.

"Some of his colleagues also didn’t understand his work, he writes. He once drafted a faith-outreach fact sheet describing Obama’s views on poverty, titling it “Economic Fairness and the Least of These,” a reference to a famous teaching from Jesus in the Bible. Another staffer repeatedly deleted “the least of these,” commenting, “Is this a typo? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Who/what are ‘these’?”"

Well,  an example of "these" would be the 81% of evangelicals that voted for Trump because they really don't want to be forced to bake cakes for gay "weddings" or let men shower with their daughters in public locker rooms! Especially not while TP celebrates dress designers, entertainers, etc bragging about not working with the Trumps. Freedom of Association for all or for none!

The following paragraph fully summarizes for me what happened to nearly all  actual practicing Christians in the 2016 elections. We realized that this was no longer "America", which WAS a Christian nation, and voted accordingly.

Many of those 81 percent are accommodating cultural changes in America that are deeply problematic. Liberals have been trying to convince Americans, and evangelicals in particular, that America is not a Christian nation. The 2016 election was evangelicals saying, “Yeah, you’re right! We can’t expect to have someone who is Christian like us. We can’t expect to have someone with a perfect family life. What we can expect is someone who can look out for us, just like every other group in this country is looking for a candidate who will look out for them.”

The whole article is worthy of a read. It makes what I regularly say in this blog clear ... TP is no longer interested in actual Bible believing Christians, only in "social christians". Since TP lives in it's urban bubbles, it doesn't realize how many actual practicing Christians there are, so it remains shocked it can lose an election. The article goes into some detail on the fact that it is impossible to be a pro-life TPer these days because TP no longer even affirms life. (and this is the ATLANTIC!)

One of the somewhat surprising but very true things about human nature is that we can know a truth at a very deep level, yet not apply it in some area because we are totally blind to it right in front of us. I'll use gayness as an example. NPR quite regularly talks about the importance of "gay outreach" -- making sure that people meet and know gays and have gays talk to them about how important gay "marriage" is to them because it "puts a face on the issue".

They regularly say this, yet the vast majority of them don't know a practicing Bible believing Christian ... and don't want to. Being gay is only of this world ... like being an alcoholic, workaholic, adulterer, etc.  If one is willing to humble themselves and seek repentance, our earthy demons can be battled and we are ultimately assured of victory, at least in eternity.  Belief in the saving power of Christ and Gods Truth is eternal -- so perhaps THAT is why they shy away from Christians. They seek "heaven on earth", and their "heaven" damned sure isn't the one that any Christian would desire.

I see us as at a new transition point. *IF* Satan has become real enough to the secular christian left that they can "walk in the garden" as Satan did with Eve, and converse with practicing Christians about how important it is to doubt God on issues like homosexuality and gender (did he REALLY say ... ?"), then there is a major prospect for the descent of this tribal territory (BOistan)  to continue and even accelerate no matter who is in political power. The "ace in the hole" of Christ in the modern world may well be that the dark forces are even more distracted by the physical "pleasures of the flesh" and world than the Christians. We can pray it is so -- secular "chrisitians" avoiding actual Bible Christians cuts off one avenue for Satan. Unfortunately it also reduces the chance for the prodigal secularists to return to Truth (Christ).

Secular "christians" being willing to sit down with Christians and do their best to convert them is more dangerous than having them disassociate, shun and unfriend them. Secular (social) "christians" are often very intelligent and well able to discuss and influence. As CS Lewis covered so well in the "Screwtape Letters", Satan and his demons are very willing to help those who serve him to believe that they are serving God and are oh so pious in their service of "the good of our father below".

What the article does not mention is Ephesians 6:12

12 For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

Typing away on a laptop ready to post to a blog that lives in "the cloud" of the vast internet makes it seem surreal that this physical (and virtual) modern world is only a "lens", and not reality. Reality is eternal and spiritual.

We are spirits having a physical experience -- we need to remember that every day in fear and trembling. I love the main message of this old song ... it's particular theology is vague to non-existent (likely just as well), but it is basically true, assuming the "material" part is even what we think it is.

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Solving The BOcare, Medical Care Crisis

http://www.hoover.org/research/how-cure-health-care-0

By the time you get to the end of this post, you will know how to fix the healthcare system.

This post is important -- we need a little background Friedman that PJ O'Rourke has enhanced to stick in our brains first relative to how money is spent. This is taken from his book "Don't Vote, It Just Encourages the Bastards!"

I think we all intrinsically understand the preceding -- it makes a REAL difference whose money any person is spending and it makes a real difference who it is being spent on!

Now on to Milton Friedman on healthcare (I recommend you read the whole linked column, but I'm doing cliff notes here in case you are not going to). Milton has astutely observed that as technology has advanced in medicine, people in the developed world have paid more and more for health care, yet are generally less satisfied. Advances in technology in other areas (cars, tv, cell phones, the internet) have produced LOWER costs and GREATER satisfaction!

Rapid technological advances have occurred repeatedly since the Industrial Revolution—in agriculture, steam engines, railroads, telephones, electricity, automobiles, radio, television, and, most recently, computers and telecommunication. The other two features seem unique to medicine. It is true that spending initially increased after non-medical technical advances, but the fraction of national income spent did not increase dramatically after the initial phase of widespread acceptance. On the contrary, technological development lowered cost, so that the fraction of national income spent on food, transportation, communication, and much more has gone down, releasing resources to produce new products or services. Similarly, there seems no counterpart in these other areas to the rising dissatisfaction with the delivery of medical care.

So apparently, having 3rd parties -- employers, insurance companies and government buy our healthcare has provided us with a very expensive off color Yugo healthcare -- and we are surprised? But it's worse than that -- because government is involved.

Some years ago, the British physician Max Gammon, after an extensive study of the British system of socialized medicine, formulated what he called "the theory of bureaucratic displacement." He observed that in "a bureaucratic system . . . increase in expenditure will be matched by fall in production. . . . Such systems will act rather like ‘black holes,’ in the economic universe, simultaneously sucking in resources, and shrinking in terms of ‘emitted production.’" Gammon’s observations for the British system have their exact parallel in the partly socialized U.S. medical system. Here, too, input has been going up sharply relative to output.

Why is government different? It combines typical human hubris and incompetence with monopoly power -- in fact,  potentially total coercive power.  How to escape from this morass, now made much worse by BOcare? Well, the "perfect solution" would be:

The ideal way to do that would be to reverse past actions: repeal the tax exemption of employer-provided medical care; terminate Medicare and Medicaid; deregulate most insurance; and restrict the role of the government, preferably state and local rather than federal, to financing care for the hard cases. However, the vested interests that have grown up around the existing system, and the tyranny of the status quo, clearly make that solution not feasible politically. Yet it is worth stating the ideal as a guide to judging whether proposed incremental changes are in the right direction.

 So what does this all mean in simple easy to understand terms?

1. Like all goods, medical care WILL (and always has been) be "rationed" -- supply and demand are a form of rationing, as are long waits. The government decides on the waits, like having less MRI machines for the country than Mayo has with waits of 12 - 18 months. My wife would likely be a quad in Canada, but their healthy people LOVE their system! (the number of healthy people exceeds the number of sick people -- so socialized medicine is politically astute ...  note "insane evil pig" above )
   
2. 80/20 rule, 80%+ of medical care can be "WalMart, Target, Bloomies" levels of care -- basic physicals, high blood pressure, thyroid issues, diabetes, throat cultures, standard pregnancy/delivery -- People need to pay for 80% of their health care out of pocket, just like their groceries and gasoline.
   
   You buy the level you can afford when you are hurting -- and it is cheap because there is competition, and very limited liability. It is like buying normal groceries -- not steak, certainly not caviar. Just like when your car breaks or house needs a new roof, you either have savings to handle those "unexpected expenses", or you are forced to use credit. If you are really poor, you go seek state assistance, or to to the "medical shelf" (like the food shelf).
   
3. When really bad things happen -- cancer, trauma, heart attack, stroke, etc, "Cirrus Vision Medicine" kicks in -- note, I didn't say "Gulf Stream, Trump's plane, or Air Force One" level of medicine. The Cirrus Vision is a very advanced JET plane ... but it isn't "snotty". You can't afford the Cirrus level either, but just like fire insurance, you pay a premium for a policy so you are not RUINED ... it costs more than your fire insurance because the odds of you eventually getting bad sick are higher, and the care is going to cost more than replacing your house.
   
   You DO "notice it" -- Some number, say "20% of your net income" is yours to pay. Serious illness ought to be financially like having your home burn down -- a really bad thing (which it WILL be anyway, because serious health issues are MUCH more than just financial). 

A lot of this unfortunately assumes that we re-educate people on some of the basic facts of life that our political and educational system have hidden from us so they can shear us. 

1. "Single Payer" means that if you are a person that uses only public housing, public transportation, public health, etc today, you will likely LOVE it! If not -- like if you have your own home, car, etc, then you will also find that you need to have your own healthcare. You will pay dearly for the "public option", and THEN  unless you are REALLY wealthy, you will pay hyper-dearly for the "private option" that you actually use -- if you can afford it at all. Increasingly, many of us that bought into the old "American Dream" will finally fall into a frayed, stinking, 10-20 people to a ward slum of healthcare like the VA (the "public option" poster child), and find that we are dying in BOistan. 
2. Single Payer" isn't ... it is "paid by all taxpayers present and future". It is one stop lobbyist stop for those getting the money. They know who to pay off, take on junkets, provide good stuff for, etc. No need to deal with slimy "customers" (patients) anymore ... they are not paying anyway! If DC is happy, it's all good. If your business ever had a "large users group", imagine a "ONE users group"! How well did your business treat the customers that were not "large" compared to the big spenders? Imagine only a single real customer that determined your entire financial picture as a healthcare provider and you will start to get the idea. 
3. There is NO free lunch! Somebody is paying -- maybe not you, but somebody. Your neighbor, your kids, your grandkids, SOMEBODY (and likely not the "really rich guy" -- he has lawyers and tax accountants that he pays instead). When you don't understand that, most likely you AND everyone else is paying WAY more than you realize for your "free lunch", which is exactly the case for healthcare. "Free goods" are insanely expensive!
4. NEVER insure against losses that you can self-insure for! Yes, this means NEVER purchase the "extended warranty"! Assuming that the warranty is actually going to cover things that actually might happen (a BIG assumption!), someone is betting that they will make money by you purchasing the warranty, and they have LOTS more information than you have about the transaction and odds! Just like Vegas, they are "the house", and rule #1 is that the house wins! They have to, otherwise they would not be in business!
5. 
   Note, this applies DOUBLE to "don't have the (federal) government pay for people's food, car repairs, or basic medicine". The government is REALLY "the house", and they will take A LOT of pounds of your taxpaying flesh as they seek to pad their pockets and buy votes to stay in power! If government MUST be involved in chairity (it ought to be neighbors and churches), then it starts LOCALLY and as failure happens, the funding needs to take longer and longer expensive trips to the state and federal capitols so that 20-30-40 cents can return to do good deeds.
   
6. "The Government" is not "magic", and certainly not "god". Yes, it can promise to rob from your neighbor to give you things like healthcare, but it will also certainly charge a hefty fee for it's larceny "service". Since it is robbing though,  it WILL also rob from you, your children and your grandchildren as well. You asked it to be a robber, do you REALLY think it is going to be an "honest robber"?
7. Robbing for a "really good reason" is still robbery. If the reason is THAT good, reasonable people will want to invest in it, or even gift the money. The corruption engendered by deciding that it is morally OK to take money from others by force fits well with the "morality" that it is OK to take the life of another person for your own convenience. When you are willing to kill for convenience, or even allow such killing,  morality is over. (killing for convenience is another name for abortion -- as in the abortion of all moral standing, meaning that if you trust any person or organization (eg US Government) that supports abortion, you are insane and deserve whatever happens to you)
8. Once institutions are robbing people, there is no such thing as "reasonable", or "limited" because "institutions" ARE people  -- real imperfect standard issue people. Not "public servants", or some other sainted term. When your day to day job is robbing a set of people to hand the money to another set of people so they will keep you in power, you are going to want to keep some loot for yourself, and you will find a "legitimate" way ... or your union will.
   
   Since you have already convinced yourself that charging people vastly different rates based on income for redistribution is "moral", "progressive" even, it is much easier to see how you absolutely "deserve" a higher salary, cushy benefits like super health care yourself, full salary retirement at a young age "indexed for inflation", shorter work hours, more vacation, total job security, etc, etc) ... all of these are either "in" or "in sight" for unionized government workers see (AFSCME) 

The whole Friedman article is WELL worth reading. We COULD solve our healthcare issues in the next year or two -- I only hope that Trump and his advisors are looking at this sort of information!