North Korean Red Line, Unless That Dictator is ME!

Obama Vows a Response to Cyberattack on Sony - NYTimes.com:

BO on "The Interview":

“We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States.” That would encourage others to do the same “when they see a documentary that they don’t like or news reports that they don’t like.

BO on the tape that supposedly "caused" Benghazi (but didn't, just another BO lie):

In a speech at the United Nations around this time, the president declared — no doubt with Nakoula in mind — “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam." 

Hillary Clinton said: “We will make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.”

Now that "red line" BO and Hillary followed through on!!

The guy in the picture is Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a person our current dictator saw fit to imprison for making a film that probably did offend some Muslims, but had NOTHING to do with Benghazi.


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Vermont, A Single Payer Canary Dies

As Vermont Goes . . . | National Review Online:

Vermont loved BOcare and thought they were going to do one better by going to single payer. Guess what? The liberal la la land of Ben and Jerry's found out it was too damned expensive!

This would be a really good story for Americans in general to be extremely aware of, so you can be certain that the coverage of this in the MSM will be very slight.

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Peak Left?

Next Up in America: The Liberal Retreat - The American Interest:

I VERY highly recommend reading the attached article. I FERVENTLY hope it can be true -- that we can significantly turn the corner without things being much worse or even an ending of the US as we now think we know it.

I would love it to be so, but I think there are a few things that must be soberly considered:

• The political gains since BO have been in midterms. The bulk of the true low information and complete wards of the state voters don't come out in those elections. 
• Even Reagan failed to actually REDUCE government -- he slowed the growth, but he did not reduce it. 
• 40% of Americans now get over 50% of their income from some form of government transfer. Over 50% get a significant amount of their income via transfer. Those statistics and trends are not sustainable and must be changed for there to be an ACTUAL turn away from the left ditch. 
• The top income quintile now provides over 90% of net US tax revenue. The 2nd highest quartile provides a bit, but the bottom 3, 60% of the population are net takers vs makers relative to tax revenue. People have a tendency to vote where their bread is buttered --- thus, smaller government is at somewhere between a 60% - 80% current disadvantage. 
• 90%+ of government workers including teachers and university professors are left leaning Democrats who contribute millions to their employer / party via AFSCME, plus run the IRS, run any campaign contribution policing, and of course indoctrinate our kids that "left is best". We are perilously close to an effective single party run state. 
• Maybe worst of all, people like to believe what they like to believe. An ACTUAL change of direction is going to be painful -- we have all been embezzled to the tune of $120T in unfunded entitlements + $18T in on the books debt ... something like a $138T hole. I covered this here. 

I could go on, but the bottom line is that the "soul of the nation" has largely been turned from the basic principles of America -- a highly moral and religious people, strong work ethic, strong belief in individual responsibility and initiative, belief in ACTUAL Equal Protection (as in no "progressive" income tax), etc, etc to very much a "Statist" view -- highly centralized and powerful state with impacts on all aspects of day to day life, strong redistributionist / leveling economic policy and maybe worst of all, the State taking over as the center of life vs God / religion / local community.

Until we ACTUALLY make a turn, what might look like a "turn from peak" is really just a pause with no progress away from the abyss and often just a reduction in our headlong rush to totalitarian state control.

We must make an ACTUAL TURN away from the leftward totalitarian slide if we truly want to make this time to be seen from the future as "Peak Left".

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Taliban Kills 145 Total, 132 Children, US Ends Operations

Pakistan school attack: Taliban kill 145 - CNN.com:

This story has pretty much flashed by the US media and disappeared. In other news, the US and NATO ended combat operations in Afghanistan this week

Things are going really well aren't they? Well, we are way to focused on more important matters. N Korea hacking Sony and successfully stopping a movie, and BO making nice with his comrades in Cuba.

It turns out that no matter how intently we would all like to gaze at our navels, there are people in this world that are quite busy going about creating the kind of world that they want. Since BO is in the WH, one pretty much has to read between the lines to understand that the kind of world they are busily making after the retreat of the US is not really what most folks here probably have in mind.

Our borders are completely porous, and we have plenty of home grown Islamic sympathizers that would be just find executing an attack like the Pakistan school attack here. While BO and the MSM went nuts over one crazy kid at Sandy Hook killing 20 kids and 6 adults, one wonders if an Islamic organization carried it out here it would be termed "workplace violence" -- that is what they classified the Ft Hood shooting that killed 13 and wounded 32 as, in fact as of 2013, the shooter was still collecting pay while awaiting trial.

We are certainly not awake. I'd guess that a very small percentage of Americans even realize that BO ended combat operations in Afghanistan this week. A few more know about the school attack in Pakistan. Maybe what "5%" or less know about the "workplace violence" and the pay still being collected?

Think WAY BACK to the W Bush administration. How much coverage was there of nearly ANYTHING that could possibly be construed (or fabricated) to be a negative reflection on the president? His National Guard experience, Abu Ghraib, the question of if he mishandled 9-11, Valerie Plame, Katrina, how low his poll numbers were .... the list was ENDLESS.

If Reagan was the "teflon president", BO is the "alternate universe president". It is as if anything that happens in the country or world that is less than completely positive is happening in some alternate universe that must be kept "top secret" from the American Public.

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HP, "The Machine"

The Machine: A new kind of computer:

I swear I worked on one of these once ... "Pacific", the IBM S/38, somewhat descendent of IBM's abortive attempt to re-create computer architecture post 360, "Future Systems".

There is a part of me wants to dust off the old resume and beg to climb on board such an ostentatious endeavor ... "big projects", "big architecture", "millions of KLOC" and all that. I'm pushing 60, tilting at such windmills is a younger mans sport -- and yet.

There are not a lot of anything approaching "details", but it certainly sounds like the core of this thing is some version of "Single Level Store"(SLS),  one of the leading "features" (and and achilles heel) of the S/38 along with the concept of "A High Level Machine Architecture". Very useful as an abstraction -- see Java Virtual Machine and many others since, the devil is in the translation of virtual to real. Real hardware only runs the real -- and there is the rub.

An engadget article gives some more "detail" that makes it at least sound like this time the distance between the hardware and the SLS is tiny ... "memristors" make the memory actually single level. No actual computer memory and backing store -- although one assumes there are still faster caches and register stacks in the architecture, though one would have to see it to be absolutely sure.

But how "real" is the abstraction presented to the OS programmer, the compiler writer (really the back-end optimizer writer), and finally the application programmer?  Does it "show through" to the application layer? If not, then the issue becomes how well all this works with unmodified plain old Unix programming model code of various flavors. If it does, then there is maybe more hope for a true revolution, but it has to be BOTH very good, AND very fast ... as in VERY easy to program and runs like a banshee, else not even the middle ware guys (Web Servers, Data Bases, etc) will bother to create new versions of their products for it.

If anybody can write code that is actually not aware of "instantiation", the reading of data from disks in file or DB formats into "records / buffers / data structures" that can potentially be a step forward, though as many theorists have discovered it is also very much a two edged sword. Sever the human programmed in understanding of "temporary" (in memory) and "permanent" (written to media like disks) and all sorts of problems ensue. How does the underlying OS / programming language decide what is "garbage", ie working storage used by the program during execution, but not of use after it is done ... in some cases this is obvious, but if the programming model is changed to not make the differentiation clear, it gets very complex.

What does "permanent" mean? Is it ALL mirrored or otherwise protected? Huge amounts of real industrial programming (and resources like time/hardware/etc) are devoted to "checkpointing" where the program(s) were at so the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) properties can be maintained through loss of power, processor failures, bus / communication network failures, disk failures, etc ... There is lots of code to make that happen. Does it change? If so, even for MUCH better, the conversion will be large.

I could likely wax on for a good deal longer. Clearly I'm curious and will be watching as this unfolds. 
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Postmodern Deconstructionist Rape

A Bad Week for Rape Culture | Power Line:

For those fortunate souls spared from the concepts of postmodernism, and deconstructionism, I'll be very brief ... you can look up Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida on your own and attempt to arrive at a definition of these schools of "thought" (and the quotes are VERY appropriate) that were largely created to question all of the underpinnings of at least western, if not all thought. Essentially, they say that "truth" is all a matter of perspective, mostly defined by "power" and "privilege". So morals, law and even science become targets of "literary criticism" ... the ad hominem attack being as good as any and the straw-man argument being the equivalent of mathematical proof by their logic.

I'm not going to dwell on these definitions other than to say that folks like Foucault and Derrida wound my spirit. While there is no question that Middle Ages Christendom was corrupted by a bad series of Popes (see Borgia popes if you want your stomach turned), it has been quite clear since at least the middle of the 20th century that Secular Humanism has been corrupted to an even greater degree and part of the fruits of that are things like Postmodernism and Deconstructionism.

I believe that you have to be careful when exposing yourself to poison, and I find that very much exposure to things like Postmodernism and Deconstructionism have the effect of poison on my spirit. These concepts have however had a very large effect on our culture.

For those that have been involved in corporate life post '90s, at least the males are aware that "Sexual Harassment" is defined by "how the person reporting it FEELS".  In the case I was personally involved with, the "feeling" had to do with some mixture of discomfort in finding out that office mates who had helped care for a young lady when she had a broken leg by getting her lunch, water, etc also harbored "conservative political views".

 To make matters worse, they planned a Bachelor Party for a younger male co-worker, and they were supposedly "decent guys with wives that had kids and everything" ... a Bachelor Party! How could they! This would have been late '80s, it was my first experience of a "snowflake" experiencing the "horror" of the world not being exactly like she felt it SHOULD be!  If you have never experienced this, it may sound hard to believe, but it is a fact -- that charge is a LEGITIMATE charge of "Sexual Harassment" in our current USA corporate environs. Males can and do lose their jobs over things like this.

Fast forward to "rape" ... now sometimes asserted to be "unwanted kissing", and then sprinkle in "the truth is what you say or feel it is", "there is no objective truth", "western culture is a rape culture" and a witches brew of other bright ideas, and you get things like Leah Dunham and the University of Virginia referenced in the link.

We live in a society where at least all our elites are well versed in all manner of relativism, supposed noxious effects of power and privilege, as well as a strong desire to "be on the right ("The Party") side" and WELL aware of both the prizes of being on the "good" side (see Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy and thousands of others we never hear about) and the penalties for being on the "bad" side (eg. Bill Cosby, Clarence Thomas, Bob Packwood, and a cast of thousands having lost their jobs, promotions, etc.

In the words from Cool Hand Luke, "What we have here is a failure to communicate". Those of us on the "bad" side from the perspective of "The Party" need to be VERY careful, or better yet, "get our minds right".  While in SOME (very few) cases as in the linked article, the forces of "the truth is what I feel it is" will go so far out on a limb that the elites can't quite strain credulity far enough to accommodate them, but it won't be often, and it certainly won't be for lack of trying!

The historical end of this is that reality finally becomes too great for the masses to ignore  and there is a revival -- of Christianity at least, if not some form of conservative republican government, ala the original founding of the US or Burke's England. But it usually takes starvation, killing and lots more badness before that comes to pass.

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Reason and Analysis, Brand Blanshard

http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&index=aps&linkCode=ur2&tag=gm050-20&keywords=reason%20and%20analysis%20blanshard

After having this rather expensive "real practicing philosopher" book on my shelf for a long time partially read, I have finally finished the rather herculean task of completing it, although it is doubtful I will ever reach the ennobled state of claiming significant understanding of it in this mortal coil. The complexity, arcane technicalities of lexical analysis and obscurantism of thought that philosophy is drawn to never ceases to amaze me.

Let me TRY to make this somewhat simple.

The purpose of the book is to cover the various "assaults on reason" from the start of philosophy up to the present.  One can validly call that "assaults on transcendence", which in it's easiest to understand form is "God" ... and especially the particularly rational form of God introduced in the canon of Western Christianity.

To give the form of the problem, I think Mannheim does a good job:

"one must make one's choice between two views: on the one hand that there is a reason working in and through men's minds which can lay hold of a timeless structure of things: on the other, that thinking is a series of temporal events determined, like all other events, non-rationally" 

In other words, reason vs positivism. Reason (in it's most productive historical use) says roughly  "there is a grand plan, and it is discoverable because our minds happen to be made to relate to that grand plan". Positivism says there is no plan, only a pile of "events" with no "privileged frame of reference", certainly including our concepts of "reason", "meaning", etc.

Naturally, Mannheim liked the non-transcendent view, but wanted to make it privileged  ... which of course is immediately self-refuting as is all relativism, since there IS NO PRIVILEGED (eg "right", "better", etc) POINT OF VIEW ... if there aren't any universals, absolutes, etc, there can't be.

Or to put it another way in roughly the terms of Heidegger:

"As the existentialist contemplated this world, his feeling was one of nausea. Was there anything in this nightmare that he could tie to? One thing only - his own existence. Certain of nothing else, he could be certain at least that he existed, and that he was somehow fashioning his own fate. And in doing so, his safety lay in the depth of his disillusionment. He was weak; he was a pilgrim and stranger in a world not of his making; he would be defeated shortly by death; there were no principles that he could adhere to; his life therefore was to be one of anxiety and care. But for Heidegger, "deliverance from illusion is to be achieved by the man, who, opening himself to anguish, resolutely faces nothingness in anticipation of his own extinction"". 

Hard to beat that as an upbeat recruitment paragraph for  "Life without God, The Nietzschean way".

As is pointed out in the rest of the book in number of places, most philosophers in attacking reason, causality, universals, etc and attempting to replace them with mathematics, logical atomism, category differences, and a host of other chimeras, are actually unable to practice what they preach in order to even make the attempt. They are forced to use reason, causality, universals, etc in order to even get a running start at their attack.

"I attack the principle of solid ground while standing here on .... er, never mind". Only they fail to realize their predicament.

Needless to say, it gets quite hard to keep an open mind about the usefulness of all this after the first 10 or so attempts that always must be arrogantly and loudly launched -- after all, if one is to rush as Quixote to the windmill of all of human thought for thousands of years, as well as the day to day existence experienced by ones own self and all those of one's shared existence to date, one must have a quite high opinion of their own logic -- er "series of temporal brain events".

And so it goes. The vast vast majority of even all somewhat deep thinkers either fail to, or more likely refuse to, consider the difficulty factor of doing away with little basics like a rational repeatable universe that is understandable to themselves and others in the same manner taken as a "universal a priori fact". What they see as a "problem" is of course that such a universal a priori fact is hard to accept without some cause beyond "shit happens", and is perilously close to "God".

Much as in Mannheim's choice "You have to face the fact that there is a God, or there isn't", many like to jump to "there isn't" in hopes of being freed from moral stricture and eventual judgement, but like Mannheim, completely ignore the existential consequence of the no god, no order, no universals, no reason for there to be reason, meaning, etc. The abyss of despair.

The previous paragraph is the reason that I think having some understanding of how philosophy, or at least epistemology works is important and a major area of lack in modern western education.

Ideas do indeed have consequences.

I'm For Obama, I'm Against His Assassination

20 Hypocritical Republican Senators Voted to Fund Obama's Executive Amnesty - For America : For America:



One of the MANY reasons that Government needs to be smaller is that it is completely and easily identifiable as insane.



To the extent that there is anything remotely sane behind this nonsense article it is that these Republicans didn't join Ted Cruz in a stunt that could never pass in the current Senate under Harry Reid and would only gum of the works in getting the obscene but no-choice "CRomnibus" (Continuing Resolution omnibus) bill passed.



"Therefore" ...



The authors of this column want you to think that being against Cruz's stunt is being "FOR BO's Royal Amnesty Decree". A perfectly awful hash of Senate procedural obscurity with insane clown posse political muckraking.



There was really no choice but to do another obscene continuing resolution because of the involatile rule of government that has been established since Bush 1. "When the government shuts down due to a fiscal disagreement it is ALWAYS the fault of Republicans". This was proven by:



a) HW Bush, Democrat Congress demanded he sign a budget raising taxes, he demurred, government shut down was declared by media to be his fault, he eventually capitulated.

b). When Clinton failed to sign a budget passed by Republicans in both houses, it was declared to be  the fault of the Republicans,  they eventually capitulated with great credit given to Clinton.

c). Last year when BO and Harry Reid declared "we will not negotiate on the budget", the problem was declared to be the Republicans, who eventually backed down again.



The Constitution declares that the House of Representatives sets the budget -- they own the purse strings, but we no longer live under the Constitution, we live under control of "The Party" (D) and it's media arm, so Constitution be damned ... it is what TP says it is.

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Orwellian Word Torture

Cheney unchained | Power Line:

Watching things like this Meet The Press segment I'm reminded of how our technically and socially cocooned western "Disney existence" makes us extremely vulnerable to thinking that problems like "long lines at Space Mountain" might constitute something with some relation to "discomfort" in the real world.

In 1984 and in Animal Farm, Orwell gave us a solid background in the relative ease with which a generalized media environment can totally change the perceived meaning of words for people living in the bubble of the influence.

So we see words like "racism" once about slavery, lynching, bull whips and Jim Crow (back when it was Democrats that ran "Animal Farm") now becomes "not supporting BOcare", or not running around saying "Hands up, don't shoot" after a convenience store robbing thug that attacked a police officer ends up shot dead during his assault of the officer.

So too "torture". What was once known and recognized as being treatment that went on for months and years and often brought death or permanent injuries carried for life, is now reduced largely to "waterboarding".

So we get insanity like Todd asking Cheney "if Iranians waterboarded a US soldier in the future, might we not want to see them tried for war crimes"? Indeed ... as Cheney responds (with less detail), such methods being used by folks that have no trouble twisting joints out of sockets, cutting off various appendages, gouging out eyes, blowing up intestines with air, etc, etc are not all that likely to go with waterboarding as a method.

In the insane "hypothetical world" that we live in however, I find it very easy to believe that if as far as Todd knew, the US had never used waterboarding on a prisoner and the hypothetical Iranian incident happened, he and all sorts of US (as well as international) media and government folks would be standing up and defending Iran saying "The US waterboards it's own soldiers as part of SERE training! How can it POSSIBLY seek to call Iranians "war criminals" for using a technique it uses on it's own soldiers!!!". Of course, it could not ... they would actually be right!

Then we have the case of hundreds of Vietnam era veterans covered in the linked article that actually WERE tortured at the hands of the North Vietnamese. Outrage from American press or elites? Nada ... in fact, they typically side with the North Vietnamese as being the aggrieved party.

One of the veterans actually tortured is quoted in this paragraph that I find to be useful:

Our world is not completely good or evil. To proclaim we will never use any form of enhanced interrogations causes our friends to think we are naive and eases our enemies’ recruitment of radical terrorists to plot attacks on innocent kids, men and women – or any infidel. If I were to catch a “mad bomber” running away from an explosive I would not hesitate a second to use “enhanced interrogation,” including waterboarding, if it would save lives of innocent people.

The rub is that it seems obvious that not only are good and evil both in presence, the positioning of which is which is often not what one might expect. It doesn't take very long to realize that in the eyes of Senator Feinstein or Chuck Todd, Cheney, W, etc are the "evil". The various terrorists (another word that BO and the media is really loathe to use) that might call themselves "Islamic", but our president assures us are not, are sometimes "misguided", or "over zealous" in the eyes of Feinstein, BO, or media elites, but they are clearly not "evil" in the sense of W, Cheney, or even old Dick Nixon.

Nixon and the US military were formerly juxtaposed with the zealous and at least mostly justified N Vietnamese. They may not have treated their US captives "perfectly", but one would need to understand "their culture" and centuries of slights or perceived slights by the west before having anything at all to say about their methods -- and even then, anything smacking of "judgement" would be presumptuous coming from a nation that once had slaves and mistreated Indians!

So too the long suffering Arab culture. If they seem to be "violent" to the less well educated, well, there were the Crusades,  the colonial era, the creation of Israel, and of course the corruption of western corporations and money in the grubby oil business. All the potentially problematic behavior of "the group that describes itself as the Islamic State" is to be viewed from some value free perspective of high minded consideration for all of the ills imparted by Western civilization, with no potential thought that 1400 years of Islam may have been less than perfect all on it's own.

We know that Cheney and W are evil. We don't even know what to call ISIL -- or ISIS. Our media elites have not fully succeeded in alchemy of turning ISIL into "good" as they did with the PLO, the Nicaraguan rebels, N Vietnam and the USSR, but they are well on their way -- we don't even clearly know what they are called, but it would certainly be unsophisticated to call them "evil" -- or (horror) "Islamic"!

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Conscience of a Conservative (Goldwater)

http://www.amazon.com/Conscience-Conservative-Barry-Goldwater/dp/1481978292/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418238472&sr=8-1&keywords=conscience+of+a+conservative

For a good long time I have been guilty of failing to read this work which many conservatives consider to be a cornerstone of conservative thought. I plead that some of the later utterances of Goldwater in his waning years led me to question his veracity as a conservative, but relative to this work, the proponents were right, it is first class.

It concisely covers the basics of conservative thought including how conservatism considers man as more than flesh and blood, having an eternal soul. "The root difference between Conservatives and the Liberals of today is that Conservatives take account of the whole man, while the Liberals tend to look at only the material side of man's nature".

Various pleas for limited government and clear delineation of the powers of the federal government and what are reserved for the states are included. "Throughout history, government has proved to be the chief instrument for thwarting man's liberty."

His two chapter discussion of States Rights is an excellent defense of against the idea that they are obsolete since the fight against Jim Crow in the South. "States Rights mean that the States have a right to act or not to act, as they see fit in the areas reserved to them." Worth a read in the age of BOcare.

He covers the attack of "progressive" taxation on Equal Protection and Property Rights under the Constitution as well as giving us an accurate preview of the what the unfettered expansion of the Federal Government has come to mean from the perspective of 1960.

My biggest surprise in reading the book was how accurately he predicted and largely provided the architecture for Reagan's victory over the USSR.

"Our enemies have understood the nature of the conflict and we have not. They are determined to win the conflict, we are not".

The closing paragraph of the book makes one glad yet again that we were privileged to have Ronald Reagan as President"

The future as I see it, will unfold along one of two paths. Either the Communists will retain the offensive, will lay down one challenge after another will invite us local crisis after local crises to choose between all out war and limited retreat; and will force us ultimately to surrender or accept war under the most disadvantageous of circumstances. Or we will summon the will and the means for taking the initiative, and wage a war of attrition against them---and hope, thereby to bring about the internal disintegration of the communist empire. One course runs the risk of war, and leads in any case, to probably defeat. The other runs the risk of war, and holds forth the promise of victory. For Americans who cherish their lives, but their freedom more, the choice cannot be difficult. 

Goldwater had the right architecture, Reagan implemented it, and the wall came tumbling down.

A quite short and well written summary of the basics of conservative thought. I ought to have read it sooner.

Forgiveness for $40M

The Torture Report Reminds Us of What America Was - NYTimes.com:



http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/12/feinsteins-war-on-the-cia-what-purpose-does-it-serve.php



The top link is to a writing by a former Abu Ghraib interrogator now a college professor that proudly proclaims that "he can't be forgiven". His level of hubris is palpable, the need for Christ is rarely screamed as loudly.



"What America WAS"? What a sad joke -- the propensity of government agencies to abuse their powers is eternal. To not see the constant reality and threat of all forms of abuse by all forms of government is to show willful disregard for known and oft proven reality.



The second link is to some coverage of "the torture report" with what I consider to be the main reason for the report -- Feinstein and other Democrats in congress signed off on "enhanced interrogation", and they now want to do the Pontius Pilate symbolic washing of the hands.

For Feinstein, $40 million, long-term damage to the CIA, and the potential for deadly attacks on Americans overseas apparently are a small price to pay for this satisfaction.

 The insanity of our elites navel gazing about what was or wasn't done by one government agency or another in the months and years after 9-11, while we continue to do battle with a ruthless enemy that has no qualms about public beheading nor any forms of real torture (that leave lasting physical marks) is comedy. Which often gives way to tragedy.



Government agencies have always been and always will be capable to ANY form of abuse or torture imaginable. If the 20th century made anything at all clear, it ought to have been that. Ultimately, THAT is the reason that GOVERNMENT MUST BE LIMITED! Leave it un-limited and it is as predictable as aging that the eventual recipients of the most egregious possible tortures will be the thoroughly  demonized and scapegoated "opposition".  (See German gas chambers and Soviet Gulag)



Man has known from the time of his first consciousness of mortality that he is in dire need of forgiveness. All manner of sacrifice, penance, and sundry contrition has been attempted, but only God taking on the form of man and dying for the sins of all as made forgiveness a reality for billions.



What makes us "better" than our enemies? Nothing at all intrinsically -- we are all sinful humans.



To the extent we are "better" is to the extent we recognize the authority of Christ and retain increasingly small vestiges of being  a "Christian Nation". Much as surgery will always be painful, war will likewise always be painful. Attempting to put controls on the carnage is reasonable, but having illusions as to just how effective such controls can be given the doubly de-humanizing aspects of government bureaucracy (CIA, military, etc) and war itself,  is always going to be a recipe for disappointment.



We need controls, but we also need to be FAR more forgiving of the men and women in the front lines of the messy business of war than of the preening pretenders to royalty like Feinstein. Let's face it, they signed off on enhanced interrogation because they were afraid for themselves and their political careers, and now they want to "un-sign" for their own political skins and personal sanctimony no matter the cost.



We are rarely treated to such a clear example of total fecklessness.



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American Royalty, Hillary

Plans for UCLA visit give rare glimpse into Hillary Clinton’s paid speaking career - The Washington Post:

She is the wife of a womanizing ex-president. She led a failed effort to nationalize healthcare. She is a failed presidential candidate, a failed Secretary of State, and an exceedingly lackluster one and a third term Senator. She is American Royalty.

Her "reduced speaking rate" for universities is $300K. Between her and her husband since leaving office, they have amassed wealth of $100 million dollars. In 2012, Bill alone rolled in $17M in speaking fees.

The nice thing for the Clintons is that articles like the WaPo above are rare. Reagan did a couple high price speeches after leaving office and media was all over it as "inappropriate". Slick and Hilly pull in over $100 million and it is really no big deal.

The standard is clear ... if you are in The Party, Democrat, you are part of the "royal line" ... as long as you follow that line you can amass fortunes, avoid taxation (see Sharpton $4.7 Million in tax debt), womanize (contrast Bill Clinton and Bill Cosby), and who knows what else ... it is the TRUE "noblesse obilige" because TP is royalty.

Tea Party: Angriest, Most Hateful People On Earth

Anne Lamott: “Look at the Tea Party: Some of the angriest, most hateful people on earth, and they’re backed by what they think is Scripture” - Salon.com:

I know, it is Salon -- but sadly, Salon is a real entity. There are a significant number of people that read this and I think more than we actually know think it is quite true.

It is hard to read through something like this because it exposes so well the shallows of so much of modern life -- concern over how good the next woman looks, concern over wealth status, concern over how smart your kid is, etc ... and then the summary line:

I really believe that earth is forgiveness school – I really believe that’s why they brought us here, and then left us without any owner’s manual. I think we’re here to learn forgiveness.

This of course we juxtapose with the title line -- a summary judgement of a group of people along with a reference to "scripture" ... and then she gets up on her throne of wisdom and gives us this:

All wisdom traditions have at their root three basic ideas: To take care of the poor, to cultivate a sense of presence or union with a power much greater than ourselves, and to soften the heart.

Christianity is the acceptance of healing Grace through Christ's blood by Grace alone through Faith alone, followed by a life of attempting to follow Christ through the Holy Sacraments, Holy Preaching and Holy Scripture. There is "wisdom" in that, but the Old Testament / Judaism is more the "wisdom tradition". It boggles the mind to conceive of what Anne Lamont conceives of as "wisdom".

First she judges a group of people with VERY little of a specific agenda beyond "smaller government" as "hateful", then she claims "scripture" is 180 degrees opposed. Actually, Scripture is silent beyond "render unto Caesar" on government -- it is up to us. Christ never specifically inveighed against Rome, the death penalty, or even slavery. He was pretty clear where his kingdom was at and that earthy concerns were extremely minor when compared against the eternal.

I point this rather sorry example out for two reasons. First, because for a very large number of people that primarily get their news from mainline outlets, would tell you a statement like the title statement is a correct summary of the Tea Party. Those of us that have sympathy with something other than continued growth of government need to be aware of that ... the calculus is as simple as "government is great and benevolent, to seek to slow or Gasp!, reduce it is hateful, evil, etc".

The second point is that the BEGINNING of wisdom is the fear of God -- the actual recognition of our mortality, insignificance in time and space, but significance to God, of our very limited selves. In actual "wisdom traditions", humility is the start of wisdom. We as a people have lost so much that most have never read any "scripture" beyond some fluffy gauzy shards that convince many that whatever anyone thinks that isn't somehow conservative, traditional or actually religious in nature (as in they believe it and follow it) is all the same ... and my (Anne's) view is as good (and really better) than anyone's! ... past, present or future, so let me just tell you what is trump -- today we are all angry!

A short reading of actual wisdom tradition would quickly point out that such a position is the position of the fool claiming to be wise -- but today it gets published as wisdom, showing that much of our culture is about glorification of the fool. Wisdom is clear on the outcome of that.

Matt 7:26, 27

Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell-- and great was its fall.

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Return From The Plague, Thanksgiving

What a great way to spend a holiday -- 102 degree fever T-day, 101 Friday, finally broke Sat ... now just hacky chest cough, back to like "90% capability" and working out again since yesterday. I do believe that I notice that I don't bounce back quite as quickly at 58 as I once did -- nah, must be my imagination!

When I worked, I might have said "at least it happened while I was off so I'm not behind at work". The vast majority of my IBM career was like that -- 100ish e-mails a day, documents to review by dates, plans, schedules, status, architecture, presentations, approvals, issues .... Yes, in the early years there was actual code and testing, ah for the good old days.

I'd say I look forward to holidays more now -- chance to get together with people. I don't exactly lack  for human contact, but not so much the overload that one experienced when leading teams of 20+ and at times as many as 60 people ... and of course interacting with lots of others in various capacities. People invigorate me, there are days now that I can miss that a little.

Not a lot one can do about scheduling flu. I've gotten the flu shot for over decade, didn't get it before that. Think the only previous time I had flu this severe and long lasting was just after finals in one of my college years when I was down for close to a week. I'm sure it is an odds game -- supposedly they pick the "most likely" viruses, so statistics say that it "improves your odds" ... lots like various other things, when the sample is YOU, statistics don't really mean a lot!

It is a good chance to reflect on how bad it can feel to be human, and how little we actually control, though some of us love to fancy it otherwise. Good time for a little prayer that I avoid having a longer term illness as debilitating or worse, and the chance to appreciate how hard life can be for those who do.

Naturally, the little I felt like it during a lot of it, but more as I perked up, I read. Somewhere -- my brain wasn't on it's full correlation / recall mode, I hit "the 3 things needed for happiness". According to whatever I was reading it was 1) Meaning 2) Purpose 3) Hope.

Not a bad trio ... I can tell you that with a 102 fever, all three were pretty much a "don't care", but Hope! Reading that reminded me of a favorite passage though, I Corinthians 13: 12-13

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face;
Now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known.
But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Even when we are feeling superb by our earthly standards, we are extremely sick by heavenly standards. Even when we think we have locked some piece of knowledge, technology or skill down cold, we are but barely dimly aware from a Godlike view. For me, the promise that I will FINALLY "know fully" is especially precious.

For today, I'm very thankful for the small measure of health and mental clarity allowed in this vale of tears! 

Happy belated Thanksgiving. 

Earth's Most Abundant Mineral Finally Sampled

Scientists Have Finally Sampled the Most Abundant Material on Earth | Motherboard:



Huh, how can it be most abundant and yet not sampled yet. Well, the answer is DEEP man, REALLY DEEP ... as in like 660mi deep.



The article is not all that interesting, "bridgemanite" is the new stuff.  The ringwoodite found in the Brazilian diamond and the speculation about an ocean larger than all of those on the surface "down there somewhere" is more interesting to me.



Perspective and humility -- there is A LOT that we don't know and have a heck of a time trying to even begin to figure out how we can know. ( have any ideas on how to drill a 660 mile deep well? )



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