A good column covering the obvious "made for outrage" coverage of poor Ahmed Mohammed for taking a bunch of circuit boards and wires to school around 9-11.
It is worth a read, it is entertaining ... it would be more so if what was once a nation peopled by massive common sense had not become such an asylum of the ridiculous. A teaser and the conclusion ...
This is an age of overreaction. It is, unhappily, also an age of race-hustling and grievance-mongering. Thank goodness that felonious Pop-Tart in Maryland was one of the strawberry-flavored ones with rainbow sprinkles and not brown sugar/cinnamon or marshmallow hot chocolate or another of the flavors of color, or we’d be having a national discussion about white-frosting privilege.
and the conclusion ... we are mostly a nation of fools, bouncing to the beat of a "made for left wing politics" narrative.
Ahmed Mohamed was mistreated by imbeciles, and he’ll be famous for it, for 15 Warholian minutes, and then again for a 30-second spot when he graduates in a few years and goes off to MIT or wherever. The fact is that he is not worse off because his name is Mohamed, but better off: Nobody would be paying attention otherwise, and he might very well be in jail. Being mistreated by imbeciles is the sine qua non of American public education today, but that fact is of political use only periodically, as in this case.
I'm in the midst of "The Closing of the American Mind" ... it is my 3rd or 4th reading, but it has been over a decade since the last, or I'm sure I would have blogged it, although it will be HARD to summarize since it covers the breadth and a good deal of depth of all of Western Thought ... Plato, Socrates, Hegel, Weber, Heidegger, Kant, Hobbes, Locke, Calvin, Rousseau. Marx, Nietzsche ... etc.
One of the fundamental things that must be understood is that "reason" is a TOOL that can be used to "rationally explain" most ANYTHING! What counts are "first principles" -- the "leap of faith" ... postulates that are not testable but taken as a priori FACT like "the universe is predictable and understandable" ... the basis for science.
The other thing that is hard to accept, but I find very true, is that it all comes back to God or it comes back to Nietzsche ... who unfortunately, although NOT intentionally, led to Hitler. If you "kill god", then you enable new "Supermen" -- creators of new myth. Men who are "beyond good and evil", but rather DEFINE the new "values" (morality) -- using the "will to power" (the scare quotes are around the statements of Nietzsche).
“There is in fact no way of thinking about the world, says Hitler, which allows us to see human beings as human beings. Any idea which allows us to see each other as human beings … come[s] from Jews,” Snyder told me in an interview. As Snyder sees it, Hitler believed the only way for the world to revert to its natural order—that of brutal racial competition—was to eradicate the Jews.
Hitler saw the idea of "man as man" -- "universals" to be a "Jewish idea" -- the idea of abstractions being "beyond nature". Hitler was a naturalist ... an ecologist. He believed "survival of the fittest" and that humans were NATURAL ... not "chosen", "specially created", etc.
There is in fact no way of thinking about the world, says Hitler, which allows us to see human beings as human beings. Any idea which allows us to see each other as human beings—whether it’s a social contract; whether it’s a legal contract; whether it’s working-class solidarity; whether it’s Christianity—all these ideas come from Jews. And so for people to be people, for people to return to their essence, for them to represent their race, as Hitler sees things, you have to strip away all those ideas. And the only way to strip away all those ideas is to eradicate the Jews. And if you eradicate the Jews, then the world snaps back into what Hitler sees as its primeval, correct state: Races struggles against each other, kill each other, starve each other to death, and try and take land.
Hitler is very wrong of course ... the idea of the world as we see it being a "projection" of universals or "perfect forms" goes back to Plato ... but Augustine, in "City of God" synthesized the Judaeo / Christian vision with Plato ... Augustine realized that the God of the Bible was the reality of what Plato apprehended dimly.
He sees the Jews as being the thing which destroys the world, which infects the world. He uses the term “pestilence” in this sense—the Jews have infected the world. They’ve made the world not just impure in some kind of metaphorical sense—he really means it. And so the only way to purify the world—to make things go back to the way they’re supposed to be, to have a natural ecology, to go back to this struggle between races, which Hitler thinks is natural—the only way to do that is to physically eliminate the Jews.
All our "big questions" of the day come back to "God or nature" -- Religion says God, ecology says nature. Hitler was an ecologist. One needed listen to an ecologist very long to hear that MAN is a "pestilence" -- Hitler was just a more selective ecologist. He felt that once the Jews were eliminated, nature would take it's course and the fittest would reign.
I worry a little bit now about, just very generally, that with the financial crisis; with the instability in the Middle East; with the Chinese economy tanking; with Russia breaking all the rules in Europe; and with people in Russia, in Europe, in North Africa more freely expressing anti-Semitic views—I worry a bit that we are tilting towards some kind of anti-globalization where the Jews, or somebody else, could become the explanation for why things are going wrong.
Humans LOVE to have a scapegoat! The Jews, the 1%, "the right", Christians, etc
Once you abandon God ... or the idea of the "transcendent" if you just can't buy God, then you fall into what Nietzsche so courageously but tragically discovered -- the abyss. The utter meaninglessness of existence. Then you are DRIVEN -- to self destruction, or to "the will to power" ... the creation of brand new mythology that comes from outside of reason.
A quick glance at mythology -- be it Nazism, Islam, Marxism, Progressivism, Atheism, Scientism, Historicism ... or from the non-believer POV, Christianity will inform you that they are not all "equal".
You WILL pick one ... or perhaps you have a great "will to power" and will invent your own, but it is at least incumbent on any thinking person to know what they serve.
After years as a Birther, loads of misogyny along with making inane one-liners into a virtual Brand, "The Donald" went too far and the MSM is all over him! He libeled all Muslima by allowing the false charge that BO is a Muslim to stand! This is almost as bad as the "Hitler was a Jew" claim,
No race or group should have to carry the burden that BO is "one of them"!
Just listen to him for a minute or two -- he is FAR FAR FAR above ALL of humanity! BO is like the Cheese ... he stands alone! In the audacious odiferousness of his own mind.
This article is to philosophy as Boone's Farm is to wine. It attempts to burden the Star Trek universe with a heavy load of foggy metaphysics -- one can almost hear the "WARNING -- Structural failure imminent!" blaring in female computer monotone accompanied by klaxxon and flashing red.
If you are a significant Trekkie with a pretty good memory, it might be entertaining -- if not, don't bother.
The assertion of the article is that Star Trek had more philosophical underpinnings than I think it really had, but if it had them, it "evolved" from old relatively moral and hard headed "liberalism" to hippie age "tune in, turn on and drop out" escapism, to the modern anarchy of lust, sensation, and total relativism.
This quote comes in discussion about the movie Star Trek VI, "The Undiscovered Country" where "peace at all costs" with the Klingons appears to be just fine. In fiction, such things sometimes work.
This represented an almost complete inversion of “Star Trek’s” original liberalism, and indeed of any rational scale of moral principles at all. At no point in the show’s history had Kirk or his colleagues treated the Klingons unjustly, whereas audiences for decades have watched the Klingons torment and subjugate the galaxy’s peaceful races
The article carries a rather mushy understanding of "old liberalism" -- which gets rather confusing, given the appropriation of the old term "liberal" via FDR and company in the '30s when terms like "progressive", "fascist" and "socialist" fell on rather hard times. "Liberal" was once rooted in LIBERTY, as in LIBERTARIAN, meaning "right wing" with the left being tyranny and the right being anarchy. Then the Statists stole it -- theft being one of their "prime directives" (see "income inequality").
It is pretty clear that the author of the column pines away for a form of "liberalism" at least long dead, if not imaginary ...
Roddenberry’s generation emerged from World War II committed to a liberalism that believed in prosperity, technological progress, and the universal humanity they hoped the United Nations would champion. In the Kennedy years, this technocratic liberalism sought to apply science, the welfare state, and secular culture to raise the standard of living and foster individual happiness worldwide.
Ah, the optimistic world Statism of the Kennedy years! The dream of a Camelot that never was. One can dream of a "universal humanity" (no country to die for, and no religion too, (the Beatles Lennon) ...) ... let's throw in "the welfare state" and "secular culture" along with "technology" with LOTS of "hope" and call it "metaphysical hope stew"! What would a thinking person expect this stew to do rather than rot, or in his terms "evolve" into something even more random ... say the end which he closed the article with.
But that perversity is the natural consequence of the breakdown in the liberal principles that once guided the series. “Star Trek’s” romance with relativism gradually blotted them out until the franchise came to prize feeling over thought, image over substance, and immediate gratification over moral and political responsibility. What was once an expression of the Enlightenment faded “into darkness.”
Over nearly 50 years, “Star Trek” tracked the devolution of liberalism from the philosophy of the New Frontier into a preference for non-judgmental diversity and reactionary hostility to innovation, and finally into an almost nihilistic collection of divergent urges. At its best, “Star Trek” talked about big ideas, in a big way. Its decline reflects a culture-wide change in how Americans have thought about the biggest idea of all: mankind’s place in the universe.
Was the author REALLY surprised that naming "prosperity, technological progress and universal humanity" along with "the welfare state" and "secular culture" as "PRINCIPLES" failed to work out and rather degenerated into what he laments? Not just for Star Trek, but more importantly for Western Civilization?
... or did he really hope that Star Trek would save us all?
Wow, ALL OF ANTARCTICA! But one needs to remember the issue of TIME ... the sun is predicted go out as well! If you don't list the time, that also makes a good headline .. except the current estimate is 5 billion years in the future.
If you go to a bit more detailed source, you find this.
But he's a scientist, and like all proper scientists he's willing to admit inconvenient truths. In this case, the truth in question is his own prediction that no matter what humans do in the way of carbon emissions, sea levels are not going to rise by more than 8cm this century due to melting Antarctic ice. For context, the seas have been rising faster than that for thousands of years. They rose 17cm just during the 20th century, and the Antarctic cap is far and away the biggest body of ice on the planet.
Just for "startling effect", there is 8cm ... by 2100! Think future technology MIGHT be able to handle that? Consider that the Wright Brothers first flew in 1903 and we landed on the moon in 1969 ... 66 years. We have 85 until 2100. Admittedly, we SUCK compared to progress in the 20th century so far in the 21st, but really. 8cm?
Want the get a meter of rise? Even according to their rather extreme burn rates and calculations -- 2200AD. I'm betting you don't make it. Your kids don't make it either. Maybe you will have a really old grandchild? Oh, and that assumes that the models are a whole lot more accurate than the current "on pause and holding" for 18 years models -- let alone potential fluctuations in solar, less than precise calculations on atmospheric sensitivity to carbon, etc, etc.?
People that make predictions 100s and thousands of years in the future really ought to do what I did yesterday once in awhile. Sight in a new scope on a S&W .460 magnum pistol.
You boresight it with a laser in your basement. Then you try 10 yds -- good, pretty damned close. Then 25 yards, hmm ... need a few adjustments. Then 50 ... hmm, back to 25, then 50 again ... looking better, OOPS, ran out of ammo. This is off a bench rest -- so much for the cheap .45 long colt ammo, can't even keep a tight group at 25 yds ... gotta do the buck a round Hornady! Damn, just small variation gets BIGGER at just 50 yards with a pistol. I've had it hitting dinner plate groups at 100 before with good ammo, hitting a poster size "group" at 200 yds ... going to take a while to get back to there, and I may just end up going back to open sights. Scope eye relief on a pistol is REALLY a PAIN! Makes me wonder if I'm too old for this and just put open sights back on it!
Oh, BTW, a poster sized "group" is in no way "good", but if you were being shot at by a .460 mag at 200 yds with that accuracy, it would not be a good day!
I wonder what being off by a few thousandths does at a predictive range of 1000 years? I guess the nice part is that you KNOW that nobody that has ANY remote remembrance of anything about you or your "science" is going to be looking at your groupings!
Yet another case where how information is REPORTED makes ALL the difference!
Read the whole column, very short and you will be VERY much rewarded for your time! A sample.
Despite many people who urge us all to vote, as a civic duty, the purpose of elections is not participation. The purpose is to select individuals for offices, including president of the United States. Whoever has that office has our lives, the lives of our loved ones and the fate of the entire nation in his or her hands.
Do you want to have a medical diagnosis based on a vote that seeks to get the highest turnout possible, or would you rather select a medical practitioner based on training, certification and experience to arrive at the diagnosis.
Our founders purposely DID NOT create a Democracy, but rather a Republic in order to have rule by laws rather than men. They DEFINITELY were not interested AT ALL in seeing if they could round up the illiterate, the criminal, the non-citizen, etc to "get out the vote".
The population in this area of N America is insane. Sowell is wise -- the contrast is painful!
OK, I assume that the PL guys are being a bit light hearted on this one given the excess of attractive femininity in the picture, but I gotta admit that I'm concerned. Power Line is my favorite general "not too out there but reasonably conservative go to blog". I've always found the Power Line Blog to be very well reasoned -- it is run by lawyers, lawyers who believe you need a written basis for law (the Constitution), and the need to run a nation on laws rather than the whim of the masses de jour.
If I sound dismayed, it’s only because I am. Conservatives have spent more than 60 years arguing that ideas and character matter. That is the conservative movement I joined and dedicated my professional life to. And now, in a moment of passion, many of my comrades-in-arms are throwing it all away in a fit of pique. Because “Trump fights!”
As I've covered in this blog many times, conservatism to me IS principle, and it is A LOT older than 60 years ... it is at least back to Burke, and really to the Torah and the Ten Commandments. It is the search for and the willingness to acknowledge, be enlightened by, and directed by THE ETERNAL!
"Character" is a more fluid matter because of the fact of our humanity. To have standards is to live with some level of hypocrisy. A lot of good NFL football teams set out on the standard of the perfect season culminating in a Super Bowl win. In baseball, the perfect game is a goal for every pitcher.
The last perfect game in baseball was thrown by Felix Hernandez in 2012, the last perfect season in the NFL was Miami in 1972. The last perfect human life was Jesus Christ, AD 30ish -- absolutely unique, we separate history upon his perfection ... Before Christ (BC) and Anno Domini (AD) meaning "in the year of the Lord". To be a human that holds to high standards is to be some level of hypocrite. To the conservative, that is how improvement happens -- to the "liberal", the focus is to change everyone else, ultimately by force.
As the Goldberg article points out, it is not clear that Trump possesses any principles whatever beyond "win baby win", and his character is best summed up as "he's a fighter" -- certainly commendable, but the question of "for what"? must be asked. Money? That is clearly his track record. Fame? Power? Ego? None of these are inherently bad, nor disqualifying -- but to be a conservative, things like "smaller government", "rule of law", "sanctity of life", "religious freedom", "individual freedom", "the family", etc have to show up somewhere and at least compete strongly with the more common human motivators.
"Make America Great" is indeed a worthy objective, but the meaning of that for a conservative is a return to the lost principles that both once made "America" and then made it "great". There is no America without shared ideas -- America was a nation founded on ideas rather than mere territory or ethnicity. While the territory still exists, "America" is now only a reference to a glorious past.
Goldberg must have more faith in himself and in other humans than I do. Desperate people not infrequently even commit suicide. I'd like to completely believe that was impossible for me, but I'm not sure I know the pain that drives that permanent solution to a temporary problem -- I'm quite certain that their pain made them decide it was "the only option". I pray to never be put to that test.
That is roughly how I look at the Trump phenomenon among the thinking conservatives. These are desperate times and that makes for desperate people. The America that we once knew is GONE -- no respect for the Constitution, no respect for the separation of powers, government expanding and worming it's way into all aspects of life, the young and the old corrupted -- the young by indoctrination, the old by being bought off with "benefits". "These are the times that try men's souls" ... and for some, the goal of "winning at any cost" seems worthy. They have reached that dark night of the soul where truly ANYTHING is better than going on at the level of depravity we now see.
One of the major failings of "progressivism" is the giving in to the human temptation of "We HAVE to DO SOMETHING!". Wisdom says that often God has a plan that you may have driven you to panic, but a much more important maxim is "FIRST, do no HARM!" ... because you still believe that there is a plan beyond man's plan, so even though it appears there is no hope, God is still in his heaven. Lose that faith, and the human desire to do something --- ANYTHING, including elect a Trump, suddenly seems "good". (or the parallel analogy, take your own life)
"Progressivism" worships man -- and action. Conservatism worships God -- and ideas. "Progressivism" looks at man's navel, and at the earth -- matter. It is basic idolatry, the worship of man and material.
But all conservatives are human as well as conservative -- so when the chips are down, the temptation to fall to what is natural to fallen man is great and sometimes irresistible to many, really ALL without the help of God! That is one of the dangers of "secular conservatism", it sounds good on paper, but in the long dark night of the abyss, it often turns out to be like Alcoholics Anonymous without the higher power. The human reaches for the bottle -- the action. The Trump!
I see the name itself as another proof of God's earthly intervention and eternal sense of humor. From the dictionary ...
trump -- any playing card of a suit that for the time outranks the other suits, such a card being able to take any card of another suit". trump up -- to devise deceitfully or dishonestly, as an accusation; fabricate:
When I consider God's power and the fact that we know he has a sense of humor -- for we are created in his image, such things give me that little shiver of awareness. It isn't just the odds against a "Goldilocks Universe" that the atheist need compute! As I once answered a response to that linked post, I see (VERY loosely, as an ANALOGY) our existence as a "Matrix" (of a far different sort than the movie) that is "running on God".
I can very much understand the Trump temptation (covered one aspect here), but temptation is still temptation. We must resist it with the help of God (or some other higher power) just like an alcoholic resists the bottle! Trump appears to be a solution, but he is a "Trumped up" solution -- devised deceitfully and dishonestly. We know that to be true because has no ideas and principles that he points us to, except his own image.
The left wears away the rule of law like water wears away granite.
For YEARS we have been seeing the 2nd Amendment infringed on by government officials at all levels with no outcry from the left dominated media at all. In fact, officials who refuse to follow the LEGAL opinions of the court are treated as HEROES! I say "legal" because in Heller, the SCOTUS by a thin 5-4 margin merely upheld the plain language of the Constitution, in Obergefell vs Hodges (gay "marriage" ruling), the SCOTUS found an entirely new "right" to gay "marriage" in a Constitution that doesn't even mention marriage at all!
Creating a legal right to gay "marriage", or changing the clear text of the Constitution require Constitutional Amendments in a nation ruled by law. That is not the nation we live in.
In Heller the court merely ruled that the 2nd amendment says what everyone knew it said for 200 years. If the 2nd amendment was to actually be amended to say that "Only citizens in the US Armed Forces or official police forces may carry weapons" one could legally remove the arms from the citizenry and still have military and police forces with weapons. But if Heller had been found against the plain text of the Constitution, then any group that DID retain the right to bear arms would need special political authorization.
The OPTIMUM for the left is another SCOTUS decision overturning Heller that sets a precedent saying that citizens have no Constitutional right to bear arms, thus allowing differential treatment for "special groups" (military, police, government agencies, certain private security agencies .... ???) driven by political power.
The right wants EQUAL PROTECTION under LAW, the left wants CONTROLLED RESULTS under POLITICAL POWER because that allows them to dole out political favors which increases their political power. Our national arguments often come down to equality of opportunity and treatment under law applied to ALL, vs equality of results as mandated and determined by political POWER.
Law vs Power.
The idea of America was to radically reduce the power of politics -- allowing personal freedom, individual virtue, religion, individual work ethic, local organizations, business and entrepreneurship to thrive and create the greatest nation in the history of the world made up of individual free men. Naturally, the left, the power of tyranny, has hated the Constitution from the start -- so they attack it by all means possible, slow wearing constantly and nuclear strikes when possible.
If the left, already with very near complete control of the legal system which is no longer founded on a written Constitution can dole out the power of armament as it sees fit -- a future arm of "The Party" can issue a decree that "TP leaders in good standing can carry arms" -- but opposition would be unarmed of course. By this path a single party gains total control of a nation.
"Consistency is not an issue" is one of the most powerful weapons of Lucifer and the left. The ability to deal in radically differential treatment depending on the issue and clouding the minds of people so they are unable to connect issues to see plain violation of any semblance of equal treatment under the law keeps the vast majority in a state of darkness.
We are still at the stage where "the truth is out there" -- it CAN be discovered, exposed, and understood, but it now takes HARD WORK. We have slipped to where this kind of reporting and writing becomes more and more rare -- when it is gone, the masses shuffle under the lash of tyrannical evil and wonder "How could this happen here?".
The damage that BO has wrought is local, national and global. Surging crime is one of the local effects.
Homicides were up 76% in Milwaukee, 60% in St. Louis, and 56% in Baltimore through mid-August, compared with the same period in 2014; murder was up 47% in Minneapolis and 36% in Houston through mid-July.
When the President, Attorney General, and the Justice Department largely side with the thugs, the thugs get braver and law enforcement takes cover. The reverse of what law abiding citizens want.
The lawful use of police power is being met by hostility and violence, often ignored by the press. In Cincinnati, a small riot broke out in late July when the police arrived at a drive-by shooting scene, where a 4-year-old girl had been shot in the head and critically injured. Bystanders loudly cursed at officers who had started arresting suspects at the scene on outstanding warrants, according to a witness I spoke with.
I wrote about this earlier this summer as it started to be reported in the some right wing press -- now it is up to the WSJ editorial pages -- about as good as it gets for right wing reporting. The MSM is still pretty mum -- crime is now surging. People are aware only anecdotally.
The saddest part of left wing policies and evil in general is how quickly destruction comes vs how long and arduous the path of good! After the destruction wrought by the left in the 60's, cleaning up the US cities was a HARD, SLOW and EXPENSIVE process that started in the '80s with increased policing, longer sentences, more prosecution of petty and "gateway crime", and "fixing the broken windows". We stuck to it through both the Clinton and Bush administrations and saw many previously unsafe areas of our cities become safe once again. It was not easy!
Now BO has reversed the trend, and discredited the hard work done by so many by all but directly calling it "racism". The highest percentage of the crimes were always committed by Blacks and Hispanics -- so cleaning up that crime meant jailing Blacks and Hispanics. It was ALSO Blacks and Hispanics that were MOST BENEFITED by the reduction in crime -- lives saved, property saved, property values increased as the areas that they live in became more liveable. Now they suffer the most as the progress is reversed.
The wages of BO are ultimately death -- locally in crime, loss of jobs, self reliance and self respect and the wrecked healthcare system. Globally in instability, the rise of bad actors in Libya, Egypt, Syria ... and the enhanced power of bad actors in Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, Cuba, etc. How much death? Like Pandora, once released, how far the stench of evil reaches is very hard to predict, but the time of prophesying evil is now over -- it is now on the rise for any with eyes to see.
This article is a bad example of thought, but a good example of the sort of thinking someone schooled in physics and not much else engages in. The base problem of human knowledge is that it is done by humans. There is only so much that a single person can know, no matter how brilliant they may be. When they focus on one thing to become very expert in it (a worthy cause), we know that they likely have very deep knowledge in that subject, so far so good. The way the world works, that means their knowledge about most everything else is quite shallow.
Beyond that the shallowness, all but the wise fail the "Man's got to know his limitations" test -- absolutely everything "known" is "known" ONLY from the perspective of easily fooled and mortal man -- as evidenced by the author of the article, prideful beyond all reason. We could wax on at length about man's limits -- "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" is another good one to apply here -- if you are a scientist it is easy to think you have the most important knowledge, and it ought to be applied to the exclusion of other knowledge.
Being finite beings, we have a choice between being "Knowing everything about nothing, or nothing about everything". Unfortunately, even that is an inadequate description of our limits -- I'm closer to knowing nothing about everything, but even so, each day I find some part of "everything" that I was totally unaware of!
Here is a paragraph that illustrates some of this from the article .
The problem, obviously, is that what is sacred to one person can be meaningless (or repugnant) to another. That’s one of the reasons why a modern secular society generally legislates against actions, not ideas. No idea or belief should be illegal; conversely, no idea should be so sacred that it legally justifies actions that would otherwise be illegal.
The author has discovered the point (which even he claims to be "obvious") that "people see things differently" ... even more so, they see things as "widely varied in importance" (eg sacred, profane, good, bad, stupid, meaningless, etc).
So "modern society" legislates against "ideas vs actions". Can he name a society that didn't or doesn't legislate against actions vs ideas outside of George Orwell books or potentially our existing society with "hate speech"? The fact is that NONE of us know what others are thinking -- even speech is an "action", and if he believes that our "modern secular society" is somehow very "open" on that topic, he really needs to write an article on how it is OK to call other people N**S, Wetbacks, Faggots, ... etc. since those are "only words".
Therefore his paragraph is nonsense -- nobody legislates against ideas, but US "secular society" comes as close as anyone has in a long time with their concept of "hate speech" and "hate crimes" ... so his supposed "model society" is a great example of what he claims he is trying to combat!
The government has a compelling interest in insuring that all citizens are treated equally. But “religious freedom” advocates argue that religious ideals should be elevated above all others as a rationale for action. In a secular society, this is inappropriate.
In what used to be the US, "The Government" was a servant of the people and was very limited in what it could do. When the government was limited, it was required to treat all people equally. If it was still so required there would be no "progressive" income tax, affirmative action. hate speech or crimes, etc. The government would be limited from doing a great many of the things that infringe on religious liberty today -- religious liberty supposedly guaranteed under that same Constitution that is no longer in force.
So in this paragraph, the author apparently finds one supposed "law of the land", ... religious freedom is inappropriate in a "secular society". Interestingly enough, since freedom of speech is under the same clause in the Constitution, is that ALSO disallowed in a "secular society"?
So what IS a "secular society"? He doesn't say -- it appears to have no "values", so one would assume no fixed rules at all. He does point out "The more we learn about the workings of the universe, the more purposeless it seems." So why did he not just stop the column there? If it is all purposeless and meaningless, why waste our time? Clearly he does not truly believe that -- because he hates God and religion. His hatred is at least enough to a motivator for him to write a column, so at least hatred still holds meaning for him in a supposedly purposeless universe.
He does say this at the end .
We owe it to ourselves and to our children not to give a free pass to governments—totalitarian, theocratic, or democratic—that endorse, encourage, enforce, or otherwise legitimize the suppression of open questioning in order to protect ideas that are considered “sacred.” Five hundred years of science have liberated humanity from the shackles of enforced ignorance. We should celebrate this openly and enthusiastically, regardless of whom it may offend.
So then holding NOTHING sacred becomes sacred -- we have seen this "Brave New World" before -- eugenics? genocide? slavery? medical experiments on human subjects? the Gulag? ... the shop of horrors is endless. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot -- this is an old movie. God is dead, all praise the man with the strongest "Will to POWER" (Nietzsche) ! Why not? ... it is all purposeless -- so any purpose found must be from the bootstraps of a "Superman" -- he with the greatest will to power!
Certainly a Constitution that limits the government can't be "sacred" -- as it is no longer is here, otherwise we would not be having this discussion. We would be having a discussion about a gay "marriage" amendment passing both houses of congress by 2/3 majorities -- followed by a discussion on it passing 3/4 of the states.
**IF** it passed -- and it seems highly likely that if there was to be ANY chance of that, it would have included some sort of allowance for the first amendment religious freedom that the column author hates, in order to make it able to pass. Those are the sort of compromises that were the essence of what was once America under rule of law.
But as it is, we have no "law" to be compared with "religion" -- because we ALREADY hold nothing sacred as a nation, so there is no Constitution as a basis for law, and therefore no law to followed save raw power.
Which apparently to this cosmologist is either "fine" or "unknown" ... since his thinking on these subjects of law, rights, politics, morals, etc is so fuzzy as to defy parsing for any real meaning beyond that he hates God and religion and is very confused about the other topics he covers.
One hopes he seeks out an oncologist rather than a fellow physicist if he ever needs cancer treatment!
I don't have the stomach to go off and watch any BO video, if you do, I'm sure you feel a lot better after you stop watching it!
It is absolutely clear that BO remains so full of himself that even when events show that both Putin and the Iranians have and are treating him as the complete stooge he is, he can't see it. His ego is too large to see anything but his imagined magnificence.
Mr. Obama said. “He did not take my warnings, and as a consequence, things have gotten worse. It appears now that Assad is worried enough that he’s inviting Russian advisers and Russian equipment….We are going to be engaging Russia to let them know that you can’t continue to double down on a strategy that’s doomed to failure.”
Worse for people in Syria and certainly worse for any tiny stature that America still has left in the world (remember Russia as our buddies on the "Red Line"?), but NOT worse for Putin, Russia and Iran! Things are going WELL in the region for Iran and Russia! Their influence and power there is rising by the day!
Unfortunately, you CAN "double down on a strategy that's doomed to failure" -- America DID, it is called "Death by BO"! and it smells exactly like any strategy that involves rotting away.
On Labor Day, BO declared that he would do one of his favorite things -- FORCE contractors to abide by whatever he decrees to be the right sick leave action.
He pointed out how things like letting businessmen and competition operate have been "wrecking the economy for a long time". Obviously, what you need is a supposed Constitutional scholar (who at least doesn't act like he has ever read the Constitution), who has never run so much as a lemonade stand for business experience, make a bunch of decrees about how business OUGHT to work!
"You just wait, you look up at the sky and prosperity will come raining down on us from the top of whatever high-rise in New York City," he said sarcastically. "But that's not how the economy works." He added that the GOP's mindset has been "wrecking the economy for a long, long time."
Certainly one can't allow business owners risking long hours of labor as well as their own assets and the assets of investors in a market economy to make decisions! We need FORCE!
No doubt it won't be very long until we hear BO making claims that "business needs to hire more, invest more, etc" -- and if he had his way, he would FORCE them to do so.
On this 9-11, we can see that BO isn't much about force when it comes to actual enemies of America -- but he is ALL about it when it comes to the backbone of what provides the goods, services, wealth and jobs that used to allow our country to be great. With Iran, we have to surrender -- because that is all we can do! No force there! Syria, Russia, Iraq, Afghanistan -- we even had Chinese ships cruising off Alaska last week.
What needs to be bent to the will of BO is that recalcitrant American Business -- "They didn't build that", and BO is totally certain that he has brilliant "better ways" to grow the economy -- only the economy has at best sputtered in the over 6 years of his oh so proud rule.
It is obvious this decree has as much thought as the rest of his holy pronouncements:
But the White House wouldn't specify the cost to federal contractors to implement the executive order. The Labor Department said any costs would be offset by savings that contractors would see as a result of lower attrition rates and increased worker loyalty, but produced nothing to back that up.
That is really essence of BO... "nothing to back it up".
The linked column is a good one to read, I recommend it. Here are some thoughts it catalyzed for me.
Do we REALLY think that the results of the Iran "agreement" will be a mushroom cloud over NYC? As the column points out, we certainly HOPE not, but then we never hoped for 9-11 either.
In retrospect, might 9-11 have been predicted / stopped? Certainly -- there were plenty of signs IN HINDSIGHT, and as I wrote about here it was sort of a toss-up at the time in the MSM as to whether W or Reagan were just "responsible" for 9-11, or, according to something like 30% of Democrats at the peak ("Truthers"), the whole thing was an "inside job" pulled off by the dunce W and his own Dr Evil, Cheney.
If a teen takes to driving their motorcycle at night with no helmet while drinking excessively, do I really think that they are going to kill themselves? No, I again "hope not", but I realize it is a distinct possibility!
Being a "conservative" means that one is willing to look at possible negative outcomes. We all know that young people tend to be more liberal and at least gain SOME level of conservatism as they age. Today we see less of that since the left is so terribly dominant, and I'm convinced that many simply see no choice anymore -- they rely on government benefits, their AARP magazines tell them that "left is the only answer", and it becomes a "social issue" -- their kids and friends are lefties, they feel they have no choice. Besides, they feel like it is a sign of being "hopeful"!
While we hold out hope that we will see no mushroom cloud over Jerusalem of NYC, we DO already see Iran sending troops to Syria ... possibly that is the equivalent of our hypothetical drunk driving teen getting a DUI? The MSM is pretty much ignoring the Iranian troops -- the other problem with the left is that most of the people that start drinking the Kool Aide aren't even aware of a lot of what is happening. In case you didn't notice, the world is a lot less stable these days -- and we have a "deal" with one of the most destabilizing forces.
How did we get to 9-11? Complacency -- same way we got to BO, gigantic debt, bloated entitlement programs, wishful (hopeful) thinking, low percentage of people working, poor productivity, 42 million people living here not born here -- at least 11 million of them illegally, etc.
A teen driving a crotch rocket around drunk and high on weed is relatively rational and intelligent compared to BO and his foreign and domestic policies -- and one has to be some sort of a "looney" to think that anything "really bad" could result!
We can "hope" it isn't a mushroom cloud over one of our cities, but Iran doesn't need ICBMs to hit Israel! In the meantime, just watching the news makes one wonder how bad it has to get to call it "disaster"!
Nice to see BO come out and threaten to veto the budget that congress needs to pass -- after all, he sent up a budget and the Senate voted it down 98-1! When you are TP though, your media doesn't report that very much, and they CERTAINLY don't bring it up while you bray and bluster for the cameras, crippled duck that you are.
The article points out a few other inconvenient facts to go with his Odiousness ... LESS people were actually working in August than July even though 173K jobs were "created" -- even more people gave up because the economy stinks, and government policies relative to business and working stink oven worse!
It seems like about two decades since this stooge was elected -- I guess one way to make life longer is to elect the most noxious clown possible president!
Maybe I really DO need to give Trump a second look. Hell, maybe I CAN live forever -- or at least feel like it is forever!
