In Memoriam: Memorial Day From My Vantage Point

Seventy years ago or so, everyone knew someone who had had a family member snuffed out in the Second World War. Most towns, large and small, had memorials erected to the patriots from their community who had died unspeakable deaths in order to protect their nation.

It is so with our families. My wife’s uncle was part of a bomber crew that bombed Japan and then flew to China, because the plane couldn’t hold enough fuel to return to base. After his last mission, he wasn’t heard of again until the early 2000’s, when an intrepid Chinese spice hunter descended a nearly vertical mountainside – and found the wreckage. It had been undisturbed for over half a century.

The remains were sent to US Military, and he was accorded a burial with full honors in Arlington National Cemetery.

On my side, Uncle Bob was a fighter pilot in the South Pacific. He was shot down over open water near a tiny tropical island that today is nearly uninhabited. His remains have never been found.

-.-

Today the urge to preserve a nation is being swamped out by the utopian one-world philosophy, which seems to maintain that if all oppressors were somehow eliminated, then the entire planet would be at peace forevermore, no nations or borders needed. And in fact that math works. (*) If that equation is oversimplified and made a moral principle.

What doesn’t work is the secondary idea that those who love their freedom and national identity are actually oppressors. And that Victimhood Categories can be very aggressive to each other.

The utopians were presaged by the racial purity advocates, including those who called themselves “progressives”. In the early 20th century it was “scientific eugenics” which featured sterilization of undesirables and ultimately abortion on demand. These were expanded by both the Japanese and the Germans; both eradicated the impure.

Today the eradication of the impure is constrained to the western Left. Found in major control points such as media filters, corporate posturing and the training grounds for the young, the eradication has barely turned violent when compared to the great one-world purity assaults of WWII. But they are no different in their narrative of exclusion/eradication, and their self-delusions of superiority and grandeur.

When one changes the “truth” as some “moral” opportunity presents, then one is detached from any facts which obtain in the matter. That indicates self-induced delusion. And that applies to half of the American population. Screaming a full year after inauguration that the president must be impeached due to his crimes for which there is no evidence, is self-induced delusion.

There was little such self-delusion in the 1940's American communities who sent their prime sons to fight the tribalist, racist Japanese and German/Aryans. The entire nation stopped what it was doing (starving under FDR) and mobilized to defend its national interests, character, and Modernism.

It might never be that way again.

*Until they realize that the victimhood groups will not play together, and some will try to destroy their Leftist overlords. They cannot realize that now, because it is fully outside the narrative and in not “intersectional” with the premises of the Left.

I'm Back, Sorta

from a couple of serial illnesses...

Alternate Account

I'm back... I think

My blogging rights were removed by Google for reasons only they know. Now they have relented for reasons only they know.

I have set up an alternative account HERE

If I disappear again, go to that site.

One Million

Reached 1,000,000 pageviews today. That's for a full decade, which started off very, very slowly.

Google & Me

Google took away my blog privileges on Dec 31. Reason stated: my password changed 4 months ago. I had just posted the item just below. So I know that my password was working then.

Today Google returned my blogging and email privileges.

It's a strange feeling when you are completely cut off like that, and it has prompted me to at least think about a personal website/blog with no relationship with the gargantuan guardians of communication. I need to look for a host, though, or a way to host it myself.

I'll be offline for a Week to Ten Days

But I will be back.

I'm Off-line Until...

Next Monday or Tuesday.
See You Then.

Gorilla Choices

The boy fell into the gorilla cage. The gorilla got the boy, gently it seemed, but dragged him clumsily.

The gorilla was beautiful. Magnificent even. However, the gorilla had to die. There was no other choice in this case. Perhaps the gorilla would have protected the boy. One "animal expert" said the gorilla did not thump his chest and was protecting the child. Another, Jack Hanna, said that the gorilla would have killed the boy. No one actually knows, and that's the true basis for what happened: the gorilla had to be killed, because know one could possibly know what would happen otherwise.

If there were any hesitation on the part of the zoo, and the boy got his neck snapped, even unintentionally, that would be inexcusable. I would have done the same, and killed the animal immediately. Then I would have cried all the way home. It's a heartbreaking job.

Culpability for the death of an animal is different than culpability for the death of a child. But it must be assessed and assigned. Both the parents and the zoo seem to share in this. Some precocious children can climb quite well. But there are fence designs that can prevent topping out, such as with an inverted J at the top, pointing outward. The fencing must be examined and improved somehow. But how is it that a parent could not stop or did not stop a climbing toddler?

Regardless of culpability, no one wanted this to happen. It's a terrible tragedy that could have even been much worse.

The Vector of this Blog

This blog does wander around. The subject of Atheism covers a lot of ground, from its decidedly Leftist bent, its self-authorized morality (if any), to science, Scientism, evolution and Darwinism vs. morality and rationality, and so on.

Lately the cultural aspect has dominated, with Islam taking the fore. And I have come to the following conclusion: there are significant similarities between Atheism and liberal, peaceful Islam.

For example, both consider human wisdom to trump religious revelation. Neither asserts any human contact with a deity. Both veer off into controlled societies when the liberalism wears off and the strictness of their actual fundamental worldviews take over. When they ultimately do revert to fundamentalism, violence becomes an option in order to protect their cherished narratives. Neither respects any rules outside of its predetermined narrative. Both squelch western-type freedoms and are tolerant only of adherents to their respective worldviews. Both use western technology while despising the culture which produced it. Both are based in non-coherent first principles. Neither admits it.

So technically, both groups are, or tend toward, closed groups which entertain little in the way of western logic and democracy and rather depend on the wisdom contained in themselves and others just like them.

They are dissimilar in ways too. Islam is not Philosophically Materialist, and Atheism is. Islamics tend to congregate rather than assimilate, Atheists not so much, although the Leftist faction does to some extent (identifying politically together, tending to be bi-coastal in the USA).

So the direction of this blog has interestingly been in the direction of monitoring and assessing entire cultures, the logic of their worldviews, their attempts to shift culture in order to totally own the worldview of everyone, and objective history being covered and lost (e.g. Democrat racism for two and a half centuries; re-assertion of Marxist class war despite its astonishing failures).

So actually there are vectors in all directions, on almost all subjects. (except sports I guess).

Disappointment

I've been doing this for 8 years and I'm still not on any blacklists. I need advice, obviously. There are some people who are obviously privileged, since they get right on blacklists, and so easily, it appears almost effortless. Is it my breath?

Are there easy, bunny slope blacklists that get one into the proper shape for the black diamond black lists? Are there belts and degrees involved?

I'm thinking maybe there's an opportunity here - creating blacklists for the black-list disadvantaged. I'm not sure how much I'd pay to be blacklisted, not much I suppose. Unless it came with a trophy of some kind, of course. That'd do it for me, I'd sign up to be blacklisted right now, just for the trophy.

Been Gone Awhile

Just back from a trip. There are several emails I need to answer but it will take a short while for me to get to them all. I needed the time off with the family - it was great, and I'm refreshed but tired.

Harassment of Writers on the Web

Cathy Young discusses the issue of harassment of writers who publish on the internet. The problem, if it is a problem, is that feminists and possibly females in general, receive harassment which they cannot deal with, emotionally. As Young points out, all writers get harassed, not just women, not just feminists. In fact, feminists throw out some of the nastiest of the nasty as they target their enemies in their class war. But Young is right; probably anyone who writes about more than kitten photo captions gets harassed.

It is concerning when the harassment turns into stalking. An unfortunate consequence of the open internet is that many, possibly all, addresses and other information can be mined on most people. Much of my personal history exists on the 'net, without my permission or knowledge until I looked to see.

A few years back I wrote something which offended an Atheist who decided to cyber stalk me. It is unsettling to know that a psycho can determine all your personal information right down to your current address and phone number right off his computer screen. I removed all references to my last name from both my sites, and more recently I have added a tracker which allows me to know the ISP of readers who come to the site. I haven't had to use that information, because references and comments from those types of individuals ceased immediately upon installing commenter ID. They obviously do not wish to be identified themselves, so they stay away altogether it appears. There's nothing of interest here if they can't even try to destroy it any more.

This approach affords both myself and serious readers and commenters a forum for discussion without pre-juvenile harassment and schoolyard bullying. I sometimes think I should fully identify myself, but then I think back and remember. I don't want to have to shoot some incensed Atheist child-man who shows up to break in and settle my hash. And with the psychotic nature of the current class war as well as the venom on the web, who is to say that it wouldn't happen?

For Those of You Who Forgot My Christmas Present...

...You can pool your resources to get me this:

I'll need the shiny aluminum body, of course.

Thanks in advance! I do need a ROAD TRIP!

On The Road...

...So Posts will be sketchy for a week.

My Personal Facebook Account Has Been Shut Off

Could it be because I post many articles which are anti-Leftist? I wonder if the Tea Party FB page has also been shut off? Maybe it is just a mistake, who knows what goes on out there.

We're on the Road

As of last night we are three states over, and will be taking a friend to have heart surgery. Sounds very serious, much more than the "slide in four stents and send 'em home".

So, posting will be spotty, depending.

Pale Moon

After the Mozilla debacle I converted to Pale Moon browser. So far I am quite happy with it. Anyone else have experience with it?

Watching A-Bombs in the 50's

These photos remind me of my own experience with the A-bomb testing in Nevada. We lived for a time in Henderson, NV, just south of Las Vegas. My parents would wake us up in the very dark pre-dawn hours to see the blast some 90 miles away. At the prescribed time the entire sky would light up and stay bright for what seemed to be minutes. Then it dropped to a duller red glow for quite awhile. We waited outside until the shock wave came through, turning the stillness of the desert night into a brief but strong windstorm. And quite the boom. And that was it.

I asked my dad later in life how he knew when to get us up to see the explosion. He said that the truckers all knew when it was going to be, because the road closings were announced well in advance. My two uncles ran the AEC com link from a mountain top where they could have seen the blast directly but they couldn't look at it and had to face away. And they didn't give away the blast time, because it was "classified". Go figure.

Here's For A Better New Year...

For One and All!

Hiatus Interruptus

I will be using the blog only sporadically for the next month (*), partially due to the busyness of the season, partly because I am so far behind in my reading that I need to concentrate on getting it done. Here are a few of the books which I have not read, or read only partially, and which rise to the top of the "unread" pile:

In no particular order (since I tend to read them all simultaneously):

The Higgs Fake; Unziker. (half read)
Higgs; Baggot.
Higgs Discovery; Randall.
The Trouble With Physics; Smolin. (half read)
A Manual For Creating Atheists; Boghossian.
The Death of the Grown Up; West.
Pure; Anderson. (half read)
The Art of Making Sense; Ruby. (one of my favorite logic authors: half a century ago)
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle; Barrow and Tipler. (partially read)
Philosophy of mind; Jaworski. (partially read)
Chesterton, Collected Works, Vol 2. (Partially read)
The Outer Limits of Reason; Yanofski. (partially read)
Information and the Nature of Reality; Davies and Gregersen.
Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life; Yockey. (Started, nearly up to "the central dogma of molecular biology).
Mind and Cosmos; Nagel. (half read, this book caused an uproar amongst the faithful materialists - I need to finish it).

A decade ago I read three books a week, mostly philosophy and logic texts. I was obsessed with completing my education, and forming a rational basis for a valid worldview. Now, I find that my new worldview is validated by virtually everything I read, regardless of the source. Still, education never stops, and knowledge is never complete - much less access to truth (which must be inferred from deductions).

It's a fascinating intellectual life, and my real life tends to get in the way.

Today, for example, we have snow and frozen livestock waterers, so I have to get suited up and get with the program.

(*)I might get sucked into an interesting conversation, should one arise.