On The Blog Post “Hiatuses in the rise of temperature” at ClimateLabBook

July 16, 2015 Leave a comment

Bob Tisdale's avatarBob Tisdale - Climate Observations

UPDATE:  It has come to my attention that some persons believe I ridiculed Dr. Geert Jan van Oldenborgh and Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. in this post.  That was not my intent and, on rereading this post, is far from the truth.  I have the utmost respect for both climate scientists.  I simply used Dr. van Oldenborgh’s blog post as a springboard for this one.  Geert Jan has since written a follow-up post about lower troposphere temperature data.  See Is there a pause in the temperature of the lower troposphere?   And I referred to Dr. Pielke in this post for two reasons. First, he is known to skeptics, and, second, he agrees with Dr. van Oldenborgh about the importance of ocean warming.   I simply put ocean warming into terms that are more familiar with most readers…deg C, instead of 10^22 Joules.

My apologies to Geert Jan van Oldenborgh and Roger Pielke Sr…

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Curiouser and Curiouser

June 7, 2015 Leave a comment

From the Big Bang to the Black Rabbit Holes of Moral Relativism

Have you noticed that many of the well-coifed commentator’s these days now use the phrase, “The fact of the matter” to preface their comments? This is empiricism trying to counter relativism’s cynicism.

Modern day liberals, pundits of the ersatz, consider themselves open-minded individuals. They are proud of their openness to all things. So open-minded are they in fact that when truth is encountered it is immediately short-circuited bypassing their AND/OR gates, never residing in memory. Truth is discharged from their feel good capacitors. Truth, for them, is just one of many options. Truth is not the warm and fuzzy logic they want to be plugged into. Truth is electrifyingly absolute.

“As a rule, only very learned and clever men deny what is absolutely true. Common men have less brains, but more sense.” -William T Stance, an epitome found at the beginning of Roger Kimball’s book “The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia”.

These open-minded folk are so welcoming to come and go Change that they post a “For Rent” sign on their foreheads for all to see their obeisance to the gods Openness, Diversity and Equality.

House built on sandy soil. Erosion.

Oops, there goes another foundation!

These open-minded folk are also the ones who so voraciously attack the First Amendment as a mistake-a mistake to let people speak their minds. Go figure. But this thinking works in the Rabbit Hole known as Asinine.

Let’s take a look at only some of today’s Ass-saults on Absolutes.

It is 2015 and truth and its consequences can be hard to swallow. Truth and its consequences can be abstracted into “Am I a victim of uncontrollable influences?”

Here is a portion of Vanity Fair’s May 2015 article “Civil War at NBC News” written by Bryan Burrough about NBC’s Brian William’s deliberate lack of Total Recall scandal:

“[Deborah] Turness [head of NBC] and the other executives who had gotten involved quickly became frustrated, as they would remain for days, with William’s inability to explain himself. “He couldn’t say the words ‘I lied,’ “recalls one NBC insider.

We could not force his mouth to form the words ‘I lied’. He couldn’t explain what had happened. [He said,] ‘Did something happen to [my] head? Maybe I had a brain tumor, or something in my head? He just didn’t know. We had no clear sense what had happened. We got the best apology we could get.

And that was a problem…”

Brian Williams-post truth

Brian Williams-post truth

It is 2015 and you can Tune in, toke up, smile big: Introducing The First Church of Cannabis.

(Bill) Levin, a 59-year-old carpenter, started the church on March 26, 2015, to push the limits of Indiana’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which prohibits the government from “substantially burdening” anyone’s right to exercise his or her religion. Earlier this year, the controversial bill sparked protests from gay rights groups claiming it would allow for businesses to discriminate against gays and lesbians citing religious beliefs. (Emphasis mine)

The First Church of Cannabis is Epicurean in all in its smoke and mirror glory. Who needs a church with the living true God when the inaccessible uncaring-what-you-do god of Epicurus will do?

 

Speaking of “gay rights” it is 2015 and most Americans greatly overestimate the percentage of the LGBT self-described “queer” population. Perhaps this is due to air deprivation-the loud sucking in of all the air from the planet by the LGBT ‘community’ in order to replace it with the exhaust of revved up Epicurean narcissism:

“PRINCETON, N.J. — The American public estimates on average that 23% of Americans are gay or lesbian, little changed from Americans’ 25% estimate in 2011, and only slightly higher than separate 2002 estimates of the gay and lesbian population. These estimates are many times higher than the 3.8% of the adult population who identified themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender in Gallup Daily tracking in the first four months of this year.” (Emphasis mine)

Of course the LGBT ‘community’ will refute the accuracy of this poll by saying that another 30% of the population is still in the closet (waiting to be coaxed out of the closet and into a confused symbolism state-the LGBT ‘light’ of gay).

 

It is 2015 and moral relativism’s apotheosis is a “fundamental transformation” POTUS with a bully pulpit.

Barack Obama’s latest political foray into untruth is his national domestic and foreign policy of fatalism-“AGW, this is settled science”. This populist scientism qualification is severely lacking in the facts due diligence requires asserting “settled science”. Obama’s stipulation is meant to shunt away the requisite evocative questions inherent within a democratic political process. In Obama-speak “Settled science” means “Settled issue”: “I said IT and therefore it must be true since I have enough power and sycophantic cohorts to proclaim it to be true”.

 

It is 2015, June, and Pastor Saeed Abedini has been in an Iranian prison for three years while Obama negotiates his own legacy.

 

It is 2015 and where we once had two distinct naturally evolved sexes-“He created them male and female”- we now have the amorphous word “gender” bandied about. The political winds of “Diversity” are uprooting millennia of family trees-naturally evolved binary sex procreations and ‘recreating’ traditional marriage in its own image with a frenzy to will to power one’s self-‘right’-ness… but never righteousness.

 

It is 2015 and have you noticed that multiculturalism is all the rage? You don’t hear the word “multiculturalism” proclaimed in public but one can see its assault on America and its devastating effects under Obama’s lawless immigration fiat.

Multiculturalism insists that all cultures and all religions are of equal value. Multiculturalism insists that there is no difference between Judeo-Christian beliefs and those of radical Muslim imposed Sharia Law. Per Obama and the Progressives all groups must be co-opted in order to dilute your white European background vote and shore up non-Western Democrat votes for the next election. “Divide and conquer” is his conscious mantra.

Multiculturalism is passive-aggressive toward America. Multiculturalism genuflects to the god “Hyphen”.

It is 2015. Have you noticed that we are no longer Americans? We are now hyphenated groups: African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Hispanic-Americans. Many of these and other groups live a hyphenated life of one foot in and one foot out, having forsaken adopting the American settler’s values. “They are coming to America” for the handouts that only Big Brother can give and know full well that American values are ‘flexible’ according to who is in power, ergo kindled ethnocentricity melts the pot holding them.

 

It is 2015 and women now have added their maiden name to their married name-one foot and in one foot out of the marriage.

 

It is 2015 and I am reminded of Alexis de Tocqueville’s prescient warning about soft despotism. I apply it now to our 2015 morally relativistic “activist” judiciary that

“extends its arm over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”

 

It is 2015 and moral relativism’s tyrannical belief system has taken modern man captive and placed him in chains within a dark but fire lit cave.

As pushed in Epicurus’ time an individual’s sensory feelings, his inner sanctum response to the self-projecting chimeras on the cave wall, have become a socialism everyone must share to ease pain or else. To make this a personal reality each Atlas must shrug off the moral cornerstone with which one needs to plumb line truth and then replace it with the Objectivism of ‘rational and ethical’ egoism or, better, self-interest à la carte à la cave.

The modern listener is now tuned into the frequency, “The fact of the matter” and “This is settled science” to reassure his free-floating cave-wall derived angst. At the same time leaving the cave of self-pity is not an option and thereby Democracy in a cave is denied the daylight of truth.

We say, “if Barack Obama’s scientism can make us a victim of say AGW in a society of victims then the scientism proposed becomes ‘truth’ for me, a willing adherent to the new criterion-moral relativism. And victimization means I am therefore oppressed and in need of Big Brother to take my Whole World in His Hands”.

Moral relativism as a formula for life and not yet atheistic (atheism would come after Christianity began) was tossed around during the time (BC) of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. The “atomists’ of that era believed in a distant out-of-sight-out-of-touch god. They believed that one’s own sensory feelings and close kowtowing friends would better serve their introspective needs. Scientism, born during The Enlightenment, is moral relativism’s distant cousin.

Scientism is the politics of fact. Where science is about seeking truth in the form of verifiable fact, scientism is about seeking consensus about how you feel about the facts. These feelings are Epicurean sensory feelings superimposed onto verifiable fact-“How will this fact affect me”.

 

I could go on giving examples of this post’s rubric but it is Sunday and I must go to my church to remove the impurities of Moral Relativism from my mind, heart and soul. Come join me.

Curiouser and Curiouser, to be continued…

Some things to ponder:

When everything in life is valued by the same lowest common denominator as the Progressives would have it does value retain value? Are we not animals at the lowest common point? Ergo, isn’t socialism basically the exalted rights of certain animals on the Animal Farm to determine the rights of the others? See de Tocqueville quote above.

Is it OK for teachers groups to have seminars decrying white privilege while at the same time affirmative action denies other races (e.g., Asians trying to enter Harvard) equal opportunity? Is “white privilege” really Black on-demand-privilege projection?

“Justice: by any and all means necessary.” Is it OK to place Black-American ethnocentrism over every other race while demanding diversity, equality, egalitarianism and justice? Isn’t “Justice: By any and all means necessary” spoken by a Black-American District Attorney a call to lawlessness and anarchy under our country’s rule of law?

Isn’t the application of discrimination of one race over another called racism? Inequality?

It is 2015 and the erosion of moral relativism is washing away the sand foundation of society’s structure.

“What Americans call “liberalism” is the ideology of western suicide.” -James Burnham, Suicide of the West

***

It is 2015 and WordPress has informed me that it is my six-year anniversary blogging with WordPress. Inconceivable!

 

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Empire of Lies – Andrew Klaven

December 17, 2014 Leave a comment

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Imagine Education Normal: Logocentrism

December 10, 2014 Leave a comment

Homeschool1A recent comment dialogue I was involved with on another blog made me realize that many people act and react out of an imagination that is cable TV connected. Their words lacked perspective, moral imagination and a coherent basis for reality. Their words, wildly absurdist, were meant to make a serious point. Sadly this has become normative for online point-counterpoint.

Below are some excerpts from a brief article about education, books versus TV, imagination, home schooling and preserving what’s good in a civilization. 

The article provides a great prescription for a child’s education.   Two of my children were home schooled for several years, so I know from experience the author’s point of view.

The article begins with the author asking “Are you ever afraid that home schooling your kids will make them, um, oddballs?” As parents we asked ourselves the same question. We found the answer to be a resounding “No.”

 I have heard people tell me that children who are home schooled lack social interaction. That is absolute nonsense. And, consider the social interaction coupled with the teacher’s ‘propaganda’ that occurs now with your child.

What you do as a home schooler is to connect with other parents who are doing the same thing and who share your values. Then, you just let the kids relate. We did this with families from our church community.

Together, you go on field trips. You are free to do myriads of fun learning activities. These would include science, music, sports and drama events.  And, there are plenty of curricula with associated support-internet and otherwise-for anyone who wants to home school their child.

The following excerpts are from a Touchstone Magazine article:

 Education Normal

Mark T. Mitchell on the Oddity of Giving Children a Moral Imagination

 Will your kids be raised primarily on books or on television? To put it another way: Will your children be educated in a logocentric environment, where the written and spoken word is the primary conveyer of meaning, or will they ingest most of their information through electronically generated images?

Now, of course, emphasizing books over television is not the entire story, for books vary in quality and there are plenty of books that cultivate misshapen virtues and a cynical view of life. But I think it is safe to say that parents who make the effort to emphasize books as a way of life will generally be those who have been powerfully moved by books themselves. They have experienced the wonder and joy and goodness of certain books and will introduce these to their children even as one introduces a family member to a much-loved friend.

But setting the content of the books aside (for only a moment), those whose minds are shaped by an ongoing encounter with language will develop mental habits that include patience, perseverance, the ability to think abstractly, and an imagination that does not require the constant stimulation of external images. The imagination of the reader (guided by the author) creates the images, whereas the child raised on television merely imbibes what has already been fully rendered by the camera.

 More than Rules

There are two facets to educating a child well. The first is to recognize that education is not merely the accumulation of facts, but that it has an unavoidably moral aspect. A suitable education must do more, therefore, than simply teach facts, even moral facts. Education must seek to cultivate the moral imagination of the child, for reducing moral education to a list of rules is bound to fail…

But if our children are raised primarily on visual images, if they do not cultivate the mental disciplines necessary to access truth via language, then the Holy Scriptures will remain opaque, the creeds and confessions of faith will be meaningless recitations, and hymn lyrics will be merely pleasant-sounding rhymes to accompany occasionally pleasant-sounding music.

While the ultimate aim of education is to cultivate the souls of children toward godly virtue, a secondary but related end is the preservation of civilization…

stewards of our civilization must possess well-cultivated language faculties capable of grasping complex and abstract ideas and concepts.

 Normal Children Needed

If a proper education is to accomplish or at least to seek to accomplish these tasks, then a normal child is one whose moral imagination is well formed, whose soul is oriented toward a love of logos and the Logos, and who knows and loves the best of his own civilization. Such a child will, perhaps unwittingly, become a steward of the good, the true, and the beautiful. In a world where normal is considered odd, such children are desperately needed.

Mark T. Mitchell teaches political theory at Patrick Henry College in Virginia. He is the co-founder of Front Porch Republic.
Read more: http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=22-07-014-v#ixzz1ZpTpK4sP

~~~

Teacher propaganda? Do tell:

 Worker Bees, Outcome Based Education and Our Little Ones

 The People of the “White Privilege” Lie

Parents angry after school tells 13-year-olds they can have sex, choose gender

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Let’s Clear the Record

December 6, 2014 Leave a comment

Where to begin after the past week’s events? How about a headline like this?

“Gotham’s Mayor of Mayhem Bill de Blasio throws the NYPD under the bus! The Joker throws his card on the table.”

Wait! There is more. The op-ed page tells it like it is!

“Gotham’s Mayor speaks pseudo-conciliatory words meant to shame the ‘white privileged’…“Centuries of slavery””

BTW: it will seem like “centuries of slavery” under this Joker’s socialist chokehold. Welfare, as opposed to charity, becomes a form of slavery. 

 

Now let’s hear from the best of America. Let’s hear what an African American, a man of considerable intellect and common sense has to say about “centuries of slavery” and the welfare state.

 

 

The Jokers and Lawlessness. They go together, hand and glove. But it is no joke…   joker

 

There is no doubt about it: lawlessness is the spirit of the anti-Christ. And, that spirit is at work within our country’s authority today, within our classrooms and within our neighborhoods. Wisdom has seen it coming and has warned us about it.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge,
    but fools despise wisdom and instruction.

~~~

“How long will you who are simple love your simple ways?
How long will mockers delight in mockery
and fools hate knowledge?”

 Lawlessness as promoted and enacted by a government authority, whether explicit or implied, whether by a mayor or an AG (Eric Holder’s Fast and Furious, IRS discrimination, etc.) or a President (Obama’s illegal and defiant amnesty fiat), done to satisfy political ends will inherently backfire.

Simply put, what goes around comes around. Ergo, witness rioters, looters and protesters protesting a lack of societal conformity by those in authority. These same protestors, though, never protest a lack of societal conformity on behalf society’s participants. Not only are they sectarian in their lawlessness. They are sectarian in their practice of ‘justice’. They want ‘fairness,” “egalitarianism,” “blind justice” and ‘restraint” for their defense but never as their motive.

What goes around comes around. Morphing on…

Let’s set the record straight. The current elected “radical transformation” leadership works out of a laboratory of lawlessness. They form mayhem out of human parts. They own the Frankenstein monsters they have built.

These monsters can’t breathe, they sometimes lay in the street and some stand in front of podiums and put their hands up.  Most of them are mindlessly looking for the nearest voting booth for another jolt to keep themselves going. The walking dead now roam the streets.

 ~~~~~~

As mentioned above, Wisdom saw the outcome of fools not “centuries of slavery” ago, but millennia ago.

From Wisdom’s rebuke found in the Word of God, The Book of Proverbs Chapter 1 v. 32-33:

For the waywardness of the simple will kill them,
and the complacency of fools will destroy them;
but whoever listens to me will live in safety
and be at ease, without fear of harm.”

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Immigration Fiat Meet Multiculturalism or Don’t Pass the Fiat Fondue Melting Pot

November 22, 2014 Leave a comment

Remember when your parents said, “Eat your supper, eat your peas or go to your room without supper.”?  no peas

 That is the Eat-Your-Supper-Fiat. Whether you liked the food or not your were required to eat whatever was set before you because, “I said so.” You were offered two choices:  “accept what I am demanding of you or face the consequences of not obeying me.”

 As adults, as voting adults, as voting adults with representatives we are now told by Dear Leader Obama that we must swallow his Executive Fiat without representation. And, we must also accept the consequences of not loving him with supine obedience:  a renunciation of the U.S. Constitution and a negation of our elected representatives.

 And here’s the excuse for just such a demand: there are “poor little children from other countries torn from their families, who do not have a regular meal to eat.” Sob. Sob. Sniffle. Sniffle. “Shame on you, taxpayers! You did not obey my commands!”

 How these children were torn from their families and became hungry is another story involving crossing our sovereign border and avoiding immigration authorities. They snuck into our country illegally in hopes of demanding to be fed and taken care of by U.S. taxpayer money as in “Illegal immigrants to be eligible for Social Security, Medicare”  BTW: They are illegal immigrants and not ‘undocumented” travelers on the road of life.

 Now that the ‘dinner’ has been served sitting in front of us is a smorgasbord multinational characters, some who may be Jihadists, felons, drug dealers, gang members, diseased and most certainly impoverished. Yet, we are informed by IL-Rep Luis Gutierrez that we the voters are uninformed children in need of Dear Leader’s guidance. Remember, we are the “stupid voters” ala Jon Gruber. We are not supposed to care what we are fed as long as “Change” is on the menu.

The Dear Reverend Hussein Obama has also blessed the meal. He used Holy Scripture to endorse his lawlessness and to promote his legacy of “Me, Myself and I”. The spirit of anti-Christ is crouching, ready to devour.

The Gospel-according-to-Progressive George Soros funded Illinois Voices For Immigration Deformity has also blessed the meal with their alliterative babble” “Bibles, Badges, Business.” They forgot to add “and Balkanization to boot.” Their “Call to Action” is the new Evangelical Gospel of antinomianism.

 Now that Dear Leader has served us his self made whipped up fiat fondue we are told to eat and like it: “If you don’t eat what I am serving, you can’t have any pudding, how can you have any pudding if you don’t eat what I am serving!” But there is more to this fiat force feeding than meets the throat.

Multiculturalism and Immigration Fiat now meet face to face-a few million times over.

 Forced multiculturalism, whether as found in England or Germany or France hasn’t worked out well. Many immigrants do not share the same values as their host country. In fact, the immigrants often isolate themselves into their own cultural collectives. And, the radical Islamists currently crossing our border make no distinction between church and state. They want us to be under their Sharia law. They will kill us to make this happen.

In The New Criterion article by Roger Kimball titled “Institutionalizing our demise: America vs. multiculturalism”, Kimball mentions a book by the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington

“Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity” (2004), Kimball writes:

“Does it,” Huntington asks, “take an Osama bin Laden … to make us realize that we are Americans? If we do not experience recurring destructive attacks, will we return to the fragmentation and eroded Americanism before September 11?”…

Multiculturalism is a moral intoxicant; its thrill centers around the emotion of superior virtue; its hangover subsists on a diet of nescience and blighted “good intentions.”

Wherever the imperatives of multiculturalism have touched the curriculum, they have left broad swaths of anti-Western attitudinizing competing for attention with quite astonishing historical blindness. Courses on minorities, women’s issues, the Third World proliferate; the teaching of mainstream history slides into oblivion. “The mood,” Arthur Schlesinger wrote in The Disuniting of America (1992), his excellent book on the depredations of multiculturalism, “is one of divesting Americans of the sinful European inheritance and seeking redemptive infusions from non-Western cultures.”

A profound ignorance of the milestones of American culture is one predictable result of this mood.”

 

Let it be known that Our Dear Leader, Supreme Professor of Cultural-Legal-Social-Economic-Self-Aggrandizement Studies, has enslaved us to Multiculturalism. His doting bureaucrats will feed his new slaves from the fiat fondue melting pot, a pot laced with every form of human depravity known to man. 

Dear Leader, in his great wisdom, has purposely created this ad hoc toxic milieu so as to dilute America’s melting pot with third world values. Progressive dictatorships feed off of this pot.

Equally as important to Dear Leader is creating millions of worshippers of Progressivism’s cult combine of language, morally relative values, lowest common denominator culture, Gaia-incensed global-warming and the rule of ad hoc law.

Dear Leader wants to amass voters who are submissive, “stupid” and obedient. And, like him, they must not care that there are laws to obey or boundaries to be wary of, or red lines to never cross. The illegal immigrants are to be his hapless ‘victims,’ Dear Leader is to be their Savior and America (always the oppressor in his anti-colonialism zeitgeist) will now submit to him. We are to be his colony of worker bees.

For the ‘victims’ there is to be the 1%’s pot of gold to be had and a third world free-for-all party to attend. “Go ahead. Break the law. Just don’t get caught. But if you do, we have liberal–minded judges who will ‘figure’ it out for you at the time. Remember, laws are meaningless under ‘social justice.”

How else can the Democrat/Progressive party survive? Only by mandating desperate, “stupid” and lawless voters out from shadowy existence and thrusting them into ‘daylight’ of the voting booth. That is how the Progressive Party survives. That is how illegal immigrants will be used. And, that is why Hillary Clinton nods her approval while awaiting her throne.

 

Here, the Rev. Robert A. Sirico speaks to the issue of Multiculturalism and the fact that all cultures are not equal:

 

 

And, Thomas Sowell, as well, about multiculturalism, affirmative action and the minimum wage, all of which comes into play with millions more people entering the country willy-nilly:

 

 

~~~~

Lest anyone think that I am not being Christian enough, insensitive to the plight of others and a bigot in my opinion post above, let me summarize my own situation and realign your thinking.

  I am a Christian woman who lives in an apartment building, not an ivory tower. Above me lives a Hispanic family. Below me lives another Hispanic family. Across the hall from me is a single black woman with her son. 

 The apartment buildings surrounding me are filled with a majority of Hispanics, some black Americans and some white Americans.

 The apartment building complex south of me is occupied mostly with Hispanics, with some black Americans and some white Americans.

Reader, can you say that about where you live?

 Mi amiga, Veronica, works in the food service cafeteria where I work.

 I have no problema with Hispanics or with legal immigrants. I do have a big problem with Obama’s edict and the illegal process he used and coercive multiculturalism.

~~~~~

SNL spoofing the executive fiat:

 Obama Shoves Legislative Process Down Capitol Steps

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Label Me “In Christ”

June 1, 2014 Leave a comment

jaj 09-21-2013 001 - R1

 

You could read this “Danger” sign at face value, decide to heed its warning and not take your canoe over the dam. Or, you could read the sign as an inconvenience, as someone telling you what to do. You have the freedom to ignore the warning. The consequences still pay out in full.

 There are signs everywhere informing our decisions. We make choices based on past experience and present warnings. We may proceed or we may stop and change course.

 Signs just give us the information. And again, we may trust the sign and heed its warning. Or, we may disregard the sign and all credible evidence and choose to go forward, knowing full well that there will most likely be consequences. In this case, I would take the path most chosen… by wise people. I would go directly ashore after reading the sign.

 Seeing this “Danger”sign today as I walked along the river I was reminded of several critical thinking dialogues I have engaged in. Like the river sign, there were warning signs or red flags that the discussion I was having, the canoe trip, would soon require a commitment to the truth at hand.

Often in these dialogues the person I am conversing with will begin dismissing out of hand anything I say that is contrary to their zeitgeist. My position is considered without merit, without ‘value’ in their eyes, based on their already altered life. They soon begin repeating the party line phrases they’ve heard others in their hive repeat.

As the communication between the two ships “passing in the night” nears, the “Danger” sign of truth I am quickly identified as a Kool-Aid drinker,” as too stupid and no longer human enough to understand that the sign is “more unconventional than life itself and not in keeping with what people really should think.” I am often told that the sign can not be accepted at face value since science has proved otherwise. 

From being dehumanized I am then in turn objectified. Now, any human experience I could share that would quickly prove the “Danger” sign to be absolutely valid is deemed as just morally relative existentialist personal experience. Accordingly, in this person’s worldview, there can be no Absolute Truth when ‘feelings’ are on the line. To them only subjective feelings (now called ‘rights”) matter. The feelings of others may or may not matter depending on whether you are “in” or “out”.

As the conversation continues the Skull and Crossbones is raised to threaten me, to keep me at bay. The broadsides begin. I am broadsided with labels.

 

Labels? Why labels?

 Socially, for the sake of “diversity;” paying homage for their vice to virtue.

 And, labels give the ‘Socially Privileged’ the means to socially profile someone even though they supposedly “hate profiling” (i.e., SPLC).

 Inordinate labels give all sorts of people ‘outs’ and disclaimers.

 Drive-by labeling allows the hive-minded self-described “diverse” to avoid the truth and, more importantly, enables them to avoid bearing individual responsibility for the mal-effects of their broad brush labeling via tweets, social programs, ‘right’s agendas, discriminatory government policies and public education (reprogramming) all of which defines who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ under the Mad magazine-like masthead of “Diversity Means Inclusive: “What-me-Worry?””

 Labeling enables moronic activism and anti-social behavior (i.e., White Privilege Conference). The ‘Labelers’ label the ‘other’ as ‘bad’ ~ he/she is not one of us ~ invoking God-like privilege.

 Today, being “diverse” means that you can appear all-wise “inclusive” with your ‘peeps’ by excluding, denigrating and literally hating people based on labels.

 Talk to a homosexual about their homosexuality. You can’t because you are labeled “homophobic.”

 Consider this recent tweet conversation between @witycindy and @torqueflite a same-sex marriage devotee.

 

 

When all was said and done Cindy Wity @witycindy was labeled “homophobic”, a “hater”, a “Kool-Aid” drinker, a “bigot,” “a pathetic wretch”. (They labeled Christ, too. @witycindy is in Good Company.)

 I believe that you can read the whole conversation for yourself on twitter. (BTW: I made screen capture pdfs of @torqueflite’s public tweets just in case they are erased.)

 There are many topics where labeling is used to abort meaningful conversations. Of course politics is one of them.

 You can’t disagree with Obama’s fiscal, domestic or regulatory policies, his back door fiats or his lack of coherent foreign policy without being labeled “racist.” You are considered a “racist” solely for not ‘accepting’ the half-black Obama’s total incompetence, his deception or his distaste of America carte blanche.

Labeling is meant to dehumanize the ‘other,’ creating an object of derision.

Hitler labeled the Jews “Undesirables.”

Stalin labeled those who peasants who did not want to participate in collectivism as “kulaks.”

“They often used the term to label anyone who had more property than was considered “normal,” according to subjective criteria, and personal rivalries played a part in the classification of enemies. Historian Robert Conquest argues:

The land of the landlords had been spontaneously seized by the peasantry in 1917-18. A small class of richer peasants with around fifty to eighty acres had then been expropriated by the Bolsheviks. Thereafter a Marxist conception of class struggle led to an almost totally imaginary class categorization being inflicted in the villages, where peasants with a couple of cows or five or six acres more than their neighbors were now being labeled “kulaks,” and a class war against them declared. (from Wikipedia)”

This labeling sounds a lot like a Barrack Obama’s political campaign of labeling the ‘wealthy’ as the “1%” and Christian gun owners as ”bitter clingers” ~ all sounding as if pulled from Saul Alinsky’s style book: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.

 Labels? Why labels?

 The religion of moral relativity or ‘Diversity’ is evangelistic. With its labels and bumper stickers it preaches to us, telling us to “COEXIST” in a world where you are now ‘redirected’ to be PC, to say what you do not believe and can never question under the tyranny of moral relativism. My Lord is nothing like this.

 ***

If you believe in a god who accepts everything you do and denies you nothing would this god be a good parent or a Good Shepherd? In truth, such a god is a man-made idol created in keeping with a self-generated belief system, a belief system labeled as “Diversity.”

Like the “Danger-Dam” sign there are plenty of God’s Signs and Wonders pointing us away from sin and darkness and the wide path leading to destruction. Labeling others, as was shown above, is used to tear down those signs.

 Labeling, again, as shown above, dismisses by verbal abuse and bullying the most important of conversations, those that involve truth: “Did God really say…” and “Truth. What is truth?” The Evil One does NOT want this conversation to happen. The Evil One would rather crucify the One with Truth.

 Label me “In Christ” and willing to discourse about truth.

Added:

Stop the label machine! Here is an article from the Illinois Review website: University of Chicago Students offended by Gay Rights Activists Use of a Transphobic Slur!

For more about God’s Signs and Wonders and His natural law placed in the soul of man read Human Rights Repository.

 For more about inordinate labeling read The People of the “White Privilege” Lie.

 For information regarding the characteristics of evil read “Hell is Empty and All The Devils Are Here.”

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Live the Dream

May 20, 2014 Leave a comment

https://twitter.com/Callisto1947/status/468797096309432320

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“Highly Qualified to be Completely Useless”

March 23, 2014 Leave a comment

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Tear Down That Anthropocentricity

March 8, 2014 Leave a comment

 Solzhenitsyn

 

It may have been in the later 1970s that I became aware of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.  I don’t recall exactly what brought him to my attention. It may have been news reports of the Soviet Union’s exiled dissident. Solzhenitsyn had been deported from the USSR and stripped of Soviet citizenship in 1974. He later came to live in the US for almost twenty years.

 With the admixture of the Cold War, the horror stories coming out of the USSR, reports of Solzhenitsyn’s moral courage and my youthful desire to make a difference in the world I soon became enthralled by Russia and Solzhenitsyn.

 During the 1980s I read Solzhenitsyn.  I read all three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago, an eye-opening history of the Soviet police state and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novella.  These works forever etched on my mind the Stolypin cars used to resettle passenger and livestock together; Stalin’s Cult of Personality, his purges, his deportations, his gulags and his murder of tens of millions of people.

 In addition to media reports about Soviet atrocities in the 1980s I traveled to Poland for business purposes.  I used a polish translator.  It turned out that the translator, a Pole, was once a CIA agent who worked inside Russia. He told me about the atrocities done to the Poles by the USSR and the KGB.  He hated what the Soviets had done to his people. From my perspective, except for the occasional flower stands on the streets, Warsaw and Bialystok looked gray and depleted of life from the effects of Communism.

 Solzhenitsyn, an author who documented life under Stalin with short stories, novels and poems that included harsh critiques of Stalin and totalitarianism, survived prison camps – the gulags – and assassination attempts by the KGB. But, Solzhenitsyn kept writing, speaking out against the evil being done to the Russian people.  This is why Solzhenitsyn is a hero to me unlike any ‘hero’ regarded today.  This man suffered for the truth he did not hesitate to speak.

 Born the month that Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected to the presidency, I was raised during the Cold War days (1947-1991). I recall the election of John F. Kennedy and the US ‘cold shoulder’ standoffs with the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.

 The two superpowers, the US and the USSR, stood diametrically opposed politically, economically and ideologically. Solzhenitsyn would speak to one of those powers when he gave his Harvard commencement address on June 8, 1978 – A World Split Apart. For some context, the speech was made the summer after Jimmy Carter was sworn in as President on January 20, 1977.

 I came across the speech again yesterday.  I reread it on the train last night, on my way home from work.

 Though I prefer shorter posts I would like to share the power of these words with you plus some poignant commentary about Solzhenitsyn’s works and words from the book The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order by Daniel J. Mahoney.

 First, from the book, Chapter 7, The Totalitarian Subversion of Modernity:  Solzhenitsyn on the Self-deification of Man and the Origins of the Modern Crisis are some words of warning for any democratic impulse:

 “The experience of totalitarianism, that “twentieth-century invention,” as Alexander Solzhenitsyn once called it, ought to have permanently discredited all facile or naïve progressivism. But as the previous chapter attests, too many in the West mistakenly identified the fall of Communism in the East-central Europe and the Soviet Union with “the overflowing triumph of an all-democratic bliss.”  The writings of Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) provide unique resources for understanding both the evils of totalitarianism and the limits of democratic euphoria.”…

 Regarding Solzhenitsyn publishing of August 1914 in 1972:

“If August 1914 provided a devastating critique of the sclerotic character of the old Russian regime, of the unwillingness of its purblind bureaucrats and courtiers to adjust thoughtfully to conditions of modernity, it is also clear that Solzhenitsyn had no sympathy for those left-liberals then or in his time who flirted with nihilism, apologized for terrorism, and showed contempt for the best spiritual and cultural traditions of the Russian nation. The luminous essays by Solzhenitsyn and his collaborators in From Under the Rubble contemplate a Russian future freed from evils of ideological despotism.  At the same time, its contributors warned against the slavish imitation of the worst features of contemporary Western democracy, including its scientism, subjectivism, and rejection of the classical and Christian resources of the Western tradition.” (emphasis mine)

 The chapter then goes on to speak of Solzhenitsyn’s indictment of Marxism and collectivism, as well, his “Augustinian defense of freedom – but no special privileges – for religious believers.”

 Under the chapter’s section The Fragility of Modern Liberty:

 “Solzhenitsyn, though, remains what has always been – an eloquent and principled defender of liberty and human dignity.  Yet, Solzhenitsyn is acutely aware of the fragility of the Enlightenment principles that under gird the regime of modern liberty… Solzhenitsyn’s refusal to sever freedom from an order of truth sets him apart from every radically modern articulation of human liberty and makes him suspicious in the eyes of those who identify liberty with the rejection of all natural or divine limits.” (emphasis mine)

 There is way too much depth about Solzhenitsyn and the weakness of our modern democracy in The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order for me to relate here and now.  I highly recommend the book to you.

 Now to Solzhenitsyn’s words:

 Intro: The Soviet and Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian during his commencement address delivered at Harvard University, June 8, 1978, without wavering, noted that the problems of the two superpowers were not the military strengths and ideological differences of each turned against each other but rather their lack of a moral center and moral courage.

Because Solzhenitsyn was addressing a western audience, an elite Western audience at Harvard, his speech was decidedly a stinging indictment of the West – its materialism and it’s almost “unlimited freedom of choice of pleasures, its self-serving, inbred media and its disavowal of its spiritual roots:

 “However, in early democracies, as in the American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. … State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer.” (emphasis mine)

 And…

“If humanism were right in declaring that man is born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President’s performance be reduced to the question how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.” (emphasis mine)

And…

“It would be retrogression to attach oneself today to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times. Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?” (emphasis mine)

 In the speech Solzhenitsyn speaks of “…our Earth – divided against itself;” “…all of a sudden the twentieth century brought the clear realization of this society’s fragility.;” ”…the persisting blindness of superiority;” “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.;” “…and the decline of courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood, is ironically emphasized by the occasional outbursts and inflexibility on the part of those same functionaries when dealing with weak governments and with countries that lack support, or with doomed currents which clearly cannot offer resistance..  But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful government and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?  Even when echoed from the distance of 1978.

 Take a look at what drives you and perhaps you will see why America is no longer a nation under God, no longer a nation of civil courage, of moral decency.  As Solzhenitsyn points out in his address the West has become humanist anthropocentric:  “the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him…with a willful denial of a “Supreme Complete Entity.”

Liberty and the rule of law is not enough to keep us right side up. “Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.”

And, perhaps you will now understand why people would vote for a president who uses class warfare rhetoric to promote the sands of material security as foundational to life’s happiness and not the bedrock of spiritual fortitude.

Please read the speech in its entirety. You will be better for it. Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address 6-8-1978

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