Priorities - Death or Dry

 A BLM member hanging from Trump Tower in Chicago from a rope was threatening to kill himself if he did not talk to President Trump before the election. Funny thing, it was raining and he was wearing a raincoat with the hood up.

Correcting Higher Education

 In an October 17, 2020, American Thinker article titled 'Academic Teachers and Political Activists', John M. Ellis, a distinguished Professor Emeritus at UC Santa Cruz, argued rightly that the only way to begin teaching our children to think analytically, productively, and independently is to replace the pure political activists in academia with true academics. As much as I agree with him, I can't readily see how that can be accomplished. What kind of litmus test could be administered? While there are certainly many post-graduates who have not been tainted by activist ideologies, they are in the minority. How can they be singled out? Obviously, the majority of candidates who will have passed out of our K-18 system any time in the past 40 years will have been indoctrinated as anti-American Marists. And, of course, the hiring authorities and senior administrators are in that category. In this environment, I don't think a changing of the guard can be accomplished. Rather the entire system needs to be abolished and rebuilt from scratch and that can only occur when the money runs out, which it will as enrollment continues to decrease. It will require a bunch of failures, starts, and stops but over time it will achieve the desired balance.

Academic Teachers and Political Activists - American Thinker (americanthinker.com)

Who Cares about 'yelp*'

 I have never understood why anyone would trust a yelp* type website that accepts anonymous comments regarding any business. But obviously many do. Now, in accordance with traditional Communist party tactics, yelp* is publishing anonymous “consumer alerts” on businesses to warn consumers about businesses associated with egregious, racially-charged action. And exactly how will yelp* make that determination? Of course, from anonymous comments made by disgruntled consumers, competitive businesses, or yelp* employees. So your black, female waitress was a little lax in paying attention to your every two-minute harangues. Angrily, you decide your resources: 1-write a negative yelp* review; 2-write a yelp* review claiming that the waitress' non-actions were racially motivated; or, 3-complain to the restaurant manager. Being the asshole that you are you elect option 2 as the promising to cause the optimum damage to the restaurant. yelp*, being managed by the assholes that they are, eagerly place a warning on the hapless restaurant. We've been aware for a long time now that this is standard practice in our academies (anonymous tattle-telling) that have resulted, without due process, in students, even professors, having their records besmirched at the least, even suspended or in the case of staff, fired. 

Democracies Do Not Work

 

From John Adams to John Taylor, 17 December 1814

Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to Say that Democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious or less avaricious than Aristocracy or Monarchy. It is not true in Fact and no where appears in history. Those Passions are the same in all Men under all forms of Simple Government, and when unchecked, produce the same Effects of Fraud Violence and Cruelty. When clear Prospects are opened before Vanity, Pride, Avarice or Ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate Phylosophers and the most conscientious Moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves, Nations and large Bodies of Men, never.

And not have survived the last 200+ years. 

Socialism By Hicks

From: How Modern Education Makes Good Little Marxists - American Thinker (americanthinker.com) 

 In his Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, philosopher Stephen Hicks traces the history of the breakdown and collapse of the discipline of philosophy and its impact on other disciplines.  Hicks posits that fields within the humanities at large, not just subfields such as Critical Theory, the grievance studies, Postmodernism, etc., have always intertwined themselves with the various flavors of socialism.  They've striven to find theoretical methods to become an intellectual ruling class who could properly reform and organize society.  Their problem, however, became that socialism failed on every level: economically, it has irrefutably proven its drastic inferiority to capitalist ideas and usually results in creating vast conditions of poverty.  Politically, it has produced horrific tyranny, from modern Venezuela to the former Soviet Union.  Intellectually, it has not been able to justify itself, given its numerous inherent contradictions and denial of individual rights.

Hicks concludes that today, a notion of resentment has accordingly taken over both the intellectual and political movement.  He states, "Socialism is the historical loser, and if socialist know that, they will hate that fact, they will hate the winners for having won, and they will hate themselves for having picked the losing side.  Hate as a chronic condition leads to the urge to destroy[.] ... Postmodern thinkers hold that not just politics as failed — everything has failed" (Hicks, 194).  In other words, if you can't win, then destroy becomes the motto of such ideologies.  The target for that urge to destroy is at first honest students, then those virtuous people who resist, then the national history, and finally the cities and the governmental system itself.

The Three Hard Questions

Something from Nothing? 

t is difficult to think of something, anything, coming from Nothing. Actually, it is impossible to conceive of Nothing. The mind keeps bouncing around to "void" or "space" or "vacuum". But in reality, each of those is a definable something. About the only way to describe Nothing is by stating what it is not. Nothing is the lack of anything, the absence of everything. However, saying that does not bring a vision to mind, only more questions. And "empty" does not work because something has to be "empty" to be so. "Nothingness" as a concept of an entity composed of Nothing is redundant and merely a softening that adds nothing to the definition. The question then becomes, is there a Nothing? Or can we even ask that question because to do infers that Nothing is a something? Nothing does not provably exist.

Scientists have devoted endless hours to determining how the seeable universe began yet is stymied as to what came before or what is beyond, even if there is a beyond. Was there always something? Ah, enter the God or gods, or supreme being, or intelligent designer, or cosmic consciousness, or a set of laws of nature, or laws of physics, or whatever. So now, in the beginning, whatever the case, we have a chief or chiefs of nothing which is something. The logical conclusion is simply that there has to be and has to have been something that always was. Could that something has been a Mother Universe, infinite and eternal consisting of the properties necessary to create Children Universes?

What is Time?

We don't have a clue. It just is. We see its results all around us in the form of entropy. The farther down the arrow of time we go, the greater the disorder. Scientists theorize that time began with the Big Bang. Since time comprises the past, present, and future, there could not have been a "before the Big Bang" simply because there was no time and "before" is in the past. If there is a "before" and time did not begin with the Big Bang then it follows that the time before the Big Bang was static and a basic element of the Mother Universe. Could the eternal, infinite Mother Universe contain all time from which our puny universe was granted a tine forward-moving slice? Within the "before" there is no arrow of time. Just Time with a capital T. That arrow in our universe came about with the Big Bang. None of this is of any help in discerning what is time. But that should be of little concern. When anything in the known universe is broken down into its most basic form, say the quark, we can go no further. And we can't define it. We can say what it is part of but not what it is. 

I Know I Exist

 How do I know that I exist? The proof of my existence is my consciousness, my awareness of self, and other forms of life and stuff. I know, circular. And awareness is not proof. So, how am I aware? How am I conscious. Could it be that I am imagining it all? Like a very long dream? We know that everybody and everything is made up of atoms, yet through our lenses, the atoms are formed into beings and objects. The atoms are no longer visible. We have constructed the world around us. Have we also constructed our existence? 

The concept that consciousness is a basic ingredient of the universe, intrinsic, part of the universe's design coming out of the Mother Universe, and that it would exist even without there being beings I find ridiculously hubristic. As far as we know, we humans are alone in the universe and possess the highest level of sentience possible. Given how insignificant we are relative to our universe much less to the Mother Universe, I doubt that consciousness would have been another of the basic elements preexisting the Big Bang. And we know that life on Earth did not begin with the Big Bang and that consciousness only seems to have value to life so I conclude that consciousness is evolutionary. The why of consciousness remains in question as I do not certain what value consciousness provides to the living.

A great discussion regarding the types of consciousness we humans possess is in an article, 'If a Robot Is Conscious, Is It Alright to Turn It Off?' at If a Robot Is Conscious, Is It OK to Turn It Off? | RealClearScience

Miscellaneous Observations

 Every moment is in the past. Every experience is in the past. There are only the past and the future.

We're all broken somehow.

Words/phrases to describe most news articles: ponderous, platitudinous, painfully redundant, unprecedented, sophomoric for such an august group, juvenile memes

If time were a human or social construct as some have theorized, the end of humanity would be the end of time. However, we know that the universe is expanding and we can postulate that it will continue to expand with or without us. The matter and antimatter that make up the universe are moving through space thus there are locations where it had been in the past. During expansion the same matter and antimatter do not occupy all positions along the expansion path simultaneously. No, prior positions are no longer occupied. Those prior positions were occupied before current positions. So while traveling through space, matter and antimatter are also traveling through time. Admittedly, an unmeasured time but time nontheless.