tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-77024431776010453972024-02-18T21:14:39.662-08:00The Fear FilesUncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.comBlogger85125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-32047813374777399162023-10-27T13:38:00.001-07:002023-10-27T13:38:47.445-07:00Faith and Truth, Part III<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhBxyEHJ7HURJz5etzD1_K5g_Cyf2ayxmrA1FHTgOJVMQy-QqP12UQVBldO7qd_96JglXClM5IBs0Nv-6BC1qc0HsryGwyo3d1nfUrVCvYQQInWHvdibs0vADx0M5JDWr1zXTZ4uMUfG56yU6fNh4k3UagT7Z7YUU2sAMgQ0adylcm3YugSsTL7t46fSLw" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="888" data-original-width="776" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhBxyEHJ7HURJz5etzD1_K5g_Cyf2ayxmrA1FHTgOJVMQy-QqP12UQVBldO7qd_96JglXClM5IBs0Nv-6BC1qc0HsryGwyo3d1nfUrVCvYQQInWHvdibs0vADx0M5JDWr1zXTZ4uMUfG56yU6fNh4k3UagT7Z7YUU2sAMgQ0adylcm3YugSsTL7t46fSLw" width="210" /></a></div><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0f1419; display: inline; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">So, despite my procrastination, I'm going to get in here and do this, because it is the most important part of Exodus that has the biggest parallels with our own time.
It's part 3 of the Exodus </span><img alt="🧵" class="r-4qtqp9 r-dflpy8 r-sjv1od r-zw8f10 r-10akycc r-h9hxbl" draggable="false" src="https://abs-0.twimg.com/emoji/v2/svg/1f9f5.svg" style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; display: inline-block; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; height: 1.2em; margin-left: 0.075em; margin-right: 0.075em; vertical-align: -20%; white-space-collapse: preserve; width: 1.2em;" title="Thread" /><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0f1419; display: inline; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">, here for you.
God taking the slack out of his people.</span><p></p><div><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0f1419; display: inline; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Moses was touched by God, had to face down his own doubts about God and about himself. That was part 1 and can be found here: <a href="https://fearfiles.blogspot.com/2023/10/faith-and-truth.html" target="_blank">https://fearfiles.blogspot.com/2023/10/faith-and-truth.html</a></span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Following this pattern, Moses had to provide "proof" of his God to Pharaoh, establishing the pattern of worldly governments establishing themselves as "gods" in their own right. You know how that ended.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">So, now Moses has been told that he can extract his people from Egypt, and he goes about doing so with a surety that is remarkable, given the challenges. Those challenges are kind of glossed over, so let's dedicate a bit of thought to the lash-up that Moses drug around for 40 yrs. </span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">One morning in the Spring of 1446 BC, after strife that I've not really touched on, Moses woke up from a nap and led 2.5 Million Jews out of Egypt. 600,000 men. And you KNOW that they didn't pack lightly. They brought the fucking kitchen sink with 'em. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">And let's talk about the character of those people. What do you think they were like?</span></div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">
They had been enslaved for generations. Kept, fed, tended, abused, but dependent in every way on their Egyptian masters. Upon Pharaoh. For their very existence. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">They knew in their hearts that there was a way of living that was free. God had promised them this in the stories of Abraham and his progeny. They seemed "up" for this challenge, and so Moses led them out.</span><div><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I mean think about it for a minute. A lot of you have stood in front of, or led formations, but 2.5 million? With all their shit, their kids, and their animals? How daunting was that?
My brothers and sisters, Moses was a fucking stud.
[Hand and arm signal for "forward"]</span></div><div><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">As I mentioned earlier, Moses knew he had to hurry because the Man was bound to change his mind and come to destroy his people.
And they did. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">A moment here that gets glossed over in the modern era: In 1446 BC, Egyptian chariots were the modern equivalent of M1A2 Abrams fucking tanks. What's more, Moses KNEW and had employed chariots in his past. All of that risk was known.
Think about all of those factors for a couple of minutes</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Right? 600K men. Better part of 1.9 million women, children, and God knows how many dogs, cats, and livestock of every imaginable stripe. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">But we're free and we're moving and that's a good day, by God.</span></div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">
Oh, except we've got to somehow get all of those people over the Red Sea.</span><div><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">You wanna talk about a "pillar of faith"? Here's Moses, who knows where he's gotta go, and what's pursuing him, and what that force is capable of in terms of destruction, and there's the Red fucking Sea. Bigger than life.</span></div><div><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Meanwhile, behind him, he's hearing "Oh shit, we're fucked! We should never have left Pharaoh. This was all a mistake!" </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">And here is the crux of all of this. The sheer will of Moses to hold his leaders to the cause, despite every reason to just give it up. the effectiveness of those leaders to hold the resolve of the people to just keep fucking moving forward.</span></div><div><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">So, they get to the Red Sea and God fulfills his promise and brings them across (Moses' S-4 had to be dancing a fucking jig, by the way)
THEN after every Israelite crossed with dry feet, and the armored phalanx began across the gap, God destroyed the Egyptian phalanx. </span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">2.5 million people. With all their shit. Those of you who've moved people, sit for a minute and contemplate the scale of this miracle. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Saved. Moses' faith and will has to be noted here. That's Cooperstown shit, right there. GOAT.
I'm gonna skip over a lot of what comes next, but I have a reason for doing so.</span></div><div><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">What did Moses have to do next?
He had to make his people feral again.
Abraham was feral. Esau, Joseph, and Jacob were feral.
The Israelites that Moses led into the desert were not. They were analogous to domesticated turkeys. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><b>It took God one single day to get the Jews out of Egypt. It took God 40 fucking YEARS to get Egypt out of his people.</b></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">
Right there. That's the Lesson of Exodus. We sit up here, fat and happy, with our "Soft men create hard times" memes. Moses spent 40 years trying to fix that. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Because God the Father could not simply allow this weak tribe to go out and be dominated by the feral people in Canaan. He had to harden them, he had to make them effective, so he spent a generation or two making them free.</span></div><div><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0f1419; display: inline; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">As </span><div class="css-1dbjc4n r-xoduu5" style="-webkit-box-align: stretch; -webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; align-items: stretch; background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0f1419; display: inline-flex; flex-basis: auto; flex-direction: column; flex-shrink: 0; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; white-space-collapse: preserve; z-index: 0;"><span class="r-18u37iz" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: horizontal; flex-direction: row;"><a class="css-4rbku5 css-18t94o4 css-901oao css-16my406 r-5c1b6u r-1loqt21 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/wayofftheres" role="link" style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #ff7a00; cursor: pointer; display: inline; font: inherit; list-style: none; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: inherit;">@wayofftheres</a></span></div><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0f1419; display: inline; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> and </span><div class="css-1dbjc4n r-xoduu5" style="-webkit-box-align: stretch; 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padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: inherit;">@DolioJ</a></span></div><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0f1419; display: inline; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> and </span><div class="css-1dbjc4n r-xoduu5" style="-webkit-box-align: stretch; -webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; align-items: stretch; background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0f1419; display: inline-flex; flex-basis: auto; flex-direction: column; flex-shrink: 0; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; white-space-collapse: preserve; z-index: 0;"><span class="r-18u37iz" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: horizontal; flex-direction: row;"><a class="css-4rbku5 css-18t94o4 css-901oao css-16my406 r-5c1b6u r-1loqt21 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/Brushbeater" role="link" style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #ff7a00; cursor: pointer; display: inline; font: inherit; list-style: none; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: inherit;">@Brushbeater</a></span></div><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0f1419; display: inline; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> and </span><div class="css-1dbjc4n r-xoduu5" style="-webkit-box-align: stretch; -webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; align-items: stretch; background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0f1419; display: inline-flex; flex-basis: auto; flex-direction: column; flex-shrink: 0; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; white-space-collapse: preserve; z-index: 0;"><span class="r-18u37iz" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: horizontal; flex-direction: row;"><a class="css-4rbku5 css-18t94o4 css-901oao css-16my406 r-5c1b6u r-1loqt21 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/EMBurlingame" role="link" style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #ff7a00; cursor: pointer; display: inline; font: inherit; list-style: none; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: inherit;">@EMBurlingame</a></span></div><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0f1419; display: inline; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> and </span><div class="css-1dbjc4n r-xoduu5" style="-webkit-box-align: stretch; -webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; align-items: stretch; background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0f1419; display: inline-flex; flex-basis: auto; flex-direction: column; flex-shrink: 0; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; white-space-collapse: preserve; z-index: 0;"><span class="r-18u37iz" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: horizontal; flex-direction: row;"><a class="css-4rbku5 css-18t94o4 css-901oao css-16my406 r-5c1b6u r-1loqt21 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/braxton_mccoy" role="link" style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #ff7a00; cursor: pointer; display: inline; font: inherit; list-style: none; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: inherit;">@braxton_mccoy</a></span></div><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0f1419; display: inline; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> et al. have tried to emphasize over the past couple of years, we have a duty to be Moses, essentially. Yet, we can't expect any of the advantages of having God part the Seas for us. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Rather, we must rely on our own cunning and resilience to carry us and our families through what is to come.
Exodus is a cautionary tale. You should read it. You should think about Moses, and how you measure up.</span></div><div><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">You don't need "proof", you don't need Him to come down and crush your enemies. The proof is in your heart, it's been there for millions of years.
You need only have faith in that tiny voice that begs you to do the next right thing.</span><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span><div><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span><div><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span><div><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0f1419; display: inline; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div></div></div></div>Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-20492488424449173502023-10-24T23:16:00.000-07:002023-10-24T23:16:04.641-07:00Faith and Truth, Part II<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjkjv38UsXHYCyyYAtlgflkcARTGwVjx8f02KicKJJhlRpJla8tqYpI46TesOm827CD7uGNpaYcq1bXUkk44ufIIFoA_kJjsw_TVuzqQeuw72Lzow4dHuTDaSxQaDQwk2h8SoKJK0fY-HkHiE_dT-xRI43YqOdaGZofDSKV4KHTKb1BB9Z7TDYjPoMD8UU" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="782" data-original-width="860" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjkjv38UsXHYCyyYAtlgflkcARTGwVjx8f02KicKJJhlRpJla8tqYpI46TesOm827CD7uGNpaYcq1bXUkk44ufIIFoA_kJjsw_TVuzqQeuw72Lzow4dHuTDaSxQaDQwk2h8SoKJK0fY-HkHiE_dT-xRI43YqOdaGZofDSKV4KHTKb1BB9Z7TDYjPoMD8UU" width="264" /></a></div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Tonight, we're going to talk about Exodus again. Because it's instructive, and we might ought to pay attention to what has been laid before us as a lesson for thousands of years.
"Faith, truth, and proof"</span><p></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">A quick lead in that is not related to Exodus, but which is common to the human condition and is remarkable throughout this entire argument.
Milton, in "Paradise Lost" pointed out something remarkable that you should include in your perceptions: </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The basis of the sin of Lucifer before the Fall was his assumption that he knew EVERYTHING that was worth knowing. Look upon your politicians and your leaders and judge them according to that.</span></p><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Assess your own ego and put it against that. But let's get back to Exodus in light of that.</span><div><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">So, when we left Moses night before last, we saw that he begrudgingly accepted his own worth as God's chosen representative, to plea before Pharaoh for the freedom of his people.
Daunting, no?</span></div><div><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">We see that Moses required proof of His ability to pull it off.
We talked about my own interpretation of why he did that it part 1 of this. Find it here: <a href="https://fearfiles.blogspot.com/2023/10/faith-and-truth.html" target="_blank">https://fearfiles.blogspot.com/2023/10/faith-and-truth.html</a></span></div><div><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">But it's remarkable how the entire book of Exodus is dedicated to the central question that was laid before God by everyone: "I require proof of your effectiveness before I will believe that you are the one, true God." </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Moses did it. Pharaoh did it. The people of Israel did it. Let's talk about Pharaoh tonight, shall we?</span></div><div><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">So Moses came on and did the Thing. He came to Egypt to free the people of his father, at the behest of the Almighty. Accepting of his function in this, confident in his faith. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">He was known to Pharaoh, and thus he got an audience with him. His argument was essentially this: "My people are slaves, and my God has sent me here to free them. I require that you do so, immediately."</span></div><div><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></div><div><div class="css-1dbjc4n" style="-webkit-box-align: stretch; -webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; align-items: stretch; background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-basis: auto; flex-direction: column; flex-shrink: 0; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;"><div class="css-1dbjc4n r-1s2bzr4" style="-webkit-box-align: stretch; -webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; align-items: stretch; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-basis: auto; flex-direction: column; flex-shrink: 0; margin: 12px 0px 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;"><div class="css-901oao r-18jsvk2 r-37j5jr r-1inkyih r-16dba41 r-135wba7 r-bcqeeo r-bnwqim r-qvutc0" data-testid="tweetText" dir="auto" id="id__1e0vlr7v3br" lang="en" style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0f1419; display: inline; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; position: relative; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: inherit; display: inline; font: inherit; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space: inherit;">To which Pharaoh replied, "I am Pharaoh."</span></div></div></div><div class="css-1dbjc4n" style="-webkit-box-align: stretch; -webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; align-items: stretch; background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-basis: auto; flex-direction: column; flex-shrink: 0; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;"></div><div class="css-1dbjc4n" style="-webkit-box-align: stretch; -webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; align-items: stretch; background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-basis: auto; flex-direction: column; flex-shrink: 0; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;"></div><div class="css-1dbjc4n r-1r5su4o" style="-webkit-box-align: stretch; -webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; align-items: stretch; background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-basis: auto; flex-direction: column; flex-shrink: 0; font-size: 15px; margin: 16px 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;"><div class="css-1dbjc4n r-k4xj1c r-18u37iz r-1wtj0ep" style="-webkit-box-align: start; -webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: horizontal; -webkit-box-pack: justify; align-items: start; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-basis: auto; flex-direction: row; flex-shrink: 0; justify-content: space-between; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;"><div class="css-1dbjc4n r-1wbh5a2 r-1b7u577" style="-webkit-box-align: stretch; -webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; align-items: stretch; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-basis: auto; flex-direction: column; flex-shrink: 1; margin: 0px 12px 0px 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;"><div class="css-1dbjc4n r-1d09ksm r-1471scf r-18u37iz r-1wbh5a2" style="-webkit-box-align: baseline; -webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: horizontal; align-items: baseline; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; display: inline; flex-basis: auto; flex-direction: row; flex-shrink: 1; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;"><div class="css-901oao r-14j79pv r-37j5jr r-a023e6 r-16dba41 r-rjixqe r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" dir="ltr" style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #536471; display: inline; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a aria-describedby="id__3r12s4jhcce" aria-label="9:04 PM · Oct 23, 2023" class="css-4rbku5 css-18t94o4 css-901oao css-16my406 r-14j79pv r-1loqt21 r-xoduu5 r-1q142lx r-1w6e6rj r-poiln3 r-9aw3ui r-bcqeeo r-3s2u2q r-qvutc0" href="https://twitter.com/CoyoteUnclean/status/1716666914938949834" role="link" style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #536471; cursor: pointer; display: inline-flex; flex-shrink: 0; flex-wrap: wrap; font: inherit; gap: 4px; list-style: none; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: nowrap;"></a></div></div></div></div></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Think on it for a sec. "I am the monarch. I am the state.
I am God."
Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
"You need no other authority than ME."
"You need look to any other to protect you than ME."
"Any who say different are acting in a manner that is unreliable and endangers us all"</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">"If it is as you say," said Pharaoh, "prove to me that your God is the true God."</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">And so it went. Proof demanded in order to accept God and release His people.
Proof demanded, despite the truth shown to Pharaoh.
Over, and over, and over, and over. Until God's wrath was demonstrated to him in such a manner as to take his own child and the children of Egypt.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">What can we derive from that?
I think Milton's conclusion regarding Lucifer is the most impactful, and is the most repetitive throughout history.
"I know EVERYTHING that is worthy as knowing." </span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">That perfectly describes the downfall of the Morningstar, and of every single stupid motherfucking idea we've ever heard of. If one is careful in his study, one can note that pride as being the foremost cause of every single tyranny in the history of the fucking world.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The demand for "Proof" of God.
The denial of the existence, purpose, and plan of God.
Rather than faith in what is plainly the most powerful thing imaginable.
What can one do in the face of that?</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Challenge oneself, as Moses did, to fulfill one's potential. Walk before God with humility and paying attention to opportunities that appear within that mindset. Then, move forward aggressively to take advantage of that opportunity. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Pharaoh's and Lucifer's failure cannot be our own. We DON'T know EVERYTHING that is worth knowing. It is upon us to remain humble in our perception of the world. That is our choice, and it is what separates us from Pharaoh. It is what makes us free. </span></div></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Freedom, indeed, is predicated on the humility to admit that one is wrong, that one has much to learn, that He is not finished with us until we die.
It is predicated on the discipline to listen, to assume that we'll never know ALL the answers, and to remain open to His will. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Pharaoh could not see this. His pride was too consuming. His people paid for that. </span></div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">
Moses had seen this, walked appropriately in his faith, and led his people out of Egypt. Out of tyranny. With no assurances.
"Go and do the Thing," he was told.</span><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">He did the Thing, with faith in himself and faith in his God.
In front of a people who had been slaves, domesticated for generations.
And THAT is the third level to this lesson, and we'll deal with that tomorrow.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div>Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-13310375884506587742023-10-22T01:58:00.001-07:002023-10-22T01:58:16.323-07:00 Faith and Truth<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgfXTuPBlHBKSEw4FzPgt4G5P7DzWt8B07W2OWH0QhyiPE7f43Ik01nwUOl4ROEofysi23-sEdWqkHHL3hRK3xpqS57bjFLYx3Nl08hwPNDxVot6x_n_9KZ5jy4T0MoOnYXmwVbZbZqrde0XuKLRkfQU1gNMMDYBa1fsr-hyiAJBSC83YW3dKoFufCMyzw" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="612" data-original-width="612" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgfXTuPBlHBKSEw4FzPgt4G5P7DzWt8B07W2OWH0QhyiPE7f43Ik01nwUOl4ROEofysi23-sEdWqkHHL3hRK3xpqS57bjFLYx3Nl08hwPNDxVot6x_n_9KZ5jy4T0MoOnYXmwVbZbZqrde0XuKLRkfQU1gNMMDYBa1fsr-hyiAJBSC83YW3dKoFufCMyzw" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">There is so much truth that we can take from Exodus, if we can just put down our modern sensibilities and consult that ancient wisdom that lies deep within each of us. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Among the most important lessons that we can derive is the repeated bludgeoning of the ineffective tactic of trying to provide "proof" of God to those who are neither willing nor prepared to receive God. It's a great fucking story, that runs a few different levels.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">First level: Moses himself.
Moses by virtue of this faith, has been chosen by God to free His chosen people. He is God's Instrument in this particular situation.
(henceforth "Moses" will be referred to as "Mo", in deference to my mortarmen. IFYKYK) </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Lotta back and forth in this. Mo doesn't think he's worthy. Mo doesn't want the responsibility. Mo has doubts. One can understand. It's a heavy, heavy burden, and one that takes a special kind of madness to take up and do the Thing appropriately. </span></p><div class="css-1dbjc4n r-xoduu5" style="-webkit-box-align: stretch; -webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; align-items: stretch; background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0f1419; display: inline-flex; flex-basis: auto; flex-direction: column; flex-shrink: 0; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; white-space-collapse: preserve; z-index: 0;"><span class="r-18u37iz" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: horizontal; flex-direction: row;"><a class="css-4rbku5 css-18t94o4 css-901oao css-16my406 r-1loqt21 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/wayofftheres" role="link" style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #ff7a00; cursor: pointer; display: inline; font: inherit; list-style: none; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: inherit;">@wayofftheres</a></span></div><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0f1419; display: inline; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 17px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> talks about this.</span><div><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Mo eventually agrees and goes about doing the Thing. How to convince folks of his cause? Won't they just think I'm fucking crackers?
This is the first level: even though Mo has PROOF, Mo lacks FAITH in himself. He had to get past that before he began his work. God nudged him. </span></div><div><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">So God said, "What's that in your hand?"
Mo: "A staff"
God: "Heh. Check it out."</span><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfMKu480jL3j9IuDh1mE0_X9GhodS2HnP9dUiP1GQe35dCLDzBFCJUkznzPwJeor1mr47VqpxPGKdFJ7XM5XTINVCst2FlUxRYlb18hNi9Bw9oUEN5h9U_hWheY4VKeY73zF-3AJbhFtuIdwGu6qgVTtRAk26gZnjxFZsS5ZY4KOKXgr77wRw58Yoyg9E/s320/snake.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="241" data-original-width="320" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfMKu480jL3j9IuDh1mE0_X9GhodS2HnP9dUiP1GQe35dCLDzBFCJUkznzPwJeor1mr47VqpxPGKdFJ7XM5XTINVCst2FlUxRYlb18hNi9Bw9oUEN5h9U_hWheY4VKeY73zF-3AJbhFtuIdwGu6qgVTtRAk26gZnjxFZsS5ZY4KOKXgr77wRw58Yoyg9E/s1600/snake.gif" width="320" /></a></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">So it's fucking PROOF, right?
But Mo needed the FAITH in himself (and by extension, what God was telling him). So God went through several examples of proof. Finally, armed with this, Mo felt confident enough to go and do the Thing.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The hour is late and the flesh is weak, so I'll wind up the first level with a few observations.
1) Perception & knowledge differ by virtue of our willingness to accept the reality of what we perceive. Failure to do so results in us lying to ourselves.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">2) Demanding proof in order to have faith is a fool's game. You know truth in your heart the moment that you perceive it. Refusal to act in a manner that is required by virtue of that truth is a moral failure.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">3) Demanding MOAR proof is just stubbornness and rationalizing of what is right in front of you. You know what you should be doing in your heart. Some of it will require you to change. Some of it will require sacrifice of things you like.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Change is ubiquitous, whether you like it or not.
Sacrifice is your duty as an adult human being, no matter how much you'd like to take it easy.
Have faith in your ability to become what you're meant to be.
Get after it, fella.
2nd Level tomorrow night.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span><span style="color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></span><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p></div>Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-58721329507904038692022-07-04T20:07:00.009-07:002022-07-05T19:28:20.677-07:00Standing Out<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh93kpDeIwKPyVwOZ2tgcXzyQvLW6TtEWAZ0GUqpXja7JcqRYHGsszvvy6OUVLiEPuO1FNCFNqhr56MGqTReBADWtMiv-Q8c13PC4pQfGZrArRY53hzHCjoOKYZwCOyPSdr9YxY-XEOHiK29ThgCuR0lMGhrVXktJxVziZbUzWPkLjWzgLSXXQ4Z3j0" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="667" data-original-width="1000" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh93kpDeIwKPyVwOZ2tgcXzyQvLW6TtEWAZ0GUqpXja7JcqRYHGsszvvy6OUVLiEPuO1FNCFNqhr56MGqTReBADWtMiv-Q8c13PC4pQfGZrArRY53hzHCjoOKYZwCOyPSdr9YxY-XEOHiK29ThgCuR0lMGhrVXktJxVziZbUzWPkLjWzgLSXXQ4Z3j0" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p> Not too long ago, various biologists were studying zebras out in the wild. The problem they kept confronting in their observation of individual zebras was discerning a given subject as it milled about with the herd. Someone came up with the idea to mark his subject with a simple blot of paint so that he could keep track of the subject.</p><p>To their horror, the lions cut that individual from the herd and ate it almost immediately. Thus, it was surmised, the safety of the individual within a zebra herd was in blending in with the rest of the zebras. Those who stand distinct will be identified as individuals and consumed.</p><p>When I first heard of this study, it struck me in a very significant way. Most who know me will attest to the fact that I've walked the earth these many years with a large paint blot on me for any apex predator to see. When I was a young lieutenant, I tried like mad to wash it off. By the time I was twenty-seven, I realized that it was a pointless exercise and that I must find a way to make due, malformed though I might be.</p><p>It's a weird dichotomy for me, and it's something that I've chased around in my head for decades. Mistrusting groups of people while being a Marine. Working for a government that I mistrust. An old friend wrote to me the other day that, "Your paranoia of anything new and the world writ large is scary to me. Not because of the things that cause it; because of what your nightmares must look like." (I responded with, "My nightmare is Solzhenitsyn's description of what happened to his country.")</p><p>If nothing else, these suspicions have allowed me to think critically in ways that are probably far from standard and I think it has been useful in those instances where I can avoid cynicism at all costs. What follows, therefore, is a realistic view of the healthy interaction between an individual and the group, the mob, the masses, "culture"; how "duty" and "patriotism" jibe with "individual sovereignty" and "free will"; and finally, how the difficult path which is separate from that of the herd justifies our suffering and allows us to transcend it. </p><p><b style="font-size: x-large;">Standing Out</b></p><p>Any explanation that seeks to explain the way things are now without looking from whence we came leaves out the conditions under which this entire reality is operating. Hobbes, Locke, Nozick, et al recognized this, but most obviate the requirement to consider this stage of history in the context of a "state of nature". I will spare the 10,000 words that the worthies referenced above used to explain how we derive "natural rights" because that isn't germane to my argument. </p><p>Sometime between 550,000 and 750,000 years ago, homo sapiens became distinct from our nearest ancestors. What's never really talked about is how a species of "featherless bipeds" with very unimpressive physical defenses survived and reproduced with enough success to take over the world. The obvious answer is that we grouped together into tribes and adopted habits and techniques unique to the most successful of those nascent groups. Perhaps the largest factor that reinforced this was the fact that, unlike female apes, human females were very selective in whom they mated with. Also, while this is supposition, I think the beta-version of the human race had a heightened ability to communicate or at least empathize at least a subconscious level that gave them an advantage over other predators. Thus, humans strived, suffered, overcame, and thrived in groups that conformed to very strict patterns of behavior. An individual who would deviate from those patterns was either quickly killed off or similarly excluded from the group and died alone because his deviation could result in the decimation of the entire tribe. Kierkegaard brushed up against this when he said:</p><p><i>"Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. A person keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there." </i></p><p>The stakes were high indeed in those days. But over time, men who had new ideas did emerge to the benefit of their tribe. Think on it for a second, those geniuses had a tightrope to walk, didn't they? They had to learn the various behavior patterns that had benefitted their tribe for generations. They had to prove their worth in executing those patterns competently. They had to conceive of a "better way" and then have both the competence and reputation to articulate their "new ideas" to the rest of the tribe sufficiently to convince their mates to diverge from the "old ways" of doing things. Only then would their new ideas be tested at quite a risk to their tribe, people whom they loved and were devoted to. Any failure potentially meant the abrupt end of everything and everyone they knew. I think this adequately describes the reason why such geniuses are seen to be a bit crazy and are easily and casually disregarded even now. More so, this completely describes the anxiety that Kierkegaard described above. </p><p>Now, rather than trace all of the advances made by men such as these, let's just think for a moment about what all this means. What began as collections of very small tribes of people have resulted in 8+ billion people across the globe. There was error and there was blood but we somehow managed to get to the year 2022. I would submit that all of this was made possible by the continued selection across time of those who were not simply complacent to go along with the tribe. Thinking critically within a given pattern of behavior is in our DNA. The circumstances are not anywhere close to being as dire as they were in the beginning, but the propensity to expand outside of established norms is deep within our genes and within our psyche. Each of us is the sum of the men and women who were willing to risk everything to find a better answer to the problems encountered through all of the suffering and striving for hundreds of thousands of years. Placed in this light, it is clear that we have a duty to our ancestors and our families today to fulfill all of the requirements that they surmounted to advance us to this point. </p><p>It is in this that we can answer the dichotomy posed above between being a member of the herd while yet standing out from the herd. There remains risk involved and it is not easy. For most, the call to conform and "stay in one's lane" is the obvious and least strenuous choice. As Fredrich Nietzsche once said:</p><p><i>“A traveler who had seen many countries, peoples and several of the earth’s continents was asked what attribute he had found in men everywhere. He said: “They have a propensity for laziness.” To others, it seems that he should have said: “They are all fearful. They hide themselves behind customs and opinions.” In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that there will be no second chance for his oneness to coalesce from the strangely variegated assortment that he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience – why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conformity and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that forces the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. For the majority it is idleness, inertia, in short that propensity for laziness of which the traveler spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than they are fearful.”</i></p><p>So the pay off for not risking the disapproval of society, for accepting conventional wisdom without taking the time and effort to analyze it, is safety. The lions can't see you against the backdrop of the rest of the herd. </p><p>What would then justify standing out from the crowd? What is it that dwells within each of us to step out of line? Why face Kierkegaard's "anxiety" if we don't have to?</p><p>Well, you're going to suffer either way. You will feel pain whether you walk their line or not. Reality is structured in that manner and there's no arguing or bargaining your way around it. </p><p>But you do have a choice as to how you will face that pain, that suffering. The legacy of our anscestors is choice in what we believe and how we embody that belief in how we act. It is thus our responsibility to make use of that legacy to learn about the world around us, to understand what our limitations are, to dare to step beyond those limitations when it is appropriate and necessary for us to do so. Philosophers for time out of mind have done so and attached adjectives like "meaningful", "satisfaction", "proper", or "complete" to describe life as a result of having done so. </p><p>I find those descriptions to be somehow incomplete. Nietzsche up there threw out "laziness" and "fearful" in describing those who refused to accept the burden of originality. I tend to agree, and I've come to the conclusion that such negative connotations reflect an unwillingness to look within oneself and realize the potential that is inside of us. The realization of that potential by constant learning, improvement, and reflection that is then embodied in our interaction with the world is what we owe to that legacy that was freely given to us by dint of simply existing in our current form. </p><p>We learn with the tribe as we grow older. We understand its ways, what keeps it thriving and why. Then it becomes our lot to look within us, to see the potential there, to make up our own minds, and to choose to step out and lead it. The failure and the repetition is necessary for us to realize the full value of what is inside us. That potential doesn't belong simply to us though. It is on loan from our ancestors. It is the birthright of our children and their children. It belongs to the tribe. </p><p>Stand out.</p><p><br /></p>Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-83778440333434697302022-03-01T22:09:00.000-08:002022-03-01T22:09:03.977-08:00The Best I Got Left<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiuUzs6XEEzUflu-GE4LhuvOUsbMDLST8oSeU_E3XVmatBRV_1wvB2gTx74BG3gJKkf6TBV-KJNkMMvIrWq3KiPSz5rJvmLATX3J_EcUE47eHPEzEVKAhN5UlyjdGHp_fQFnmJptkT5uwheWpX5dZUdLaIrJoNEbZyRnJDfvDQ-c_8graCuEjB0TKw6" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="721" data-original-width="960" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiuUzs6XEEzUflu-GE4LhuvOUsbMDLST8oSeU_E3XVmatBRV_1wvB2gTx74BG3gJKkf6TBV-KJNkMMvIrWq3KiPSz5rJvmLATX3J_EcUE47eHPEzEVKAhN5UlyjdGHp_fQFnmJptkT5uwheWpX5dZUdLaIrJoNEbZyRnJDfvDQ-c_8graCuEjB0TKw6" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><p></p><p>The Best I Got Left. </p><p>1 March 2022</p><p>Unclean</p><p>It was 2002. I was a 32 yr old Captain. The President wanted to go to war. I wanted to go to war. The media went on a tear like we're seeing right now. "You're with us or with THEM!" We said. We said it constantly, we heard it without end, and we never questioned the authorities on whose behalf we were to fight.</p><p>We were wrong. Not because we fought, but because we forgot to question the answers that were given to us. Many of us have looked back and were not surprised at the lies, now plainly exposed, that were fed to us. We knew in our hearts that the justification was a little sketchy. It didn't matter, back then. We wanted to fight.</p><p>We were wrong. I was wrong.</p><p>My mistakes make up the majority of the fund of knowledge that I offer to those who are young. In the case of mass corporate media driving madness toward war, don't listen to them. That was our failure. That was my failure. Good men died because of me.</p><p>We failed in the first act, that of independent thought. Largely because of that lack, our efforts were doomed from that very point forward. Lies are nothing but attempts to misshape the world around us into something other than reality. Reality inevitably snaps back and shows us to be fools. Anything built upon that lie falls without foundation.</p><p>Well, twenty years have passed and the exact same people who drummed up the war then are at it again now. They are, again, trying to misshape the world into something other than reality. Anything that is based upon that will fall just as utterly. Good men will die as a result.</p><p>Don't lie to yourself, and don't let somebody convince you of following them when they are busy misshaping the world. Ask the questions. Question the answers. Keep questioning until your heart is satisfied. Anything less than that is failure.</p><p>I'm rather past the halfway point of the four-score that I hope to be allotted. I pray that the Lord will allow me to atone by destroying an enemy worthy of a good death, but I'm old enough to know that He rarely goes in for that sort of plain symmetry, nor do I fear that I am worthy of such an opportunity at redemption. </p><p>What is left, then, is to teach. To observe and instruct about reality as it is, not as I wish it were. That is truth. It's about the best that I have left. </p><p>Don't let my mistake, all those years ago, be forgotten.</p><p>Learn from it. </p><p><br /></p><p></p><p> </p>Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-91893918843618463772021-10-02T21:08:00.002-07:002021-10-02T21:08:41.288-07:00Legislation vs. Morality<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQlc-HyZM65jw7tTu6MWXJH5T8rhg3rLssiqCiaMXeXoyz1z3Ius71zGfHlc3nQrT7CFLrU3TIzwMYKcCUXXL-74RxoeRwnwZlDG-2O1DUcxdOS8dMHzD68mdoMXK9w111kmN-mStwpp8/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="429" data-original-width="899" height="153" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQlc-HyZM65jw7tTu6MWXJH5T8rhg3rLssiqCiaMXeXoyz1z3Ius71zGfHlc3nQrT7CFLrU3TIzwMYKcCUXXL-74RxoeRwnwZlDG-2O1DUcxdOS8dMHzD68mdoMXK9w111kmN-mStwpp8/" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p>My mother had a few bromides that have stuck with me over the years. "Don't poop where you sleep" was a good one. "Keep your pecker out of the payroll" is one that has kept me out of trouble for the better part of 35 years.</p><p>But she used to repeat, watching the news of the day, that "You can't legislate morality." I've been working that out since I was 18, and on it's face, it's completely bullshit, since Moses' Ten Commandments and the Hammurabi code are both results of the steady and continual watching of goal-oriented behavior long enough to extract and embody those things which were most important to a burgeoning society.</p><p>Thus is morality, and thus is it embodied in law.</p><p>But I get what Ma was trying to express. We've watched it get worse and worse over the past 35 years. What she meant, and what we've seen, are laws that contradict morality. </p><p>Morality is simply the rank ordering of patterns of behavior that are most important to us. Think about it. What is the best thing you could be? </p><p>Maybe that thing would be someone who voluntarily accepted to be denied by his friends, betrayed by his church, and tortured to death by his state, in order to wash the burden of sin from mankind. Something like that, I reckon. I can't conceive of anything more heroic. Hit me up in the comments if you can perceive anything more awesome than that.</p><p>So, that's the highest, as nearly as I can determine. </p><p>Here recently, anyone who would try to act in such a manner would be branded as a "white supremacist" (regardless of race. See: Larry Elder.) He would be branded as a "domestic terror risk". </p><p>I think what Ma meant when she said "you can't legislate morality" was that it is very important for us not to confuse God with the government. </p><p>God loves you.</p><p>Your government looks upon you as chattel.</p><p>God expects you to sacrifice appropriately to become a better person and strive to transcend the suffering that is endemic to living on this mortal coil. </p><p>Your government expects you to consume as you are instructed, be smart enough to pull levers and push buttons upon command and no smarter. To readily and cheerfully act in a manner that benefits them personally. </p><p>We can see a diversion between the two ideals. The government is not your God. It is comprised of barely competent office holders who have no consideration for your lot in life and are actively hostile toward you if your interests conflict with theirs. We'll never fix that. It's baked in. We have to realize this fact and simply go on our way...</p><p>Our way to becoming worthy of Christ's sacrifice, on a path to transcend the pain of existence through forthright thought and action. </p><p>When choosing who may represent us, I recommend looking for those who might defend us from those wearying bureaucrats described above. We should demand that those who represent us have the chief quality of wanting us to be free of restriction, able to achieve our goals, and unfettered in our natural rights. </p><p>In that manner, we may realize a government that once again is more concerned with the freedom of its citizens, while disregarding the temptation to force us into a chosen manner of behavior. </p><p>That is the way. To demand more of ourselves and expect more of those who wish to speak on our behalf. </p><p>Unclean</p>Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-3442253904814813972021-07-13T15:16:00.002-07:002021-07-13T15:20:09.968-07:00Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West, Part V<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv03MPSzVQHhZFtZeTJKC5W_f6FNW7ys2uc7lfclsG2kHIbTzAJp66F3GkaYFfxC3qWL1XiwOWTKVn7IxoVedD-W6V0makbcit1P9XxK-ygTyPjL1u18D3t4_pEtz5KfF0K_-9FC8R1-I/s200/solzhenitsyn3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="173" data-original-width="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv03MPSzVQHhZFtZeTJKC5W_f6FNW7ys2uc7lfclsG2kHIbTzAJp66F3GkaYFfxC3qWL1XiwOWTKVn7IxoVedD-W6V0makbcit1P9XxK-ygTyPjL1u18D3t4_pEtz5KfF0K_-9FC8R1-I/s0/solzhenitsyn3.jpg" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">More selected passages from Solzhenitsyn’s </span><i style="text-align: left;">Warning to the
West.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes; text-align: left;"> </span><span style="text-align: left;">This one is the last, best,
and longest.</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes; text-align: left;"> </span><span style="text-align: left;">Taken from his talk on BBC
radio on 24 March 1976.</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes; text-align: left;"> </span><span style="text-align: left;">This one truly
brings home what came before us and the daunting task in front of us.</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes; text-align: left;"> </span><span style="text-align: left;">Please read this and share it as widely as
you are able.</span></div></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>…The years went by.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The decades went by.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In spite of the Iron Curtain, views on what
was happening in the West, what people were thinking about, kept coming through
to us </i>[in the USSR’s Gulags], <i>mainly thanks to the BBC’s Russian broadcasts,
although they were vigorously jammed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And the more we learned, the more the state of your world perplexed us.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Human nature is full of riddles
and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art—and by art I mean the
search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, over
simplified explanations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of these
riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of
slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find the strength to
rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body; while those who
soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lost the taste for freedom,
lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to
crave slavery?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b>Or again: why is it
that societies which have been benumbed for half a century by lies they have
been forced to swallow find within themselves a certain lucidity of heart and soul
which enables them to see things in their true perspective and to perceive the
real meaning of events; whereas societies with access to every kind of
information suddenly plunge into lethargy, into a kind of mass blindness, a
kind of voluntary self-deception? </b></i>[Emphasis added]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;">This is precisely what we have
found to be the correlation between the spiritual development of the East and
that of the West.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And, alas, the process
of your development is five, if not ten times swifter than ours.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is what almost robs mankind of any hope
of avoiding a global catastrophe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For
years we refused to believe this, thinking that the information which reached
us was inadequate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A few years ago I
spoke of this with considerable alarm, in my Nobel lecture.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;">And yet, until I came to the
West myself and spent two years looking around, I could never have imagined the
extreme degree to which the West actually desired to blind itself to the world
situation, the extreme degree to which the West had already become a world without
a will, a world gradually petrifying in the face of the danger confronting it,
a world oppressed above all by the need to defend its freedom.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>There is a German proverb which
runs </i>“Mut verloren—alles verloren”: <i>“When courage is lost, all is lost”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is another Latin one, according to
which the loss of reason is the true harbinger of destruction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But what happens to a society in which both
these losses—the loss of courage and the loss of reason—intersect?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the picture which I found the West
presents today.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;">Of course there is a perfectly
simple explanation for this process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
is not the superficial one, so fashionable in our day, that man himself is
irreproachable and everything is to be blamed on a badly organized society, but
a purely human one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once, it was
proclaimed and accepted that above man there was no supreme being, but instead
that man was the crowning glory of the universe and the measure of all things,
and that man’s needs, desires, and indeed his weaknesses were taken to be the
supreme imperatives of the universe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Consequently, the only good in the world—the only thing that needed to
be done—was that which satisfied our feelings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It was several centuries ago in Europe that this philosophy was born; at
the time, its materialistic excesses were explained away by the previous
excesses of Catholicism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But in the
course of several centuries this philosophy inexorably flooded the entire Western
world, and gave it confidence for its colonial conquests, for the seizure of
African and Asian slaves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And all this
side by side with the outward manifestations of Christianity and the flowering
of personal freedom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By the beginning of
the twentieth century this philosophy seemed to have reached the height of
civilization and reason.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And your
country, Britain, which had always been the core, the very the pearl, of the Western
world, gave expression with particular brilliance of this philosophy in both
its good and its bad aspects.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;">In 1914, at the beginning of our
ill-fated twentieth century, a storm broke over this civilization, a storm the
size and range of which no one at that time could grasp.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For four years Europe destroyed herself as
never before, and in 1917 a crevasse opened up on the very edge of Europe, a
yawning gap enticing the world into an abyss.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;">The causes for this crevasse are
not hard to find: it was the logical result of doctrines that been bandied
about in Europe of ages and had enjoyed considerable success.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But this crevasse has something cosmic about
it, too, in its unplumbed, unsuspected depths, in its unimaginable capacity for
growing wider and wider and swallowing up more and more people.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;">Forty years earlier Dostoevsky
had predicted that socialism would cost Russia 100 million victims.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the time it seemed an improbable
figure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let me ask the British press to
acquaint its readers with the impartial three-page report of the Russian
statistician Professor Ivan Kurganov.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
was published in the West twelve years ago, but, as is so often the case with
matters of social significance, we only notice things that are not
contradictory to our own feelings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From
Professor Kurganov’s analysis, we learn that if Dostoevsky erred, he erred on
the side of understatement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From 1917 to
1959 socialism cost the Soviet Union 110 million lives! <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;">When there is a geological
upheaval, continents do not topple into the sea immediately.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first thing that happens is that the
fatal initial crevasse must appear someplace.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For a variety of reasons it so happened that this crevasse first opened
up in Russia, but it might just as well have been anywhere else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And Russia, which people considered a
backward country, had to leap forward a whole century to overtake all the other
countries in the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We endured
inhuman experiences which the Western world—and this includes Britain—has no
real conception of and is frightened even to think about.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>It is with a strange feeling
that those of us who come from the Soviet Union look upon the West today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is as though we were neither neighbors on
the same planet nor contemporaries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>yet we contemplate the West from what will be </i><b>your
</b><i>future, or we look back seventy years to see our past suddenly repeating
itself today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And what we see is always
the same as it was then: <b>adults deferring to the opinion of their children;
the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas; professors
scared of being unfashionable; journalists refusing to take responsibility for
the words they squander so easily; universal sympathy for revolutionary
extremists; people with serious objections unable or unwilling to voice them;
the majority passively obsessed by a feeling of doom; feeble governments;
societies whose defensive reactions have become paralyzed; spiritual confusion
leading to political upheaval.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></b>What
will happen as a result of all this lies ahead of us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the time is near, and from bitter memory
we can easily predict what these events will be. </i>[Emphasis Added]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Please go back and read that last paragraph aloud to
yourself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Solzhenitsyn said those words
to us 45 years ago.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Pray.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Think,
people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Speak the truth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Your freedom is your gift and your burden.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To earn it, you must carry it and hold it
with the utmost care.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><o:p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><o:p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></i></p>Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-89085843893765366882021-07-12T17:50:00.009-07:002021-07-12T17:56:55.440-07:00Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West, Part IV<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh3k9du2T10AU3iVEzQNAjPj4WnUFxzBW9sC-npG2uM-3-dX576RpWpR-XIdNvDU50IMMLrhuIV-vPuAdTPvT7451q9_jRKyyddFucJu-rIFABBkGahohPQ2uX9BD6g4H1LooeclnpR_k/s310/alexander-solzhenitsyn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="310" data-original-width="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh3k9du2T10AU3iVEzQNAjPj4WnUFxzBW9sC-npG2uM-3-dX576RpWpR-XIdNvDU50IMMLrhuIV-vPuAdTPvT7451q9_jRKyyddFucJu-rIFABBkGahohPQ2uX9BD6g4H1LooeclnpR_k/s0/alexander-solzhenitsyn.jpg" /></a></div></div></div><br /><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Day four of selected passages from Solzhenitsyn’s <i>Warning to the West</i>, from
his speech to the AFL-CIO in D.C. on 30 June 1975.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In ’75, for those too young to remember, the
U.S. Government was trying to avoid Nuclear War with the USSR by pandering and détente.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ford was not a strong voice for freedom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here’s what Alexandr thought of that
diplomatic approach.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Again, note how
this lines up with current events and how we’re dealing with China currently:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>You have to understand the
nature of Communism, all of Lenin’s teachings, are that anyone who doesn’t take
what’s lying in front of him is considered a fool.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you can take it, do so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you can attack, strike.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But if there’s a wall, then retreat. </i>[No
shit, that’s a direct fucking quote.] <i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Communist leaders respect only firmness
and have contempt for persons who continually give in to them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Your people</i> are <i>now saying—and this is
the last quotation Iam going to give you from the statements of your leaders—'Power,
without any attempt at conciliation, will lead to a world conflict.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I would say that power with continual acquiescence
is not power at all.<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><o:p> </o:p></i><i>From our experience I can tell
you that only firmness makes it possible to withstand the assaults of Communist
totalitarianism. History offers many
examples, and let me give you some of them.
Look at little Finland in 1939, which by its own forces withstood the
attack. You, in 1948, defended Berlin by
your own firmness of spirit, and there was no world conflict. In Korea in 1950 you stood up to the Communists,
only by your firmness, and there was no world conflict. In 1962 you forced the missiles to be removed
from Cuba. Again it was only firmness,
and there was no world conflict. The
late Konrad Adenauer conducted firm negotiations with Khrushchev and initiated
a genuine détente with Khrushchev, who started to make concessions…</i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><o:p> </o:p></i><i>…We, the dissidents of the USSR,
have no tanks, no weapons, no organization.
We have nothing. Our hands are
empty. We have only our hearts and what
we have lived through in the half century under this system. And whenever we have found the firmness
within ourselves to stand up for our rights, we have done so. It is only by firmness of spirit that we have
withstood. And if I am standing here
before you, it is not because of the kindness or good will of Communism, not
thanks to détente, but due to my own firmness and your firm support. They knew that I would not yield an inch, not
a hair’s breadth. And when they could do
nothing they themselves fell back.</i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><o:p> </o:p></i><i>…Finally to evaluate everything that
I have said to you, we need not remain on the level of practical
calculations. Why did such and such a
country act in such and such a way? What
were they counting on? Instead we should
rise above this to the moral level and say: ‘In 1933 and 1941 your leaders and
the whole Western world made an unprincipled deal with totalitarianism.’ We will have to pay for this; someday it will
come back to haunt us. For thirty years
we have been paying for it. And we’re
going to pay for it in an even worse way in the future.</i><i><o:p> </o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Look around.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Check’s
come due.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pay attention.<o:p></o:p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-70405720640338466732021-07-10T14:33:00.004-07:002021-07-10T14:38:42.610-07:00Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West, Part III<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9OV-9kRhN7asu4k4RzvhVYMhtHSqLB4RIkKo4ETDvgWSq82a1ic5d2JQzx13UFTAI85sAMfzOGydt1lOs25H2VWHwSn9qE_G4in9JQFlQxR2LXTrrBcCb4PpP6AdoRp1-np5Q7vdpRAc/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="380" data-original-width="570" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9OV-9kRhN7asu4k4RzvhVYMhtHSqLB4RIkKo4ETDvgWSq82a1ic5d2JQzx13UFTAI85sAMfzOGydt1lOs25H2VWHwSn9qE_G4in9JQFlQxR2LXTrrBcCb4PpP6AdoRp1-np5Q7vdpRAc/" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">More from Solzhenitsyn’s <i>Warning to the West </i>speech of 30 June 1975 in
D.C., to the AFL-CIO.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He describes the
context of the Communist system.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most
Americans aren’t tracking this information.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Not much of it has been taught in schools.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Note that the Soviet tyranny was several of
orders of magnitude larger than that of Nazi Germany, and China is several
orders of magnitude larger than the USSR.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>With that in mind, as you read, note the parallels between the nascent
Soviets and what is happening around us in Canada, Europe, and the US right
now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I lost count.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>For decades on end, throughout
the 1920’s, the 1930’s, the 1940’s, and 1950’s, the Soviet Press</i> <i>kept
writing ‘Western Capitalism, your end is near.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We will destroy you.’<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>But it was as if the capitalists
had not heard, could not understand, could not believe this.<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>Nikita Khrushchev came here and
said, ‘We will bury you!’ They [the capitalists] didn’t believe that
either.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They took it as a joke.<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>Now, of course, they [the Soviets]
have become more clever in our country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Today they don’t say ‘We are going to bury you,’ now they say, ‘Détente!’.<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>Nothing has changed in Communist
ideology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The goals are the same as they
were, but instead of the artless Khrushchev, who couldn’t hold his tongue, now
they say, ‘Détente.’<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>In order to make this clear, I
will take the liberty of presenting a short historic survey—the history of
these relations which in different periods have been called, ‘trade,’ ‘stabilization
of the situation,’ ‘recognition of realities,’ and now ‘détente.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These relations have at least a forty year
history.<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>Let me remind you with </i>what
kind <i>of system relations began [the Soviet System].<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>The system was installed by an armed uprising.<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>It dispersed the Constituent
Assembly.<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>It capitulated to Germany—the common
enemy.<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>It introduced punishment and
execution without trial through the Cheka [Secret Police].<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>It crushed workers’ strikes.<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>It plundered the countryside to
such and unbelievable extent that the peasants revolted, and when this happened
it crushed the peasants in the bloodiest possible manner.<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>It smashed the Church. <o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>It reduced twenty provinces of
our country to utter famine.<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>This was in 1921, the infamous
Volga famine. It was a typical Communist technique: to struggle for power
without thinking of the fact that the productivity is collapsing, that the
fields are not being sown, that the factories stand idle, that the country is
sinking into poverty and famine—but when poverty and hunger do come, then turn
to the humanitarian world for help.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
see this in North Vietnam today, Portugal is on the same path.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the same thing happened in Russia in
1921.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When the three-year civil war,
started by the Communists—and ‘civil war’ was a slogan of the Communists, civil
war was Lenin’s purpose; read Lenin, this was his aim and his slogan—when they
had ruined Russia by civil war, then they asked America, ‘America, feed our
hungry.’ And indeed, generous and magnanimous America did feed our hungry…<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>…This was a system which was the
first—long before Hitler—to employ false announcements of registration, that is
to say: ‘Such and such persons must appear to register.’ People would comply
and then they were taken away to be killed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For technical reasons we didn’t have gas chambers in those days.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We used barges.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A hundred or a thousand persons were put into
a barge and then it was sunk…<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>…This was a system which
exterminated all other parties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And let
me make it clear to you that it not only disbanded each party, but destroyed
its members.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All members of every non-Communist
party were exterminated.<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>This was a system which carried
out genocide of the peasantry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fifteen
million peasants were shipped off to their deaths.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>This was a system which introduced
serfdom, the so-called passport system.<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i>This was a system which, in time
of peace, artificially created a famine, causing six million persons to die in
the Ukraine between 1932 and 1933.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
died on the very threshold of Europe. And Europe didn’t even notice it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The world didn’t even notice it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Six million persons!<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Keep all this in mind. The media narrative ignores Antifa, their destruction, and their arrogance while tacitly excusing their ideology.</span></p><p></p>Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-48386478225012847492021-07-09T19:28:00.004-07:002021-07-09T19:51:44.758-07:00Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West, Part II<p><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeZIgufx7YFGlZ30ISzIgpCvp0aCOSrIydo6esCxQw6Y5vMpk2bptAt4BMEXFhQ_ZDC9lldCEu3YrFUNEG46MAjADta0aISoPuwfDrjLPBXqFWQWSwzmG-FsF4WhzPaKRcH2wzKAbIvJA/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: times;"><img alt="" data-original-height="380" data-original-width="554" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeZIgufx7YFGlZ30ISzIgpCvp0aCOSrIydo6esCxQw6Y5vMpk2bptAt4BMEXFhQ_ZDC9lldCEu3YrFUNEG46MAjADta0aISoPuwfDrjLPBXqFWQWSwzmG-FsF4WhzPaKRcH2wzKAbIvJA/" width="320" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="background: white; color: #050505; font-family: times; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 107%;">Night 2 of the
series of selections from Solzhenitsyn's "Warning to the West",
published in 1976. This is part of his speech to the AFL-CIO on 30 June 1975.</span><span style="font-family: times; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="font-family: times;">Solzhenitsyn had just survived 10 years in
the Soviet Gulags, and had been exiled from his homeland.</span><span style="font-family: times; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="font-family: times;">He wrote the </span><i style="font-family: times;">Gulag Archipelago</i><span style="font-family: times;"> and won
a Nobel Prize for doing so, back when that award had some meaning.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><span style="background: white; color: #050505; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Let me remind you of a recent incident which some of you may
have read about in the newspapers, although others might have missed it:
certain of your businessmen, on their own initiative, set up an exhibit of
criminological technology in Moscow. This was the most recent and elaborate technology that here, in your country, is
used to catch criminals, to bug them, to spy on them, to photograph them, to
tail them, to identify them. It was all
put on exhibit in Moscow in order that the Soviet KGB agents could study it, as
if the businessmen did not understand what sort of criminals would be hunted
down by the KGB.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><span style="background: white; color: #050505; line-height: 107%;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><span style="background: white; color: #050505; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The Soviet government was extremely interested in this technology
and decided to purchase it. And your businessmen
were quite willing to sell it. Only when
a few sober voices here raised an uproar against it was this deal
blocked. But you must realize how clever
the KGB is. This technology didn’t have
to stay two or three weeks in a Soviet building under Soviet guard. Two or three nights were enough for the KGB to
examine and copy it. And if today,
persons are being hunted down by the best and most advanced technology, for
this I can also thank you, Western capitalists.</span><span style="font-size: 11.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><span style="background: white; color: #050505; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: times;">Think of what happened in Hong Kong last year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How the CCP completely steam rolled that
entire island, despite their promises of 1997.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They used American technology to create biometrics and roll up an entire
opposition, deport them to the mainland, and imprison them in Gulags…<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: times;">Just like the 1920s in the USSR.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’ve allowed our elites to do this once.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Silicon valley is fucking doing it
again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sit up and take notice.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: times;">-Unclean</span><o:p></o:p></p><span style="font-size: large;"><b></b></span><p></p>Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-34184812067134762542021-07-08T21:54:00.001-07:002021-07-09T19:29:52.946-07:00Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West, Part I<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixZdRTTjqTK2Gvkk9NreoTU8mZ_48JxYI7Rs36tQ6CW-2l7w0No6G3iPljh0vTyat2CB-1kwi7NYI-O-Yp78hqK97P41x6m7EYEELYt5cumraku5MJ9KcBv_cA2JfnxhVHtbzwbYwP4QY/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><img alt="" data-original-height="380" data-original-width="507" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixZdRTTjqTK2Gvkk9NreoTU8mZ_48JxYI7Rs36tQ6CW-2l7w0No6G3iPljh0vTyat2CB-1kwi7NYI-O-Yp78hqK97P41x6m7EYEELYt5cumraku5MJ9KcBv_cA2JfnxhVHtbzwbYwP4QY/" width="320" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In 1975-1976, Alexandr Solzhenistyn, Nobel Peace Prize
winner (back when it still had some meaning) spoke to UFL-CIO gatherings in the
United States, and was allowed on the BBC in the United Kingdom. Someone transcribed those speeches into a
compendium that was published in 1976 as "Warning to the West".</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Ruth bought this compendium for me last month in honor of
Fathers' Day, and I read it furiously for about three days. I sat on it, and I can't do so any further,
because you need to read what this man, who spent a decade in the Gulag, had to
say regarding the expectations of a downtrodden people of the free folk in the
United States. What he describes, his
predictions, and the method in which he describes it, should be imparted to
every free man as a caution. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Without further ado, I transcribe a selected portion of the
speech that Solzhenitsyn gave to the AFL-CIO in Washington D.C. on 30 June
1975.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-family: verdana;">At the beginning of the
Revolution, all those in the leadership, the Central Committee of the Communist
Party, were émigré intellectuals who had returned after disturbances had
already broken out in Russia to carry out the Communist Revolution.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-family: verdana;">But one of them was a genuine
worker, a highly skilled lathe operator until the last day of his life,
Alexander Shliapnikov. Who is familiar
with that name today? And yet it was he
who expressed the true interests of the workers within the Communist
leadership. <o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-family: verdana;">In the years before the
Revolution, it was Shliapnikov who ran the whole Communist Party in Russia—not Lenin,
who was an émigré. In 1921, he headed
the Workers’ Opposition, which charged that the Communist leadership had
betrayed the interests of the workers, that is was crushing and oppressing the
proletariat, and had degenerated into a bureaucracy.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-family: verdana;">Shliapnikov disappeared from
sight. He was arrested later, and since
he firmly stood his ground he was shot in prison; his name is perhaps unknown
to most people here today. But I remind
you: before the Revolution, the head of the Communist Party of Russia was
Shlipnikov—not Lenin.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-family: verdana;">Since that time, the working
class has never been able to stand up for its rights and, in contrast to all
the Western countries, our working class receives only handouts. It cannot defend its simplest, everyday
interests, and the least strike for pay or for better living conditions is viewed
as counter-revolutionary. Thanks to the
closed nature of the Soviet system, you have probably never heard of the
textile strikes in 1930 in Ivanovo, or of the 1961 worker unrest in Murom and
Alexandrovo, or of the major workers’ uprising in Novocherkassk in 1962—this was
in Khrushchev’s time, well after the so-called “thaw”.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-family: verdana;">The story of this uprising will
shortly be told in detail in my book, <u>The Gulag Archipelago III</u>. It is a story of how workers went in peaceful
demonstration to the Novocherkassk party headquarters, carrying portraits of
Lenin, to request a change in economic conditions. They were fired on with machineguns and
dispersed with tanks. No family could
even collect its wounded and dead; all were taken away in secret by the
authorities…<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-family: verdana;">…In 1947, when liberal thinkers
and wise men of the West, who had forgotten the meaning of the word “liberty,”
were swearing that there were no concentration camps in the Soviet Union at
all, the American Federation of Labor published a map of [Soviet] concentration
camps, and on behalf of all prisoners of those times, I want to thank the
American workers’ movement for this. <o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-family: verdana;">But just as we feel ourselves
your allies here, there also exists another alliance—at first glance a strange
and surprising one, but if you think about it, one which is well-founded and
easy to understand: this is the alliance between our Communist leaders and your
capitalists.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-family: verdana;">This alliance is not new. The very famous Armand Hammer, [a
businessman] who flourishes here today, laid the basis for this when he made
the first exploratory trip to Soviet Russia in Lenin’s time, in the very first
years of the Revolution. He was
extremely successful in his reconnaissance mission and ever since then, for all
these fifty years, we see continuous and steady support by the businessmen of
the West for the Soviet Communist leaders.
The clumsy and awkward Soviet economy, which could never cope with its
difficulties on its own, is continually getting material and technological
assistance. The major construction
projects in the initial five-year plan were built exclusively with American technology
and materials. Even Stalin recognized
that two-thirds of what was needed was obtained from the West. And if today the Soviet Union has powerful military
and police forces—in a country which is poor by contemporary standards—forces
which are used to crush our movement for freedom in the Soviet Union—we have
Western capital to thank for this as well…<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Here is a man talking 45 years ago about something that
happened 104 years ago that is currently happening right now between the global
corporations and the Chinese Communist Party.
We’ve fucking been here before, and we don’t need to do it again. More tomorrow. Thanks for reading to the end.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">-Unclean<o:p></o:p></span></p><p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: verdana;"> <o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p><br /></p>Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-24580049888437277442021-06-28T02:28:00.000-07:002021-06-28T02:28:11.844-07:00The Desert Whispers<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW05rmrdEe-LL3Rizhrrhl7ZP5FAAC0MlQn-7Q0KhfCzkc47cXfxoEb0ifAlqJjqMJUQH09MlG9qkZqjz8VvXF4k1dZYOzcr7QBUSxnj6SeK_prPv1ub78irdpFckZRX9bJf4qfX-ocsQ/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="408" data-original-width="612" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW05rmrdEe-LL3Rizhrrhl7ZP5FAAC0MlQn-7Q0KhfCzkc47cXfxoEb0ifAlqJjqMJUQH09MlG9qkZqjz8VvXF4k1dZYOzcr7QBUSxnj6SeK_prPv1ub78irdpFckZRX9bJf4qfX-ocsQ/" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p>Full of life, burdened by it, and overserved, I ventured outside.</p><p>Searching for the voice of one long shed of this mortal coil.</p><p>The desert whispered.</p><p>"She's gone, but I am here. I've always been here. I'll always be here."</p><p>I listened.</p><p>"Why do you carry these burdens?" She whispered.</p><p>"They are mine to bear," said I brashly, "what business is it of yours anyway?"</p><p>"Why, I am here to take them from you," she said. "I am here to focus your mind", she whispered.</p><p>I sat there, stock still, listening. My mind revolting in anger at the world, at the desert.</p><p>"Be still," she whispered.</p><p>"I have been here since the world was formed. I am here to sharpen you. You cannot win o'er me, nor can you win o'er the problems of the world. I am here to focus your mind. It is cool now, the moon is up and the stars are splayed across the sky in a miracle for all to see. Why do you struggle against me? Do I not show you the infinite each night? Do I not focus your mind each day? Why do you come to me with such resentment?"</p><p>"I suffer." I said, weakly.</p><p>"All suffer," the desert whispered. "To suffer is to be mortal. I am here as a stone, to sharpen you. You can choose to succumb, or you can choose to accept what will be and live."</p><p>"What will be?", I asked.</p><p>"I will challenge you," she whispered. "I will make the simple difficult and the complex impossible. Whether you accept what will be, and learn from it is your choice. I am reality. I do not bend. Make your choice."</p><p>"If I do as you say and accept this, what assurances do I have that I will be happy?", I begged.</p><p>"None. Reality is not constructed in that manner. I am." </p><p>She whispered.</p>Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-44795617804147600962021-05-31T16:05:00.005-07:002021-05-31T16:05:55.471-07:00Memorial Day, 2021<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikPcwkI7m1dc7uUvPPGY8uEQDsH0cGlgjZhVaeuOB3hHscgL2sfZUgq6Jj0IDJp1a2kFVfzL6vZwALhdl-pdPuzwjVVf-i6srCOvGveWxhVPI63u77k3iAT7_qVBpyWtZitJYIWfL0VzA/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="700" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikPcwkI7m1dc7uUvPPGY8uEQDsH0cGlgjZhVaeuOB3hHscgL2sfZUgq6Jj0IDJp1a2kFVfzL6vZwALhdl-pdPuzwjVVf-i6srCOvGveWxhVPI63u77k3iAT7_qVBpyWtZitJYIWfL0VzA/" width="320" /></a></div><br /> On this day, each of us has a story. We've seen the price paid that we all freely agreed to go ourselves. Each of us has witnessed the tragedy and suffering that resulted. This day, we put quarrals aside and deal with loss. That is proper, and I offer the following.<p></p><p>The concept of "sacrifice" is a deep one. Men have written thousands of pages about the idea. It can be glibly described as "putting off immediate gratification for future gain". But those of us who've been so close to this particular fire knows that it's so much deeper than that. Our brothers endured that fire for us. Being a part of that has certain moral imperatives that are unfamiliar to many in this modern society. </p><p>Having seen what we've seen, that imperative is that we each get our own sacrifice right in recognition of their larger sacrifice. The things we do every day, the setting aside of proximal comfort in recognition of future potential. We have to live our lives in such a way so as to earn what they have freely and finally given to us.</p><p>And so, as I sit here and get morosely drunk over a period of several hours, I will ask myself questions: "Is my sacrifice deep enough to honor them? How should I change my behavior to make that sacrifice good enough to justify what they gave to me?"</p><p>I haven't found the bottom of that particular well, but I dig at it as much as I can. This is the day to do so, and these Americans are the best reason to do so. I urge you to kick it around on your own, apply these things to what motivates you to become better. Throw that burden on your back and own it as you walk your path, with as much grace as you can muster. That is the lesson that they've left for us, and the best way to represent ourselves to their memory. </p><p>Momento mori, my friends. </p>Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-55554273341143909482021-04-18T11:22:00.000-07:002021-04-18T11:22:13.791-07:00"The Wanderer"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvke80C2lDKC0ttRqfXyjQLsEH23Z-Y87wtigvBmGtvg-J7Ozfe2xvJIyN9VdZpE2HqtpT6mRQ_rNPSbjqF_HciRD86weIvHnkr7moYBUeE4jotf_pGLvdtjgtSc6Nk78ur-A2BGFGiBg/s426/UncleanInHarness.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="426" data-original-width="414" height="368" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvke80C2lDKC0ttRqfXyjQLsEH23Z-Y87wtigvBmGtvg-J7Ozfe2xvJIyN9VdZpE2HqtpT6mRQ_rNPSbjqF_HciRD86weIvHnkr7moYBUeE4jotf_pGLvdtjgtSc6Nk78ur-A2BGFGiBg/w476-h368/UncleanInHarness.PNG" width="476" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>"The Wanderer"</p><p>[A poem from the fifth or sixth century A.D., written by an Anglo-Saxon warrior, contemplating his life after "many winters". I urge you to read it as deeply as it deserves, and then read it again. As the author concludes, faith is the only saving grace we are given.]</p><blockquote style="background-color: #f7f6f1; border-left: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #656565; direction: ltr; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 1.375em; padding: 0.5625em 1.25em 0px 1.1875em;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 1.375em; max-width: 38em; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;">Often the lonely receives love,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />The Creator’s help, though heavy with care<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Over the sea he suffers long<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Stirring his hands in the frosty swell,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />The way of exile. Fate never wavers.</p></blockquote><p style="background-color: #f7f6f1; box-sizing: border-box; color: #181818; direction: ltr; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 1.375em; max-width: 38em; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;"></p><blockquote style="background-color: #f7f6f1; border-left: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #656565; direction: ltr; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 1.375em; padding: 0.5625em 1.25em 0px 1.1875em;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 1.375em; max-width: 38em; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;">The wanderer spoke; he told his sorrows,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />The deadly onslaughts, the death of the clan,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />“At dawn alone I must<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Mouth my cares; the man does not live<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Whom I dare tell my depths<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Straight out. I see truth<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />In the lordly custom for the courageous man<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />To bind fast his breast, loyal<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />To his treasure closet, thoughts aside.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />The weary cannot control fate<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Nor do bitter thoughts settle things.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />The eager for glory often bind<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Something bloody close to their breasts.</p></blockquote><p style="background-color: #f7f6f1; box-sizing: border-box; color: #181818; direction: ltr; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 1.375em; max-width: 38em; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;"></p><blockquote style="background-color: #f7f6f1; border-left: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #656565; direction: ltr; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 1.375em; padding: 0.5625em 1.25em 0px 1.1875em;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 1.375em; max-width: 38em; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;">“Wretched, I tie my heart with ropes<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Far from my home, far from my kinsmen<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Since a hole in the ground hid my chief<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Long ago. Laden with cares,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Weary, I crossed the confine of waves,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Sought the troop of a dispenser of treasure,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Far or near to find the man<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Who knew my merits in the mead hall,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Who would foster a friendless man,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Treat me to joys. He who has put it to a test<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Knows how cruel a companion is sorrow<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />For one who has few friendly protectors.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Exile guards him, not wrought gold,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />A freezing heart, not the fullness of the earth.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />He remembers warriors, the hall, rewards,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />How, as a youth, his friend honored him at feasts,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />The gold-giving prince. Joy has perished,</p></blockquote><p style="background-color: #f7f6f1; box-sizing: border-box; color: #181818; direction: ltr; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 1.375em; max-width: 38em; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;"></p><blockquote style="background-color: #f7f6f1; border-left: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #656565; direction: ltr; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 1.375em; padding: 0.5625em 1.25em 0px 1.1875em;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 1.375em; max-width: 38em; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;">“He knows how it is to suffer long<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Without the beloved wisdom of a friendly lord.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Often when sorrow and sleep together<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Bind the worn lonely warrior<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />It seems in his heart that he holds and kisses<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />The lord of the troop and lays on his knee<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />His head and hands as he had before<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />In times gone by at the gift-giver’s throne.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />When the friendless warrior awakens again<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />He sees before him the black waves,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Sea birds bathing, feathers spreading,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Frost and snow falling with hail.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />The wounds of his heart are heavier,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Sore after his friends. Sorrow is renewed<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />When the mind ponders the memory of kinsmen;<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />He greets them with joy; he anxiously grasps<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />For something to say. They swim away again.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />The breasts of ghosts do not bring the living<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Much wisdom. Woe is renewed<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />For him who must send his weary heart<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Way out over the prison of waves.</p></blockquote><p style="background-color: #f7f6f1; box-sizing: border-box; color: #181818; direction: ltr; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 1.375em; max-width: 38em; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;"></p><blockquote style="background-color: #f7f6f1; border-left: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #656565; direction: ltr; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 1.375em; padding: 0.5625em 1.25em 0px 1.1875em;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 1.375em; max-width: 38em; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;">“Therefore in this world I cannot think of a reason<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Why my soul does not blacken when I seriously consider<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />All the warriors, tested at war,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />How they suddenly sank to the floor,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />The brave kinsmen. But this world<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Every day falls to dust.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />No man is wise until he lives many winters<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />In the kingdom of the world.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />The wise must be patient,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Never too hasty with feelings nor too hot with words<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Nor too weak as a warrior nor too witlessly brash<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Nor too fearful nor too ready nor too greedy for reward<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Nor even too feverish for boasting until testing his fibre.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />A man should wait before he makes a vow<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Until, like a true warrior, he eagerly tests<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Which way the courage of his heart will course.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />The good warrior must understand how ghostly it will be<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />When all this world of wealth stands wasted<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />As now in many places about this massive earth<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Walls stand battered by the wind,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Covered by frost, the roofs collapsed.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />The wine halls crumbled; the warriors lie dead,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Cut off from joy; the great troop all crumpled<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Proud by the wall. One war took,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Led to his death. One a bird lifted<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Over the high sea. One the hoary wolf<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Broke with death. One, bloody-cheeked,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />A warrior hid in a hole in the ground.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Likewise God destroyed this earthly dwelling<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Until the strongholds of the giants stood empty,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Without the sounds of joy of the city-dwellers.”</p></blockquote><p style="background-color: #f7f6f1; box-sizing: border-box; color: #181818; direction: ltr; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 1.375em; max-width: 38em; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;"></p><blockquote style="background-color: #f7f6f1; border-left: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #656565; direction: ltr; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 1.375em; padding: 0.5625em 1.25em 0px 1.1875em;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 1.375em; max-width: 38em; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;">Then the wise man thinks about the wall<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />And deeply considers this dark life.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />From times far away the wanderer recalls<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />The deadly slashes and says,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />“What happened to the horse? What happened to the war-<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /> rior? What happened to the gift-giver?<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />What happened to the wine hall? Where are the sounds of<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /> joy?<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Ea-la bright beaker! Ea-la byrnied warrior!<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Ea-la the chiefs majesty! How those moments went,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Grayed in the night as if they never were!<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />A wall still stands near the tracks of the warriors,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Wondrously high! Worms have stained it.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />A host of spears hungry for carnage<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Destroyed the men, that marvelous fate!<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Storms beat these stone cliffs,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />A blanket of frost binds the earth,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Winter is moaning! When the mists darken<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />And night descends, the north delivers<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />A fury of hail in hatred at men.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />All is wretched in the realm of the earth;<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />The way of fate changes the world under heaven.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /> Here is treasure lent, here is a friend lent,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /> Here is a man lent, here is a kinsman lent.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /> All of the earth will be empty!”</p></blockquote><p style="background-color: #f7f6f1; box-sizing: border-box; color: #181818; direction: ltr; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 1.375em; max-width: 38em; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;"></p><blockquote style="background-color: #f7f6f1; border-left: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #656565; direction: ltr; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 1.375em; padding: 0.5625em 1.25em 0px 1.1875em;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; direction: ltr; font-family: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px 0px 1.375em; max-width: 38em; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;">So spoke the wise in heart; he sits alone with his mystery.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />He is good to keep faith; grief must never escape<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />A man’s heart too quickly unless with his might like a true<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /> warrior<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />He has sought a lasting boon. It is best for him who seeks love,<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Help from the heavenly Father where all stands firm.</p></blockquote><p><br /></p>Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-37540338755510635812021-02-13T03:05:00.002-08:002021-02-13T03:09:02.382-08:00 Passive Non-Compliance.<p><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK6I5gFLon_hKiF21Q5aQdV5FyqPKlAi-dwFDQhdDv4Vo6oAbH-yrv-rgrWW1M3b1Hn1Z5mBRE5Zldz5PMSOqSFMVg-w1IBy0JZu3QI3HWk_hwwWmsrnFsxPHMScWShhHDDzqkvBKpmwI/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="295" data-original-width="300" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK6I5gFLon_hKiF21Q5aQdV5FyqPKlAi-dwFDQhdDv4Vo6oAbH-yrv-rgrWW1M3b1Hn1Z5mBRE5Zldz5PMSOqSFMVg-w1IBy0JZu3QI3HWk_hwwWmsrnFsxPHMScWShhHDDzqkvBKpmwI/" width="244" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">An instruction manual.</span></p><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">Okay, so you've been told to do a number of things which are impossible to do simultaneously by a number of different governing organizations that are staffed by incompetent people.</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">Ah! So I see that you've run up against the US federal government. </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">Well, I've been in the service of this organization for almost 27 years, and I'm here to help you parse this out. </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">First, stop doing something that you've been trained to do like a lab rat since you were young: stop assuming that they know something you don't. They don't. In fact, by virtue of the fact that you care about various issues and have access to an internet, you probably know more than they do about this random subject. Make your own decision and stop caring about their outrage.</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">Next, stop assuming they want the best for you, they don't care about you. They care about their job. Not only are they ignorant, they're also incompetent despite being provided cogent data. Do your own research, come to your own conclusions, and live your life as best you can.</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">Next, learn to not give a fuck about their outrage. You're smarter and more capable than them. You've done your research and have decided to act in a specific manner that may be counter to what they have imposed on you by some fiat. Their fiat does not trump your intelligence, competence, or ability to decide what is the best course of action. Do whatever the fuck you decide, and ride out the consequences. </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">This is not limited to the current pandemic bullshit. This includes everything in your life. Stop being a lemming. The idiot at the front of the lemming formation is just as clueless as the rest of the lemmings and will lead us all off a cliff if we let them. </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">Fortunately, your unique ability as an individual to decide how to act in a manner that serves your long term self-interests, and those of your family, your community, and your state, allows you to do whatever the fuck you want to do. Allow me to quote James Madison, who wasn't a lawyer either, but wrote the fucking US Constitution: </div><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">"Amendment IX: <span style="font-family: inherit;">The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."</span></div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="animation-name: none; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; transition-property: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none;">Passive non-compliance is awesome. I've been doing it since I was a 1st Lieutenant. It's fucking liberating. Fuck 'em. Do what you want to do.</div></div>Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-53831325456128121002021-02-08T23:37:00.001-08:002021-06-24T21:48:45.170-07:00Religion, Part II<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2GctKpNn5xRAJ0bkz3qtoBoMvNe_vYlappPNfOjIAk1rQHj_YF1HzKnXiECx67b_xTvAXA6Z0yT6hlRyvWjognC3sCo80iHvbICiig26lE_fVT1aXZaT5CeH3U1SYb1R3J65mnFkP-PU/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="351" data-original-width="480" height="330" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2GctKpNn5xRAJ0bkz3qtoBoMvNe_vYlappPNfOjIAk1rQHj_YF1HzKnXiECx67b_xTvAXA6Z0yT6hlRyvWjognC3sCo80iHvbICiig26lE_fVT1aXZaT5CeH3U1SYb1R3J65mnFkP-PU/w451-h330/image.png" width="451" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p>[Find part one here: <a href="https://fearfiles.blogspot.com/2021/02/religion.html" target="_blank">Religion</a>]</p><p>"Conscience" is the revaltion of morality.</p><p>"Transcendence" is the hyper-resolution of an experience that elevates one above mere existence. It is the swift, sharp kick to the head that alters our perceptions and informs our morality. So, to tie that concept into my last post, one can translate that as "transcendence realigning one's priorities." One can see from this that transcendence can be of critical importance for us. The search for transcendence seems to be relatively constant across cultures, across demographics within cultures, even though it takes on many, many forms. Transcendence is different for each of us. Some find it in music, others find it in cooking, some in mathematics. As far as I can tell, few of us have not found something transcendent. It is as universal as truth or morality.</p><p>So, how do you prioritize your life? What truths do you find meaningful? How does the employment of those truths in pursuit of your morality manifest itself? That is your religion. It doesn't matter that you identify as an anarcho-communist-nihilist. That doesn't mean that you have no religion, because that state-of-being actually defines the religion that you're acting out. The a-priori structure that you're demonstrating simply belies the fact that you are expressing the exact same solution-set as a priest or pastor does.</p><p>This solution-set, completely independent of belief structure, is the answer to the ubiquitous question: "How should I behave?" How one pursues that behavior set is a religion. One who steadfastly maintains that there "is no God", and "believes in nussing", is just as religious as the most zealous pastor, priest, rabbi or imam. That individual is pursuing a morality, based on accepted truths, and conducts himself according to a corresponding ethical code. How could it be any different? Despite that individual's "identity", he has DNA and that genetic code has been passed down for several million years in a very specific manner. This a-priori structure is ubiquitous within the human experience. </p><p>So I believe that Christ is the "way and the life", why is my religion good? Because pain equalizes us all. I dare you to argue against it. If pain exists, then something opposite has to exist. That "opposite" is transcendence. The elevation above the pain. What is described in the Bible is the story of how to live, stories told many times over and from various perspectives. If one accepts that the most awesome superhero is a guy who did nothing wrong, but who consciously volunteered to be betrayed by his friends, denied by his church, and tortured to death by his government, so that he could sacrifice himself to atone for the inherent fallibility of all mankind, then one might be aiming at an example that is worthy of following. If one understands that each individual is made in the image of the creator, then one might be able to judge each individual according to his character. If each individual should act in a manner in Christ's example, then society becomes enriched incrementally, as each individual lives up to his potential. I can't see a downside to that, and societies that have encouraged those criteria have been wildly successful in providing their citizens with the resources that are required to remain free. </p><p>On the other end of this, each society that has chosen to disavow God or fail to live up to Christ's example have resulted in corruption of its leadership, wholesale slaughter of its citizenry, and the destruction of truth and ethics, while attempting to redraw morality in a manner that doesn't recognize the inherent divinity of the individual. In those nations, transcendence is only possible by becoming an enemy of the state. See: Solzhenitsyn, Gandhi, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. </p><p>Moreover, individuals who choose to pursue a morality that is counter to the tenets of Judeo-Christianity generally find themselves bereft of meaning (unable to identify truth, or deny that any truth exists). If there is no truth, no ethics, and a denial of morality, then how does a goal-oriented individual function? For what does one aim to achieve? </p><p>That last question, to my mind, gets down to the bottom of this. If you are not striving in a manner that serves your family, your community, while you grow by your sacrifice for something other than yourself, then how does the "religion" that you're serving improve anything? To quote Tyler, "Those things that you own, end up owning you", unless those things serve some overarching purpose to drive forward and assist you in achieving your purpose, that reinforce the meaning of your life, that allow you to transcend the suffering of this mortal coil in that pursuit of purpose and meaning. </p><p>"Religion" involves picking up a burden, and carrying it, with as much grace as one can summon. It isn't about your "inalienable rights". It is about your inescapable responsibility to yourself, to your family, and to your fellow man. </p><p>Such is my perception.</p><p>Unclean</p>Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-61740340901991695952021-02-07T20:32:00.001-08:002021-02-07T20:34:38.016-08:00 Religion<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPVbZE5VExCoHdmvQ45UdiQOaNVQZsa45uYI0pZ1V3TRVlMfvtmugXq73zv87jrT-fsoMLBC-QeRyYBb4rMYdRePJCsVsstsvanjc60ZvdXgV2CKjE2VD-bhrudducDcsZ2X6ogNrngqs/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="236" data-original-width="450" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPVbZE5VExCoHdmvQ45UdiQOaNVQZsa45uYI0pZ1V3TRVlMfvtmugXq73zv87jrT-fsoMLBC-QeRyYBb4rMYdRePJCsVsstsvanjc60ZvdXgV2CKjE2VD-bhrudducDcsZ2X6ogNrngqs/" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p>So here we are at last. The central question. </p><p>I spent many years, mostly in my 20's and 30's, in a state that can most accurately be described as "agnostic". I had some fundamental issues with the idea of the Christianity that I had learned as a child. I think that, as I look back through the years, that idea was communicated to me in a very inaccurate and ham-handed manner. "Believe this or you're fucked" is not the right way to perceive the teachings within the Bible, nor is it an effective way of communicating the lessons of Christ. Yes, He did say "no one comes to the Father except through me", but that wasn't the explicit threat of damnation that was sold to me by my parents and some of my pastors coming up, and I wish they had framed the problem in a more realistic manner. I seek to do so now, and I apologize with all my heart for not having resolved this sooner. </p><p>Before I go any further, we need to define a few things, at least as far as I've been able to deterimine their definitions:</p><p>1) Morality: The thoughtful layout of what one prioritizes in thought and action. </p><p>2) Truth: An idea that, if one strictly adheres to, results in meaning or purpose. A tool by which one structures the reality that one perceives.</p><p>3) Ethics: The method in which one employs truth to realize meaning, and thus live as a moral human being.</p><p>So one can see the interplay between these three concepts. If one's priorities are fucked, then one is not aiming at a target that will be either fulfilling or meaningful. If one can't discern the truth, one can't shape reality in a manner that results in a satisfactory purpose. If one has no ethical structure, then one cannot therefore use truth in a meaningful way to reinforce or realize those things that one has identified as important in life. </p><p>I can't believe that I've not thought deeply enough about these things to understand them in this fashion. It has literally has been under my nose for almost thirty years.</p><p>Consider Aristotlean Ethics. It's not a moral code. It simply instructs how to employ the truth in such a fashion as to mitigate harmful behavior while increasing the chances of using truth to perceive reality in an unbiased manner. Kant's "universal imperative" is very much like this. I think that's why I've gravitated towards those ethical paradigms since I first heard them in my early 20's. It's the same reason that Christianity strikes me as truth, and it's very much why I took to listening to Dr. Peterson several years ago. </p><p>There is an a-priori structure within us that is so deep within our neurology that it's almost autonomic. There are concepts that are so basic that we don't even question them. "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game." What the fuck does that mean?</p><p>"Always make a good first impression." Well, no shit. But why is that so important?</p><p>Well, in the first example about "playing the game right", we're teaching our children that it's not important that you're skilled at something, but it is critically important that you treat your peers in a respectful manner, so that you'll be chosen to play as many games as possible throughout your life. </p><p>The second example is truly a throwback to how deeply seeded our initial perceptions are. It's not higher-brain functions that comprise a "good first impression", it's so much deeper. If you haven't seen this, go on a web search-engine and look up "cats and cucumber videos". You'll see that cats have a primal reaction to cucumbers because they initially perceive them as snakes, and they're scared shitless of them when somebody puts one on the ground behind them, even though they've never seen a snake. Lab studies of common rats will show that one can waft the odor of a cat through a rat cage, even though that rat has never encountered a cat, and the rat will go back into his den and scream for two whole days (which, when considering the life span of a common rat is like you or I doing that for a solid week.) First impressions are lasting for this same reason. A species of "featherless bipeds" (AKA "Homeo Sapiens") did not consolidate its hold on the top predator rung for the past million-or-so years unless we had some next-level instincts. Among those instincts is the ability to spot an asshole on first sight. So there you go. There is your a-priori structure.</p><p>So what are the implications of this a-priori structure? Aside from threat-identification, I really think that we have a proclivity to manifest our behavior in such a manner that we are drawn toward truth, and we tend to structure our morality in a manner that draws us to purpose and meaning. I don't think that it's an accident that our perceived-reality is structured as "chaos" and "order", while the left and right hemispheres of our brain are manifested to process reality in that exact duality. </p><p>I think that what I've argued thus far is enough for one sitting. It lays the basis for the instanciation of religion. The implications of that instanciation will be the next chapter. Please stand by.</p><p>Unclean </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-29990351629182844572021-01-30T19:19:00.000-08:002021-01-30T19:19:24.989-08:00Isaac<p><span style="font-size: large;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKsf5PF3HgzMjD1LjQzwZLb5eM24sm_Zphc2O9jd-ipRYTX8c2-Vm8vhdC-d_b_dD0VLIjF4kJu84I3hf2XgtuZ945Nl08yXIEZoYw4APOA9xU-L5RdnW1i6NGKd1Ljuxcwi9FEGSvhwE/s745/Abraham-and-Isaac.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><img border="0" data-original-height="745" data-original-width="602" height="512" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKsf5PF3HgzMjD1LjQzwZLb5eM24sm_Zphc2O9jd-ipRYTX8c2-Vm8vhdC-d_b_dD0VLIjF4kJu84I3hf2XgtuZ945Nl08yXIEZoYw4APOA9xU-L5RdnW1i6NGKd1Ljuxcwi9FEGSvhwE/w455-h512/Abraham-and-Isaac.jpg" width="455" /></span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><p style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Did some listening today. And some thinking. About old things, things that have driven our society forward for thousands of years, things that laid the foundation of this civilization. </span></span></p><p style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">One of these old stories has to do with the father of Judaism, Abraham, and what happened between him and his son (by Sarah), Isaac. </span></span></p><p style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">After a lengthy tale of hardship and toil, Abraham was told to sacrifice his son to God, and he willingly prepared to do so, to the point where God stepped in and told him "meh...nevermind".</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Or so I've always perceived. No explanation, no sermon has ever really satisfactorily satisfied me as to why this is crucial knowledge that would make sense within the canon of the Old Testament. I've never liked that story, never could get my head around it. For like 35 years. It's bothered me. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Well, I was "today years' old" when I finally figured out the lesson that I believe is behind the story. It is indeed tied to the idea of "sacrifice" but I think "sacrifice", in this case, was meant in a much broader sense. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Abraham was told to "sacrifice" his son to God, which seems a bit severe, seeing as how Abraham and Sarah were 100 years old when he was born and the mere existence of Isaac was a frickin' miracle to begin with. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">But in what sense was the concept of "sacrifice" used here?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">I think the lesson here is to understand that "sacrificing" one's own progeny is to forthrightly send them out into the world, thus exposing them to the cruelties that are manifest there, after teaching them to act in a proper manner, to strive to become as righteous as one is capable of, and to expect them to live up to those lessons while the parents themselves live up to the example that is inherent in those lessons. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">If one does so forthrightly, then the lesson taught to Abraham, and to us by extension, is that God will care for our children in a manner that will be better than even we, the parents, are capable of and in ways that we haven't really considered. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">It is necessary for every parent to do as Abraham did, to instruct our children properly, to demonstrate that behavior set, and when it is time, expose our children to the cruelty and malevolence of mankind with serenity and calmness. Because it is incumbent upon each of us to have faith as we do so; that God will care for them in ways that we haven't even thought about.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Thus is the lesson of Abraham and Isaac, as I've come to understand it. Let me know what you think.</span></p></div>Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-77552544540024043442020-12-26T01:39:00.002-08:002020-12-26T04:11:00.650-08:00Coriolanus<div abp="167" style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMwPQi6k7vmX4ZSW_ZdD4S10FLxi4-iU-dACL7Zw1FBbHmKjY02TXDxsXLGO0_4pBOiBd7FgZC6rfOkfoo_V6IgPUVf39RR9nZKUxbyjCA0prjMaQI3rrSvzXtfh46bsV9Bqycr6MiFCI/s1222/Coriolanus_1869.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="779" data-original-width="1222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMwPQi6k7vmX4ZSW_ZdD4S10FLxi4-iU-dACL7Zw1FBbHmKjY02TXDxsXLGO0_4pBOiBd7FgZC6rfOkfoo_V6IgPUVf39RR9nZKUxbyjCA0prjMaQI3rrSvzXtfh46bsV9Bqycr6MiFCI/s320/Coriolanus_1869.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><br /></div><br /><br /></div><div abp="167" style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div abp="167" style="text-align: left;">
There seems to be a war on, and I don't perceive that it's the same kind of war that most of us have trained for. This isn't a war against an external threat that threatens the borders of this nation. Nor am I referring to some shadow obviation of our fiat currency or technological security.</div>
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I am referring to the war that is currently being waged against the warriors who defend this nation. </div>
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It is, without a doubt, the most subtle battle that I've ever experienced, but there is a battle there nonetheless. I mean, I got the sense in February 1992, when the first edict out of the first Clinton administration was to "don't ask/don't tell" became a compromise to the wholesale legitimacy of homosexuality within the ranks of the military, that the actual ability of the military to suppress, close, and rip the throats out of our enemies was a secondary consideration in the upper-levels of the government. </div>
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I thought, as a young Captain, that the Clintons wished to weaken the military culture that they had despised since the 1960s.</div>
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I was so wrong. They didn't want to just "diversify" the military culture, they wanted to end it. The military culture in the United States is perhaps the oldest. It has hoary cultural traditions that are scary to this society, where any mode of behavior that is not closely supervised by some government bureaucrat is inherently dangerous and possibly suicidal. The dichotomy is kinda big and deserves it's own section...<br />
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<strong><em><u>The Difference </u></em></strong></div>
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It's not dishonorable, just thoughtless. All of us who have returned home face the inevitable... "Did you hafta kill anyone?" <br />
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Unfortunately, the sheer numbers of those who choose to enlist/commission, against those who won't, will not sustain a sufficient number of people to allow us to maintain the culture that we've managed to sustain since the nation was born. As a result, those who've had "skin in the game" become increasingly rare. As with Rome, fewer and fewer understand what it means to bleed for one's oath, for one's nation. As with Rome, once you've alienated those willing to bleed for you, you've lost the soul of the nation, since the willingness to do so is what binds us together as citizens.</div><div abp="167" style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div abp="167" style="text-align: left;">Martius (AKA "Coriolanus") teaches us that we should fight for what we believe no matter what. </div>
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[Brutus] <a abp="168" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3.3.143"><em>There's no more to be said, but he is banish'd,</em></a><br />
<a abp="170" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3.3.144"><em>As enemy to the people and his country:</em></a><br />
<a abp="172" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3.3.145"><em>It shall be so.</em></a></div>
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[The people] <a abp="7086" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3.3.146"><em>It shall be so, it shall be so.</em></a><br />
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[Coriolanus] <a abp="175" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3.3.147"><em>You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate</em></a><br />
<a abp="177" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3.3.148"><em>As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize</em></a><br />
<a abp="179" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3.3.149"><em>As the dead carcasses of unburied men</em></a><br />
<a abp="181" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3.3.150"><em>That do corrupt my air, I banish you;</em></a><br />
<a abp="183" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3.3.151"><em>And here remain with your uncertainty!</em></a><br />
<a abp="185" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3.3.152"><em>Let every feeble rumor shake your hearts!</em></a><br />
<a abp="187" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3.3.153"><em>Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,</em></a><br />
<a abp="189" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3.3.154"><em>Fan you into despair! Have the power still</em></a><br />
<a abp="191" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3.3.155"><em>To banish your defenders; till at length</em></a><br />
<a abp="193" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3.3.156"><em>Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels,</em></a><br />
<a abp="195" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3.3.157"><em>Making not reservation of yourselves,</em></a><br />
<a abp="197" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3.3.158"><em>Still your own foes, deliver you as most</em></a><br />
<a abp="199" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3.3.159"><em>Abated captives to some nation</em></a><br />
<a abp="201" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3.3.160"><em>That won you without blows! Despising,</em></a><br />
<a abp="203" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3.3.161"><em>For you, the city, thus I turn my back:</em></a><br />
<a abp="205" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="3.3.162"><em>There is a world elsewhere.</em></a></div>
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Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-79548849473102614012020-12-14T00:48:00.011-08:002021-09-06T01:46:05.457-07:00Though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness...<p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbII4nE-AZEZe40g28KJ8T8eqwmMVF4sueofTg-Vv2A5VAVgdJncRfIEdcFlLpHnQigfl-Fa5055rIMD5iZvW33oE2MaRb2jWuiNUJXRZOnj7jmTJHnk1o3V2VAVoMMCdOlIAq2eDPgoU/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="674" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbII4nE-AZEZe40g28KJ8T8eqwmMVF4sueofTg-Vv2A5VAVgdJncRfIEdcFlLpHnQigfl-Fa5055rIMD5iZvW33oE2MaRb2jWuiNUJXRZOnj7jmTJHnk1o3V2VAVoMMCdOlIAq2eDPgoU/w346-h299/image.png" width="346" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p>I remember feeling like I do right now back in 2012. I was in my rig (a white gov't 4x4 pickup truck), listening to AM talk-radio following the presidential election. </p><p>"Fuck 'em", I thought. "If this is the will of the people, let 'em come on and do what they're going to do. We'll see what happens after."</p><p>Trump happened after.</p><p>So now we have this here. One of the most instructive utilities of the Trump administration is the true exposure of how deep the establishment "swamp" runs. </p><p>Definitions are important, so let's get into the "Swamp" in this context. "Swamp", can be defined as the established global corporations who funnel billions of dollars worth of lobby money into the legislature, and even more billions of dollars worth of graft into paying off bureaucrats in the executive branch to serve their interests at the detriment to the electorate. While I have no readily available data indicating that such remarkable amounts of money are making it into the pockets of judges, to think that those worthies are immune to such graft is to deny a reasonable appreciation of human frailty in the face of overwhelming corruptive influences. Suffice to say that I will conject that the judiciary is in on this too, if only because I'm not naïve, and I've observed judicial behavior.</p><p><br /></p><p>The Swamp could not allow a second Trump administration. They've pulled out all the stops since the day he was inaugurated. On that day, numerous sages in the corporate media actually compared Trump to Hitler. You can't do that again. That's "11" on the volume knob, and they went there on DAY 1. They created a Russia narrative. They weaponized both the DoJ and the Intelligence Community to convince us that Trump was a Russian Asset, or to impeach him for doing something with the Ukraine which was actually true of his accusers.</p><p>They've emptied their vaults. They got in bed with China, allowed China to cultivate a virus and destroy the working class, and covered for China at every turn. This was the only course of action available to them in December of 2019.</p><p>In December of 2019, the GDP was somewhere around 3.9% (remember, we were told by the last President in 2011 that 1.8% growth in the GDP was "the new normal"). Working class wages, job availability, and minority unemployment were at the best that they ever had been. We have not deployed in support of a new war since Trump took office. The inner-cities were blooming unlike anything we'd seen since Eisenhower.</p><p>Then it all turned to shit. Wuhan Flu, George Floyd, manufactured crisis, anarchy and war in the streets...</p><p>And yet the Dow/Jones still thrives. Daily trading hit 30,000 in one day several weeks ago.</p><p>Small businesses crushed. Whole towns effectively destroyed. Local governments allowed their citizens to fend for themselves while being attacked in their homes and businesses. District Attorneys in every Democrat-majority city are allowing criminals to go free for almost anything short of class "A" felony. An electorate denied their relief through the social contract.</p><p>Yet Silicon Valley thrives. Amazon crushes all-time shipments. Netflix and streaming services flourish. Wal-Mart and Home Depot are killing it. Local stores are dying. Local restaurants and bars, bakeries and gyms, all of them are being crushed by government fiat. Think about that. Not because the people don't have the money or the desire to go there, but because the government has not favored them. How pissed would you be if that was your business? Where is the social contract here? Why did you pay taxes and pay for licenses for decades, if this was your end? </p><p>While the rich and powerful dine in comfort in trendy restaurants, I can't go with my wife when admitting her to the hospital for an afibrulated heart condition. She and I have to wait while she sits in the ER with no food and no rest for more than twelve hours, until they take her to a room. So that I can then talk to her through a closed window as she cries and suffers. </p><p>I walk through a small town that I've lived in for almost twenty years. I know it well, and yet I can't recognize folks whom I've known for years because we're all in masks to protect us from a virus that is fatal in less than .05% of those effected under the age of 60. (We joke at work that you're more likely to die from a shark attack in a port-a-shitter at Checkpoint 35 in the Prospect Training Area than from this.) Social distancing holds us aloof from one another. Masks rob us of our individuality. We default to suspicion of one another, resentment, mistrust.</p><p>Yet China had one of the best quarters in the past three years by exporting masks and medical equipment to the world that they infected.</p><p>There is one public figure who brought this about by pointing out that America was being cheated of her potential. To bring him down, they have crushed the working class, again, the same as they've done since China was allowed into the World Trade Organization in the early 1990s. </p><p>On my news feed, I see Bill Gates, Tony Fauci, and each talking head (employed by one of the multi-national corporations that own every news outlet) telling me that all of this is necessary. Just like NAFTA was "necessary". Just like JPCOA, the Paris Accords, and TPP were "necessary". Just like everything the establishment has ever done to us to sustain the impression that they know better than us, while taking what we have and are capable of making and sending it overseas. </p><p>That illusion was destroyed in 2017.</p><p>Say what you want about the man (but do it somewhere else, though. I've heard it all, and your narrow-minded disapproval of his reported flaws will not move me.) Trump showed us just how corrupt this establishment is. He demonstrated that we didn't need to make war in SW Asia for oil, because we have all we could ever need here, thank you very much, and all we really needed to do was to explain to the Middle Eastern potentates that we're done fighting their wars for them, and then come home and get rid of the internal regulation that was holding down petroleum extraction within the United States. Guess what? We became energy independent within two years of Trump's inauguration, and they've been fighting their own fights over there without us. We'd been lied to for fifty years. Now we know different.</p><p>What else have we been shown? Well, here's something. We don't need China, China needs us. The President dealt with China exactly how a sane businessman would, offering deals that would give mutual advantage. We were killing it. In December 2019, China had the worst sustained GDP development, bereft of our purchases, since the 1950s. The main reason for that downturn was because the President had created a normalized trade agreement, so of course their GDP would take a hit. Since they couldn't reap the profits off the backs of the American working class, the Chinese Communist Party came to the solution that they preferred to turn this around through actual biological warfare against the rest of the world. The Swamp signed on for that one, and it's still using it to attempt to convince us that China is blameless. </p><p>In light of this information, and given the reasonable doubt as a result of recent investigations that there is much to be in doubt with regards to the legitimacy of this election in at least five states, I think the working class is being sold down the river yet again. When Big Media, Big Pharm, Silicon Valley, the US Chamber of Commerce, the vast majority of Wall Street, and the Large Global Banking Interests all agree in their opposition to a single man, I start wondering: what is their unifying common interest? Further, those who claim to be part of the traditional left, in opposition to the "Man", the "Establishment", the "Reactionaries", why are you siding with the common interests of these mega-billionaires? </p><p>Jesus wept. Rage Against the Machine actually advocated using their lyrics to the song "Killing in the Name Of" as a mnemonic to recite while washing one's hands during COVID restrictions. (So you sing the chorus... "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me"... while you comply with the wishes of the WHO)</p><p>So that's the world right now, as it seems to be arrayed against us. </p><p>What can we do in the face of this, you ask?</p><p>Get in the books. There's a ton of things that I don't know that I should know. I watched about a hundred MLB games per season since I stopped deploying. I have had roughly 300 hours between March and October given back to me to get smart on things. Over the past five years, I've read the "Gulag Archipelago" by Solzhenitsyn, "A Brave New World" by Huxley, "Maps of Meaning" and "12 Rules for Life" by Peterson, "Camp of the Saints" by Raspail, and "Winter in Moscow" by Muggeridge. I recommend all of them, though you'll need to hit me up if you want a copy of the last two. Amazon has paperback copies of "Camp of the Saints" available for $148 and those of "Winter in Moscow" available for $758. Good luck finding them in a library. (I managed to find a copy of them both on an online abandoned book auction for less than $100 each. Check those places out. That's the only way this information will survive. Silicon Valley is trying to kill it.) Read the Constitution, and know it. Read the Federalist Papers, where the founders explained their reasoning of arranging the government in the manner that they did. Those things are your responsibility as a citizen, a steward of this Republic. If you don't know these things and can't articulate a defense of them, then your children and grand-children don't have a chance in hell of living under such an arrangement.</p><p>Get local. You've heard me say this before. If Trump can't maintain office, and the incoming admin succeeds in packing courts and adding DC and Puerto Rico as States, this is not going to end well. Get local. If and/or when Federal and State governments start trying to flex their extra-constitutional muscle, the fella on the dime to enforce that bullshit will be your local leaders. When that happens, you're going to have a bunch of nervous bureaucrats, who have access to statute law and armed men to enforce it, at odds with angry armed citizens who don't like it. There needs to be a means of mediation that involves people talking to one another, and those people are us. Go find a VFW, and American Legion, or a Marine Corps League. If you're not former military, find a civilian group like the Elks. </p><p>In 2004, when J. Paul Bremer [spits between fingers] fired the Iraqi government and every member of the Ba'athist party (i.e. "every Iraqi who had a job"), what resulted was something that I'd read about, but never, EVER, thought that I'd see in this world: A Hobbesian State of Nature. Without a government to hold "All under awe. Where life will be nasty, brutish, and short." Hobbes predicted that, in such a state, men would hole-up and defend their shit while slowly reaching out to their neighbors to effect "mutual protection associations". This is a contract. "If they come for your shit, I'm gonna roll in and help. You'll do the same for me."</p><p>That gets bigger and bigger. In Iraq, we saw the resurgence of the tribes in this manner. For us, the tribes will be communities, and the leaders will be those who can mediate between the bureaucracy and the citizens.</p><p>Get in there. Get ahead of this. Hope for the best and assume the worst. Noah didn't start building when it started to rain.</p><p>Folks, the Supreme Court just turned down an opportunity to resolve a case between states for the election of the Chief Executive. It's getting cloudy, and a flood is increasingly likely. By virtue of your experience and your training, you are the instrument in this situation. Get busy and start building those arks. </p><p>Unclean </p>Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-38531537006748551232020-09-07T03:36:00.001-07:002021-05-15T15:01:08.865-07:00 The Alternative Preamble --OR-- The Inherent Right to Your Pain.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO8vhNarRG8cmlSphdyr_uvkRtuVMcVl9muqOA6wUab8vrO8rYcuTECg5OKH9pP6R7C07WFYt8kqeK-pBJfqx2RM-LXE2hxyydJ6PUIZHJlg_6sOPn9tLIi95rkP6uJAiZ90I_OyR6EcA/s586/Sisyphus.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="380" data-original-width="586" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO8vhNarRG8cmlSphdyr_uvkRtuVMcVl9muqOA6wUab8vrO8rYcuTECg5OKH9pP6R7C07WFYt8kqeK-pBJfqx2RM-LXE2hxyydJ6PUIZHJlg_6sOPn9tLIi95rkP6uJAiZ90I_OyR6EcA/s16000/Sisyphus.jpeg" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><b><i><span face="" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-size: 14px;">The Alternative Preamble</span></i></b></p><p><span face="" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-size: 14px;"><b><i>--OR--</i></b></span></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 6px;"><b><i>The Inherent Right to Your Pain.</i></b></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 6px;"><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 6px 0px;">Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 6px 0px;">Life, liberty, and the mitigation of individual suffering?</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 6px 0px;">Life, liberty, and the inherent responsibility of the individual to accurately identify and deal with our own pain?</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 6px 0px;">Three manners of saying the same thing. Folks, 99% of life isn't dedicated to "pursuing happiness". It's dedicated to threat mitigation, so that each of us can identify those things that will most likely kill us.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 6px 0px;">I think Jefferson/the Framers came up with a nice bumper-sticker, but I think they elided over the true function of the utility of freedom. Sure, we'd all like to be unrestricted in our mobility up the hierarchy, but each of us is much more interested in accurately being able to identify the things that will result in our demise, and be free to overcome those threats, (specifically those who were on the American Frontier in 1776). Whether those threats are British occupying forces, hostile Natives, feral predators, criminals, robber-baron creditors, monopolistic oil or railroad interests, invading carpet-baggers, Jim Crow Democrat political machines, or Silicon Valley Utopians, our response to these potential threats should be as unrestricted as possible. Because, once those threats are mitigated, the "pursuit of happiness" is much easier, by several orders of magnitude.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 6px 0px;">As we are frequently reminded by Karen shaking her finger at you: "you can't know his pain." This is true, and it's actually the basis for why the government, and you (yes you) should leave me the fuck alone so that I can deal with it in an integrated manner. Go back and reread the Declaration of Independence with this mindset, rather than the shiny "pursuit of Happiness" prelude, and tell me I'm wrong. I'll wait.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 6px 0px;">Here's the deal. Whether you read Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Victor Frankl, or Martin Luther King, the commonality that runs through the narrative of all three is that tyranny began at precisely the point where individuals were lumped into groups. Cordoned off into sub-categories of humans. Each one of those sub-categories had something terrible done to them. Yes, their "pursuit of happiness" was limited, but what does that even mean?</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 6px 0px;">No, something more onerous was done to them: Their suffering, their pain, was taken from them, combined, and then dictated to them by someone who didn't even know them, whom they had never met, who cared nothing for them, and to whom their individual identity was nothing more than an entry on a demographic spreadsheet. Groups don't suffer. Groups can't feel pain. Individuals suffer, and the pain of the individual is his responsibility to mitigate. It is only possible for that individual to do so. Nobody can take your pain and fix it. You do that.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 6px 0px;">That is the danger of a tyranny, and the very manner of its consolidation around the necks of a given nation. Tyranny attributes the degree and effect of those grievances to groups of people, and refers to them as "the downtrodden". Those people, grateful that they seem to have gained a sympathetic ear, buy into a narrative that tells how their group has uniquely suffered along this mortal coil, this panapoly of suffering. Blame is assigned. Pejoratives are assigned ("Kulaks", "Juden") Those groups are persecuted.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 6px 0px;">Ask any lower class Ukrainian in 1927 to identify who was persecuting him, and he'll respond "The Kulaks!"</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 6px 0px;">Ask any lower class Chinaman in 1958 to identify who was persecuting him, and he'll respond "The Intellectuals!"</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 6px 0px;">You see my point. Each of these examples demonstrate how the pain of the individual was subsumed into the resentment that was convenient to people who could give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut whether these poor, benighted individuals lived or died. The pain of these individuals was their own, it was taken from them, mandated that they be outraged by it, and then was subsequently forged into a weapon to enslave all of them.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 6px 0px;">Many of you don't share my race, creed, religion, national origin, or age, but each of you has value because you're an American citizen. That was the deal. I don't want anyone to come around and assume your pain and take responsibility for it from you. It is yours, and your individual agency is tied specifically to how well you choose to deal with that pain, that suffering, and grow past it, through it, and to ultimately transcend it. It is the immutable responsibility before every human to do that, to teach our children how we managed to do it, and to derive satisfaction from having beaten it. Tyranny wishes to take that process from you.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 6px 0px;">What is at stake here is our very soul. Each of us is indelibly marked by the pain that we've overcome. Each scar marks something that we've learned. These scars are precisely what identify us as individuals. Different from every other person. Worthy of being considered as an effective contributor to this society. Not your race. Not your religion. Not your national origin. Not your age.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin: 6px 0px 0px;">Don't let them assume your pain. It is not theirs, it is uniquely yours. Overcome it. Learn from it. Allow that process to specifically identify you, not some arbitrary trait that someone else wants to rope you into. It's who you are. Don't let them take it from you.</p>Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-62023428226967285982019-12-15T18:47:00.000-08:002019-12-16T23:16:31.516-08:00The Flood, Part Three<img alt="Allowing Lent to Disrupt Our Lives and Renew the World ..." src="https://s1.qwant.com/thumbr/0x380/2/9/5dfbbe49ab3d40c317eb9ee394d2e0b2d947612683c285deb651b47ef81f0e/jesus-the-temptation-rosetta-jallow.jpg?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi0.wp.com%2Fimages.fineartamerica.com%2Fimages-medium-large%2Fjesus-the-temptation-rosetta-jallow.jpg&q=0&b=1&p=0&a=1" /><br />
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Completed Unclean Thawts (At least for now)<br />
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So, I outlined the universal apriori basis of "The Flood" in part one, here:<br />
<a href="https://fearfiles.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-flood-part-one.html">https://fearfiles.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-flood-part-one.html</a><br />
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Then, last night, I explained it's implications within society and politics here:<br />
<a href="https://fearfiles.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-flood-part-2.html">https://fearfiles.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-flood-part-2.html</a><br />
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So there's your context, which is important in predicating what I think is the most important aspect of this archetype. Tonight, I'd like to try and articulate the implications of preparing for "The Flood" in the life of the individual.<br />
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I think the Bible does an effective job of describing a proper way to perceive the relationship between the individual and reality. It does this through a narrative that tells the story of how man evolved the instinct to sacrifice. As I mentioned last night, these points are echoed in fables and parables that have been handed down from the recesses of time. They are ancient in origin. Mankind became aware of the difference between him and God: limitation. The implication of this difference is suffering. To be mortal is to suffer. There are two natural reactions to this: 1) Become bitter at the nature of reality, believe in nothing, and slowly detract from the fund of potential energy around you by maintaining a severe affect; 2) Deal with reality on its own terms. Enjoy what you can, while you can. Find a purpose that is rewarding and believe that the purpose that you serve in enduring the pain justifies the struggle. Understand that this sacrifice, this denial of gratification in the short term, will serve that purpose in the long term. This idea of "sacrifice" is what is portrayed by Abel, and Abraham, and Noah. It's reflected in the ant, the tortoise, and the frog. We see the story everywhere we look. In "Neo" from the Matrix, in "Cool Hand Luke, in "Obi Wan". It is a recognition that the unfairness of the reality that we experience can only be mitigated by our effort in accepting the burden of responsibility for our fellow man, for the people that we love.<br />
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It is the recognition that The Flood is imminent, and that each of us has a duty to build a vessel within us that is capable of withstanding the worst abuse that can be dispensed by nature and by the malevolence of mankind. None of us have a "right" to that vessel, precisely because nobody on Earth has the duty to build it for you. It takes work. It requires that we deny ourselves gratification so that fewer will suffer in the end. It's an ominous responsibility that lies before every human being.<br />
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So, how do we get there?<br />
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If we accept what I just described with regards to the nature of the reality that we find ourselves in, I believe that we have a duty to tell the truth to ourselves, and to be aware of how malevolent each of us is capable of being. When mankind first came to understand his own pain, it was a small intuitive leap to understand how to inflict pain on others. This is another unfortunate implication of mortality, and that understanding is critical for each individual to gain an intimate familiarity with. The alternative is a lie: "I could never do THAT." "People are genuinely pure, it's the world that corrupts them."<br />
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In the biblical narrative, a good example of this is outlined when Christ was tempted by Satan in the desert. He was shown, it is described, the successful ends of his efforts. It was all within his grasp. All he needed to do was to bow and accept the pure malevolence of reality. He turned his back on that, understanding it at its core, and chose to go forward as he had: suffer betrayal by his friends, banishment by his church, and be tortured to death by his government so that it would be possible for God to look upon mankind favorably so long as they acted in a similar fashion.<br />
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Go back and read that again. This is what preparation of the individual for the imminent Flood entails.<br />
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"But it's just a story, right? That shadow, that temptation to submit to the cruelty of the world, it's just a parable. Those implications don't apply to me. I'm just a fat old white dude in the Mojave Desert." <br />
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Such are the lies that we tell ourselves, seeking a justification for not taking up the burden that is rightly ours. The denial of that burden leaves us vulnerable to the inevitable Flood. Lies are just our futile attempts to bend reality to our advantage. It doesn't work that way. The Flood is coming. It will expose your lies and leave you without shelter, emotionally unfit to continue.<br />
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I was talking to a dude the other day, a good man who is under criticism from his professional community because they refuse to accept his explanations for why they can't do something that they want to do. I told him, "Tell them the truth unapologetically. The truth doesn't warp your reality, it warps the reality of those who are full of shit because they lie to themselves." I had inadvertently walked into something that applies across the human experience and is one of the reasons why I've taken up the pen this weekend.<br />
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Accept as much responsibility as you can manage with dignity. Challenge yourself at every opportunity. Become familiar with your malevolent nature and hold that nature at bay, while also recognizing that malevolent potential in others. Tell the truth to yourself and those with whom you interact. Do this every day. Remain cognizant of this as you do all the little things.<br />
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The Flood is on the way. People will be counting on you. Be worthy of their faith in you, and be worthy of your faith in yourself.<br />
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Shalom, my friends.<br />
UncleanUncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-83814198362997622362019-12-14T22:23:00.003-08:002023-03-30T16:50:53.923-07:00The Flood (Part 2)<img alt="Room for the River – Dutch flood control | The River ..." src="https://s1.qwant.com/thumbr/0x0/2/f/d1e025512dd29047d0e62957d858fe4702425f7b791e25df173d92837dbd62/Maeslantkering_closed.jpg?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi2.wp.com%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2F8%2F81%2FMaeslantkering_closed.jpg&q=0&b=1&p=0&a=1" /><br />
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So, expanding upon last night's argument (which can be found here, for those who need context: <a href="https://fearfiles.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-flood-part-one.html" target="_blank">The Flood, Pt. 1</a></div>
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It is established that the threat of "The Flood" applies to societies worldwide, and this threat is viewed as having two causes: 1) sin, (defined as sustained apathy, incompetence, or corruption); and 2) entropy, (defined as the inevitable deterioration of everything). At first blush, it would almost seem as if the sustainment of a working system of culture, society, or government is impossible, given what we know in our apriori structures about the futility of these things.</div>
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Well, it's a good thing that we have memory, which allows us the opportunity to not make the same mistakes over and over again and thereby suffer stupidly. We've spent hundreds of thousands of years watching one another, noting what works and what doesn't, and then passing these observations genetically and verbally to our progeny. This has resulted in a number of utter fucking miracles, when you consider the odds, that I will deal with directly.</div>
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When contemplating the threat, "the Flood", that is represented in our collective memory, one might ask how we can mitigate it. Well, to use this metaphor to it's most effective ends, it would seem to be a moral imperative for us to prepare adequately for its inevitable arrival.</div>
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Holland, a country that has much of its arable territory located inconveniently beneath sea-level, has built a system of levees to protect against the eventual flood. Their engineers did so in a serious manner, planning their construction while accounting for the effects of the worst possible storm that could come about once in 10,000 years.</div>
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We can readily contrast this wise planning against the experience of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans. The Army Corps of Engineers, when planning the levees to protect that city, calculated the effects of the worst possible storm that could come about once in 100 years. Meanwhile, corruption within the administration of that city took advantage of a system ripe for the taking, thereby corrupting the initial construction and subsequent maintenance of those levees. They were shown to be every bit as effective as the effort and thought that were evident in their creation and maintenance, and a whole city drowned as a result.</div>
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We should not be surprised. The fables that have been handed down to each generation for thousands of years give truth to this story. The "Ant and the Grasshopper", the "Tortoise and the Hare", and most depressingly, the "Scorpion and the Frog" all deal with treating reality seriously, not taking anything for granted, and preparing for the worst.</div>
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So, what should we do? Well, as nearly as I can tell, the solution for a sustainable society runs in exactly these areas. One must prepare a vessel capable of withstanding the worst abuse that the world and mankind can manifest upon it. Once that is done, it is imperative that the vessel be maintained appropriately, to be able to continually withstand this abuse.</div>
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Among the miracles that I referred to above, we can count the modern manifestation of a Lockean Republic as perhaps the best example. Locke put into words something that is truly fantastic: The idea that a government doesn't exist to enrich the throne, but rather a government exists to defend the liberty of its people, who will then prosper as they are allowed to exercise their own free-will in the furtherance of their own self-interests within the confines of the rights of their fellow men. Consider how unlikely it is that Locke should derive these specific ideas, that he could be able to articulate them effectively, that those articulations should prove to become popular, and that English exiles would then use those ideas and build a nation on another continent based upon them.</div>
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The founders of this nation are to political philosophy what Dutch engineers are to disaster mitigation.</div>
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In the way that the Constitution is laid out, and its rationale explained in detail by two guys who didn't even like each other in the Federalist Papers, they weren't planning out a Utopian society like post-modern flapnoodles such as Ocasio-Cortez, Warren, or Sanders. No, the founders were planning for the worst of times, the 10,000 year flood.</div>
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I think they succeeded fantastically.</div>
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With the vessel (The Constitution) having been effectively constructed by serious people to stave off corruption and apathy, while also mitigating the effects of incompetence, what is left to us is to maintain that vessel. How does one do that, exactly?</div>
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First, it depends on a competent citizenry. It is necessary for us to understand and articulate the machinations of the protective scheme that was handed down to us. This also requires us to understand the composition and strength of the "flood" that is inevitable. Only through reading and comprehending these things will we be able to maintain the worthy structures that were gifted to us to maintain. Since part of this protection involves freedom of expression, we must take each opportunity to remind one another of the coming storm, whether it be just off the coast or imminent sometime in the next 10,000 years.</div>
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Therefore, maintenance of this vessel looks something like this:<br />
Learn about our government. Learn about the alternatives that we've chosen not to exercise and why we've made those choices. Talk to one another about the utility of what has been prepared for us and the threat posed by these alternatives. Teach our children about these things. Pray the entropy doesn't undermine our efforts. Everything else is in God's hands. As He described to Abel, your sacrifice must be genuine and sincere.</div>
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And that gets into tomorrow's bit...</div>
<div><div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-top: 6px;"><br /></div></div><div><div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-top: 6px;"><a href="https://fearfiles.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-flood-part-three.html" target="_blank">The Flood, Pt. 3</a><br /></div></div>Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-82183877143934797352019-12-14T20:03:00.001-08:002023-03-30T16:48:52.370-07:00The Flood (Part One)<span face=""helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-size: 14px;"><img alt="Top 10 Horrifying Moments in the Bible - Listverse" src="https://s2.qwant.com/thumbr/0x0/5/7/27fb383b868f8783e82e2a78938b7ffe92958a2a1c6130520eb5f6179e0d9f/noahs-flood.jpg?u=http%3A%2F%2Flistverse.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2012%2F06%2Fnoahs-flood.jpg&q=0&b=1&p=0&a=1" style="background-color: transparent;" /></span><br />
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<span face=""helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-size: 14px;">Most societies have a "flood" mythos that fits into our story. It is a cross-cultural phenomenon that is there for a reason. It is a warning.</span><br />
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Mircea Eliade, in his book "History of Religious Ideas" says that the commonality between most "flood stories" across the narratives of many societies is a manifestation of a combination of "sin and entropy". Each of us can learn a lot from this, both individually and as a perspective on our culture.</div>
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First, I think it's necessary to delve into a few definitions.</div>
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The etymology of the word "sin" comes from the Hebrew word "chatta’ah", which translates "to miss the way". Whether you admit God or not, each of us knows what it is to do wrong, and that description of "sin" is instructive, I think. To "miss the way" implies that the "way" was there, but you missed it, through apathy, incompetence, or malevolence.</div>
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Entropy is the inevitable deterioration of everything. It's a fundamental law of the physical world around us. It implies that everything, an atom, a molecule, a structure, or an ideal is running to ruin constantly, right before our eyes, and we are helpless to stop it.</div>
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So it would be logical to say that the destruction of reality, i.e. the world around us (the flood) is brought about by the apathy, incompetence, and malevolence of people (sin), accelerated by the natural tendency of reality to dissolve over time (entropy). This would seem to be the lesson of this story that is common among cultures, warning us against a "flood" in our society and a caution to each of us in our personal lives.</div>
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Viewed thusly, it would seem to be an important lesson, given to us from time older than time. What is implied in this lesson, then? What are the moral implications that have been handed down to us, individually and as a culture, to avoid this disaster?</div>
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I've got a few ideas about these remedies, temporary as they might be, to stave off this inevitable flood. I'll get into my ideas about the societal implications tomorrow night, and the individual implications on Sunday.</div>
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Unclean</div>
</div><div><div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-top: 6px;"><br /></div></div><div><div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-top: 6px;"><a href="https://fearfiles.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-flood-part-2.html" target="_blank">Part 2 can be found here.</a><br /></div></div>
Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7702443177601045397.post-53202209983846890092019-11-10T00:12:00.001-08:002021-07-13T00:09:18.119-07:00The Context of a Free Culture<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
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Last night we talked about the "Great American Stew Pot" and why that's awesome.</div>
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Tonight, we need to break down reality a bit. Because, let's face it, despite the shiny happy story we all want to believe, every religion agrees on one central point: we are mortal, which means we have limits. The cost of limitation is suffering. Therefore, to be mortal is to suffer.</div>
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I leave whatever coping mechanisms you've developed over the years to deal with that realization, but what has specific implications for us as a nation is this: if everybody suffers, then no suffering by any group can be said to be more important than that of any individual. In this manner, the law that protects us all under this social contract recognizes the rights of the individual as the accepted unit of measure. Thus, we've arrived at an agreement with each other that "I will live my life and defend my liberty and property in such a manner that it will not interfere with you doing the same thing."</div>
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It really is that easy.</div>
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What complicates it ties in a little bit with what I was saying last night. We're not a "melting pot", we're a "stew pot". You bring into the equation your identity, with all of the oppression and suffering from your line, and I bring all of mine, and we stand and bitch at each other about whose ancestors got the shittier end of the stick. The basis of suffering as the primary condition of mortality would seem to negate the basis for that conflict. Let me explain.</div>
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My family is Scots-Irish. A quick summation of my tribe: Two thousand years ago, the Romans slaughtered 1/3 of the Celts, enslaved another 1/3, and taxed the shit out of those remaining who were lucky enough to survive, farm, and reproduce. After the Saxons conquered Britain and intermarried with the Angles enough, many Scots moved to Ireland. The Anglo-Saxons then bought up a lot of the land and eventually started forcing Scots-Irish into debtors' colonies in the New World, which was great until Sherman burned it down. So a bunch moved to Texas and lived up on the plains, fighting with Comanche with no expectation that the government could protect them. It was rough, but enough of my ancestors reproduced and here I am.</div>
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None of that matters now. Every single race or creed can trace a similar path of woe and oppression. The woe and the oppression is the default position of the human race. It's not the "Man" or the "System" that's kicking my ass, it's the limitations of mortality. As near as I can tell, there are two possible reactions to this realization: 1) Become bitter and cynical of the reality in which I find myself, and accept a nihilistic representation of the world around me and just make it worse; 2) Accept reality on its own terms and seek to conduct myself in a manner where the suffering is justified by challenging myself to become better. Voluntarily accept responsibility for as much as I can and try to follow Christ's example to make the world around me a better place.</div>
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By a miracle, I've been blessed to live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. One where my natural rights are protected by law and I have the latitude to make these choices. The fact that this latitude exists for every single individual citizen should overshadow all of the ancestral baggage that we're dragging around. The potential that lies within the individual, when added to the chaotic potential that exists within a free society is enough of a challenge for each of us to master without kicking each other in the shins about the fact that you are of Italian or Belgian or English or Yankee or Comanche descent and our grandfathers fought once upon a time. -Unclean</div>
Uncleanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01549978726477058386noreply@blogger.com0