Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity – TRANSCRIPT — Excerpts In his famous letters from prison, Bonhoeffer argued that stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice, because while “one may protest against evil; it can be exposed and prevented by the use of force, against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here. Reasons fall on deaf ears.” It becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power, be it of a political or religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. Almost as if this is a sociological-psychological law where the power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. [Full text at link: Bonhoeffer’s Theory ] VIDEO AT THE END OF THIS ITEM
Illustrations From the Thread by @realJPowell “A little refresher on how much stupidity you’ve been subjected to recently. Enjoy”

[continue reading…]

In 1924 a bankrupt businessman in Portugal launched an audacious international scheme to become one of the wealthiest men in the world.
Written by Alan Bellows • May 2022

He was a bankrupt yet ambitious Portuguese businessman named Artur Virgílio Alves Reis. He was born in Lisbon in 1896, raised in borderline poverty due to his father’s poor investments. After graduating from secondary school, young Alves Reis attempted a course in engineering, but dropped out after just one year. In 1916, shortly after Portugal joined the Allies in the Great War, 20-year-old Alves Reis and his new wife Maria fled to the Portuguese colony of Angola on the west coast of Southern Africa.

Angola was not a very comfortable place to raise a family; it was a beautiful land of tropical beaches, sparkling rivers, and Sub-Saharan desert, but the African territory was impoverished due to plunder and neglect by faraway overlords. The Portuguese had used the land as a slave colony as early as the 1500s, but when Alves Reis arrived in 1916, human trafficking was gradually being replaced by exports of coffee, cotton, and tobacco.

Young Alves Reis was handsome, creative, and ambitious⁠⁠—and he could charm the spines off an Angolan girdled lizard. When he learned that Angola needed qualified engineers to help build its new agricultural infrastructure, he used a friend’s college degree as a template to forge a bachelor’s degree in his own name. Printed on fine bond paper, it stated that he had graduated from Oxford University’s Polytechnic School of Engineering, listing specialties in a huge range of disciplines, including geology, physics, electrical engineering, civil engineering, and mathematics. He adorned it with official-looking seals and forged signatures. He then carried the fabrication to the very pinnacle of legitimacy-lending institutions: The local notary. This particular notary was not as rigorous as some, and Alves Reis seemed like an upstanding gentleman. So the public official helpfully stamped and signed the document, thereby certifying its authenticity⁠⁠—nevermind that Oxford University had no “Polytechnic School of Engineering”.

With these manufactured credentials and his superhuman charm, Alves Reis soon secured a high ranking position in the Angolan capital Luanda, overseeing plans for buildings and sewers for the Department of Public Works. This desk job proved rather tedious, so he used his mala fides to secure an additional part-time job as a supervising engineer at a railroad repair shop. He quickly earned the respect of his fellow railroad workers⁠⁠—unlike other supervisors, who kept their distance from the greasy and sooty railroad engines, he was willing to get his hands dirty in the railyard, climbing around to help diagnose mechanical problems. Despite his lack of formal training, he demonstrated a surprising proficiency for troubleshooting the hulking machines. [continue reading…]

Once more the need of the Internet Powers That Be to assure themselves that I am not the Great I AM but just a little website stomped all over my site this morning. Things seem to be back to normal now that I have made my sacrifice as required.

From the bells of St Mary
To the Count of Monte Cristo
Nothing can stop
Nothing can stop
Nothing can stop
The sins of Memphisto

Sally used to play with her hula hoops
Now she tells her problems to therapy groups
Grampa’s on the front lawn staring at a rake
Wondering if his marriage was a terrible mistake
I’m sitting on the front steps drinking orange crush
Wondering if it’s possible if I could still blush
Uh huh Oh yeah [continue reading…]

Dear Sir or Madam,
Thank you for your generous and unsolicited donation. It was a pleasure to find in my PO Box today. Be assured that this gesture on your part will be used and appreciated by Olive. I try and often fail to thank those that donate. I would thank you personally except for the fact that I cannot determine which one of the 2,197 citizens of Castle Rock, Washington you might be.

Best always,
Gerard Van der Leun

And Olive the Cat, her mark:

“Here’s what’s happened…. the flight deck was initially blocked by plane taxiing or slow getting away from landing zone.

“The next Hornet called in on the radio but was still in the clouds so the LSOs ( Landing Signal Officer) reminded the pilot to turn on the bright landing light. The LSO spotted the light and gave the pilot some corrections in the last seconds “ Power, Power!” The pilot touched down early or short but still caught the arresting wire. Pilots always go to Full Power upon touchdown hence All of the spray. The deck was Fouled or blocked by that plane that landed, hence the repetition of calls by the LSO looking backward and arms held high acknowledging this. The arresting wire got stuck being retracted back into position, that’s why the Motor Cart and others went to pull out the kink so to speak. The LSO graded the landing by telling the guy hunched over as he wrote down the plane ID # 500 and the summary of the landing- “ High Start, Drifted left, over corrected n descended too low”.  That’s why LSO stated “Power.”

Raconteur Report: Large, Clanking, Steel, 16#@  Quite another thing to do it in driving rain, with visibility down to ｼ mile, if that.

“So, coming in at 160 knots (184mph) you’re going to land a gray airplane on a gray ship, in gray seas, on a gray day, in a gray fog. Got it?”

There are four arresting wires to hit in a sweet spot only 50 yards long from #1 to #4, and after that, it’s “BOLTER! BOLTER! BOLTER!” slam the throttles forward, and go around for another try. This guy just managed to get back aboard after catching the #4 wire.

From eleven years back:

Happy UnBirthday to Me: I Almost Forgot to Mention That American Digest is 9 Years Old @ AMERICAN DIGEST

American Digest became nine-years-old back in May. At least that’s far back as the Wayback Machine tracks it in the year of Our Lord 2002: The New America – Dispatches. It is a bit older than that but I no longer remember exactly how much. Early 2002 in post 9/11 New York City was, as they say, “a life in interesting times.”

The first incarnation of the page (shown above) was in another space and another time.

To date my counters show 6,311 posts in the main column and 5,768 posts in “Thinking Right.” That’s 12,000 items and change. I’ve really got to tidy that up someday and move this whole endeavor to a newer and spiffier platform. Tasks I keep putting off until tomorrow.

Maybe I’ll get to it someday. For now, thanks for stopping by and putting up with me. God knows I wouldn’t.

I’m now at 35,342 items and moving on up. . . 

The ‘Super Market’: Eat your heart out Hale Adams RECALLS Ghost, I get it — I’m inclined to think that “real” money is gold and silver coin, or at least greenbacks freely exchangeable for gold and silver.

The problem is that the pool of goods and services is (over the long haul) always expanding. If the prices of these goods and services were fixed-in-place over the course of many decades, and if the price of gold and silver was also fixed, we would need vast quantities of gold and silver (perhaps more than is available to mine in the Earth’s crust) to make into coins to serve the economy, to allow the markets to function.

If the limits of precious metals available to us has an upper bound that we’re crowding pretty hard, and if the price per ounce is fixed, then it follows that deflation would set in. That was pretty much what our great-grandparents were experiencing in the late 19th Century — that’s when the arguments for the free coinage of silver were so widespread, and those experiences were what gave Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech such power.

One of the lessons our grandparents (mine were born in the 1890s) learned in the 1930s is that a persistent deflation is a recipe for disaster. Look at the CPI in the 1920s and ’30s, and you will see that the general price-level collapsed by about 30 to 40 percent in the space of just three years, from 1930 to 1933. We can argue about the root causes of the Great Depression (my own favorite is the Smoot-Hawley tariff), but the fact is that the money supply shrank drastically — in some places, people were reduced to barter because the was no money to be had.

(My father, born in 1927, could remember farmers in the ’30s coming to my grandfather, who was a small-town doctor, and asking if they could pay a small bill for, say, three dollars, with a dozen bushel baskets of apples, for example. Grandpa would ask Grandma to look at the apples: “Verna, are these apples worth $3 to you?” Dad said that you could see the gears turning in her head as she sized up the apples for her family’s consumption or as trading material, and she would turn to Grandpa and say, “Yes, Amos, those are worth $3.” Grandpa would take the bill for $3 from the farmer, and write “Paid in Full” on the bill.

(Another time, a farmer showed up at Grandpa’s office with a shotgun. “Doc,” said the farmer, “I ain’t got the money to pay this bill for twenty-five bucks. Will you take this shotgun instead?” Grandpa looked the shotgun over, decided it was a nice piece, and wrote “Paid in Full” on the man’s bill.

(There was simply NO MONEY to be had.)

Yes, high inflation (more than, say, 4 or 5 percent a year) sucks. But you have to have a small (0 to 2 percent) rate of inflation if you’re to allow the economy to work, to give it the “wiggle room” to avoid nasty bouts of deflation (again, look at the ’30s). The problem right now is that we have a “ruling class” (or so they imagine themselves to be) who confuse dollars with wealth, and think the more dollars they print, the wealthier the country is. (Some of the “ruling class” aren’t so stupid, of course, they’re just along for the ride in a cynical bid for power.) And so we are in for a rough time of it under Their Fraudulencies, Biden and Harris.

(I’m willing to cut the-powers-that-were in the ’70s some slack — the old men running the show at the Federal Reserve back then were young men in the ’30s, and were likely deathly afraid of a repeat of the catastrophic deflation they had to live through. Unfortunately, they erred too far in the other direction — 15% inflation isn’t very good for economies, either.)

(And I’m sorry, Gerard, for running off at the keyboard, again.)

So, Ghost, I sympathize — there’s something comforting about the heft of a “Walking Liberty” half-dollar or a “Morgan” dollar. But they’re gone, and they’re not coming back. And it’s not because of “theft” — it’s almost a question of physics. There just ain’t enough gold and silver to use as coins at any price-per-ounce that is close to what our parents and grandparents knew.

As usual, my two cents’ worth.
Hale Adams
Pikesville, People’s still-mostly-Democratic Republic of Maryland

Auntie Analogue RECALLS: “In the 1950’s my Mom or Grandma took the pre-teen me by the hand, and walked three blocks to a chicken market on a city side street. In a stack of cages were live chickens whose cacophonic clucking made one hell of a racket. Mom or Grandma chose a chicken and one of the men behind the counter removed it from the cage and, standing behind the counter glass, with an expert blow from a cleaver, beheaded it on a chopping block right in front of us. Before the headless fowl had stopped moving the man wrenched the bird around and around in the maw of a machine whose loudly whirring rotors plucked almost all of the feathers. Then the man deftly gutted the chicken, with his hands scooped out its intestines and other inedible organs which he plopped into a galvanized steel garbage pail (I remember peering into the pail to gaze in wonder at a mass of squirming, seemingly ever-settling chicken guts). Next, the man immersed the carcass, for some long seconds, in a big steaming metal vat of boiling water, then withdrew it and expertly wielded cleaver and knife to dismember to order, dress to order, and wrap the chicken in brown butcher paper.

At home Mom or Grandma manipulated the whole chicken or chicken parts, turning them round and round to find and pluck, or to burn off over the gas range burner flame, the few remaining feathers.

How we survived eating fresh-killed chicken must remain a mystery.

My uncle raised chickens and in front of me, my brother, and my uncle’s own children, with a bird clenched between his knees and the head in his grip, he beheaded it with three or six strokes of a knife, released the headless bird inside his pen’s chicken wire fence and let it run about willy-nilly until it stopped moving. My aunt plucked the chicken, boiled it for a few minutes to kill surface bacteria, then prepared it for roasting or frying, or for potting to make chicken soup.

And my Grandma’s chicken soup, made with freshly killed chicken, was the best and, in my experience, remains unequaled.

A CLOSE-UP AT 1:32:07

Funny he doesn’t look like a shambling, demented, drool-cup filling fraud with a toothless crack-smoking son whose personal password is “ANALSEX69”.

Comparatively speaking the leader of Russia looks healthy and formidable if burdened and sad. Winning or losing he appears to be a serious man. But that’s just the news from my lying eyes. I could be wrong. I probably need a second opinion.

“Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem.” The Daily Timewaster. Now More Than Ever.

daily timewaster: William Stinson Soule (American, 1836 – 1908). Kiowa Chief Trotting Wolf [Gu-ee-ah-pay, Coyote Walking] and wife, 1869–1874.

After the sudden collapse of CNN+, Chris Wallace scores a new prime time cable show

Civilizationalism | This civilizational angst is what lies at the heart of the war in Ukraine. The Russians see themselves fighting a war for the survival of their civilization. Volunteers from all over the Russian Federation are now fighting in the Ukraine because they see themselves at war with a West that threatens their existence. Washington is not threatening genocide, but something almost as bad, the erasure of their national identity. The Chechens like being Chechen and they will die for it.

This civilizational sensibility is hard for Western people to grasp. America, of course, has no real identity. It is a collection of economic and political slogans that holds together a continent full of strangers. Europe still has some vestiges of national identity, but that has been anathematized by the ruling elite of the continent. Nationalism is now a synonym for fascism. In its place is the concept of European which is even less meaningful than American sloganeering.

In America, totally not a third world country, totally not a banana republic, judges face intimidation to rule in favor of the regime. https://t.co/4fcWbcw38I

— PEG (@pegobry) May 8, 2022

The Story Behind “It’s a Small World” –   The National Recording Registry has inducted 25 new songs into its registry this year, one of them being “It’s a Small World.” The song was never a radio hit, but it’s been played more than 50 million times- all in the theme park ride at Disney theme parks. All you have to do is see the title and it starts playing in your head, no matter how much you hate it. [continue reading…]

Well thought, well said, deeply felt, and exceptionally executed. Criticism, at long last my lord, for accomplished grown-ups who have been paying attention.

Yes, it is over an hour long. You don’t have to watch it but if you like this sort of thing you will like this sort of thing.

“There is a world dimensional for those untwisted by the love of things irreconcilable.” — Crane

This Custom, Two-Story 1953 Spartan Manor Trailer Is an Absolute Dream

The Manor served the Williams family for the first years but, by 1957, it had become clear that it was no longer enough for the growing girls. They slept on the couch in the rear, with the parents in the master bedroom at the front end. Williams decided – and proceeded – to expand the trailer upwards that same year.

He bought parts from Spartan and built a second floor that housed the girls’ separate bedrooms. To give them the impression of separate rooms (as opposed to a loft) and more headroom, he dropped a section of the floor of the second story into the ground floor. It’s what Shirley calls a “box” in the video, located above the dining area and the fridge in the kitchen. This helps with keeping the trailer at 13.5 feet (4.1 meters) high, so it could still clear bridges and passageways.

[Note: MAY 2022 Lois Lucille McNair Van der Leun passed from this world to the arms of Christ in the 104th year of her age in 2019 with her family in attendance. I never knew a kinder and wiser human being. Others not her son agree.]

[Note: First written in 2007 and still, for the most part, true. So far.]

Her earliest memory is being held on the shoulders of her father, watching the men who lived through the First World War parade down the main street of Fargo, North Dakota in 1918. She would have been just four years old then. When she was 90 years old she came to her birthday party wearing a chic black and white silk dress, shiny black shoes with three-inch heels, and a six-foot-long purple boa. She’s threatened to sing Kurt Weill’s ‘The Saga of Jenny” and dance on the table one more time.

She’ll sing the Kurt Weill song, but we draw the line at her dancing on the table this year. Other than that, it is pretty much her night, and she gets to call the shots. Which is what you get when you reach 90 97 and are still managing to make it out to the tennis courts three to four times a week. “If it wasn’t for my knees I’d still have a good backcourt game, but now I pretty much like to play up at the net.” [Note: Alas she had to give up tennis at 95 back when her knees finally gave up. She didn’t. Water walking twice a week. She gave all a scare a couple of years ago but came roaring back after major surgery and is more or less back to the regular schedule.] [continue reading…]

[Note: NOVEMBER 2018 Burned out of Paradise I have moved in with my mother in Chico. Yes, I have become that “72-year-old man who lives with his mother.” It’s not so bad. Not so bad at all to live with an active and sharp and sardonic and sweet mother as she enters her 104th year. ]

[Note: MAY 2022 Lois Lucille McNair Van der Leun passed from this world to the arms of Christ in the 104th year of her age in 2019 with her family in attendance. I never knew a kinder and wiser human being. Others not her son agree.]

In her 104th year, this happenstance kitchen collage of my mother’s life is growing both richer and deeper. The image above is of what once was a bulletin board. It is kept in my mother’s kitchen in her apartment to the rear of an unassuming but decent collection of apartments in the small city of Chico, California.

It’s too bad the image of it is so small here on the page. But no matter how much I might enlarge the image of it, it could never be as big as what it represents. Although small in scale it is larger than the lives it chronicles. It is the sum of all love. [continue reading…]

PEAK PUTIN PROPAGANDA POPS!: Putin is said to bathe in the blood extracted from deer antlers, which are hacked off while they are growing and still full of fresh blood [!!]. Let that soak in.

We already see the Dems assembling anew their election fraud machine, one which worked so well for them in 2020, and I have serious doubts about the fighting spirit of many Republicans. We, for example, see dire predictions of a renewed COVID surge; that “surge” will “require,” of course, not just the traditional masks of obedience and lock-downs, but also mail-in ballots. We hear a steady and, unfortunately, bipartisan drumbeat for war with Russia with no clear explanation of the US interests in such an event. This banging of the war drum fosters an air of fear, crisis, and uncertainty that can redound to the benefit of our masters’ hold on power. These masters seek to avoid blame for record violent crime; a massive illegal alien wave; historic levels of inflation; rising interest rates; impending food shortages; factory closings; and plunging stocks and exports: all classic indicators of a recession to come.

The elites’ 11 most absurd claims

HORROR: NYC Robbery Suspect Punches Elderly Man to the Ground, Kicks Him in the Face (VIDEO) What did the attacker look like? You already know. You always know. [continue reading…]

May 1940. “The ‘super market’ in Durham, North Carolina.” Back when self-service groceries were enough of a novelty that photographers put the name for them in quote marks.

Bargains? Well, let’s check those prices.

Steak 25cents a pound? Yes indeed.

Pickles 2 pounds for 25 cents plus juice and napkins for a nickel each.

2 (make that two!) pounds of tomatoes for 13 cents. Bring cash. Debit cards just slow thing down.

It’s been a long and winding road to find myself back where I began.