It’s trendy now to diminish 9-11. Doesn’t feel that way to me. We suffered badly and anything done by the USA to the shitty countries wherein resided the perps was not nearly enough.
See the news vid this morning with Trump, Vance, Bloomberg, Biden, Harris, Schumer, etc., all lined up at the 9-11 memorial. Trump is popular there; Harris is small and insignificant. Biden is there in a surprise appearance.
There is indeed blowback happening from the debate. ABC “News” looked even more whorish than Kamala, which is saying something. Some will wake up and know that the news they’ve been watching is mostly bullshit.
John A. FlemingSeptember 11, 2024, 12:52 PM
Like I just said in the previous thread, there is no justice in this world. If there were, Mecca/Medina/Qom/Baghdad would be smoking ruins to this day. Instead, we got twenty years of grinding wealth-destroying war that accomplished nothing to our enemies, who emerged stronger than ever with our help, while we are prostrate and enervated, our military in disrepair and adrift, our people in hysterics.
Then again, some say that is justice, some being our adversaries and their fellow travelers among us.
So whaddyagonnadoboutit?
azlibertarianSeptember 12, 2024, 11:11 AM
“Like I just said in the previous thread, there is no justice in this world. If there were, Mecca/Medina/Qom/Baghdad would be smoking ruins to this day….”
Imagine a husband and wife coming to the point where they’re about to decide to divorce. He’ll say “I can’t stand the way you keep this house. We live in a pig sty.” And then she’ll respond with “You don’t make enough money. We’re never going to get anywhere with what you make.”.
It doesn’t matter which vantage you take. Like it or not, he is in a divorce about the money he’s earning and she’s in a divorce about her housekeeping skills. When you’re in a conflict, the other side gets a vote on the reasons for the conflict.
So to bring this back to the early 2000’s and why we still haven’t received justice in this world, back then, we bent ourselves over backwards to avoid the perception that we were entering into a religious war. We believed ourselves to be in a war against all these bad people and the actions that they took, but we stopped the criticism at the religion that they themselves used to justify their actions. And that is why Mecca, Medina and Qom (Baghdad is of secular importance, and so I have omitted it from this point) were not attacked.
Further, to bring this to the present-day wars, why is Russia in Ukraine today? Why did they annex Crimea in 2014 and then Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia in 2022? Why did they take Georgia in 2008? What, exactly is Russia doing here? If left unhindered, what steps will Russia take in the future?
I get it that the US, specifically, and the West, more broadly, are tired of being in wars. Believe me, I fully understand. Son-in-law #1 is in a Special Operations field and has been deployed more times than I care to remember. We’ve had 2 decades of involvements in faraway places and for what, exactly? We’ve spent money like spend-thrifts which has done little other than to leave our military tired and ill-equipped. I don’t want another war, anywhere. Not one bit.
But today, we watch a hot military war in Ukraine (without our full support) and another one centered on Israel (again, where our support is qualified) and while they might seem to be seperate but simultaneous conflicts, IMO, they’re really not. These conflicts are really just examples of the East being at war with the West.
The choice we have is: Do we recognize what the other side is doing here? In the terms of my example above: Does the husband recognize that his wife wants him to bring home more bacon? If the East is at war with the West, at what point does the West decide that they too are at war with the East?
This is not to say that I am encouraging more war. I simply recognize that, like it or not (and I don’t), war is being waged against the US and our interests. I think that the US, the West, and the rest of the world would be better off in the long-term if we saw a future that was at least partially forged on the West’s terms. Bring us the “justice” that we seek instead of the justice that our enemies seek.
JMO, and as always, YMMV.
Casey KlahnSeptember 13, 2024, 8:28 AM
Well said. Let me summarize by adding what Tolstoy, the Russian, once said: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
Put me down in the camp of those who want no more wars ever. I hope Trump gets elected and does like he said. He said he’d not wait for inauguration day to end the wars. I believe there is a fair and tough way to negotiate this, and that both sides will walk away missing their asses but without the shooting wars.
You said a very intelligent thing. The USA keeps Ukraine at war but makes no objective statement of a desired outcome. That is criminally wrong of Biden. I thought for a brief moment at the debate that they were about to get a statement of initiative out of Harris, but instead she just ranted pro war stuff in the form of word salad.
The cold hard truth is that an axis of 3 major powers are aligned against the West and the USA and making coordinated proxy war against us as we speak. It is some stage of WWIII. Thanks Joe Biden!
If I may deviate a bit, AZ, elsewhere someone asked if we are in imminent danger of a shooting war with any or all of the three: China, Russia, and Iran. Yes is the answer. I once walked down a forest lane completely stocked with anti-personnel mines (training charges) and my task was to avoid being (training) blown up. I can’t remember how I did, but the take away was clear and stays with me: if you walk down the wrong lane in a forest that has enough mines, you’re fucked.
ghostsniperSeptember 11, 2024, 1:56 PM
STRAT
=====
For some time now I’ve been craving the sound of some screamin’ single coils cause nothing else delivers that “live wire” effect like they do. And when you channel them through the shape of a strat body, well, nothing else compares.
I happenstanced upon the one at the link below a couple weeks ago and threw it at my wish list. This afternoon the crave took over and I pulled the trigger. It’s supposed to be here on fri (prime) and I’ll immediately plug it into my BIG Fender amp and see “wut up dawg”.
More than likely on Sat I’ll tear it down to ground zero and microscopically inspect it then using laser precision, put it back together the way the factory wished it could do. That means I will put a new set of Elixar 11’s strings on it. I’ll most likely order a clear pick guard and knobs.
The one I ordered is Olympic white with 3 single coil PU’s and a maple fretboard with chrome furniture. DAWG!!!
Wait. The solid body of an electric guitar has an effect on the sound produced? It has been my understanding that pickup design and all the onboard electronics were much more important, and the solid-soundboard was just for looks. I thought it was so heavy and solid that any vibration feedbacks were severely damped. I know nothing about electric guitars, have no experience with them, but I do understand signal generation, amplification and filtering.
ghostsniperSeptember 11, 2024, 3:09 PM
The word “subtle” is HUGE in the world of electric guitars. Supposedly, the legendary Eric Johnson of “Cliffs of Dover fame, can hear the diff between brands of 9v batteries in his effect pedals. shrug
If you play an electric bare, nothing connected, you can barely hear it. BUT through the magic of electricity and human ingenuity you can create a wall of sound the size of an arena that can render people unconscious.
True, I probably can’t hear the diff between say a Strat and an Les Paul, all things being equal.
But, when you run them as they were meant to be there will be layers upon layers of things added to the mix that make even what seems subtle, HUGE. Saw the top bout off a strat and yes, you will alter the sound it produces. I am in no way trying to lessen the effcts the pickups or anything else has.
ghostsniperSeptember 11, 2024, 3:12 PM
And yes, you can strap a pickup on a shovel and play some unbelieveable music.
Take a look at Justin Johnson on his back porch.
As a young schoolboy I became fascinated by astronomy, and burned through all the books about it in the school and local public library. My parents got me a telescope, and I spent many nights in the backyard looking at all the favorite sights.
I did not go into astronomy as a career, but I’ve always paid attention to the latest discoveries.
It is really quite mind-blowing astonishing when considered in toto. The very first massive stars were the seeds of black holes. Black holes are the seeds of galaxies. Galaxies and galaxy collisions are the mechanism by which the endless multitudes of stars are formed, live out their lives, and go kablooey at the end. The stars are the forges of all the elements. The ejected gas clouds from the previous star generations coalesce into new generations of stars and solar systems. And then the endless multitudes of stars and their planets are the seeds of life. The early universe was massively violent that we see backward in time through our telescopes. It is only now in it’s early adolescence that the cosmos is stable and sedate enough, rich enough in all the elements, for life to form and evolve across the needed billions of years, from single-celled to us.
As an engineer, it looks like the universe has been designed (!!) as a means to create life. And provide environments for life to spread and occupy. We see now trillions of galaxies, each with trillions of stars, around which there must be endless planets. The universe has been rolling an infinity of dice for billions of years. We cannot be the only so-far successful outcome.
What we see is just too vast and intricate to be an illusion generated in a simulation matrix in which we are ensnared.
All that is prelude to this thought I just had. Why do all our religions tell stories about angels? From whence comes these ideas? What could an angel possibly be, given what we know? The God that created the universe and started it on its merry way cannot have created angels to help shepherd life. They aren’t needed. There are too many stars, too many planets, too much time, for a Creator to send angels to one planet around one middling star in one middling galaxy out of the near infinitudes.
If we fail and gutter out and fall back into the primordial ooze and are recycled in the deeps of time, that’s ok, the Creator has trillions more experiments running. No species lasts forever, but life goes on until there are no resources left or a cosmic event comes and wipes it out, and there are still endless billions of years to come.
Tolkien thought the angels were the incarnate Powers of the World. They were the builders, and once the world was created, the angels were diminished, their powers having been spent on their creations. And they then take a back seat and mostly observe the progress of their creations. As if all they can do now are minor touchups and nudges. But even they are not certain of whence goeth their creations and for what purpose, and so unable to be certain about what nudges should be done.
C’mon, angels. Really? What could they possibly be? I read a note on Instapundit some time ago that it may be that we are too immature a species, our intelligence too primitive, to be able to observe and comprehend the “purpose” and the true nature of the universe.
ghostsniperSeptember 12, 2024, 2:48 PM
Grab a Book, any book, but make sure it’s this one:
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
In January of 1776, Thomas Paine published a book called Common Sense: The Origin and Design of Government. It sold 100,000 copies in the first two months. Today, a book would have to sell 11,000,000 copies to match the proportion of the population that Paine’s book reached. Common Sense went on to print somewhere between 300,000-400,000 copies, equivalent to somewhere between 33,000,000-44,000,000 people today. As Postman notes in Amusing Ourselves to Death, the “only communication event that could produce such collective attention in today’s America is the Superbowl.”
In the mid 1800s, Abraham Lincoln and one of his political adversaries (Stephen A. Douglas) used to have public debates that lasted hours. Each participant would get a minimum of an hour of speaking time before the other rose for a rebuttal, and debates could often last upwards of 4 hours. What is even more remarkable is that the audience of regular common people was rapt with attention for the entire affair. Today, politicians are given 1 minute to give an opinion on a major issue and their opponent is expected to keep their rebuttal to 30 seconds.
So, there is a definitive difference in the mainstream intelligence of people from our past in comparison to people today. How did this come to be? Postman posits that it is due to the rise of television as our main source of information gathering. In the 17th and 18th centuries ideas were shared via writing (and if you go back father, to the days of humanity before writing and reading were wide-spread, when ideas were only shared orally, the scholars and politicians of the day were those select men with a knack for oratorical skills.) Postman notes how the first fifteen presidents of the United States most likely wouldn’t have been recognized by their citizens on the street, yet those same citizens could have identified them by their latest speech or piece of distributed writing. Today, things are quite different. Postman wrote this book in the 1980’s when Ronald Reagan was president—a man who was previously a big time Hollywood actor in the 1960s and built a national reputation as someone on the silver screen. Even more recently we endured the presidency of Donald Trump, the former host of a reality television series. Was Donald Trump a good politician? The debate is still out. Is he entertaining? Absolutely—he is the most entertaining politician we have ever had in the age of television and I personally am not surprised at all that he is the most popular politician in the United States right now.
The core argument of Postman’s book is not only that television changed how we receive information, but it changed our entire relationship to information on an epistemological level. Whereas writing is geared towards conceptual thinking, sequential order, careful reasoning, objectivity, and a delayed response, television is meant for entertainment. Television, with its constantly moving pictures and engaging sound effects, is meant to be amusing. When we indulge in TV for entertainment’s sake, sinking into the couch after a hard day’s work to watch our favorite half hour comedy, that is not the TV that Postman is talking about. The TV that has decimated attention spans and amused us to a breaking point is the TV that has infiltrated our religions, our politics, and our education systems. “As a television show, and a good one,” Postman writes, “Sesame Street does not encourage children to love school or anything about school. It encourages them to love television.”
With television’s incorporation of the news cycle, our ways of learning about the world are also stunted. We get a story about the Middle East, and then a minute later we’re hearing about gridlock in the Senate, quickly followed by a story about a dog riding a crocodile in Florida. These are all entertaining stories to be sure, but what do they all have in common? For 99% of us, they have no impact on our daily lives. Do I wish there was less violence in the Middle East? Of course. What can I actually do about it? Essentially nothing. With all the graphic images and sounds coming out of the television screen, however, it is incredibly engaging and I can’t look away!
Television is designed to make everything it touches entertaining, and it has infiltrated our culture so much so that with the advancement of the internet and social media, the trends in this book have only exacerbated. “The form in which ideas are expressed affects what those idea will be,” Postman writes, and I couldn’t agree more. We the people now expect everything in life, whether it be news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion, etc., to entertain us. If it doesn’t, we don’t want it. Personally, I believe that our culture would benefit tremendously from a return to typography—a large part of the reason why I started reading and writing book reviews in the first place. Books are where real education lies, and in my opinion a better education is the way towards a better future. The internet has recently made huge swaths of information readily available (thanks Wikipedia!) so we now must take focus from what we are learning and return focus to how we go about learning it.
Wednesday was the 23rd anniversary of 9/11 and a paid subscription article from an American dude going by Good Citizen landed in my inbox. I don’t know where GC lives these days but he left the US shortly after 9/11 and has set up camp in mostly eastern European locations. I think he’s in his late 40’s. Here’s GC’s take on 9/11… the Jews did it. I concur. Remember Jeffrey Epstein? Jeff amassed an extensive video library of politicians and celebrities having sex with underage girls, and boys, too, that was used to blackmail these people of influence into servicing Israel. I believe that library is now in the hands of Bibi Netanyahu. The servicing continues and LBJ was an early agent for the Jews and helped lay down the evil we are paying for today. I hope this link opens for you. I left a couple of links in the comments section regarding the work of Dr. Judy Wood who was the first to focus extensively on the science of Direct Energy Weaponry, or DEW, that can set the countryside ablaze and reduce steel and concrete skyscrapers to dust. Lots of subject matter and videos to peruse here. https://thegoodcitizen.live/p/9-1-1
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
Green Pants Interior by Klahn
Who Am I? by Carl Sandburg
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.
Duty, Beauty, Liberty, Country, Honor, Family, Faith — Plus a few simple easy to follow rules for guys
Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea
They thought great thoughts about liberty
Poets wrote down words that did fit
Writers wrote books
Thinkers thought about it
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
Many’s the road I have walked upon
Many’s the hour between dusk and dawn
Many’s the time
Many’s the mile
I see it all now
Through the eyes of a child
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
And close your eyes
Leave it all for a while
Leave the world
And your worries behind
You will build on whatever is real
And wake up each day
To a new waking dream
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Change, change come over
Change come over
Talkin’ about a change
Change, change
Change come over, now
Change, change, change come over
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
Gerard Van der Leun
inside job
It’s trendy now to diminish 9-11. Doesn’t feel that way to me. We suffered badly and anything done by the USA to the shitty countries wherein resided the perps was not nearly enough.
See the news vid this morning with Trump, Vance, Bloomberg, Biden, Harris, Schumer, etc., all lined up at the 9-11 memorial. Trump is popular there; Harris is small and insignificant. Biden is there in a surprise appearance.
There is indeed blowback happening from the debate. ABC “News” looked even more whorish than Kamala, which is saying something. Some will wake up and know that the news they’ve been watching is mostly bullshit.
Like I just said in the previous thread, there is no justice in this world. If there were, Mecca/Medina/Qom/Baghdad would be smoking ruins to this day. Instead, we got twenty years of grinding wealth-destroying war that accomplished nothing to our enemies, who emerged stronger than ever with our help, while we are prostrate and enervated, our military in disrepair and adrift, our people in hysterics.
Then again, some say that is justice, some being our adversaries and their fellow travelers among us.
So whaddyagonnadoboutit?
“Like I just said in the previous thread, there is no justice in this world. If there were, Mecca/Medina/Qom/Baghdad would be smoking ruins to this day….”
Imagine a husband and wife coming to the point where they’re about to decide to divorce. He’ll say “I can’t stand the way you keep this house. We live in a pig sty.” And then she’ll respond with “You don’t make enough money. We’re never going to get anywhere with what you make.”.
It doesn’t matter which vantage you take. Like it or not, he is in a divorce about the money he’s earning and she’s in a divorce about her housekeeping skills. When you’re in a conflict, the other side gets a vote on the reasons for the conflict.
So to bring this back to the early 2000’s and why we still haven’t received justice in this world, back then, we bent ourselves over backwards to avoid the perception that we were entering into a religious war. We believed ourselves to be in a war against all these bad people and the actions that they took, but we stopped the criticism at the religion that they themselves used to justify their actions. And that is why Mecca, Medina and Qom (Baghdad is of secular importance, and so I have omitted it from this point) were not attacked.
Further, to bring this to the present-day wars, why is Russia in Ukraine today? Why did they annex Crimea in 2014 and then Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia in 2022? Why did they take Georgia in 2008? What, exactly is Russia doing here? If left unhindered, what steps will Russia take in the future?
I get it that the US, specifically, and the West, more broadly, are tired of being in wars. Believe me, I fully understand. Son-in-law #1 is in a Special Operations field and has been deployed more times than I care to remember. We’ve had 2 decades of involvements in faraway places and for what, exactly? We’ve spent money like spend-thrifts which has done little other than to leave our military tired and ill-equipped. I don’t want another war, anywhere. Not one bit.
But today, we watch a hot military war in Ukraine (without our full support) and another one centered on Israel (again, where our support is qualified) and while they might seem to be seperate but simultaneous conflicts, IMO, they’re really not. These conflicts are really just examples of the East being at war with the West.
The choice we have is: Do we recognize what the other side is doing here? In the terms of my example above: Does the husband recognize that his wife wants him to bring home more bacon? If the East is at war with the West, at what point does the West decide that they too are at war with the East?
This is not to say that I am encouraging more war. I simply recognize that, like it or not (and I don’t), war is being waged against the US and our interests. I think that the US, the West, and the rest of the world would be better off in the long-term if we saw a future that was at least partially forged on the West’s terms. Bring us the “justice” that we seek instead of the justice that our enemies seek.
JMO, and as always, YMMV.
Well said. Let me summarize by adding what Tolstoy, the Russian, once said: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
Put me down in the camp of those who want no more wars ever. I hope Trump gets elected and does like he said. He said he’d not wait for inauguration day to end the wars. I believe there is a fair and tough way to negotiate this, and that both sides will walk away missing their asses but without the shooting wars.
You said a very intelligent thing. The USA keeps Ukraine at war but makes no objective statement of a desired outcome. That is criminally wrong of Biden. I thought for a brief moment at the debate that they were about to get a statement of initiative out of Harris, but instead she just ranted pro war stuff in the form of word salad.
The cold hard truth is that an axis of 3 major powers are aligned against the West and the USA and making coordinated proxy war against us as we speak. It is some stage of WWIII. Thanks Joe Biden!
If I may deviate a bit, AZ, elsewhere someone asked if we are in imminent danger of a shooting war with any or all of the three: China, Russia, and Iran. Yes is the answer. I once walked down a forest lane completely stocked with anti-personnel mines (training charges) and my task was to avoid being (training) blown up. I can’t remember how I did, but the take away was clear and stays with me: if you walk down the wrong lane in a forest that has enough mines, you’re fucked.
STRAT
=====
For some time now I’ve been craving the sound of some screamin’ single coils cause nothing else delivers that “live wire” effect like they do. And when you channel them through the shape of a strat body, well, nothing else compares.
I happenstanced upon the one at the link below a couple weeks ago and threw it at my wish list. This afternoon the crave took over and I pulled the trigger. It’s supposed to be here on fri (prime) and I’ll immediately plug it into my BIG Fender amp and see “wut up dawg”.
More than likely on Sat I’ll tear it down to ground zero and microscopically inspect it then using laser precision, put it back together the way the factory wished it could do. That means I will put a new set of Elixar 11’s strings on it. I’ll most likely order a clear pick guard and knobs.
The one I ordered is Olympic white with 3 single coil PU’s and a maple fretboard with chrome furniture. DAWG!!!
https://www.amazon.com/Fender-Affinity-Stratocaster-fingerboard-Olympic/dp/B091BH6LZK/ref=pd_rhf_dp_s_gcx-rhf_d_sccl_1_6/146-3865031-8279206?pd_rd_w=4uZhr&content-id=amzn1.sym.f714e129-a2ad-4639-b076-38ae36a3f73b&pf_rd_p=f714e129-a2ad-4639-b076-38ae36a3f73b&pf_rd_r=071H91QCZNWJ0DG0TGA4&pd_rd_wg=Xa65z&pd_rd_r=5768fa1c-d103-4cf5-aab8-a2e7e8e18116&pd_rd_i=B091BH6LZK&th=1
Wait. The solid body of an electric guitar has an effect on the sound produced? It has been my understanding that pickup design and all the onboard electronics were much more important, and the solid-soundboard was just for looks. I thought it was so heavy and solid that any vibration feedbacks were severely damped. I know nothing about electric guitars, have no experience with them, but I do understand signal generation, amplification and filtering.
The word “subtle” is HUGE in the world of electric guitars. Supposedly, the legendary Eric Johnson of “Cliffs of Dover fame, can hear the diff between brands of 9v batteries in his effect pedals. shrug
If you play an electric bare, nothing connected, you can barely hear it. BUT through the magic of electricity and human ingenuity you can create a wall of sound the size of an arena that can render people unconscious.
True, I probably can’t hear the diff between say a Strat and an Les Paul, all things being equal.
But, when you run them as they were meant to be there will be layers upon layers of things added to the mix that make even what seems subtle, HUGE. Saw the top bout off a strat and yes, you will alter the sound it produces. I am in no way trying to lessen the effcts the pickups or anything else has.
And yes, you can strap a pickup on a shovel and play some unbelieveable music.
Take a look at Justin Johnson on his back porch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9-ltPsbw9g
As a young schoolboy I became fascinated by astronomy, and burned through all the books about it in the school and local public library. My parents got me a telescope, and I spent many nights in the backyard looking at all the favorite sights.
I did not go into astronomy as a career, but I’ve always paid attention to the latest discoveries.
It is really quite mind-blowing astonishing when considered in toto. The very first massive stars were the seeds of black holes. Black holes are the seeds of galaxies. Galaxies and galaxy collisions are the mechanism by which the endless multitudes of stars are formed, live out their lives, and go kablooey at the end. The stars are the forges of all the elements. The ejected gas clouds from the previous star generations coalesce into new generations of stars and solar systems. And then the endless multitudes of stars and their planets are the seeds of life. The early universe was massively violent that we see backward in time through our telescopes. It is only now in it’s early adolescence that the cosmos is stable and sedate enough, rich enough in all the elements, for life to form and evolve across the needed billions of years, from single-celled to us.
As an engineer, it looks like the universe has been designed (!!) as a means to create life. And provide environments for life to spread and occupy. We see now trillions of galaxies, each with trillions of stars, around which there must be endless planets. The universe has been rolling an infinity of dice for billions of years. We cannot be the only so-far successful outcome.
What we see is just too vast and intricate to be an illusion generated in a simulation matrix in which we are ensnared.
All that is prelude to this thought I just had. Why do all our religions tell stories about angels? From whence comes these ideas? What could an angel possibly be, given what we know? The God that created the universe and started it on its merry way cannot have created angels to help shepherd life. They aren’t needed. There are too many stars, too many planets, too much time, for a Creator to send angels to one planet around one middling star in one middling galaxy out of the near infinitudes.
If we fail and gutter out and fall back into the primordial ooze and are recycled in the deeps of time, that’s ok, the Creator has trillions more experiments running. No species lasts forever, but life goes on until there are no resources left or a cosmic event comes and wipes it out, and there are still endless billions of years to come.
Tolkien thought the angels were the incarnate Powers of the World. They were the builders, and once the world was created, the angels were diminished, their powers having been spent on their creations. And they then take a back seat and mostly observe the progress of their creations. As if all they can do now are minor touchups and nudges. But even they are not certain of whence goeth their creations and for what purpose, and so unable to be certain about what nudges should be done.
C’mon, angels. Really? What could they possibly be? I read a note on Instapundit some time ago that it may be that we are too immature a species, our intelligence too primitive, to be able to observe and comprehend the “purpose” and the true nature of the universe.
Grab a Book, any book, but make sure it’s this one:
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
https://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Business/dp/014303653X
In January of 1776, Thomas Paine published a book called Common Sense: The Origin and Design of Government. It sold 100,000 copies in the first two months. Today, a book would have to sell 11,000,000 copies to match the proportion of the population that Paine’s book reached. Common Sense went on to print somewhere between 300,000-400,000 copies, equivalent to somewhere between 33,000,000-44,000,000 people today. As Postman notes in Amusing Ourselves to Death, the “only communication event that could produce such collective attention in today’s America is the Superbowl.”
In the mid 1800s, Abraham Lincoln and one of his political adversaries (Stephen A. Douglas) used to have public debates that lasted hours. Each participant would get a minimum of an hour of speaking time before the other rose for a rebuttal, and debates could often last upwards of 4 hours. What is even more remarkable is that the audience of regular common people was rapt with attention for the entire affair. Today, politicians are given 1 minute to give an opinion on a major issue and their opponent is expected to keep their rebuttal to 30 seconds.
So, there is a definitive difference in the mainstream intelligence of people from our past in comparison to people today. How did this come to be? Postman posits that it is due to the rise of television as our main source of information gathering. In the 17th and 18th centuries ideas were shared via writing (and if you go back father, to the days of humanity before writing and reading were wide-spread, when ideas were only shared orally, the scholars and politicians of the day were those select men with a knack for oratorical skills.) Postman notes how the first fifteen presidents of the United States most likely wouldn’t have been recognized by their citizens on the street, yet those same citizens could have identified them by their latest speech or piece of distributed writing. Today, things are quite different. Postman wrote this book in the 1980’s when Ronald Reagan was president—a man who was previously a big time Hollywood actor in the 1960s and built a national reputation as someone on the silver screen. Even more recently we endured the presidency of Donald Trump, the former host of a reality television series. Was Donald Trump a good politician? The debate is still out. Is he entertaining? Absolutely—he is the most entertaining politician we have ever had in the age of television and I personally am not surprised at all that he is the most popular politician in the United States right now.
The core argument of Postman’s book is not only that television changed how we receive information, but it changed our entire relationship to information on an epistemological level. Whereas writing is geared towards conceptual thinking, sequential order, careful reasoning, objectivity, and a delayed response, television is meant for entertainment. Television, with its constantly moving pictures and engaging sound effects, is meant to be amusing. When we indulge in TV for entertainment’s sake, sinking into the couch after a hard day’s work to watch our favorite half hour comedy, that is not the TV that Postman is talking about. The TV that has decimated attention spans and amused us to a breaking point is the TV that has infiltrated our religions, our politics, and our education systems. “As a television show, and a good one,” Postman writes, “Sesame Street does not encourage children to love school or anything about school. It encourages them to love television.”
With television’s incorporation of the news cycle, our ways of learning about the world are also stunted. We get a story about the Middle East, and then a minute later we’re hearing about gridlock in the Senate, quickly followed by a story about a dog riding a crocodile in Florida. These are all entertaining stories to be sure, but what do they all have in common? For 99% of us, they have no impact on our daily lives. Do I wish there was less violence in the Middle East? Of course. What can I actually do about it? Essentially nothing. With all the graphic images and sounds coming out of the television screen, however, it is incredibly engaging and I can’t look away!
Television is designed to make everything it touches entertaining, and it has infiltrated our culture so much so that with the advancement of the internet and social media, the trends in this book have only exacerbated. “The form in which ideas are expressed affects what those idea will be,” Postman writes, and I couldn’t agree more. We the people now expect everything in life, whether it be news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion, etc., to entertain us. If it doesn’t, we don’t want it. Personally, I believe that our culture would benefit tremendously from a return to typography—a large part of the reason why I started reading and writing book reviews in the first place. Books are where real education lies, and in my opinion a better education is the way towards a better future. The internet has recently made huge swaths of information readily available (thanks Wikipedia!) so we now must take focus from what we are learning and return focus to how we go about learning it.
Wednesday was the 23rd anniversary of 9/11 and a paid subscription article from an American dude going by Good Citizen landed in my inbox. I don’t know where GC lives these days but he left the US shortly after 9/11 and has set up camp in mostly eastern European locations. I think he’s in his late 40’s. Here’s GC’s take on 9/11… the Jews did it. I concur. Remember Jeffrey Epstein? Jeff amassed an extensive video library of politicians and celebrities having sex with underage girls, and boys, too, that was used to blackmail these people of influence into servicing Israel. I believe that library is now in the hands of Bibi Netanyahu. The servicing continues and LBJ was an early agent for the Jews and helped lay down the evil we are paying for today. I hope this link opens for you. I left a couple of links in the comments section regarding the work of Dr. Judy Wood who was the first to focus extensively on the science of Direct Energy Weaponry, or DEW, that can set the countryside ablaze and reduce steel and concrete skyscrapers to dust. Lots of subject matter and videos to peruse here.
https://thegoodcitizen.live/p/9-1-1