PN:
Joe’s Comment – Nice observation. What Marcus Tullius Cicero didn’t mention is that we all operate on all of these levels all de doo dah day. And so it goes….. the wisest among us act beastly on occasion, and the dullest have moments of clarity, moments of wisdom. Would that we could always behave appropriately.
Israel’s Bday
VP Mike Pence delivers birthday greetings from America to Israel.
Damn straight.
Damn fine.
A reminder of what friendship, dedication, alliance, and promise can produce:
What a contrast to the previous administration.
Refreshing…..
But wait, there’s more!
A few days later, the POTUS vows to move the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem!
The Arab world is soiling their collective panties.
What the President is committing to do, is fulfill a bill passed in 1995 and passed again 6 months ago with overwhelming majority. Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Obama all kicked the can down the road.
Not in the play book for The Donald – get ‘er done seems the rally cry.
Super refreshing!
Pearl Harbor
The Japanese made a terrible strategic gamble when they attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. They were thinking emotionally, says Joe.
In their mind, such a devastating loss would undermine the American will, would destroy the resolve of We The People.
It didn’t turn out that way.
Dr. Victor Davis Hanson explains why in this interesting thumbnail history of congressman Carl Vinson, a visionary Democrat congressman who embodied the spirit of “big stick” foreign policy. A visionary leader for his time.
These were the days of a Democratic Party that actually had a platform, and fought well in their weight class. Here is a photo of a rescue crew pulling a sailor from the USS West Virginia from the water –
This and many more photos of Pearl Harbor under attack at Pamela Geller’s website.
ISIS (or Morons, More or Less)
Ever wonder what makes these maroons tick?
Ever wonder why they are like pissed off hornets all de doo da day?
Ever wonder when the West is going say that’s enough?
Joe and I wonder about these and a multitude of other concerns.
The eminent scholar John Gray (we never heard of him, but found this article very insightful (or is that incite-full?). Seems the “Liberal” West has some ‘splainin’ to do. A selection of quotes from the article –
“The rise of ISIS is intensely unsettling to the liberal West, and not just because of the capacity the jihadist group has demonstrated to launch a mass-casualty terrorist attack in a major European city. The group’s advance confounds the predominant Western view of the world. For the current generation of liberal thinkers, modern history is a story of the march of civilization. There have been moments of regression, some of them atrocious, but these are only relapses into the barbarism of the past, interrupting a course of development that is essentially benign. For anyone who thinks in this way, ISIS can only be a mysterious and disastrous anomaly.
For those baffled by ISIS, however, it cannot be only ISIS that is mysterious. So too must be much of modern history. ISIS has brought with it many atrocious assaults on civilized values: the sexual enslavement of women and children; the murder of gay men; the targeted killing of writers, cartoonists, and Jews; indiscriminate slaughter at a rock concert; and what amounted to the attempted genocide of the Yezidi. All of these acts of barbarism have modern precedents, many of them in the past century. The use of sexual violence as a military strategy featured in ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in the 1990s; during Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971; in Nepal, Colombia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and many other conflict zones. The destruction of buildings and artworks, which ISIS has perpetrated at the ancient site of Palmyra among other places, has several twentieth-century precedents. Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks razed churches and synagogues in Russia. Mao Zedong demolished large parts of China’s architectural inheritance and most of Tibet’s, while the Pol Pot regime wrecked pagodas and temples and aimed to destroy the country’s cities. In these secular acts of iconoclasm, the goal was to abolish the past and create a new society from “year zero”—an idea that goes back to “year one” of the calendar introduced in France in 1793 to signal the new era inaugurated by the French Revolution. Systematically destroying not only pre-Islamic relics but also long-established Islamic sites, the aim of ISIS is not essentially different…….
…….For those who find the rise of ISIS baffling, much of the past century can only be retrogression from modern life. Even the regime that committed a crime with no precedent in history must be regarded as an example of atavism: the Nazi state has often been described as having taken Europe back to the Dark Ages. Certainly the Nazis exploited a medieval Christian demonology in their persecution and genocide of Jews, but Nazism also invoked a modern pseudoscience of race to legitimate these atrocities. Invoking a type of faux Darwinism, Nazi racism could have emerged only in a time shaped by science. Nazism was modern not just in its methods of killing but also in its way of thinking.
This is not to reiterate the claim—made by Marxian theorists of the Frankfurt School—that modern scientific thinking leads, by some circuitous but inevitable route, to Nazism and the Holocaust. It is to suggest that when it is invoked in politics modernity is a figment. The increase of knowledge in recent centuries is real enough, as is the enlargement of human power through technology. These advances are cumulative and accelerating and, in any realistically likely scenario, practically irreversible. But there have been few, if any, similar advances in politics. The quickening advance of science and technology in the past few centuries has not gone with any comparable advance in civilization or human rationality. Instead, the increase of knowledge has repeatedly interacted with human conflicts and passions to produce new kinds of barbarism…….”
Of course, sticks and stones, et cetera.
Technology advances have outstripped social and cultural advances by orders of magnitude. What we feel as “normal” in the West is really more anomalous, more unique in the history of humanity.
Joe and I side with Mr. John Gray in believing the very rarity of Western culture is a bona fide justification for continuing the experiment.
With that said, we shall segue to the following ascorbic critique of government (and who shall govern) from the website “Those Who Can See“…..
Governments Are Us
Joe and I read an article about who it is that makes the Western world what it is, and how they came to do so. You can read it too, click here.
Despite jibber-jabber about the great “melting pot”, the assimilation of the immigrant, that story so often repeated that it has become government “double-speak”, the folks at “Those Who Can See” maintain it just ain’t so, Joe.
Their contention is the lack of discrimination in immigrant vetting is a danger that could spell the demise of the West.
Click on the link.
Read the article. It is lengthy because it is pregnant with data, reference, and example.
Quotes to stir interest –
……” ‘The opinion advanced in [Jefferson’s] The Notes on Virginia is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. ‘They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or, if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism? ‘There may, as to particular individuals, and at particular times, be occasional exceptions to these remarks, yet such is the general rule.’…….
…… But we at TWCS suspect that, on the contrary, Jefferson was right—Governments Are Us. ‘That temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism’ has not been equally distributed on Planet Earth.
We mostly rule ourselves now–the age of empire is over. If we rule ourselves badly, that’s because we are somehow ill-equipped to handle the running of a large, modern representative state.
So if we few in well-run countries usher in the many fleeing ill-run countries, what will be the result? Is it possible such people will recreate the conditions they’ve created in their own countries, right here on our soil? If so, we should be very, very careful which groups we let in the door.
What is the evidence?……
…… It is the distinctive fact regarding colonial migration that it was Teutonic in blood and Protestant in religion. The English, Dutch, Swedes, Germans, and even the Scotch-Irish, who constituted practically the entire migration, were less than two thousand years ago one Germanic race in the forests surrounding the North Sea. The Protestant Reformation, sixteen centuries later, began among those peoples and found in them its sturdiest supporters. The doctrines of the Reformation, adapted as they were to the strong individualism of the Germanic races, prepared the hearts of men for the doctrines of political liberty and constitutional government of the succeeding century.
These are the men who created the American Republic, for ‘ourselves and our posterity’–Englishmen, and men closely related to them. Their individualism and commonweal orientation led naturally to republican self-government.
So when did things begin to change?…..
……But what about today? What groups are we importing into the West now, and what character and flavor of governance do they bring with them? Are they apt, as Jefferson wondered, to ‘bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism?’…..
…… While Hispanics have been flowing into the U.S., Muslims have been doing so into Western Europe. Samuel Huntington famously said that ‘Islam has bloody borders.‘ In the context of immigration, one might say that their communities have frictional borders. What style of governance do they bring with them? …..
…….Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma doesn’t mince words. According to him, ‘There Are No Successful Black Nations’:
Nigeria, the most populous black nation on Earth, is on the brink of collapse. A culture of incompetence, endemic corruption, dignified ineptitude, and, chief among all, destructive selfishness and greed has played a major role in its unravelling. The same, sadly, can be said for most other African nations. … As long as we continue to ignore our own self-assessment and soul-searching, we will remain the undignified race.
The annual Prize for Achievement in African Leadership is given out by the foundation led by Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese billionaire. In the eleven years it’s been on offer, only four have been won—most years, not one leader on the continent meets the jury’s exacting standards:
There have also been accusations that failing to find a prize winner can encourage negative stereotypes about Africa and its leaders. Hadeel Ibrahim, Mo’s daughter and founding executive director of the foundation, told CNN: “We’re holding a mirror up to Africa and if there’s a winner, congratulations to the winner and to that country, and if there’s no winner we hope that African people get more of the leadership they deserve.“……
……Commons, in 1907:
Other races and peoples, accustomed to despotism and even savagery, and wholly unused to self-government, have been thrust into the delicate [American] fabric. Like a practical people as we pride ourselves, we have begun actually to despotize our institutions in order to control these dissident elements, though still optimistically holding that we retain the original democracy.
Humans are not interchangeable. The accidents of history, of our culture, and yes, even our genes have helped make us who we are and our societies what they are. If we treasure the liberal democratic systems we’ve inherited, let us have the good common sense to think carefully about just who we allow into that ‘delicate fabric.’ The very future of our societies may depend on it.
Thank you for reading.”
Very thought provoking arguments.
Joe and I ask….. is it a rational analysis of reality?
We think there is much here that has to do with IQ.
Joe’s Garage
Joe and I are joint proprietors of an old two-lever RobertCat 743DS skid-steer (we’re not familiar enough to call it a BobCat), and an UNO-41E Snorkelift man lift. Our skill set is gradually improving.
We have a long, long, LONG way to expert operator kudos:
If there were an equivalent of the Olympics for machinery operators, these dudes would get gold:
POLITICS, POLITICIANS, WACKJOBBERY, HUMOROUS, STUPID
SUNDAY SERMON
Dr. Jordan Peterson continues his lecture series Personality with segment 08: Carl Jung and the Lion King (Part 2):
Joe and I are finding much meaning and much food for thought watching these lectures. Wish we’d known these ideas much earlier in our career as a human.
WEATHER (OR NOT)
This week in Vernon was pleasantly mild. Some frost overnight on a few non cloudy days. The furnace in the house has been cycling at a lower rate than last December.
Today, Sunday, the sun broke through the clouds and all was wonderful in the valley.
Joe says if it lasts until March we’ll have dodged the advancing Ice Age bullet for this year.
That Joe is such an optimist!
Joe (dreamer) Mekanic
p.s. Ramirez puts his dreams into drawings –
