Tagged: truth

Bomb Shelters In North Vietnam

So I’m reading Reporting Vietnam, published by the Library of America. It consists entirely of articles from throughout the war.

The last article I read mentioned how President Johnson, in March of 1968 declared that due to the fact that during war the President need to focus his attention entirely on the war, he wouldn’t be running for re-election (can’t mix campaigning). This article also mentioned that by this time many advisors of his wanted to stop bombing the North.

I repeat, many advisors wanted to stop bombing the North.

To be sure, fact: America and South Vietnam were bombing North Vietnam.

Today’s article includes, “Outside Hanoi, the driver’s first job, I discovered, was to look for a shelter for the passengers whenever the alert or the pre-alert sounded. Every hamlet, sometimes every house, is equipped with a loud-speaker, and the alarm is rung out by the hamlet bell…When there is no hamlet nearby, a band of soldiers, tramping along with a transistor radio, may warn you that planes are coming.”

Fact: the NV commies had decided they wanted to live and so built and used bomb shelters.

****

Like fish which breathe in the water, or Everest climbers who pack oxygen for their summit, it seems that there are “tells”, if you will, that can be used to make sense of life on Earth. Can’t breathe underwater? Probably don’t live there.

One such “tell” that you live in a country that is being “bombed” is the presence of “bomb shelters.”

Final question in today’s lesson: What, then, does it mean if you claim to be “bombed” but have no bomb shelters?

Bonus question: What does it mean if you repeat the claim that some country is consistently being bombed, without ever thinking to ask, “Do they have bomb shelters?”

(Answers: 1. The claim is a lie. And 2. You’re a demonstrable fool.)

Filling Space

George Carlin joked about how people acquire space—then we fill it up. Something like, “Look! There’s some space! Let me put something there!” (It’s Saturday. I know. I’ll help if you’re not yet bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Think of our closets, rooms, trunks of cars, open land etc.)

Isn’t the same thing true for mental space? I’m thinking specifically about “misinformation” “delusions” “lies” and the like. What is our problem? We just can’t keep mental space empty? We can’t admit “I don’t know” and wait to fill it until we do? Does there have to be a filler for every single topic that enters our mind?

Is that healthy? Does it even accomplish anything? We all just walk around spouting lies as if no one can tell, even though we also, on some level, know we “don’t know” everything?

Is it really so hard to keep a clean mental house? Is it really so hard and inhumane to tell your conversant, “Now, you know that’s not true”?

What is it? Is it that we need people in proximity to us so desperately that we’d rather put up with their incessant, void-preventing bullshyat than call them to try harder to keep their integrity?

I don’t get it.

Trump Lies, Kamala Lies, Politicians Lie. Don’t Act Shocked.

I do not see any meaningful difference between Trump’s “AI crowd” claim and Kamala’s calling Biden a “racist”. Do you?

It’s called “mudslinging”.

Politicians do it all the time and we should all be desensitized to it by now.

These lies are not an attack on your good name or your dignity. They are not an affront to your person. They are merely evidence that politicians lie. And we knew this before Trump. We knew it before “democrats”.

Next.

How We Feelin’?

I like the conservative hawks who say we’re not fulfilling our mission as World Good Guy.

I do not like all the conflicting reports.

I feel embarrassed that I questioned Zelensky’s motives at the outset.

I hate it when otherwise honest people will bully their way through a conversation and say, “Whether or not it’s true, it’s helpful because it motivates” about things like the stupid Ghost of Kyiv or some Russian soldier body count.

Generally, we seem to be living in a time period where we have totally forgotten how to work with a liar. The way to do it is by his/their actions. Actions don’t lie.

I’m tired of hearing how “we” are trying to figure out what is in Putin’s mind.

I’m very tired of WWII comparisons. I’m not a child. I don’t need an analogy. And I’m pretty sure that there are tens, if not hundreds, of nuances to this invasion of Ukraine by Russia that make it fundamentally different than the invasion of Poland all those years ago.

I was worried about nuclear attack Sunday, but I’m not worried anymore. And that worries me.

I still believe, but haven’t taken the time to back it up with research, that Zelensky is nowhere close to George Washington. Or other great American generals. He has said some strong statements. But I’m not inspired to virtue by them. (And don’t tell me how rare GW is. That changes nothing about my point. My point is we’re only a few cities away from Zelensky’s speeches being pure propaganda.)

The thing I dislike most about LeBron James are the moments I can tell that he remembers he is on camera. His face changes. It’s uncomfortable to watch. I don’t recall Jordan ever letting on that he cared about the cameras. I think I’m talking about something related to focus. If you know what I’m referring to, then you know how I feel about the leaders of the West right now. They’re not behaving out of true belief. They’re believing that they’re participating in a “photo op”. Their vanity is on full display. “History will show we did the right thing,” their actions and speeches say. Give me a break. Walking out of a “zoom call” is not exactly a sit in. Or an assassination by mob.

I told a German friend who’d made some, imho, wild predictions about this week that I’d call him this Sunday if all his predictions were wrong. He said, “Feel free. I hope I am wrong.” I don’t think I will anymore.

I don’t know what it’s like to be a European watching this invasion.

I do know what it’s like to be an American watching this invasion. It feels like bombs and missiles really aren’t as powerful or lethal as movies would have us believe.

Enough about me. How about you? How we feelin’?

This Is Not COVID

“The spherical extracellular viral particles contain cross-sections through the viral genome, seen as black dots.”

The above image and caption is from the CDC site. https://www.cdc.gov/media/subtopic/images.htm

I could not emphasize enough that not one of you, nor I, can explain that caption.

If I break it down grammatically, like 8th grade sentence-diagramming, it says, “The particles contain cross-sections.”

What does that mean? Is there a problem when particles contain cross-sections?

Beyond this, “spherical extracellular viral”, and “through the viral genome”, and “seen as black dots” are also utterly unintelligible to me. To be clear, I’m saying that even after reading “seen as black dots,” it would be silly for me to say, “Oh, I see what you mean,” given that the entire image is black dots against a white backdrop.

COVID is black dots? Stop the press!! It’s all over my phone screen!

All this is on my mind partly because of that line I included in my recent “stupid” post about the stupidity of COVID illustrations, and partly because I’ve been listening to a podcast called “Closer To Truth” which is some sort of fun “X-Files”-feeling, state-of-physics-today (in layman’s terms) show. It generally accomplishes its purpose, but the other day one of the interviewees referred to an illustration to make his point about multiverses and the size of everything. This use of illustration to explain truth, then, triggered me again.

The simple fact is using illustrations to convey truth bothers me.

A little backstory: Before modern script writing, like alphabets and even syllabaries before them, man often used something like emoji’s to communicate across great distance, time or space. We might call them pictograms or hieroglyphs. And when it came to numbers, some cultures used certain animals to express differences between say hundreds, thousands, and whatever they thought (but couldn’t utter) was bigger than thousands. A cow might mean hundreds, a frog, thousands, and an infamous one to express the largest amount was a stick figure of a man apparently examining the grandness of the starry night with open arms. To our eyes and ears and minds, this fact—this use of pictograms by our ancestors—is intriguing at best, and downright embarrassing at worst. But here we are again, using artist’s renditions to explain “truth”.

So what should happen instead? Here’s an example. If you’re tempted to ask, “Is there a multiverse?” The person you’re asking should say, “That’s the wrong question.” (The physicists would admit that.) The right question is, “Will our children think the idea of a universe is a quaint, but obsolete understanding of things, in the category of earth-as-center?”

And my point here is not physics, but reasoning, dignity in fact, so I need to say that if my children are going to think in terms of multiverse, they’d be fools for doing so because of illustrations. This is no different than how I believe you’re foolish if any part of your atheism or belief in evolution comes from the illustrated sequence of a monkey gradually standing upright.

Same goes for COVID. Is there a new virus or illness or health issue on Earth? Whatever our opinion, we’d be foolish if we based it on an illustration.

Another example of getting at truth properly: I knew I could be a pilot because I saw planes fly.

And another (negatively): Not one writer of the Bible uses an illustration—whether clay, or ink, or tapestry—to persuade either their contemporary audience or us.

I must insist on decrying the use of illustration when it comes to truth because, interestingly enough, the experts keep using it. At its root, an illustration can only ever be truth in the sense that the illustration commissioner, upon reviewing the piece, says, “That’s exactly what’s in my mind.” That the illustration matches his imagination can be true, but that does not move the argument along. The further—and necessary—step of “…and what’s in my mind is truth,” is not contained in or advanced by the truth that the illustration matches the mind. The man behind the imagination still has work to do. The truth debate is between individuals. Talk to me. Use your words. I’ll listen.

Don’t be fooled, folks. If someone pulls out an illustration to answer your truth question, still or motion, assert your manhood or womanhood; give yourself dignity and ask them to use their words.

The World Does Not Need More Children’s Books By Minority Authors

I saw a headline the other day about LatinX and other minority authors. It went on about how, while they are publishing some children’s books, there is still a great deficit and a need for more. Let me be clear: that’s simply not true. The world does not need more children’s books by minority authors.

I’ve mentioned on this blog before, more than once, that I attended an evangelical seminary for three years. It was a fairly robust graduate program, so far as I could tell—though I did not decide to obtain a master’s degree. Why not? Because I’m a man of action. And my professor and advisor could not answer the following question satisfactorily: “I’m a pilot. I wasn’t born a pilot; I had to learn how to fly. Likewise, I want to know what skill I will have by working so hard to get the degree. What skill, that I don’t already possess, will I have?”

He couldn’t answer it. I remember he tried; I remember he talked a lot in the space that naturally followed my question. But I also remember that he seemed to almost be speaking gibberish. There was some kind of mental block or other in that interaction.

Over a year later or so, I finally figured out “the academy”. So I emailed the advisor (I was no longer a student) and told him as much. In short, I said, “Higher education is all about writing the primer for the field. In this case, it’s the Bible. You all want to get on the translation committee of the best-selling Bible. In other fields it’s the History 101 text or the Biology 101 text that is taught at Harvard or wherever is most elite.”

My advisor replied, “So are you ready to come back and finish your degree?”

This is why I maintain and declare that the world does not need more children’s books written by minority authors. It just doesn’t. As always, minority authors have nothing to say. And if they did, they certainly wouldn’t need support from the majority. And if the majority, people like me and my old advisor, get them to quit writing, that means they certainly have nothing to say.

I haven’t gone back to finish my degree and I won’t. Like I said, I’m a man of action. I can already do everything those folks can do. But I do not care to write the primer for any field. Except maybe “Bravery”. Yeah. Maybe I’d like to write a book on Bravery.

Here’s my Bravery primer: If you really have something to write, then I wouldn’t be able to stop you no matter how hard I tried.

Three Interesting Pontifications

  1. I’m going to relate the disregard for Biden and Sanders’ age to the current government response to see-oh-vee-aye-dee nineteen.
  2. I’m going to teach you bravery.
  3. I’m going to escape again.

Let’s begin. Like many of you, I have long been perplexed by Biden and Sanders’ age. This is because for as long as I can remember, our culture’s socially-approved political and historical posture has included the denigration of old white men. With the sought for and welcomed shut-down of America by these same socialites, not to mention their shaming of any folks who say, “Don’t worry”, I am no longer perplexed. What is now abundantly clear, even to a dunce like me, is Americans are in a state of denial regarding death.

Next, professional pilots must pass flight physicals on at least a yearly basis. As it was devised by pilots, this rule is naturally incredibly wise and far-thinking. And yet, it can be stressful on the day. Imagine with me that you’re not sick and you must go to a doctor. The doctor during this interaction has the power–not to tell you that you’re sick–but to bring an end to your career, and quite probably your childhood dream.

Again, as a pilot there is at least one day a year where even though you’re not sick, you must transfer the controls of your life to a person who has the power to crush your soul. How do we do it? Or, more specifically, how do I do it? Firstly, I tell the truth. The truth is that that doctor’s no more in control than I am. Something bigger is going on. Secondly, I remind myself that it’s not a one-time visit. As a professional pilot, I have to be healthy every day. The minute I feel unhealthy, I have to land.

In other words, the fear lies in applying incorrectly intense focus on that one doctor visit, and the courage lies in spreading out the focus over a lifetime. More simply, when I begin to dread the flight physical, I change my perspective.

Hey you! If you’re feeling afraid, change your perspective. (Don’t worry.)

Lastly, I made my wife watch Field of Dreams with me last night. I had mentioned the film to her and my step-son the other day, and when I tried to summarize it, I couldn’t get through a summary without crying. Weird. Anyhow, recently when we’ve watched a film, I have loved the new-to-me sensation of contemplating what she (a non-Western immigrant) must be thinking as she watches it, considering that she doesn’t know any of the multiple references each film makes and uses in order to be a coherent whole. (For example, forget ((or add to)) ballplayers themselves as being a new entity; think of watching the “I’m melting” line as the ballplayer walks into the cornfield.)

In any case, with all the hysteria and uncertainty and “shuttering” going on, last night, I didn’t want to see the movie from her perspective. I just wanted to imagine what it was like for Ray to rush to the field after his daughter told him there was a man standing on it. I just wanted to imagine seeing a ballplayer standing in the outfield under the lights in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa. I just wanted to imagine that I still lived in America.

Here’s a Better Suggestion

What?! You’re kidding me, right? Dying newspapers are banding together against President Trump?

Most Americans cannot even read.

Even more do not read.

Rather than joining forces against perceived attacks, newspapers and other written news mediums would be more likely to defeat President Trump’s attacks by publishing early-readers like Dr. Seuss’s Fox in Socks. Or Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever.

The president’s words cannot possibly threaten the literate.

Another One For Only My Christian Readers

This Sunday, the church I have been a member of for three years now will recognize any/all graduates. It’s a fairly depressing ceremony as the congregation has lost so many members over the years that there are only a few remaining “youth” or “grandkids” that can be mustered out for display. For my part, I will be recognized for my post-undergraduate certificate thingy.

This calls to mind two things. First, I am sure I know more about the Bible, text-criticism of it especially, than my pastor and I’m not sure what to do about that. Second, I am sure someone will suggest I finish the master’s degree proper at some point when they realize I didn’t get one.

Here’s the thing. I will never attempt to do this. My reasons are not difficult to understand to me, but to all you encouragers I feel like my reasoning requires moving a mountain.

This is my final attempt. I stumbled upon this little gem in my Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 2. On the topic of “being” the following is included.

“It has seldom been supposed that reality exhausts the objects of our thought or knowledge. We can conceive possibilities not realized in this world. We can imagine things which do not exist in nature.“

Every professor at the school I attended for three years, including those who sit on the NIV translation committee, believe that reality does exhaust knowledge. For example, they believe numbers are not imagination, but real. (As are triangles, nouns in the genitive case, and the like.)

Folks can believe what they want. But coupling this belief about the world with the one painted by the Bible makes it flatly a lie. They are wrong at a level which touches evil. Worse, in all my discussions with them, they never even acknowledged that they knew there was another option. Well I’m it. And I won’t fight them. I won’t. It’s foolishness.

There is huge trouble brewing–like you should be afraid–when men-of-god do not discern the difference between a circle or noun and the Exodus. One is only in our mind, the other happened. In that moment, the instant separation fades, the moment the circle “happens,” pride envelopes them and the meaningful distinction between creature and creator blurs. Aside: One thing I haven’t yet had time to research is just when precisely the academic types stopped declaring themselves divine. We know the infamous and hell-bound Greeks used to, and we know that they don’t anymore. But I’m curious when they stopped actually asserting it. By my thinking, the folks who think the LORD is in some way involved with grammar etc. are just closet-deity-declarers. Here’s the test question for you laymen. Can the all-powerful LORD make Frodo not throw the ring into Mordor? If you think the LORD can stop Frodo, how would He? And if you think the LORD cannot stop Frodo, what is preventing Him?

Do not mis-read me. Men-of-god can have as deep of imaginations as Anne Shirley. But they have to admit when they’re using them.

For example, I have reached far enough back into Ancient Near Eastern history to believe that the reason the adversary in the Garden is “the serpent” (versus some other predator) is because of how serpents bind their prey. Sin–disobedience to our Heavenly Father–binds us up just like the serpent binds its food. Serpents don’t use fingers, they don’t use arms and legs, they use everything that they are. That’s precisely how the adversary works. He doesn’t mess around and he desires us. And a really neat part of this is that no matter how much we struggle, we cannot get free. It takes someone outside of us to save us. Just like the Gospel recorded happened some two thousand years ago.

But that is all part of my imagination. The Word of God says no such thing. It draws no connection, and it never seeks to answer my question of, “Why the serpent?…besides the fact that it was the serpent.”

So that is my imagination. You don’t have to believe it. It probably isn’t true. But it satisfies me.

Finally, you may ask, “Why not track down some seminary that is in line with your understanding?” Ah, but there couldn’t be one. The LORD holds all power. Christ holds all power. It is His to give. Understand?

In retrospect, I should’ve went to Law School. Or Engineering.

Oh well. I can translate some cuneiform. That’s something.

HashtagYouToo?

Late last year when actresses began revealing that the situation in Hollywood was exactly as most of Middle America had always known it to be, I made a small non-monetary wager with one male relative of mine who shall remain unnamed. Pride was the only thing worth winning or losing. I said, “This whole thing will blow over by summer. Quit acting like trending hashtags have power.”

Well, you can imagine that he has been quick to point out that summer is here and the #MeToo movement still moves.

My angle has always been H-. What do you want me to tell H-? I believe that the only thing to teach her on this topic is what the Bible teaches. Its words have at least two elements which women need to be raised hearing repeatedly. The first element is that men rape women. As many skeptics point out, this behavior is recorded as occurring more than once and sometimes even by the so-called hero of the story. No argument here. Thousands of years later, however, we should not be shocked to discover we have not evolved or some shit.

The second element is the teaching that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. How many victims believe that about their body? Maybe all, maybe none. No women mention it in their accusations is all I know.

As a divorced man, I can tell you that I will never understand the “stay” aspect of #MeToo. The “safe word” notion seems reasonable if you’re into some kink. If he doesn’t agree to it, well, at least you know where he’s at. But to be frank, well no. Frankly I just “can’t get there from here” as they say. (LEAVE.)

You know what one of you once told me? She said, “On dates I never think about how I am being treated. I think about how mad my dad would be if I let myself be treated bad.” Obviously I haven’t forgotten that. And not so obviously, after three years of ancient language study, I think that is a near perfect word-for-word translation into English of the Apostle Paul’s Greek, “your body is the temple of the holy spirit.”

Lastly, if the I’m-only-sharing-this-now-because-I-want-to-prevent-further-victims sentiment that falls under the #MeToo umbrella, if not is the umbrella, continues past the summer, I cannot see how anyone still associating with #MeToo is not a fool in the sandy biblical sense. Unlike, say, the American Revolution or the Civil Rights movement, in this case, the longer you last, the weaker you become. You set it up that way.

Then again, reading “20 Years Strong: #MeToo Movement Denies Allegations of Impotence As It Considers New Gender-Neutral Logo” on some future day does not seem unlikely.