John McGhie born in Scotland in 1867. Spent most of his life in Pittenween a fishing village where the Firth of Forth opens to the North Sea. McGhie died in 1952.
Famous for painting women working in the fishing "industry".
A hard life!
A hat-tip to the tireless Lucas Machias
All too often, video footage of MSU Spartans makes us look like unsophisticated hicks. Frankly, I think it is pure, Grade-D envy of our gitter-done attitude and the gorgeous women (like Mrs ERJ) who attended MSU.
It is with great pleasure that I share this video of this lovely lass and her recipe for Himalayan Venison*. Four-and-a-half minute runtime.
The concepts of Original Sin and Noble Savage are bookends on a continuum of the inherent nature of Man.
Noble Savage, as promoted by Rousseau during The Enlightenment held forth that man was born perfect. Not only was he made in the image of God. He was a god. Evil was entirely due to the warping and distortions of society and of social inventions like religion.
Original Sin as commonly understood held forth that man, though made in the image of God, is a fallen creature that needs socializing in order to function as a moral element within God's economy.
Noble Savage is a seductive concept. The less we parent, the less we formally instruct, the less we incarcerate, the better our citizens will be.
While seductive, especially to those whose role it is to parent and instruct and rehabilitate, the overwhelming evidence is that feral children from single-parent families are not "Noble".
You have to be willfully blind to believe that the inherent nature of Man is good and honorable and generous. Fifteen minutes of watching two two-year-olds play in a sandbox when there is only one toy-shovel should be enough to convince anybody that children don't pop out-of-the-womb wanting to share.
The Financial Industry doubles down on their belief that her party will prevail in the upcoming election
The problem with aggressive "Hate Speech" enforcement is that it removes one of the exit-ramps for problem resolution.
Many people respond to a calm "You are standing on my foot. Please move." Some do not.
Some respond to a louder "Hey, you flipping idiot, you are standing on my foot. Get off of it." A few do not.
Of the few who do not respond to the louder "...flipping idiot...", they need some additional words to grab their attention "....@#$%^& *&^%!!! Get off my foot or I will knock your block off!!!!" delivered at much higher volume.
Dumb-azzes are notoriously hard of hearing and the "@#$%^&" gets their attention.
Exercising that last exit-ramp before initiating physical violence will get you tossed into gaol in Great Britain and might get you fired.
The fans of the Nanny-State observe that violence is often preceded by @#$%^& and in their feeble-minds think it CAUSES violence. They think that by eliminating "Hate Speech" they will will "break the chain" that leads to violence.
This "Words are violence" trope ensures that escalations will be shorter and many more of them will end violently.
"Good people"
Another trope I am tired of is the entire "My friend is a good person and did such-and-so. That means that such-and-so behavior is OK."
I am very deliberately NOT listing any "such-and-so" behaviors because it would polarize and antagonize readers.
My beef with the trope is three-fold.
My first beef is "define what a good-person is". The Bible tells us that all good comes from God and standard Christian theology states that all mankind* are sullied by Original Sin.
Most people seem to define a "good-person" as somebody who consistently claims that their actions are based on a sense of altruism and empathy. That leaves a lot of wiggle-room. People are delusional and often very out-of-touch for WHY they do things. It is easy to rationalize actions after-the-fact by simply forgetting facts that contradict your personal narrative.
Another issue I have with "good-person" is that many actions revolve around allocating resources of some kind of zero-sum-game. If somebody gains, who loses? Are the losers considered in the altruistic-narrative? How many criminals have been shown "mercy" at the expense of their future victims? The dopamine rush of exercising altruism sees the plusses but rarely comprehends the minuses of their actions. The plusses are immediate. The minuses are in the future.
My second beef is the assumption of a transitive (if-then) property between "good-person" and "every action is morally pure/desirable".
Even if I accepted that somebody is a "good-person" (whose actions are informed by the Bible and by God's will), there will be times when they make poor, morally indefensible decisions.
Maybe they were tired, or hungry. Maybe they just had a fight with their wife or their boss. Maybe they had a couple of beers or are stressed for time. Maybe they were preparing a defense for their Doctoral dissertation or some other once-in-a-lifetime event and acting in the most moral way would pose an inconvenience.
Everybody is faced with hard-decisions as we navigate through life. Sometimes we make the wrong call.
My third beef is that one of the underlying drivers is the belief "It is more important that we have solidarity than that we be right"
I thought the other person was kidding me when they laid that line on me. They weren't. It was only later that I realized that I should have challenged them with "Since I am not changing my opinion, then you HAVE to change yours...because it is more important that we have solidarity than that you be right..."
I get that humans are social animals. But we don't have to be stupid.
*With the exception of Jesus and possibly his mother Mary. Some branches of Christianity believe that Mary was conceived without Original Sin.
Well, crap! What a revolting development.
I was working on the property yesterday but didn't do any chainsawing. Sometimes sawdust in the eye will irritate them. I sprayed herbicide and was whacking Black Walnut saplings. The herbicide lists eye irritation from the triclopyr ester as a symptom of eye contact but I have no memory of any spray-drift getting near my face.
According to my records, I went to the zoo three days ago when I might have been exposed to virus/bacteria.
We will see how I feel tomorrow.
Fiber-Optic Cables
Did we just see a trial-run on hobbling the information infrastructure in France?
It got some attention from the media due to the novelty. Main fiber-optic trunks were damaged at multiple points and nearly simultaneously a series of fires caused the trains to stop running. The media said "it is unclear if the two attacks are connected"
The most recent news articles are from six days ago which sounds like the story was squashed.
I cannot speak to the fragility of the internet. At one time, it was claimed that the internet was designed to be highly redundant in terms of routing and expected to retain some degree of functionality even after a nuclear strike.
Intermittent service
The internet is such a part of our economy now that loss of several major trunks might have large implications. I HOPE there are disaster contingency plans-on-the-shelf that outline an orderly step-down. One approach is to have a hierarchy where military and emergency services get highest priority, medical second highest priority...and so on down to recreational video streaming and personal emails getting the lowest priority and being heavily throttled.
Another strategy is to provide intermittent service where some functions like Youtube and Netflix (lots of bandwidth consumed by just those two) are prohibited when most people are working.
We see similar approaches during electrical power shortfalls. We see rolling black-outs and deliberate brown-outs. As an aside, if you have a well that relies on electricity then you probably want to have a convenient way to store/transport water. Figure out how much weight you can carry and size your containers appropriately. Humans can endure "without" a lot of things. Water is not one of them.
Conversations with a 70-year-old Vietnamese man
I missed much of what he was telling me. His voice was soft. He never lost his accent. My ears are old.
He was one of the boat people. One of his uncle's boats was attacked by pirates when they were twenty-miles off-shore. Some people swam out-to-sea in hopes of being picked-up by boat-people. They left with literally just the clothes on their backs.
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| There are two bands of traffic off-shore of Vietnam. The closest part of the commercial shipping band is about 200km (125miles) off-shore. Local traffic is closer but approaching them was likely to get you executed or thrown in prison. (Source of image) |
He moved to France while much of his family relocated to Winnipeg and Toronto. Years later he moved to Canada and then to the US. Even today I doubt that he weighs more than 120 pounds.
Life was very hard. "Evil walks in this world" he told me. He could have been quoting 1 Peter 5:8
I didn't ask him what he thought of Communism. I didn't feel like I needed to.
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