U.S. Grant's battle at Vicksburg in some regards determined the fate of the civil war. The tactical difficulties of the assault is under-appreciated by most Americans. A video review of the battle and its course complexity shows Grant's military skills at their best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqp7_BYTRec
American issues of Christianity, cosmology, politics, ecosphere, philosophy, contemporary history etc
5/26/19
5/25/19
House Demos May Lynch/Impeach and Innocent President
House Democrats in the majority may decide to lynch (aka impeach) President Trump. With the power to impeach needing just a majority vote by the House there is a very good chance that will go ahead. After all Democrats didn't get much satisfaction from the years-long Mueller Report.
With NBC's The Blacklist done for the season there isn't much worth watching on television this summer. Football and The Blacklist are gone for the summer so a good political lynching may be all there is for the mob to watch. That could take a few months at least.
What About the biggest Hollywood Stars for impeachment doing a Trump-hating group rap song sing-a-long? That might help to require equal time film-making with pro-Trump action stars.
Since the Senate won't convict on the bogus charges it's all in good fun and will keep the country off the dreary subjects of good ideas for Presidential candidates and good legislation in the House; neither really exists any way. Hopefully President Trump will find some way to get in new buzz phrases for the nation to mirthfully use.
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/13/722438309/executive-privilege-fight-inches-democrats-closer-to-impeachment
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/01/718710736/poll-most-democrats-back-impeachment-hearings-a-move-thats-unpopular-overall
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/20/politics/house-democrats-pelosi-trump-impeachment/index.html
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/05/22/what-republicans-and-democrats-saying-impeachment/3755705002/
With NBC's The Blacklist done for the season there isn't much worth watching on television this summer. Football and The Blacklist are gone for the summer so a good political lynching may be all there is for the mob to watch. That could take a few months at least.
What About the biggest Hollywood Stars for impeachment doing a Trump-hating group rap song sing-a-long? That might help to require equal time film-making with pro-Trump action stars.
Since the Senate won't convict on the bogus charges it's all in good fun and will keep the country off the dreary subjects of good ideas for Presidential candidates and good legislation in the House; neither really exists any way. Hopefully President Trump will find some way to get in new buzz phrases for the nation to mirthfully use.
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/13/722438309/executive-privilege-fight-inches-democrats-closer-to-impeachment
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/01/718710736/poll-most-democrats-back-impeachment-hearings-a-move-thats-unpopular-overall
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/20/politics/house-democrats-pelosi-trump-impeachment/index.html
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/05/22/what-republicans-and-democrats-saying-impeachment/3755705002/
Silence in the Deep (a poem)
Silence
in the deep
over
a motionless span
relativity
is special and general
warping
shapes and appearances
passing
through
growing
apart space expands ephemeral
though
in situ motionless
honeycombed
membranes of virtual fields
spark’d
with a breath exhales the real
First
breath and last
filling
echoes with worlds words
mathematical
constructions, chains of circumstance
curved
filling slots with zeros and ones
others
with something sharp
musically
chorded ones
molecular
symphonic combinations begun,
woven
across abyssal plains
Pieces
traveling like ships-
knight,
kings and queens
bishop
pairs viewing the long diagonals
of
marine phytoplankton from a distance
like
virtual particles
in
all positions over the verse-waves
that
could be or become and were
after
silence shared the void.
5/24/19
Demos Won't Deal on Disaster Relief Bill
House Democrats could easily persuade the lone Republican who voted against the disaster bill to change and vote for it. All they would need accomplish is add 2 billion for border security disaster relief to the bill and he would likely sign off on it.
Democrats would rather have porous borders than compromise a little. Disaster relief is less meaningful to Democrats than creating national emergencies with mass illegal immigration.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/lone-gop-rep-blocks-disaster-aid-bill-in-surprise-move
Democrats would rather have porous borders than compromise a little. Disaster relief is less meaningful to Democrats than creating national emergencies with mass illegal immigration.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/lone-gop-rep-blocks-disaster-aid-bill-in-surprise-move
5/23/19
Special and General Theory of Relativity Conundrum
When people explain special relativity they tend to say that the effects are mostly illusory. That is, neither individual in the twins paradox experiences change subjectively, though comparatively one ages slower than the other as he travels near light speed.
Yet when the special theory is given flesh and blood in the general theory, an individual should experience mass as virtually increasing towards infinite as he approaches the speed of light. It should be comparable to the way a bicycle rider experiences increased resistance when he rides into a headwind as he pedals harder.
I may be way off about this. It may be that I have too much general theory and quantum cosmology stuff in mind. I should say that occasionally I write science fiction, so I am trying to be correct about that. I cannot find anything about it.
For some reason I got the idea that traveling faster through the fields of the Universe- including gravity and electromagnetism- made one experience those fields faster with increasingly shorter intervals-My understanding-that may well be incorrect, is that if a Lorentz invariant is “a temporal separation between two events”, then a traveler crossing through different elements/spaces of a field such as may exist in the Universe containing all other fields the Higgs perhaps) would encounter the strength of those field elements closer together with increased speed, temporally, and approaching the speed of light, the virtual addition to the traveler’s mass would be infinite.
That is why photons need be massless to travel at light speed. Gravity waves travel at light speed too. Steady state, decohered quanta approaching light speed have a ‘virtual’ mass increase that is added to them by virtue of traveling so quickly through the field. I thought the general theory added empirical content to the special theory among other things.
China Busy Destroying Earth's Ozone Layer
It is remarkable that a problem believed solved by intelligent humanity in the '70s has resurfaced; large scale release of gasses that attack the world's ozone layer.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/23/china-emits-illegal-greenhouse-gas-that-destroys-ozone-layer-study.html
One hopes the Communist, atheist Chinese leaders get some sense and quit releasing mass quantities of very dangerous gas into the atmosphere. The gas trichlorofluoromethane aka CFC-1 is illegal under the Montreal Protocol that China signed and dishonored. In the old days people used chlorofluorocarbons as a propellant in deodorant spray and air-conditioning coolant (Freon). It is possible the Chinese are secretly manufacturing the gas to sell to third world countries for hard cash, that may not know any better. Some Africans may want air-conditioning and don't have an E.P.A. Easy people to dump cheap, dangerous gas on. Some Chinese atheist leaders are dangerous red-necks.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-aerosols-still-bad/
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/23/china-emits-illegal-greenhouse-gas-that-destroys-ozone-layer-study.html
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-aerosols-still-bad/
On Morality...cont.
In post-Calvin Geneva some of the pastors were described by outsiders as Socinians. They were unhappy with that. Socinians had taken the trinity out of theology and some of the churches promoted reason over scripture. Much of the American church has gone that way. The Unitarian Church of Transylvania apparently were Socinians and the left wants to make the Protestant branch a cuddly promoter of all leftist platform ideas. That can trick people of course regarding true doctrine and scriptural interpretation. The trouble is that the Holy Spirit does allow people to interpret scripture for-themselves and their understanding. Because of reformation tolerance or even accentuation of self-interpretation instead of Catholic authorities the rise of fake Christian churches was inevitable. Within those structures the left can claim whatever they like as righteous doctrine including murdering the unborn. Plainly from the life of Jesus while in Mary's womb there was implicit recognition of the sentience of the unborn, although for Jesus the sentience range was increased.
One shouldn't forget Marcus Tullius Cicero's 'On Natural Law'. It is an argument that nature itself has an evident preferred moral behavior- such as parents don't eat progeny. I took a course on-line from Yale/Coursera recently on everyday morality. It was interesting to learn what they think in academia. They tend to write-off deontological ethical systems, including that of Immanuel Kant and his idea of the categorical imperative. There is a kind of list of moral values that people select from, and the left tend to value individualism and freedom from harm as about it, while conservatives also include a few others like honor that is lacking in the left. Morality can be defined in several ways, objectively. The easiest way is to regard it as social behavior and norms that people actually have in fact, and then describe that as their moral system, rather than describing some ideal way they might say they have or aspire to. The left also want to find a primitive morality hard-wired in babies. Calvin believed that God communicates basic moral values through conscience, and Christians go farther through the Holy Spirit toward realizing what right behavior is. Here is more on that topic--Searching for some sort of innate morality in babies that could be taken as a cognitive characteristic such that people are hard-wired to certain behaviors that he can regard as moral seems sketchy.
Morality is an ability to differentiate between abstract values rather than natural behavior for-itself. The difference between defecating in public or in a toilet stall is a moral and legal question perhaps, yet a dog or a baby defecating on the floor isn't taken to be a moral question they have flunked.
Moral philosophy isn't about unavoidable deterministic behavior. Animals pursue with personal egoism perhaps, things that are good for them, or that they believe to be good. An example would be youthful alcoholism. maybe a child discovers that drinking gin and orange juice or whatever is good, or tastes good, so they continue even though it is bad for their health. If creme puffs were actually poisonous and bad, people would eat them anyway of they didn't know better. The pursuit of what is thought to be the immediate good is not a moral question.
Socrates wanted to show that human children may have innate knowledge in one part of The Meno in a famous passage of 1900 words where he interviews a slave boy. Cicero wrote a discourse On Natural Law. The babies interpreting fair distribution or unequal distribution were not perhaps showing a moral sense. They have have transferred their own worldview into the two characters and preferred a balanced rather than an unfair or unequal distribution for-themselves. The babies may have liked or disliked a triangle shape more than a square, or alternatively have required more time to understand a complex image in regard to a triangle and sphere vs a square and sphere in motion. A triangle has slope and a square has only angles.
While morality may be what people actual do. It is a culturally based social dialect and an evolutionary praxis of change. Its realm may be stretched and broken as a society expands or is broken, so chaos and moral breakdown occurs.
One should not overuse moral reductionism to posit that like a Universe expanding from a singularity, the moral state of mankind is a kernel within babies that grows into adulthood. While some adults are simplistic regarding moral behavior and world view, and some societies are simplistic in behavior and world view in some historical periods, in the modern world, given the possible ranges of freedom of motion and action of human beings as a physical being, moral values are chosen, accepted as true dogma, and so forth, intentionally rather than automatically.
Anyone can understand that putting a hand on a stove burns. Babies vicariously understand that about others. Adults often lack that capacity and willfully persecute others at a distance with modern tools of they can on the basis of rumor. The gang morality of organizations and collectives for pursuing people to victimize is an exaggeration of the profit motive or pursuit of the good narrowly that is expanded into mass organizational moral values.
Organizational morality can have good or bad values, and designate those values like algebraic literals wherein one drops in the meaning such that it supports organizational goals.
One shouldn't forget Marcus Tullius Cicero's 'On Natural Law'. It is an argument that nature itself has an evident preferred moral behavior- such as parents don't eat progeny. I took a course on-line from Yale/Coursera recently on everyday morality. It was interesting to learn what they think in academia. They tend to write-off deontological ethical systems, including that of Immanuel Kant and his idea of the categorical imperative. There is a kind of list of moral values that people select from, and the left tend to value individualism and freedom from harm as about it, while conservatives also include a few others like honor that is lacking in the left. Morality can be defined in several ways, objectively. The easiest way is to regard it as social behavior and norms that people actually have in fact, and then describe that as their moral system, rather than describing some ideal way they might say they have or aspire to. The left also want to find a primitive morality hard-wired in babies. Calvin believed that God communicates basic moral values through conscience, and Christians go farther through the Holy Spirit toward realizing what right behavior is. Here is more on that topic--Searching for some sort of innate morality in babies that could be taken as a cognitive characteristic such that people are hard-wired to certain behaviors that he can regard as moral seems sketchy.
Morality is an ability to differentiate between abstract values rather than natural behavior for-itself. The difference between defecating in public or in a toilet stall is a moral and legal question perhaps, yet a dog or a baby defecating on the floor isn't taken to be a moral question they have flunked.
Moral philosophy isn't about unavoidable deterministic behavior. Animals pursue with personal egoism perhaps, things that are good for them, or that they believe to be good. An example would be youthful alcoholism. maybe a child discovers that drinking gin and orange juice or whatever is good, or tastes good, so they continue even though it is bad for their health. If creme puffs were actually poisonous and bad, people would eat them anyway of they didn't know better. The pursuit of what is thought to be the immediate good is not a moral question.
Socrates wanted to show that human children may have innate knowledge in one part of The Meno in a famous passage of 1900 words where he interviews a slave boy. Cicero wrote a discourse On Natural Law. The babies interpreting fair distribution or unequal distribution were not perhaps showing a moral sense. They have have transferred their own worldview into the two characters and preferred a balanced rather than an unfair or unequal distribution for-themselves. The babies may have liked or disliked a triangle shape more than a square, or alternatively have required more time to understand a complex image in regard to a triangle and sphere vs a square and sphere in motion. A triangle has slope and a square has only angles.
While morality may be what people actual do. It is a culturally based social dialect and an evolutionary praxis of change. Its realm may be stretched and broken as a society expands or is broken, so chaos and moral breakdown occurs.
One should not overuse moral reductionism to posit that like a Universe expanding from a singularity, the moral state of mankind is a kernel within babies that grows into adulthood. While some adults are simplistic regarding moral behavior and world view, and some societies are simplistic in behavior and world view in some historical periods, in the modern world, given the possible ranges of freedom of motion and action of human beings as a physical being, moral values are chosen, accepted as true dogma, and so forth, intentionally rather than automatically.
Anyone can understand that putting a hand on a stove burns. Babies vicariously understand that about others. Adults often lack that capacity and willfully persecute others at a distance with modern tools of they can on the basis of rumor. The gang morality of organizations and collectives for pursuing people to victimize is an exaggeration of the profit motive or pursuit of the good narrowly that is expanded into mass organizational moral values.
Organizational morality can have good or bad values, and designate those values like algebraic literals wherein one drops in the meaning such that it supports organizational goals.
On the Right of the Left to Murder the Unborn on Fake Christian Grounds
In post-Calvin Geneva some of the pastors were described by outsiders as Socinians. They were unhappy with that. Socinians had taken the trinity out of theology and some of the churches promoted reason over scripture. Much of the American church has gone that way. The Unitarian Church of Transylvania apparently were Socinians and the left wants to make the Protestant branch a cuddly promoter of all leftist platform ideas. That can trick people of course regarding true doctrine and scriptural interpretation. The trouble is that the Holy Spirit does allow people to interpret scripture for-themselves and their understanding. Because of reformation tolerance or even accentuation of self-interpretation instead of Catholic authorities the rise of fake Christian churches was inevitable. Within those structures the left can claim whatever they like as righteous doctrine including murdering the unborn. Plainly from the life of Jesus while in Mary's womb there was implicit recognition of the sentience of the unborn, although for Jesus the sentience range was increased.
Police Facial Recog Systems May Identify Wanted Criminals- Democrats Hate That
Police use of facial
recognition systems are coming under some media and civic attack- such as San
Francisco where they were banned, because they potentially can recognize wanted
criminals, illegal aliens and fugitives from the law that might otherwise pass
unrecognized by a patrolman. The expert systems are an upgrade to fingerprint
and I.D. scans that policemen can employ to verify that a possible suspect is
or is not already wanted.
With so many tens of millions of undocumented people in the United
States the possibility that a policeman will remember the face of some hundreds
of thousands of fugitives from the law when encountering one is non-existent.
Facial recognition systems are about the only way law enforcement people can
sort through the bins of billions of individuals that live in or may travel
through the United States each year.
Lawless cities that would prefer to allow terrorists and law
breakers of various kinds to drift through the masses incognito are not helping
to secure public safety at all in banning face recognition systems.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/15/san-francisco-bans-police-use-of-face-recognition-technology.html
https://gizmodo.com/we-dont-need-to-pause-police-use-of-face-recognition-we-1834958605
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/15/san-francisco-bans-police-use-of-face-recognition-technology.html
https://gizmodo.com/we-dont-need-to-pause-police-use-of-face-recognition-we-1834958605
Certainly democrats could abuse the system and track people as
ruthlessly as corporations track smart phone locations and with rtf scanners and
sales record follow the location of many citizens already. It is the private
sector corporate world with the use of face recognition system that has the
greatest capacity to abuse the data. While law enforcement agencies use the
technology to sustain public safety the corporate world already has the ability
to use it for whatever critical collusions or scientific purposes they like
without public review. Public review of law enforcement uses of face
recognition technology should exist in camera each year to confirm that it
isn't being used with nefarious application as might a zodiac killer use the
technology to sort out and track his victims, or a very old and rich University
study society to learn who it prefers to delete economically.
5/22/19
Every Citizen Should Care About Public Debt
Classical virtue is relevant even in an era of mass media social conditioning and commercialism. If one learns anything from history it is that societies function best with virtuous citizens. One should work for the ideal state regardless of one’s personal longevity or lack of. Socrates didn’t fear death, he was concerned about acting without virtue and truth. Public debt is not good though many would rationalize it away.
John Calvin, the reformer, acquiesced with the idea of loaning money, yet felt that interest should only be charged on the rich that can afford it. The public cannot well afford vast public debt one-third of which is held by foreign entities. It is the poor that lose out to pay for the debt. The British American Revolutionary war loans and interest thereof were not paid off until nearly the start of the 2oth century. Social spending in England was minimized to pay the debt down, and Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto in those poor English circumstances.
Though one cannot accomplish construction or maintenance of the ideal state alone, citizens should work as best they can toward those social ends that best serve the people, the democracy, and the well being of others. Concern for others as well as oneself are not only Christian values they are classical values that pre-exist even Hellenic Greece.
To live a life without pursuit of virtue or truth if one can, is in a sense to fail at life Being a good citizen and human being concerned with working for virtue in even a small way may not get one to heaven, for one needs the Lord to enact that, yet it does make humanity itself a little better, and human works brighter and more honorable.
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