President Biden spake; "2nd Amendment isn't Absolute"

 President Biden has declared the second amendment to be less than absolute (whatever that means). It is good when a President can declare the constituion and its amendment maleable and subject to his personal political will. Lucky he isn't for the return of slavery or he could declare the 13th amendment isn't absolute either.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-address-gun-control-assault-weapons-ban

Apparently Presidents can declare elements of the constition less than absolute after deeming an offending amendment so. If it doesn't say that in the constitution its proobably because it isn't 'absolute'.

N.P.R. Propaganda in support of Administration narrative on Ukraine Annexation

 As the U.S. government prosecutes its war against Russia in the Ukraine the administration requires a continuing narrative of support for its version of events and causality of the Ukraine-Russia conflict. This morning National Public Radio broadcast a tale of two statues of Vladmir- the founder of Kievan Rus, as a way to convey the impression the Russians are pretenders to be leaders of the Slavic world and Ukraine was always an independent country not part of Russia or the Rus. People that have read history know that is largely in error.

Vladimir- a Viking whom had ventured down the Dnepr River in the era of Vikings traveling European rivers for exploration and war in the 9^th century onward a few hundred years, consolidated the river settlement of the Slavic people at Kiev and the Russian nation formed. Russians increased in population and eventually expanded north and east to areas sparsely populated for hundreds of years. Eventually the capital of Russia became Moscow- a convenient location especially as Russia eastward expansion took them over the Urals and to the Pacific. NPR gave the false impression that Ukraine was always an independent country and wasn’t part of Russia, and that is propaganda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus%27_people

The history of the Varangian-Vikings and their heirs that expanded Russia is fascinating and of course jostles within themselves and with other people around them for land. That process is what is continuing today. President Biden and the Democrats decided to get involved and take some land for the Catholic-Polish and German-British side.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUgzqkCW6A4

If the United States last another century or two it is possible the capital may be moved to Missouri and that wouldn’t mean that Washington D.C. is no longer part of the U.S.A. The capital at Moscow does not mean that the Ukraine isn’t part of the historical Russia. Moscow can rightly claim to be the lineal successor of the Rurik dynasty and the nation of the Rus founded by Grand Prince Vladimir at Kiev. It should be noted that Vladimir was not the first leader of the Rurik dynasty- that would be Rurik. Vikings were leaders and Slavs and Finns the people for some time, although I would guess that the bloodlines merged eventually.

Power compensates for the need to be accurate or truthful; for administration that is very helpful for providing rationale to support supplying multiple launch rockets to Ukrainians so associates can send missiles flying about Ukraine at Russians. When taking a country- Ukraine, from Russia, it would be better to be honest about the historical facts, than disingenuous.

The better version would be that President Clinton levered Ukrainian independence from Russia while warring on Serbia during the interregnum following the disintegration of the Soviet Union. After a quarter century of rebuilding Russia the Russians are trying to take back the Ukraine.

Philosophical inquiry into characteristics of God in regard to the Universe

Philosophers naturally enough pursue knowledge of what isn't known. Cosmology today obviously is incomplete. The expansion of the universe that is accelerating, the size of the Universe, dark energy, dark matter etc. those are a few of the problems. The idea of a multiverse is also something one can easily consider and compare to the ideas of what an infinite, eternal being of a Creator of Multiverse should be to be consistent in modal logic terms with what is known of creation. One would think philosophically, that a characteristic of God would be actualization of an infinite number of universes a priori, in His thought, as an omnipotent and omniscient being. One knows that the Higgs field slows down two-dimensional mass less particles in so they pick up the appearance of a third dimension- and hence mass can exist as an apparent phenomenon. Energy seems to be the basic substance, and what it is actually made of at the funamental level isn't certain. Leibnitz thought one-dimensional monads made of spirit comrprised what might be zero-dimensional points of string theory, I believe it is. None of this is deflection. It is simple philosophical interest in the theology of an infinite Being sustaining universes and multiverses. This isn't a "god of the gaps' approach though it would be unreasonable to expect God to be a material substance like a human or someone meaasurable to science i.m.o.

Social Media is Harmful to Democracy

 Social media is where Americans discuss politics. It is owned by the richest people. They determine what is hateful speech or what is fake news and delete it or bury it in search engine listings. Social media therefore is conditioned and permitted free speech warping democratic expression toward its own ends; it is not a neutral moderator or political speech or art. Social media is heavily biased and filtered by Democrats serving plutocrats.

The remedy probably is to have a public social media alongside privately owned social media. Reason dictates that privately owned Democratic expression venues will be biased and hate free expression of political opposition or even of taxing the rich more.

If the Congress wanted to be useful it would establish a public free speech social media system that would provide every citizen a web page of their own that is secure and available for all to read in cyberspace. If the Congress wants to protect democracy and free speech it would need to establish publicly owned social media right away while there are still Americans not conditioned by the plutocracy to follow along their narratives.

Validity of Bible and Quran comparatively

  When I need to get an epub file 'validated' that can be a rigorous process going over the code involved. Philosophers like to be very careful with the use of language and what it means. many have pointed out that some philosophical problems are actually language meaning problems, rather than things-in-themselves. Comparing the 'validity' of the Biblos (little books) with the Quran would require defining validity and agreement on a truth theory I suppose, first, before comparing historical data. If you look at my free e-book that is a commentary on Berkhof's Introduction to the New Testament, you would see some of the meticulous work Berkhof did and examining the gospel books. One can do that for the Quran too, and learn what references in it compare with those of the Bible.

https://www.lulu.com/en/ie/shop/garrison-clifford-gibson/a-commentary-on-berkhofs-intro-to-the-new-testament/ebook/product-21420051.html?page=1&pageSize=4

In the past I read quite a lot of history including that of the ancient world. There is quite a lot of material, and virtual none of it is 'fables'. People can have mass hysteria or insanity; actually the validity of truth isn't necessarily determined by majority vote, although these days that may be a popular view (that it is). Mass ignorance is common in political propaganda. Popular sentiment shouldn't determine the verdict at trials- facts should play a primary role. In philosophical concerns one need interpret facts or data and understand where and how that data fits into other relevant matter. It is important not to leap to conclusions in logic as well as history. If atheism is a popular belief today, it does not follow that a majority vote validates it.

Of the 256 possible forms of syllogism just 24 are valid. People talk past point, overlook relevant data and often assume that some material is comprehensive, exhaustive and universal when it is not. As is known- "If an invalid argument has all true premises, then the conclusion must be false." Alternatively, if an valid argument has false premises its conclusion is false. The distribution of terms assumed to be universal that are not is a problem with arguments relying upon contemporary physics concerning Christianity.

Consider the history of Abraham and his son Isaac, whom God ordered Abraham to sacrifice. It is challenging to formulate in a strictly logical paradigm, There is much historical, archaeological, scriptural and analytical evidence needed for even comprehending the circumstance. So much that generally just the faithful take the time. Human knowledge and lifetime is limited. People specialize and want to put blinders on to filter out what they consider is unimportant data. They make summary dismissals of material they regard as unimportant, and quickly decide truth or falsity for convenience concerning faith in the Lord.

At the last second God allowed Abraham to substitute a sheep that became caught in the brush as the sacrifice. That incident was a paradigm for the appearance and sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ 2000 years later. There are many things that are known and worth looking in to. Of course as you say; one must determine what one believes for-himself. In a social dialectical reason context, that paradigm is interesting for the case of criminal trials.

God is not embedded in the Higgs Field like Humans

 Jesus said that no one had seen the Father except for the Son. One may accept the numerous witnesses of Jesus and his works as evidence of God, if one accept eyewitness accounts as evidence. Moses at the end of his life was given to see the glory of God that passed before, just fractionally. There has been much work done on researching the Bible and its history. Louis Berkhoff did some excellent work on that. I went over the book and made a commentary of it. Free to download...

 https://www.lulu.com/en/ie/shop/garrison-clifford-gibson/a-commentary-on-berkhofs-intro-to-the-new-testament/ebook/product-21420051.html?page=1&pageSize=4 

 God is Spirit and not embedded in the Higgs field. Contingent beings made to exist in the Higgs field as steady state mass cannot obtain evidence of anything besides energy-mass of the universe I believe.

It is worthwhile considering the nature of ideas and how they fit philosophically into language and meaning. Ideas about what exists, and how it does exist, including a Creator have always been a part of philosophy. The neo-Platonist Plotinus is a good example. His 'Enneads'- 54 tractates are worth reading. St. Augustine was a Plotinian before he converted to Christianity. 

https://archive.org/details/plotinustheennea033190mbp

Government negligence bungles security for school kids forced to attend school

 Federal and state governments should be sued for failing to protect school kids required by law to attend school until the eighth grade. If those students could afford expensive, secure private schools whom were shot at Uvalde they would still be alive. Forcing school kids to congregate in unsafe places with unlocked doors and no security is irresponsible. Would the government put even 40 billion dollars into upgrading elementary school security or blame Barney Fife's slow response instead.

If kids are forced by government to go to school, the school should at least be a secure environment. If governments prefer to be negligent and incompetent that’s usual enough, yet they should pay a steep price for it.

Democrats 'Assault Weapons' Ban has faulty logic

 Democrats seeking to ban assault weapons in a kind of knee jerk response to the Uvalde massacre simply have badly flawed logic or knowledge of firearms. There are innumerable weapons with a high cyclic rate of fire if fully automatic, yet if semi-auto most weapons are about the same speed- being that of how quickly one can pull the trigger, shoot and repeat until the magazine is empty. Thus an ordinary nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol would have been as effective; if not more, at shooting people confined in a room quickly.

Rifles like the AR-15 legally purchased by the Uvalde shooter are not weapons of war as President Biden described them. They are semi-automatic rifles that shoot a fairly small caliber bullet one at a time. 

An AR-15 is a civilian version of the M-16 that I trained on in the Army decades ago. It is not the state of the art Army rifle. What they are good for is shooting accurately from 50 to 300 yards. A pistol generally can't do that. Buying an AR-15 for short range shooting is more of a hindrance than a help for lunatics witrh a grievance. One can shoot a deer with an AR-15, yet not brown bear such as was sighted at the golf course in town today, so the radio station reported. If one wants to shoot a brown bear-and one should not for they have a right to exist too, one should use the older Army rifle that fired 7.62 rounds- the M-1 Garand.

Using AR-15s makes potential shooters easier to spot, and the weapons are more troublesome to use than pistols. One can use larger magazines on pistols too, and match 'assault weapons'. Actual assault weapons that fire on full auto like Kalashnikov AK-47s or 74s that fire 7.62 and 5.56 caliber bullets respectively when actually manufactured for military application are matched by a nume of smaller, high cyclic rate of fire weaponsthat are much smaller and easy to conceal. The Glock G-18 for instance, has a switch to go from semi to full automatic fire of 9mm rounds from a 30 round magazine. It would be far more effective for homicidal lunatics at close range, rather than the hard to hide under a raincaost semi-automatic 'assault weapon'. There are zillions of fully automatic short range weapons that are concealable. 

East-West Philosophical Mix

Nakamura's fine work "Ways of Thinking of Eastern People' describes much of Eastern philosophy including Taoism and several versions of Buddhism. India and the Sky religions of the early Aryan immigrants perhaps is responsible for the caste system, and India is sort of East and west simultaneously. Siddhartha influenced people everywhere, as did Asian religious thought like that of Zoroastrianism. Nietzsche seemed fascinated with Zarathustra, and believed a strange metaphysic concerning reality. 

Schopenhauer's 'Fourfold Roots of Reason' seems like the best, succinct continuation of Kant's 'Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics' that is itself a summary of the 'Critique of Pure Reason', yet Schopenhauer also wrote about metaphysics and a strange view of the world derived from Zoroastrianism and other eclectic sources that seemed fundamentally to be extrapolations of his views about the state of human beings elevated into a transcendent account for the world; very weird yet supporting his miysogynist ideas based on reincarnation.

It may be that Marco Polo brought some ideas to China, yet after 1400 or so there was so much sharing of ideas interculturally that etiologies become more challenging I would think. Karl Marx was quite influential; as a counter to imperialism it's a good revolutionary, practical device. It does crimp individual freedom to think and express ideas, an unfortunate necessity to a certain extent in a very overpopulated nation. 

American and european atheism to a substantial degree attack philosophical thought and revert to pure materialism; definitely a denier of spirit viewpoint. Anti-spiritual exclusivity in my opinion has influenced China recently, to join with Marxist-Feurbach's doctrine. A Metaverse may be entirely made in spirit- bootstrapped in a Berklian paradigm of ideaism. It's necessary to continue to think rather than being living the unexamined life concerning physics.

Pres Biden Can't Resist Escalating War with MLRS to Ukraine

 President Biden probably can't resist escalating the Ukrainian war problem by sending oodles of Multiple Launch Rocket System units to that country so Ukraine can target Russia better. On the principle of increasing force is always right; a foundational principle of the New Democrat Party evolved since 2000, one knows the old guy will automatically increase his grip on the game of chicken with Russia.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/26/politics/us-long-range-rockets-ukraine-mlrs/index.html

Russia has 98,000 MLRS of its own left over I suppose from cold war 1.0 years and lots of artillery. I would guess they have more than the rest of the world combined since those tools were a basic part of the Soviet military theory in defense against the west. Escalating the war will help use up the inventory. When those stocks are low maybe negotiations happen, or alternatively, nuclear war occurs. It is said that Russia has only 5,800 ballistic nukes and just 1,800 ready to launch, so there isn't anything to worry about concerning the N.B.A. leftiwing championship cities being nuked at all (Boston and San Francisco). It isn't like Russia will be willing to drop its inventory down 2 or 3 missiles and leave itself defenseless.