For Sect. Kissinger was an extraordinary Diplomat

  With the passing of Henry Kissinger the United States has lost its foremost diplomat who had a strong vision for America’s role in the world. He died the 29th of November, 2023. A pragmatist who wrote a thesis on von Metternich in graduate school, the nation’s former National Security Adviser and Sect. Of State during the end of the Vietnam War and post-war period was able to break the diplomatic freeze with Communist China and its leader Chairman Mao Zedong and get the ball rolling on transforming China into a form of capitalist rather than state authoritarian economy.

Former Sect Kissinger was no stranger to controversy; even in his last couple of years he took a stand in opposition to America’s rash policy of hostility toward Russia and military support for Ukraine. With a doctorate in history he well understood Russia’s historical claims on Ukraine and the need to keep Russia in the pro-western camp regarding security, economics and environment. Henry Kissinger was instrumental in getting SALT talks to limit nuclear weapons going with the former Soviet Union. That was in effect was the earliest opening for detente.

Kissinger living to the age of 100 experienced the Second World War as a soldier in 1945 and  was stationed in Germany where he learned first-hand of the disaster that war is. He understood the need for security and in striking careful rational balances in international relations. Security needs to occur with historical precedence, equal justice, economic security and political freedom for the masses.  the need for security and in striking careful rational balances in international relations. Security needs to occur with historical precedence, equal justice, economic security and political freedom for the masses.

If a Rental Time Travel Machine were Affordable...

 I would go to a time before time existed, when there were no laws of physics to pass the time considering how to avoid, when time travel traffic cops didn't need to sort out billions of time travelling machines crowding no-space and one could get a good view of the creation of time easily finding a parking spot at the edge to watch it.

Questions, Answers and Philosophy?

 Philosophy may provide quite a bit of knowledge that one hadn't had before. For me that is a good thing. If reading history one likes to discover new areas that one doesn't know much about, and philosophy has similar content to learn. One feels pretty good for example, after learning classical logic before moving on to symbolic logic and learning a system or three. With more knowledge one may ask better questions, or invent new ideas that seem worthwhile and can make commonly held opinions seem quite inadequate or even wrong. Philosophy in the modern world may be a learning tool at end, if one exhausts most primary content, for then one may realize or develop the opinion that the sole meaningful point in life is that of one's relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and the hereafter that does eventually follow. In the meantime one tries to make the world a better place so far as possible, for others as well as oneself. Then one encounters questions like 'is it really impossible to make the world much better or just?' etc.

A Definition of What Morality Is

Morality is a description of the way people and society actually conduct themselves. Obviously that can vary or flux. Some patterns are recurrent, some behaviors are acceptable and others receive social reproof or approbation.

Some people have made formal systems of morality, in some cases moral behavior has historical precedent. If one has moral duties, believing one has been commanded by God to behave in a particular way, those divine commands may provide a moral system or structure.

Not only is behavior a source of moral description; qualitative and quantitative analysis, so is the way moral behavior is described and the situations in which it is applied subject to variability. In the ante-bellum south the excuse for slavery (or one excuse) was that Negroes were not human and therefore they could not be harmed by being enslaved. 

Society may not be able to recognize select situations as occasions for moral decision. Pejorative values (majority values) are often use-truth values wherein white is called black when it is convenient for the power class interest to have that value.

Philosophy and the Bible

 I believe the history of philosophy is substantial and comparatively few have even read most of the primary works. That being said fields like the philosophy of logic and analytic philosophy are worthwhile yet even fewer read that. Philosophy is kind of like an accoutrement to the last supper really. Understanding the world a little better isn’t such a bad thing.

The New Testament does follow chronologically (appx 480 to 540 years after) the Old yet it isn’t a derivative. The N.T. are largely letters written by disciples of Jesus Christ, and apostles like Luke and Paul. The O.T. has a fascinating history going to the foundation of the Hebrew language probably invented by Moses circa 17th-16th century B.C. Moses had access to Hebrew oral traditions dating perhaps to Abraham circa 2000 BC. The material was passed on to David who brought all of scripture together and probably in the court of Solomon or Rehoboam a comprehensive work of it was assembled that has changed very little the past 3000 years. There were some well known redactions from the J and priestly writers of the OT. 

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The New Testament was written in Greek in the first century, yet that is not the Torah aka Pentateuch-the first five books of the Old Testament. That was originally written in Hebrew except for Daniel and Ezra in Aramaic . The New Testament is different from the Old. The New Testament was written in the first century A.D., while the last book of the Old Testament- Malachi- was written in 430 B.C. The Septuagint translation into Koine Greek occurred in the 3rd century B.C. Septuagint means ’70’ in Greek. There were 72 scholars with six from each Israeli tribe that made the translation.

Why Africa Developed Slower than Europe Briefly

 It’s simply history and inertia. While metallurgy was developed first in the middle east, technological progress developed faster in colder, northwestern regions where working with hot water, steam and harnessing it’s power was stimulated by the climate. Africa being hot lacked certain challenges and opportunities that met with inventive responses and accumulative progress. Even flowing water to power mills was comparatively more plentiful in Europe than Africa.

Don't overlook Chinese inventions either…They developed a lot of tech even during the Han dynasty. It’s just that royalty tend to benefit exclusively from it, unlike the west where democracy and mass production accelerated tech inventions with a market ready to exploit every technology item produced for profit.

The Retarded Policy of Support for Ukraine-Russia War

 Democrat administrations selected hostility with Russia leading to war rather than historical competence and statesmanship to find a reasonable negotiated settlement that would have avoided the horrors of war. Fundamentally the President’s policy is retarded. Hammering a square peg into a round hole to make a policy of political avarice work, and repeat when it doesn’t ad nauseam isn’t intelligent and is harmful to U.S. national security in a variety of ways militarily, economically and environmentally.

There would be nothing easier, considering history of finding political settlements that worked, than ending the Ukraine-Russia conflict along present lines. Renegotiating the end of the cold war 1.0 theft of all of Ukraine from Russia is the sole stable political basis to establish lasting peace and normalized Russian-Ukraine-U.S. trilateral relations on a positive scale. The alternative is of course protracted war risking biological, chemical and nuclear escalation, a divided world economy and unnatural obstructions to getting the world t work cooperatively in the attempt to conserve and restore the planetary ecosphere.

Retarded political leadership is quite damaging to national and global interests. It reminds me of the decline of quality leadership in the Roman Empire after the age of the Antonines (five of seven emperors were beneficial to Roman interests). Only a few generations of retarded Presidential leadership are needed to make a national silk purse into a sow’s ear, and the U.S.A. is on the way. Yek the future is still not closed to peace and prosperity for those of faith and good leadership.