2019-09-11 Wednesday evening: Back from the dead at DW!

It's been a year and a half since I last posted at DW. I spent the first half of 2018 in a live/work situation with an eccentric, elderly entrepreneur in the hills outside of Scappoose; it had its moments, but it proved to be a financial and professional setback. By the end of 2018, I was back in the professional world, working full-time in IT and living in Hillsboro.

And that's where I'm at now. I work help desk in a technology company in the Dawson Creek area, and live just a couple of miles down the road in Tanasbourne. My trusty Subaru failed the emissions test last April, so I've been commuting by bus, which entails a fair amount of walking - and that's probably good for me.

Last month I visited San Francisco for a week to see the kids. Didn't get to spend as much time with them as I would have liked, but it was great seeing them. They are both wonderful young people and I couldn't be happier to have them in my life - even if at a distance.

Socially and politically, I'm enjoying being around people again, and I'm more comfortable being open about my politics than I used to be - coming out of the closet as a conservative, so to speak. I don't feel like I have to be secretive about it anymore.

On social media, I am active on that necessary evil known as facebook, and post a lot of political links (along with the obligatory cat videos) there. I'm also giving the alternative social media a fair trial; Gab seems to be struggling, but I'm on Gab [https://gab.com/asherabrams] where I post sporadically, and I'm on MeWe [https://mewe.com/profile/5ab6613ba40f3016336ffd08] where ditto.

And of course I'm still on LiveJournal [https://asher63.livejournal.com/].

September 11. It's that day. I'm going to share this excellent piece by my longtime facebook friend Abraham Miller:

https://spectator.org/9-11-you-said-you-wouldnt-forget-you-did/

'The system of competing tribes with different realities only works if there is an overarching sense of community. From the Europe of the Peace of Westphalia, 1648, emerged the idea of the nation state. This was the binding together of similar yet different peoples into a shared identity.

Three-hundred-plus years later, that ideal began to crumble. Devolution became the objective of peoples who found unity artificial. Minus the integrative loyalty of communism, Yugoslavia crumbled into different ethnic enclaves and civil war. Czechoslovakia broke into the Czech and Slovak Republics. The Soviet Union broke up into its pre-imperial past. Many African states devolved into tribalism.

Our strength is most definitely not our multiculturalism. Our strength is a multicultural society that possess a transformative sense of unity. Dramatic events like 9/11 rekindle that purpose.'

Please go to the link to read the whole thing.

Linkage.

Victor Davis Hanson on the decline of higher education.
https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/01/from-icon-to-just-a-con/

Overwhelmingly liberal and often hippish in appearance, American faculty of the early 1970s still only rarely indoctrinated students or bullied them to mimic their own progressivism. Rather, in both the humanities and sciences, students were taught the inductive method of evaluating evidence in hopes of finding some common explanation of natural and human phenomena.

Yes, we studied “mere” facts—dates, names, grammar, syntax, and formulae—but deliberately to ground or refute theories with evidence and to illustrate and enhance argumentation. Essays bled red by old masters of English prose style, whose efforts were aimed at ensuring students could communicate effectively but also with a sense of grace. ...

What went wrong? The former students of the 1970s came into power and gradually began to reject the very code of conduct and training of those who taught them. And in turn they taught a new generation who for the first time had little first-hand knowledge of the great campus scholars and icons of the past. ...'


Michael Weingrad on a science-fiction novel with shadows of anti-Semitism.
https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/arts-culture/2019/09/a-science-fiction-novel-in-which-the-jews-become-overlords-of-the-post-human-future/

'In the alternate timestream of The Smoke, the United States never came to global dominance; instead, a volcanic eruption in the 19th century made parts of North America uninhabitable. Meanwhile, in Europe, World War I came to an early and decisive end in 1916 when a precociously invented atom bomb was dropped on Berlin. As for World War II and the Holocaust, they never happened. A passing comment informs us that, in the world of The Smoke, Adolf Hitler choked to death on a grape.

What, then, became of the Jews? Something much more consequential: in response to mass pogroms against the Jews in 1917, Lenin gave to the Jewish socialist Bundists a home in Soviet Birobidzhan, the bleak Siberian outpost that in real life was proclaimed by the Communists as a (rather unsuccessful) Jewish ethnic territory. There, a Jewish scientist affiliated with the Bund develops a new technology, dubbed the “Gurwitsch ray” after its inventor. In the novel, the “G-ray” enables the Bundists to leapfrog past the rest of the world in technological advancement.

The ray would seem to be Ings’s cipher for technological progress itself. ...'


Gay Republican Mauro Garza to challenge Rep. Joaquin Castro in San Antonio (TX-21).
https://woai.iheart.com/content/2019-08-15-gop-gay-club-owner-to-challenge-congressman-castro-in-2020/

Garza, who ran unsuccessfully for the nomination to the District 21 Congressional seat in 2018, said he was actually prompted to challenge Castro by the 'doxxing' of Trump supporters by the Congressman.

"No one has a right to incite violence against others or promote the destruction of private property held by others simply because of passionate political disagreements." Garza said. "Freedom cannot survive in an environment where one side thinks the other side is evil and not merely incorrect."'


'We wouldn’t be shooting it down.'
https://tribunist.com/military/this-f-16-pilot-was-ready-to-give-her-life-on-911-now-shes-telling-her-incredible-story/

“Why? Because there are things in this world that are more important than ourselves. Freedom. The Constitution of the United States. Our way of life. Mom, baseball, apple pie; these things and so many more that make us uniquely American. We belong to something greater than ourselves. As complex and diverse and discordant as it is, this thing, this idea called America, binds us together in citizenship and community and brotherhood.”