asher553 | Entries tagged with life

... and actually, I am 29 "all over again"!

So I spent natal anniversary number fifty-eight quietly at home. First paycheck from the new gig hit the bank yesterday morning, putting me in an appropriately celebratory mood.

On a more somber note, my birthday falls - as it has every year since 1991 - on the anniversary of the Battle of Khafji, which began on the night of January 29. My unit, the 1st Light Armored Infantry Battalion, 1st Marine Division, lost several men in two fratricide incidents on that night.
https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/U.S.%20Marines%20in%20Battle%20Al-Khafji%20%20PCN%20106000400_3.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/Storm-Horizon-Khafji-Battle-Changed/dp/0345481534/
https://www.amazon.com/Tip-Spear-Marine-Light-Armor/dp/1591144981/

More recently and closer to home, I learned Friday morning that Rabbi Mordechai, whom I'd known for many years (since around 1988) and who presided over my marriage to TNG's mom, has passed away. He was a well-known and loved figure in the San Francisco orthodox community, and later moved to Israel. In 2016 he lost his son Shlomo - one of ten children - who was serving in the IDF.
https://www.jweekly.com/2016/07/22/son-of-former-s-f-couple-dies-in-idf-incident/

Life is a battle, and we, the living, are the survivors. Every birthday is another stripe earned, another hashmark on the sleeve.

Crossposts: https://asher63.livejournal.com/806610.html

We've all known the bright kid who came home from the library with a big stack of books and sat in his room reading all day and thought he knew everything about everything. I used to be that kid, but I grew out of it. Some people never do.

Almost everything we know about the world, we learn from other people. It follows that our ability to understand the world depends on our ability to understand people.
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Meaningful giving requires knowledge.
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Performative virtue: disconnection of perceived "virtue" from any tangible results in the real world.
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The ability to benefit another party depends on a clear and accurate knowledge of what their needs are, and of what kind of help is wanted, or even if it is wanted at all. Acquiring this knowledge depends on your closeness to the other party. This applies both in market economics and in the practice of compassion.

Truly giving to another person means there's a relationship. There is a feedback loop that tells you when your care has been beneficial, or misguided, or unwanted, or harmful. This relationship, this intimate knowledge, only arises out of person-to-person interactions. It cannot be replaced by any institution.

Physical needs: food, shelter, clothing.

Spiritual needs: dignity, identity, meaning.

Crossposts: https://asher63.livejournal.com/791124.html

Wasn't that long ago, I made fun of conspiracy nuts. These days, I buy ALCOA wrap according to my hat size. Times change.
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Authoritarians love "states of emergency" because then all normal constraints and expectations are waived. Day-to-day technical and managerial competence is no longer scrutinized because "it's an emergency!" Any kind of action, no matter how ill-advised, can be justified because it's "doing something".
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If you take 50 random people off the street, and you want to find out which ones are alcoholics, invite them all into a bar and buy them each ONE drink. And then watch to see what happens. Because some people can't stop at just one.

Those 50 people are the 50 state governors. The COVID-19 crisis gave them their first taste of unchecked, raw, 200-proof power. And we saw which ones got drunk on it.
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The Covid scare campaign (as distinct from the virus itself, which nobody disputes is very real) appeals to a certain strain of vanity: the conviction that "I am among the selfless few, bearing the burden for an ungrateful and ignorant humanity".
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The "new normal" needs to be a Big Government that has been de-fanged, de-clawed, and neutered.
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There's a deliberate strategy to decouple moral reasoning from the objective, observable consequences of your actions. Global warming, pandemic masks. It's so that your sense of guilt can be properly manipulated.
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'Thus the principle of the unity of humanity, so noble in theory, rapidly divides mankind into two camps: those who are regarded as favoring the good of mankind, in they adopt the empire's categories for determining what is beneficial and right; and those who are regarded as opposing the good of mankind, in that they insist on thinking in terms of the customary categories of the tribe, which the empire invariably condemns as primitive and barbaric.' - Yoram Hazony

Crossposts: https://asher63.livejournal.com/790760.html

facebook and youtube and twitter are ACTING like they've got something to hide. That's the thing. That's what they don't get. You may or may not have had an opinion about HCQ and C19, you may or may not think Stella Immanuel is a few sandwiches short of a picnic. But when the tech platforms suddenly come marching along in jackboots and disappearing articles and screaming about MISINFORMATION!!!! - they you've got to think something looks suspicious. They are showing with their own actions that there's something there.
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A lot of young people and wanna-be young people came to Portland from small towns out of state, and bought into the hipster myth. Their conservative old towns and churches and families weren't cool enough for them. They deserved better. So they set about the task of making over themselves - and the city - into something ever more exciting, exotic, glamorous, and dangerous. And we've seen the result.
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My observations about debating. (1) All of us have a filter in our brain, like the spam filter in your email inbox. What looks like junk, gets filtered out. If they are programmed to filter out your message, all the facts and logic in the world will be of no avail. Their thinking will not change until they update their spam filters.

(2) Visibility is the key thing. The left used its influence to exaggerate its own numbers, and to keep conservatives believing they were few and isolated. When this illusion collapses, the left's power to shame disintegrates.

(3) At the end of the day, people go by experience. When day-to-day experience conflicts with the accepted narrative strongly enough and consistently enough, the narrative will have to go. People can only watch riots and Bible burnings for so long. At this point, a coherent, articulate alternate narrative will help them make sense of their world, and will be welcomed.

(4) Putting all of these factors together, what's going to win the day is for all of us to keep speaking out, courageously and clearly, and putting the lie to the leftist establishment's castle of illusion.
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"Stay home, stay safe." Because if we could come out of hiding, we might learn how many more of us there are. And then their spell of fear would lose its power.
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If I convince myself that most people are ignorant bigots, then I get to feel "special" just by not being a bigot.

If I believe the other guy is a nazi, then I only have to be 1 percent better than a nazi to be the good guy.
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You put a whole population of law-abiding citizens under indefinite house arrest, sooner or later incarceration is gonna lose its value as a deterrent.

Crossposts: https://asher63.livejournal.com/790233.html

The riots were never about a police killing, and the lockdowns were never about a virus.
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Institutions and their petty rules are the refuge of the emotionally immature and the mentally unstable. Such people look to bureaucracies for the validation they are unable or unwilling to find in healthy human relationships and community.
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The filter. We all have an information filter in our brain that acts like the spam filter in your email program. Its purpose is to filter out junk information so that your processor doesn't get overwhelmed. What looks like junk, gets ignored. It is the reason we screen out noise like the crazy guy ranting on the street corner. And thank G-d it's there, because we wouldn't be able to function without it. But like the spam filter in your inbox, you have to check it once in a while, because its algorithm is not infallible. You have to update your assumptions about what's reliable and what's junk; otherwise you could miss important information.
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Time is an economic good: a scarce commodity with alternative uses. Use it wisely.
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Your body is made of bones and flesh; a robust system includes a rigid component and a flexible component.
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Establish good habits - it's easier than breaking bad ones.
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They say history is written by the victors. I say history is written by people who can write.

Crossposts: https://asher63.livejournal.com/789421.html

Authoritarians love "states of emergency" because then all normal constraints and expectations are waived. Day-to-day technical and managerial competence is no longer scrutinized because "it's an emergency!" Any kind of action, no matter how ill-advised, can be justified because it's "doing something".

And then comes the need to "restore order" ...

Crossposts: https://asher63.livejournal.com/779961.html

Some workplaces are meritocracies, where if you are competent and you work hard, you are rewarded and you get ahead. Others are anti-meritocracies, where competent people are penalized because they make the others look bad.

That's probably my single biggest criterion for deciding where I want to work or where I don't want to work.

Crossposts: https://asher63.livejournal.com/766089.html

Sometimes if you push harder, you can surprise yourself. A couple of weeks ago I did that. There were two weeknight events that I wanted to go to, both of them in Portland (about an hour from Hillsboro by city bus) in a single week, and I wasn't sure if I'd have the energy. But I went to both, and was glad I did. The first event was the Peter Hook concert Tuesday night. The following Thursday it was the WalkAway event with Dinesh D'Souza and Andy Ngo - as well as WalkAway founder Brandon Straka, and radio host Lars Larson.

I only stayed for the first half and had to miss Dinesh, but it was good to see Andy. I'd been following him on social media (and met him once or twice in person) since the whole business around him getting fired from the Portland State newspaper. But it was a great event and I was glad I went - it was sold out with 500 seats, and no trouble to speak of from the other side. (They had about 20 of their folks across the street, wearing black masks, yelling curses, and chanting unintelligible slogans.)

Anyway, I've felt energized ever since then. I made it through the week fine, and realized I had more energy than I thought. I realized that a lot of what I thought was being tired was just me telling myself that I should expect to feel tired. Once I changed that mindset, I found I could accomplish a lot more.

Crossposts: https://asher63.livejournal.com/762920.html

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.

So I've attained the magical age of 55 years. Hey, it's both a Fibonacci number and a triangular number!

Looking back, the hardest thing to think about is all the connections with people that I haven't kept up as well as I should have. What gives me hope and encouragement is finding a deeper, stronger sense of purpose as I grow older, as the distractions fall away into the background.

Going forward, I mean to focus on the things that matter most.