Culture and Religion

Deism – A Rational Path to the Irrational.

Being of German Jewish descent, raised as a Roman Catholic, I find Deism the most appealing one of the many ways to think about God and Nature. ‘Deism’, from the Latin term ‘deus’, meaning ‘God’, is a philosophical and religious perspective that emerged prominently in the 17th and 18th centuries during the European enlightenment. It posits or postulates that a supreme being that we name “God” created the universe and set it in motion according to rational, natural laws, but then stepped back and allowed its creation to run its course. A creator God as the “Watchmaker”.

Deists emphasize human reason, morality derived from nature, and skepticism toward organized religion, scriptures, and any form of dogmatic thinking, including secular ones, such as ideologies. They view the Bible as a historic document rather than as divine revelation, and reject concepts like the Trinity, the original sin (i.e. collective guilt), or the divinity of Jesus as “superstitions”.

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Culture and Religion

Uuuhm, like, you know, literally, so … The Gradual Decay of our Speaking Culture

Let’s start with ‘Uuuhhm’. When watching TV or listening to talk radio, I often hear sentences like this: “I – uuuhm – have come to believe that – uuuhm – mmm – uuuhm – most people – uuuhm – do not – uuuhm – eat the right food.”

Clearly, a person speaking like this does not really know what he or she wants to say. When we speak, we can think ahead to develop a concept in our mind what we want to say next and how we want to say it. But rarely do we have a word-for-word text ready to be spoken, unless we have learned our statements by heart or speak from a teleprompter, which is not possible when we are in an unrehearsed conversation or discussion.

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Culture and Religion

Should Picture Voter IDs be a Requirement?

I have never heard anybody complain that the requirement of a picture ID for any of the above-mentioned activities disadvantages Black Americans.

Arguably, none of these activities is anywhere close as important as voting in our Federal elections. The USA is a democratic Republic. We are a republic, because we have separation of powers, because the people are the ultimate sovereign, because we have a constitution, and because we have a federal structure in which much of the power belongs to the States, to local governments, and to individual citizens. Our republic is democratic because the transition of power is not accomplished by civil war, inheritance, or coup d’etat but by general, equal, free, and secret elections. If we allow the democratic election process to be compromised or corrupted by allowing people to vote who are not legal citizens of this country, we are essentially destroying self-governance and our national sovereignty.

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Political Ideologies

Trump is Hitler, a fascist, a Nazi – say leading Dems. Here is a piece of reality.

this is another issue on which there is no similarity between Trump and Hitler. Trump has an elaborate sense of humor and often even makes fun of himself. One of my distant relatives in Germany was a Nazi prosecutor. He sought the death penalty for a shipyard worker who had written a funny poem about Hitler. The man was shot. Like almost all despots, Hitler had no sense of humor, leave alone self-irony.

Equating Trump to Hitler not only shows a pitiful lack of understanding who Trump is and what he tries to accomplish. It also shows a dangerous lack of understanding who Hitler really was and what he did and the severity of his crimes, his war mongering, his insane ideas of racial superiority and inferiority, and his imperial aspirations. Maybe equating Trump to Julius Caesar works better. Here is Mark Anthony about Trump (loosely based on Shakespeare):

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Science and Philosophy

Lack of Knowledge and Flawed Thinking Breed Bad Politics

Recently, I listened to a Korean communist woman being interviewed about mathematics. She explained how Westerns non-communist logic and science are all wrong. The interviewer responded by asking her if she believed that 1 + 1 = 2. Her response was approximately this: “If you add one drop of water to another drop of water, you do not get two drops of water but one bigger drop of water.” Hence, the equation of 1 + 1 = 2 must be wrong and all math built on this must also be wrong.

What she performed is called a ‘semantic shift’. The term ‘plus’ is equivocal. This means that it can relate to different concepts depending on the context. First, she relates it to numerical addition. When we say, “one plus one” in a purely numerical sense, we are operating within the context of arithmetic where one numerical value plus one numerical value is two.

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Political Ideologies

Kamala Ante Portas – Lord Help us!

In her debate with Donald Trump and in her subsequent interview, Mrs. Harris responded to almost any question with the stereotype: “I was raised in a middle-class family…” Instead of answering the questions, she talked about herself in teleprompter-served cookie cutter bits.

In many public statements, she tried to paint herself as an underdog with the claim that she is a “person of color” who had to “sit in the back of the bus” as a school kid. She also called herself “black” and “African American”. She touts “Joy, joy, joy” and recommends herself as the solver of all our current problems, when she had spent the past 3.5 years as Vice-president creating and/or exacerbating these problems and continues doing so.

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Culture and Religion / Political Ideologies

Russian vs. Yiddish Bagels – An Etude in Communist Propaganda

Bublichki are a traditional Jewish/Russian street food. They can look and taste like bagels or like doughnuts. In 1922, by the Ukrainian Jew Yakov (Davidovich) Jadov from Odessa composed a song titled “Bublichki”, “Бублички” in Russian, and its text was in the Russian language.

The socio-economic context of this song is the NEP (New Economic Policy), an economic policy implemented in the Soviet Union in 1921 by Vladimir Lenin in an attempt to stabilize the country’s economy after the Boshevik Revolution. The NEP was intended as a temporary measure that allowed for a limited amount of free-market capitalism, while the state continued to control the large industries, the banks, and foreign trade. The NEP created a thriving class of small entrepreneurs, but it also led to further impoverishment of large parts of the population, mainly in the big cities. The song reflects the desperation of a street bagel vendor who is trying to sell his last bagels before nightfall.

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Science and Philosophy

Chicken Licken says: Climate Dooms Day is Coming

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said during a TV interview in 2017:
“The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”
A few months after her statement the clock in Union Square was changed to function as a “climate clock” indicating how much time mankind still has until global warming becomes an irreversible run-away phenomenon.

On August 18, 2024, when this was written, the dooms day clock showed 4 years, 338 days, zero hours, 30 minutes and zero seconds till dooms day.
In October of 1958, the New York Times wrote:
“Some scientists estimate that the polar ice pack is 40 percent thinner and 12 percent less in area than it was a half century ago, and that even within the lifetime of our children, the Arctic Ocean may open, enabling ships to sail over the North Pole.”
The article mentions that the arctic ice shield was on average about 7 feet thick then and today, it is still on average about 7 feet thick.

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Economy

The Peace Dividend — A missed Opportunity

US Army statistics show that, during the Vietnam war, it took the US soldier about 200,000 rounds of 5.56 (.223) ammunition to incapacitate one threat soldier. The near-miss distance by which the average US soldier missed a threat soldier was about 51 cm (about two feet). The waste of ammunition was enormous and expensive.

Currently, all man-portable combat weapons still use cased ammunition. The shells are still mainly made from brass, which is an alloy of copper and zinc, both relatively expensive strategic metals of limited availability. All shells from fired rounds are wasted. In war, they end up somewhere in the environment and they can only be recycled when used under controlled conditions e.g., on a shooting range. The brass shell constitutes about 50% of the value of the .223 round. It also makes up over 50% of the space or volume a round consumes.

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