To Save the World

From a factual perspective, we can no more choose our political and economic beliefs than we can choose our arithmetic beliefs.

by John Conlin for American Greatness

Many people fear society is being ripped apart and may never be whole again. Some question whether the country has ever been this divided.

A common response to such talk of impending doom is often, “yeah, yeah, yeah—I might agree those are all problems but what is your solution?”

The following is not just my solution, but the solution—the only one that is based on reality and thus has any chance of increasing our collective odds of long-term survival. In fact, it is a paradigm shift of historic proportions.

Big talk, eh? Well, you wanted the solution so read on . . . 

There is a solution—one based on science and more importantly, reality—and it is staring us right in the face if we only care to look. And if we decide we want to childishly ignore reality, it will sooner or later show us that it most certainly exists. Thinking we are almost God-like in our ability to deny reality will end poorly for us all.

But it requires throwing the entire conservative/liberal, Right versus Left thinking in the trash bin of history. Right versus Left is childish, immature thinking. 

This dichotomy is at the core of our present dilemma. On one hand, we have used the discoveries driven by the Scientific Revolution to transform our world. In less than 500 years we have collectively discovered the fabric of reality to an astonishing degree.

Yet once we leave the hard sciences and mathematics—and even those are being soiled—we revert to a pre-Scientific Revolution paradigm based on opinion rather than inter-connected and self-supporting facts. Hippocrates’s adage summarizes where these separate paradigms lead: “There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the later ignorance.”

Science-thinking is about discovering reality. Opinion-thinking is about attempting to define reality—based of course on one’s opinion.

How about taking a short, mental trip with me, and let’s see where this might go, since the present clearly isn’t working and it’s getting worse by the day.

To start, people who are blindly partisan should be ignored in this process—nothing will change their minds and it is a waste of time and effort to attempt to do so. Unless you are willing to at least temporarily consider an alternative, quit reading and go back to your small part in what has become mindless tribal wars. 

Rather, I’m talking to those who are concerned with the direction of the country and the world and are open to considering alternative worldviews. What follows is an attempt to describe a planet-wide paradigm shift of epic proportions. Yes, I know how that sounds; trust me I know. But give it a shot anyhow.

In my professional life, I have had a lot of experience in working with teams to analyze a situation and collectively come up with a better design and better way of doing things. I have discovered a few rules to keep this process on track:

1) It is a fool’s errand to look to solve issues from a problem perspective—rather one needs to operate from an agreement perspective. Trying to fix things by looking at problems generally ends with finger-pointing and even more friction. This is a good rule to follow in all areas of your life—focus and build on agreement, not disagreement. For this process, you must at least temporarily mentally abandon the present and thus must . . .

2) Truly start with a blank slate. You can’t bring any biases or preconceived notions with you . . .

3) It is a fact-based process—no one cares what your opinion is. What is the truth? What is reality? That is what we are searching for. And this isn’t some “heavy” concept; we do it all the time… that’s what we do when we move a houseplant from this window to that, searching for where it seems to like it the most.

4) Consistency of thought and action. No contradictions are allowed. Something can’t be big and small or fast and slow at the same time. If in the process we do run into one we must go back to the earlier point of agreement and discuss which is right until we reach a conclusion. 

5) Must run the film in the right direction. Confusion often comes by thinking of things backwards in time. Think of attempting to watch a movie backward and trying to make sense of it. It can’t be done. You must mentally go back in time and run the process forward if you have any chance of it making sense.

6) And you only move forward with agreement—everyone’s voice matters—regardless of position or power—but only if they can back up what they are saying with facts or strong agreement from all other participants. Don’t forget—no one cares what your opinion is. As noted in #1, don’t look for areas of disagreement but instead focus on areas of agreement. 

7) Begin at the beginning (this also forces you to “run the film” in the right direction). 

For a business, this might be strategic analysis. For us, it is the beginning of us, humans. We evolved on this planet, as did all life. There has probably never been a more supported theory in all of human history. 

The Left has soiled this fact by attempting to tie it with an anti-God/anti-religion perspective. This is false and in no way does acceptance of the reality of our evolution demand the negation of God. In fact, it does just the opposite.

But the fact remains, we are a natural part of this world and nothing we can do, nothing we can build, can operate outside of this reality.

The evolution comment above has probably generated strong emotions in some of you. If so, you have violated Rule No. 2 above—the necessity of starting with a blank slate. If at any time during this process you fight an idea, you are doing the same. 

You can always go back to your old ideas later so there is no risk in abandoning them for a few minutes. One can’t consider a round earth while insisting on the earth being flat. One can’t consider relativity and space/time if you insist on Newtonian physics. 

This is no different—you can’t consider the view from another mountain top if you are unwilling to go and stand on it and experience it yourself. If you won’t, what are you afraid of?

Amazingly, once you accept our evolution almost all significant political and economic disagreements fade away.

This is common in a business reorganization as many of the seemingly unending company problems are actually symptoms of a poorly designed and/or poorly functioning system. Build things right from the start and these arguments and frictions evaporate. It’s not that they are “solved.” It’s that the problem has now never existed in the first place.

In the past, people have used their opinions as the template for finding and defining reality. That is actually backward. The only template is reality. If you later want to compare this to your previous opinions that’s fine—although meaningless to anyone other than perhaps yourself.

But once you accept our natural place in the world it becomes crystal clear that individual freedom and thus small, limited government is the only viable choice. The science on this—to say nothing of real-world results—is overwhelming.

Science has revealed reality through billions of interconnected facts—not a single one in conflict with any of the others—proven every day in an almost infinite number of interactions. This is something opinions never can do—they attempt to stand alone and people frequently hold one opinion on this subject and another conflicting opinion on another. This does not mirror reality.

All of progressivism falls apart when it is forced to define itself as parts of a greater whole—with none in conflict, just like science.

And rather than debate every single issue, whether progressive or conservative, we instead start with a clean slate and begin at the beginning of us—we evolved here and are a natural part of the universe. 

There is reality and it is discoverable. Swarm intelligence and the self-organization it drives have been with us since long before we were human. Progressivism is built on a false and inferior model—that having a boss or leader is necessary. Swarm intelligence—which is just as real as is gravity—proves this is not only flawed but certain to fail and create potentially catastrophic failures.

Real-world results over hundreds of years, to say nothing of the facts that drive this paradigm change, prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that individual freedom does not lead to anarchy—big government does that—but rather to order, progress, and advancement. 

If we want to save the world we need to change as many adults’ minds as possible and spend the bulk of our efforts on teaching children this advancement in thinking. Opinions are for things like whether chocolate or strawberry ice cream tastes better, not for politics, or economics, or any other area that is based on fact.

So, you want to save the world? Join us and help spread individual freedom and a fact-based paradigm around the world.

Christian Patriot News, We the People news, and more-Dec 18

 

Happy Saturday! Here's tonight's news:

https://www.bitchute.com/video/sbAxqWLEqyWa/

China Is Returning To Confucianism, Not Communism

While China recovers its noble past, Americans are purging their foundational teachings and obliterating memorials and mementos to their spiritual fathers.

by Ilana Mercer for American Greatness

Fareed Zakaria is a CNN serial plagiarizer. Like another CNN offender, online onanist Jeffrey Toobin, Zakaria is forever forgiven and brought back from literary purgatory, to inflict mediocre, user-friendly, neoliberal/neoconservative statecraft and foreign policy on viewers who are none the wiser.

Zakaria recently broadcast a television special, “China’s Iron Fist.” He called China “[t]he most serious competition the United States has ever faced. The Chinese are doing AI, biotech, hi-speed rail—the industries of the future.” As if competition were a crime.

Zakaria also joined others of a neolib/neocon meddler mindset in ragging the Chinese for “repression at home”—does he know China’s not his home?

He grumbled about a declining free market, and “stronger insistence on communist ideology in every sphere,” to say nothing of a “more aggressive policy abroad.” From Zakaria’s perspective, aggression abroad is the sole prerogative of America. Curiously, Zakaria made no mention of China’s culpability in the COVID calamity. Or of China’s disregard for and consequent plundering and polluting of the natural world, animals and their habitats, especially.

The broadcast was the familiar, simpleton’s Disneyfied, angels-and-demons foreign policy storyline. To wit, multicultural, democratic America is an oasis of freedom and happiness. China—having actually morphed into quite the middle-class, materialistic, consumerist society—is the opposite of all that, less Western; less worthy. The West being the best, such a trend is to be condemned. The Chinese are 92 percent ethnically Han and rather like their nationalistic monolithic country—a fact that has no relevance in the meddler’s mindset.

The American foreign-policy elite’s Sinophobia is a distraction from the fact that the Chinese ruling elite generally acts in the national interest; whereas the American ruling caste acts in ways so antagonistic to its people’s welfare as to constitute treason.

The acid observations of The Economist are infinitely wiser, certainly calmer than Zakaria’s: “China’s leaders still want investment and technology from the West, but they think it is in decadent decline and are decoupling from Western norms and ideas.”

This point needs refining, because, while rejecting the West’s degenerate direction; China has selectively embraced many of the West’s highest achievements. 

For instance . . .

Classical Music

Enabled by indulgent and permissive parents and pedagogues, America’s youth have become increasingly licentious, lippy, and libertine. Most are ignorant and lousy at writing, reasoning, and conversing coherently about anything other than raaaaaacism. They have also become unmoored from their finest traditions. The Chinese—who seem to know what’s good—are returning to things classical, traditional, and eternally and universally beautiful. 

Having banned corrupt hip-hop culture, China has a new export: Western classical music. “Once, classical music generally travelled from the West to the rest,” marvels the Economist. “Now China is reversing the exchange, not merely performing Western classical music in China, but exporting it.” 

Taste is subjective, but standards are objective. 

Properly categorized as street theater, not music, rap and hip-hop, objectively speaking, are gutter culture, certainly without any musical merit, technically and tonally. Are Chinese leaders wrong to want none of it? 

Zakaria’s assertion that China is returning to communism, moreover, is shallow, even stupid, given the concerted quest among Chinese to reverse the communist Cultural Revolution and reclaim Confucianism, which is antithetical to communism. 

Confucianism 

While America crumbles into a deadening, brutal wokeness; China, interestingly, seeks spiritual sustenance in its ancient, grand tradition of Confucianism.

Native to China, Confucianism was decimated by socialism, which—Mr. Zakaria may have forgotten—came out of the West. Unlike our own traitor class, China’s leaders know what succors the soul, and they want to infuse the nation with that home-grown cultural sustenance.  

The Chinese are not a multicultural pottage; they are a real nation that shares a rich and ancient culture. The beauty of a shared, admired heritage is that the country can reclaim it as it works to reverse the foreign cultural revolution, which forbade Confucianism. And indeed, as The Economist confirms, “Chinese parents are keen on a more Confucian education.”

Core curriculum and Western classical texts have been all but purged from American schools. In China, the number of “classical texts to be taught in schools has increased from 14 to 72.” From here on, China’s kids will be “learning classical Chinese thought, texts, and morals, especially those associated with Confucius.”

So, which is the more exalted and elevated quest, Confucianism or charter schools?

As you see, Zakaria’s rah-rah America über alles hysteria with respect to China is worse than incomplete; it’s half-assed.

Xi Jinping

And who is behind this mission to elevate his people, not mire them in the dreary, postmodern deconstructionism into which America’s wokerati have plunged our now institutionally radicalized country? None other than President Xi Jinping. He “has done more than any other modern leader to elevate Confucian ideas.”

Spared the American-style multiculturalism that hobbles the national spirit—and with their Muslim population ruthlessly controlled to eliminate even the slightest threat of terrorism against the majority population—there is indeed no stopping the Chinese.

During the Cultural Revolution, “Mao exhorted the Chinese to smash anything old.” À la Antifa, “Gangs of Red Guards swarmed Qufu, Confucius’s hometown, and blew up his tomb.” Americans have arrived at that point. They are purging their foundational teachings and obliterating memorials and mementos to their spiritual fathers. Been there, done that, say the Chinese.

Sotomayor Is the 21st Century Roger Taney

The court can’t save us; that isn’t its role. But we can prevent it from being part of our decline and doom.

by Deion A. Kathawa for American Greatness

The U.S. Supreme Court on December 10 handed down its much-awaited opinion in Whole Women’s Health v. Jackson. I’ll bottom-line the result as simply as possible.

The court concluded that Texas abortion providers may maintain a pre-enforcement challenge to the law at issue, S.B. 8, but only as against state licensing board officials, not other state officials such as the attorney general, judges, or court clerks. The decision to allow suit against the licensing officials was 8-1 (Justice Clarence Thomas alone would have directed the district court to dismiss the suit as against all defendants). The decision to preclude suit against the attorney general and court clerks was 5-4 (Chief Justice John G. Roberts and the three Democratic appointees were in the minority and would have allowed pre-enforcement challenges to proceed against the attorney general and court clerks).

I say all that just for context; the technical dimension of the opinion has been picked over thoroughly by legal academics and commentators since it was released. On that front, I don’t have much, if anything, to add.

Instead I want to focus on an aspect of the case that has received far less attention than it should have : a portion of Justice Sotomayor’s partial dissent.

In Justice Sotomayor’s view, S.B. 8

is a brazen challenge to our federal structure. It echoes the philosophy of John C. Calhoun, a virulent defender of the slaveholding South who insisted that States had the right to ‘veto’ or ‘nullif[y]’ any federal law with which they disagreed. Lest the parallel be lost on the Court, analogous sentiments were expressed in this case’s companion: ‘The Supreme Court’s interpretations of the Constitution are not the Constitution itself—they are, after all, called opinions.’

The Nation fought a Civil War over that proposition, but Calhoun’s theories were not extinguished. . . . [Citations omitted.]

It’s important to note that Justice Sotomayor directly equates a law that has been duly enacted by Texas’ legislature for the purpose of protecting the unborn within the state’s border from lethal violence with the worldview and policy preferences of South Carolina Senator Calhoun, a man who openly and explicitly defended slavery as a “positive good” on the floor of the United States Senate. Simply describing each side clearly puts the lie to Justice Sotomayor’s sophistry; on the merits, her comparison fails utterly.

Playing legal hardball to prevent the slaughter of the unborn could not be more different than advocating for the continuation and expansion, not to mention societal approval, of chattel slavery, a monstrous deprivation of the liberty of some men for the benefit of others, even though all are “created equal.” That Justice Sotmayor and her colleagues, Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan, cannot see that is a testament to how warped their moral compasses really are.

It’s good to protect babies; it’s bad to enslave people. Don’t trust everything you read in the U.S. Reports, folks.

But Justice Sotomayor’s comparison also fails even when we drop down a level from the merits to assess the legal reasoning.

The Supremacy Clause (Article VI, paragraph 2) provides: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land . . .”

Notice what’s not there: Supreme Court opinions.

Frankly, I’m surprised that a good liberal like Justice Sotomayor wrote that “[t]he Nation fought a Civil War over” whether the court’s interpretations of the Constitution in its opinions are equivalent to the Constitution itself, the supreme law of the land. After all, the Civil War was definitely primarily about slavery. The Lincoln-Douglas debates made that abundantly clear, as does common sense.

But more than that, Justice Sotomayor, perhaps unwittingly, aligned herself with Chief Justice Taney’s wicked 1857 opinion in Dred Scott v. Sanford. There, the court purported unilaterally to settle national policy on slavery in one fell swoop, mangling the Declaration of Independence in the process, by holding that blacks were not and could never be citizens of the United States. The “Sotomayor-3” would do exactly that for abortion, and they are rightly—finally—facing pushback.

In a sense, then, the Civil War was about the court. President Abraham Lincoln strongly attacked the underlying logic of Dred Scott in his First Inaugural Address:

the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.

Seen in this light, the allusion to Calhounism that Justice Sotomayor makes isuseful—but not at all for the reasons that she seems to think it is. It’s not always immoral and imprudent to challenge the Court’s decisions; after all, sometimes they really are just that heinous, and a Lincolnian resistance to them and their pernicious logic and reach is called for.

Justice Sotomayor’s invocation of this dark time in American history exposes the court’s liberals (and apparently also the chief justice) for what they are: judicial supremacists—tyrants. Jackson has made it clear, if you didn’t already know: that quartet is perfectly content to rule us without our consent. And that should seriously trouble us all.

The Court can’t save us; that’s not its role. But it can assuredly be part of our decline and doom. Let’s not let it be.

Melania Trump steps out in Florida for a ‘Christmas visit’

 Melania Trump is making sure service members are remembered this holiday season. The former first lady paid a special visit on Thursday morning to the U.S. Coast Guard Station Lake Worth Inlet in Florida. Sharing photos on Friday from the outing, Melania wrote: “Wonderful Christmas visit with members of the U.S. Coast Guard. Thank you for everything you do to protect our country!”  

“Remember to say a special prayer for our great service members who are away from loved ones during the holiday,” she continued.  

The former first lady spent time with members of the station on Dec. 16 and toured the coast on board a rescue vessel. Melania spread holiday cheer wishing members of the Coast Guard a merry Christmas with cookies and cards. “The cards and cookies were appreciated,” the U.S. Coast Guard Station Lake Worth Inlet wrote on Facebook. They also thanked the mom of one for her “kind words.”

Former President Donald Trump’s wife was dressed in a chic nautical outfit for the visit. Melania stepped out wearing navy trousers, a striped top, white blazer, flats and sunglasses.  

https://www.hola.com/us/celebrities/20211217307569/melania-trump-florida-christmas-visit-coast-guard/