Suicide Crisis

This is going to boil down to meaning. Interesting to note that the authors never mention the change in the significance of the church in the lives of Americans, as the church is what taught our culture that human life matters. I have not been a believer in years, although I wish that I were.

Post modern culture, or whatever you want to call our present schizophrenic perception of the meaning of human life, doesn't, as Jung put it, "relativize the pain of this life." I would put the school shootings phenomenon in the same pot of "loss of meaning".

https://freebeacon.com/issues/the-curious-case-of-americas-suicide-crisis/

Thursday nights, smoking a cigar, drinking diet coke and eating pizza ...

...with sun dried tomatoes, mozzarella and pepperoni in a small dojo office in Bath, Maine, in the 90s.

My teacher, Al Gardner (we called him by the Japanese term, sensei), was a very interesting man. Musician, athlete, fighter, teacher; he was morbidly obese, 2nd generation Armenian (Bardesbanian was the family name) and very charismatic. He was much more than that, too, but that's all I can come up with for now. I loved him and trained hard and got as much as I could from my time in the dojo. And I received a lot from the time I spent there. I gained the social benefits of a hard working but caring group of fellow students, I was given a chance to train children and give them what I had to offer. I had a life long fascination with the martial arts and its promise of transformation. I was learning, growing, receiving appreciation and getting and giving love. A single male in my late 20s - along with a career with its many ups and downs - what could have been better?

The most valuable thing my teacher taught me wasn't how to beat an opponent in a fight, or to be a fearless master of my human frailty, or to find inner peace through meditation. He taught me the overwhelming value of dialogue.

On the aforementioned Thursday nights, he and I would chew the fat. "The fat" included politics, martial arts, his stories, current events, and events at the dojo. We both liked guns and were fascinated with strength, physical power and music, and we were both intoxicated by the charms of the opposite gender.

And it's a good thing we had those things in common. He was a Yankee, I was a southerner. He was out of the rat race after earning a degree from one of the top ten undergraduate colleges in the US, I was a lieutenant in the USN, a Naval Aviator, learning how to conduct war from an airplane. I came from a Christian background and sympathized with the Israelis. He was in tune with the sorrow of the Palestinians. He was a life long democrat and read Time Magazine every week (which I scoffed at involuntarily and rudely). I was a Reagan Republican but realizing in small ways that I didn't like the GOP as much as I wanted to. I think he had used more drugs than I even knew existed, but also left that all behind. I was getting drug tested by the government routinely, had been a police officer before I joined the USN, and limited my intoxicants to beer, and bad beer at that.

As I gained confidence in my safety with him, in my sense that the relationship was real enough that I could speak more freely, I ventured into conversations about the parts of life, the universe and everything on which we disagreed.

I am a nerd and few people I have known have been willing to indulge me in the chase for ideas, the testing of beliefs and the learning that results when thoughts of two different people can mix and mature with honest feedback. It turns out that Al was welcoming of the dialogue.

He never convinced me to believe what he believed. I never convinced him to believe what I believed. Our beliefs should have been a threat to each other. The human connection, the friendship, love and respect we held with each other overcame the human instinct to be right or dominant.

I gained an invaluable insight in those moments with Al, greater than an understanding of what martial arts is, greater than learning a traditional martial arts system (more accurately, small parts of 4 systems). I learned that underneath the disagreement is an assumption, and if I can get to the assumption of someone that believes differently than I do, I'll be able to accept the legitimacy of the belief and honor their humanity in spite of the fear their different belief generates in me.

Sometimes, people believe what they do based on insufficient knowledge, but far more often, their fundamental assumption on a topic drives what they learn.

Discussion to convince will rarely if ever generate enough safety to allow either party to discover the other party's foundational assumption, even if the other party knows to look for it, and thus is a wasted effort.

A caveat to the above conclusion is that there may be a side benefit in that honest discussion helps others who how similar beliefs to see they are not alone, however, if that is the point, it can still be made without questioning the intentions or humanity of those who believe differently.

Another caveat - once the politicians, of either party, make their way to the stage to do battle, they are there to win and they will either lie, cheat, steal or bully their way to a win or they will be eliminated from the political gene pool. Our "political leaders" are the best humans on the planet at doing anything to win while claiming their own virtue exceeds that of their opponent. Fools that we are, we believe them.

The practice of professing belief without expecting to win over or change the beliefs of others is not particularly rewarding in the short term, it's much more sporting to try to win the internet with a snappy quip designed to disparage the beliefs of others. I don't think it is going to be the new rage. I'll keep at it as a celebration of the gift of Al's time and attention. 

We Make Our Own Meanings

The folks that write this type of stuff have this meaning - whites had more power, therefore their violent behaviors were more wrong than the violent behaviors of the folks with less power.

They should read "Guns, Germs and Steel" so they could see the reality of human experience. Those who progressed to agriculture had extra food and that allowed food storage, building of year around shelter, and specialization (smiths, farmers, politicians, priests, fishermen, carpenters, masons, etc). Disease followed, leaving the surviving "civilized" folks living in cities less vulnerable to the germs they supported via civilization. While they grew smaller and sicker eating an agriculturalist's diet, they could have a child each year, and would win the breeding wars.

Specialization and population growth was a two headed monster that allowed some groups to be as dominant as the whites were when they arrived in america. If they were violent to the natives, it was just as likely the natives were violent to them - only the ones with guns, germs and steel were better at warring and could replace those lost. The natives, limited to a  child every 4 years, could not compete.

One example, the Comanche, who were exterminating competing tribes to dominate the great plains and the buffalo, were estimated to have been 16,000 in number at their peak. At that time, there were already millions of whites. Were whites worse than the Comanche because they were better at genocide? In my view, no, whites were evolving to a point of view that exterminating, enslaving or dominating non-white, or non-Americans, was wrong. That's why there are still pockets of natives in this country. That they were as murderous as the natives but better at it does not make for me the meaning that whites were bad and the less powerful natives were good. Humans are humans, with many good and bad elements in how we struggle to secure our own safety and abundance of resources.

Crying about asymmetry of power is missing the point that human groups have struggled for dominance since they were human, and this point in history may be the most peaceful time that has ever been.

https://bt24news.com/analysis-comment/opinion-the-vicious-reality-behind-the-thanksgiving-myth/

Fascinating Story, I Wish Her Well in Her Journey

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/how-mattress-girl-changed-her-mind

It is easy to have contempt for politicians and I do ....

.. but this story is powerful nonetheless for the connection to the human experience.

Every November, as she has done for almost forty years, Nellie Connally readies herself for the reporters’ calls. She has her hair done in preparation for the cameras, and she buys flowers—yellow roses, typically—to freshen her home, a sun-washed two-bedroom condominium on the twelfth floor of a luxury high-rise, the Four Leaf Towers, in Houston. Because the story is always present in her memory, she doesn’t have to brush up for the interviews, and because she is a trouper—she wanted to be an actress, a long, long time ago—she always sounds as if she is speaking on the subject for the first time. The story she is perpetually asked to tell, of course, is the tale of that fateful day, November 22, 1963, when she rode in an open Lincoln convertible with the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy; his wife, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy; and her husband, John Connally, the governor of Texas.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/the-witness-2/

It was wrong even when it was right

Yes, exactly. It was inexcusable what all those folks did to cover up for Bill the abuser, it was compromise to get power over principle, and there was nothing to respect about those who did what it took to support Bill.

Yin yang style, it still may have been the right thing to do. What if that was the necessary stage to get to where we are now, where Bill-behavior isn't tolerated?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/opinion/sunday/bills-belated-metoo-moment.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion

Missed this one from 3 years ago ...

There are many, ahem, bombshells in this one.  I remember being there in 2006 and the guys I worked with said, "nope, we were looking for nukes and their precursors, didn't find any."
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/390517/bush-didnt-lie-deroy-murdock

Sure He Was a Homophobic Murderer But ...

OK, so he was a monster who murdered and tortured many, but his people (the compliant ones that were left after the murdering and torture) could read, and had GREAT health care. And don't forget, Fidel hated racial inequality. The fact that cuban girls were prostituting themselves for soap and shampoo money is a small price to pay for their health care and literacy (unless it was homosexual activity or left them with AIDS in which case off to the pokey for them) - heck they could read about themselves in US newspapers. 
What kind of person forgets the murder and torture when they talk about FC?
http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/4640553-155/george-f-will-fidel-castro-and

Perspective

We judge Columbus harshly because the same power that enabled the Europeans to conquer the world also allowed them to impose their views on the world. And the views they imposed are now our views.

Even as the conquest was reaching its zenith in the 19th century, the Europeans were bringing to the world the then-novel idea that one group of people didn’t have the right to impose its will on another group.

This revolution in thinking, which ultimately undermined European imperialism, was announced by the Declaration of Independence and its assertion of the self-evident truth of human equality. It was carried further by the British who suppressed the slave trade with their all-powerful navy, commercial might and insistent diplomacy, and who led the campaign for the abolition of slavery. It was completed by American insistence after the world wars of the 20th century on the right of self-determination, the right of people to self-government.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/straight-talk-about-christopher-columbus-1476050242

Sadly This Seems True

Criminologists have tried for decades to prove that the overrepresentation of blacks in prison is due to criminal-justice racism. They have always come up short. They have been forced to the same conclusion as Michael Tonry in his book, Malign Neglect: “Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned,” Tonry wrote. In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They found overwhelming evidence establishing that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/hillarys-debate-lies-14759.html

Context Changes Most Everything

Definitely interesting to read this with the context of the Orland massacre and other current events.

If you’re going to do the exegesis, Right Reverend Shutt, I might recommend knowing that we don’t call verses “lines.” Also, maybe notice that the listing of sins indicts literally every single human on the planet. So if you’re thinking that Christianity calls for the execution of gays, you have to think, on the basis of the same passage, it calls for the execution of everyone. And if you’re thinking that, and you know anything at all about Christianity, maybe ponder whether everything you’ve written is embarrassingly wrong.

http://thefederalist.com/2016/06/17/new-york-times-claims-romans-calls-for-execution-of-gays/

The Irony of "Public Health"

Obesity researchers then were eying sugary drinks with great suspicion. For decades, dietary guidelines had told Americans to cut back on fat. When it came to weight gain, most experts thought, a calorie is a calorie, no matter the source. Because fat has more than twice as many calories per gram as carbohydrates or protein, people should avoid fat. Then in the 1990s, some nutrition experts—watching obesity rates surge despite that advice—started rethinking carbohydrates.

Some scientists argued that eating carbs floods the bloodstream with sugar, which triggers a sharp release in the hormone insulin. Insulin brings blood sugar down and also tells the body’s cells to store fat rather than burning it. After a carb-led surge in blood sugar, the scientists argued, the outpouring of insulin is so great that within about two hours the blood sugar level crashes down to below normal. That low blood sugar makes people feel hungry, prompting them to eat more. By this line of thinking, a calorie wasn’t just a calorie.

At around the same time, Dr. Robert Lustig was arguing that sugar is not just another carbohydrate but is uniquely bad—he called it toxic. When the fructose in sugar hits the liver, he said, it sets off a hormonal chain reaction causing chronically high insulin levels that, over years, lead to obesity and diabetes.

Yet another group of researchers was showing that calories in beverages are not nearly as filling as calories in food. In one study, when people ate calories in food they compensated by eating less later in the day, but when they drank their calories they actually ate more food later.

In the end, it didn’t matter much to the health department whether soda leads to weight gain because it delivers unnecessary calories, or because those calories come from carbohydrates, or because those carbohydrates are sugar, or because the sugar is in liquid form. Sugary drinks make people fat.

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/17/coca_colas_sneaky_evil_politics_how_big_soda_twisted_race_and_used_the_koch_brothers_to_fight_a_tax/

The irony here - a public health advocate, cheering for the latest round of government manipulation, who won't tell the rest of the story:  government manipulation pushed the population towards sugar, and was the cause of the obesity epidemic and the resulting costs to the national health care coffers.  All those "life saving medications" we are paying for are largely those that treat hypertension, vascular diseases and the diabetes that causes them (and probably causes many cancers too).

The Koch brothers work to their own self interest by opposing government over reach, and make enemies in the process because so many love government over-reach.  Coke exists to sell a toxic product and probably cannot face up to that fact and survive.  Coke and the sugar industry did a fabulous job using the idiots in federal government to manipulate the public's perception of the risks of sugar ingestion whilst those same federal government idiots were telling the public to avoid fat. Neither Coke or any other citizen or business entity on their own did even a fraction of the damage in human health and suffering that our government has.

Will the government lovers ever acknowledge the shortened lives and suffering on their hands?