Curtis Dahlgren
THE WAR ON DISSENT; the Ides of March are here again ("but not past")
By Curtis Dahlgren
"In what sense do we reject ethics, reject morality? In the sense given by the bourgeois, who based ethics on God's commandments." – Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924)
I'M NOT ARGUING; I'M JUST EXPLAINING IT BETTER. I saw those words on a sweat shirt at Wal-Mart. I had to chuckle because there are some people who will raise a counter-point for every point one makes in the attempt to converse. I'll bet the phenomenon only gets worse, in some families at least, since college 'co-eds' outnumber the boys 60-40.
I use the term 'boy' loosely but, to the government "healthcare" law, a 26-year-old is still a child! As someone said, 26 used to be the onset of middle age! Now a 26-year-old might sue his/her parents for college tuition, if Uncle Sam hasn't already "forgiven" his student loan. For those of us raised in the 40s and 50s, it was our job to help keep the family afloat. Whether you had farm chores or a paper route, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Without the work performed by my brother and me, our parents couldn't have made the monthly farm payment (I'm just glad they did, and I never sued for back wages).
In the era of Father-knows-best, economics wasn't an abstract subject; it was survival. We knew there were no free lunches, because our labor was producing the "lunch." Economics was absorbed by osmosis on the farm. In the 1950s it would have been mind-blowing to see Uncle Sam borrowing 40 cents for every dollar he pays on debt service (interest on that 18 trillion dollar national debt). That's like borrowing all the money you pay for your credit card's minimum monthly payment. Dumb question: When will the debt stop growing? America is off the track and in the quick sand. And – it was no accident. We were derailed on purpose! So how did THAT happen?
Once upon a time there was a pundit long ago by the name of Balaam. He was offered a huge bribe if he could bring a curse on a certain nation. He was unable to bring the curse, because the Lord saw that the nation was still trying to, essentially, do the right stuff. As long as 50-some percent of the people had the right stuff, they couldn't be cursed. So the pundit knew what he had to do. If he were to collect the money; he had to first destroy the country's moral standards and education. The first thing he did, therefore, was having the teachers say that "we must not make value judgments." Pretty soon there were no stigmas except the concept of stigmas. Instead of 10 commandments there was just one: "DO IT." Sex became almost compulsory, and if anyone complained, they were told to just shut up; this is diversity!
AND SO, the nation collapsed and Balaam collected his "bet." Thus the term "follow the money" was coined (no pun). It is called the Way of Balaam to this day. That true story comes to us from thousands of years ago, but human nature never changes. That is how America got derailed. We didn't fall; we were PUSHED – by academics in both the secular and sectarian world. "Americans thought they could do just fine without acknowledging God or actually reading the Bible," said a letter in our local weekly. How's that working out for us, eh? Columnist Michael Guido says that the problem is Dalmatian Theology: Many people – even in seminaries – believe that the Bible is inspired only in SPOTS! Spiritual anarchy leads sooner or later to societal anarchy. I saved a column by Dennis Prager from April 2013 that "explains it best":
"I offer the single most politically incorrect statement a modern American can make: I first look to the Bible for moral guidance and for wisdom. I say this even though I am not a Christian (I am a Jew, and a non-Orthodox one at that). And I say this even though I attended an Ivy League graduate school (Columbia), where I learned nothing about the Bible except that it was irrelevant, outdated and frequently immoral . . For well over a generation, we have been living on 'cut-flower ethics.' We have removed ethics from the Bible-based soil that gave them life and think they can survive removed from that soil . . When the current executive editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson, was appointed to that position she announced that 'in my house growing up, the Times substituted for religion' [I think she has since been replaced] . . The other modern substitute for the Bible is the heart."
SCIENCE, of course, is a biggie. "God is dead, the professors said. At least the God of Judgment." The flaw in the slaw is that, without God (and His standards of morality), scientists can't be trusted any more than journalists! I quote from an article from Creation.com, July 2013:
"Most of the known cases of modern-day fraud are in the life sciences. In the biomedical field alone, fully 127 new misconduct cases were lodged with the Office of Research Integrity (HHS Dept.) in the year 2001. A Nature editorial concluded: 'Long gone are the days when scientific frauds could be dismissed as the work of the mad rather than the bad. The unhappily extensive record of misconduct suggests that fraudsters believe their faked results . . . ' The accused include some of the greatest modern biologists, and the problem exists at Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, Baylor, and other major universities."
[To which I would add East Anglia in the UK (the next person to bring up Global warming is going to get a pie in the face. It was seven degrees below zero this morning, nearly the Ides of March, 2014).]
P.S. That's a portion my 3/14/14 column. A year later, there's only MORE questions about ethics in government, academe, and journalism. A new University of Chicago poll says that only 11 percent have a lot of confidence in the federal executive branch, 5 percent in Congress, and about 19 percent in the Supreme Court. Anarchy is breaking out. We not only have war on conservative dissent, but also on the police!
PPS: You don't have to be black to occasionally run into imperfect officers (you can even be white and gray-haired), but the "hands-up, don't shoot" thing never happened in Ferguson. Even that wouldn't have justified rioting, looting, and burning of minority businesses. As Prager would say, anarchists are going by their hearts and not reality (similar to the illogic of the Israel-haters). If patriotism is the last resort for some people, fanning the flames of race warfare is really the last refuge of the floundering scoundrels.
It's time – right now - to "stand athwart history and yell STOP!"
© Curtis Dahlgren
March 14, 2015
"In what sense do we reject ethics, reject morality? In the sense given by the bourgeois, who based ethics on God's commandments." – Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924)
I'M NOT ARGUING; I'M JUST EXPLAINING IT BETTER. I saw those words on a sweat shirt at Wal-Mart. I had to chuckle because there are some people who will raise a counter-point for every point one makes in the attempt to converse. I'll bet the phenomenon only gets worse, in some families at least, since college 'co-eds' outnumber the boys 60-40.
I use the term 'boy' loosely but, to the government "healthcare" law, a 26-year-old is still a child! As someone said, 26 used to be the onset of middle age! Now a 26-year-old might sue his/her parents for college tuition, if Uncle Sam hasn't already "forgiven" his student loan. For those of us raised in the 40s and 50s, it was our job to help keep the family afloat. Whether you had farm chores or a paper route, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Without the work performed by my brother and me, our parents couldn't have made the monthly farm payment (I'm just glad they did, and I never sued for back wages).
In the era of Father-knows-best, economics wasn't an abstract subject; it was survival. We knew there were no free lunches, because our labor was producing the "lunch." Economics was absorbed by osmosis on the farm. In the 1950s it would have been mind-blowing to see Uncle Sam borrowing 40 cents for every dollar he pays on debt service (interest on that 18 trillion dollar national debt). That's like borrowing all the money you pay for your credit card's minimum monthly payment. Dumb question: When will the debt stop growing? America is off the track and in the quick sand. And – it was no accident. We were derailed on purpose! So how did THAT happen?
Once upon a time there was a pundit long ago by the name of Balaam. He was offered a huge bribe if he could bring a curse on a certain nation. He was unable to bring the curse, because the Lord saw that the nation was still trying to, essentially, do the right stuff. As long as 50-some percent of the people had the right stuff, they couldn't be cursed. So the pundit knew what he had to do. If he were to collect the money; he had to first destroy the country's moral standards and education. The first thing he did, therefore, was having the teachers say that "we must not make value judgments." Pretty soon there were no stigmas except the concept of stigmas. Instead of 10 commandments there was just one: "DO IT." Sex became almost compulsory, and if anyone complained, they were told to just shut up; this is diversity!
AND SO, the nation collapsed and Balaam collected his "bet." Thus the term "follow the money" was coined (no pun). It is called the Way of Balaam to this day. That true story comes to us from thousands of years ago, but human nature never changes. That is how America got derailed. We didn't fall; we were PUSHED – by academics in both the secular and sectarian world. "Americans thought they could do just fine without acknowledging God or actually reading the Bible," said a letter in our local weekly. How's that working out for us, eh? Columnist Michael Guido says that the problem is Dalmatian Theology: Many people – even in seminaries – believe that the Bible is inspired only in SPOTS! Spiritual anarchy leads sooner or later to societal anarchy. I saved a column by Dennis Prager from April 2013 that "explains it best":
"I offer the single most politically incorrect statement a modern American can make: I first look to the Bible for moral guidance and for wisdom. I say this even though I am not a Christian (I am a Jew, and a non-Orthodox one at that). And I say this even though I attended an Ivy League graduate school (Columbia), where I learned nothing about the Bible except that it was irrelevant, outdated and frequently immoral . . For well over a generation, we have been living on 'cut-flower ethics.' We have removed ethics from the Bible-based soil that gave them life and think they can survive removed from that soil . . When the current executive editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson, was appointed to that position she announced that 'in my house growing up, the Times substituted for religion' [I think she has since been replaced] . . The other modern substitute for the Bible is the heart."
SCIENCE, of course, is a biggie. "God is dead, the professors said. At least the God of Judgment." The flaw in the slaw is that, without God (and His standards of morality), scientists can't be trusted any more than journalists! I quote from an article from Creation.com, July 2013:
"Most of the known cases of modern-day fraud are in the life sciences. In the biomedical field alone, fully 127 new misconduct cases were lodged with the Office of Research Integrity (HHS Dept.) in the year 2001. A Nature editorial concluded: 'Long gone are the days when scientific frauds could be dismissed as the work of the mad rather than the bad. The unhappily extensive record of misconduct suggests that fraudsters believe their faked results . . . ' The accused include some of the greatest modern biologists, and the problem exists at Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, Baylor, and other major universities."
[To which I would add East Anglia in the UK (the next person to bring up Global warming is going to get a pie in the face. It was seven degrees below zero this morning, nearly the Ides of March, 2014).]
P.S. That's a portion my 3/14/14 column. A year later, there's only MORE questions about ethics in government, academe, and journalism. A new University of Chicago poll says that only 11 percent have a lot of confidence in the federal executive branch, 5 percent in Congress, and about 19 percent in the Supreme Court. Anarchy is breaking out. We not only have war on conservative dissent, but also on the police!
PPS: You don't have to be black to occasionally run into imperfect officers (you can even be white and gray-haired), but the "hands-up, don't shoot" thing never happened in Ferguson. Even that wouldn't have justified rioting, looting, and burning of minority businesses. As Prager would say, anarchists are going by their hearts and not reality (similar to the illogic of the Israel-haters). If patriotism is the last resort for some people, fanning the flames of race warfare is really the last refuge of the floundering scoundrels.
It's time – right now - to "stand athwart history and yell STOP!"
© Curtis Dahlgren
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