What are your opinions on Ben Shapiro's hypocrisy regarding his refute of identity politics and ...

timon_phocas comments on Apr 6, 2019:

I am not a Jew. I am a pretty serious Christian. I reject white supremicists and identity politics of all flavors. I am utterly in favor of the Jews living in their ancient, ancestral homeland. I believe it is in accord with Biblical promises and simple fairness. The US State Department says ...

timon_phocas replies on Apr 14, 2019:

@Smersh75 Howdy, I must agree there is a delicate balance between what God promises to give and what He expects His people to fight for. It's a difficult needle to thread because we cannot fully know the mind of God. Nonetheless, when the Children of Israel went into Caanan under Joshua they went as an armed force, fighting many battles. Sometimes they lost battles because they disobeyed their God. Most of the time they won them because they obeyed. They still had to fight for their land even though God promised it to them. I don't think it's very different today.

Why did Hitler & Stalin go to war if they were both leftists?

timon_phocas comments on Mar 10, 2019:

I think a quote from Erdrogan of Turkey is illuminating. He said that democracy is like a street car, you get on it to go somewhere and you get off when you've arrived. Erdrogan used democracy to achieve power and then "got off." Socialism is the same kind of street car. You use it to achieve ...

timon_phocas replies on Apr 14, 2019:

@4everlearning Howdy, Let me restate. Stalin made the same geopolitical moves the czars did. The czars always wanted preeminence among the Slavic peoples. They wanted to control the Baltic coastland. They wanted to dominate Central Asia. They wanted to secure the Russian Far East. I am not saying the czars were totalitarian monsters like Stalin.

Julian Assange is a free speech hero.

timon_phocas comments on Apr 13, 2019:

Julian Assange is a vindictive, repulsive prick. The Ecuadorian embassy turned him over to British police because that's exactly how he behaved towards them. British newspapers report he threw temper tantrums, smeared feces on walls and refused to clean up after himself and his cat. And these were ...

timon_phocas replies on Apr 14, 2019:

@cRaZyTMG Howdy, The US is charging Julian Assange with helping the erstwhile Bradley Manning to hack passwords into databases the erstwhile Mr Manning had no access to. All characterizations aside, that is a crime. The real responsibility for the massive subsequent leaks lies with a quota obsessed Army bureaucracy that put a twitchy flake into the Army and kept him there. But the post wasn't about responsibility, it was about Julian Assange being a, "free speech hero." Reinhold Neibuhr was a free speech hero. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a free speech hero. Julian Assange is a vindictive, repulsive prick.

I'm no astronomer but I was reading about the missing mass of galaxies.

The_Q comments on Apr 11, 2019:

First of all, God job on the thinking, and while I am no expert in astrophysics, I can comment on time dilation. as that is something we can measure. But first, Dark matter is just a name for unknown, or missing matter that seem to be missing based on the speed of galaxies and systems we ...

timon_phocas replies on Apr 13, 2019:

BTW, time dilation is working right here in Colorado. The National Bureau of Standards has an atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado. It runs s fractionally faster than the Naval Observatory's atomic clock in Washington, DC. The scientific explanation is that the Naval Observatory's atomic clock is deeper in the gravity well than the one in Boulder. The rest of Colorado, however, believes that Boulder has always lived in another dimension.

I feel immense gratitude right now.

jwhitten comments on Apr 11, 2019:

What about the Holodomor? Or the Rape of Nanjing? Or the Killing Fields in Cambodia? Or the Armenian Genocide? Or Bosnia? Or the great purges under Chairman Mao? Or Shining Path? Or... the list is too long to iterate! Why do we insiste upon "remembering the Holocaust", which on the grand scale of ...

timon_phocas replies on Apr 13, 2019:

@jwhitten thanks, this was a great conversation.

Assange has been arrested

timon_phocas comments on Apr 11, 2019:

I'm pretty sure wikileaks is a FSB or GRU front. Mr Assange won't be tortured or executed. A long vacation in Leavenworth, Kansas might be on his itinerary, however.

timon_phocas replies on Apr 11, 2019:

@Boohickert FSB is the sucessor to the KGB, the Soviet Communists' secret police (both foreign and domestic) The GRU didn't have to change its name. It is the Red Army intelligence service.

Rep. Ilhan Omar is proof that even 'god' makes mistakes sometimes.

timon_phocas comments on Apr 11, 2019:

God makes babies. It's entirely Ilhan Omar's fault that she grew into the duplicitous, hate filled person she is today.

timon_phocas replies on Apr 11, 2019:

@jwhitten Reminds me of the joke about the self made man. He didn't want it that way, but no one else was willing to accept the blame.

I feel immense gratitude right now.

jwhitten comments on Apr 11, 2019:

What about the Holodomor? Or the Rape of Nanjing? Or the Killing Fields in Cambodia? Or the Armenian Genocide? Or Bosnia? Or the great purges under Chairman Mao? Or Shining Path? Or... the list is too long to iterate! Why do we insiste upon "remembering the Holocaust", which on the grand scale of ...

timon_phocas replies on Apr 11, 2019:

@jwhitten Howdy again, jwhitten. I've been a pretty steady consumer of history since my sister got me my first library card. Since that was 56 years ago, it amounts to a pretty impressive pile of books. So yes, I am aware of the sad litany you wrote about. And some by Senachcherib, Nebuchadnezzar, and King Leopold in the Congo. And how settlers in 1860s California would ride through river and creek beds to shoot Native Americans. Human history is largely an account of violence for the sake of wealth and power. And sometimes violence just for hatred. So you're right, the Holocaust is not the only organized atrocity in the world. But it does act as a signal warning of how thin the veneer of civilization really is.

I feel immense gratitude right now.

jwhitten comments on Apr 11, 2019:

What about the Holodomor? Or the Rape of Nanjing? Or the Killing Fields in Cambodia? Or the Armenian Genocide? Or Bosnia? Or the great purges under Chairman Mao? Or Shining Path? Or... the list is too long to iterate! Why do we insiste upon "remembering the Holocaust", which on the grand scale of ...

timon_phocas replies on Apr 11, 2019:

Howdy jwhitten, Interesting question. Many levels at which to approach the question. You are right, there are so many instances of vile cruelty in human history. So why is the Holocaust important, or special, or worthy of emphasis? For those of us who are not Jews, it's easy to dismiss because it's about what Germans did to Jews. But it's more than that. It's about what humans can do to other humans. It's about how a rich, cultured, technically advanced civilization can be devolved down to its base hatreds. It's about how that civilization can then act wretchedly on a scale that beggars the imagination. It is a warning for us all. Another aspect is that, so to speak, it was caught on tape. We have the minutes of the Wansee Conference. We have blueprints, construction and repair orders for the gas chambers and cremetoria. We have the railroad schedules. We even have movies of their use. No one can deny the mountain of evidence. I wish we could have "home movies" of slave ships or the Trail of Tears to remind us of our capacity for evil. But we don't. We have the Holocaust to remind us to be morally vigilant.

I suspect the FBI, NSA and CIA will all escape justice for their illegal spying on Trump

10thGeneration comments on Apr 11, 2019:

I suspect not. There are two classes of political animals whose world fractured when Trump won the 2016 election. Both classes were quickly on his trail. The long term elected establishment and the high level appointed career establishment went after the campaign and the administration. John McCain ...

timon_phocas replies on Apr 11, 2019:

from your lips to God's ears

Give us your (short) opinions on God 1) Does God exist?

timon_phocas comments on Mar 12, 2019:

Karl Barth, considered the most profound evangelical theologian of his time, summed up his writings by saying, "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so." Simple yet elegant. I look at the universe and see the work of a creator. I look at history and see the same. I look at the...

timon_phocas replies on Apr 11, 2019:

Howdy @ROGAN You see faith as abandoning reason and inquiry. I see a different aspect of it. Forty-odd years ago Patty and I held hands and promised to be partners for the rest of our lives. We did not know everything about each other, but we knew about the character of the person we were putting our trust in. Enough to commit to a relationship. That's what faith is. That's what God wants. You are right when you say it's about the BOOK. I've read the Bible a long time and I've grown more and more impressed with its depth, its profound insights, its subtlety. It's a dialog with humanity spanning fifteen-hundred years and scores of authors. I believe in its divine inspiration. But this is more of an informed consent than a blind acceptance. "Come, let us reason together..." Isaiah 1:18

Gulag Archipelago

E-E-E comments on Apr 6, 2019:

I have not read these books. They peak my interest. Is there or are books that are Nazi Germany equivalent(s) to this? These books would be seem like they are worth taking research notes on.

timon_phocas replies on Apr 11, 2019:

@E-E-E Sorry it's taken so long to get back to you. There are many books about the 3rd Reich. From the prisoner POV books by Victor Frankel and Elie Weisel are very good. At the apex of Nazi government, Albert Speer's books. Rereading "Inside the 3rd Reich" is in my "to do" stack. Geobbels diaries are a POV of a commited Nazi ideologue. I like books by John Toland, he is a careful historian.

Stalin deliberately starved Ukraine to eliminate independent farmers in 1932-33.

Segovia comments on Apr 8, 2019:

And they all patterned their policies after the Union treatment of the former Confederate states following the Second American Revolution. So don't be smug.

timon_phocas replies on Apr 11, 2019:

@Segovia or rather, Sherman's path through Georgia and the Carolinas.

I'm no astronomer but I was reading about the missing mass of galaxies.

timon_phocas comments on Apr 10, 2019:

Astronomers in the first part of the 20th century caught this. It took 100 inch telescopes to get the first photos of galaxies. They counted the stars, estimated their mass and ran the orbital equations. There was no way the orbital masses added up to make sense. So they invented "dark matter." If ...

timon_phocas replies on Apr 11, 2019:

@Judah80 I tend to reason by way of history. This reminds me, in a broad way, of Ptolemaic Astronomy. It was heliocentric. All planets moved in perfect circles around the earth. But there was a problem, this didn't explain movement of planets in the sky (how a planet would suddenly shift from eastern to western parts of the sky). So they proposed a fix. The planets still described perfect circles around the earth. But they also described perfect, smaller circles around the circumference of their larger orbits.These were called epicycles. It was an elegant solution. They were even able to calculate future solar eclipses with it. No mean feat in the age of Roman Numerals and purely integer math It worked. Sort of. Every few years it became innacurate. Then they had to jigger the epicycles to get it to accord with observed phenomena. Ptolemaic astronomy only worked sporadically because their fundamental assumptions about the universe were wrong. We're in the same situation with modern astronomy and dark matter. Dark matter is today's epicycle.

Rosie said if President Trump won she was moving to Canada, we Canadians being to " polite" and ...

Scanderbeg comments on Apr 8, 2019:

She has changed her mind. If If Trump wins 2020 she is going somewhere else :)

timon_phocas replies on Apr 8, 2019:

I hear Elon Musk is going to Mars. On one hand, it is far enough away. On the other, she'd probably take a separate BFR just to boost her into orbit.

Gulag Archipelago

E-E-E comments on Apr 6, 2019:

I have not read these books. They peak my interest. Is there or are books that are Nazi Germany equivalent(s) to this? These books would be seem like they are worth taking research notes on.

timon_phocas replies on Apr 7, 2019:

"One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovitch" is a novella about the GULAG experience. It's by Akeksandr Solzhenitsyn and gives the flavor of his writing. The GULAG Archipelago is over 2,000 pages, ranges over the whole history of the Soviet Union and its essential, inevitable prison camp system.

Just saw a report that Maryland is proposing a bill to allow welfare recipients who can't cook or ...

Boardwine comments on Apr 5, 2019:

I live in Maryland. It's a liberal utopia. I mean the cities are cesspools, the roads are falling apart and the school system is an utter failure. But we’re #1 in murders per capita so we’ve got that going for us….which is nice. Why should the tax payers incur any additional cost? No you ...

timon_phocas replies on Apr 5, 2019:

I worked at a big box membership store for a few years. About 20% of our business was with EBT cards. And right there you see one of the problems. Oh, you'll see rent-a-mobs of "poor people" on the TV if you cut back on the Food Stamp program. But the real protests will come from the CEOs and Wall Street types who see 19 to 22 percent of their business being threatened.

Seattle is Dying - YouTube

timon_phocas comments on Apr 1, 2019:

My mother died from a heroin overdose in March of 1962. I was a few months shy of 8. It was an aberration in 1962. Now it's just another lifestyle choice. See how tolerant we are? Each one of those people sprawled on the street is a catastrophe. It is a life gutted, reduced to a craving, so ...

timon_phocas replies on Apr 1, 2019:

@purdyday Thank you I have come to realize that pain is the common denominator of human life. It comes in different circumstances, but it always comes. We are all walking wounded. One of the best things we can do is reach out to the other walking wounded around us. So thank you again

Some educators seem to suffer from cognitive dissonance when describing the atmospheric greenhouse ...

timon_phocas comments on Apr 1, 2019:

Has anybody searched for correlations between sunspot cycles and historically observed climate variations?

timon_phocas replies on Apr 1, 2019:

@esumbar There have been climate swings before the Industrial Revolution, so we know there have to be other climate change mechanisms. Thank you for bringing up another possibility.

One of our left leaning British cousins brought up the KKK.

James comments on Mar 31, 2019:

I have lived in the South for more than 35 years. I do not know anyone personally that is or ever was in the KKK. However, since wearing a MAGA hat is now akin to being an actual Nazi... ...Nope. I can't even make a joke about that. This is right out of the Marxist play book. They slander anyone...

timon_phocas replies on Mar 31, 2019:

Yes, and in describing all opponents as "Nazis" they minimize the actual, wretched evil Nazis actually were.

I was talking to my husband about IDW community.

pbuck0145 comments on Mar 21, 2019:

I posted this several days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr0OX6ai4Qw

timon_phocas replies on Mar 22, 2019:

thanks. interesting talk I've tried other alternatives to FB, but they seemed like intellectual monocultures. IDW is diverse and the conversations are interesting.

I've read remarks by Representative James Clyburn (D, South Carolina).

kingtet comments on Mar 21, 2019:

There are two claims Clyburn's making: 1. **Comparisons between Trump and Hitler.** Godwin's law was frequently invoked by Glenn Beck and Huckabee about Obama during his 8 years. They tended to do so in bad faith, simultaneously equating his policies with the more superficial aspects of ...

timon_phocas replies on Mar 22, 2019:

Howdy kingtet, Interesting reply. National popular vote losses combined with electoral college victories are a fairly common feature of American elections. It is, after all, how we got Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Bill Clinton and George W Bush. All were elected with minorities of the popular vote. It did not make them illegitimate or make their administrations similar to Hitler's chancellorship. The real reason conservatives object to comparisons of Trump with Hitler is that Hitler was a totalitarian monster. Within six months of being appointed chancellor he had abolished freedom of the press and assemby, outlawed opposition parties and begun the deadly work of concentration camps. Is the New York Times controlled by Trump? Is MSNBC off the air? Are Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi living in the Colorado Supermax? If the answers are no, then Trump is no Hitler.

Can free markets exist without legal intervention to guarantee competition?

timon_phocas comments on Mar 19, 2019:

Every monopoly seems permanent. The Vanderbilts and railroads. Rockefellers and oil. IBM and computers. And then, suddenly, they're not so permanent after all. Facebook and Google have one now. We're using one of the alternatives right now.

timon_phocas replies on Mar 20, 2019:

Howdy @andrewo, As monopolies crest in market power they all try to control political power, too. Google basically operated Obama's digital marketing. When he was elected they opened what amounted to a branch office in the West Wing to provide marketing and research services for his administration. Obama was very kind to Tech Titans. Coincidence? But the point of my post was that monopolies cannot be permanent. Railroads couldn't stop autos and airlines. Standard Oil couldn't stop Texas oil fields and refineries. IBM couldn't stop Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Bill Gates couldn't stop the internet from becoming the focus of personal computing. Facebook/Google/Amazon are on top right now. It won't be permanent.