Lift Up Your Hearts!

I don't always understand Jordan Peterson, nor do I always agree him, but he is always interesting and makes me think. Here he manages to ponder the causes of anti-Trump extremism, the fears of Trump voters, the fundamental natural resource of Western civilization, and the terrifying erosion of trust he has observed over the last five years, all in three minutes.

Every person, every sermon, every book has something of value to offer to those who will listen with a discerning heart and mind. I am fond of repeating my own aphorism: The wise man recognizes truth even in the words of his enemies. How much more so in the rest of the world?

At the same time, we find ourselves attaching too much value to the words of people we admire. We have much to learn from those with whom we already agree on important issues, but at least with our "enemies" we know to be cautious. It is so human to want to find a path and stick with it, to find the "one right way" to approach a situation and shut our eyes to alternatives and to information that might contradict what we think we know. With complex issues, such as childrearing, health care, charitable giving, education, foreign policy, economics, even personal organization, rigidly following the advice of others often leads to disaster.

I'm not saying that there's no such thing as a "right path," nor that truth is subjective, as so many people want to insist—but that people, even the wisest, best-educated, and most experienced people, are still fallible human beings and make really lousy gods.

Our own knowledge, experience, and thoughts don't necessarily show us the right way, either, and for the same reason. "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." Nonetheless, those are the tools we're given and we need to make the most of them.

Listen to others, seek many counsellors, be happy to learn from them—but never stop thinking for yourself. Make the effort to compare what others say with what you know from living your own life. After all, the day is coming, and now is, when those others might actually be "human bots" paid to spread falsehoods and stir up trouble, or AI (Artificial Intelligence or Automated Idiocy, take your pick) doing the same.

It wasn't long ago that I wrote the following:

People who buy extra toilet paper, or cans of soup, or bottles of water for storage rather than immediate consumption are not hoarding, they are wisely preparing for any interruption of the grocery supply chain, be it a hurricane, a pandemic, civil unrest, or some other disruption. As long as they buy their supplies when stocks are plentiful, they are doing no harm; rather, they are encouraging more production, and keeping normal supply mechanisms moving.

Plus, when a crisis comes, and the rest of the world is mobbing the grocery stores for water and toilet paper, those who have done even minor preparation in advance will be at home, not competing with anyone.

It's always fun to come upon someone who not only agrees with what I believe, but says it better and with more authority. Lo and behold, look what I found recently, in Michael Yon's article, First Rule of Famine Club.

Hoarders, speculators, and preppers are different sorts, but they all get blamed as if they are hoarders. Hoarders who buy everything they can get at last minute are a problem.

Preppers actually REDUCE the problem because they are not starving and stressing the supplies, but preppers get blamed as if they are hoarders.

Speculators, as with preppers, often buy far in advance of the problems and actually part of the SOLUTION. They buy when prices are lower and supplies are common. Speculators can be fantastic. When prices skyrocket, speculators find a way to get their supplies to market.

I hadn't thought before about speculators. I'd say their value is great when it comes to thinking and acting in advance, but the practice becomes harmful once the crisis is already on the horizon. Keeping a supply of plywood in your garage and selling it at a modest profit to your neighbors when they have need is a helpful service, but buying half of Home Depot's available stock when a hurricane is nearing the coast is selfish profiteering.

Do you have books from your childhood that have been loved into reality, like the Velveteen Rabbit? Think twice before trading them for newer editions. The same advice holds for any book you value.

I've already been hanging on for dear life to my copies of C. S. Lewis' Narnia books with the original American text. The modern, modified versions are interesting—I believe they are the British versions—but I still prefer the American versions, which contains Lewis' later revisions. What I really don't like about the currently-available books is the way they are numbered in chronological order, rather than publication order, as I strongly believe that they make much more sense in publication order.

Far more important than these minor changes, however, is what is being done to books now. This Natural Selections essay, "The Age of Censorship," gives some examples of what has been done to the new editions of Roald Dahl's works.

Many of the changes are of a type. For instance, more than a dozen instances of the word “white” were changed. White was changed to pale, frail, agog or sweaty, or else removed entirely. Because, you know, a color can be racist.

In one book alone—The Witches—The Telegraph counted 59 new changes. These run from the banal—”chambermaid” is replaced with “cleaner”—to cleansings that appeal more directly to modern pseudo-liberal sensitivities. The suggestion that a character go on a diet, for instance, is simply disappeared. And this passagage,“Even if she is working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman,” has been changed to, “Even if she is working as a top scientist or running a business.”

It’s hard to know what even is believed by the censors who made these changes. Do they mean to suggest that nobody should go on a diet, or that no woman has ever worked as a cashier or a typist? And what, pray tell, is a “top scientist.” I’m guessing that none of the censors could provide a working definition of science, but that when asked to conjure a scientist up, they imagine someone with super science-y accoutrements, like a white lab coat and machines that whirr in the background. Sorry, that would be a pale lab coat.

Dahl's final book, Esio Trot, contained this passage, not in the text but in an author's note: "Tortoises used to be brought into England by the thousand, packed in crates, and they came mostly from North Africa." This was replaced by: "Tortoises used to be brought into England by the thousand. They came from lots of different countries, packed into crates."

I'm beginning to suspect that the real reason for these changes is to dumb down the language, the quality of the writing, and the readers.

It's not just children's books that are being rewritten. This Guardian article explains how Agatha Christie's books have been subjected to the censors' edits.

Among the examples of changes cited by the Telegraph is the 1937 Poirot novel Death on the Nile, in which the character of Mrs Allerton complains that a group of children are pestering her, saying that “they come back and stare, and stare, and their eyes are simply disgusting, and so are their noses, and I don’t believe I really like children”.

This has been stripped down in a new edition to state: “They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children.”

Really? Is there some sort of requirement that when one dons a censor's hat, one must forget how to write interesting prose?

Back to Natural Selections.

There are many things troubling about the creative work of an author being changed after his death. It interferes with our understanding of our own history. We live downstream of our actual history, which did not change just because censors got ahold of our documents. Having the recorded version of history scrubbed interferes with our ability to make sense of our world.

Post-mortem revisions are also bad for art. These edits raise questions of creative autonomy. Of voice. Of what fiction is for. Fiction is not mere entertainment. Fiction educates and uplifts, informing readers about ourselves and our world, and also about the moment in time that the work was created.

When our children were young, I noticed that the newer version of Mary Poppins had been scrubbed of a chapter that was decidedly inappropriate to more modern sentiments. I didn't think too much about it at the time. But now I'm utterly convinced that even young children deserve to know—need to know—that not all cultures and times have had the same values and priorities that we do now. That while we may find other beliefs and practices horrifying, many other cultures would find our own beliefs and practices equally horrifying. What's more, and most important of all, that people in the future will look at us with the same patronizing disgust with which we see our predecessors. We are not the pinnacle of civilization.

That's an excellent topic of conversation for parents and their children, and what better place to start than with a beloved book?

I've reviewed a couple of Rod Dreher's books (Live Not by Lies and The Benedict Option) and find him on the whole a wise voice in the wilderness. A friend sent me an article that he wrote about the opening ceremonies at the Paris Olympics: "A Civilizational Suicide Note on the Seine." I disagree with Dreher that the spectacle was blasphemous, on the grounds that I don't think you can blaspheme any gods other than your own, and France has not been a Catholic country for a very long time. 

However, I'm certainly disgusted by what little I saw, which was enough to show me that I didn't want to watch any more. That they could claim they had no idea a very large number of people would find the show abhorrent reveals a great ignorance—of history, of art, and of their audience. What is most offensive to me, however, is that the parade was so obviously not safe for children—and the opening ceremonies are often the part of the Olympics families most eagerly watch together.

I figure God can take care of himself, but we have an obligation to protect children from sights inappropriate to their age, and in this, Paris and the Olympics failed them.

(I'm not taking the time to pull quotes to publish here, but it's a good article if you want to follow the link. Dreher is an American journalist who lives in Budapest.)

Here's yet another reason why I prefer to judge politicians by what they do rather than what they say:

Porter was listening to Vice President Harris speak. As I walked by his office, I heard her say, "For the past 10 years we have had a president who did his best to divide our country." I fully admit that that's a paraphrase, because I don't remember word-for-word, but I assure you that was the sense and the number is correct.

I can't just walk away from something like that, even though yelling at the screen didn't do the least bit of good. Let's do the math.

Ten years ago, we were more than halfway through 2014, and Barack Obama was president. Donald Trump took office in 2017, then Joe Biden in 2021. That's four years when Trump was president, with roughly two and a half of Obama and three and a half of Biden. So, four years of the person she vilifies, bracketed by six years of those she admires. Shouldn't the latter take 60% of the blame for the mess she claims was made of the past ten years? She, personally, should take 35%, since she was second-in-command, and by her own admission highly influencial in the decisions that were made during that much of the time.

I didn't realize how much power a president has in deciding who gets protection from the Secret Service and who does not.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. had repeatedly asked for Secret Service protection as a presidential candidate, and was repeatedly denied—until the attempted assassination of President Trump made it politically inexpedient not to grant the request. But as soon as Kennedy decided to remove his name from the ballot in 10 states, the protection was immediately removed, even though his campaign is still active in the remaining states.

This action is not surprising from an administration whose primary strategy appears to be to do everything possible to remove its competitors from the ballot, from the Democratic primaries to November's election.

But it was not always so.

Some claim that Secret Service protection is only for viable candidates (they get to define the term), and typically only within 120 days of the November election. But before the 1980 election, Jimmy Carter made sure that Ronald Reagan, Ted Kennedy, and his other opponents were protected by the Secret Service long before the election; in Ted Kennedy's case it was for more than a year, beginning before he officially announced his candidacy. 

The president can make it happen if he wants to, and Jimmy Carter acted from higher principles than we're witnessing here.

David Freiheit, who is still "my favorite Canadian lawyer," despite now living in Florida and no longer practicing law, interviewed Sam Sorbo, a woman who had not been on my radar at all, about homeschooling. I said that Sam was not on my radar, but as he introduced her and mentioned her husband, his name rang a bell for me. I had no idea why. I can hear my family laughing at me, because, while my brain can easily cough up trivia like the second lines of famous poems, there seems to be a black hole in my memory when it comes to people associated with popular music and movies. They will be proud of me, however, because it didn't take me (okay, me and Google) long to solve the mystery: Kevin Sorbo was one of the stars (and better actors) of The Firing Squad, the movie that we watched just a couple of weeks ago.

Puzzle solved, I could settle down and enjoy the interview, which I share here. The content starts at 4:47 and goes on nearly to the very end, making it over an hour long. The school stuff starts about 22:00; what comes before is the story of how she got to that point, which I also found interesting. As an old-time homeschooler—20th century, with grandchildren homeschooling in the 21st)—I love hearing today's homeschooling journeys, how things differ, how they are the same, what we've learned, what we've forgotten. Above all, I like to hear the enthusiasm of converts and potential converts. Do this, not because the alternative is so bad (although it often is), but because this is so good!

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s historic speech brought to mind this entry from my father's journals.

June 5, 1968

For the first time in months I turned on the radio during breakfast this morning to hear the outcome of the primary election in California, and learned with a shock that Senator Kennedy had been shot. It seems inconceivable that so many people have taken to shooting people they disagree with, and that to so many the end seems to justify the means. Somehow, things have got to get back on the right track.

I just watched Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s Phoenix speech live, and admit I was transfixed by every word. Politicians, it turns out, can still speak intelligently, rationally, and with substance!

It's not as long as it looks (90 minutes)—the video says 90 minutes, but his speech doesn't start till 41:29. I highly recommend it.

Thanks to all the leaks, everyone was expecting Kennedy to endorse Donald Trump. And that he did, without drama, but with conviction, because he believes he can worth with President Trump, especially on the issues that drive his own vision: freedom of speech, war policy, and the unspoken epidemic of chronic disease in America. On these issues Kennedy spoke at length from his heart, taking advantage of this "bully pulpit."

I strongly recommend taking the time to listen.

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will protect and defend the Constitution of the United States 

This is what I had to agree to when I changed my political party affiliation several months ago. I don't remember it from Pennsylvania, New York, or Massachusetts, nor from the two other times I've registered to vote in Florida. I knew it to be required of the president and other high-level officials, but didn't know it applied to ordinary voters. Maybe it's new; maybe I just missed it or am remembering poorly. Whatever the case, it's a good idea, and I'm taking it most seriously.

The least I can do is vote with my mind, my heart, and my conscience.

The Constitution of the State of Florida is a bit more fragile, harder to protect and defend, because it's so easy to amend. But I'll do my bit by voting down some truly egregious constitutional amendments on the ballot this year.

(Click to enlarge.)

Grace's "numbers" have been doing very well, as has she herself.  But at today's clinic visit, her creatinine level was elevated, and that was confirmed by a repeat test.  This indicates potential trouble with her kidneys, so she is scheduled for a kidney ultrasound on Friday.

Thank you, as always, treasured pray-ers.

The Firing Squad

The first thing I must say about this movie is that it did everything I asked of it, and did it well.

The temperature and humidity were as bad as anything Florida had to offer, and promised to get worse in the afternoon. The place we were staying in Connecticut has no air conditioning, and the breeze that usually makes hot temperatures bearable if not actually pleasant was not doing well, and promised to be nonexistent at low tide.

One of the first places Willis Carrier introduce his miraculous invention was the movie theatres, to which people flocked for relief from hot city summers. We followed suit, choosing to watch The Firing Squad because we were under the erroneous impression that it was produced by the same folks as the wonderful and moving Sound of Freedom. I wish it had been, because the true story it tells, which made the news all over Asia, never seemed to make any headway here in the West.

It's a powerful, true story that deserves a better movie.

I don't properly appreciate great production values until I see a movie where they're lacking. The story is great, but I confess to cringing through much (though not all) of the movie. There were just too many things that didn't ring true. One of the least important yet most annoying to me was this: How can you have a movie, set in an Indonesian prison, with heat and rain and mud and work details, and whatever inhumane conditions one might expect in such a place—and the prisoners' bright orange uniforms remain clean and pressed throughout? Trivial, perhaps, but it sure struck a discordant note.

Speaking of notes, I did appreciate that when the men were singing Amazing Grace in the chapel service, some of them were off pitch. Now that was realistic.

I also wish the reformed characters showed in the movie some grief and repentence for their heinous crimes. I'll bet the real men did.

Great story, mediocre movie. Only you can decide if you'll put up with the latter for the former. And I must say that movies made outside of the high-budget, Hollywood world are getting better, and that's something.  Here's an interview with two of the actors that you might find interesting.

But as I said, The Firing Squad did exactly what I asked of it, providing us with two hours of cool, dry comfort. Definitely worth the price of admission. I suppose we could have gone to the grocery store instead, which was also air conditioned—but that would have cost a whole lot more.

When our daughter and her family moved to a small town in New Hampshire, the disadvantages were obvious to me. Over time, I've learned to see the advantages as well. Two segments of the following America's Untold Stories video make me all the happier they live where they do, and I want to tell my grandchildren: Hang on to your hometown! But also, be aware of what's happening elsewhere, so you can recognize the beginning stages when they come to you.

Back when our children were still in elementary school, I attended a conference at which a speaker regaled us with horror stories of what was going on in public schools. I'm afraid I didn't take her too seriously, because—like so many people who are passionate about an issue—she came on too strong, and painted a picture far too bleak to resonate with my own experiences. I was very much involved in our local public schools, and had not seen the abuses she was describing. The thing is, she was right. She was ahead of her time, and her stridency put people off—not unlike the Biblical prophets. But all she warned against came to pass, and orders of magnitude worse.

One reason I like America's Untold Stories is that Eric Hunley and Mark Groubert pull no punches without being strident, and more often than not have personal experiences to back up their concerns. Caveat: I haven't listened to the entire show, which is over two hours long at normal speed, so I don't know what else they talk about. The first segment I'm concerned with here, about the "Homeless Hilton" being built in Los Angeles, runs between the 17-minute mark to minute 26; from there until minute 48 deals with the New York City school system.

[Quoting Manhattan school board member Maud Maron] Parents, and the children of immigrants who came from former Communist countries—Eastern Europeans and the Chinese—were saying, "Maud, we know what this is, and this isn't good."

It's easy to think, "Well, that's Los Angeles and New York; it has nothing to do with my town, my city, my schools." To that I can only say, weep for those cities, pray for those cities—and be awake and aware of how your own home might be at risk of starting along the same paths.