who died and made you king

Yes, I know there is a song and even the meeting of the sentence but i just think it is an appropriate heading for what is to come next. Yesterday i was reading this post where I think the suggestions made were way reasonable. That America should focus on peaceful means and all until our resident defender of western values showed up to inform us that is idle talk, dreams of 12 year olds, so to speak. The military industrial complex and the emperor must all be appeased and pursuing peaceful coexistence through trade and cultural exchange and limiting the military to national defence and maybe international peacekeeping missions with other nations.

Maybe I am missing something since I live so far removed from the military or its workings that maybe it is important to have military outposts in every other country, occasionally have your spy agency overthrow democratically elected presidents and have drone assassinations miles away from home where children caught in the crossfire are collateral damage (what were they doing there, playing? Don’t know there are drones overhead?).

Tell me what you all think? William Astore or Tildeb?

It’s been 15 years

And I still miss her reconciled to the fact that the closest I can come to see her is the pictures we have somewhere at home most of which have been pilfered over time by well meaning relatives and friends.

Could this be the reason

Trump wanted NATO members to increase their military spending?

As far as most of Nato’s European members who contributed troops to Afghanistan were concerned, this was a theatrical exercise designed to keep the US committed to the defence of Europe. In the case of the Poles and the people of the Baltics, the great spur here was fear of Russia. In the case of the French, it was largely because they can only maintain their sphere of influence in Africa with American help. In the case of others like the Germans, it was because they knew that they were not capable of summoning up the fighting spirit or the military spending to maintain peace in the Balkans and deter Serbian or Turkish aggression there. The memory of Europe’s 1990s failure in Bosnia runs deep. 

This makes for quite interesting reading but it is long-ish.

Is there a god

On my friend Ark’s blog there is a discussion or is it a narrative on where the burden lies in the god debate. And I generally agree with him. However, I think, and our late friend *my atheist life* would agree, we can say there is no god and the burden of proof doesn’t switch to us. Why so, you might ask, first, no coherent definition of a god has been provided that would demonstrate such a being(s) would exist. There are contradictory attributes of alleged gods that such beings are unlikely to exist. Whether such beings are necessary and in what manner of existence they are to exist have not been demonstrated. And attempts have been made to do this.

I know my empiricist friends wouldn’t commit themselves to such a statement arguing, among other reasons, new evidence may convince us otherwise. That is all fair. But until this evidence is adduced, we have nothing to go on with and as the good priest Jean Messlier wrote, to believe in God(s) is to believe in a chimera with no parallel in experience.

But I could be wrong

All morality

Can be summarised as follows

To enjoy and have others enjoy, without doing harm to yourself or anyone else

Nicolas Chamfort

For the discerning reader, you can see the tinge of utilitarianism in this maxim. This however, reminds me of the article I read recently (Brian you remember) that talk of morality is no longer meaningful or something to that effect.

I think, echoing Nietszche and Onfray, that we have failed in creating a new morality. We are still caught up in the Platonic-Christian ethos though with a secular priestly.

Maybe I am missing something.

If you are Jewish, you need Christ

And before you come crucifying (no pun intended) me pick it up with the pope.

Maybe the pope was misquoted [(is he a politician?) since that’s the line our politicians use even when quoted verbatim] when he said

The Law, however, does not give life, it does not offer the fulfillment of the promise because it is not capable of being able to fulfill it. The Law is a journey, a journey that leads toward an encounter… Those who seek life need to look to the promise and to its fulfillment in Christ

Popeye

We are hoping to hear the pope’s response soon after he consults with Peter. Stay tuned brothers and sisters not in the law 🙂

Some random pics

Someone went a hiking

I think this is a clever ad

The less said the better

Can you see blue

The mountain was covered in clouds

Making America great again

The covid vaccine way.

The US and a few other wealthy nations have announced intentions to give booster shots to their fully inoculated citizens from September in a bid to improve their immunity. This is at at time when about 5 billion humans are yet to receive the vaccine and there are people who believe this is a moral outrage.

Let’s pretend for a moment you were the policy maker and is intent on vaccine uptake at home and elsewhere, especially faced with a situation where there are vaccine skeptics, would you encourage a booster shot for the fully inoculated or would you persuade the unvaccinated to get their shots thus improving the chances of the community?

In the meantime, keep safe. And if you can, avoid staying in crowded places for long, among many other things you can do to protect yourself.

The definitive list of those (lost) who are hell bound

Who ends up in Hell?

Many fundamentalist ‘Christians’ maintain that Hell is reserved for people who are immoral. Helpfully, they are able to narrow this down into a few specific types of people:

• People who voted for Clinton, Obama, Biden, or any democratic president in history
• Liberals
• Communists
• Liars (unless they are also elected Republicans)
• Thieves
• Murderers
• People who are violent
• People who question my constitutional right to bear arms under the second amendment
• People who question my right to invade other countries so that we can find and remove their weapons from them
• People who don’t live in the United States of America
• Atheists
• Agnostics
• Catholics (according to protestants)
• Protestants (according to Catholics)
• Hypocrites
• Pagans
• Muslims
• Critics of Israel
• Jews
• Hitler
• People who believe that a vaccine is more effective than prayer
• People who believe in evolution
• People who believe the earth is more than six thousand years old
• Christians who don’t take the Bible literally
• People who disagree with my interpretation of an ancient Jewish manuscript written in a completely different time, culture, and context to my own
• Christians who don’t own and read the King James Version of the Bible
• Christians who go to a different church than me
• Christians who believe in free will
• People who have not asked Jesus into their heart of their own free will
• People who have never heard about Jesus
• People who believe that people who have never heard about Jesus will end up in heaven
• People who don’t believe in Hell
• Fornicators
• Masturbators
• Goats
• Gymnasts
• People who dance
• People who engage in pre-marital hand-holding
• Women who speak in church
• Women who wear pants
• Women who cause men to sin by wearing dresses that are too short
• Men who wear dresses
• Women who think they are men
• Men who think they are women
• Women who support men who think they are women
• Men who support women who think are men
• Men who like men
• Women who like women
• Men and women who affirm and support men who like men and women who like women
• Adulterers (unless they are men)
• Rapists (unless the rapist and their victim are married)
• Drunkards
• People who like rock music
• People with tattoos
• People who have read any of the Harry Potter books
• People who watch horror movies
• People who enjoy life
• Witches
• Fortune tellers (unless you call it a prophetic word from the Lord)]
• People who gossip (unless it’s to collect prayer requests)
• People who are greedy
• People who are absurdly rich (unless they are a televangelist)
• People who walk away from the evangelical church after three and a half decades
• Dead people
• People who see dead people
• Cats
• You

Hey, it’s because I love you that I am warning you that you’re going to end up in Hell if you don’t repent and start believing exactly the same things I do. In fact, you’re pretty darn lucky that I am so enlightened and can show you the error of your ways.

Don’t you feel better now that you’ve heard the ‘Good News’ of the Gospel?

I sure do!

In fact, I’m sure glad that I have faithfully administered my Christian duty by warning you about Hell.

Hallelujah

Source document

Writing about history

Karl Marx in the 18th Brumaire of Napoleon said history repeats itself first as farce then as tragedy. Seeing the events of Kabul and of Afghanistan in general one wonders if the end whenever it came would be different. And I am here asking myself whether in another 10 years we will not see the same scenes playing out in semi occupied Iraq?

But in all the madness, there is still room for laughs. It seems everyone who joins the Afghanistan WhatsApp group always left; the soviets lefted, the brits, the French and now the Muricans. Maybe next we will see Afghanistan left the group too. One can hope.

I am no expert in Asia politics; geo or otherwise but one hopes these fellows can determine how their future will be. Seeing people falling off planes trying to flee is sad to say the least.