With the firm disclaimer that such material is not for everybody, I’ve been intending to write philosophical or religious essays regularly on Dust in the Light. Time has a way of slipping past, however.
At an accelerating pace in the months since the last-published post on the site, concepts have started to click into place for me, so I’ve put the project in a place of higher priority in my scheduling plan. Ultimately, this is the thinking that I’m driven to do, so I guess I’d better actually do it from time to time.
Toward that end, I thought I’d best start from the very beginning. Again, this sort of writing may not interest many, and some will think it a completely speculative exercise of the imagination and a waste of time; there’s a reason I’ve developed an entirely different site to publish this stuff. If Anchor Rising readers will indulge me, however, I’ll only mention it in short posts as I write over there.
[Open full post]Here it is: In the beginning was the Idea. Whether He reposed thus for unknowable eons or for the merest of moments is a nonsensical distinction, because there was no time. Time had no meaning until the Idea gave Expression to Himself, like a Father begetting a Son. Begotten, not made. Between this Father and this Son, the Expression was a complete and total reflection of the Idea all at once, as if speaking a single syllable — “Be” — communicated all that being could possibly mean.
So perfect and complete was this relationship that the Idea and the Expression would have been only the Idea, itself, but for their mutual Awareness of each other, their Paraclete. This Awareness… experience… or Spirit was also complete and total with the other two, but in such a way as to make all three facets of the Trinity distinct: an idea, an expression, and the relationship between them.
A few weeks ago, this sort of commentary would have been unthinkable:
Dr. Clive Dix, who played a key role in helping pharmaceutical firms create the COVID-19 vaccines, told LBC radio on Jan. 16: “The Omicron variant is a relatively mild virus. And to just keep vaccinating people and thinking of doing it again to protect the population is, in my view, now a waste of time.”
Dix said the focus now should be on protecting vulnerable people, such as those over 60, 2 percent of whom remain unvaccinated.
Many of us have been saying that should have been the approach from the beginning. Unfortunately, the “experts” wanted to experiment with undermining our economy and causing unknowable harm to our cultural character, psychological health, and youthful development.
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Matt Margolis is completely right. The rhetoric from the White House would be completely different if the perpetrator, the motive, and the victims weren’t as they were.
It’s curious that Psaki failed to mention that the hostage situation was in a synagogue, wouldn’t you agree? While details are slim right now, it’s very clear that the hostage-taker is Muslim, and he’s targeted Jewish people in their place of worship. Biden and members of his administration are never at a loss for words when it comes to hate crimes or even gun violence that fits a certain narrative.
That goes across the elites and the media. Change the identity groups and this would be a national story contributing to the progressive narrative, with the perpetrator’s name and face plastered everywhere as the face of evil. As it is, I’m not sure I’d even know it happened if I didn’t read a bunch of alternative media.
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In the pantheon of American holidays, the day set aside for remembrance of Martin Luther King, Jr., has always fallen into that category of events that feel as if they’re on the calendar mainly as a reminder. Before MLK Day was initiated, the named holidays for two American presidents, Washington and Lincoln, had the same feel.
Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Independence Day have expansive traditions. Memorial, Veterans, and Labor Days put forward particular groups and activities for contemplation in our own ways. Holidays named for individuals don’t quite have the same feel. Some ambiguity arises with Columbus Day and St. Patrick’s Day, because they’ve become heavily associated with particular ethnicities. But Martin Luther King doesn’t fit in that category, both because of the nature of his achievement and because our society treats the cultural markers of his ethnicity differently.
The holiday’s newness is surely a factor, as is the continuing demand that we must refuse to unite… truly. Victim status has become useful. A day on which everybody — black, white, young, old, rich, poor, conservative, liberal — can feel almost as honorary members of the African American community, as we do with the respective holidays for the Irish and Italians, is simply not permitted. (Cinco de Mayo was working its way into the culture, but the grievance industry put an end to that.)
That’s unfortunate. The notion of “cultural appropriation” is a travesty. These are the ways in which we unite as a single community and a single nation. Proscribing them as if unity is a form of continued oppression or colonization ensures continuing division with flares of hostility. In a sense, any relationship is a process of mutual colonization, and blocking a relationship with particular group means they will always be separate and children will grow with the feeling of fundamental difference.
This is what radical progressives want, obviously. They’ve flipped the old script, and just like their racist predecessors, they want to leverage division in order to grow and maintain their own power.
One silver lining to this development is that it brings new significance to MLK Day, as a time when we can come together in memory of his dream and that period in history when unity and equality could be shared goals. Maybe like the Omicron variant, wokeness will be the final end of society-wide racism and division in our country after the contagion sweeps the country and the infected recover from its mental illness.
The question is: What sort of traditions ought that significance inspire on this day each year?
Featured image by Bee Calder on Unsplash.
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Where Have All the Workers Gone? 12/13/21 from John Carlevale on Vimeo.
Host Richard August talks jobs and economics with Derek Amey of StrategicPoint, a wealth management firm.
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John Loughlin talks with Nick Gorham about Rhode Island politics, Frank Gaffney about China in the world, and Dan Schultz on local political strategies.
Featured image by Fernand Leger on WikiArt.
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John Ransom thinks the cratering valuation of BuzzFeed is will burden the investment plans of other organizations in the same category, whether we call them “new media,” youth media, digital media, or whatever.
Why BuzzFeed is languishing is an interesting question, and I can’t help but think it has a lot to do with the organization’s progressive ideology and Democrat partisanship. A publication can’t maintain its edginess when the people it was slicing are out of power and its writers and editors consider the people in power off limits for the same sort of cutting criticism.
We’re seeing an advanced form of the same dynamic in Rhode Island. At the end of the day, what’s the point of a news organization, let alone a number of competing ones, when it mainly offers affirmation for people who think they can’t be defeated, especially when it’s so clear that reality doesn’t agree with their regime?
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Two ingredients for a crucial point producing deeper understanding are present in a RealClear Politics commentary by Phill Kline, but he doesn’t quite draw them together.
The first set of ingredients consists of seven items his organization, the Amistad Project, has found through litigation related to the 2020 election. Basically, they are the familiar points that have led some of us to conclude that the election was illegitimate (aka, stolen), even if direct fabrication of votes can never be proven.
The second major ingredient is this summary:
This situation is the fruit of decades of policy and intellectual neglect. We have nationalized every issue, and national leaders have responded by claiming to be able to fix every problem facing every American citizen. They pass a vaguely worded law and push authority over to the vast administrative state while ignoring the application of that law and avoiding accountability for the law.
This separation of political power from political accountability is now so embedded in our republic that we have generally accepted an unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy telling us when we can visit loved ones in the hospital, celebrate a marriage, gather over the holidays, or engage in political rallies.
Kline doesn’t quite make the connection between these two distinct topics, but I’d suggest that the first is actually a consequence of the second. In fact, the picture emerges best by taking them in reverse.
The goal — albeit, probably a natural and organically evolving one — was to separate power from accountability. Seeking to sell vague principles without having to take responsibility for their implementation, elected officials have pushed accountability into a faceless bureaucracy and sought to export it to a distant national capital. This has made government less and less responsive to the interests and desires of the public, to the point that it is of existential importance for competing interests to win a handful of national elections.
This, in turn, is now leading to an assault on the very last tool for accountability: the ballot box. As Biden bizarrely bellowed, the tyrants now realize they must nationalize the counting of votes so that they can ensure the proper outcome every time. They simply can’t have their entire machine of rule accessible to somebody intent on making it work differently.
This isn’t a partisan point, but a predictable sequence of stages that can be deduced from core principles, and we all must take responsibility for reversing the trend. We need to revive different core principles, such as respecting individual autonomy and prioritizing local control — even when our neighbors want to do things with which we disagree and letting government one step up get involved because that way we’ll win a local spat.
Featured image by Tom Wilson on Unsplash.
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Sorry, but I don’t see how this, from Janine Weisman, isn’t a display of the need for greater education in economics:
Good to know: Starting tomorrow, health insurers must pay for your at-home #COVID-19 home test kits. All
@BCBSRI plans except Medicare fully cover the home test kits without a prescription, and each person on the plan is covered for up to 8 home test kits every 30 days.
Consider that it’s impossible to find the tests right now, even with people having to pay for them. Making them essentially free will only make that problem worse. The key is to reduce the government-mandated value of testing and to allow pricing mechanisms to limit their use to people who actually need them for one reason or another.
Honestly, I do not understand why this is so difficult for folks to understand.
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Bethany Feudenthal, who writes for the Newport Daily News, has been commenting on her low rate of pay, with social media posts such as this:
I might be controversial at times, like last year I posted my W2’s on social media, and yesterday I posted my pay stub from last week. Journalists write about public official’s salaries, but we rarely talk about our own. Journalism is a tough job. We deserve fair pay.
She makes a fair point about pay. Informing people about their communities and their government ought to pay well. It ought to be an area of such broad and concentrated interest that its practitioners stand toe-to-toe with, say, teachers and college professors.
The thing with “ought to,” however, is that the phrase comes burdened with questions about why the desired condition isn’t already the case, who is responsible for the fix, and what process can bring about the solution without doing more damage in some unintended way. These aren’t easy questions to answer.
Here’s the bottom line: The market for traditional news is not what it used to be (especially because it is no longer needed as a source of entertainment), and the number of people who want to provide it — with varying degrees of opinion mixed in — is so huge that many are willing to do it for free. Furthermore, the opportunities for businesses to advertise and otherwise promote themselves are now nearly limitless, not only in terms of advertising, but also spanning to earned-media hits, viral campaigns, promotional items, and more. The reality of news organizations has simply changed. They are no longer at a naturally limited bridge between the demand for advertisers to reach an audience and the demand of the public to fill time, partially by paying attention to what’s going on in the world around them.
So, “ought to” is a problem. In the old model, news organizations’ client landscape was pretty much split between the people who subscribed (and thereby gave them an audience) and the people who advertised (seeking access to that audience), with respect and credibility bestowed by those who wanted to be covered, understanding that those who had access to an audience held the advantage. Now, the readers are no longer convinced of the value of paying for the product. The advertisers are no longer convinced of the value of the space, compared with other options. And many of the people desiring coverage (particularly in government) can access audiences directly and have realized that they have something marketable for which the reporters ought to pay with generally positive coverage.
Don’t forget, by the way, that we used to have a cultural understanding that (1) advertisers, which used to include want ads and classifieds, weren’t necessarily endorsing anything that might be published in or endorsed by the publication and (2) the news organizations weren’t implicitly endorsing the products, services, or advocacy whose ads they took money to publish.
So, who “ought to” fund the news? The question has become especially difficult as it is ever-more obvious that the providers are almost universally biased toward a particular party and a particular ideology.
Some say the government, which would only increase officials’ expectation of positive coverage while decreasing the audience’s trust. When I attempted to draw an answer from Feudenthal, the answer seemed to be non-profit donors, which means journalists would be bound by the often-ideological demands of the people writing the checks.
Maybe a new market of ideologically funded, free-to-the-reader news would serve modern purposes in a community that’s reasonably well balanced, politically. In Rhode Island, however, it would be tantamount to adding sandbags to the already-dragging side of the ship. Around here, that sort of press will be (arguably, is) merely part of the insider class.
In that case, the statement that journalists “ought to” be better paid is little more than a negotiation stance among insiders for a larger piece of the take from a paying audience that is increasingly held captive at the point of a government gun.
Featured image by Engin Akyurt on Unsplash.
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