Logic and reason have left the building

Trump made a statement giving the elites and the media the vapors:

“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick — if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know.”

Trump's loose language can have many interpretations, and I would take him at his word that what he meant was that the political power of the gun rights movement might make a difference in the vote in November. On the other hand, the other interpretation, as Robert Ibrahim has noted over at the American Thinker in a post entitled The Real Reason Trump's Second Amendment Comment Provoked Outrage is also possible. Trump could be reminding not only the Hillary supporters and progressives, but the media too, that when a fee people are prevented from exercising their free choices, they can, indeed their duty when everything else is exhausted is to revolt.  It is the reason the Second Amendment was put into the Constitution.  When using reason, words, and peaceful protest do not effect change, indeed, when reason and peaceful protest is scoffed at, there remains only to revolt and resist.  (Before you become cynical over recent "peaceful protests" as at Ferguson, MO or Baltimore, MD, please remember the Tea Party protests in Washington, DC, where not only was there no violence whatsoever, but the place was cleaner than when the protesters arrived.)

This is an historical, proven fact, and why liberal media and elite are, if only subconsciously, going crazy against Trump: he dared mention -- and thus legitimize -- the one thing that must never be mentioned, not even as a remote consideration, because it is the one thing guaranteed to overthrow them: rebellion. Hence the media circus of shock, awe, and outrage: it’s all meant to quickly rebury this briefly exhumed and dangerous idea from the public’s eye.

And before someone sics the Secret Service or the FBI on me, let me be clear I am not threatening anyone. I am merely reporting what is known; that if the "progressives" do not back off, they will, at some point, draw a reaction from a people that have held back too long. Even God has his limits. Which brings me to another piece from the American Thinkers by Joanna Rosamond entitled Media Driven Insanity. A quote:

The fact that several months before elections we are constantly told that a candidate has already won, definitely rings an alarm bell. Orwellian “newspeak” morphed today into NewsSpeak, with the mainstream media acting as thought police. While we are being nonchalantly reminded about a long list of observable crimes that go unpunished, the media cheer their authors and try to contaminate us with the “enthusiasm.” One can´t help but notice how visionary Orwell´s writing was: “So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don´t even know that fire is hot.”

Where did ol´ good logic go? The processes used in thinking and reasoning should be natural to homo sapiens, and it´s impossible not to have a brain-ache when you clearly see that it´s not the case.

The emphasis is mine.  Does the emphasized part cause anyone else to think of another document that has a similar phrase: "But when a long train of abuses...pursuing invariably the same object...to reduce them under absolute despotism...?" Perhaps it is just me, and I am becoming to paranoid, but it seems one has to suspect that some hanky panky is going on.  How can the everyday Democrats support a woman who has committed so much crime and mischief?  Indeed, how are everyday Democrats able to stomach Obama, Holder, Lynch, or any of the other un-indicted felons they have put in power?  More and more it boggles the mind.

Like Everything Else It Destroys, the Left Murdered Art

Bruce Walker brought up a topic I had not thought much about in years.  If you have been around for a while, as I have, you may have noticed that the movie industry isn't producing new movies any more.  Instead, they are recycling old movie scripts with new actors and much better, more thrilling computer generated special effects.  I haven's seen a good, "original" movie in years.  But it goes much deeper than that.  And that is the story the Bruce Walker is trying to tell in his piece at American Thinker today entitled The Left has Murdered Art.

 As a young man, I enjoyed poetry. I especially enjoyed Robert Frost, T.S. Elliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens and of course the 19th century poets. But I studied all sorts of poetry and literature at the time. You may think that being an engineer, a carrier of guns, and a poet was just to much for one person, but Williams was a physician in his day job, and Stevens sold insurance. In fact, few poets made their money on poetry. It is a labor of love. It turns out I came by my poetic leanings naturally, as my paternal grandfather published a small volume of poems.  But my grandfather was a brick layer by trade.  And of course, as you might expect, I love pens and writing because it is these things that make poetry possible.

I published several poems in college.  After graduation, I tried publishing in the literary journals and magazines of the day, only to be constantly rejected.  My material was not "fresh" or "original."  And I have to admit that some of it was indeed crap.  Eventually, I just sort of gave up, perusing other things.  Later, though, I learned that my problem was not lack of originality, but rather that I had not attended the "right" poetry symposia, the "correct" writing conferences where the resident poet or writer would properly impress upon the struggling young skulls filled with mush the leftist dogma,  As a struggling artist yourself, you should empathize with the struggle of the masses against the great oppressor class, don't you know.  What poppycock.

If originality and freshness were truly the criteria, no one would publish anything new.  The fact is that every thought a man can have has already been thought. There are no new poems, only an endless rehashing of the previous generations poems.  Neither Emily Dickenson, nor Elizabeth Browning wrote anything new.  As noted in Ecclesiates, there is nothing new under the sun.  I sing in the choir at church, and here again, the choir director often picks hymns nobody recognizes because they are used to the older hymns.  Our choir director points out that the new writers deserve to be heard.  But of course, the new writers do not bring anything new to table.  How could they?  Do they really deserve to be heard?  Not if original and fresh are the criteria.

My mother had a set of three volumes of a book called Master Plots, that showed all the plots ever devised.  Every story you read, every movie you see, every television show, has a plot that can be found among the master plots.  I have seen Romeo and Juliet countless times, and will probably see it several more before I pass on.  Oh, the story line varies, the characters have different names, and there are different twists to the basic plot, but all of these shows are basically Romeo and Juliet, the star crossed lovers, whose love can never be.

Good art speaks directly to our subconscious mind.  A good poem or a good song will settle in to our subconscious, and we may not realize what it is saying to us until years later when a thought, a memory, a smell, or something else will trigger it, and all of sudden we will be struck by the poem or song.  Good paintings and sculpture can have a similarly haunting effect.  But the Left has truly murdered art, giving us  Piss Christ while denigrating Maddona and Child. The fact is that good art is being produced only in isolated corners of the world today, gets no funding or respect, and if those in control have anything to say about it, it will remain hidden for all eternity.

Update:  On a different note, I see that Mike Vanderboegh has passed away.  The world will not see his kind again for at least a generation.  I knew him but little, but admired what I saw.  May the Creator of the Universe keep him safely in his arms.

Writing With a Pen...On Paper...Makes You Smarter

The piece on the Fountain Pen wasn't complete because, because the purpose of pens, inks, and papers is to write. One writes ones thoughts, which if the paper itself survives, may tell future generations your thoughts.  Reading what the great thinkers of yesterday had to say informs me that man has not changed since man first recorded his thought on clay tablets.  Writing a letter telling someone else about what goes on in your life, and getting a response keeps people in touch in ways e-mail does not.  I found a bunch of letters home to my Mom, on her death, that I had written and she had kept.  Oh, the sophomoric confidence of youth!. Or you could write a novel, or....just a list of things you need at the grocery store. Writing can be as prosaic as a business letter, of as complicated as a T. S Elliott poem. Nancy Olsen's piece Three Ways Writing with a Pen Affects Your Brain at Forbes Magazine notes that writing with a pen on paper positively affects your brain. Writing increases neural activity in the brain and sharpens your thought processes. But it also slows the brain down, giving time to think more thoroughly.

So, while I am an old curmudgeon who wants to see future generations still know how to add and subtract in their heads, use a slide rule, use logarithms, and other archaic techniques, this article points out that hand writing does indeed make us better thinkers.  And isn't thinking better the essence of being smarter?  Knowing facts is important, to be sure, but to then go beyond the facts to synthesizing a philosophy from these is what truly makes us human.  A pen (preferably a fountain pen) ink, and paper make that possible.

Update: The author of this blog apparently went through the same process I did late in life, when he realized his handwriting technique, never good, hand become crappy. The blog is Write Analog While a lot of the information presented here is interesting and worthwhile, the most interesting is the youtube piece embedded entitled "Why Write: Penmanship for the 21st Century.  The speaker is a Master Penman and an artist, and uses his penmanship in his art.  But you and I, the lowly penmen who just want to write a letter don't have to achieve Master Penmanship levels to get the benefits of writing.  Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of people to write to anymore, but I do keep a journal that keeps me practicing writing each and ever day.

It is possible to get too much into fountain pens in the search for the "perfect pen," which of course doesn't exist, and spend way to much money on pens.  So here's a few I have found to be worthy pens at a cheap price.  For carrying in the field, the Lamy Safari. You can change nibs on Lamy pens, which makes them very versatile.  Lamy pens do not have the most buttery smooth nibs on the planet, but can be tamed down with a little writing on a piece of leather.  Not too much.  It is basically like a strop.  For a more flexible nib, may I suggest the Noodler's Ahab. I just got one of these to replace a beloved Sensa Meridian that had broken. The pen is fantastic, smooth, durable, and fits my hand perfectly.

The Fountain Pen.

I have been a fountain pen aficionado for a number of years, and today I use a ball point or roller ball pen but rarely.  I mentioned yesterday that I was going to a pen club meeting in a couple of weeks, and my co-worker asked incredulously how I came to be interested in pens.  Fountain pens reached their pinnacle around 1950, and thereafter the ball point began to take over.  In school I used a Bic stick pen, and my penmanship was atrocious.  But by then teachers were counting less for one's penmanship so I skated through.  But fountain pens are still made, and a surprising underground of people use them on a daily basis.

How I came to be a fountain pen aficionado may be a story for another day.  But why I am attached to fountain pens may be shorter.  The pros of fountain pens are:

Your choice of nib style is broad  You can choose those nibs that produce a single line width from spidery extra fine, through bold broad, Then there are italic nibs that produce a wide line when the stroke is vertical to a thin line when the stroke is horizontal.  these nibs are often called stub nibs, and when used with nuanced grace, produce everyday writing that is extremely legible but also appears neat and graceful. Italic is a mans hand. Then, for the florid penman, there are the flex nibs, that produce variation in line width through greater or lesser pressure.  Spencerian penmen (and especially women) appreciate a flexible nib.  My grandmother had an outstanding Spencerian hand, though it was sometimes hard to read for all the fancy curlicues placed throughout.

Your chose of inks is enormous.  I am sure with just the inks I have that they will last for my lifetime, and yet the ink companies are always developing new inks, in new colors and shades.  Some inks have become standards such as Waterman blue black.  I usually mix Waterman black with the blue black to improve the intensity of the color on the page, but it is an undistinguished ink that nonetheless fits many occasions well and so has become a standard. Then there are inks like Noodler's Bulletproof black, or their Legal Lapis, also bulletproof, that can not be removed without destroying the paper on which it is written. These inks are good for check writing, or any application that demands a guarantee that the written word has not been altered.  Other inks are used for artistic purposes, and the occasional letter.  Many men like an ink line Waterman Havana Brown or Montblanc Toffee.

Most of all, though, fountain pens demand very little pressure to produce a line.  Indeed, too much pressure will destroy your pen.  The lack of pressure though, frees you to manipulate the pen to produce good penmanship.  Good penmanship fulfills the basic requirement for any writing, namely that each letter be different enough from every other letter that legibility is enhanced, and the message you are trying to send can be read easily without misunderstanding.

You can basically say that the cons of the ball point pen are the opposite of the pros above for the fountain pen.  But the ball point does have some, (very few) virtues.  For one thing, the self contained ball point system is pressurized, so that a ball point will write at any angle..  You can write on the ceiling with a ball point.  Your fountain pen will fail you there.  The biggest con of a ball point is the pressure required to get a decent line, and the fact that even with that pressure, ball points often skip, refusing to start without multiple swirls.  My fountain pens write first time every time as long as they have ink.  In addition to needing more pressure, many ball points are poorly made in terms of ergonomics.  Thing of the ubiquitous Bic stick pen, or one of its many copies.  Then think about the habits children acquire trying to hold onto these pens.  You see their hands all bunched up with the pen held in an unnatural position between every other finger finally coming out between the ring finger and the pinky.  Is it any wonder these people can not write?

I have very expensive fountain pens, purchased years ago when I thought that the type of pen in my shirt pocket conferred on me a certain status which turned out not to be worth anything anyhow.  Today, though, I carry and like inexpensive fountain pens such as the Lamy Safari.  These pens are rugged, and write as well, if not necessarily as smoothly, as more expensive pens.  The nib is easily changed.  Indeed, the whole pen is easily maintained, and if they do break, or are lost, only cost around $20 to replace.  I have also purchased a Noodler's Ahab, again a cheap pen but the description sounds like something I would like.

It is commonly thought that people in ages past were largely illiterate.  This was not necessarily true. The Roman upper class, and a large chunk of the middle classes were able read, write, knew history, arithmetic and such mathematics as may have been available and fit what they might have needed.  The same for the Greeks.  The Hebrews were also quite literate.  The Roman army was of course literate, and depended on written orders throughout to keep  all levels of command informed.  The middle classes needed at least to know the 3Rs as they used to be referred to in order to conduct business, compute taxes, and determine whether or not they were making a profit.

During the middle ages, the merchant class developed a style of writing that used the printed symbols for letters, and connected them to make writing faster and more fluid.  This became known as Italic writing.  Italic has the characteristic of writing one desires.  Each letter is distinct from every other letter, it is neat, yet not fussy, and the connections are logical.  There are no forced rules such as each letter must start on the bottom line.  And once a child learns to print, connecting the letters is a fairly simple task, since one does not need to learn he letters all over again.

My Dad gave me a pen for Christmas one year, a Rotring Fountain pen, and a bottle of Private Reserve Plum.  A strange gift, but I put it to work improving my handwriting by learning the Italic form/  Learning about Italic made me wonder about the style of cursive I learned called the Palmer method.  Palmer, it seems, started not from the middle ages, or even a history of writing, but rather took the Spencerian system, and simplified it to make a business style of writing for the late 20th Century.  But had Palmer looked further back, he would have found that we already had an even simpler and more elegant style in Italic.

My Dad was a wise man, who seemed to increase in wisdom as I got older.  He once noted that writing was the truly greatest development man had made toward civilization, because it allowed one to read the words of the greatest thinkers throughout history.  Too bad some people have forgotten this great benefit in their zeal to acquire power and wealth.  Those old musty documents contain the words of greater thinkers with more erudition than today's grubby politicians.  
    

Communists disguised as Democrats overturn logic again

I am getting just a little bit tired of Communist groups continuing to sue the State over voter ID laws, and apparently doing a bit of judge shopping as well.  The latest group to sue is the ACLU, with the result that a Federal Appellate judge has overturned it.  From the WaPo:

Voting rights activists scored legal victories in key presidential election states Friday, the most important being a federal appeals court ruling that North Carolina’s Republican-led legislature enacted new voting restrictions in 2013 to intentionally blunt the growing clout of African American voters.

The unanimous decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit was an overwhelming victory for the Justice Department and civil rights groups. Election law experts consider North Carolina’s voter law one of the nation’s most far-reaching.

Now, as it points out here at the American Thinker, one has to wonder if logic still count for anything?

If it is unconstitutional to require an ID to be able to vote, how is it okay to require an ID to cash a check, board an airplane, drive a car, or anything else? If I go up to a bank teller and present a check against Donald Trump's account, what right has the teller to ask me for an ID? Surely such an action would be discriminatory, given the federal court's ruling.

I recently sold some scrap metal to a junkyard. It was a couple of old car batteries and miscellaneous scraps of copper and aluminum I didn't need. They required me to show a government-issued photo ID to receive payment. The reason for this is simple: to help track and discourage people who steal such things and sell them to junkyards. Surely the integrity of our electoral process is more important than keeping tabs on people who sell scrap metal to junkyards.

There is one, and only one reason why requiring a government issued photo ID to vote is not desirable: if you want to make it easier to commit voter fraud. That's it. I am past tired of communists disguised as Democrats overturning common sense laws put in place to ensure one person gets one vote, and no more. Despite what the communists disguised as Democrats think, some animals are not more equal than others.

Trump may be unfit to be President, but we KNOW Hillary should not be elected Dog Catcher

Yesterday, Obama made the fitness of Trump to be President an issue by claiming that Trump "unfit to serve". Is he kidding? The absolute worst President in history, is talking about someone else's fitness to be President. Is this the pot calling the kettle black?

The point is he may indeed be unfit to be President, but we don't know that.  On the other hand, we know Hillary is unfit to hold even the office of dog catcher.  Which is the point being made at the American Thinker in a post by Patricia McCarthy entitled Fitness Test for the Presidency.

 At the time that Obama first ran for office, some voices raised questions about his fitness per the Constitution, but they were quickly shut down and never received much ink. As Alan Korwin has pointed out in the American Handgunner as well as here at AZCentral, the Constitution requires that a president be a "natural born citizen." A natural born citizen is one born to two United States Citizens on United States Soil. McCain was put through the ringer because while both parents were US citizens, he was born at a foreign posting in the Panama Canal Zone. Ted Cruz was questioned quite openly about his father's citizenship at the time, and the fact that he was apparently born in Canada. I have come to agree with Korwin on the point. Ted Cruz is unfit to be President by virtue of his not being a natural born citizen.  McCain, on the other hand, was born on soil that was, at the time, under United States jurisdiction.  So why was Obama, the son of a Kenyan citizen given a free pass?  No one even wanted to know.

In any case, Obama has no ground to stand on in claiming Trump is unfit.  He was also unfit, and remains so.  The Left though has achieved its goal, and precious little can practically be done, short of declaring every action taken in the last 8 years null and void.  Meanwhile,whether they knew the Constitution or not, millions of people have been complicit in committing the crime of misprision of treason.

Trump has his faults, but he is not an unindicted crime boss

Selwyn Duke doesn't post often to American Thinker, but his writing is always a treat, and today's post is no different.

Too often one encounters people who believe that "all religions teach the same thing."  I find this sort of thinking reductionist at best, and lacking in spiritual insight.  As an example, Buddhism believes that man becomes god himself if he becomes enlightened enough.  Judaism, on the other hand looks at God as the all powerful creator of everything that exists.  Man can never become God, but God can, if he so chooses, accept certain men, based not on their works, but on their faith.  Christianity proposes that all men may become the sons of the living God if they have faith in Jesus, and truly believe.  Through God's great grace and love for his creature, man, Christians dare to call upon Him as "Father."  This is a profoundly different idea than the religion proposed in the Koran, in which man must submit.  Christianity's "perfect example" is Jesus, who was a servant to all mankind, eventually suffering a torturous death, taking the punishment each man deserves on Himself, for the salvation of mankind.  For this reason Jesus was called the Son of God, and the Christ, the Savior of Mankind. Hence Christians pray to God in the name of Jesus Christ.  Islams "perfect example" is a lusty womanizer, pedophile, warlord, who healed no one, spread his religion by terrorizing anyone who would not immediately accept it.  The Christian God wants us to love him and have a relationship with him.  Islam's Allah demands you submit.  So you perhaps see some slight differences there?

Selwyn Duke's article ttoday at American Thinker is entitled  Why the Establishment Can't Grasp the Nature of Islam . Duke introduces his topic with these paragraphs:

The media and effete powers-that-be have been twisting themselves into Halal pretzels Islamsplainin’, rationalizing how a given Muslim terrorist attack isn’t really “Islamic” or isn’t significant. These contortions can become quite ridiculous, such as suggesting that recent Allahu Akbar-shouting Munich shooter Ali Sonboly might somehow have had “right-wing” motives because, among his violent passions, was an interest in Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik.

A more common (un)intellectual contortion is the minimizing tactic of claiming, as is politically correct authorities’ wont, that a given jihadist attacker “has no ties to IS” (the Islamic State), as if there’s nothing to see here if a man doesn’t provide notarized evidence of allegiance to the boogeyman du jour. Yet this is much as if we’d claimed during the Cold War that a Marxist terrorist attack wasn’t really a Marxist™ terrorist attack because we couldn’t find a connection to the Soviet Union. The issue and problem wasn’t primarily the Soviet Union but communism (Marxism birthed the USSR, not the other way around), an evil ideology that wreaks havoc wherever it takes hold. Likewise, the IS didn’t birth Islam; Islam birthed the IS.

Various people have been mislead to believe that since not ALL Muslims are waging violent jihad, that somehow Islam is the "religion of peace."  But anyone who has studied ISIS tactics, or those of the Taliban, will quickly note that fellow Muslims are more often the target of these groups ire than are Christians, Jews, and other assorted religions.  As it turns out:

Yet there’s more to understanding Muslim violence. A comprehensive German study of 45,000 immigrant youths, reported in 2010, found that while increasing religiosity among the Christian youths made them less violent, increasing religiosity among the Muslim youths actually made them more violent. Not more violent “if they join Islamic State” — but more violent, period. And while the study authors had their own, mostly politically correct explanations, I think I know a major reason why.

Becoming serious about a faith and digging into it generally means getting closer to its actual teachings. A lukewarm cradle Catholic may have little knowledge of even the Bible, but a devout one will likely have read that and the Church’s catechism. Likewise, an indifferent nominal Muslim (you know, the kind they call “moderate”) may not know much of the Koran, nine percent of which is devoted to political violence. Yet a pious Muslim may scour that book — and more. He may also imbibe the remaining 84 percent of the Islamic canon, the two books known as the Hadith and Sira.

And, respectively, 21 percent and 67 percent of their texts are devoted to political violence.

That’s what you call a full dose. Also note that while access to these two more obscure Islamic canonical texts was once limited, the Internet age places them at everyone’s fingertips. Couple this with the violent preaching of immigrant Imams, and that Muslims consider violent warlord Mohammed “The Perfect Man” and thus the ultimate role model, and the German study’s findings are no mystery. Speaking of mysteries, though, the true effect of Islam will remain one unless we delve further — and break ourselves of certain misconceptions common to our times.

If one merely reads the newspaper, or listens to the nightly news reports on the television, one gets a disconnected presentation of events. These can seem random, disconnected, events out of the blue.  The value of news magazines is in their more in-depth reporting, tying various pieces of the random events together to form a picture.  One such picture is the one proposed by Eileen F. Toplansky, also at the American Thinker today, in a blog post entitled: Is there a backstory about Khizr Khan and Donald Trump?

 As it turns out, there is.

But is there even more to the story about Khizr Khan? According to Theodore Shoebat and Walid Shoebat, Mr. Khizr Muazzam Khan is a promoter of Islamic sharia law and a co-founder of the Journal of Contemporary Issues in Muslim Law (sharia). In fact, in the past, Khizr Khan has shown "his appreciation for an icon of the Muslim Brotherhood" by the name of Said Ramadan, who "wrote material for the Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia, an organization that has been promoting Islamic revivalism and indoctrination to recruit young people in Malaysia to jihadism." Mr. Said Ramadan was the son-in-law of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood including Ahmad Bahefzallah, the boss of Huma Abedin (Hillary Clinton's aide)[.]"

With the background Toplansky has provided, it looks more and more as if Mr. Khan's performance at the DNC convention was indeed a plant designed to get Mr. Trump to make exactly the sort of statement that he indeed made. But looking at the bigger picture, at least Mr. Trump has shown no tendencies to allow Sharia to supplant the Constitution. The Democrats themselves look more and more like a party of fruits and nuts (for a sampling see the trangendered issues, the gay issue, the planned parenthood abortion issue, the current problem with showing ID for voting, but nothing else), led by a criminal gang, supported by the useful idiots of the press, and looking to prey on the rest of us. How any normal, red blooded American can seriously associate with these people is anyone's guess.

 Mr. Trump has his faults, to be sure, but they don't (so far) extend to actual treason, and he is not an unindicted crime boss.