Curtis Dahlgren
"WHY NOT US?" (Super-karma Sunday, Jim Murray version)
By Curtis Dahlgren
ROCKY MOUNTAIN MELLOW. PACIFIC HIGH PRESSURE. No one is madder than the Broncos. Why didn't the Plan work? I don't know. It's not my job, but I have just one thing to say.
The curse of the Bambino. The Chicago Cubs effect. Bucky's revenge. Northwest passage by Wilson. Sherman marches to the sea. But despite the NFL's emphasis on scoring, it took the Seahawks (what?) at least six seconds to score. The biggest surprise since Joe Namath fumbled the coin toss. Nerves versus verve. The art of winning. Hawks fly. Broncs cry.
Pitching usually beats hitting, but this was the biggest blowout since Sandy Koufax got bombed in his last game. The USA TODAY says the Seahawks spent the fourth quarter in coronation mode. Time to bring back Tim Tebow?
All the mirth aside, I saw Koufax in person just once, and he got knocked out of the box by a grand slam homer with nobody out. I saw Mickey Mantle just once and he went 0-for-5. I was a fan of both of them, but stuff happens. The bottom line is football is just a game. Socio-economic geo-politics, etc., are NOT. I had started another column before the game – my response to the State of the Union – so let's get back down to earth, which the President says is HOT, HOT, HOT: "Save the planet. You can bike it if you like it."
THE COLUMN: GOD, GUNS, AND MOSES, or, THE COLD HARD FACTS
"In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it." – Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)
ARE PEOPLE BECOMING IMPERVIOUS TO THE TRUTH? I graduated from high school in 1960, but kids who graduated in the late-60s were getting a dumbed-down version of history – if any at all. They didn't even recognize any history in the movie "Dr. Zhivago"; they thought it was a love story.
Back in the "good ol' USSR," during the heyday of the old media Izvestia, a man goes to a hard-to-find clinic and says, "I need to see an eye doctor and an ear doctor right away!" When asked why, he says:
"Because my eyes aren't seeing what my ears are hearing!" He was hearing voices – the voices of propaganda (to propagandize means to try to persuade others of what one does not believe oneself).
A Ukrainian stood in line for hours to buy a loaf of bread, and just when he got to the store's door, it got locked with a sign on it that said "Out of food." The last straw! Camel's back. Jig's up. The guy went off like a firecracker, almost postal, complaining to no one in particular, everyone within earshot. Three men in trench coats came up to him and said, "Shut up. And this is your last warning." The guy goes home and says to his wife:
"It's worse than we thought. They're not only out of bread but they're out of bullets!"
Do you know why the KGB always traveled in threes? One knew how to read, one knew how to write, and one kept an eye on the two intellectuals. Then there was the one about "What would happen if the Red Army captured the Sahara Desert?"
"Nothing would happen for 50 years, and then they would have to import sand."
I have a whole book full of those jokes somewhere if I could find it, but today's column is a warm-up to reviewing another great book that I recently got my hands on: "ECOCIDE IN THE USSR; Health and Nature Under Siege" by Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr. (Basic Books, 1992). Yes, the whole Creation groaned behind the Iron Curtain, not just the 100 million turned into slaves and murdered. The 1917 Bolshevik revolution took Russia from the 19th century to the Middle Ages to the Dark Ages. And they took almost every bordering nation along with them. Finland, for one, fought back. Finland even had a plan – ready to roll – to take out the Bolsheviks early-on, but France and Britain nixed them. The rest is history.
One hundred million is equal to one-third of the population of the United States. Estonia literally lost one-third of its population to murder and deportation to slave-labor camps (shades of Ezekiel)! Meanwhile back here, fellow-travelers of the Communists said that eye-witnesses – people who saw their family, friends, and neighbors shipped off screaming in cattle cars – were "too close to the situation to be unbiased." The Soviet Union was an ally – sort of – of ours. Radical theorists had promised Utopia and produced Hell On Earth.
We'll destroy you,
old romantic world!
In place of faith in our soul
we have electricity and steam.
In place of misery, pocket the riches of all worlds!
The old men? Kill them. And use the skulls for ashtrays!
- Vladimir Mayakovsky (1920, on Lenin's philosophy)
CONCLUSION
For purposes of today's column, the point is that God isn't dead, but neither is Bolshevism. I always thought that Americans were a different breed of cat, sons of the pioneers, the offspring of Puritans, Pilgrims, and lovers of Freedom everywhere. TODAY? I don't know for sure. Are the American people, today, immune to propaganda – or impervious to the Truth?
"No one can bar the road to the Truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death."
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn (author of "August 1914")
I don't know what the short-term holds for us, but the difference between the traditionalists and the progressives is, like the Russian peasants and the Seahawks, we get the last laugh. I'm just a midget with a cyber megaphone, but I have an announcement to make:
"WHY NOT US? WE KNOW, TO COIN A PHRASE, THAT WE WIN IN THE END."
JOHN 3:16
P.S. When I looked at my thermometer yesterday morning, I was looking for the needle around the big zero, but I should have been looking in the vicinity of 25 below zero! Twenty-seven states are under a winter weather warning. The enviro-mental wackos have exceeded their wildest dreams. They have created a scarcity of firewood as well as a shortage of propane (some of them think the latter is a capitalist conspiracy, even though they forced ethanol on us). Some say that we burn more energy producing ethanol than our cars get out of it, but under totalitarian dictatorships, science serves the masters, not the Truth.
"The self-defeating logic of utopian totalitarianism could tolerate only facts that served and bolstered the myth. Any others were not truths but heresies to be suppressed along with anyone incautious enough to defend them. 'Statistics,' Lenin ordered in 1921, 'must be our practical assistant, and not scholastic' . . . "
- Feshbach and Friendly, in "Ecocide"
Under any form of totalitarianism, science is nothing more than a sorcerer's apprentice. Beware "settled science"!
PPS: Addressing the Congress of Deputies in a televised speech, 1989, writer Vasily Belov said:
"No country has so many academics as ours. There are academics all over Moscow – outer space specialists, all kinds of them! But why is it that in the countryside, the peasants cut grass with the same scythe they had in the twelfth century?"
[That's central planning for you. Are academics bringing us Back to the Past, too?]
© Curtis Dahlgren
February 4, 2014
ROCKY MOUNTAIN MELLOW. PACIFIC HIGH PRESSURE. No one is madder than the Broncos. Why didn't the Plan work? I don't know. It's not my job, but I have just one thing to say.
The curse of the Bambino. The Chicago Cubs effect. Bucky's revenge. Northwest passage by Wilson. Sherman marches to the sea. But despite the NFL's emphasis on scoring, it took the Seahawks (what?) at least six seconds to score. The biggest surprise since Joe Namath fumbled the coin toss. Nerves versus verve. The art of winning. Hawks fly. Broncs cry.
Pitching usually beats hitting, but this was the biggest blowout since Sandy Koufax got bombed in his last game. The USA TODAY says the Seahawks spent the fourth quarter in coronation mode. Time to bring back Tim Tebow?
All the mirth aside, I saw Koufax in person just once, and he got knocked out of the box by a grand slam homer with nobody out. I saw Mickey Mantle just once and he went 0-for-5. I was a fan of both of them, but stuff happens. The bottom line is football is just a game. Socio-economic geo-politics, etc., are NOT. I had started another column before the game – my response to the State of the Union – so let's get back down to earth, which the President says is HOT, HOT, HOT: "Save the planet. You can bike it if you like it."
THE COLUMN: GOD, GUNS, AND MOSES, or, THE COLD HARD FACTS
"In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it." – Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)
ARE PEOPLE BECOMING IMPERVIOUS TO THE TRUTH? I graduated from high school in 1960, but kids who graduated in the late-60s were getting a dumbed-down version of history – if any at all. They didn't even recognize any history in the movie "Dr. Zhivago"; they thought it was a love story.
Back in the "good ol' USSR," during the heyday of the old media Izvestia, a man goes to a hard-to-find clinic and says, "I need to see an eye doctor and an ear doctor right away!" When asked why, he says:
"Because my eyes aren't seeing what my ears are hearing!" He was hearing voices – the voices of propaganda (to propagandize means to try to persuade others of what one does not believe oneself).
A Ukrainian stood in line for hours to buy a loaf of bread, and just when he got to the store's door, it got locked with a sign on it that said "Out of food." The last straw! Camel's back. Jig's up. The guy went off like a firecracker, almost postal, complaining to no one in particular, everyone within earshot. Three men in trench coats came up to him and said, "Shut up. And this is your last warning." The guy goes home and says to his wife:
"It's worse than we thought. They're not only out of bread but they're out of bullets!"
Do you know why the KGB always traveled in threes? One knew how to read, one knew how to write, and one kept an eye on the two intellectuals. Then there was the one about "What would happen if the Red Army captured the Sahara Desert?"
"Nothing would happen for 50 years, and then they would have to import sand."
I have a whole book full of those jokes somewhere if I could find it, but today's column is a warm-up to reviewing another great book that I recently got my hands on: "ECOCIDE IN THE USSR; Health and Nature Under Siege" by Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr. (Basic Books, 1992). Yes, the whole Creation groaned behind the Iron Curtain, not just the 100 million turned into slaves and murdered. The 1917 Bolshevik revolution took Russia from the 19th century to the Middle Ages to the Dark Ages. And they took almost every bordering nation along with them. Finland, for one, fought back. Finland even had a plan – ready to roll – to take out the Bolsheviks early-on, but France and Britain nixed them. The rest is history.
One hundred million is equal to one-third of the population of the United States. Estonia literally lost one-third of its population to murder and deportation to slave-labor camps (shades of Ezekiel)! Meanwhile back here, fellow-travelers of the Communists said that eye-witnesses – people who saw their family, friends, and neighbors shipped off screaming in cattle cars – were "too close to the situation to be unbiased." The Soviet Union was an ally – sort of – of ours. Radical theorists had promised Utopia and produced Hell On Earth.
We'll destroy you,
old romantic world!
In place of faith in our soul
we have electricity and steam.
In place of misery, pocket the riches of all worlds!
The old men? Kill them. And use the skulls for ashtrays!
- Vladimir Mayakovsky (1920, on Lenin's philosophy)
CONCLUSION
For purposes of today's column, the point is that God isn't dead, but neither is Bolshevism. I always thought that Americans were a different breed of cat, sons of the pioneers, the offspring of Puritans, Pilgrims, and lovers of Freedom everywhere. TODAY? I don't know for sure. Are the American people, today, immune to propaganda – or impervious to the Truth?
"No one can bar the road to the Truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death."
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn (author of "August 1914")
I don't know what the short-term holds for us, but the difference between the traditionalists and the progressives is, like the Russian peasants and the Seahawks, we get the last laugh. I'm just a midget with a cyber megaphone, but I have an announcement to make:
"WHY NOT US? WE KNOW, TO COIN A PHRASE, THAT WE WIN IN THE END."
JOHN 3:16
P.S. When I looked at my thermometer yesterday morning, I was looking for the needle around the big zero, but I should have been looking in the vicinity of 25 below zero! Twenty-seven states are under a winter weather warning. The enviro-mental wackos have exceeded their wildest dreams. They have created a scarcity of firewood as well as a shortage of propane (some of them think the latter is a capitalist conspiracy, even though they forced ethanol on us). Some say that we burn more energy producing ethanol than our cars get out of it, but under totalitarian dictatorships, science serves the masters, not the Truth.
"The self-defeating logic of utopian totalitarianism could tolerate only facts that served and bolstered the myth. Any others were not truths but heresies to be suppressed along with anyone incautious enough to defend them. 'Statistics,' Lenin ordered in 1921, 'must be our practical assistant, and not scholastic' . . . "
- Feshbach and Friendly, in "Ecocide"
Under any form of totalitarianism, science is nothing more than a sorcerer's apprentice. Beware "settled science"!
PPS: Addressing the Congress of Deputies in a televised speech, 1989, writer Vasily Belov said:
"No country has so many academics as ours. There are academics all over Moscow – outer space specialists, all kinds of them! But why is it that in the countryside, the peasants cut grass with the same scythe they had in the twelfth century?"
[That's central planning for you. Are academics bringing us Back to the Past, too?]
© Curtis Dahlgren
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