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Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Scattershooting 180314

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Scattershooting while wondering if any in the Soros-controlled media have half a conscience about using those Parkland kids as pawns to push their radical, extremist, totalitarian gun-removal agenda.

Today I have a few longer entries. If you have a thick skin, and you won’t regret entering the gallery. If you don’t, go reread See Spot Run instead. Onward…

EXPUNGE TOXIC PEOPLE from LIFE — A PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS: Classical stoicism and Christian worldview (as opposed to religious practice) share many common philosophical underpinnings. Given their geographic commingling and conterminous nature in the Greek/Roman power era, this is no surprise. To the substantial extent stoicism is consistent with Jesus’ teachings, this is a good thing! Among the common virtues are: self-control, fortitude, overcoming adversity with dignity, personal responsibility for one’s behavior, ethical/moral well-being, calmness with emotional discipline (anger control, shedding of envy and jealousy). Properly swap in God for “Nature” in the stoic upholding, since He created nature: “Virtue consists in a will that is in agreement with Nature.” [citing Russell Bertrand’s A History of Western Philosophy] There’s another remarkable commonality.

In that vein, I recently read a nice little article by Darious Foroux that offers wise advice for any age: Stop Giving Toxic People Your Time. The essay self-advertises its roots in classical, secular Stoicism, but is consistent with the Christian worldview as well. As such, it’s good for all of us, secular or religious. Who are toxic people in your life or workplace? Quite simply: liars, cheaters, manipulators, backstabbers, thieves (whether of stuff, money or time), and of course the sociopathic. In short, as the article notes, avoid close associations with people who don’t have values. They will bring you down into dark places if you let them. Instead, seek out the strongly moral and the virtuous as friends and role models, acknowledging of course that nobody is perfect, and everybody sins. Perfection isn’t the point, virtue is.

EMASCULATED “MEN” and DEARTH of FATHERHOOD: The wussification of American “men” is well underway and has been for much of the past 15-20 years, maybe more. Too few dads are willing to teach their sons what manhood means! From the Christian-worldview perspective, it means being mentally and physically strong and sturdy in keeping with our God-given biology, while at the same time, servant leaders of households (wife and children) — loving and benevolent, present for them, while also decisive and wise, and firm without cruelty in discipline of kids…and never, ever abusive or manipulative! It means real strength — authentic strength of mind, body and spirit, not the trendy fad-word “vulnerability”. The “vulnerable man” gets used, taken advantage of, beaten up (literally or figuratively), his self-advertised weaknesses readily attacked by human predators, and in the end, he is discarded like yesterday’s garbage when he is no longer useful to his manipulator(s). Unsolicited advice: instead of advertising your “vulnerability”, don’t advertise or hide it…just fix it, with authenticity!

The best outcome we can hope for from the feminist/leftist school-curricula indoctrination of (effectively or actually) fatherless boys, deprived of that sorely needed role model by a broken society full of broken families, medicated to a mentally awry extent on synthetic brain-altering chemicals from early ages, awarded participation stickers/trophies for mediocrity in academics and athletics, “educated” that Christianity is an outdated mythological construct for simple/stupid people, and emasculated psychologically through the feminism’s inherent misandry to believe men are not an equal gender but an inferior one, is that they somehow rebel in a constructive way and learn to be a real man regardless. That has to be rare.

The typical path is they grow into emasculated little pencil-armed leftist dweebs, bereft of strong father figures and therefore of any meaningful understanding of manhood as an ideal, instead perpetual victims “in touch with their feminine side”, and either wondering what the proper use is for that little bitty thing sticking out between bunghole and bellybutton, or ashamed of it. Sometimes the shame extends to a delusional, genetically absurd extreme of defying the XY chromosome and lopping that thing off, much to the insane approval of left-wing social engineers. The worst outcome is of the kind we saw from a deranged orphan in Parkland, FL. Fortunately that is rare also, but gets a lot of attention and is blamed on the wrong thing (guns). What we need are more Christian servant-leader fathers! I mean real fathers — expressively loving while grounded in solid morals, convicted to lead lives of personal and professional virtue, pillars of honor and integrity, leading households both directly and by example. Until we get back to cherishing that role (and that role model), expect more of the same. And more misguided blame…

TRUMP’s CONTINUED DEBASEMENT of HIS OFFICE and of CONSERVATISM: Speaking of personal and professional virtue, the Trump administration clearly lacks this. It’s no surprise. I have no qualms saying, “I told you so”, because it’s the brutally honest truth. I told you it was coming. It has. It will. I told you he would stain conservatism, despite the truth that Trump is not a conservative (but instead a pseudo-populist blowhard and con artist). He has and he will. I take neither pride nor comfort in this, because it’s bad for our nation. It’s bad for our nation to have leftism take over, which is exactly what will happen as a pendulum-swing reaction to this moron (who was a pendulum-swing reaction to an Obama administration that was highly dishonorable for other reasons). It’s bad for us all to have a highly unqualified, immoral and undignified President (regardless of nominal party affiliation) engaging in personal attacks on social media, paying hush money to a smut star over an alleged affair (while married to his third freakin’ wife, after publicly cheating on at least his first!), and firing cabinet members left and right. Donald — if you were going to let ______ go (fill in any name among many from Tillerson on back), why did you hire him/her in the first place? That shows a horrifying lack of either personal or professional judgment, or both. Yet as Mark Levin recently stated, Trump didn’t know Rex Tillerson from Rex Reed or Tyrannosaurus Rex. That’s readily apparent. Get it right the first time, you big blowhard! Apparently that’s too much to ask from someone so administratively incompetent. His ineptitude makes even the notoriously naive, facile, over-his-head Obama’s look sanguine by comparison.

Look, dear reader: as you probably have found, I think independently, am beholden to no party line, follow no herd of lemmings. I will not hesitate to praise what Trump has done right (Gorsuch, Mattis, Haley, agreeing to meet the pot-bellied Nork dictator depending on results), nor wrong (see above, plus steel/aluminum tariffs, tone-deaf responses to several incidents, vile and immoral utterances almost weekly, and too much else to list in brief). Hard as it is to imagine, the alternative was at least as awful. At the same time I am so glad Hillary is not President that even I, one of uncommonly gigantic vocabulary, have inadequate words to describe my relief. I just want to reiterate, for the record, that I did not vote for this a**hole either, and wish he were not the alternative to the unadulterated and multifaceted evil that the Clintons would have unleashed upon us from the White House. Where is the stoic, wise, knowledgeable, strong, intelligent, dignified statesman with a foundationally unwavering Christian worldview, who can and should be our Presidential leader and representative to the world? Will we ever have another?

FEDERAL CRIMINAL CHARGES NEEDED for “SANCTUARY” OFFICIALS: The Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf, and other radical left-wing state and local officials enabling and hiding illegal aliens, need to be taught this: illegal immigration is…illegal, under Federal law. Wow, what a revelation! An illegal act is illegal! So is aiding and abetting commission of a Federal crime by harboring fugitives, and also, warning them that law enforcement is coming. That makes her an accessory to a Federal crime. There is no need to over-analyze here. This is very straightforward. In addition to obstruction of justice, which is being considered, she should be charged and put on trial for harboring fugitives, and aiding and abetting a Federal crime: one count of each per illegal alien involved.

“SCATTERSHOOTING” IS HERE TO STAY; DEAL WITH IT: Finally, a misguided mind, whose name is withheld to protect his/her tender and insecure little ego, and whom I care about despite (and perhaps because of) their need for re-education to reverse years of high-school and university indoctrination in the ways of the passive-aggressive virtue signaler, recently suggested that I stop titling this periodic entry, “Scattershooting”. You can guess why.

Short answer: “No.” Long answer: “Hell no”. Longer answer: If you do not have the mental wherewithal to separate the figurative from the literal, nor the metaphorical from the tangible, nor to realize that being offended is a choice, I suggest going back to Romper Room and playing in the safe-space sandbox. Nobody forces you to read this. Yet ya did. Can’t take the heat? Stay out of the kitchen. Sometimes we all need to hear things we don’t want to hear. Call this love — tough love.

The Proper Roles of Hype and Emotion in Science

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Recently a few respected scientific colleagues responded to some findings regarding the relatively warm global surface temperatures apparent so far in 2016, compared to the previous year(s), with adjectives such as “stunning”, “shocking”, “disturbing”, etc. Why?

As scientists, is our purpose to act stunned, shocked, saddened or ecstatic (depending on our emotional attachment to the findings or sociopolitical biases revolving thereabouts)?

Alternatively, should we dismiss the temptation to launch hyperbole and simply present scientific findings to media and policy-makers in a factual, levelheaded, mature manner?

I advocate the latter. It is not our purview to influence policy or public opinion on the merits of our own work (or others’ research that directly involves ours); in fact one can argue that it is a conflict of interest. To any extent I may have done so ever, I ask for forgiveness.

Moreover, hyping and exclaiming results also leads to cumbersome, divisive backlash that can range from nuisance-grade distraction to substantially counterproductive to completely self-defeating. That wastes time and concentration that could be used to do science. Instead, we simply should present results, be open, reproducible and accountable about what we’re doing, and let the policymakers and opinions go from there.

If the data, methods and conclusions are robust, and can stand up to scrutiny, they will stand the test of time and attacks by ignorant non-scientists. As I often say, “Excellence is self-evident.” Also: “Excellence needs no self-advertisement.” Nor does it need embellishment from emotionally derived hyperbole. Humility and calm still have a place…or at least they should!

    “But…but…we’re humans, not robots! We have emotions!”

Acknowledged. True, yet irrelevant. To counter: we’re humans, not subhumans. This means the ability — and responsibility — to compartmentalize in a self-disciplined way, to extinguish the smoldering, toxic cigarette of emotion when we need to be objective and analytical. Snarling wolves arguing over a kill can’t turn off their rage or overexuberance, but we are higher-order sentient intellects than that. We can…and should.

It’s great to have a burning, chronically motivational baseline of passion about our fields of study; otherwise why do it? Yet in science, sometimes we need to be able to question, critique and even attack our own work dispassionately, and flip the switch off our egos and self-investments. We need to be prepared to defend our work objectively when it is robust, and to falsify it when counter-evidence appears. Check your emotions at the lab door. Those without that level of self-discipline are not well-suited for science and should consider other lines of work.

Scientists who find themselves emotionally invested in their research should back off that work until such time as it can be done more objectively, or pass it off to someone who has more maturity and self-control. Sure, results may surprise us; that’s the nature of any anti-hypothetical finding. However, hypotheses are meant to be refuted as much as supported. When I am doing research, I am not “shocked Roger”, nor “astounded Roger”, nor “conservative/libertarian Roger”. Those things are dropped off in a box and left there to pick up at the end of the research hours. Why? Easy: they are immaterial to the data, analyses and conclusions.

Data don’t care what we “feel”. The results simply are what they are. We analyze, report and conclude. Why add hype to that? To generate clickbait and draw attention to ourselves in order to pander to fawning from the frothing e-mobs with ten-second attention spans? I pray not! What we do as scientists is not about self, nor about shock-and-awe, but about science, about assessing evidence and offering the results thereof. To inform, not to titillate…otherwise we become walking mini-versions of TV “crockumentaries”, entertainers instead of informers, foolishly validating ourselves as scientists by how loudly an audience claps and whistles at our dog-and-pony act.

The Venn diagrams of reason and hype don’t overlap. And science, above all, is about logic and reason. Keep shock and shouting out of it and compartmentalized elsewhere, in other realms of life. Keep reasoned, keep cool and keep humble. Away from the lab or cubicle walls, in the world outside our own scientific studies, there’s plenty to be about which to be shocked, disturbed, dismayed, thrilled, ecstatic, enraged, etc. Inside: drill into the science and do it with utmost focus, unadulterated by emotional contamination.

The Slavery of “Free Thought”–Part 2: It Isn’t.

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In Part 1, I covered the levels of thinking as a nested analog to Matryoshka dolls, arguing that the freest thought is the most unlimited–in other words, that which doesn’t deny or abrogate the spiritual realm outside oneself. Thinking in a way that is not constrained by self-limitation, consideration not just of the artificial and natural but of the supernatural, truly is the height of open-mindedness. Refusing it, denying higher authority outside humanity, restricts thought merely to the tangible and visible, and as such, is a form of closed-mindedness.

Ultimately, those who bind themselves within any of the dolls’ shells are enslaved, not free. That applies to all of us! We all are enslaved to our human limits of thought. But the smaller the doll we choose to inhabit, the less free and the more restrained we become, the smaller the intellectual prison cell with which we have sentenced ourselves, the stricter the self-tightened shackles bind us.

Don’t get me wrong: I love logic and reason! “Science, logic and reason” (with a dollop of imagination selectively mined out of necessity) are the ideal modes of thought when applied as tools to solve scientific and logical problems! Yet only closed-minded fools, deniers utterly bereft of evidence for their null claims, attempt to apply natural standards to the supernatural, or illogically demand tangible evidence for that which transcends the tangible. How shallow, self-limiting, and truly, contrary to logic and reason!

Another important caveat: it also is possible for those in the outer realms to lose or ignore the inner ones, thereby becoming intellectually hollow. We see that capacity exercised commonly in those who are very spiritual but ignorant of math and science, or in the scientist or engineer with extremely underdeveloped social (emotional) skills.

Nonetheless, logic and reason alone are nothing more than chains of bondage–dark dungeons, really–when considering matters outside that shell. Ignoring or denying the outer realms, we even may get comfortable, smugly self-delusional in the idea that we’ve gone as far as necessary, that this stop alone will suffice.

None of us are purely free thinkers because of our human limitations–distraction, diversion, hubris, finite IQ, irrationality (a.k.a. emotion), and vulnerability to anti-intellectual influences. Still, we are freest in thought when we don’t enclose ourselves within any of the inner dolls–when we use our innate (or God-given, for some of us) free will to wander the fullest possible realms of learning and exploration. Learning doesn’t involve merely facts, concepts, logic and reason, but also, ideas past the here and now, beyond the tangible.

Consider love. I’ve posed to rigid adherents of “science, logic and reason” the following simple challenge. Do you love someone? Who? [We’ll assume the challenge is directed at a man married to “Annie”, for the sake of argument.] Now…prove you love Annie!

Naturally, after considerable hemming, hawing, stammering, hand-waving, sidestepping, avoidance tactics, diversionary straw men, complaints about the validity of the challenge, and attempts to escape onto tangents such as biological benefits of love (which still don’t prove love), one thing becomes crystal-clear. He can’t meet this challenge. He loves Annie, but cannot prove it. He is trapped, ensnared in a “logic” cage of his own construction, imprisoned, enslaved.

This is because anything that comes up as “evidence” (physical or verbal affection, performing good deeds and favors, benevolence, sex, and giving of material objects, service or time) can have many causes and motivations–including platonic, selfish and/or unloving ones–even sociopathy. None of them are unique to love, nor do they prove love.

With a big-enough combination of financial power and cold lack of scruples, a man could hire a live-in woman for some amount of time to perform for him every act of every sort that is associated with love–to service all carnal desires behind closed doors, and to put on for the world every outward appearance that she is madly head-over-polished-toenails in love with him. In fairness, a woman similarly could get a dude to service her in outwardly “loving” ways. Either still would be mere pretension–a well-acted and protracted escort/maid service of sorts–but certainly not love!

Love isn’t subject to arbitrary logical “rules” regarding fallacies. It cannot be calculated with arithmetic, nor placed in a beaker and weighed, nor derived and solved as partial differential equations. Love sometimes is passed off as a chemical reaction in the brain. This is an article of faith (not science), for one cannot document on paper the specific organic-chemistry reaction uniquely yielding love. Show me the unique solution to the biochemical love equation? Don’t try; you cannot.

Love transcends the tangible, physical and mathematical, and defies evidence-based reasoning in unambiguously establishing its existence to the exclusion of other motivations for behavior. As such, love cannot be proved, and the challenge cannot be met! “Science, logic and reason” therefore fail, and fail with miserable and dismal wretchedness, at explaining tangibly the most advanced and wondrous aspect of the human experience.

Those who espouse the supremacy of logic, yet profess any sort of love, face a dilemma they often criticize in the religious–coexistence of the rational and irrational in the same person. How can a religious scientist believe in and love and serve a God he can’t prove to you and me? Well, dear reader…the same way the atheist can be scientific and logical, yet still have love for anther human that he can’t prove to you and me. The difference, as I see it, is that the love for God is directed at the perfect and omniscient–the one ultimately and most truly deserving of worship (the highest form of love).

After all of this, it is readily apparent that the most free thinker does not enslave himself within science, logic and reason, nor within emotion or imagination, nor within only spiritual space. Instead, the freest thinker delves into the abstract, the spiritual, the eternal, the mental processes that journey beyond tangible evidence, while not losing sight of any of the inner ones–engaging in a lifelong exploration of the entire intellectual spectrum.

I don’t hate the spiritually handicapped. I feel pity and empathy instead; for I once was blissfully ignorant that way, jailed in the same state of self-inflicted spiritual infanthood and underdevelopment. Those who tried but gave up prematurely have experienced spiritual atrophy, with much the same net result. When spiritually handicapped, much like physical or mental handicaps, one is missing an essential capacity or capability. The good news is that, unlike a missing limb or a blind eye, we can grow or regrow the spirit, boost our spiritual IQ–but not without struggle, and only if we’re open-minded, free thinkers about it.

This is because the truest level of free thought involves logical intellect, emotional intellect, and spiritual intellect, none to the exclusion of the others, each in its distinct place, but also, each to the others’ enrichment. This is the essence of the most vast thinkers, the truest manifestation of free thought!