Tag: Reality

Quote of the Day: Where in the World Are We?

Susan Quinn
Susan Quinn
146
 

I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore. —L. Frank Baum

This was a statement made by Baum’s character, Dorothy, in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. But I couldn’t help thinking that any one of us could make the same observation about life in the United States today.

Many of us have lived long enough to remember a different United States. It’s gratifying to glorify our past with Ozzie and Harriet images, professional baseball, our victory in WWII, and the respect other nations had for our country. We even realize that some of our memories are overblown, hazy stories that we recall or were passed down to us by family who loved this country and wanted to pass on their admiration for all that we stood for.

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Quote of the Day: Facts

Seawriter
Seawriter
149924
 

“Facts don’t care about your feelings.” – Ben Shapiro

I have used this once before, but if ever there was a quote that summed up this week this is it. We have seen it in the lefty reactions to the Rittenhouse verdict. It is a giant cry of “Don’t confuse me with facts. My feelings tell me he is guilty.”

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The Truth Doesn’t Matter Anymore

Susan Quinn
Susan Quinn
7617
 

The title of this post is not just a philosophical statement. It is a living, breathing admonition of our culture, one that once fundamentally guided our decisions, our relationships, and our belief systems. Truth was the foundation of our education, of governance, and business. We all knew that it was not embraced by everyone—the liars, drama queens show up everywhere—but I believed they were the exceptions rather than the rule.

No more. And let me tell you why I find this fact deeply disheartening.

Just this morning on my walk I listened to the Ricochet podcast, High Noon, with Inez Stepman. I like her interviews because they are thoughtful and intelligent. This time she was interviewing Professor Robbie P. George of Princeton University, and I enjoyed his sharing his early education and understanding of the importance of knowledge for its own sake; he also spoke about his priority in searching for truth. So far, so good. Then he mentioned that one of his best friends was Cornel West, who is a professor on the far Left, a self-described Democratic Socialist. I am quite certain that they have found a way to bridge or overcome their differences; I have seen West interviewed, and he is a thoughtful and reasonable person. But I found that I was annoyed and highly skeptical about George and West’s relationship. Then I realized the reason.

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Perception is Reality

Susan Quinn
Susan Quinn
409
 

We were at a small, intimate dinner, and that evening turned out to have a profound impact on me. For the first time, I was meeting a woman whom I’d heard about named Peggy Bassett, who had become a minister at the age of 50. She was adored by her community, and when I met her, she was a victim of ALS. Although she could still eat with us, she was in a reclining wheelchair. Yet her face glowed with serenity and joy. When one of the other guests asked her just before dinner how she was doing, she replied with some effort, “I’m just fine in here.”

I’m just fine in here.

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On the Why of Poetry

Internet's Hank
Internet's Hank
1610
 

A Sierpinski sieve. Thanks to the magic of Ricochet this one is even more fractal than it looks; there’s a sixth level of the pattern hidden in the image resizing.

Last time I wrote about poetry I took a scientist’s view of the matter. This time I’m starting in math. Clearly, I understand what all this poetry stuff is about. Do y’all remember what a fractal is? It’s a pattern that repeats itself all the way down.

Imagine, if you will, that those white triangles are islands in a sea of black. You have a continent in the middle, a couple isles nearby, and more and more islands and islets the further away you get from that central continent. It’s bad water for navigating in because there’s an infinite number of rocks, pebbles, and even smaller navigation hazards poking up out of the surface of the water. Maybe it’s more of a swamp than an ocean. Okay, now zoom in. Let’s say you’re small enough that you live on one of the islands. You can deduce the pattern; you know that just over thataways there’s a bigger island. Is there another, larger one beyond it, or are we looking at the top of the pattern?

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Why I’m Still Out of a Job

Internet's Hank
Internet's Hank
7028
 

It ain’t because there is no work available. Let’s get that right out in front of everything else. All the world is screaming out for labor; look around you. Every Walgreens and McDonald’s is looking to pick up some extra help. If I were a video game character and I were playing through life as myself I would be picking up extra shifts in between job applications. I’d have a job in a week; a good job, one that my mother would be proud to tell her friends about. I’d still pick up shifts at McDonald’s; more money is better than less money, and there’s nothing wrong with those jobs.

Video game characters don’t get tired, not like real people do. I’d have an even better job a month after that. Not honestly mind you; I wouldn’t have given full value to that first employer, not enough to cover the costs of hiring and training me. Video game NPCs don’t fill out government paperwork. And they take it pretty well when you do things that’d seem skeezy to real people. But I’m not a video game character and I’m not moving up in the world.

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A Palestinian State Would Mean Israel’s Destruction

Susan Quinn
Susan Quinn
268
 

The completion of the marathon series of elections in Israel could determine the nation’s existence. If Netanyahu loses, Benny Gantz as prime minister will likely return Israel to the Leftist positions. Although Gantz has been characterized as a moderate, he may be offering those positions for public consumption. The fact is, Gantz is an unknown politically, and Israel needs a leader who will take clear and firm positions.

A number of issues have shifted in the Middle East that suggest Israel is not criticized as severely as it has been in the past. That shift begins with Arab countries that have discovered they have much to gain militarily and commercially with Israel. This change doesn’t mean that these countries will embrace Israel; in fact, many of the exchanges between the two countries are only first steps, and those countries could always sever their connections. But at this time, Sudan, Saudi Arabi, UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Oman, Morocco, and Bahrain have all showed an interest in changing their relationships with the Israelis, agreeing to a “normalization of relations.” Behind those decisions, for example, are the purchase of spy equipment by the Saudis, discreet meetings with a Minister of UAE; cooperation between Israel and Egypt to provide security in and out of the Gaza strip; a security buffer between Israel and Jordan, as well as Israel supplying Jordan with water.

All is not rosy, however, internationally. The United Nations continues to try to cripple Israel. Most recently they created a boycott list against Israel of over 100 companies, which is clearly political and meant to be punitive:

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The World Isn’t Fair

Susan Quinn
Susan Quinn
4417
 

As a child, I would get so annoyed with my mother when she would tell me, “The world isn’t fair.” She believed that with all her heart because her life experiences had taught her that truth. She had been knocked down many times, but always managed to pick herself up. She learned, after a while, that many of her disappointments came from her own choices; she also realized, however, that things didn’t always turn out the way she wished they would have.

As a person who lives pretty much on the optimistic side of the worldview scale, you might be surprised to see that I agree with my mother. No matter how I want things to be, it’s sometimes a coin flip to see how they turn out. And most of the time when they don’t pan out, it’s not that important or I can learn from the experience.

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Group Writing: In My Imagination

CB Toder aka Mama Toad
CB Toder aka Mama Toad
2310
 

When I was a little girl, I often was conscious of living life in my imagination. I might be walking up the driveway from the school bus in reality, but in my imagination I had suddenly become Aragorn the Ranger, and my noisy siblings just ahead of me probably couldn’t even see or sense my stealthy, long-legged presence behind them.

I might be trailing through the mall behind my mother as we boringly shopped the sales for school shoes, but in my imagination I was Laura Ingalls, providing a running commentary on everything of any interest around us for my blind sister Mary.

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We’re All Going to Die

Susan Quinn
Susan Quinn
7925
 

Everywhere I go I hear people talking about the massacre in Las Vegas. The 24-hour news cycle is obsessed with the tragedy, and there is no getting away from it. But one question that is asked over and over again frustrates and saddens me: “When we know why he did it, we’ll able to make the future safer.”

It’s a lie. A well intentioned lie, a desire to delude ourselves into thinking that we don’t live in a dangerous world and that we can protect ourselves. But in many ways, we can’t assure a perfectly protected existence. There is no living with “zero risk.” Let me try to clear up the delusion about making a safer world in a constructive and positive way.

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Member Post

Mike Rapkoch
Mike Rapkoch
158
 

About the time I reached the teen years, my folks decided that each of us six kids should have a bedroom of our own. My folks were not rich, so a mansion on a hill was out of the question. Instead, mom and dad purchased a house with an unfinished basement, and pop went about […]
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Surreal Reality

Jordan
Jordan
2414
 

surreal

For a while I wondered why Facebook acquired Oculus. It didn’t make sense to me at the time, but now I understand. They did it to influence the world we choose to experience as well as the social media experience. And if you don’t believe that Facebook will attempt to create the experience it wants you to have with this technology, you don’t understand Facebook.

This picture is worth a thousand cold chills down the spine.

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Member Post

iWe
iWe
3015
 

We on the Right often get bogged down in “facts” – thinking that, somehow, it should sway “Black Lives Matter!” rioters that thousands of black men are unlawfully killed by other blacks for every black man killed unlawfully by a police officer. But it does not. They don’t care.  Preview Open
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Member Post

Casey
Casey
911
 

I find it quite impossible to understand what is happening these days. For many moons, we humans poured the water of society into useful vessels.  The vessels we built were limiting and their shapes somewhat arbitrary but their existence allowed us to make good use of the water.  At some point we decided that our […]
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Member Post

C. U. Douglas
C. U. Douglas
53
 

Once again, C. U. is here to comment on pop culture because other than work and expecting a baby he has nothing better to do. Someone get that man a hobby, please. Now, aside from ceasing to refer to myself in third person, allow me to say that I’m not a fan of reality television. It’s […]
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Member Post

EJHill+
EJHill+
44
 

Ask anyone where they do their best thinking and you’ll get a handful of reasonably familiar answers – in the car commuting, in the shower, on long walks, wherever one can find a certain degree of solitude. The range of thinking usually takes one of two directions – real world problem solving or engaging in […]
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