What art Thou

What art Thou


Art thou

             A convenient Christian

Hiding away

              Away hiding your face

Unknown

              A Christian

When ’tis

              Convenient for thee

Is that

             What ye be

A Christian of convenience

              Hiding

                          Hiding

Lest someone see

                         That you are

A Christian

                   Making the accusation

Do you remain safe

                    No danger brave

To prove

                   That

A very inconvenient

                    Christian ye’ll be!?

© 2010 Vic jones

What Happened to My Ads Part 2

Yesterday I asked what had happened to the adsense ads that I used to have on this page. Then I went and did some research. It seems, that unless I’m getting 10,000 views per month, I won’t be getting any ads. It also seems that I need to keep my posts longer than 500 words.

I don’t know about any of my readers, but I think that for the most part I’m going to have no problem meeting that word limit. Although to a poet like myself (at least I have pretensions of being a poet at times) that 500 words is a large amount of fluff to throw at the page without ever really saying anything.

On any subject that I’m familiar with I can actually get some good detail done with a piece of that size, and as anyone can see by this post, it isn’t really hard to stretch out what is written in a post that really isn’t very informative.

One other thing that I found is that it seems that it is a good idea to link your blog to your youtube channel. Now one thing I must admit is that I don’t really have a youtube channel, though I do comment on items on youtube.

But why don’t you have a youtube channel? Simple, because I have a face for radio, and a voice for silent movies! Or in other words I at least feel that I don't do well at speaking, and that my audience would be in danger of hurling if they saw my mug.

Of course I could just do audio with white boards or screen shots to back the audio… But like I said, at least in my opinion, I don’t have a very good voice.

Ah well, off to upwork www.upwork.com to see if I can’t find some sort of small gig to get my foot in the door as a proofreader… Though what I’ve seen there is very frustrating. It seems that everyone who wants someone to do that job is looking more for an ‘expert’ reader than a proofreader. After all you really don't even need a MFA to proofread effectively. At least for English you don't need such a credential. After all what you really need is to be familiar with written English and how it should be done. And that familiarity can come from a variety of sources. I like to say that my source for my knowledge of how the English language is written is from reading a large number of both fiction and non-fiction books, where I’ve had the displeasure of having spent my money on something to discover that there were spelling errors in it!

I do believe that I’m going to see if I can also convince another place to take me on as an ‘extern’ that is someone who learns while they work but from a remote location, rather than a central office. I’ll make an offer that ought to be hard for them to refuse, that is to work for a certain amount of money each week regardless of the work they shove in front of me. If past experience is any guide, I get through quite a pile of work anyway when it comes to proofreading. I guess I should go now.

Until my next post, read, rate, and follow my work please!

What happened to my ads?

Lack of posting I think, so I'm hoping that they will come back if I put more items here more regularly...
Still I tried to put up an adsense gadget here today and see no result on my main page... Oh well, research into the obtuse area of online ads is evidently required.
Not that easy really, as this is one area where my ignorance is worse than usual. Still, if I would even make phenning from this (or mils) I need to discover what happened. It used to be that you could put up a tip jar, so I suppose I'll check that out next.

Lesson 60 from The Hard Knocks School of Life

Everything eventually gets lost!

Or in other words, at some point I’ve lost my original set of these pithy observations on life. What would have been the best solution for me? E-mail it to myself. That is the poor man’s version of i-cloud or Carbonite^® which is in essence online, offsite storage. There are several drop-boxes out there that offer a gigabyte or more of storage ‘free’ as well. I should have (I thought I did, but I can’t find it) taken advantage of one of them! I have a partial novel stored as a draft (somewhat easier to find than an actual e-mail) which also works. After all I don’t know the limits of the other systems but Google^® has 15 gigabytes of storage as a ‘free’ service of their e-mail application.

I hope today’s lesson helps someone who thinks they can do without one of these services. Life happens. Guard against it to the best of your ability!

Flailing and Failing

I actually started writing this piece before the last one that I posted was begun, which is part of what goes to the title of the piece. That is that I spend a lot of time flailing about for subjects to write about. It isn't that there is nothing to write about, it is more that there is so much I could write about that I often get hung up on deciding what to write about and therefore write nothing! So with no further ado, onto my subject for the day.

As is probably pretty obvious at this point, a lot of the activity in my life amounts to flailing. Of course since flailing is undirected activity I shortly tire and of course fail. Thus the title of today’s blog: Flailing and Failing.

It is obvious from personal experience that undirected (without a plan) activity is bound to fail. Yet as I’ve noted before, I don’t even have the very basics of writing a plan. So if I can’t write a plan how can I direct my activity that I may avoid the cycle of flailing and failing that has been the signature of my life to this point?

Whew! I really don’t know how to remedy the flailing that is at least 99% of all the problems I have with life. One thing that is pretty certain to me (and ought to be to anyone else who may ask me later) is that if you don’t know where you’re going, then you end up wandering in the wilderness…! And frankly I’ve had it with wandering in the wilderness! You’d think that reading the Bible would have given me a clue that wandering in the wilderness means I’ve missed something important in my life!

And I guess that today’s blog is really about that. I know where my heart has been for some time. I want to proofread, and possibly write for a living.

It is obvious to me that unless something changes drastically this blog is little better than a hit and miss hobby, and I’m certain of this: you cannot make a living at a hit and miss hobby. It is my hope to begin to write regularly here; if for no other reason then for the practice that makes me write a certain amount each week or each day.

With that in mind I’ll get this posted and hope that my days improve.

Bad Ideas, and Answers to Them

I have to admit I’m a fan of some ideas and not of others. I’m not a fan of the idea of socialism. Frankly I hold socialism to be an evil idea that holds a lot of ideas that are inimical to human flourishing at least, and given some of what I have heard from certain sources socialism is against human existence.

At its best socialism holds being poor as a social good or a condition which may not be remedied without government intervention. I find both of those ideas (that being poor equaling a social good or that being poor as something that may not be remedied except through government action) to be reprehensible. For this reason even though my disorganization has prevented me from implementing his ideas I’m an absolute fan of Dave Ramsey daveramsey.com because he has done as much as any one in modern times to explode the myth that government action helps those who are in dire financial straits.

I’ve lately also become a fan of Dr Alex Epstein https://industrialprogress.com/ (I may be incorrect that Alex is a Doctor of Philosophy) but if he is not he works with a couple of actual doctors of philosophy. But enough of the man’s credentials, as far as I’m concerned there is far to much concentration on credentialism these days. That is that we first concentrate on a person’s credentials rather than his ideas.

I’ve long been against the ideas forwarded by the ‘green’ energy cabal. First because they ignore or discount the obvious solutions to using less ‘fossil fuels’ and second because most of their preferred solutions are at best not reasonable if our goal is human flourishing. After all ethanol requires that we grow crops then turn them into fuel for our transportation needs. And yes if our goals are human flourishing then transportation is a basic need. I’m convinced that at best ethanol is a net negative as far as a fuel goes. That is that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than is yielded in the final product.

I’m not sure I could prove that right now, however that is my feeling, that is that ethanol produces less energy than it uses. Therefore I leave that argument to people willing to do the mathematical work and research that question at this point it is only a contention of belief for me. However be that as it may, there is another and worse effect of concentrating on ethanol for transportation fuel. That is that at its very best this idea changes the use of land from producing food for humans (for humans to flourish they must have a consistent supply of food) to using it to produce crops to be turned into fuel. Even if we assume no net loss on the energy produced by making ethanol and using it for transportation, repurposing land from food for people or for food animals to producing fuel is going to interrupt the economy so far as food production goes.

I’m a fan of nuclear energy, and two designs that I’ve seen pieces on, though I don’t think I’ve seen the technical papers on either of them but the overviews I’ve gotten say that either one is much safer than current LWR (light water reactor) designs. The designs I’m speaking of are the MSR (molten salt reactor) and the PBR (pebble bed reactor) as far as I can understand (and if the summary pages I’ve read are correct) both the MSR and the PBR are meltdown proof. Which eliminates one of the major concerns when dealing with nuclear power. Now why is nuclear exciting? Because the fact is that reliable access to electricity is indicative of the ability of people to flourish, oh and by the way improves the probability that people will move from poverty to wealth!

If I were to argue at all for a ‘renewable’ fuel in the transportation sector I would argue that we must move to CNG (compressed natural gas) natural gas is easy (relatively) to produce, and as a bonus could be produced in large quantities from something that we are already throwing away. I E a ‘resource’ that we are treating as a waste product. Of what am I speaking? I’m speaking of sewage! How easily could we change our current sewage treatment systems to methane (CH₄) I don’t know? But I do know that as long as we have sewage, we could produce endless supplies of natural gas (methane) if we were willing to spend the resources necessary to do so. However at this point of time I’m guessing that turning our waste water treatment systems into methane breeders is not economically feasible.

However if I were in a place where the state has embargoed the importation of methane via pipelines I might start asking if it was possible to build a proof of concept plant for a small city. That though is not really my point today. I want to go back to the beginning of my piece and note that there is an idea (socialism) that is bad for humans as it tends to militate against human flourishing. Once you understand this then you can see a virulent strain of socialism is actually at the base of the ‘green’ energy movement. And that folks frightens me, and ought to frighten anyone who has any historical perspective, for socialism has been responsible for all sorts of human suffering in the name of making all men equal in their outcomes.

Have a good day and resist bad ideas!

Try again!

It has been a long time since I made an entry here, which I admit is one of the problems I have with writing. And I might add most of my ideas to improve my life. That is that they are diffuse and intermittent, with great emphasis on being intermittent.

Therefore I have been thinking lately on how I can take my thinking which is diffuse (unorganized mostly but lacking concentration) and intermittent (obviously given the length of time since I’ve posted here that is given) and convert them to something that is both concentrated and consistent.

Obviously, given my lack of training in this area, most of my efforts have been at best ineffectual. That is what some of my earlier writing on issues such as outlining an organizational tools has dealt with. And to be honest I still lack even those basic tools. Which makes making the next step in the effort even more difficult for in many ways I am still in a playpen watching everyone around me run and have fun and not only do I have no way I can see to escape the playpen but there has been an active effort by some to make sure I don’t leave that playpen.

Some of my efforts here have been writing about that very issue, that is leaving the playpen, the safe space if you will. For if one were to redefine safe spaces as playpens where you never allowed yourself (for it is my experience that for all of the outside influences I fight the worst enemy I have in all of my effort is myself) to experience either victory or defeat in the hope of avoiding defeat. But I have found this: If your focus is on defeat, that is what you experience, no matter how hard you try to avoid it. So how do I who have all of my life focused on avoiding defeat change my focus to achieving victory. I mean that is terrifying! If I fail badly now while not even really crawling, what will my failures when running look and feel like.

Yet I do not any longer wish to be constrained to the prison I and others have kept me in for all of my life. Where do I go from here?

First I’m going to listen to this speach again. If you have come here from somewhere else and maybe this is the first time you’ve thought about what is in my blog, then I urge you to start arguing to 100 in your life rather than arguing to zero!

George

I've often said that I would like to write every day. And further I've stated that I don't consider writing to be too much of a chore. That is the actual act of writing is not terribly difficult if I've got access to a computer, and therefore a word processor. At that point the difficulty becomes, what shall I write? And to be altogether honest it is not as if the budding author really lacks for subject matter. Rather he or she is always wondering if what has caught his eyes will appeal to the general public or if he can attract an audience to his view point.

Today I thought that I'd pause to make some observations about life. Lately I've been homeless for one reason and another. While I've been homeless it has been my privilege to be able to access at least some of the services of the local rescue mission.

While taking my meals there I've had a chance to meet some of the people who also eat there, and to observe their behavior. Some people are like myself, very appreciative of what we are given and respectful of the place and its intentions (and I might say results) and others are not, they seem to feel that the few rules that the mission imposes are a hardship beyond bearing.

However I shall for a while put aside such people and concentrate on one old man. This man's name is George. From interacting with George I've come to suspect that he is suffering from a mild case of Alzheimer’s disease. Certainly every day he sees me and asks my name.

The one amazing thing about George, though is watching everyone else who eats at the mission deal with him. I've never seen anyone treat George in a disrespectful manner. I might add that if I ever do see anyone treat George in a disrespectful manner I will probably no longer be able to eat at the mission. Part of the reason for that is that the mission, like a lot of other organizations I've seen has forgotten that there is a difference between fighting and evil. Indeed I might venture to say that if we fail to fight evil wherever we see it then we yield to evil and assure that it is able to advance its rule over the world. Indeed to fail to fight evil is in and of itself more than an expression of cowardice, it is in fact enabling evil in its intention to eliminate good.

But a discussion of good and evil is only a side line to what I wanted to say about George. You see if we believed Barack Obama we would expect to see George disrespected, if not for the fact of his illness, then for the fact that he is among the few men with a dark skin among a large group of men with light skin. But fortunately, unless Barack Obama gets his way, the world will not work the way he believes it does. For in reality most people will not disrespect the aged, not even if they are of a different 'race'.

But if Barack Obama continues to spew his line of hatred for those who do not look like him then the world, not just the USA may plunge into a time when 'racism' is rampant. When men with black skins kill men with white skins for no other reason than that they look different. I hope my fear is unfounded, but little that I've seen in the past few years gives me reason to hope. For at every turn Barack Obama has insisted that any opposition to his policies amounts to racism on the part of his opponent. Indeed he is unable to grant his opposition any intention of good, rather reserving good intentions for himself regardless of the actual results his policies produce.

Compulsion Vs Cooperation

One of the big issues we as humans have in life is the line between compulsion and cooperation. We almost know instinctively that we must cooperate or die. Yet when we try to compel someone to cooperate with us we get rebellion or something worse. Still it seems that in every generation there are those who will say that the only way to achieve cooperation is to compel people to cooperate! It seems to me that cooperation is the exact opposite of compulsion and that if one tries to obtain cooperation by force (which is the definition of compulsion) then cooperation disappears.

The question remains though if we know that cooperation is necessary to maintain society how do we obtain the cooperation? The answer to that is persuasion. Persuasion that the person being asked to do something will benefit from that which he is being asked to do.

Now it is possible to persuade people that if they steal from 'the rich' it will be to their benefit. But since theft eventually breaks down societal cooperation it does not benefit you to listen to those who would convince you that when a group of people does a thing it is more moral than when an individual does a thing.

© 2012 Vic Jones

Gun Bans are the Instruments of Tyrants

If you don’t believe the title of this article then you should learn history. After all a careful search of history will bear this out as the following quote from the socialist dictator Adolf Hitler shows. This year will go down in history. For the first time a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient and the world will follow our lead into the future.” —Adolf Hitler, 1935

I’m certain that more research into gun control laws on a world-wide basis would reveal that more tyrants than Hitler used this method to obtain total control of their nation. I know that the people of the Soviet Union were not permitted to have guns. Nor were the people of Mao's China. In England right now they are experiencing riots because gentlemen are no longer armed. And one very effective tool of the would be tyrant is to allow chaos to reign until the people demand that something, anything be done to restore order to the society.

I also note this for consideration here: In our prisons all weapons are supposed to be in the hands of the guards yet hardly a day goes by (I’d guess that in aggregate no day goes by) without someone (including an occasional guard) being stabbed. This of course does not include the fact that some prisoners will be beaten by others with fists or feet! Thus in the most controlled society that we have we see the presence of weapons and violence without weapons. Therefore we can draw the conclusion that it is not the weapons that are the cause of the violence but rather the minds of men.

If you are a woman you should be even more up in arms against any attempt to disarm you. After all the greatest indicator that you will not be raped is your ability to defend yourself. And ladies, a black-belt rarely trumps a weapon of any sort not even a knife.

Of course there are lots of laws regarding the size and type of knife you may carry as well all of which make committing a mugging easier. Or a home invasion less risky to the criminal. I join many who ask why it is that after a shooting spree by someone we want to blame the gun (which has no feet) for the mayhem caused by the deranged mind that chose to make his fellow man an object of prey.

“After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it.”
—William S. Burroughs

The invisible holocaust

Some people today all over the world claim to worship the earth. These people have as a sacrament of their worship, the sacrifice of infants. The infants they started with were the invisible ones. The ones that had not yet been born. Now they are reaching for children who have been born. See this column: http://townhall.com/columnists/brentbozell/2012/03/07/the_lefts_war_on_babies for more information.  This (abortion) has been advanced as choice or as medical care for women. What is rarely pointed out is that even under the circumstances of a well controlled and well sterilized operating room an abortion (the murder of an innocent) is dangerous to a woman.

What also is not spoken very often is that most abortion clinics (abattoirs for the unborn or temples to a false God of death) are far from a well controlled and well sterilized operating room. In fact except for the fact that they have been declared to be legal they are still almost as bad (if not worse in some cases) as the back alley abortion doctors they were supposed to replace. They replaced them but rather than making abortion safe it just made it more prevalent.

I’m certain that this piece will make some people angry. This includes some deluded women who have bought the lie of sexual freedom. Freedom rarely indicates the ability to do whatever you want especially without consequences. This is because if society does not enforce consequences then nature surely will. Indeed the only thing that women being unwise about the use of their genitals has done is increase is the childishness of men as the men have been able to get that which most men want most without that which men fear most.

What I mean by that last statement is that most men will do most anything for sexual contact with a woman. Most men when they are honest fear commitment to one woman the most. This is because commitment to one woman prevents them from plowing the field next door so to speak. Now we all know that there will be some who will violate their commitment for whatever reason. This does not invalidate the idea that we should hold up the ideal of the kept commitment as best. Indeed the fact of violated commitment proves the necessity of consistently pointing to what we should be doing rather than saying, ‘well no one can possibly do that,’ we should say, ‘yes we have failed to do that, now it is time to get busy and try for the ideal again.’ This is because if we strive to be better people rather than settling for failure and accepting that we will never reach the ideal we become closer to the ideal. While accepting failure, especially saying that because we cannot reach perfection we should not try leads to worse and worse conditions for everyone.

© 2012 Vic Jones