The Crowhill Journal

Now we’re giving them tanks? This is a dangerous escalation. What’s going to happen when a Russian missile kills some of the U.S. advisers and trainers we’re sending along with those tanks?

Don’t forget that Hunter worked for a Ukrainian company called Burisma, and there are reasonable allegations that some of Hunter’s absurd salary was going to Joe.

Or is it just a coincidence that Hunter got a sweet job in Ukraine with Joe’s influence, and now we’re sending billions to Ukraine?

Is Zelenskyy threatening to reveal some juicy details if Joe doesn’t give him tanks?

William’s comment on the classified documents issue reminded me (again) that when evaluating a politician we have to force ourselves out of “the narrative.” (I dislike that phrase, but it’s useful here.)

Politicians want us to evaluate them by their stands on issues, implying that they’re principled people who are trying to be true to a philosophy or a cause. No matter how many times their behavior shows us that isn’t always or even mostly true, we fall for it again and again. They use an appeal to an issue to get the power to do what they want to do, which is to get more power and more money.

I’m not claiming that every politician is just a power-hungry sociopath who uses his office to line his pockets, but that tendency is always there to one degree or another, and it’s most certainly a major part of the system they work within.

Our attitude towards politicians should be about the same as the attitude of a prison warden towards the very talented prisoner who does the accounting. He has useful skills and is doing an essential task, but you’d be a fool to trust him. You have to have systems in place to keep him from cheating you.

A problem we face in America today is that many of those systems that are supposed to be keeping a wary eye on these snakes have themselves become part of the system. It’s like the police in the areas of Mexico that are controlled by the cartels.

Jefferson was a bit of a hot-head when he said all that business about nurturing the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, but there’s a kernel of truth in it.

A benefit of thinking (according to some guy that Jordan Peterson often quotes, whose name escapes me) is that our ideas can die rather than us.

We need to apply that sort of logic to all these alleged checks and balances, which get corrupted from time to time. We need to shake them up, change them, break the system and recreate it with new checks and balances. Otherwise the mafia/cartel/swamp will simply find ways to make those things part of the system.

There’s a lot of political bickering about how the Trump case is different than the Biden or Hillary case (or vice versa), but I seem to recall that Congress has been leaking classified information for decades. IOW, as much as I love the fact that Biden is being dragged through the mud right now, there is a larger problem. We’re simply not protecting our secrets well enough.

Mike Pence: Classified documents found at former vice-president’s home

John Wayne Jew phoned in from sunny California to join Pigweed and Crowhill on this one. It was a lot of fun.

This month in woke with John Wayne Jew

There’s a saying that every time an old person dies, it’s like a library burning down. All that knowledge is lost.

It’s easy to imagine a 70-year-old thinking, “What’s the point of learning something new? I’ll be gone before too long, and it will all be for nothing.”

In one sense, this is like Woody Allen’s concern that the sun will eventually destroy the Earth. “What’s the point of it all?” he wonders. But he could just as well ask what is the relevance to him, right now, of what happens millions of years in the future.

So one answer to the question “why learn things now, if I’m just going to die and it will all evaporate,” is that you’ll enjoy it now.

In that sense, “Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die” takes a narrow view of what’s fun to do right now.

Here’s another way to look at the question.

Some people say that the history of the universe is “God getting to know himself.” The idea is that all consciousness is somehow connected to a bigger scheme. I used to find the idea rather silly, but there’s something to it.

You could ask, for example, how God knows what it’s like to be this or that, and one answer (which I am not advocating) is that the very definition of God is that He’s the sum total of all experience. IOW, every conscious experience of every conscious thing is somehow part of the mind of God.

Stated that way, it sounds New Age-ish and a little ridiculous, but it’s actually embedded in the debates over God’s foreknowledge.

One question that Reformed theologians used to ask was “When did God know that man would fall?” — i.e., before or after he decided to create the world. IOW, did he decide to create the world, and then foresaw that man would fall, or did he consider creating the world, saw that man would fall, and then decided to create it anyway?

I think the question is a little silly because we’re imposing an “in time” perspective on a being who exists outside of time. Still, it reminds me of the “God getting to know himself” perspective.

Imagine the state of things before creation. All of existence is simply the Trinity living in a state of perfect love. In that reality, does it make any sense at all to ask “what does it feel like to be a 9-year-old girl, starving to death in Ethiopia?”

There are no girls, there is no time, there is no starvation, and there is no Ethiopia. The question makes no sense until the concept of creation is broached.

Once again, the question imposes a time-bound perspective on a being that is not bound by time, but I hope you’re starting to see the point. God’s perfect knowledge of every detail of creation only makes sense once He decides to create, or at least considers the idea of creating. In that way, every detail of creation is, in a sense, “God getting to know himself.” Or at least “God becoming omniscient with reference to the creation.”

Perhaps you could reduce it all down to this infra-lapsarian perspective. “God only knows what I’m experiencing right now because I’m experiencing it.” Which is not that far removed from the New Agey “the universe is God getting to know himself.”