Morning Entry

 

February 5, 2023/0243

The picture at left was taken at the Salvation Army homeless shelter in Savannah. I lived here for 9 months before I found a job, saved money, and moved into an apartment. If you're wondering why it took so long, it's because they require you to wait 6 months-a veritable vacation from life itself-in order to do a lot of thinking and praying about what, exactly, got you to this point. Meanwhile, they put you to work around the shelter 40 hrs. a week (I worked in their warehouse, and did a stint as a front desk clerk).

But today, I am no longer homeless, working a full-time job at a local hospital about a mile and a half from my apartment. Today, I am grateful to the Salvation Army in Savannah for helping me get back on my feet again.

Victor Davis Hanson's lecture Hillsdale College

“Mr. Hanson, an accomplished classicist and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is one of the great amalgamators of American political writing. He has a particular gift for bringing together a dizzying array of events, controversies and ideas and making sense of them by advancing a coherent argument that incorporates thousands of years of history… Mr. Hanson hits hard, but I don’t find his analysis unfair or partisan. There is enormous value, moreover, in thinking about toxic political developments not as problems of the moment but as destructive pathologies to which all societies are prone at all times.”―Wall Street Journal

Morning Entry

by John Russell Turner

I've been working at St. Joseph's hospital here in Savannah, GA for 8 and a half months. The people who run the place call my job "environmental technician"; but I call it "porter", because I take the trash out and dispose of things around the hospital. Here's how a typical day for me goes: I clock in, and head to our department office for a meeting. After the meeting is over-usually 15 minutes or so-I go to the chute room and empty the trash bins there. Afterwards, I go to seven different wards in the hospital and pick up their trash. Around mid-day I go up to the seventh floor and work my way down, picking up cardboard and biohazard on the way. So I walk about 15 miles a day, and three miles going back and forth to work from my apartment. It's not strenuous work, but the constant walking around the hospital gets a bit tough on my feet. I have a sturdy pair of walking shoes, however, and so it's all good.

I woke up a bit early this AM, so I have some free time to write this. Perhaps later I'll look more into a couple of AI programs I've been interested in. 

Politics and the English Language

by George Orwell

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

SONG AND DANCE MAN

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP IN THE SEVENTIES, I (and most of my peers) thought of Bob Dylan as someone our parents listened to, along with others like Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, and the hundreds of bands popular in the 1960's. That in itself was enough to relegate Dylan to the "uncool" list, as far as we were concerned. Besides, most of us were busy listening to bands like Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Foreigner, AC/DC, et al...and Dylan had an air of being highbrow, of being "relevant" and "meaningful", which alone was enough to make that fabled teen-age list of the uncool.

Elian Gonzalez Revisited

It seems like so long ago now, but I remember when I first became really interested in politics. It was the Elian Gonzalez affair, about twenty or so years ago now, that caught my attention.

Individual Human Rights

by John Russell Turner

For Erich Ferger

THERE ARE ONLY THREE RIGHTS which every man, woman, and child possess, regardless of their gender, skin color, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, or political orientation:

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

-United States Declaration of Independence

Let's recap: the three rights are: 1. the right to life, to live; 2. the right to liberty; and 3. the right, i.e., the liberty or the freedom, to pursue that which makes one happy, as long as in so doing, you do not kill, do physical harm, nor steal from anyone. These rights can not, must not, be taken away from any person without legal due process (they are inalienable), and for violation of clearly defined, morally objective laws. 

Furthermore, these rights are not granted by man, by the state, nor by any human group or society, nor by any individual. They are granted by the Creator,  by God. And if you don't believe in God, these rights are intrinsic in our nature as human beings. We are literally born with these rights. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Period.

All the other so-called "rights" we hear about, the alleged right to a job, housing, medical care, et al, are not given to us by God, nor by our nature as human beings. These are not rights, they are entitlements, usually given to people by a government agency. Such entitlements require the transfer of economic goods (jobs, services, money, and stuff) from the producer of those goods to the taker of those goods. If citizen A is told he has a right to a job, and so decides to collect on this right, citizen B must give it to him. If citizen B refuses, then by any number of methods (threat of imprisonment, fines, and ultimately, death if he refuses hard enough), the government will force him to do so. This is clearly immoral, because it violates citizen B's rights to hold property, his right to pursue his happiness without being literally robbed in order to supply someone else's "right" to his property. The right to own, and to freely dispose of property is a necessary corollary to the right to live, and to pursue happiness. This is because of man's nature, of his means of survival. He or she builds a house, buys a car and clothes, and plants, raises, or buys food. These things are his, for him to dispose of as she, or he sees fit, so that he might live a reasonably happy life.

Socialism, in essence, is parasitism, but of a weird, bizarre kind because it is human parasitism upon other humans. Cannibalism. Furthermore, it offers the hideous spectacle of evil masquerading as good, since it all depends not on the moral and just, but on violence and death. Such is the moral sewer underneath the concept of socialistic, man- granted rights.

On a personal note, this is why I believe in God, why I believe that all of my rights come from Him, and not from the state. When rights come from the state, hell ensues, and we get rivers of blood and corpses stacked on top of each other in ditches.