Christianity

Heinlein and Independence Day

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Today, three days after Independence Day, is the 37th anniversary of the death of Robert Heinlein, who would have a thing or two to say about revolution in our time.

For some years now I’ve thought civic holidays in the US should have, whenever possible, a specific conceptual focus, as Thanksgiving Day already does. MLK Jr Day should be devoted to game theory, Columbus Day to learning about discovery and exploration in general, and so on.

The question we should openly discuss every July 4th is: are there prices too high to save the United States? My formulation is from Heinlein’s Guest of Honor speech, “The Future Revisited,” to the XIXth World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle in 1961:

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The Long Awaited Fix

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At long last, like a decades-long grumbling appendix, the radical Islamic mullahcracy which has ruled and ruined Iran for slightly longer than my daughter has been alive, is being suitably and righteously dealt with.

By the Israelis, and not the US, but I’ll take what satisfaction I can get and be grateful. Business is being settled at long last and after more than 40 years. The running sore of the Middle East, the funder, inspiration and director for so much terrorism against the non-Islamic world is being debrided and sanitized. I honestly wonder why that has taken so long, knowing full well of the specific animus that the mullahs of Iran had against both Israel and the US. I guess that we all had other fish to fry, metaphorically speaking, over the last four decades; settling the hash of the ayatollahs just wasn’t at the top of our ‘to-do’ list. As a member of the military and most often stationed overseas, I had plenty of reason for Iran-sponsored/funded terrorism to be on my mind, after the violent takeover of the US embassy in Teheran, and the holding hostage of embassy staff, as well as Americans who just happened to be in the wrong place on that day.

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True Colors

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I have to hand it to the Great Orange One, and his cohorts – The Donald (or his staff and advisors) have a supernatural gift for deliberately or unconsciously goading individuals and establishments into revealing their true unsavory, appalling and unashamed selves. It’s been an eye-opener … although some of the revelations really aren’t much of a surprise. Everyone paying the least bit of attention to coverage of Joe Biden’s public appearances over the last half-dozen years saw that yes, indeedy, the President was wandering farther and farther off into dementia-land. Now prominent members of what I am now calling “The White House Press Corpse” claim unconvincingly that Biden’s dissolving mental condition all came as a shocking surprise to them, and the truth about that was deliberately concealed from them by his staff/doctors/the Tooth Fairy. It’s clear now – if it wasn’t before – that the official Washington Press Corpse has been paid the big bucks to be the Democrat Party in-house stenographer, and not to venture a toe into any circumstance where they might just stumble and fall over an inconvenient fact or two. Credibility of the establishment media with a good part of the news-consuming public is right down there with fast-talking hucksters advertising cheap Chineseium on late-night cable channels, and guys in flashy coats selling aluminum siding or reclaimed used cars. We’ve established what they are, and now we know what the price is.

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Francis

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Pope Francis has died. Two things lept to mind.

First, JD Vance was one of the last people to see him alive.

Second, while the rule is to wait a decent interval before speaking ill of the dead, his leaving of this world had been expected for a long time, and it seems many observers already had obituaries in the can regarding his legacy. So I will add my thoughts.

I’ll start off by stating up front that I am not a Catholic. I have a number of Catholics in my immediate family and circle, so the Church is not alien to me and I have a great deal of both familiarity and sympathy for it.

The next thought is that institutions work best when they remain “tethered” to their founding principles. A balloon that is connected by a tether to the ground may rise or fall, but it isn’t going to go floating off into the wild blue yonder.

One of the problems we have in this country is that our political institutions and culture, while superficially remaining the same, have become untethered from the founding principles of natural rights and social contract.

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In At the Beginning

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Reading here and there about what can only be viewed as corruption of various charitable agencies by an apparent flood of government dollars, I am certain now that I was inadvertently present at the very start of that corruption – a warping of charitable concern towards refugees, as well as non-refugee migrants, the homeless, the addicted and the otherwise socially maladjusted. I was a college student in my junior year at a no-name public university, at the time of the fall of the South Vietnamese in 1975. My adolescent years had been haunted by the ongoing war in Vietnam, a war painted in the most horrific colors by the then-extent national media. I grew up in a place, a time and in a class of Americans where men were much more likely to be drafted and sentenced to serve for a year in what was painted by the national establishment media as a pointless, endless, thankless war.

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