A Message about Islam for Feminists

Women, learn to speak the truth about Islam.

Another sane woman's voice.

While we're talking about leftist women, give a listen to The Patriot Nurse

A man's perspective

Pardon the subtitles, but France is waking up to the truth

Elephant Mountain Maine

This morning I heard the news that Dante Bulli, the pilot of the B-52 which crashed on Elephant Mountain late in January 1963 passed away last month. I'll link to an ABC article for more information. My condolences to his family and friends.

Aviation Safety Network incident number 48333 covers this crash incident and identifies the airplane as a B-52C number 53-0406.
Later in the same month another B-52 crashed in New Mexico. Aviation Safety Network incident number 48392 identifies the airplane in this New Mexico crash as a B-52E number 57-0018.
Seven airmen lost their lives in the Elephant Mountain crash. Another two airmen lost their lives in the New Mexico crash according to these ASN reports.

Just now I found this incident report, again at the ASN website, incident number 48295, describing a follow-up incident in January of 1964 where a B-52H model on loan back to Boeing to test stress from low-level radar avoidance flights lost its vertical stabilizer and rudder but miraculously and at great risk to the crew after six more hours of flight landed at Blytheville Air Force Base, Arkansas.

The second survivor of the January 1963 Elephant Mountain crash, Gerald Adler, ejected from one of the upward-ejecting seats and survived the fall despite the fact that his parachute never deployed. Adler was not sitting in his usual navigator position on the lower deck. That seat and the seat beside it eject downward. Three seats on the upper deck eject upward and Adler was in the third upward-ejecting seat.

Google Earth shows the trailhead for this crash site at 45 degrees 31 minutes 40.5 seconds north latitude, 69 degrees 26 minutes 04 seconds west longitude. This location is 6.8 miles northeast of the house that I grew up in. The crash took place probably during my bus ride home from school when I was in 8th grade. My house overlooked Lower Wilson Pond and several mountains including the west face of Elephant Mountain where the crash site is located. Two large picture windows in my home faced the direction of the crash but unfortunately for the crash survivors, we didn't see the smoke. It was a brutally cold January day with strong northerly winds blowing plumes of drifting snow across the ice of Wilson Pond. In the days that followed rescue helicopters from
Dow Air Force Base in Bangor flew directly over our house on their flight from the Greenville airport to the rescue site at the base of the mountain. Rescue crews followed logging roads up the side of the mountain to the crash site.

I first visited the crash site in May, 1963. Air Force search teams were still searching the wreckage. I can still remember the strong smell of jet fuel. At that time there were no roads closer than the old logging camp location on North Brook, the spot where now the Elephant Mountain access roads cross North Brook. The rest of the trip was an uphill hike on eroded logging roads.

I believe I took my first pictures of the crash site in the spring of 1968 when I was home on leave from the Air Force although it may have been when I came home in May 1970 before my deployment to England. Back in 1963 I remember hearing stories of wreckage being hauled through town but I never witnessed any of that. What amazed me on my first trips to the site was that the only recognizable part of the fuselage was the tail gunner's section which remains to this day on site. Broad flat sections of the wings, intact landing gear with tires, heavily damaged, and as I recall all eight jet engines were scattered in a field of smaller debris along a northerly path downslope through charred hardwoods crossing several logging paths that traversed that section  of the mountain. Years later I learned that the vertical stabilizer was still on the ground on the far side of the mountain although to this day I have not been there to see it.

Some of the wreckage was salvaged when the paper company built permanent gravel roads into the area but a local snowmobile group organized an effort to recognize this site as an historical monument rescuing the remaining wreckage from further salvage. The site is accessible by snowmobile in winter but summer visitors can drive by car (no all-wheel-drive required) to a trail which meanders for a couple hundred yards up through the debris field.

I worked on the B-52H model at Grand Forks Air Force Base and briefly on the D model in Fort Worth, Texas as an avionics technician. A few of the men in my shop flew along on some of the training missions but I was transferred out of that work before I had any such opportunity. Until today I thought the H model didn't have that vertical stabilizer problem in low-level flight. I knew that on earlier models of the B-52 the vertical stabilizer was on a hinge such that it could be folded over sideways giving the plane the clearance it needed to fit inside a maintenance hanger. From 1968 I remember older B-52 models used for training on the flight line at Chanute Air Force Base with their tails folded down. Later models didn't have this feature and I always thought these later models were safe during low level flight but clearly I was mistaken.

Safer Motorcycle

That seems like an oxymoron to me, the phrase "safer motorcycle". Aren't all motorcycles sort of inherently unsafe? Don't they just plain want to turn over sideways and dump the flesh of their riders' bodies onto the road? I suppose that's one of the reasons why we have started seeing those flashy three-wheeler things driving around that from almost any perspective look like some sort of cringingly unstable sports car.

Wouldn't it be safer of they added a 4th wheel to those things?

So here's my question:

Why aren't there any four-wheel motorcycles? Would that be politically incorrect or something?

Liberalism

We seem to be on a roll tonight. Now my overly-simplistic definition of Liberalism. All this debate going on at all these high institutions of learning and what do we get? A muddy understanding of only semi-defined words and concepts.

So let's try simplifying Liberalism, which many are starting to think is a modern-age plague.

Making it simple...

Liberalism is the belief that a parent's right to teach his or her children discipline and respect for elders and authority should be severely curtailed.

Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism

There seems to be some debate about what islamophobia is, how it should be defined, what sorts of beliefs and activities qualify.

I like to keep things as simple as possible in my mind probably because my mind, when it comes to stuff like this, is so tiny but let's give this a try. So I say to myself, self, define what islamophobia means to you.

Islamophobia is the fear of offending Muslims by speaking the truth about their religion because we have been conditioned to believe that if you tell a Muslim the truth about his religion he will be offended and become violent and abusive.

I am finding that if I use this definition, much of what is said now in Europe and in the USA makes more sense.

Anti-Semitism has a similar definition in my overly simplistic mind.

Anti-Semitism is the belief that if you speak the truth about Israel and Zionism or about the role Jews have played in history, you should be covertly retaliated against.

Immigration Comedy and All That Jazz

I've been watching old movies again, well one old movie anyway, Shipping News. A common thread in that movie is writing catchy headlines for newspaper articles. I'll keep working on it.

Normally there isn't much for headlines on Sunday morning until the Sunday morning network talk shows air but today seems to be an exception. You see, there was a nuclear bomb dropped right in the heart of the free world and the fallout has already tainted life here on the planet forever.

Well, figuratively anyway. As in it might as well have happened that way considering the attention given in this morning's headlines.

It seems the whole world is in an uproar because the President of the United States thought he had the authority to actually say who can and who can not enter into this country by enforcing existing law.

The audacity!!!

What could he possibly have been thinking! Who does he think he is, the President???

I could be wrong but I'm thinking maybe there is a growing population of Americans who are beginning to imagine that immigration is becoming a problem for people accustomed to living in freedom in a free world.

And I'm thinking those people, that growing population of people who do value freedom, aren't the problem.

I'm thinking the problem is that there aren't enough of those people living in countries where freedom is still tolerated to maintain freedom itself.

Maybe I need to qualify my use of the word "freedom" here since in true Orwellian society words can have multiple - even conflicting and opposing - meanings.

When I speak of freedom I'm not talking about the freedom to shoot oneself in the head. I'm not talking about a society's right to eliminate freedom from its midst. I'm even inclined to think that maybe in the contract we made with government when we set up our governments there may be clauses that demand that we don't give ourselves or our governments the right to overthrow our government by overpopulating our nation with people who prefer not to be free, people like the kinds of Muslims who prefer Sharia Law.

But that's just me...
and a few million others...
Nobody else seems to get my point.

And it's all those nobody else's that all these headlines this morning seem to be aimed at.

I spent a good part of the day yesterday educating myself as to the nature of this situation we find ourselves in here in the West, the problem with welcoming immigrants who don't accept our values, the problem of this looming societal suicide of Western Civilization. My teacher for the day was born Irish Catholic just about the same time in world history as myself. He has been a career comedian so he has a way with surprising his audience with the unexpected. Recently he has focused on this rising trend in Europe and in Britain.

His work is so controversial that YouTube has actually found cause to censor him.
But he's back!

Google Pat Condell

Al Jazeera Relocates Cuba

I woke this morning to a Google-featured news article in Al Jazeera with an unusual tilt:
Hassan Rouhani: Now is not the time to build walls

Aside from being the most Orwellian news article I have ever come across, leaders in Iran calling for more respect for free trade by America, part of the new propaganda campaign against Caucasian males, there was an unusual component in the map this article included which shows the path of the projected US/Mexico border wall that President Trump wants to get started on.

It appears to me that Al Jazeera (whose logo clearly appears in the lower right just beneath the island of Cuba) has repositioned said island of Cuba westward by hundreds of miles, just to get it into the picture.

Oh and since when did Middle-Eastern Islam become a race?

As an aside...
I keep coming across tiny little errors in grammar in many of the false news propaganda articles recently published on the Internet. They are the sort of errors that you normally would never see in professional writing because they are so easily caught by a skilled editor's proofreading. Maybe it's just that so much of what we read now is composed in microtext on smartphones, but even so, why are the errors not caught before publishing?

Here's the error found this morning in the text of this article. Quoting the article:

On Thursday, one of Iran's most popular actresses said she would boycott next month's Academy Awards in protest at the ban.

Protest of the ban perhaps, or protest against, but protest at? How often do you see that in professional writing? For me at least it interrupts the flow of thought.

Since nearly all glitches like this one seem to appear in anti-Trump propaganda I'm beginning to think this is a good way to spot propaganda. It bypasses the editor's desk.

Once Upon a Time I Had Faith in Women

Watch this all the way through

The Demon of Relentless Righteousness

The greatest threat to Peace on Earth is war, wouldn't you agree?

I've spent most of my adult life believing that. I graduated from high school in 1967, just before "high" school took on a whole new meaning. The war in Vietnam was ramping up. I remember notices on bulletin boards in school informing us up-and-coming adults that when we turn 18 we were required by law under the threat of severe punishment to register for the draft - the Selective Service. I felt frightened by the whole prospect, needless to say. Either I register and risk death in Vietnam or I don't and face certain prison - in a "free" country no less!
I had already made my choice not to attend college, not only for financial reasons although those loomed huge, but also because I felt unprepared. I was an especially slow reader. I turned 18 in my senior year and obediently registered for the draft. After working through the summer I realized that I needed to do something if I didn't want to be an infantryman risking my own death in Vietnam killing and maiming people I was programmed to believe were enemies of American freedom.

Little did I realize at the time that I was being choked by righteousness, or rather by American self-righteousness, but that's exactly what was happening.

My solution was to enlist in the US Air Force so that's what I did.
That's not something I look back at with pride. I consider myself to be incredibly fortunate to have been born in the United States of America, but that was a dark time in American history, a permanent stain that will never be erased, will never fade away, will not be forgotten by me until my brain has ceased functioning rationally.

My own self-righteous American pride took a deep hit in the four years I remained on active duty. It wasn't that I lost my American pride, my pride in our nation. It was the realization that I was making a sacrifice for a cause in which I had no say whatsoever other than disobedience which, just as with the draft, would bring me certain severe punishment, possible even the lifelong stain of prison time and a dishonorable discharge from the military if I failed to submit. For over three and a half years I counted the days remaining before I could be free again.

Shortly after my "honorable" discharge in a time of deep post-military depression I became what was then openly and proudly referred to as a "born again" Christian falling into the hands of what was then called Fundamentalist Christianity. I was raised as a Christian, just not as a "saved" and "fundamentalist" and "born again" Christian.
Little did I realize at the time that just as I had been raised to believe in the righteousness of America, I was submitting myself to being groomed to the righteousness of right-wing religion. It took twenty years for me to come to that realization. Well that's stretching it a bit. My conscience kept reminding me that something about all that religion was - let's say for simplicity - fishy?

My Christian experience programmed me to believe that self-righteousness is a sin, an affront to God.
I couldn't agree more.
But my conscience wouldn't let me escape the unresolvable conflict between the sinfulness of self-righteous belief and the Godliness of Christian righteousness itself. I mean, think about this, is it even possible to believe in righteousness without actually being self-righteous? I DON'T THINK SO!

Being righteous means being right or moral. Being self-righteous means thinking you are more right or more moral than someone else. Is there any difference there at all without fudging reality? I mean to be righteous you need to submit to some authority whether it be God or Allah or Humanism or any of a dozen other moral belief systems.

To not submit is to be "free".

For someone living in a free country such as the United States to submit to an undefined or loosely defined authority is pure Orwellian. Be honest now but what authority is not either undefined or loosely defined? What authority is so pure as to not be subject to skepticism by a mind seeking freedom?
What belief system delivers freedom from error?
Islam?
Christianity?
Judaism?
Buddhism?
Secular Humanism?
The music system?
Rolling Stone magazine?
Science?
Politics?

Muslims would claim that submission to Islam, Allah, the Quran, and Sharia Law is the correct answer to that question.
Christians would claim (and then probably turn right around and immediately deny) that submission to God, Christ, and Jesus as well as to the Holy Bible is the answer.
Humanists would claim that submission to higher learning and science is the closest thing there is to the correct answer, that all other beliefs are anything but "right" because of the overwhelming evidence that belief in the supernatural is irrational, destructive, unproven, and self-defeating.

Each belief system requires the believer to submit to its chosen authority.

But consider this:
Who gets to do the choosing? Why of course the believer makes that choice. The believer gets to choose, whether freely or by coercion, which authority is right. Each "self" chooses its own form of "righteousness" and there lies the conflict. If the self gets to make that choice, how is it not self-righteousness?

So what am I saying. Am I saying it's just plain erroneous to be righteous in the first place?

ummmmmmm...
Yup.

It's never correct to believe that any belief is right. It's always correct to free your mind of belief and open your mind to seek a better understanding.

Think of righteousness as a demon plaguing mankind.

Freedom is freedom from the presumed authority of any belief system.

Suspend belief.
Suspend disbelief right along with it.
Then seek a better understanding.

President Trump

Donald Trump, Republican, 45th President of the United States, now in his 5th day in office...

What's been keeping me from posting about Trump?
Cowardice?
Cognitive dissonance?
Both maybe?
Cowardice in the sense that Bernie and Hillary supporters seem to be so disconnected from what I generally think of as "truth" that it actually seems dangerous now to speak your mind if you believe the Donald.
Which I do...
At least I do way more than I have been able to believe any President since maybe JFK.

But why do the BS&HRC people seem so disconnected to me? Bernie Sanders's message this past political season had appeal. He was making a lot of sense to me but I've never really thought of myself as a Communist, never trusted Communists, so it troubled me that he was of that persuasion. Hillary Clinton on the other hand came across to me as a Neocon stooge, probably CIA. It seemed to me that every time she spoke to the voters she lied about one thing or another. That was long before the WikiLeaks email releases made it appear to me and to many others that she was corrupt to the core.

Find a Liberal who is willing to admit either of those realities? I dare you to go look!

This vast chasm between what is true and what the Left won't admit to leaves me sensing danger. It seems safer to not go public with my perspective rather than face the wrath of an irrational populace.
The existence of these two polar opposite realities triggers cognitive dissonance in my thinking, a high level of stress that leads me to think I should question my own reality even though I know that my perceptions are well-founded. The Left here in America last year decided they wanted a covert and seriously nasty woman as their President, as the so-called leader of the free world, rather than a Communist.
And that was before the conventions! Way before the election!

What has happened since the conventions is even worse.
If you don't know what I am talking about, it's probably because you rely on the "Mainstream Media" for your "facts"
In a recent Rolling Stone interview, President Obama made this comment:
***
Well, the most important thing that I'm focused on is how we create a common set of facts. That sounds kind of abstract. Another way of saying it is, how do we create a common story about where we are.
***
I mean, since when are facts abstract? What makes a story more acceptable than hearing and studying actual facts?
I'll tell you what.
Facts imply non-fiction.
Stories can be as fictional as the storyteller wants them to be.
When it comes to perceiving reality, this is the perfect example of what makes this political era so conducive to cognitive dissonance.
Nothing either needs to be or is expected to be true or real. It just needs to be something we hold in a common consensus and you just aren't American if you don't agree with the "curated journalism" (again Obama's words), the mainstream media's concocted story.
The  "curated journalism" version of who Donald Trump is, what he actually means when he speaks, is that Trump lies, lies, lies, lies. I hear it every time I tune in to "curated journalism". I especially hear it when I listen to NPR. Listening to NPR turns my stomach now just as much as Fox News did back in the George W. Bush Neocon era. Everything is spun to fit the biased narrative. No attempt is made to actually practice professional journalism where the point is not to tell a political story but rather the point is to give the audience as faithful an understanding as possible, you know, stick to the facts and give us a thorough understanding, not an editorial perspective or  "curated journalism" consensus. The way Mainstream Media reports the stories they tell now simply has to be intended to induce cognitive dissonance. It certainly isn't aimed at reporting the facts or helping us understand. Instead it's about making us believe the worst.
As long as we the people of the United States of America believe  "curated journalism", we will never understand our new President. I for one find it both challenging and rewarding to understand what he says without bias, suspend disbelief and just hear him from his own perspective.

Update 1/25/17
My goodness, no sooner do I point out NPR's ceaseless accusations against the President than I hear a refutation right on NPR. This morning, actually. A female correspondent was answering questions why she didn't call the President out as the liar he is and she explained that the definition of a lie infers intent and nobody knows what Trump's intent is. So she used other words instead in her reporting of the President's false claims. She did mention that there wasn't a consensus in her organization concerning the use of the word liar. Actually just before I heard this lady I had heard a Maine Public Radio news anchor use the term lie with reference to President Trump so what I said still stands. I still am hearing Public Radio call President Trump a liar.

Second Update Today! 1/25/17
Case in point...
Only recently have I become aware of Tucker Carlson's amazing ability to think on his seat, so to speak, with an admirable sense of humor but lacking the kind of vindictive faux superiority of - for instance - Jon Stewart. Here in this interview with a liberal writer Carlson skillfully points out what I am talking about. They discuss Kellyanne Conway whom I have come to admire as one of the straightest shooters in politics in recent decades, an honest and trustworthy person.

Here's a YouTube link for this interview