Married!?!!?

I remember watching the first interview European blonde Elisabeth did with Vermont hick Styx and thinking hey there's something going on here. Styx has been a daily staple for me but there was a brief pause this week, like maybe a day missing Styx, and then this!

Hello From Amsterdam! With Elisabeth's Philosophy (My Wife!)

The Banned

Here's my favorite interviewer interviewing one of my most favorite commentators fresh off the wires today. Anyone who thinks social media is innocent of anything ought to watch this talk.

The Candace Owens Show: Paul Joseph Watson

Of course social media is being used to spread Socialist propaganda. What's to doubt about that?

Sorry about What?

An idea just came to me for a good slogan for a t-shirt. It would have, "Sorry about What?" boldly blazoned on the front. It would catch the eye of all those people who keep saying, "I'm sorry" to me whenever I cross their path in a Walmart or a grocery store. Maybe I'd irk them before they even get a chance to irk me by saying they're sorry we just crossed paths or they're sorry I just came too close to them.

There's already far too much sorrow in the world. Why cheapen the word by using it every chance you get!

Population

I've written this before but growing up in an isolated small town the way I did I never had the experience of being around a huge number of strangers even after venturing through Chicago and New York City and even London back in my late teens and early twenties. It took driving south through New Jersey out of New York with my wife to realize how many people there are in the world. It's not like "back home" where everyone either knows you or knows someone who does. You are somebody when you're downtown and most of the people you see aren't strangers. Driving south through New Jersey just the oncoming traffic has to contain the equivalent of at least half the population of Maine and you can't even see any of them, their cars are too far away from you but you are just a tiny speck to them as well, a tiny stranger a long ways from home.

Well this travel video stirs those feelings. I really enjoy watching this guy's travel videos and I swear he has more courage than all the stunt morons on YouTube. He goes where you never see those people going.

Anyway...

Indigo Traveler
BANGLADESH IS INCREDIBLE | Exploring Dhaka

Forgiveness

You know that you have forgiven somebody when you can trust them again.

I've struggled with this for years. I know I'm supposed to forgive people who have offended me but how can I forgive somebody who I just can't trust because I know they will offend me again the same way they did before. There are quite a few people I know or have known who fit into this irony. There's my now-deceased half-brother. There's my mother-in-law for sure. There's my covertly narcissistic wife. I've known lots of "born again" type Christians who don't deserve my trust and at least half of the world's population of Muslims, or so it seems sometimes, can't be trusted. They hate us. There's this new wave of Socialists who claim not to be Commies but are. How can a forgiving person forgive these people.

To top it off, there's the fact that "forgive" and "forgiveness" and "forgiven" and the rest of the words derived from them are all words that are basically undefined meaning their meaning depends on each individual using them.

Well in the interest of clarity - and sanity - I have decided to define forgiveness using a concept much easier to relate to, namely trust. Who can you trust. Who can't you trust. And how can you forgive somebody you can't trust. It turns out you can't. If you know that somebody is untrustworthy then you just plain haven't forgiven them and can't.

Problem solved.

Religion

An off-the-cuff definition of religion came to me this morning:

Religion is belief in words that you do not understand.

Satan's Lair

I have just come to the realization that Satan's lair is the heart of a narcissist.

Virtue

What on earth am I doing writing about virtue at quarter to six in the morning on the Fourth of July?

Virtue is a very familiar and very strange word. Dictionary definitions of the word don't begin to do it justice. Virtue appears to be something that it isn't. Someone once wrote a book titled The Book of Virtues. I can remember a general sense that the book's author didn't deserve much respect from liberal-minded people because it was, how to put this, it was self-righteous. It looked at virtue from a right-wing perspective, or so it seemed. Certainly the author was associated with right-wing politics.

Traditionally, or at least through most of my life up until just recently, virtue was something you went to church for. Or at least you went to church and you accepted church doctrines (whether you understood them or not) and you felt good about yourself. The person with virtue was a better person than the person without it and the virtuous person was drawn to want to be a better person because it just plain feels good to think of yourself as a better person than the lower classes of people. So there was this nagging negative connotation to virtue, that it was related to self-righteous thinking and was thus hypocritical.

While all of that still exists, and thrives even, and makes for a good and even lavish living for some very righteous-seeming people, virtue has recently taken on an entirely new facet. Virtue is now something the political Left excels at. If you can look at somebody else and convince yourself that they are racist, then you are the virtuous one. Of the two of you, you are the better person. If you can convince yourself that people are wrong if they think that out-of-control immigration is dangerous and is a form of discrimination and that discrimination victimizes people, you can side with the victims and feel virtuous.

Virtue is the positive feeling that you get when you convince yourself that you are better than somebody else.

There's only one itsy bitsy little problem...

Conceit isn't a virtue.