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The coming dark age, part 2,322

The first story below tells us that a significant number of voters in New York are so ignorant of the political process that they haven’t the slightest idea who is running for president. The second story tells us that we have decided to use the principles of western civilization as the basis for a suicide pact The third story is about a video of college students (which I have embedded below the fold) who are unable to challenge a 5’9″ tall white guy who tells them he is actually a a 6’5″ Chinese female child in the first grade. Watch it and weep for the future.


Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

24 comments

  • Edward

    From the second article: “the right-wing extremist, who killed 77 people in a shooting rampage and bombing attack in 2011 … who gave a Nazi salute on his first day in court …”

    Only in Europe would they think that a Nationalist Socialist was “right-wing.” “Nazi” stands for Nationalist Socialist German Worker’s Party. From a European’s ultra-socialist point of view, Nationalist Socialists may seem right-wing.

    From the third article: “And these 18-year-old American college students can’t even muster the courage to keep men out of the women’s bathroom.”

    Worse than that, neither can their parents, who vote for school boards, local judges, and various politicians who are now endorsing, ruling, or even legislating that men can wantonly enter the little-girls’ restroom and locker room.

    From the video: “It shouldn’t be hard to tell a 5’9″ white guy that he’s not a 6’5″ Chinese woman[in first grade], but clearly it is. Why?”

    Because we have raised a generation of precious snowflakes who are unable to confront lies with the truth. If you confront the obvious lie, then your Democrat friends and family will call you a bigot, racist, fascist, or whatever it takes to get you to toe the current politically correct party line.

    No wonder Democrats are so willing to allow their corrupt leaders to lie with impunity. To question the blatant lie is to be bigoted.

    No wonder they refuse to question authority — ironically an authority of a generation that made a career out of demanding that authority be questioned — and “believe” the science of global warming despite the necessity that science be based upon reality and data, not beliefs (and yet use just as much CO2-generating machinery as the skeptics do).

    No wonder they take the easy route and believe that free market capitalism is the enemy, not socialism, despite all evidence to the contrary and absolutely no evidence to confirm their beliefs. They are ill equipped for reality, preferring to live in whatever pleasant childish fantasy anyone presents them with.

  • Wayne

    Edward:
    Well said.

  • LocalFluff

    Maybe they voted for Carson because they support him symbolically. He’s still in politics. Creepy Cruz can’t win, votes for him are thrown away. He can’t win the black votes against a non-candidate, how could he beat Hillary?

    The world is freer, richer and more peaceful now than ever! The technological and scientific development keeps accelerating. No global warming, no peak oil, doomsday has been canceled. Of course MENA is stuck in their tyrannic stoneage for ever, but that’s the only prpblem region in the world, only one “culture” wages war and terror. And of course the selfdestructive slave moral of the West destroys the West very quickly now, turning it into a copy of the stoneage Middle East. But that’s what Trump is talking about and people understand that. In a few years Europe will be the poorest and most violent region of the world, but the US will take care of themselves.

  • Matt in AZ

    I’d like to know how many of the Carson votes were from early voting, and just how far ahead they tend to get submitted – a better article would have addressed this. The vast majority of votes here in Phoenix were by mail, and Ben Carson got 2.71% of the vote in Arizona despite his dropping out 3 weeks earlier.

    http://wtop.com/presidential-election/2016/03/2016-arizona-presidential-primary-results/

    Also, the news media tends to not report the results of the dropped-out candidates on election nights, which is why the combined totals of those displayed often don’t add up to 100%.

  • Though it is possible these voters were expressing an educated symbolic opinion about Carson, I doubt it. Knowing New Yorkers and their generally arrogant ignorance about the state of the world (from living there most of my life), I really suspect that these voters saw his name and voted for him without knowing he is no longer running for president.

    Also, your use of the term “creepy Cruz” is beneath you. It is mere name calling, and teaches us nothing about the man himself while revealing your own emotional dislike of him, without telling us why.

    It has been my impression that there has been a real effort by the press and the Republican leadership to avoid learning much about Cruz from day one. When there were many candidates, they avoided asking him questions during debates. Now that there are only three candidates and his skills in debate could shine, the Republican Party has decided to end the debates. Most interesting.

    A close look at Cruz has shown him to be a sincere and principled man who has tried hard to do what he promised during his election campaign. I think it another sign of the coming dark age that so many people have been quick to close their minds to him.

  • LocalFluff

    I read somewhere that the Ben Carson vote in that district was misreported.

    The creepyness of Cruz is an image problem he has. Geraldino and other pundits and I think his former (from student age) room mate have used that kind of terminology. Probably it is propaganda, he’s got a wonderful family and creepy people don’t. It’s a campaign issue, not personal. That’s how I see it. He now camps in the shadow of Trump who dominates all media, not because of his money, but because of his style which made him his money! He doesn’t need to pay for media. His opponents pay for it with their hundreds of millions of dollars of attack ads. Media companies absolutely want this to go on until election day. If Trump is not nominated, they lose billions. And I guess many of the prominent media persons interviewing or commenting on the candidates have some profit sharing benefits.

    Whatever Trump is nicknamed, he just eats it and gets stronger from it. “Small hands”? :-)
    He even acknowledges that some of the attack ads are true, and moves on stronger. Unbeatable.

    The message is that the Donald knows how to succeed. Whatever the game is, he hacks it. People love, and NEED, a winner for president. It’s not about any issues or special interests or ideologies. It’s about finally electing someone who can win. It’s about competence, without competence everything is just talk. The ship is sinking, who should be the captain? I’d prefered the brain surgeon or Rand Paul, but their good ideas don’t count because they don’t know how to win. They just know what to do after they have won, which never happens. Pipedreams.

  • Cotour

    Fluff:

    You are more right than wrong, its going to be an interesting ride.

  • Edward

    LocalFluff asked: “The ship is sinking, who should be the captain?”

    The captain should be the guy who knows how the ship works and how to work it. He knows who to order to start the pumps and knows to send the underwater welder to fix the hole.

    The guy who should not be captain is the one who merely displays popularity, or the one who says “we should be like the good ship Europe” (which is also sinking), or the one who insists that the ship should be socialist — under socialism, the ships always sink, because the system is rigged for failure.

    (“Star Trek” would not have lasted more that the fourth episode, if Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Chief Engineer Scott didn’t have the knowledge to initiate a full-power restart via a controlled implosion of the warp engines. How sad is it that I can remember that, after all these years, but I can’t remember lunch from two days ago?)

    As for Carson: votes for him are symbolic, but votes for the still-running and still-can-be-elected Cruz are “thrown away”? LocalFluff, did you really want to sound so hypocritical? If Trump also cannot get the magic number of delegates, does that mean that *he* can’t win, either? Surely you don’t mean that Cruz cannot win the general election, because the polls show that it is Cruz who can win the general election and Trump who cannot.

    Back to Robert’s original posting:
    I was talking to a friend, who pointed out a couple of interesting things.

    1) Those who want us to conform to LBGTQ and allow anyone to use any restroom that they want (because they are feeling feminine or masculine that day) insist that it is so that they, the LBGTQ people, will feel more comfortable. Yet in order for those few people to feel more comfortable, the rest of us have to give up our feelings of comfort and safety.

    My thoughts are: what the hell happened to *our* safe spaces? Liberals and progressives insist upon having them for themselves, but then they take away everyone else’s.

    Although we could point out this hypocrisy, liberals and progressives take great pride in being hypocrites.

    2) The government is quick to massively fine bakers, photographers, florists, and such for following their (US Constitution) government-protected religious beliefs, but when Bruce Springsteen refuses to serve people from whom he has already taken money — just because he feels like it and no religious beliefs violated — that is Okey-dokey.

    My thoughts are: all those who cheered that the baker was run out of business also cheer Springsteen for his hypocrisy. Once again, liberals and progressives take great pride in being hypocrites.

    It is always all about them. *They* should get everything that they want, and to hell with everyone else. If they don’t get their way then they throw a hissy-fit via a riot (or cancel a concert, or add a tariff to punish a company for manufacturing overseas, or use the IRS, DOJ, or state Attorneys General against them).

  • Wayne

    Edward:
    Well stated!

  • Star Trek would not have lasted more that the fourth episode, if Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Chief Engineer Scott didn’t have the knowledge to initiate a full-power restart via a controlled implosion of the warp engines. How sad is it that I can remember that, after all these years, but I can’t remember lunch from two days ago?”

    I myself can even remember the specific episode from which you are quoting. I don’t remember the episode title, but it is the one in which Sulu takes his glove off while on a planet, gets infected by the water there, and passes it onto everyone else through his sweat. The result: everyone loses control of their emotions and goes crazy. When the Irish guy takes over the engineering room and shuts down the warp drive, Scottie turns to Kirk and says, “I can’t change the laws of physics. I need thirty minutes.” Spock comes up with the solution that actually sends them back in time slightly.

  • Wayne

    Star Trek: Original Series, season 1, episode 4; “The Naked Time”
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Time

  • Wayne

    Preview trailer “The Naked Time.”
    https://youtu.be/76j4DiSYeAY

  • Wayne

    Cotour:
    Yow, the bathroom thing is so crazy I don’t even want to touch it.

    ..can’t resist a Star Trek tangent– ref the original-series; This has been bothering me (how sad is that?!) in the Future, mining activities throughout the galaxy, appear to be (continue to be) done primarily via manual labor, which is either forced or voluntary & for-profit. -maybe 1/2 a dozen episodes at a minimum reference “mining,” but it appears to be largely manual labor & not as “advanced” as the other elements in Star Trek.
    All this technology & they still mine di-lithium crystals by hand?
    -Even in the Deep Space 9 iteration, they had “ore processing” on the space-station, as part of a Cardassian slave-labor operation. And if I’m not mistaken, at least one of the movies involves being stuck on a Klingon slave-labor mining Planet.
    Anyone ever notice this?

  • Joe

    Cotour, tranny experiment, that is crazy, the lbqtgwhatever stuff is nuts, this is dissonance, night is day no white is black, and society for the most part doesn’t have the guts to say so.

  • You have to understand that after the original series, the Federation of the Star Trek universe became a liberal utopia, a fascist state where the state has the right to dictate everything, where the state can confiscate your property at will, where all power is focused in a single individual who is not elected, cannot be overthrown or questioned, where no medical information is private and medical procedures can be used to punish and control people, and that if you step out of bounds the state has the right to put you in prison for doing so.

    Diane and I have been steadily rewatching the entire collection, and in watching Voyager and Deep Space 9, I’ve seen every single one of these examples occur, multiple times.

    Thus, why should you be surprised that the Klingons, a member of the Federation, maintain slave-labor mines? Or that the Federation would make a Munich-like deal with the Cardassians, giving away the territory of innocent third party planets like the Maquis, merely for its own convenience? You shouldn’t be.

  • Wayne

    Love my Star Trek, just dislike the overt Collectivization that appears to be a major trend!

    I have been re-watching every episode in sequential order as well. (Plenty of “dumb” episodes in the first iteration but that’s a luxury of hindsight & in relation to what came later, which was by no means a guaranteed thing.)
    And/but, as Mr. Z. notes– a lot of Political Strangeness goes on in the ST Future, including the mining precious ore by hand at every opportunity & most often as some punitive exercise against a local population.
    [Ref: ST original series, season 1-3,— maintaining a proper Orbit appears to be a major problem as well. “Private Property, Money, and Free-Trade,” appear to be slowly engulfed by the all-pervasive Federation as Season 1 progresses.)

    –In honor of the current “bathroom brew-ha-ha,” I would submit “Turnabout Intruder” as the stupidest episode ever—the one where Dr. Janice Lester transforms herself into Captain Kirk.

    Next Gen, IMO, is perhaps the worst offender in the political-correctness realm & especially Season 2, 3, & 4, which are over the top in their preachiness & overt morality-play Episodes. (The treatment of the Ferengi as bumbling “Capitalist Pigs,” is over the top as well.)

  • Cotour

    Joe:

    I totally agree with you, all of this stuff is about distraction and redefinition by the left and the Republicans have no real defense. If you ignore it your or present evidence to the contrary you are insensitive and if you have a counter position then you are a racist / anti feminist / anti Muslim / anti what ever. A non issue, issue. Pure Saul Alynski taken to the max, and the leader of this technique? Obama and his followers that surround him and in the media.

    And this thread officially proves that this site is the official home of the high I.Q. nerd as I have previously labeled it.

    The proof? When ever adult men can seriously reference in the finest of detail the TV story lines of Star Trek and base their real world opinion on those TV story lines :)

    There is something disturbing and at the same time hope full about that.

  • Wayne

    Cotour–
    HAR! Good one.[all of it!]
    Love my Star Trek… but under no delusion the future will be so bright, I’ll have to wear… sunglasses.
    Always did wonder, however, how the Planet of Gangsters, faired after they left….
    https://youtu.be/FbBuNGVDNCM

  • If you want to know how the Planet of Gangsters fared, all you have to do is look at Russia since the end of the Soviet Union.

  • Wayne

    Good point!

  • Edward

    *Sigh* I had not intended to distract from the issue at hand. However, Cotour, I am glad that there is some hope buried in the disturbing nature of our Star Trek fascination. (BTW: Captain Kirk was going to maroon his super-powered friend on an unmanned planet with an automated lithium processing plant, so not all mining/processing operations were labor-intensive. “Dammit Jim!” How do I know all this stuff?)

    Robert,
    I first realized the socialist nature of the Star Trek future when Captain Picard told one character that people of the Federation did not work for money.

    On further reflection of the original topic, the coming dark age (as opposed to the supposedly enlightened age of Star Trek):
    Five-year old children understand the difference between truth and lies, but by college, the are confused. So, when do our children unlearn this all-important difference that we spend so much time teaching them?

    I have messed with my (~10-year old) niece and nephews, telling them things that were obviously wrong, just to make them think and to make them correct me, and they were confident that I was wrong. *They* knew better, but today’s college kids (I used to call them students, but that is too respectful and no longer so truthful) don’t know better. Tell the college kids what their eyes clearly tell them is obviously untrue, and they say “good for you,” and mean it.

    How is it that twelve years of schooling makes our children so stupid?

    The liberal progressives that insist that we do as they say may think that they are the generous adults, but they are acting like selfish children. They insist that it isn’t right to “discriminate” against LBGTQ people (discrimination meaning to treat the same as everyone else) by having them follow the laws as everyone else, but they declare that it *is* OK for them to discriminate against everyone else by making *us* follow their new made-up rules that always, *always* favor them and always harm the rest of us. The liberal future is unfair and hurtful to the rights of the many in order to meet the desires of the few or the one. (Dammit. There’s that Star Trek reference, again.) Now they insist not just on a piece but on *all* of our action. (Dammit!)

    They have no morals. Their morality stops at “if it feels good, do it.” And to many liberals, harming ‘the many’ feels terrific. Liberalism is selfishness masquerading as generosity. Liberalism is all about the ends (‘all for me!’) justifying the means (‘and none for all!’ Well at least now I’m off ST and paraphrasing Dumas.).

  • Edward

    If the LGBTQ crowd believes that it is OK for men to use the women’s room and women to use the men’s room, then why do the transgendered insist upon using only one room rather than the other? Should it not be OK for men transgendering into women to continue using the men’s room, since they believe it to be OK for women to use the men’s room, and vice versa? Instead, they insist upon imposing their own way upon everyone else, no matter how much it violates everyone else’s “safe spaces.” Apparently, “safe spaces” are only for the insecure precious snowflakes that the US is raising, these days, and the rest of us can go to hell for their (the precious snowflakes’) sakes.

    Yet another liberal/progressive hypocrisy that they enjoy.

    It is no wonder that they prefer more government — a government that treats its subjects like children that cannot take care of themselves. The liberals/progressives *want* to never grow up, and *want* the conservatives to take care of them, cradle to grave; it is just that the conservatives want these children to grow up and care for themselves rather than be the (worse than) useless members of society that they are. In the liberals’ world, the conservatives are the Little Red Hen, who does all the work, and the liberals/progressives are the other animals, who play while the Hen works hard, yet still expect to share in the rewards of the hard work.
    http://www.enchantedlearning.com/stories/fairytale/littleredhen/story/

    What a pack of selfish $4!7s.

    No wonder there is a coming dark age.

  • Joe

    Red hen, eh, seems some animal are more equal then the other animals, sometimes things are as they should be.

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