my cubic centimeter

So, being an erstwhile and hapless product (i.e., graduate) of an institutional school system, I finally decided to “re-educate” myself (no, not that kind of “re-education”) in order to make up for, what one may call lost learning.  To fill in the blanks, so to speak. The so-called “Great Books” seemed to be the standard for a learning firmly anchored in the canons of Western Civilization, which is what I sought.  So, rather than amble aimlessly and indefinitely through all the many examples of that, I landed upon one such list that was actually geared to young school-age students, but still designed with grade-levels to define progress and achievement.  Yes, this was for me, you understand – a college graduate, no less.  But, onward and upward. But, where to start with this?  I felt that I should have at least a decent familiarization with primary-level classical literature, but did I?  Taking a look at the fourth to sixth grade reading list, I had to admi...

  Trying to get caught up on my daily scripture readings (yes, I’m WAY behind). This is from the reading for Christmas eve. I’m not sure how true this is anymore, but no one from my generation or born in the next couple of decades could read this without hearing the voice of Linus.    This is true because this reflected the CULTURE of our time. Culture is everything. It is the reason why engineering replaced human sacrifice to pagan gods as the means of mitigating the more disastrous effects of our environment. It is the reason why the ancestors to what became the Dutch began building a form of dike to hold back frequent flood waters over 2000 years ago. It is the reason why hospitals with names taken from Christian saints or Mary, the Mother of God, and staffed by Christian monastics were built beginning in the Medieval period to care and comfort the sick and injured. It is what gave us the ideas taken from the Romans and the Greeks to create a new nation, “conc...

 In the film “Three Men and a Baby”, the character Jack Holden, along with his two young urban professional NYC roommates, struggle to find a solution to having to care for a child that Jack fathered out-of-wedlock, and that was suddenly dropped at their doorstep. With his roommates now angry with him for this interference into their mostly self-indulgent lives, and with Jack, himself, suddenly finding a huge obligation where once was only freedom from almost all responsibility, Jack decides to appeal to his own mother to come and care for the child. Upon introducing his mom to her new granddaughter, the two of them immediately bond as you would expect - Jack:  “Oh, I'm in awe.  I mean, look at you.  You pick her up like a pro.” Mrs. Holden:  (smiling warmly)  “I pick her up like a grandmother.  That's called experience.  Darling, let's see you.  She's so lovely. What's her name?” “Mary.” “Mary!  Well, Mary!  Look at the way she's l...

  www.theamericanconservative.com/the-peacemaker-hit-list/ This is deeply disturbing and should be an outrage to any human with a conscience.  A Ukrainian “non-governmental organization”, the Myrotvorets centre, with “ties” to the current Ukrainian government, publishes what amounts to a hit list of people it deems as “Enemies of Ukraine”.  Those “enemies” include anyone who has publicly voiced opposition to Washington’s proxy war against Russia, and include several Americans. You can also read about this organization in it’s Wikipedia article:  www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrotvorets, which states that “In 2016, the Daily Beast reported that the website was curated by the government law-enforcement and intelligence agency Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).”  The “SBU” is the successor of the Ukrainian branch of the Soviet KGB and still shares many of the related characteristics of that agency, including government-backed propaganda and terrorism activities.  Th...

"Deaths from all types of cancer in the US fell by an estimated 33% since 1991, saving a cumulative 3.8 million lives, according to a report released yesterday by the American Cancer Society. Progress was attributed to improvements in cancer treatment, EARLY DETECTION, and significant drops in smoking." All good news.  However, if early detection is so important to saving lives, an irrefutable logical conclusion would simply be that suspending it would INCREASE those deaths.  We don't know yet, but it is likely that we will eventually learn, the government's policy to do just that will reveal such an increase.  This may already be evident in the rise in what is called "excess deaths".  What's certain is that THIS won't be as widely reported. “Far More Human Lives Have been Lost over the past century as a result of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital than from smoking cigarettes.  Would it therefore be appropriate to require every copy of Das Kapital to carry a w...

 In the 1959 comedy film, “The Mouse That Roared”, the fictional tiny European nation of Grand Fenwick must come to terms with an economic crisis that is threatening to bankrupt the country.  The cunning Prime Minister devises a plan sure to restore economic well being to the country.  They simply declare war on the United States.  Apparently, the Prime Minister is sufficiently familiar with recent examples of American foreign policy to understand that, by going to war with the great superpower of the West...and losing...such a scenario would usher in great sums of foreign aid to the former, and formally vanquished, adversary.  Problem solved. Needless to say, things don’t go exactly as planned – which is so often the case in many plans of international machinations – even with, and perhaps especially for, the United States. This comedy reminds me so much of the “news” and associated historical drama that is being imposed on all of us now by our mainstream media...