Andrew Breitbart 1969-2012

Wow. I had no idea how much this guy was responsible for. Huffington post, fox news "Red Eye" Big Government.com, the Drudge Report.. Heaven only knows how many other pies he had his hand in. The more I learn about this guy, the more sad I become for the loss of who I am coming to consider a kindred spirit. I loved the antidote related by Ann Colter of Breitbart being on the phone with his wife Suzie for an hour singing songs on the radio and thereby ending up an hour late to a speaking engagement. To sum up, he loved his wife and kids, he loved America, and he loved the people he disagreed with enough to argue. God Bless.

I broke my rib

I broke my Rib. It hurts. I mean really hurts. I broke it almost four weeks ago and it still hurts.  I am not a wimp mind you.  I have had Five major surgeries that I can remember. Most of them for stupid stuff. Several knee surgeries, a hernia; I am a frequent guest of the emergency room. When they get to know you by first name its a sign that you may be doing something wrong.  I picked this subject to talk to you about because it brings to mind how much those who are currently suffering at our VA  hospitals have given for our freedom.  Some are alone and some have family. Please keep them in mind. Go by a VA hospital and bring some gifts of magazines or maybe donate an old playstation or xbox. Maybe just pray for them and their family. But please be mindful that our freedom is not free.  For some the pain may never go away.

Have you made a difference?

What have you been doing?  Has it made a difference?  Was the difference with the intent of "Good" or "Bad"?  Was it for selfish reasons? Was it without a thought to your self interest? Has it made "the world" a better place or worse?   I find myself asked daily to "Save the Planet".  Can I destroy the planet?  Would I destroy my home? I would find it difficult to have a place for all my stuff.  Who exactly starts their day out and says: "I am going to destroy the planet"? I don't know how you would "Destroy the Planet".  Maybe I could start by destroying the family? That would be a good start. Then I could destroy people's belief in themselves?  How about destroy a person's belief that they matter as an "individual"?  How about destroy a group of people's ability to uplift each other?  Hey I know, religion!!! It must be destroyed!  That way there are no moral absolutes! No right, no wrong; and no one to judge me!  That would leave me free to destroy the planet. Then would just be your perception that I am doing something that destroys the planet or not?  Besides if it helps me then who cares anyway?  That is your version of the truth.  There would be no ultimate good or bad, only what benefits my selfish self interest!  Hug a child.  Go to your religious group of choice. Enjoy your freedom.

Have you made a difference today?

Christian Ninjutsu and other non sequiturs: Pelosi Relieved that none of the terrorists were w...

Christian Ninjutsu and other non sequiturs: Pelosi Relieved that none of the terrorists were w...: "Nancy Pelosi expressed 'Relief' that none of the terrorists we shot in the head had been water boarded. Ok. Let that sink in just a second..."

Happy Mothers Day (brought to you by Hallmark)

Hallmark did not invent "Mother's day"!
I spuriously stated that this was a Made up holiday by Hallmark. I am wrong.

Modern antecedents and founding
One of the early calls to celebrate a Mother's Day in the United States was the "Mother's Day Proclamation" by Julia Ward Howe. Written in 1870, it was a pacifist reaction to the carnage of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. The Proclamation was tied to Howe's feminist belief that women had a responsibility to shape their societies at the political level.
In the years after the Mother's Day Proclamation, Ann Jarvis founded five Mothers' Day Work Clubs to improve sanitary and health conditions. In 1907, two years after Ann Jarvis' death, her daughter Anna Jarvis held a memorial for her mother and began a campaign to make "Mother's Day" a recognized holiday in the US. Although she was successful in 1914, she was already disappointed with its commericalization by the 1920s.
Spelling

In 1912, Anna Jarvis trademarked the phrases "second Sunday in May" and "Mother's Day", and created the Mother's Day International Association.
"She was specific about the location of the apostrophe; it was to be a singular possessive, for each family to honour their mother, not a plural possessive commemorating all mothers in the world."
This is also the spelling used by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in the law making official the holiday in the U.S., by the U.S. Congress on bills, and by other U.S. presidents on their declarations.
Common usage in English language also dictates that the ostensibly singular possessive "Mother's Day" is the preferred spelling, although "Mothers' Day" (plural possessive) is not unheard of.

So There.  Sorry Mom.

Why I believe in God. From my upcoming book.

When I had my complete loss of faith, I started from ground zero.  I came up with the following litmus test:  What is real and observable.  I feel pain. I irritate people; they irritate me, therefore existentially we are not a dream. You are not my dream and I assure you that I am not yours.  We are.  We are someplace that exists. Our stuff is here. We have the expectation that it will continue to be there tomorrow.  Therefore, we have an expectation of consistency of reality.  That being the case we have but three possible choices existentially: 1) Atheism or no God (Zero)  2) Polytheism or many gods (Two)  3) One God (God) (One) 

1) Atheism would be equal to random chance creating everything.  A study of ninjitsu does not allow for this. We know that there is no random-ness in nature.  It is all a pattern.  Chaos becomes a fractal at the proper vantage point. If we expect a continuation or consistency in the outcome of our training then there must be a rule to which each outcome can be attached or measured.  Random chance does not allow for an expectation of consistency.  Why study a fighting style 2000 years old. It should have evolved past it’s relevance.  But yet it is still here.  Still relevant today.  

2) Polytheism:  This brings with it the concept of many gods with disparate goals and desires.  Once again we are faced with the nagging problem of  the expectation of continuity of reality.  We do not wake up to find that one god has decided to make everything taste like liver because he/ she /it is in a foul mood. 

3) One God.  To me this is the most likely case.  One God give us the expectation of continuity of reality.  One God who made: Sex, Chocolate, Beauty, Art, Music, etc..  The absence of these things I would say would be “human free will”.  We have the ability to destroy.  The ability to build.  Some people express control or “ownership” of a thing by destroying it.  By destroying it they make the statement that “this was mine to destroy”.  We see this plainly in Shiriah Law. Sharīʿah (Arabic: شريعة‎ šarīʿah, IPA: [ʃaˈriːʕa], "way" or "path") is the code of conduct or religious law of Islam. Most Muslims believe Sharia is derived from two primary sources of Islamic law: the precepts set forth in the Qur'an, and the example set by the Islamic Prophet Muhammad in the Sunnah. Fiqh jurisprudence interprets and extends the application of Sharia to questions not directly addressed in the primary sources by including secondary sources. These secondary sources usually include the consensus of the religious scholars embodied in ijma, and analogy from the Qur'an and Sunnah through qiyas. Shia jurists prefer to apply reasoning ('aql) rather than analogy in order to address difficult questions.

Muslims believe Sharia is God's law, but they differ as to what exactly it entails. Modernists, traditionalists and fundamentalists all hold different views of Sharia, as do adherents to different schools of Islamic thought and scholarship. Different countries and cultures have varying interpretations of Sharia as well.

Sharia deals with many topics addressed by secular law, including crime, politics and economics, as well as personal matters such as sexuality, hygiene, diet, prayer, and fasting. Where it enjoys official status, Sharia is applied by Islamic judges, or qadis. The imam has varying responsibilities depending on the interpretation of Sharia; while the term is commonly used to refer to the leader of communal prayers, the imam may also be a scholar, religious leader, or political leader.

The reintroduction of Sharia is a longstanding goal for Islamist movements in Muslim countries. Some Muslim minorities in Asia (e.g. in India) have maintained institutional recognition of Sharia to adjudicate their personal and community affairs. In western countries, where Muslim immigration is more recent, Muslim minorities have introduced Sharia family law, for use in their own disputes, with varying degrees of success (e.g. Britain's Muslim Arbitration Tribunal). Attempts to impose Sharia have been accompanied by controversy, violence, and even warfare (cf. Second Sudanese Civil War).

Max Tegmark’s 1998 sole postulate is: All structures that exist mathematically also exist physically. That is, in the sense that "in those [worlds] complex enough to contain self-aware substructures [they] will subjectively perceive themselves as existing in a physically 'real' world”.The hypothesis suggests that worlds corresponding to different sets of initial conditions, physical constants, or altogether different equations should be considered real.

Tegmark claims that the hypothesis has no free parameters and is not observationally ruled out. Thus, he reasons, it is preferred over other theories-of-everything by Occam's Razor. He suggests conscious experience would take the form of mathematical "self-aware substructures" that exist in a physically "'real'" world.

The hypothesis is related to the anthropic principle and to Tegmark's categorization of theories of the multiverse.

Andreas Albrecht of Imperial College in London called it a "provocative" solution to one of the central problems facing physics. Although he "wouldn't dare" go so far as to say he believes it, he noted that "it's actually quite difficult to construct a theory where everything we see is all there is".

I would characterize it thus: X= reality  Zero= no reality  Two= confused realities co-existing simultaneously with no expectation of reliable observable consistency.  One= stable reality.

 My personal belief is in the Christian expression of God. 

uss michael murphy ddg-112 christened tomorrow, 7 May, 2011

uss michael murphy ddg-112
By AW1 Tim Leave a Comment
Categories: Uncategorized
USS Michael Murphy, DDG-112 will be christened tomorrow, 7 May, 2011 at Bath Iron Works, in Bath Maine.  Adding to the significance of the date is that this was also his birthday. Lt Michael Murphy would have been 35 years old. Instead, he gave his life during Operation Red Wings at the age of 29.  He gave his tomorrows for our todays, and his memory will live on in nearly 9000 tons of US Navy warship.

More on USS Murphy here:

More on Operation Red Wings here:

More on the christening here:

From the article:

Engaged in a frenzied firefight and outnumbered by the Taliban, Navy Lt. Michael Murphy made a desperate decision as he and three fellow SEALs fought for their lives on a rocky mountainside in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province in 2005.
In a last-ditch effort to save his team, Murphy pulled out his satellite phone, walked into a clearing to get reception and called for reinforcements as a fusillade of bullets ricocheted around him. One of the bullets hit him, but he finished the call and even signed off, “Thank you.”
Then he continued the battle.
Dan Murphy, the sailor’s father, said it didn’t surprise him that his slain son nicknamed “The Protector” put himself in harm’s way. Nor was he surprised that in the heat of combat his son was courteous.
“That was Michael. He was cool under fire. He had the ability to process information, even under the most difficult of circumstances. That’s what made him such a good SEAL officer,” Murphy said.


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