Category Archive: Foundational Thoughts

This is where I start my thinking.

Nov 20

Engage

Uncertainty Principle

About half way through this article I realized was having a grand time.   Oh, I love to write and relish thinking, but I was just having too much fun pounding this one out.  Then I let some people read an early draft and they didn’t get it.  Well, they got maybe 15 percent, but the rest … hmmmm … not so much.  Just so you know, they are long time readers and not dense.  So, the problemo, the source of the disconnect, was with the content of the article.  After a bit of weeping, I decided that all was not lost; at least, I had a good time doing it. The thought occurred to me that I should just shelve it for another day.  I have about 39 articles, lying around in various states of disrepair—that have suffered as similar fate—so, what is one more?

But … I was having such a good time.  Pleasure addict that I am, the reasonable thing seemed to be rewrite, and rewrite and rewrite and see if we could get the 15% closer to 1,000,000%.  (No one will ever accuse me of thinking small.)

For the better part of three years, I have been nibbling around the edges of a much, much larger cookie, with occasional assaults on a chocolate chip in the middle.  Actually, the cookie is more like the proverbial Antarctica.  The Arena of Ideas is a landmass all on its own with a hostile environment that requires some very specific gear and survival skills.  My ongoing mission is to boldly take you where few men have gone before, by summarizing and repackaging a conversation for public consumption.  Most importantly, I’ve wanted you to see that specific ideas are the foundation of tyranny in all forms in all ideologies.  These ideas are as consistent as their outcomes.… Read the rest

Aug 18

Private Virtue

We have been seduced to believe that righteousness is retreat from the world and that spirituality is weak trembling against action, potential error, and the vague hazy threat of failure.  But far, far worse is the endless campaign, the organized moral assault against success, effectiveness, and ability.  The heavens will pour down wrath, pride goes before a fall, and God will not share his Glory says the Mystic Despots with their vacant portents of disaster if we dare to conceive of a life beyond the mediocre.

This is how the enemy of our souls wins the wars of death and destruction. The advocates of life and prosperity quit the field.  Men retreat from social, religious, and political conflict as if their private virtue is a sufficient protest against vocal, defiant, demanding, insolent evil.  As if standing amidst the fight, raising a voice with passionate dissent, and waging a war of defense is to discredit the substance of virtue, to soil some mythical pristine righteousness.… Read the rest

Jul 17

Lives, Fortunes, and Sacred Honor

By John Immel 

(Click Here for Mp3 audio)

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor. 

Declaration of Independence 1776

Freedom is a given in American experience: her people insulated from the tides of religious and secular despotism that dominates the whole of world history. Roughly five generations have been born into the independence that is America, and as always happens, the heirs of fortune never grasp what their great, great, great, great, great grandfathers worked to achieve. Liberty secured for posterity is not a divine right, but an encompassing stewardship. Failing to sustain the mental and physical rigor that created the wealth results in the inevitable generational erosion as the fortune slowly washes away into the abyss of irresponsibility, sloth, and entitlement. The symptoms of our cultural bankruptcy are expressed in a tide of intellectual evasion, soul-crushing guilt and social turmoil.… Read the rest

Apr 17

Zen of War

By John Immel

Men of DIFFERENT Principles cannot sustain fellowship because the one who is more intentionally (or unintentionally) evil, wins.

In war between men with the SAME Principles, the one who most zealously pursues his ideological outcomes wins.

Moral Autocracy is the absolution for the zealot’s evil outcomes: compulsion, pillaging, slavery.

Moral Clarity is the internal aid for individual action: truth, responsibility, liberty.

Humanity is governed by Force — Violence or Ideas.

The Zealot is advantaged by an irrational battle of hidden, obscure principles.

The Individual is advantaged by a rational battle of open, clear principles.

Find the zealot enforcing mindless darkness and know the evil.

Find the individual defending reality’s rational light and know the good.… Read the rest

Nov 19

Moral Clarity

By John Immel (Click Here for MP3 Audio)

Allahu Akbar! Or in the immortal words of Achmed the dead Terrorist: “I Keell You!”

Another Muslim took to violence and began killing. Can you believe it? Certainly you Believers in Pervasive Depravity are not shocked. You are way ahead of all of us. It is the grace of God, after all, that prevents such atrocity from occurring every minute of every day.

That is the moral relativistic logic offered, I believe. But, whatever.

Even a small familiarity with Islam’s history, and fundamental philosophy, should remove any surprise that yet another act of Mystic Despotism occurred on American Soil.

I need to add the word “allegedly” to my comments since Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, survived his killing spree. He is presumed innocent, and as is correct in American Justice, will be confronted in a military court with his accusers and the amassed evidence.… Read the rest

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