Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.
We remember the holocaust so that we can make sure nothing like it ever happens again. It’s something that is especially important during a time of rising antisemitism on the left and the right.
One of the primary ways we promote safety and security for the Jewish people is by supporting their right to self determination and mutual self-defense – something no people group can have access to without a nation state. That’s why support for the continued existence of the state of Israel forms the bedrock in the fight against antisemitism.
Finally, amid all the turmoil and division in the West, we can all agree to celebrate the recovery of the final hostage that was taken on October 7th, 2023. I’m overjoyed that his remains were able to be returned home, making way for the peace process to move forward, just in time for Holocaust Remembrance Day.
You Are the Gold
When you undermine a person’s deeply held religious beliefs, it can feel like an attack on their very existence.
My religious beliefs feel to me like a part of who I am. If you ask me, “what is an Abraham?” I will tell you that an Abraham is a born again Christian. I’ll tell you that he writes code for a living and likes to practice martial arts. I’ll tell you that he can speak Japanese.
If you tell me that Jesus isn’t real, or that I don’t know Japanese, I’ll be very disturbed by that. Because in my mind, the “self” that I am, is that person who has been saved by Jesus and can speak Japanese. If you told me that Abraham was a woman instead of a man, it wouldn’t bother me – but only because I’m so sure I’m a man, that nothing you say could undermine my belief in the existence of that person.
Now, if I couldn’t find a single person who agreed with me that Abraham is a man, that he has been saved by Jesus, or that he can speak Japanese, then I would be pretty disturbed. If that’s not me… who is?
In the United States we measure our value and our self-worth in terms of what we can do for others. And we measure it with a very concrete yardstick called “money.”
“Joe just handed me a ten dollar bill. Apparently, whatever I have to offer, Joe thinks it is worth $10.”
The Jews had the same problem 3,000 years ago; that’s why they invented the Sabbath. On the Sabbath, you’re not allowed to do anything for anybody else. You can imagine, after sitting around the house, not doing anything for anybody for a few hours, someone might say, “I feel useless. Like I’m not contributing anything to society.” Good. And the existential unease, that a lot of Americans feel and that goes along with that, is healthy.
It forces you to think about people in terms of more than what they can do for you. And it forces you to think about yourself in terms of more than what you can do for others.
So take away a man’s arms and his legs. Take away his ability to speak. And you will find a lot of American men asking themselves, “what good am I? What am I for?” Maybe his wife and children will say, “We love you!” And he will still answer, “Okay, great… but what good am I?”
That’s our cultural blind spot. Other cultures have other blind spots. Try to imagine your “self concept” being tied to a particular plot of land. A Palestinian man living in America, wants to go “home” to a plot of land that “belongs to me.” And a Jew living in Israel says, “You can’t come and live on this land. It’s inside the borders of a Western country now, where we buy and sell land on the market. And I paid a fair price for it. It belongs to me now. “
Do you know what that Palestinian man will say? “Then what good am I?” Maybe his wife and children will tell him, “we love you.” Maybe other members of his community here in America will affirm his value by hiring him to work for them. Maybe he’ll run for office, and promote the rights of black people to receive the same kind of education white people have access to.
But if he has no land, a Palestinian man still feels that same existential dread. He still asks, “what’s the purpose of my existence? Because if the person I thought I was – the person who rightfully owns the plot of land that my grandfather, and great grandfather lived on – if that person doesn’t exist… then who am I?”
That might sound weird to a Westerner. But it’s just a different version of the same category error.
Life is a process of maturation. It’s a process of losing parts of our “selves,” that were never really parts of our selves to begin with. Of losing a lot of things that we think make us who we are. But at the end of all that, there’s still someone there. Breathing, heart beating – alive. Someone exists. It just might not be the person we thought it was.
The “self” that I perceive when I’m in my 20’s, in my 30’s, and in my 40’s… the stories I tell myself and others about “who” I am, isn’t really who I am at all.
And part of the process of maturing as a person is realizing that losing things I think are intrinsic to my “identity” is good for me. Because after everything else has been stripped away, whatever is left, really is myself.
“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
It’s like a process of refining gold. And you are the gold.
When you first start out, you’re an alloy. Impure. A mixture of a little bit of gold, and a lot of other stuff that isn’t worth very much. Maybe some copper. Maybe some dirt. And the more of that other stuff you remove, the more beautiful, and the more valuable you become. Not less.
So the next time somebody challenges you, and you feel that sting. That twinge of existential threat… stop. Try to step back, and really engage with what they’re saying. Resist the urge to defend your self concept. Maybe it’s an opportunity to shine a little brighter.
Maybe it’s an opportunity to find out who you really are.
God’s Trees
Walk with me – it isn’t far
To where salt water marshes are;
Where birds, and frogs, and waters sing,
And chrystal grass unbidden springs.
We’ll leave the human world behind,
To see God’s Trees, and know His mind.
To where salt water marshes are;
Where birds, and frogs, and waters sing,
And chrystal grass unbidden springs.
We’ll leave the human world behind,
To see God’s Trees, and know His mind.
On Jews, and the Death of Civilization
So I’m listening to Andrew Klavan. He said that the reason we are having a population implosion in the West is because the relationship between men and women is out of whack.
That’s when it hit me – why there is so much focus on sexual sin in scripture. It’s one of the primary critiques of “traditional Christian values,” especially Evangelical values: we are obsessed with sex.
Think of this from the perspective of someone who experiences God as directly as he experiences forests and Mountain Dew: it strikes me that God’s deep interest in human sexuality amounts to something really simple: humans are His creation. His life’s work, if you will: we are his passion project, and He wants the project to succeed.
A critical population mass is required in order to sustain an economy. More importantly, a critical population mass is required in order to sustain the population itself – when birth rates decline for more than a generation or two, its almost impossible to turn that around.
All the things we do to sterilize ourselves, from “sexual imperialism” (ie, power- and wealth-based polygamy, which is actually what we are moving toward today… a controversial claim that’s really difficult for most people to accept) to abortion, have led to a stark decline in our population, and the resulting cracks in our economy are already starting to show. With as concerned as we are about global warming and reaching a “point of no return” in terms of global mean temperature, we’ve neglected a much greater, existential threat to human existence: the decline of human existence ITSELF. A weaker economy leads to less access to resources, leading to further population decline, and so on…
Now to my comment about polygamy. Statistics are showing something pretty startling: in our sexually libertine society, we are rapidly approaching and asymptotal trend where 80% of women are going to be voluntarily pairing with about 20% of men. “Advances” (I’ll save the antifeminist sermon for another day) in how we see gender roles have done little to overcome the vast majority of women’s evolutionary instincts: despite what we think, the way we feel in our bodies – and that includes who and what we are instinctively attracted to – hasn’t changed at all. Most women are still primarily interested in men who they perceive as having the ability to “protect and provide,” even if those signals are being transmitted on a subconscious level. Which, in the animal kingdom (and until the last 1500 years or so in the human kingdom) translated directly to competition for resources.
All other things being equal, we are going to end up back in a situation where the “top” 20% or so of men are the only ones engaged in perpetuating the species – and we’re already seeing a trend where the “losers” are leaving the game as more and more young men “check out” to watch porn and play video games. (I’m afraid there could be an apocalypse over this, BTW. You can’t just repress the most powerful biological urge in the universe, in 80% of the population, and not expect things to go horribly wrong. Just look at what sexual repression has done to Muslim communities. As unacceptable as it is to lash out violently in response to sexual frustration, I think there must be a point where enough young men become frustrated enough, that it boils over into a horrifying catastrophe like the one we saw on October 7th, 2023 – in which *sexual* violence figured prominently. I believe that the wealthiest and most powerful men in ancient times started wars specifically in order to deal with this problem – to send the “weaker” men off to vent their rage in mass, mutual die-ins rather than cause trouble at home. And here’s a reminder in case you missed it at the beginning: there is NEVER ANY EXCUSE for mass shooters or other evil individuals to lash out violently against innocent victims in response to their sexual frustration. If you’re seeing yourself in any of this “apocalyptic” language, GET HELP.)
In other words, counter-intuitively, the population size declines *faster* when people are sexually “liberated,” because there are – again, counter-intuitively – many fewer people participating. And the ones who do get to participate often end up voluntarily sterilizing themselves by various means in order to avoid dealing with the usual consequences (pregnancy) of their pleasures.
Of course God (or at the very least, the writers of the Old Testament – some of the most advanced thinkers in human history) had the perspective to see these outcomes several generations in advance. His primary concern in the Old Testament was the preservation of *His* people – and traditional Jewish sexual ethics have stood the test of time for that purpose. In spite of wave after wave of attempted genocides – something without any paralleled in human history – the Jewish population is one of the few distinct culture groups – maybe even the only one – that has managed to survive for many thousands of years.
Maybe if we value the enlightenment and it’s contributions to human flourishing, we should take a lesson or two from those “illiterate, iron-age goat-herders;” or, as we might want to call today’s version of them, “backward, sexually-repressed Bible-thumpers” – before the West sterilizes itself into extinction, along with everything it has ever built.
Oh, and to correct the record: they were shepherds, not goat herders.
And to correct it again: if they were illiterate, how did they manage to produce more written works than any other iron-age civilization?
That’s when it hit me – why there is so much focus on sexual sin in scripture. It’s one of the primary critiques of “traditional Christian values,” especially Evangelical values: we are obsessed with sex.
Think of this from the perspective of someone who experiences God as directly as he experiences forests and Mountain Dew: it strikes me that God’s deep interest in human sexuality amounts to something really simple: humans are His creation. His life’s work, if you will: we are his passion project, and He wants the project to succeed.
A critical population mass is required in order to sustain an economy. More importantly, a critical population mass is required in order to sustain the population itself – when birth rates decline for more than a generation or two, its almost impossible to turn that around.
All the things we do to sterilize ourselves, from “sexual imperialism” (ie, power- and wealth-based polygamy, which is actually what we are moving toward today… a controversial claim that’s really difficult for most people to accept) to abortion, have led to a stark decline in our population, and the resulting cracks in our economy are already starting to show. With as concerned as we are about global warming and reaching a “point of no return” in terms of global mean temperature, we’ve neglected a much greater, existential threat to human existence: the decline of human existence ITSELF. A weaker economy leads to less access to resources, leading to further population decline, and so on…
Now to my comment about polygamy. Statistics are showing something pretty startling: in our sexually libertine society, we are rapidly approaching and asymptotal trend where 80% of women are going to be voluntarily pairing with about 20% of men. “Advances” (I’ll save the antifeminist sermon for another day) in how we see gender roles have done little to overcome the vast majority of women’s evolutionary instincts: despite what we think, the way we feel in our bodies – and that includes who and what we are instinctively attracted to – hasn’t changed at all. Most women are still primarily interested in men who they perceive as having the ability to “protect and provide,” even if those signals are being transmitted on a subconscious level. Which, in the animal kingdom (and until the last 1500 years or so in the human kingdom) translated directly to competition for resources.
All other things being equal, we are going to end up back in a situation where the “top” 20% or so of men are the only ones engaged in perpetuating the species – and we’re already seeing a trend where the “losers” are leaving the game as more and more young men “check out” to watch porn and play video games. (I’m afraid there could be an apocalypse over this, BTW. You can’t just repress the most powerful biological urge in the universe, in 80% of the population, and not expect things to go horribly wrong. Just look at what sexual repression has done to Muslim communities. As unacceptable as it is to lash out violently in response to sexual frustration, I think there must be a point where enough young men become frustrated enough, that it boils over into a horrifying catastrophe like the one we saw on October 7th, 2023 – in which *sexual* violence figured prominently. I believe that the wealthiest and most powerful men in ancient times started wars specifically in order to deal with this problem – to send the “weaker” men off to vent their rage in mass, mutual die-ins rather than cause trouble at home. And here’s a reminder in case you missed it at the beginning: there is NEVER ANY EXCUSE for mass shooters or other evil individuals to lash out violently against innocent victims in response to their sexual frustration. If you’re seeing yourself in any of this “apocalyptic” language, GET HELP.)
In other words, counter-intuitively, the population size declines *faster* when people are sexually “liberated,” because there are – again, counter-intuitively – many fewer people participating. And the ones who do get to participate often end up voluntarily sterilizing themselves by various means in order to avoid dealing with the usual consequences (pregnancy) of their pleasures.
Of course God (or at the very least, the writers of the Old Testament – some of the most advanced thinkers in human history) had the perspective to see these outcomes several generations in advance. His primary concern in the Old Testament was the preservation of *His* people – and traditional Jewish sexual ethics have stood the test of time for that purpose. In spite of wave after wave of attempted genocides – something without any paralleled in human history – the Jewish population is one of the few distinct culture groups – maybe even the only one – that has managed to survive for many thousands of years.
Maybe if we value the enlightenment and it’s contributions to human flourishing, we should take a lesson or two from those “illiterate, iron-age goat-herders;” or, as we might want to call today’s version of them, “backward, sexually-repressed Bible-thumpers” – before the West sterilizes itself into extinction, along with everything it has ever built.
Oh, and to correct the record: they were shepherds, not goat herders.
And to correct it again: if they were illiterate, how did they manage to produce more written works than any other iron-age civilization?
Safe/Smart References in C++
C++’ standard library now has utilities for Weak References, RAII, and Safe Pointers. But it relies on classes and function calls, which take up precious CPU cycles and push a bunch of data onto the call stack. Not to mention, the syntax is notoriously messy.
Whether by means of garbage collection or syntactic sugar, modern languages like Go come with many of these features built in. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something similar for C++?
I figured out a way to use pointers and arrays to allocate space for my values on the heap, and to create multiple references to those values that avoids use-after free, double-free, and dangling pointer problems. The outer array is the “original” reference to the allocated variable on the heap. Subsequent references are pointers to the outer array. When the heap variable is deleted, the inner array element is set to null, which results in all of the references getting ‘null’ values, too.
The best thing about it is that you don’t need to do any pointer magic yourself – just call the utility macros.
Here’s a link to the code. Scroll down to the main() function for example usage.
Nonviolence is Immoral
So you call yourself non-resistant.
Okay… but do you expect someone else to protect you? If not, then okay. But if you do, then I say you’re just a selfish coward. You think it’s okay for someone else to risk their own safety, but you’re not willing to risk yours.
What if you saw a woman being beaten in the street, right in front of you? Would you do anything to try to stop it? Maybe put yourself between the woman and her abuser? That’s forceful resistance – imposing your will on others. AKA, “governing.”
And you know you have an obligation to do that. Only the most morally destitute person would refuse.
But what if just getting in the way doesn’t help? What if her abuser has a weapon? What if he goes around you, or pushes you out of the way, so that he can continue to hurt her? What if force is the only thing that actually helps? What if the only way to stop him is by using violence?
Do you honestly believe that refusing to use violence, in that situation, would be the right thing to do?
You could say, “In that situation, maybe violence is necessary. But I’m not the right person to do it. It isn’t my job.” Someone should risk their safety to help her – but not you. Which is selfish and cowardly, no matter how you look at it.
And what if it wasn’t a stranger? What if it was your spouse, or your children? You have an instinct and a responsibility to keep them safe. You can’t just ignore that responsibility in the name of “non-resistance.” Choosing not protect yourself is okay… but not protecting your children?
Or let’s say your government has gone overseas to fight a war. Just like you are responsible for the safety of your family, the government is responsible for the safety of all its citizens. But maybe you expect the government to abdicate that responsibility. Maybe you expect them not to protect people who depend on them for their safety. Maybe you’re against all war – against all use of force and all violence. Well, that’s just as immoral.
I saw a group protesting “the war,” chanting, “Ceasefire now!” But all people have a right to defend themselves. If you looked down an alley and saw me fighting for my life, would you demand that I give up my weapons? Because that’s what you’re doing when you march in the streets and call for an end to “the war.” It’s the same as saying you want to take away my right to defend myself – which is immoral. It’s fine for you, if you choose not to defend yourself. But don’t take away my right to do it.
Everyone’s safety is everyone’s responsibility – including yours. And each person has the right to defend himself. You can’t take away my right to defend myself, and you can’t just look the other way while others are being harmed. You can’t “delegate” the use of force to a third party, and be totally unwilling to do it yourself. And you can’t demand that someone else come and take away my right to defend myself, while you smugly claim to be “non-resistant.”
That’s why non-violence, anti-war or anti-government activism, and the refusal to “get your hands dirty” are selfish, cowardly, and immoral.
あなたへ
今夜は眠ろう
静かにお休み
疲れた体預け
瞳層と閉じてく
同じ時代に
生まれてきたのに
それぞれ違う道を
歩き出した僕達
どこにゆくんだろう？
長い夜も超え
一つ消えてく
街の灯を
数えては
遠く見ていた
いつかどこかで
偶然会えたなら
小さく笑って
幼い日々を
懐かしく思うんだろう
いつかどこかで
ー 松たか子「雪の女王以前」
Full Text of the Speech I Gave at the Arcata City Council Meeting Today
While we campaigned, weekly for American civilian hostages to be brought home, watched the “journalists, medics and schoolteachers” who were holding them in their homes in Gaza kill them one at a time, and even when we celebrated the release of the last American survivor on Friday…
Conversations were taking place here, to try to build official cultural and material ties to Hamas, the ONLY governing body in Gaza City, so my hard-earned tax dollars could be funneled to an organization that was killing Americans. The same tactics were used to disrupt and undermine this most sacred of institutions that were used when Jewish students were assaulted at Cal Poly, local private businesses were vandalized and shut down, and their owners were falsely accused of being part of a secret… Zionist conspiracy, just because they were Jewish.
Gaza city – portrayed as practically uninhabitable after supposedly being bombed to rubble – currently has sister city relationships with 17 cities in 14 countries including Iran and Turkey – while Rikuzentakata, Crescent City’s sister in Japan, has one. All coordinated by Mohammed Al’Shaqra, the Redwood Peace and Justice Coalition’s personal direct contact within the Palestinian Authority.
So where is the money really going? A large percentage of Hamas’ budget comes from charity, especially now that the annual Billion from Obama, Trump and Biden were quietly paused after October 7th – you were right about one thing: we are all complicit.
What would Arcata do with a billion dollars a year? Gaza used it to buy tens of thousands of rockets, motorized hang gliders, and go-pro’s to live-stream their war crimes – war crimes the RPJC denies took place – and the hundreds of miles of terror tunnels where they tortured holocaust survivors to death while their own people starved.
Don’t allow hate groups like the RPJC to intimidate you into submission with their gas-lighting, victim-blaming conspiracy theories or create an impression that the majority of us here in Humboldt County don’t believe Israel has a right to defend itself against the currently, on-going invasion of its sovereign territory. We do – and this member of the silent majority will no longer remain silent.
Who do you say that I Am?
You know, it just occurred to me that the New Testament has no claim to any kind of divine authority apart from a belief that Jesus is God.
First of all, if the writers of the NT “mistakenly” believed that Jesus is God (or were lying), then the NT is fundamentally unreliable.
Secondly, the teachings of Jesus form the basis for there being a second Testament of divinely inspired scripture. (Heb. 1:1-4, Mark 13:31). The NT is never depicted as the infallible words of God the Father – yet even the JWs see it as the foundation of the church itself – the church that Jesus called “My church.”
Catholics believe in Apostolic Succession, which means that Jesus delegated His doctrinal infallibility to His disciples, who then delegated it to their disciples, etc. There’s no evidence anywhere for a continuation of infallible doctrinal authority for anyone besides the writers of the New Testament (at least, not outside the self referencing claim of authority made by the church itself in the basis of its own tradition)… and the only argument for the infallibility of the New Testament is the infallible doctrinal authority of its writers – a claim they make explicitly in Acts 1:8.
If the New Testament is the infallible Word of God, and if it is also no more or less than a faithful transmission of the teachings of Jesus, then the teachings of Jesus are, themselves, no more or less than the infallible Word of God. Let me say that again: the teachings of Jesus are the Word of God.
If Jesus isn’t God, then the New Testament – His Words – aren’t God’s Words – and there’s no reason to believe anything in it, or to ascribe the same level of divine inspiration to it that we ascribe to the Old Testament. But the Mormons and JWs do ascribe divine authority to the New Testament (Mormons think the New Testament we have today is corrupted – but they still believe that the original was divinely inspired – although I don’t see why, since there’s no real value in a transcendent, ultimately authoritative written record that no one can find).
Even if “the Word” was just “a” god, that still identifies the Person of Jesus so closely with the New Testament that we can’t think of it as anything other than His book – while simultaneously equating Him so closely with the Word of God as to make Him not just it’s source, but it’s very embodiment. John doesn’t say that a prophet, messenger or teacher of the Word became flesh and dwelt among us – it says that the Word itself did. Jesus is, in fact, bringing us His OWN Word – is, HIMSELF, the Word, with all of its irresistible divine authority – Something no “mere” Old Testament prophet can claim. (Matt. 12:41-42). (Another way Jesus distinguishes Himself from the prophets is by pointing the way to Himself – by claiming to BE the Way – when all a prophet can do is point the way to Someone greater. See John 5:40, 7:37, and 14:6).
So we can’t claim any authority for the New Testament in excess of the Personal authority of Jesus, Himself (Mark 11:28)… and without the New Testament, there is no church at all (Matt. 16:18, 21:44) – which is why JWs and Mormons do claim infallible, Divine authority for the teachings (and very Person) of Jesus… even though that claim is competely meaningless unless the Person they are attributing divine authority to is intrinsically divinely authoritative – ie, is, Himself, The Divine Authority. It would make more sense for the Mormons to reject the New Testament competely, and to claim that the Book of Mormon was “Another Testament” of God the Father (not Jesus) that supercedes the authority of the New Testament, than to claim that anyone other than God, Himself, is the Source or Embodiment of His Own Words.
How to Create An Anonymous, Private, Decentralized Social Network
- The network in my imagination consists of Postal Workers,
Directories, and Clients. - Bob (a Client), lists the Postal Worker(s) that bring(s) him his
messages in one or more Directories. - To send Bob a message, Alice (another client) puts it into an
envelop that only Bob can open. Then she queries the directory to
find out who Bob’s Postal workers are and puts the FIRST envelop
into ANOTHER ONE, that only one of Bob’s Postal Workers can open.
(She can also send copies of the message to more than one of Bob’s
Postal Workers if she wants to, just to make sure he gets it). - Finally, Alice puts the SECOND envelope into a THIRD envelope,
that only one of her own Postal Workers can open. (Again, she can
give copies of her message to more than one Postal Worker if she
wants to take extra precautions to ensure that the message gets
delivered). - Alice’ Postal Worker knows who the message is from, but not who
it’s for. All he knows is which other Postal Worker he’s supposed to
give it to. - When Bob’s Postal Worker opens his envelope, he doesn’t know who
the message came from or what’s in it; all he knows is who it’s for.
This is how Tor works. - When Bob receives Alice’ message, he can check to see whether her
finger prints are on it. (He can also refuse to accept messages from
people he isn’t already friends with). - Bob doesn’t need to search the network for social media posts or
other types of messages from Alice; instead, she just sends all her
posts directly to one or more of the Postal Workers that work with
Bob (or with any of her other subscribers). - If there is a particular document Bob wants, he doesn’t need to
search the network for it; he can just send Alice a request for the
document, via whatever Postal Workers are in touch with her. Only
Alice will know what Bob is asking her for, and only Bob gets to see
the document. No one else even knows that the two of them are
communicating with each other. - If Alice’ Postal Workers wanted to spy on her, they would have
to persuade Bob’s postal workers to collaborate with them, and that
might be difficult to do if Bob was paying them enough money. - If the government wanted to spy on Alice, they would have to
force Alice’ Postal Workers to spy on her, and they would have to
know Alice was talking to Bob – something not even her own Postal
Workers would know – so that they could also force Bob’s Postal
workers to spy on him. - The likelihood of any one government forcing all the Postal
Workers in the world to turn over all their envelopes all the time
is low – and Bob and Alice could still protect against it by
secretly working with an extra set of Postal Workers that they
chose not to list in any Directory. - A government could, theoretically, pass a law against operating
as a Postal Worker. But it would be difficult to enforce, and
Clients in that country would just start send their messages through
Postal Workers in other countries. - People could be incentivized to serve as Postal Workers by
strongly-held beliefs, or by charging a fee. As someone else pointed
out, “there will always be some Russian server willing to take your
money in exchange for serving your posts.” - Finally, there could be public review boards where Clients
could post ratings and reviews of Postal Workers, to help other
Clients decide who to work with and depend on.