A Window In My Thoughts

We need to hear more stories.

patriot one — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 05:06:10 +0000

This may be closer to reality than you think

You’re sound asleep when you hear a thump outside your bedroom door. Half-awake, and nearly paralyzed with fear, you hear muffled whispers. At least two people have broken into your house and are moving your way.

With your heart pumping, you reach down beside your bed and pick up your shotgun. You rack a shell into the chamber, then inch toward the door and open it. In the darkness, you make out two shadows. One holds something that looks like a crowbar. When the intruder brandishes it as if to strike, you raise the shotgun and fire. The blast knocks both thugs to the floor. One writhes and screams while the second man crawls to the front door and lurches outside.

As you pick up the telephone to call police, you know you’re in trouble. In your country, most guns were outlawed years before, and the few That are privately owned are so stringently regulated as to make them useless. Yours was never registered.

Police arrive and inform you that the second burglar has died. They arrest you for First Degree Murder and Illegal Possession of a Firearm. When you talk to your attorney, he tells you not to worry: authorities will probably plea the case down to manslaughter. “What kind of sentence will I get?” you ask. “Only ten-to-twelve years,” he replies, as if that’s nothing. “Behave yourself, and you’ll be out in seven.

The next day, the shooting is the lead story in the local newspaper. somehow, you’re portrayed as an eccentric vigilante while the two men you shot are represented as choirboys. Their friends and relatives can’t find an unkind word to say about them. Buried deep down in the article, authorities acknowledge that both “victims” have been arrested numerous times. But the next day’s headline says it all: “Lovable Rogue Son Didn’t Deserve to Die.” The thieves have been transformed from career criminals into Robin Hood-type pranksters. As the days wear on, the story takes wings. The national media picks it up, then the international media. The surviving burglar has become a folk hero.

Your attorney says the thief is preparing to sue you, and he’ll probably win. The media publishes reports that your home has been burglarized several times in the past and that you’ve been critical of local police for their lack of effort in apprehending the suspects. After the last break-in, you told your neighbor that you would be prepared next time. The District Attorney uses this to allege that you were lying in wait for the burglars.

A few months later, you go to trial. The charges haven’t been reduced, as your lawyer had so confidently predicted. When you take the stand, your anger at the injustice of it all works against you. Prosecutors paint a picture of you as a mean, vengeful man. It doesn’t take long for the jury to convict you of all charges. The judge sentences you to life in prison.

This case really happened.

On August 22, 1999, Tony Martin of Emneth, Norfolk , England , killed one burglar and wounded a second. In April, 2000, he was convicted and is now serving a life term.

How did it become a crime to defend one’s own life in the once great British Empire ?

It started with the Pistols Act of 1903. This seemingly reasonable law forbade selling pistols to minors or felons and established that handgun sales were to be made only to those who had a license.

The Firearms Act of 1920 expanded licensing to include not only handguns but all firearms except shotguns.

Later laws passed in 1953 and 1967 outlawed the carrying of any weapon by private citizens and mandated the registration of all shotguns.

Momentum for total handgun confiscation began in earnest after the Hungerford mass shooting in 1987. Michael Ryan, a mentally disturbed Man with a Kalashnikov rifle, walked down the streets shooting everyone he saw. When the smoke cleared, 17 people were dead. The British public, already de-sensitized by eighty years of “gun control”, demanded even tougher restrictions. The seizure of all privately owned handguns was the objective even though Ryan used a rifle.

Nine years later, at Dunblane, Scotland, Thomas Hamilton used a semi-automatic weapon to murder 16 children and a teacher at a public school. For many years, the media had portrayed all gun owners as mentally unstable, or worse, criminals. Now the press had a real kook with which to beat up law-abiding gun owners.

Day after day, week after week, the media gave up all pretense of objectivity and demanded a total ban on all handguns.

The Dunblane Inquiry, a few months later, sealed the fate of the few sidearm still owned by private citizens.

During the years in which the British government incrementally took away most gun rights, the notion that a citizen had the right to armed self-defense came to be seen as vigilantism.

Authorities refused to grant gun licenses to people who were threatened, claiming that self-defense was no longer considered a reason to own a gun. Citizens who shot burglars or robbers or rapists were charged while the real criminals were released. Indeed, after the Martin shooting, a police spokesman was quoted as saying, “We cannot have people take the law into their own hands.
”

All of Martin’s neighbors had been robbed numerous times, and several elderly people were severely injured in beatings by young thugs who had no fear of the consequences. Martin himself, a collector of antiques, had seen most of his collection trashed or stolen by burglars.

When the Dunblane Inquiry ended, citizens who owned handguns were given three months to turn them over to local authorities. Being good British subjects, most people obeyed the law. The few who didn’t were visited by police and threatened with ten-year prison sentences if they didn’t comply.

Police later bragged that they’d taken nearly 200,000 handguns from private citizens. How did the authorities know who had handguns? The guns had been registered and licensed. Kinda like cars.

Sound familiar?

WAKE UP AMERICA , THIS IS WHY OUR FOUNDING FATHERS PUT THE SECOND AMENDMENT IN OUR CONSTITUTION. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH HUNTING, AND IT IS NOT LIMITED TO SMALL ARMS. IT IS OUR RIGHT TO USE ALL MEAN WITHIN OUR POWER TO PERSONALLY PROTECT AND ENSURE OUR LIFE, LIBERTY AND PROPERTY.

“..it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds..” Samuel Adams

“People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people.”

patriot one — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 06:53:39 +0000

I hear all these plans and read about all these reports of huge rallies and protests stationed at strategic places highly influential in our government; I understand the purpose of these, and I agree that they have their place and effectiveness in the peoples rise above oppressive government, but I suggest action on a more manageable, local and one-on-one basis.

Striking fear into – and ultimately uprooting – the unconstitutional and immoral parts of government is not something that needs to be done at the fountains head… wherever that may be. It is something, however, that is going to require a great deal of awake and dedicated patriots committed to the cause of freedom. So what needs to be done by us who are already awake? First and foremost we need to find and wake up all those who will listen and enlist them into the cause of liberty – the cause of God.

Numbers, once achieved, will be our greatest tool. Everything is given meaning and power by the number of people who are there to further the cause. Think of what cops do when they feel intimidated – ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY ARE OUT OF LINE. They call for backup so it’s now two opinions against one. Imagine what a local cop – pulling someone over for immoral reasons – would do when a bunch of the guys friends came and backed him up on his cause. If it’s just one guy it may only make the cop mad and act worse, which of course means that’s a step towards victory, but if you get even five or six awake patriots standing together against every wrongful act of government and it’s agents, they will start to be very weary of what they pull people over for – especially if their job and reputation are on the line.

With a group of informed citizen constantly in contact, you will all teach each other things and keep each other up to date on newly developing things. You will give moral support and a witness to all the things you do, and together a group of motivated, focused and intelligent individuals will be very likely to get people following them – people who wish they were like them, people who agree with them but are too afraid to stand up themselves and some people who just need to be a part of something.

Work locally and work together. Start talking to your city mayor and court judges. Stop cops and question them on what they are doing. Ask questions and demand answers, justice and freedom; make sure you know what you are doing!

Don’t try and reshape the government at it’s head. Wake up and alert every subject under it and before long the government will have nobody left to listen to them or receive their battering and it will be neutralized… at which point we can restore it back to how it was meant to be in the first place.

May God bless those of you who are fighting on the side of His cause and may God damn those of you who fight against Him and His immutable laws.

Auto Bailout/Government Purchase

patriot one — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 08:04:42 +0000

Look at this rotten video; just watch it and think about what they’re doing with it. It is designed to brainwash you and scare you into lethargic submission.
“Let us take care of you – you’re in danger,” yeah no thanks! I’M AN AMERICAN I CAN STAND ON MY OWN TWO GOD GIVEN FEET! Any government that has usurped enough power to save you has just as much power to use against you to destroy you! What’s the difference between a king and the group of people in congress acting in united harmony to legislate tyranny!

Just see how they feed off of your fear. There are a myriad of ‘good will’ reasons to do it, but the fear will be what gets the best of you.
You will be so scared of losing your comfortable, apathetic state of ignorance that you will give anything – indeed EVERYTHING! I just ask in God’s name – for this is His cause, “IS LIFE SO DEAR OR PEACE SO SWEET AS TO BE PURCHASED AT THE PRICE OF CHAINS AND SLAVERY?” When it’s all said and done, do you REALLY, HONESTLY THINK that you’ll be happy with your peaceful life if all you do is what they tell you to, or are you actually stupid enough to be alright with not thinking or acting as an individual anymore? because if you are I feel that you’re freedom has already been forfeited for lack of worth.

This is pretty crazy.

patriot one — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 06:49:38 +0000

Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than any composer in the world. He also invented the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search the Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered substances harder than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new English words, and trained robotic cockroaches. Technically.

Thaler, the president and chief executive of Imagination Engines Inc. in Maryland Heights, gets credit for all those things, but he’s really just “the man behind the curtain,” he says. The real inventor is a computer program called a Creativity Machine.

Stephen Thaler’s Computer Creativity Machine Simulates the Human Brain TINA HESMAN / St.

Louis Post-Dispatch 24jan04

What Thaler has created is essentially “Thomas Edison in a box,” said Rusty Miller, a government contractor at General Dynamics and one of Thaler’s chief cheerleaders.

“His first patent was for a Device for the Autonomous Generation of Useful Information,” the official name of the Creativity Machine, Miller said. “His second patent was for the Self-Training Neural Network Object. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One. Think about that.

Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One!”

Supporters say the technology is the best simulation of what goes on in human brains, and the first truly thinking machine.

Others say it is something far more sinister – the beginning of “Terminator” technology, in which self-aware machines could take over the world.

Thaler’s technology was born from near-death experiences of dying computer programs. Its foundation is the discovery that great ideas are the result of noisy neurons and faulty memories.

The invention began to take shape in the 1980s. By day, the physicist worked at McDonnell Douglas Corp., where he wielded a powerful laser beam to crystallize diamonds. He built elegant computer simulations, called neural networks, to guide his experiments.

But at night, things were different. Shirley MacLaine and her ilk were all over the TV and on magazine covers talking about reincarnation and life after death and near-death experiences.

It made Thaler wonder: “What would happen if I killed one of my neural networks?”

Neural networks can be either software programs or computers designed to model an object, process or set of data. Thaler reasoned that if a neural network were an accurate representation of a biological system, he could kill it and figure out what happens in the brain as it dies.

In biological brains, the information-carrying cells, called neurons, meet at junctions, called synapses. Brain chemicals, such as adrenaline and dopamine, flow across the junctions to stimulate or soothe the cells. In the computer world, there are switches instead of cells. The switches are connected by numbers or “weights.

”

So after work, Thaler went home and created the epitome of a killer application – a computer program he called the Grim Reaper. The reaper dismantles neural networks by changing its connection weights. It is the biological equivalent of killing neurons. Pick off enough neurons, and the result is death.

On Christmas Eve 1989, Thaler typed the lyrics to some of his favorite Christmas carols into a neural network. Once he’d taught the network the songs, he unleashed the Grim Reaper. As the reaper slashed away connections, the network’s digital life began to flash before its eyes. The program randomly spit out perfectly remembered carols as the killer application severed the first connections. But as its wounds grew deeper, and the network faded toward black, it began to hallucinate.

The network wove its remaining strands of memory together, producing what someone else might interpret as damaged memories, but what Thaler recognized as new ideas. In its death spiral, the program dreamed up new carols, each created from shards of its shattered memories.

“Its last dying gasp was, ‘All men go to good earth in one eternal silent night,’” Thaler said.

But it wasn’t the eloquence of the network’s last words that captured Thaler’s imagination. What excited him was how noisy and creative the process of dying was. It gave Thaler ideas.

What if, he asked, I don’t cut the connections, but just perturb them a little?

Thaler built another neural network and trained it to recognize the structure of diamonds and some other super-hard materials. He also built a second network to monitor the first one’s activities.

Then he tickled a few of the network’s connections, and something began to happen. The tickling, akin to a shot of adrenaline or an electrical jolt in the brain, produced noise. In this sense, noise is not sound, but random activity. And the noise triggered changes in the network.

The result was new ideas. The computer dreamed up new ultra-hard materials. Some of the materials are known to humans, but Thaler didn’t tell the network they existed. Other materials are entirely new, unknown to humans or computers before.

“A little elbow room”

When Rusty Miller went to lunch one day in 1998, he picked up a specialized computer magazine called PCAI journal. He flipped through the pages and came across a story about Thaler and his Creativity Machine inventing the ultra-hard substances. Instantly, Miller knew that Thaler had taken a step beyond other artificial intelligence technologies, such as fuzzy logic or genetic algorithms, he said.

The brilliance of Thaler’s invention is the noise he introduces into the system, Miller said.

“Noise allows neurons to have a little elbow room to dream up new ideas,” Miller said.

Other researchers have come to the same conclusion.

Good old-fashioned artificial intelligence uses human experts to input huge quantities of data and a list of rules to create a model, said Robert Kozma, a computer scientist at the University of Memphis. Kozma is experimenting with a similar technology.

The rigidity of traditional artificial intelligence technologies holds back creativity, Kozma said.

“This type of rule-based system is frozen. It’s dead and cannot get to the essence of intelligence,” Kozma said. “Creativity cannot be derived in a logical way, in a step-by-step fashion.” You need a little noise to come up with good ideas, he said.

Human brains are also noisy places, said Dr. Walter J. Freeman, a neurobiologist at the University of California at Berkeley. A debate has raged for half a century about what the brain does with noise.

Many biologists see noise as a just a nuisance or a necessary evil, Freeman said. The brain devotes many neurons to the same task so it can swamp out that random activity, those scientists argue.

But Freeman subscribes to an alternative theory – that noise is essential for the brain to function properly. Noise provides variability that allows organisms to adapt to new situations, he said.

Kozma has replaced the brain of a robotic toy dog with this new technology. The idea is to create a robot that can explore a new environment, such as the surface of another planet, without human guidance. NASA is funding Kozma’s efforts.

Thaler believes that Kozma’s research is derivative of his seminal work.

It’s not merely noise that makes Thaler’s Creativity Machines so ingenious, he argues. He has discovered a mathematical equivalent to the fleeting signals that work on neurons – a special kind of noise.

And Creativity Machines are their own best critics. In fact, they have critic networks built right in. The critics select the best ideas generated by the noisy networks and reward good work. The feedback helps the network dream up even better ideas.

Bunker-busting robots

Thaler, too, is engineering independent robots. A glossy, black, plastic cockroach named H3 could be the prototype for swarms of bunker-busting robots that could seek out, explore and use collective intelligence to defeat an enemy target. The U.S. Air Force has contracted Thaler to create such robots.

Robots, including Mars rovers, have been programmed with artificial intelligence before, Thaler said. But those robots require human engineers to program in leg movements and rules for getting around obstacles. Each unique encounter requires new programming, new rules, and time.

H3 gets no tutelage from Thaler at all. A sonar beacon beckons the robot, and H3’s legs begin to flail. Every time the robot makes a movement that carries it closer to the signal, it learns the value of the move. Within a few seconds, the cockroach coordinates enough good moves to scuttle toward the signal.

But Thaler hasn’t stopped with robots. Creativity Machines can solve just about any problem in any field, he says.

A Creativity Machine used two neural networks to study toothbrush design and performance. A brainstorming session between the two produced the idea to cross the bristles of the toothbrush for optimal cleaning. That toothbrush became the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush.

In one weekend, a Creativity Machine learned a sampling of some of Thaler’s favorite Top 10 hits from the past three decades and then wrote 11,000 new songs. Some are good, Thaler said. Miller confesses to being haunted to one of the melodies in a minor key. Other offerings are the musical equivalent of a painting of dogs playing poker, Thaler said.

But computer-composed music doesn’t have to be bad. Human mentors with good taste could train a critic network to grade the Creativity Machine’s songs, punish it for bad tunes and reward it for harmonious melodies. The feedback would hone the machine’s composing skills.

Such a self-training system was the Creativity Machine’s first invention, and the subject of Thaler’s second patent.

Carmakers and security industries want to use machines to identify obstacles, pedestrians or intruders. Some machines can identify certain objects, but change lighting conditions or mist the lens with water, and the system falls apart.

Thaler spins a collection of toy cars, trucks and planes on an old turntable in his office while a Creativity Machine watches. The computer learns to distinguish Hummers from pickups and F-18s from 747s, no matter if the object is lit by a searchlight or sits in shadow or if rain spatters the windshield. The technology could alert drivers to whether they are about to back over a boy or a bicycle. Battlefield commanders might use similar technology to assess damage and decide whether to send in more bombs.

Machines trained to detect dangerous objects could replace humans at baggage screening stations or watch for suspicious behavior.

Thaler’s first contract with the Air Force used a Creativity Machine to help design warheads that reconfigure the pattern of shrapnel scattering. That’s important to limit collateral damage and to save money by tailoring bombs to destroy a target in one hit.

Thaler’s machines engage in the guilty pleasure of reading supermarket tabloids. The networks learn how to write tabloid headlines. The “International Expirer” quickly became a hit on the Internet. But the computer reporters of the tabloid “have no shame,” and generated such celebrity-skewering headlines that Thaler removed the Expirer to avoid libel and slander suits.

Spy agencies want to use Thaler’s technology to map the Internet and detect unusual activity.

Thaler coined more than a million new English words by showing a network a list of words. It learned rules of spelling and pronunciation and generated new words. In one trial, the network came up with a name for one of Thaler’s spinoff companies – Synaptrix. The words are nonsense now, but Thaler predicts that companies could use them to name products. The machine also liked “eggo.” Too bad that one is already taken.

The technology is not ready for widespread commercial use yet, say some supporters.

“It’s got extraordinary potential. Right now the holdup is packaging the technology as a tool that somebody can actually pull off the shelf and use,” said Lloyd Reshard, the Weapons Platform Integration Team Lead at the Air Force Research Laboratory Munitions Directorate at Eglin Air Force Base. With other artificial intelligence technologies, “software is commercially available on the street, but if you want to apply a Creativity Machine to your problem, there’s no software package you can go out and buy.

”

The Air Force is working with Thaler now to solve that problem, Reshard said.

“I might lose my job”

All of the possible applications for Creativity Machines make some people uneasy. The machines could easily supplant people for many mundane jobs, and Thaler predicts that some traditionally human-only jobs, including laboratory scientist, could be up for grabs. Computer chemists could soon design new compounds and figure out how to make them.

The machines could even be used to solve pressing societal problems, Thaler says.

The prospect is just too much for people who see machines as a possible threat to humans.

The normal human response is, “Don’t want it. No thanks. I might lose my job,” Miller said.

Or worse, sentient machines could decide that they don’t need humans at all and do away with people. That fear is fueled by the plots of science-fiction movies, such as “The Terminator.” In that movie, a satellite called Skynet became self-aware, saw humans as a threat and destroyed more than 3 billion people.

Sci-fi fans see similarity between Thaler’s thinking machines and Skynet. There’s even an eerie coincidence between the fictional satellite’s Judgment Day – August 29, 1997 – and the date the patent for Creativity Machine became final – August 19, 1997.

But Thaler doesn’t see the world ending at the hands of the machines.

“I can never imagine a world that looks like ‘Terminator.’ What do people want? Food. Land. Mates. Machines aren’t interested in that,” Thaler said.

Miller, who is in the business of protecting U.S. computers from foreign attackers, agrees that machines are not the real threat. He worries more about humans with malicious intent turning Creativity Machines into weapons. Other countries are already studying U.S. patents and experimenting with revolutionary technologies. Terrorists could follow suit, he says.

“If the U.S. doesn’t wake up and pay attention, we’re going to get smoked,” Miller warns. “It’s important for people to understand. It doesn’t have anything to do with the business of business. It’s about America.”

Some people are threatened by the idea that machines could think like humans, Kozma said. They don’t like the idea of computers out-creating humans, he said.

But Thaler’s machines may never match the unique qualities of humans, no matter how clever they are at designing toothbrushes or warheads, Miller said.

Miller, a former ballet dancer and Green Beret, says he enjoys competing against Thaler’s neural networks, even when they beat him. Miller will always have a toe up on the machines, he says.

“None of his computers can do ballet.”

Yet.

Found at: www.mindfully.org/Technology/2004/Creativity-Machine-Thaler24jan04.htm

Young Americans for Liberty

patriot one — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 06:42:25 +0000

Young Americans for Liberty.

The title pretty much says it all – as titles should. They have a title; they have a system built around that title; they have a plan – an idea, but what they need is people. Active people in numbers always have and always will give power to causes. We have a multiplicity of people and now the only question lies with who and what.
Are you going to just go through life and worry about your job, worry about your next date, think about what you are going to do this week, or are you going to maybe join a cause and offer it what no other individual can offer? Even if it’s not what you think it should be, you can join it and put some effort in and make it what you want it to be. You could be part of something; you can make things happen if you are working together with enough people.
I don’t know of any other cause that is more worthy of our time than freedom. I’ve joined and I plan to stick with it. I hope you will too. Thank you for reading.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” (Hopefully I don’t have to reference that)

Philosophy

patriot one — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 16:22:59 +0000

To all you readers, I just put Plato’s allegory of the cave on my philosophy page; it’s a good read; it’ll get you thinking about where you might be in life.

I also put Hidden Wedges on there. I highly suggest it – over the allegory if you were to only read one. It may give you the courage to do the things you’ve been saying you would do someday. It’s amazing, please read it!

Thanks everyone for reading and visiting my site…. again, you have something really cool you want to contribute tell me; I haven’t read everything…. yet.

So full of care…

patriot one — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 06:19:29 +0000

“What is life, if so full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?”

A quote that has driven my mind to much thought in these last few years…

At first glance it gives the message to take time and enjoy life and not be so busy, which is a very good thing to apply. I love – so very much – just laying under a star lit sky, looking at them all flicker so peacefully quiet and just soaking up the good energy from the ground beneath me as I contemplate life; I enjoy watching the sunset as beautiful colors unfold out of nowhere and I especially enjoy sunrises as birds sing as if welcoming the glorious new day and the air is crisp and clean.

I stand and stare as often as I can because I love the world around me; I love how beautiful everything is – down to it’s very atomic structure; I love knowing that God loves it when we appreciate the things He made beautiful for us, and I am grateful, and I hope you are too – for there is much to be grateful for when not cluttered by the many things that this life can heap onto your schedule. Which brings me to my next point – the other thing I more recently got out of the quote that I feel is a little deeper….

It goes in line with another quote – and you see how I live life one quote at a time, I feel they put truth into a nice sentence that’s easy to remember – the quote is by Socrates, a man I much adore, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” After you make it a habit to take time to “stand and stare” you start to take that time to reach even deeper into the meaning, as it were, of life and the purpose of everything. It slowly goes from appreciation to contemplation, and before long, in those times of silence and beauty, you ponder about pretty much everything; you start to ‘examine’ life.

“What is life, if so full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?” In time – as I pondered this daily, I simplified the question to where I would ask myself, “What is life?” And I think that is the level of thinking that this quote and that Socrates encourages. You need the time away from everyday cares to clear your mind – even if it’s only a few minutes a day, for it will start to grow and you will enjoy it’s sweet flavor.

An unexamined life is one that is just lived one day at a time, the only thoughts crossing your mind consisting of work, money, food, social life and etc – relatively shallow things. A life that is thoroughly examined is one, I believe, that time is taken out every day to just stand, stare and study – stand to slow down your pace, stare to soak in everything and begin to study what it all means. Wherever it is that you start in your thinking, such as why is that flower so pretty and smell so good? Or why are there so many stars at night? Just simple questions like that will burst into other ones. A few minutes a day will turn into all day with a thought in your head – a thought about life.

When you start to look at things a little deeper and start to sense and see life as a bigger picture than you have before, things become more fulfilling and precious. Life makes more sense – yet there’s so much more to it than you knew – and if you turn those thoughts into action you will know what Shakespeare meant when he said, “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and misery.”

So, “What is life, if so full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?” Well, Socrates said that it’s “not worth living,” and I couldn’t agree more.

This is my plea to you. Don’t let life get out of hand; don’t undertake so many things that every day is just a blur and sleep is the only thing giving rest to the whir of everyday life. Too many cares, too busy for meditation is a good way to let life get out of hand. Time may seem slow as it passes, but once we look back at it we realize just how fast it slips away and you know it’s true. I hate looking back on anything with regret, and I’d be willing to bet that you do too. Every lost day and opportunity to do what I love kills me; I don’t know how people do it most of their lives. May we all have the courage to “ride high on that tide which leads on to fortune-the everlasting good fortune of a life well lived.” (Richard L. Evans, This Day… and Always, p 61.) God bless – for that’s what He does best.

Neutralized!

patriot one — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:36:23 +0000

I find so many neutralizing people with so many neutralizing ideas and arguments to make you grateful for what you have and not fight for anything more or else you are being greedy.

They say, well gas prices are so much worse everywhere else, people are starving everywhere, so many are out on the streets without anywhere to go to. So many arguments comparing you to the average human, trying to flatten you down to the majorities level and keep you away from greatness – as an individual and as a nation, but the truth is that there is no ‘average,’ there is no majority - only individuals that make up these vague terms, and while it is true that you ought to be grateful for the blessings you do enjoy, because without gratitude there would be no incentive to get more of anything, it is not true that you should let gratitude smother your yearning for greatness or at least the basic things that make life great, and any argument that is made by comparison can be shot down by comparison.

Yes, many people don’t have food or shelter and you should be grateful for what you have, but should that stop you from wanting anything else? In response to this argument, not many people, very few in fact, have ever been free, and – yes – we ought to be grateful for what we have in respect to liberty, but we should not and cannot just sit by on our rocking chairs of gratitude till our liberties are lulled out of our lives. Our gratitude must drive us to get more of what we are grateful for and other things. Gratitude, by nature, is meant to give us more of the things that make life abundant.

In answer to Patrick Henry’s question, “Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?” I answer with a resounding NO! People starve to death physically, but because those people are starving, does it mean that because I’m not starving I ought to not strive to have more? And while we all worry about who is starving physically, who is worrying about who is being starved of life and liberty, the spiritual and intangible things that have more worth than food in both this life and the next? Should I be starved of my desire to make the most of life till that part of me starves to death because somebody doesn’t have food? Freedom deserves more attention than food and shelter – it has so much longer lasting effects. Furthermore, with freedom, you can earn food and shelter, but with food and shelter given to you by some power, you will never earn your freedom.

Another way to look at it: I’ll strive for as much as I can get; what I don’t need, I’ll give to those who do, and through my efforts and maybe my example, they will have some sort of standard to look up to; they will have a reason to strive for greatness and have what they want instead of just seeing everybody feeling sorry all the time to an extent that nobody has the dream or passion to be rich with life.

I do not turn my heart away from those in need. I strongly believe that we ought to share as much as we can and not be greedy. I think the best place to start would be with freedom though, and from there we could rebuild the world into a place people would live in love and love to live in.

Patriot’s day.

patriot one — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 04:49:42 +0000

You may be expecting something cheesy or sad – the usual writings of people on days of memorial, but I am not going to deliver on this expectation.

In large part, I do not like days of patriotic celebration – for the same reasons I do not like those bumper sticker that say support our troops, those little cheap flags people stick in their yards every now and then and other things like that because I find that when people do things like this, they feel like they are fulfilling their civic duty; they say, “I support the troops; I’m patriotic;” they do so little for the welfare of their country yet buy off as patriotic people. The same goes for ‘patriots day’ and the fourth of July. People are patriotic two or three days out of the year and call it good when they ought to do so much more every day for the welfare of their nation.

I daresay that Ezra Taft Benson agrees; he says, “If America is destroyed, it may be by Americans who salute the flag, sing the national anthem, march in patriotic parades, cheer Fourth of July speakers – normally good Americans who fail to comprehend what is required to keep our country strong and free – Americans who have been lulled away into a false security.” (April 1968, General Conference Report) Think about it, if a person thinks they have done enough to keep their country ’strong and free,’ they certainly won’t seek out better ways to serve that purpose; they will be completely complacent.

Don’t get me wrong, I love this country; I love this country with all my heart and freedom even more. I, more than most, think we ought to celebrate and work to preserve our blessings of freedom and faith in this nation. I only disagree with how monotonous our so called celebrating has become. We ought to be more patriotic every day than we are on the two days of the year we focus on it. Our freedom relies on an awake patriotic citizenry. I think in large part that we have forgotten what it truly means to be patriotic in this country; we have forgotten to stand for principles, liberty and the author thereof and now stand for legislations, programs, presidents and socialism. We “fail to comprehend what is required to keep our country strong and free.”

So in memory of 9/11, I am so sorry for the families of those who died in the assault – those who have suffered and mourned for their losses. It was a tragedy that was horrific and without mercy, but I hope it will be a point at where many Americans wake up and start fighting to make this country as great as it once was – when freedom and peace were found overflowing.

In closing I quote Abe Lincoln when he said, “Whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River, or make a track on Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we shall live forever, or die by suicide.”

A people that are mentally awake to the world around them, free to act how they please on their knowledge and have something to believe in enough to fight for could not ever be worried of any enemy, but we – as we have lost our faith – have become frightened on account of such small threats. We have become blinded by so many things, and it is my prayer that we may all wake up and start to cleanse this nation of all things impure before we even think of reaching outward.

Political Speeches/Documents

patriot one — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 06:09:48 +0000

Hey, I’d say the page I would most like you to look at and read through is the political speeches/documents page. It has some very good – some of my very favorite – speeches on it and I’m trying to add more as I find them; I just added the one about Crockett and I highly suggest reading it. It was sent to me by my sister in law. I really appreciate when people email me things they think would add to my site – so don’t hesitate. It’s more speeches than documents now but I’ll put the Monroe doctrine and other things like that on it when I get some time. Thanks to all you readers and emailers and I’m sorry I’m slow to add anything to my page – but it gets on there eventually!