The world, we are told, was made by a God who is both good and omnipotent. Before He created the world, He foresaw all the pain and misery it would contain; He is therefore responsible for all of it. It is useless to argue that the pain in the world is due to sin. In the first place, this is not true; it is not sin that causes rivers to overflow their banks or volcanoes to erupt. But even if it were true, it would make no difference. If I were going to beget a child knowing that the child was going to be a homicidal maniac, I should be responsible for his crimes. If God knew in advance the sins of which man would be guilty, He was clearly responsible for all the consequences of those sins when He decided to create man. The usual Christian argument is that suffering in the world is a purification for sin and is therefore a good thing. This argument is, of course, only a rationalization of sadism, but in any case it is a very poor argument. I would invite any Christian to accompany me to the children’s ward of a hospital, to watch the suffering that is there being endured, and then to persist in the assertion that those children are so morally abandoned as to deserve what they are suffering. In order to bring himself to say this, a man must destroy in himself all feelings of mercy and compassion. He must, in short, make himself as cruel as the God in whom he believes. No man who believes that all is for the best in this suffering world can keep his ethical values unimpaired, since he is always having to find excuses for pain and misery.
Link
PBR or Ass?
Chess Game of the Day: Caro-Kann Defense
One of my online chess games. Two or three weak middle game moves by me and I got hit by an avalanche. Some annotations below . . .
1. …c6 Caro-Kann Defense
3. e5 Advance Variation
3. …c5 Botvinnik-Carls Defense
13. Qd4? Maybe 13. a4, instead of putting the queen where Black can point a bishop at it.
29. Ra2 Black has the best of things at this point. Possibly Rxf8, taking a piece out of the attack, is an improvement.
34. Ra8? Moving the rook back to a2 would have been better.
39. …Ra1 I thought 39. …Ra2 was better but this move still doesn’t put much of a dent in a large Black advantage.
41. Re2?? 41. Ke3 could have prolonged the agony. The game is really over at this point, but in a blitz game where we both had a little under 40 seconds left, why not play it out? Time constraints sometimes lead to unexpected blunders.
41. …Qc1 Not that I computed it at the time but Black has a forced mate from here, although it’s a long sequence.
And That’s the Truth: Nothing Was Delivered
[And That’s the Truth is a feature by our guest blogger, Sojourner Truth — PE]
Can you name me one black person who’s life is better because of Colin Kaepernick? He’s made our lives worse.
He widened the racial divide in our country, he pushed this Defund the Po-lice notion that has blown up in the face of everyone who’s tried it.
Chicago cut $8 million outta the police budget and now the mayor callin the Feds sayin “You gotta help us wid all dis goddam crime!” My lord, who’d of guessed that gettin rid of people whose job is stoppin crime would lead to more crime? And most of the crime is in black neighborhoods. Thank you, Colin Kaepernick.
This boy work for Nike, which as you know, is affiliated with slave labor. They pay people in Vietnam a dollar a day to stitch sports apparel while Kaepernick makes millions to moan about inequality and injustice. You see da irony?
If Nike sent him to Vietnam to work for a dollar a day I’d be a lot more interested in what he had to say.
And that’s the Truth!
See You in Hell, Convoy Haters
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE]
Greetings mortals —
You may remember back in 2020, pre-vaccine, when you were all in your comfy lockdowns, that everyone was fine with truckers being designated as “essential workers,” so they could risk their lives and health to deliver your stupid Amazon purchases, bring food to the supermarket, deliver medicine, make sure that presents arrived by Christmas morning, but as soon as they opposed government-mandated injections, the same truckers became racists, Nazis, etc.
The people you’re screaming at in Ottawa are the people who kept the world turning. You were fine letting them risk their lives before there was a vaccine. Now you want to shut down their lives because they fail to show the proper obedience or they ask too many questions.
See you in Hell . . .
There’s No Comprehending
There’s no comprehending
Just how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes
And the lips you can get
And still feel so alone
Utterly Different From What We Expected
We are ready to accept almost any explanation of the present crisis of our civilization except one: that the present state of the world may be the result of genuine error on our own part and that the pursuit of some of our most cherished ideals has apparently produced results utterly different from those which we expected.
Aside
Of the two witnesses, hold the principal one — You know yourself better than anyone else knows you.
P.J. O’Rourke, 1947-2022
Like many men of my generation, I had an opportunity to give war a chance, and I promptly chickened out. I went to my draft physical in 1970 with a doctor’s letter about my history of drug abuse. The letter was four and a half pages long with three and a half pages devoted to listing the drugs I’d abused. I was shunted into the office of an Army psychiatrist who, at the end of a forty-five minute interview with me, was pounding his desk and shouting, “You’re fucked up! You don’t belong in the Army!” He was certainly right on the first count and probably right on the second. Anyway, I didn’t have to go. But that, of course, meant someone else had to go in my place. I would like to dedicate this book to him.
I hope you got back in one piece, fellow. I hope you were more use to your platoon mates than I would have been. I hope you’re rich and happy now. And in 1971, when somebody punched me in the face for being a long-haired peace creep, I hope that was you.
RIP P.J. O’Rourke
Spoiled Child at the Heart of Liberalism?
RIP P.J. O’Rourke
— Conservative Momma (@conmomma) February 20, 2022
Aside
Although experiences may seem solid, they are passing memories.
Donald Knuth: Observations About Programming and Specifications
When you’re doing programming, you have to explain something to a computer, which is dumb. When you’re writing a document for a human being to understand, the human being will look at it and nod his head and say, “Yeah, this makes sense.” But there are all kinds of ambiguities and vagueness that you don’t realize until you try to put it into a computer. Then all of a sudden, almost every five minutes as you’re writing the code, a question comes up that wasn’t addressed in the specification. “What if this combination occurs?” It just didn’t occur to the person writing the design specification. When you’re faced with doing the implementation, a person who has been delegated the job of working from a design would have to say, “Well, hmm, I don’t know what the designer meant by this.”
It’s so hard to do the design unless you’re faced with the low-level aspects of it, explaining it to a machine instead of to another person. I think it was George Forsythe who said, “People have said you don’t understand something until you’ve taught it in a class. The truth is you don’t really understand something until you’ve taught it to a computer, until you’ve been able to program it.” At this level, programming was absolutely important.
When I got to actually programming TeX, I had to also organize it so that it could handle lots of text. I had to develop a new data structure in order to be able to do the paragraph coming in text and enter it in an efficient way. I had to introduce ideas called “glue,” and “penalties,” and figure out how that glue should disappear at boundaries in certain cases and not in others. All these things would never have occurred to me unless I was writing the program.
There Is No Country Like America
From an interview with Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears:
There is no country like America. There is not. Not one. . . .
I mean, I’m the one who got off the plane and here I am, here in the former capital of the Confederacy for goodness sake. I am second in command. Second in command. I’m a black woman. I am not first-generation American. I am still the immigrant.
As I said, I’m a black woman, immigrant, and what else can you say to me that would say, well, “racism, racism, racism”? How do you explain me? I’m not an outlier. I’m not a one-off. The opportunities are here.
Are we denying that there have been problems, that there has been slavery, that there has been racism, or that there has been segregation, and redlining, and blue codes, and all this stuff? No, we’re not denying any of that. We just said, I sit here second in command of the former capital of the Confederacy.
And while America may not be what she’s supposed to be, as we have a saying in church, “I may not be what I’m supposed to be, but I ain’t what I used to be.” That’s America. She may not be what she’s supposed to be, but she ain’t what she used to be. It is not, as I’ve said before, 1963 when my father came at the height of the civil rights movement.
By the way, Jamaicans have been coming and other people have been coming, who are black, to America since the 1900s, when it was way worse for us. But we understood that we could make the best of what we had, and we’ve been doing that. . . .
I am an overcomer, many black people are overcomers. We could say to ourselves, “They threw this in our path, but we’ve overcome that. They threw that in our path, but we overcome that.” And we’re going to keep overcoming. We’re going to keep striving. . . .
But the constant black versus white versus Asian versus Hispanic—who wants to live like that? No. So, we need to teach our children all of history—the good, the bad, the ugly—because one thing we learned from history, as someone said, is that we don’t learn from history. But then, we’re going to keep going, we’re going to keep striving, because our children need a hope and a future. And to keep looking back, there is nothing back there. The future is ahead.
God Hates Children?
“God hates children.”
For a moment Viking Man is too lost in his reverie to have heard, but then he turns to the other man. “Can’t say I ever thought of it that way, vicar.”
“God is always killing children in the Bible, or threatening to,” says Vikar. “He kills His own child.”
Viking Man nods slowly. “That’s a hell of an observation,” he says.
If You Gotta Go, Go Now
One of my students says she was so frustrated with an assignment she was ready to throw her computer out the window.
“What floor do you live on,” I ask.
“Second.”
“Oh, well that probably wouldn’t kill anyone, just a bump on the noggin. But you can’t say for sure if it hit them just right. Be sure you’re wearing a mask though when you do that.”
She lives in New York. My son also lives in New York so I had to call to warn him to be on the lookout for falling computers.
“Because I know someone who may be throwing one out a window. But only from the second floor so you’ll probably be able to see it coming and step out of the way.”
If I lived in New York and it came down to being killed by COVID or by a falling computer, I’d take the computer. And not just because I’m a computer professional — live by the computer, die by the computer.
But it would be quick. If everything went well, I’d never even know what hit me. I don’t want to waste away in a hospital bed.
My wife was saying the other day that if she’s ever incapacitated and unable to do things for herself, we should just let her go. Pull the plug, so to speak.
I said, “I can get a pillow and smother you with it tonight if you want. Oh . . . and Happy Valentines Day.”
Chess Game of the Day: Queen’s Pawn Game, Chigorin Variation
One of my online chess games. Some annotations below . . .
2. …d5 Queen’s Pawn Game: Chigorin Variation
12. Ne5 12. Nd2 might be better, as the queen’s bishop runs into a wall in this line.
16. Bg3 A sacrifice that’s maybe not easy to find in a 2+1 blitz game is 16. f4 gxe5 17. fxg5 followed by O-O.
22. Rxf6?!
22. …Qxf6?! 22. …Kxf6 is better just in terms of material but this is playable.
22. Kxg2? This can wait. 22. Rd1 brings another piece into the fray.
29. Rd2? I like 29. h4 because the king can use h2 as an escape square, and the rook is going to be better at d3.
30. Qe4?? Losing. Advancing the h-pawn keeps the game alive.
30. …Bh3+ Mate to follow.
I Think I Could Turn and Live With Animals
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
COVID Vaccines
At the start of 2020, when COVID first came to our shores, we didn’t know anything about it, we didn’t have a vaccine, and by the end of the year 400,000 Americans had died from the virus.
By the start of 2021, we had a year of research and a vaccine. We’ve been vaccinating people for a year, and yet we have more COVID deaths under the Biden administration than under Trump, every day more vaccinated people are getting sick, so while the vaccine may keep you out of the hospital or the graveyard, it doesn’t provide immunity, it doesn’t stop the spread, I’m not sure it even slows the spread, given that we have more cases and deaths than ever.
For a long time now, anyone saying “I don’t think vaccines are stopping the spread of COVID” or something similar have been persona non grata in public discourse. Is that still the case? If so, why?
Let’s Go Brandon
I have a shirt that looks similar to the one in the photo. The shirt is a conversation starter and the conversation often goes like this:
“I don’t like your shirt.”
“Mmmm, I don’t really like yours either.”
“Ha ha, you know what I mean.”
“I think I do and I have to say that it concerns me like a whole lot of nothing at all.”