Archive for the ‘culture’ Category

30 (32) Tips to Stay Married 30 (32) Years. #32 The Seven Second Delay

Posted: October 10, 2020 by datechguy in culture, personal
Tags:

Miranda: Ummm that was incredible. Was it good for you?

Fletcher: I’ve had better.

Liar Liar 1997

Of all the tips you have read so far this is the one that the two of us have the had the most trouble keeping.

On Radio there is a kill switch or if you know you are dealing with something that can cause grief you will have a seven second delay to allow the engineer, to keep something off the air that will get you in trouble. Marriage is the one other place where that can be most useful.

A seven second delay between the time you think something and the time you decide to say it aloud can be one of the best ways to keep a marriage strong.

The most obvious application is during an argument when someone will blurt out something that they instantly wish they could take back, or in a social setting when one might embarrass one’s spouse but believe it or not it’s OUTSIDE of such situations that this rule is most applicable.

A lifetime of watching sitcoms has had a bad effect in the sense that the idea that a conversation ends with a “zinger” might seem to be the norm, but the reality is that while that a good thing if your goal is to get a laugh from millions of viewers if your goal is a good relationship such a statement to your spouse is more likely to cause grief and not just grief the type of grief that doesn’t get expressed right away and is stored ready to be remembered as a grievance at a time of trouble perhaps even at a critical time.

This is your spouse not your “straight man” and there’s a reason why you haven’t quit your day job to go on tour.

It might take some practice, but getting that kill switch “installed” in your head will pay dividends for years to come.

The 30 (32) tips so far

I’m old enough to remember when Democrats would be worried about Having Devil Worshipers Throwing Satanic Curses at an Ill POTUS Openly on their side

Posted: October 4, 2020 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, catholic, Church doctrine, culture, News/opinion
Tags: , , , ,
Via CS Lewis Doodle on Youtube

We are really faced with a cruel dilemma. When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all he pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and sceptics. At least, not yet. I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, belief in us, (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy. The “Life Force”, the worship of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis, may here prove useful. If once we can produce our perfect work-the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls “Forces” while denying the existence of “spirits”-then the end of the war will be in sight. 

CS Lewis The Screwtape Letters #7

You know it would be a lot easier to talk all those people who absolutely insist that you can’t be a Christian in general or a Catholic in particular and be for Trump if you didn’t have a bunch of devil worshipers openly trying to hex him.

Some users, however, took things well beyond the sarcastic remark or celebration of the diagnosis, directing foreign language curses and images of Satan toward the president in his sickness.

and frankly that’s the mild stuff.

Others broke the template, forwarding similar comments and curses in a variety of other languages publicly asking for the “Lord Satan” to empower them to “vanquish the enemies of our freedom and well-being!”

“This curse carries the power of a thousand witches you will never find peace or happiness you will be cursed for centuries,” one user wrote, attaching images that appeared to be of a voodoo puppet doll burning. “The ancestors of each witch will follow you until the end of time old man.”

Now remember this is being done openly on a public platform for all the world to see.

Frankly anyone who is surprised by this hasn’t been paying attention. I submit and suggest this has been the left for a very long time.

Closing thoughts. These best counter to this stuff is of course prayer. There will be a public Rosary at my parish that I’ll be a part of next Saturday at noon and on the 24th we will be having a special mass Saturday at noon to pray for the country ending with a Eucharistic Procession I would suggest the same for your local parish.

But more importantly all of these people need to be prayed for. It’s very likely that many of them have nobody to pray for them and we must not forget that the love of God for them still exists and Christ died for their sins as much as anyone else. Thanks to these events we know who these people are and can give their guardian angels a welcome boost through prayer.

The best way to beat the devil is to deprive him of souls. Pray for these people and help deprive him of theirs.

Baked-In Birth Control

Posted: October 3, 2020 by ng36b in abortion, catholic, culture
Tags: , , , ,
The Holy Grail of Car Seats!!

Kids can be expensive. The first shock might be the hospital bill when you leave. I have friends that went into medical debt for their kid’s birth. If you escape medical bills, the next shock comes when you purchase a child seat. Really, its a throne, a really large, hard to use, plastic throne that your child will soil quickly. Because I have a large family, I noticed that these thrones couldn’t fit three across a seat. Even a booster seat seemed to magically bow outwards so that I couldn’t fit three kids in a backseat. I commented to my wife that it was a real disincentive for big families to not be able to fit three seats in the back seat.

Apparently, that was worthy of a study. A recent paper looked at just that, and noted that the new standards only saved 57 more people, but caused 145,000 fewer births since 1980. That’s a pretty significant difference.

That cost gets worse because it is near impossible to get a used car seat. When I worked at Goodwill, we wouldn’t take them because of liability concerns. To buy a new car seat for every kid gets expensive. Worse, the car seat standards change nearly every year. When it happened one year and I was told to throw out my old seats, I looked up the new standard (as in, I read the really boring, multi-page engineering standard) and noticed it barely changed anything. Going through the history of changes, most of the changes are minor. These changes serve to automatically deprecate car seats, to the point they’ve become like cell phones in that you can’t use old models, even though they may have plenty of life left in them.

This is just one thing in long list of items that makes it hard to have a large family. Unless you want to get the massive “Catholic Van,” you’re stuck with less kids. Now the government wants kids to sit in a car seat until they are 12 or 13. That’s kind of insane. Yet the same government is OK with a school bus full of kids that has no boosters, no seat belts and crappy bench seats. At least a passenger vehicle is designed with seat belts, air bags and crumple zones to keep people alive in a wreck.

Car seats is just one example of the quiet way we make it hard for responsible parents to follow the rules while also having a big family. As birth rates fall worldwide, governments are trying to find ways to promote larger families, with plenty of discussion on government child care and mandatory maternity leave. That might help, but if we’re not addressing the common day to day issues that face large families, people will continue to opt out of large families. Ironically, the most effective practices for governments might be to listen to today’s large families to understand their struggles, rather than viewing them as a burden.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Who is my neighbor on social media?

Posted: September 19, 2020 by ng36b in blogs, culture
Tags: , , ,

“Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.”

Leviticus 19:18
Too easy to share, and so bland!

The COVID-19 posturing, protests and constant craziness on social media is grinding away at plenty of nerves. Reason’s recent article about leaving people alone summarizes the current grandstanding, on all sides, in its last paragraph:

These with-us-or-against-us performances are a symptom of a larger climate in which every element of our lives has become an opportunity for tribal signaling and cultural warfare, and in which our ruling political tribes are growing increasingly illiberal in their approaches to free speech, free trade, free thought, private property, and so much more.

Reason

Right now, most people are caught in the 24 hour news cycle, which rewards getting angry over something every day. But what happens when people get fed up and start quitting? As far back as 2017 people began noting that Millenials weren’t sharing nearly as much original content on social media. As social media becomes increasingly hostile to contradictory views, its far easier to share bland, feel good articles or memes. Many people get no joy or energy from arguing with people online. People that do love the sport of online argument are likely to find an increasingly smaller number of engagement opportunities. In Top Gun terms, it won’t be so “target rich” anymore.

As people pull back, you’ll see much more use of social media to connect directly with people, but a lot less sharing of opinions. This makes tracking social media sharing as a flawed data set for gauging popular opinion. For any future election, how Twitter, Facebook and other things trend isn’t going to be a reliable indicator for polling, yet people are going to swear by it. This very different sharing is also making the social media advertising model more difficult to execute.

People will always self-select friends. We are called to love our neighbors, and if social media makes that hard, people will naturally pull back. Social media put us in a weird place of often knowing many people online, but not knowing our next door neighbor. Ironically, it might now turn us to cut out the online “friends” in order to talk more with our neighbor.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Older Entries
Newer Entries