Table talk for Thanksgiving

“If you put truth on the table, it doesn’t matter how much error is there. If truth can get an opportunity to have a fair hearing, it will take care of itself. The problem is error knows this, so it doesn’t want truth to get to the table, or if it does, it wants it to be on the table in a distorted manner."--Richard Jordan

“. . . Today there’s a great sense people have of being alienated, separated, being ‘out here by myself’ in the world. One of the reasons people join gangs, cults, movements . . .

"I remember years ago reading an article about Al Capone and Joe Kennedy. Kennedy and Capone were contemporaries, and had Kennedy not been a millionaire, he would have been considered a bootlegger. To this day, every bottle of Irish-Scotch whiskey that comes into America his family still gets a piece of.

“During the Prohibition, Al was over here in the speakeasies and he’s got guys importing it and making it in car radiators and stuff. Well, he’s a gangster, but him and Kennedy both had the same motivation; they just started at different social stratas.

“One had no money or political contact but he had street muscle. The other guy’s got political muscle and financial muscle. So one’s this big respected guy and the other, he's a ‘let’s-hang-him-and-get-rid-of-him’ kind of a guy. But the motivation behind both men was the same: Power, money.

*****

From YouTuber about our AI-driven future: "They’re going to redefine what a criminal is. What they care about is the thoughts in your mind, and if you think differently, or you actually even dare to question what the government’s doing when it tells you it’s going to ration your electricity and the food you have,  and tell you you’re going to eat bugs instead of meat . . . Well, guess what? You’ll have one of these Optimus bots following you around.

"Musk says he favors a “Banksian society” model for the future. They constantly use the word “utopia” to make people think it will be a world without poverty, without hate. All things that are human nature that they want to remove and they want you to be subservient slaves.

"In this Banksian reality, tell me if this sounds familiar to you: “An abundance and post-scarcity.” Almost everything is free or effectively unlimited because this hyper-advanced AI handles all production, logistics, etc.

"No one has to work unless they really want to. That will do great things for your mental health when you get up every day and you have nothing to do. What will you do? Turn on a video game, go to some fake reality, live in some dystopian world? God forbid humans do the things God put us here to do.

"We can have the government keep us in our homes and use our Smart locks to make sure we don’t exit because, again, carbon emissions is a big deal and there’s the carbon laws.

"You got to love how Banksian PDF points say “God-like artificial minds,” because that’s what this is. Worship is in play."

*****

Personal installment for book below and will have travelogue entry tonight--I had such a busy, exhausting day at work (at retail operation) now that we're a week from Thanksgiving.

When my dad first told my mom he was going to become a missionary doctor in Ecuador, taking all of us with him, my mom says he explained, “I’ve got to do something for God before I die.”

My dad was someone who thought he had heart trouble because of chest pain that was really just due to anxiety, probably from all the pills he took.

All through my childhood he would tell us kids individually and corporately, “I’m not going to be around much longer.”

*****

I never knew my dad had an addiction to uppers and downers until after he died (at almost 79 years old) and my mom told me—I was in my mid-30s!

Now, when I was a kid, I would see my dad take pills, and he did always carry a bunch in his pants pocket, but he said they were for certain ailments.

He tried to push pills on me and my brother and sister when we were in our teens, but I truly believe he had good intentions. None of us would really take them—we just pretended to take them if he was watching.

The thing is I never knew growing up why my dad would be in such bad moods. He could be in a real good mood and then, without any warning, turn into a bad mood. This could all happen in a five-minute period sometimes.

He could be so volatile that you never knew where you stood with him and I personally was afraid of him on and off all through my teens. I never really ever stopped being afraid of him until five or six years before his death and after my mom divorced him after 31 years of marriage.

What bothered me the most as a teen was how he could be mean (what they like to call emotionally abusive) to my mother, and I would hear her cry so often from sadness at night behind a locked bedroom door.

More than a few times I actually prayed to God that my dad would die. I admitted this to my brother once and he said he did the same thing once or twice.