When I was young it was possible for a regular ordinary person to live in Manhattan or San Francisco or even London or Paris or Rome. Now Nashville is too rich for my blood.

It was also possible for somebody with an ordinary crappy job, if they stuck to it and got a few promotions, to raise a family, buy a house and a boat, a couple of cars, maybe have a lake cottage, and send their kids to college. Now that’s a description of a multi-millionaire.

What happened? It’s true the cars are a lot better, we can afford to fly places, we have gadgets we never dreamed of, and the internet is amazing, but being middle class ain’t what it used to be.

We took the two little girls that we take care of some times, the daughters of our friends, to the lake today. I was swimming with the six year old. She was on my back with her arms around my neck, and she wanted me to dive under water with her on my back, but first she wanted to get our signals straight.

“When I tap your right shoulder it means I am out of oxygen. When I tap you on your head it means emergency. And when I tap you on your left shoulder, it means I love you with all my heart.”

It felt like God speaking to me.

This quote from C. S. Lewis perfectly describes the damage that the Russian collusion dead-enders are doing to their souls.

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything—God and our friends and ourselves included—as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”

Lewis, C. S.. Mere Christianity

What if I could take my mature mind with all of its experience and habits and reflexes and implant it in my 18 year old self. Go back with all I know now and take a different path. Instead of being a radical and a hippie, tripping on LSD, and joining a commune, I could join the CIA and have an entirely different life.

I’m pretty sure I was being recruited for the CIA when I was in college, which makes sense. My father was a retired Air Force colonel. I was a clean cut, smart, excellent student, Air Force brat going to Iowa State University, a debate star, with an expressed interest in the Foreign Service. Just what they are looking for.

There was this guy who showed up on the debate team, tall, good looking, capable, but older than the other students. He seemed more interested in me than in debate, and it wasn’t sexual. He wanted to be my buddy. He tried to get me to switch debate partners, which actually would have been smart. He was a much better debater than Lorrie, my current partner, but I was madly in love with Lorrie, so I wasn’t interested. He tried to get me to join the National Student Association, which years later was exposed as a CIA front. I believe he was trying to recruit me, but just couldn’t get anywhere.

This was 1962. I was still wearing a suit when we went to debate tournaments, getting good grades, behaving myself, and too whacked out on hormones to be thinking about anything like joining the CIA. I didn’t think about politics all that much, but when I did I was a Democrat.

Then when the 60s really hit, the CIA became totally out of the question of course. But what if I could go back and take that route? Back then I thought America was the Great Satan. Now I think America is the hope of the world. Working for the CIA would be interesting and exciting and the pay is pretty good and you could feel like you were doing something worthwhile. And what a gas it would be if I could follow that branch of fate and have a whole other life. I would become a very different person than I am now.

I think that’s what God does. He lives a life in His universe and then goes back and starts over and leads a completely different life, and that’s who we are, God taking a stroll through the Creation as a unique consciousness. No two consciousnesses occupy the same point in time and space. So God can be in all of them without overlap, everywhere. Saints , business men, Somalian pirates, super models, and serial killers, in the infinite universe. And not just us of course, but also animals and plants and rocks and empty spaces, all inhabited by God.

That’s a pretty, new-age, everything is everything, kind of thing. It goes down pretty smooth. But I also believe that God is standing outside of His Creation, looking down on It, and that He sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to Earth to redeem mankind, and there is a Heaven and a Hell. That isn’t something that I grew up with that was imposed on me. I got there on my own. Now it seems to me undeniable.

Try reconciling those two visions of reality.

Conservatives who mock AOC for calling for a 70% income tax after ten million and elimination of billionaires, and Elizabeth Warren for advocating a wealth tax, are in for a rude awakening. People are fed up with the immense and growing divergence of rich and poor.

Donald Trump, greatest status quo changer of all time, has said he is open to raising taxes on the rich. He’ll get around to it at some point.

When everything @realDonaldTrump does or tweets is reported as a sign of the end times, it’s no wonder the #StockMarket is struggling. Next year when, miraculously, @POTUS and the world are still here, the market will rebound.

The Jingle Bell Boogie from Candace R Corrigan on Vimeo.

I quit Patreon and my $5 contribution to Scott Adams to protest Patreon’s contempt for free speech, and also to protest Scott’s reluctance to stand up for free speech on the social media platforms in general. I detect an unacknowledged mercenary unter-motive, apologies for the ad hominem, but c’mon, a certain amount of mind-reading can’t be avoided.

Of course it may not be entirely mercenary. It can be a sincere belief in the benefit of his wisdom to humanity that impels him to maximize his audience, free speech be damned. I will grant him that.

I’m no longer paying, but I wouldn’t miss my morning coffee with Scott Adams for anything. There’s always a chance I might learn something. While that doesn’t happen as often as it did in the beginning, it still happens. Thank you, Scott.

U.S. withdrawal from #Syria means #Russia, Assad, and #Iran will kill all of the rebels, #jihadi and non-jihadi, and restore #Assad to power. We can’t announce it, but this is now our policy. I think it’s probably the right one, but the neocons are up in arms of course.

There are two arguments against: 1) ISIS will rise again. 2) Our buddies, the Kurds will be slaughtered.

ISIS will not rise again because Russia, Iran, Assad, and Turkey don’t like them any more than we do.

The Kurds will not be slaughtered because President Trump and Erdogan have already made a deal, and the Saudis are sending troops to support them.

There is no outcome in Syria that we can engineer that is better than the restoration of Assad under Russian control. A stable democracy is not on the menu.

The thing is, if you boycott twitter or facebook, you don’t get to be on those platforms anymore. That’s a cost. But if you boycott #PatreonExodus, it doesn’t cost anything. In fact you save money! There’s no barrier to leaving for the subscribers.

For the creators who provide the content and harvest the subscriptions there is of course a substantial cost, but if an alternative platform is created, there will be no barrier to switching.

It won’t suffer from the Gab curse of attracting all the racists and Nazis, because, as a Patreon subscriber you are not subjected to anyone’s rants. Your are just supporting those whom you deem worthy of support.