Avoiding Orwell's Law in a time of Civil War.

I had an idea today for a truly peaceful protest against racism, and it would make it impossible for anybody to oppose it.

How about Saturday morning, both black lives matter and all lives matter people commit to putting lawn chairs and tables in OWN their front lawns, signs on the tables, and spend their morning actually talking to their neighbors from a socially distanced 6 feet?

THAT is what a truly nonviolent protest looks like. Not invading other people's spaces, but having conversations with your neighbors for real grass roots change. In my case, crabgrass change.

Speaking truth to power in Oregon involves ballot measures, not protest signs and denying your fellow citizens the right to speak. Let alone destroying private businesses, stopping traffic on major streets, and burning down buildings with people still inside them.
Orwell's law states that any violent rebellion against a tyranny will create an even worse tyranny. All that ever happens when you get violent is some pigs are more equal than other pigs.

Child Safe Environment Training

Here is the link for the Knights of Columbus Safe Environment training.  

There are two ways to make sure you are updated on this training.  If you are in the REQUIRED TRAINING officer and service program list, you need to press the green button and log in with the userID of your member # combined with your last name, for instance Ted's username is 4253418seeber .  Yours can of course be found on your membership card.

If you are not in the list, you should click on the BLUE button and the registration code is KofC safe.

Both buttons are halfway down the page.

For our council, this is the list of people who need to pass Safe Environment training:

Grand Knights

Deputy Grand Knights

Program Directors
Community Directors
Family Directors
Youth Directors

The problem with identity politics

Is that there really is no law against segregation today, as long as it is chosen voluntarily.

There is NOTHING keeping sexist or racist protesters from moving elsewhere and building their own city to their liking.

In fact, there are plenty of small towns in Kansas, Texas, Colorado, Nebraska, and Minnesota that would be willing to host such a project, no matter what color you are.

Censorship is never valid

An ethical hacker point of view of the cancel culture:

First they came for the conservatives- banning their posts and videos, canceling voices they could not stand.

Then they came for the statues and paintings and works of art- the Iconoclasm. Every hint that the past ever existed, must be destroyed.

Next they will come for the books, burning any that give a hint that any other way of life than theirs existed.

After that they'll be writing memory hole worms to edit the internet to their liking so that no post can be made without approved speech and thought codes applied.

At what level of historical revisionism are you comfortable with?

Because I am not comfortable with any of it.

If you must practice historical revision, add data, don't delete it.

Write your own point of view on a plaque to attach to the base of a statue or the frame of that painting so that future inhabitants of the city can get both sides.

Don't burn books, write books!

Don't edit the internet, start your own web page or social media service.

Censorship is NEVER valid.

14 episodes from The Original Series that prove Star Trek does not NEED to be "Woke"

1. “Charlie X” (Ep. 2, Season 1)

What happens when a young man (Robert Walker), dizzy from hormones and zero family ties, can literally make anything he wishes a reality? His emotions take over, with disaster and death the natural byproduct.

Enter Captain James T. Kirk (Shatner), the Alpha Male figure poor Charlie needs.

Kirk can’t fully control Charlie, but he commands the lad’s respect and buys the crew time to deal with his god-like powers. The unchecked Charlie has no one to explain life to him, let alone place vital boundaries in his path. Without a father figure he revolts, not unlike what we’re seeing nationwide as the spoiled children who make up the Antifa crowd drag statues to the ground.

Kirk’s uber-masculine guidance can’t prevent a sad ending for Charlie, but the captain ensures no more Starfleet personnel will die by Charlie’s hands.

2. “The City on the Edge of Forever” (Ep. 28, Season 1)

Kirk falls in love, hard, during this time travel episode considered the series’ zenith. His crush is a budding pacifist (Joan Collins) who delays the U.S. from entering the second World War after Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) saves her from a life-threatening accident.

Now, Kirk and Spock must make sure that doesn’t happen again … or the Germans will develop the atomic bomb first and change the course of history.

“Star Trek’s” level-headed approach to war, when to wage it and under what terms, can be both admirable and deeply conservative.

3. “Balance of Terror” (Ep. 14, Season 1)

Spock is no war monger, but he takes a neo-con-like stand in this tense episode. Some enemies, like the Romulans threatening war along the Neutral Zone, cannot be talked out of combat. They must be defeated at all costs.

A battle between two shrewd captains ensues, leaving just enough time for a lecture on bigotry. The takeaway? Sometimes a good offense is the best defense.

4. “Space Seed” (Ep. 22, Season 1)

The episode that set the stage for “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” introduced us to a swaggering, super-human Ricardo Montalban. The episode has aged as well as the 1982 film, but a deeper look into the story reveals something else.

Khan represented a misguided attempt to perfect humanity, granting some with extra strength and intelligence. Khan and his ilk felt they knew better than everyone else, and therefore must lead by any means necessary. One wonders what Fidel Castro thought of this episode… Another problematic element for a feminist audience: the female lead (Madlyn Rhue) initially finds herself swept away by Khan’s masculine appeal.

5. “The Enemy Within” (Ep. 5, Season 1)

Modern progressives would recoil at the core of this potboiler. Kirk is split into two distinct selves, a calm, compassionate soul and a raging Id. The latter causes chaos on the ship, including a tough to watch assault on Yeoman Rand (Grace Lee Whitney). Still, we learn that Kirk isn’t the strong, capable leader we’ve come to know without a dose of “toxic masculinity.”

Removing that element would cripple the Enterprise and turn Kirk into just another, lesser captain.

6. “Dagger of the Mind” (Ep. 9, Season 1)

The unmissable message of this anti-progressive episode: “Curing” mankind of our sinful behavior and errant thoughts through science and forced rehabilitation is not just futile. It’s inhumane.

7. “Mudd’s Women” (Ep. 6, Season 1)

Gloria Steinem must loathe this episode.

Women want to feel beautiful, or at least have a man who views them that way.  The cartoonish Harry Mudd (Roger C. Carmel) knows this all too well, and he exploits it to keep himself one step ahead of the law.

The episode assumes distinct gender roles in male-female relationships while acknowledging how men’s visual senses can be overloaded by beauty and grace. And, shockingly, that isn’t deemed disastrous by the episode’s ending.

8. “The Return of the Archons” (Ep. 21, Season 1)

The first of several “Trek” tales where people are considered part of one “body” — a la the Borg — and stripped of their individuality to create a more harmonious society. Kirk talks the machinery behind this “perfect order” into destroying itself, reminding it why free will matters.

It’s a similar story with  Once again Kirk realizes the folly of living in an Edenic state and wrecks the gadgetry that makes it all possible.

9. “Arena” (Ep. 18, Season 1)

Kirk must battle a lizard creature with great strength and lousy mobility in this essential “Trek” tale. The Kirk/Gorn battle is epic by “Trek” standards, but the intriguing element arrives when we learn why Gorn’s comrades attacked Kirk’s landing team. Starfleet encroached on their territory, and they viewed the incursion as an unprovoked attack.

The un-woke lesson: People have a right to defend their territory, be it via a man-made wall or military means.

10. “Amok Time” (Ep. 1, Season 2)

It’s mating season for Leonard Nimoy’s pointy-eared hero, Mr. Spock, and it couldn’t come at a worse time for Kirk and company.

It leads to a wild fight between the show’s main players, after which Spock echoes a philosophy with a whiff of social conservatism.

“Having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting,” Spock notes.

11. “This Side of Paradise” (Ep. 24, Season 1)

Kirk and the landing party encounter a settlement teeming with contentment. There’s a catch, of course. Their bliss is provided by alien spores which keep them healthy and devoid of negative emotions.

It’s utopia — and it’s antithetical to the human condition. The society’s leader learns that the hard way after waking from his spore-driven stupor.

“Three years, no accomplishments,” he mutters.

The episode’s portrait of a biologist (Jill Ireland) who just isn’t complete without Spock by her side might drive feminists up a wall. Let’s not forget the drab, gray uniforms the settlers where, right out of the Communist Gift Guide.

Later, Kirk muses on the trouble with so-called paradise.

“Maybe we weren’t meant for paradise. Maybe we were meant to fight our way through, struggle, claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way. Maybe we can’t stroll to the music of the lute. We must march to the sound of drums.”

Not a bad definition of capitalism.

12. “What Little Girls Are Made Of” (Ep. 7, Season 1).

Prototype Borg.  This episode would be canceled on the title alone, let alone the female android that uses cisgendered female wiles to trick Kirk into being replaced with an android duplicate.

The earliest science fiction version of the singularity I know of- and why it would be an awful mistake to replace human beings with machines.

13. “The Apple” (Ep. 5. Season 2).

Another stupid machine-forced Utopia, and like all Utopias, has resulted in the stagnation of the culture that is influenced by it.  That's the problem with Utopias- it takes vice to learn virtue, it takes sin to be forgiven to be holy.  There are NO shortcuts.

14. “Patterns Of Force" (Ep.21, Season 2).  

Antifa would like you to believe only violence in the streets can stop fascism.  Antifa would like you to believe that only the totalitarian control of communism can stop the totalitarian control of fascism.  But what about libertarian freedom and a decision to have a strong ethic against prejudice and bigotry?  That is Kirk's solution when he finds his old history professor, now a first contact researcher, breaking the Prime Directive.