Tag: history

March 6, 2023 – What Your Ukraine Flag Is Really Saying

March 6, 2023 /

I did quite a bit of reading on this one. I knew in my head, from trusted sources that things weren’t exactly what they seemed. All that being said, everyone still needs to do their own research. Just because a source is trusted, doesn’t mean that it is always right.

I think that intuitively, we can all see the Ukrainian flag as a symbol of virtue signaling. It is a sign of the times. We have become a society of icons and false bravado when we perceive an injustice. Just like the ‘drop the mic’ podcast, unfortunately I think that society has turned. We have moved into a decadence phase like ancient Rome where we have more interest in other people’s problems than our own. But, that is a story for another day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Ukraine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Crimea

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity

End Your Programming Routine: Virtue signaling is certainly a form of programming. The concept implies a level of ignorance or blind faith. Now, is this something that is a major problem? Only when you are concerned with liberty and individual thought.

May 17, 2022 – Does Preserving History Matter?

May 17, 2022 /

I had an experience over the weekend. Quite out of the blue, my mom called on Saturday and said that the TV wanted to interview me about my experiences with the North Palestine Church. Not all of those details turned out to be completely accurate, but that doesn’t really matter. I swung into action to gather memorabilia to share and rushed out of the house to participate.

We called it Palestine Church growing up. It was about half a mile from my parents house. This was about as close as anything was. The only other public space was Fir Grove Elementary (about the same distance). The reason the church was in my life is that we used it as a meeting place for Boy Scouts during the summer time. It was also the fallback camping location for our monthly campouts (mostly wintertime).

The church was moved in 2012 from it’s cemetery location where it was built to about three miles down the road to Adair Village. The county now owns the building but it has essentially been closed since the move. They are slowly making improvements to get it ready for eventual use. However, there is no current vision on what it will be used for or even what needs to be done to make it usable.

As it turns out, the county was taking a video record of some of the people that were involved with using the church throughout the years. This is where the story I have been writing and my story intersect. Since Boy Scouts was such a fundamental building block of my youth, having a place to meet was an extremely vital component to having the entity exist. It also helps that it was extremely close and didn’t require a ride to get there every week.

Being speculative, would I have continued if I couldn’t easily get there? Would the troop exist without a permanent meeting place? If restored, will it ever hold the significance in the new location that it did in the old? These are all questions to be asked and not everyone in the troop many hold the same regard that I do.

These are photos inside the church at my Eagle Scout Court of Honor June 28, 1992. Each individual was asked what we would like to see the use of the church be. My response was that it maintains to be a venue that impacts people’s lives the way that this one did to mine.

End Your Programming Routine: If I am intellectually honest, the significance of Palestine church had a context of time, place and my personal interaction with the building. Just maintaining it as an available venue may never reach people in the same way. A fact that it was moved from it’s very rural location to a much more populated location removes the intimacy that us near it had. It could be anyplace anywhere really. So, while I have a strong emotional connection to the building, my real wish is that people make those connections wherever they are.

December 7, 2021 – In Contrast to Yesterday…

December 7, 2021 /

I have an experiment going on. I got this bicycle light for Christmas in 1994. I got the batteries for this light at the same time. Guess what, they still work. That is 27 years later, functioning alkaline batteries.  I like to check the light every couple of years to see if it is still working.  

This is not getting any sort of preferential treatment.  The light has been in the unheated/uninsulated garage since 2005. I am pretty sure they were in my garage in South Carolina for three years and in another garage for two previous years.  While the batteries are not getting the more extreme cold, it it a few degrees above ambient.

There has been a lot of life that has occurred in this time period.  I was doing some thinking over that course of time.

  • 14 vehicles
  • 9 cell phones
  • 6 PCs
  • 5 dogs
  • 3 houses
  • 2 children
  • 1 Bachelor’s Degree
  • 1 Marriage

I purchased my first bicycle in 1992.  I took it to school with me and it got stolen in May 1994.  So, during the summer of 1994 I purchased a replacement.  This light was to comply with night riding law on my new bicycle.  It was my only mode of transportation at the time.  

As a kid, batteries were scarce.  Usually we would get some at Christmas or a birthday with the gift but that was it.  We were on our own after that.  We might buy a four pack with our own money but this was why I largely listened to the radio on my Walkman and not tapes because it was a lot more efficient on battery power.  My boombox stereo never had batteries because it was too expensive to feed it 6, D cell batteries and we didn’t have them in the first place.  Remote control cars sat idle.  Any batteries we did have were moved between devices at the point of use.

This is the reason why I still have the batteries in my bicycle light because I was saving them until I really needed them and then I forgot about the bike and the light.  It is also why I get frustrated when my kids run through a set of batteries every two or three days on the X-box controller.  They have no appreciation for what always having batteries available means.

I have no real explanation what makes this situation different.  I have some theories however and the stem to prior manufacturing techniques.  Yesterday, I was saying that it seemed liked batteries rarely leaked.  I know that batteries have become significantly more prevalent than 25 years ago.  That has driven increased capacity demand which means new machines that don’t work as well as the original.  The other possibility was a tweak in chemistry or materials that make them more susceptible to failure.

When we lived in Lancaster, SC Duracell had a plant that made 2.3 billion AA annually and employed 1200 people.  That plant closed in 2019 and now those batteries are made elsewhere (LaGrange, GA).  So, we know there is a least one recent change.  When we lived there, my mind said that brand loyalty was supporting the local community.

From my research, I found that Radio Shack batteries were largely made by Enercell the parent company of Energizer/Eveready.  The documentation gets lost a little in the mid-1990s and now no one cares so I didn’t find  any smoking guns.  My traditional view held that Energizers failed at a higher rate than Duracell.  Plus, Costco sells a deeply discounted value pack which is convenient.  So my recent preference has been Duracell. As a value brand, I have not had the same problems Panasonic, that may warrant some more investigation as my frustration with the two American consumer brands is shaky at best.

End Your Programming Routine:  I am not correlating everything old is better, even in the battery arena.  The cordless tools of 1994 cannot hold a candle to the tools purchased today.  I think that reduced cost and the proliferation of batteries have lowered customer expectations.  Let’s be honest, most consumer electronics are disposable and a ruined battery is a chance to upgrade.  I have said many times ‘buy once, cry once’ so I really don’t appreciate when my CCrane portable radio is ruined because of some leaking batteries.

December 22, 2020 – Is Christmas Really What You Think?

December 22, 2020 /

This is for sure a holiday that I struggle with. Call me selfish, call me a Grinch or a scrooge maybe. I wanted so much to assign a newer or different reality to the holiday but chock it up to a long line of non-conforming beliefs.

Growing up a Christian, it was ingrained that this was a celebration for the birth of Jesus. My world was rocked when I was a Junior in High School and we talked about the origin of Christmas in Latin class. I had never heard of such things, it was so foreign that it took me years to accept the truth.

Alright, rewind. It is well established that the winter solstice has been recognized by indigenous cultures throughout the world. Winter solstice has a place in agrarian life because it celebrated the transition between daylight getting shorter and daylight getting longer. One of those celebrations was the Roman version, called Saturnalia.

Saturnalia was a celebration named after the Roman god Saturn, who happened to be the god of agriculture. One description I read was that it was that it was akin to Mardi Gras; an over the top party. I suppose that you could see the appeal, I mean who doesn’t like to have fun. Gift giving was one of the traditions that went along with week long party.

As the church was growing in influence and Rome was diminishing, the popularity of Saturnalia was not. It is believed that Pope Julius I co-opted Saturnalia into December 25 as the ‘official’ birthday of Jesus. Even though it is believed that his actual birthday would have been in the early springtime.

Maybe I just haven’t accepted the reality that everything is what it is. I guess that I shouldn’t be surprised people believe in traditions that are not always what they seem or are even based on reality as we are told. There is a lot different brands around the type of holiday be it ‘Hallmark’ or religious or ‘the magic of the season’. For me, maybe I will lean toward Festivus, for the rest of us.