My faith, personally, sees Wicked Witches, and knows they often get the power structure, and nothing uproots them. So, my faith isn't one that expects life to go swimmingly, or get me what I want. As I know there are real forces, and God's not always going to directly act on someone's behalf. As there can be chariots of iron in the valley. There was one moment while reading it, where I saw the Winkies were freed from slavery, and counterpointed it with Exodus, where the Jews wanted to return to Egypt, and I realized that the latter is the actual state of man, if we're not being sentimental. And that's one reason why the Bible is so credible, is that it actually explains human nature, and really confronts the theodicy without any sentimentality or illusions.

It's obvious Frank Baum is critiquing religion, and not in a bad way. He's just saying religion is a way to get what you want out of life, but it doesn't do anything real. And he's counterplaying it with the fact that magic doesn't belong in the real world. Basically, elevating scientific materialism over supernatural explanations, but faith is benign, if it gets people what they truly want, as it was always in them to begin with.

Chess is the most beautiful game in history. All aspects of human intelligence are found over the board. Memory, creativity, tactics, psychology... Like you can go 50 moves deep into an opening, or just blow it on the first five turns, and do some amazing sacrifice, or set up a tactical position that forces your opponent to do something in three turns. It's a brilliant game. And being only 64 squares, and completely visible--both players have complete information--it's truly a meeting of minds.

Well every lie is made truth by scholars. Guns jammed in Vietnam because of ammunition malfunctions, not dirt. Christians were never persecuted in Rome or Europe. Math is a Western Concept. Truth is your truth, no one else's. Everything we read, we get to say what it means, and nobody's opinion is less valid than another's. And then they enforce this through accreditation processes. Almost to say, if you're going to publish a serious article, you have to do so in bad faith, and lie or disrupt the tradition. Which further gets bolstered, because no new works of literature or important ideas are allowed to get light, and history can only be analyzed correctly once, and all afterward it's plagiarism.

If anyone wants to know what living with Schizoaffective Disorder is like, just imagine you feeling like you're on the Truman Show all the time. Replace actors with spies, kings and queens possessing your friends and family, and then add delusions about mind reading and that, all the shows you watch on television are real, and just in alternate universes... you can see how reality is ripped from you. But then there's no door to a real world, just one far worse than the one you live in now... it's a terrible disease.

 It was those Yale Safe Spaces, and coming off of Jerry Sandusky. And the Freddy Grey murder. And the Bill Cosby thing, that shocked the Black Community because he was practically the success story and standard, showing they could have the American Dream too. The real start of it was the Free Love movement in the 60s, Vietnam, then the Drug War and no warrant searches, Columbine, then 9/11, the Patriot Act, Iraq being so prolonged and damaging the economy, then the things I talked about above, and then Covid and the Alex Jones Lawsuit. Next who knows. It's just a long train of bad leadership since Eisenhower. Most of it driven by the media.