There are several important qualities that define our humanity. Today I want to talk about two of them: our capacity for conscious empathy, and our ability to consciously redirect our emotional impulses. We have a choice of whether and how we will use these; the benefits can change the course of our lives.

Empathy is the quality that allows us to relate to other people, to have feelings for them, to understand them in an experiential/emotional sense, and not just as an intellectual study. Without the capacity for empathy, we could not see one another as human, with common feelings, thoughts, and experiences.

The opposite of empathy is envy.  When we are envious, other people become simply, "the thing that possesses something we want."

But to override our impulse to see people as things requires us to stop and think, to reconsider our initial, more primitive impulses, and to make a different choice.

We'll start the week by going from the ridiculous to the sublimely ridiculous.

The first:  Malaysia has turned itself into a laughingstock joke of a country in front of the entire world.  All to placate "mountain spirits," in reality the god Malaysians really worship, the god of anti-white racist envy. 

For the sublimely ridiculous, we go to Sargodha, Pakistan - but be warned:  do not be eating or drinking anything when you read or watch this.

Question:  Can we do this with Somali ISIS wannabes in Detroit?  Headline, Monday (6/08):  In Terror Fight, Australia Debates Revoking Citizenship.

You may think we're losing the Culture War, but on two of its most important fronts there's very good news.  Also very good news in the Danger Is Opportunity Department.

And of course, the best news of the week: that early this afternoon (6/12), Obamatrade went down in flames in the House, 302-126.  This is a massive defeat for Zero, and for the entire Pub Rino Establishment.  The whole thing is a garbage bag of weirdness.

We'll close with a look at who's becoming the most intriguing prez candidate of all.

History is not static and it does not progress linearly. 

There was more free speech and unimpeded expression in 5^th-century BC Athens than in Western Europe between 1934-45, or in Eastern Europe during 1946-1989. An American could speak his mind more freely in 1970 than now.

Many in the United States had naively believed that the Enlightenment, the U.S. Constitution, and over two centuries of American customs and traditions had guaranteed that Americans could always take for granted free speech and unfettered inquiry.

That is an ahistorical assumption. The wish to silence, censor, and impede thought is just as strong a human emotion as the desire for free expression - especially when censorship is cloaked in rhetoric about fairness, equality, justice, and all the other euphemisms for not allowing the free promulgation of ideas.

Welcome to Dark Age America - a Pre-Enlightenment Age when groupthink acceptance of a lie replaces truth on grounds of social utility.  When current popular culture is not empirically grounded, but operates on the premise that truth is socially constructed by race, class, and gender concerns. When, in our current Dark Age, logic is ignored in lieu of ideology.

If taxpayers suddenly stopped subsidizing Amtrak, what do you think would happen?

Before trying to answer that question, it is useful to review U.S. railroad history. The first railroads were built in the United States in the late 1820s, and by 1900, only 70 years later, almost every town in the country had rail access.

Railroads were high tech, the Internet of their time. The system was built and profitably operated by private companies.

Amtrak and the modern freight railroad companies use the infrastructure that was built long ago. The 180-year-old privately built Canton Viaduct (an incredible stone bridge - see link) in Canton, Massachusetts and the 100-year-old Hell Gate Bridge (the model for the Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia) over the East River in New York are still used by Amtrak.

The investor-owned Pennsylvania Railroad built the hugely expensive North River Tunnels under the Hudson River in 1904-1908, which were technological wonders of the time. They are still used by all of those who ride Amtrak from New Jersey to New York.

In this context, it's rather ironic when President Obama claimed that private business only succeeded by using government infrastructure --  "You did not build that" -- when, in fact, government mostly uses privately built infrastructure.