Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

It has always puzzled me how people can look forward to retirement even while they are still young. For, first, most of their life they will not be enjoying themselves and their work but dreaming about distant future. Second, retirement almost by definition entails being useless to your fellow man. It means sitting in your house doing nothing, being bored, and pretty much waiting for death. And third, you retire when you are old and maybe sick and senile or will become sick and senile in just a few years, so how can anyone desire that?

Only the government can gobble up productive land and make it useless. Florida will “buy the nation’s largest producer of cane sugar” to “restore” the Everglades. … “Environmental groups hailed the undertaking. ‘This is putting it back the way it was in 1890,’ said David Guest, a lawyer with Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund. ‘When you come back in 20 years, it will look indistinguishable from the way it looked before the white man.’” Why stop there? Let’s make the whole US look like before the “white man.” (Those rapists of nature, white men are.) Just kill everybody. We wonder why anyone would do something so destructive as create a computer virus. Mark my words, one of these days we’ll see a greenie engineer a real virus, against which we humans have no defense, and release it into general population.

I tell you, the notion of evenly rotating ecosystems has been beyond pernicious.

What’s the point? Consider the Alaskan refuge. I’ll never visit it. At best I’ll see a nature show where the wildlife is shown to cavort and caper in the tundra. I don’t benefit at all from it. Who does? The “future generations,” for whose sake we are supposed to sacrifice, will likewise not benefit, as they, either, won’t be allowed in there.

I define mental illness as taking your intellectual errors to their logical conclusions; i.e., actually living your life according to some reductio ad absurdum. Environmentalism is a mental illness, insofar as it considers human civilization building to be a bane not a glory. From the innocent at first glance love of “biodiversity” (I admit that there may exist plants and animals for which we have not yet found use; but that’s the only good reason for preserving them for the future) via a religious impulse to serve something greater than oneself, the greenies eventually end up with a reductio that humans don’t belong on earth. Yuck.

Update. Joseph Rago agrees with me in his review of The Happening.

The difficulty with converting people is that you can’t really offer them your own life story. Your life is uniquely yours, and so are many of the reasons for which you believe. You need to study your subjects in great detail, each one individually, and tailor your teachings appropriately. The only conversion for which I was responsible I am sure of was my grandfather, who was very sick at the end of his life. His memory was getting worse, and so we’d often have to go over the same ground several times. (His favorite question was: “Was Jesus really a Jew?” Yes, I’d answer but always try to tell him that He was more than that. “Why did Hitler kill so many Jews?,” another question we’d not infrequently discuss.) He had not been a believer before but what may technically be called an “unreflective atheist.” One day he was lying in bed in his room, while I was in the other room, and I heard him praying for the first time. He said in Russian: “Lord, help me (or heal me), and I will glorify you.” Another time he revealed to me that he saw Jesus in a dream who told him that he would “become healthy and young.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him, it wouldn’t be in this life. Another thing he liked to say was “God never harmed anybody.” Almost every Sunday he’d ask me if I went to church, and I even took him with me once, but unfortunately only once, because he was too sick. Despite that, he wanted to come again. He even confessed some of his sins to me which I told him were forgiven.

One thing I regret is that on the night of his death I did not tell him, as I wanted to, that “God lives, and so does your soul. Fear nothing.”

Another thing I am proud of is that when I was in a certain unpleasant situation, there was a woman there with me, and she was very depressed. I observed her for a few days, and then when we started talking about her problem, I said, 100% rightly: “I think you are not loved enough.” She was speechless, but in a good sense, as if she just discovered something about herself she had never known before. She was so beautiful and delicate, I think I was in love with her at that time.

Well, anyway, I’m getting back to Behe. Am I even allowed to reminisce at 31?

As Lew Rockwell commented once, linking to an article on a new “white studies” program within some university’s black studies department: “It’s OK to study white people… as long as you hate their guts.” Somebody is pulling a similar prank here: the site has such poor writing and is oozing so much contempt, it’s got to be the work of a black dude.

To help you the next time you forget to turn off your car’s headlights or the ceiling light for an extended period of time after you stop the engine, and the car’s battery gets completely drained.

Just make sure you don’t forget to keep it charged (charge it once every three months, according to the manual). Also, if you have a modern car, don’t keep it in the trunk, because you may only be able to open the trunk by pushing a button on your key, and that, too, requires a working battery.

Если мяса с ножа
   Ты не ел ни куска,
Если pуки сложа
   Наблюдал свысока,
И в боpьбу не вступил
   С подлецом, с палачом, –
Значит, в жизни ты был
   Ни пpи чем, ни пpи чем!

Hopefully it’ll stimulate discussions.

I’ll be finishing up my thesis.

And now his monstrous “His Dark Materials” trilogy (whose dark materials? Satan’s?) — The Golden Compass; The Subtle Knife; The Amber Spyglass — is going to be a movie starring Nicole Kidman. Now admittedly, when I read his books a number of years ago, I was more impressionable than I am today. But I still despise the author with a passion. The trilogy is an anti-C.S. Lewis’s Narnia atheistic various sin-glorifying, including pride and hatred, fantasy. In it God would be evil if He existed, and humans must rebel against Him if they want to be free. The “God” that does exist, and with whom the “good” humans war turns out to be some senile angel. The (obviously Catholic) Church is a profoundly evil and life-draining organization designed to suppress humans’ natural happiness. The immortality of the soul is a sham, the after-death realm is a miserable place, and dead souls are glad to dissolve in the air. Similar to the way in which in Shogun the alleged filth and stench of the Christendom was compared to the equally unsubstantiated cleanliness of the Japanese, so, in Pullman’s books the armored bear who wanted somehow to get a soul (in the form of an animal companion) leads his fellow bears into a stinking and, to the author, unnatural mode of living: he “betrayed” his nature and was promptly killed by the protagonist girl’s “normal” bear.

In short, the Church and religion in Pullman’s books, instead of perfecting nature and elevating men above their nature, as they do in real life, crush the natural human instincts by a network of meaningless rules and taboos. The Church seeks power through fear. Human nature, untouched by virtue and grace, is “good” for our author; the ruthless Church only suppresses what is naturally good in humans. Therefore, it must be revolted against and destroyed.

The characters are annoying, perfectly unsympathetic, and malicious. These are evil, revolting, even demonic books. Yuck.

Update. Just as love is divided into desire (concupiscence) and friendship (willing good to another), so hatred is divided into aversion and willing evil to another. I am certainly averse to Pullman, the evil son of a bitch that he is (who enjoys his perversity), but I do not will evil to him, except insofar as punishment to him is due according to justice, especially for targeting children with his books. I would be happy if Pullman converted to Christianity and renounced his work.

Update 2. Holopupenko wisely chastises me for using an incorrect technique of fraternal correction by entitling this post “I Hate …”

You probably didn’t know it, but I have a BS in computer science and worked for 6 years in the industry doing computer programming, mostly in Manhattan, NY. But only now have I realized what programming really is. It is like Nascar racing. It’s a union of man and machine. The computer becomes an extension of you, and there are neverending, due to the complexity and variety of software development, soft and careful attempts to master this tool, to make it your own, so that working it would be as natural as using your arms. And this union, through technical expertise, allows you to do remarkable things, and is threrefore most pleasant.

1. Open Microsoft Word (I use Office XP).

2. If the symbols you need are present in the default font, keep it, else change the font to Lucida Sans Unicode (which my research says ships with Windows 98 and higher) or Arial Unicode MS (which ships with Office 2002 and higher). Arial Unicode MS is more powerful, but there is less chance that it will be installed on the user’s machine. NB: Even though I use Lucida Sans Unicode here, this page does not display perfectly on those university computers that run XP without Office. It could be that the version of the font installed on those machines is older.

3. Choose Insert | Symbol… on the menu.

4. Pick the symbols you want, e.g.,

□∀(x)[x ∉ Γ ∩ Δ]
∠ABC
if ╞ A, then ├ A
Дмитрий

5. Choose File | Save As… on the menu. Select “Web Page” in “Save as type” in the dialog box.

6. Open the file you have just saved in a text editor, such as Notepad or TextPad.

7. Copy and edit the lines that define the symbols into your web page. The resulting lines should look like this:

<span style='font-family:"Lucida Sans Unicode"'>&#9633;&#8704;(x)[x &#8713; &#915; &#8745; &#916;]</span>

See also Additional Named Entities for HTML.

8. There, you are done!

Johnny-Dee of Fides Quaerens Intellectum has picked my blog as one of his personal favorites. Thank you, my friend; I am very honored.

Everyone has heard the truism that one should take something one likes to do and find a way to get paid for doing it. But how to ensure that you enjoy your work? One word: competence. Learn every nook and cranny of your trade or science, and you’ll be guaranteed a positive utility of labor in your area of expertise.

For those who have not yet discovered the delights of Turkish pistachios, here is a public service announcement: Zenobia Nuts sells them. They are fairly expensive but worth it, trust me. (I suggest you get at least one 5-pound bag.)