A scene in the movie Patton illustrates the point:

Field Marshal Rommel, distressed by acute nasal diphtheria, is at work in his office. Colonel General Jodl enters with a Captain Steiger and greets Rommel. Jodl informs Rommel that Steiger has a report on the American General Patton.

Given permission to speak, Steiger reports from his notes: General Patton comes from a military family. His grandfather was a hero of the American Civil War. He was educated at Virginia Military Institute and West Point.

Rommel cuts in: You’re not telling me anything about the man.

Steiger continues: Sir, he writes poetry and believes in reincarnation. He’s one of the richest officers in the American Army. He prays on his knees, but he curses like a stable boy, and he has one standing order: Always take the offensive — never dig in.

To all of that Rommel listens pensively.

Jodl to Rommel: Excuse me, Field Marshal — we see the Fuehrer in fifteen minutes. He will want to know what you propose to do about Patton’s forces.

Rommel pauses then replies to Jodl: I will attack and annihilate him. Then quietly as if to himself: Before he does the same to me.

Rommel’s interest is the truth, beyond mere facts.
Patton the man, not his pedigree.

Sigmund Freud, a cocaine addict,
deserves utter ignorance.

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Familiarity with — and thus ownership of — A History Of The Christian Church, by Williston Walker, first published in 1918, was required of divinity students at serious university and seminary during the 1960s. We called it a telephone directory with dates. If you needed to know when something happened and who was there, Walker was your man. The book was very thick and very heavy.

Walker recorded facts, great swarms of them, murmurations of facts one might even say. At least this mind could not hold them all in place. And any one set of dates and names swarmed incessantly backwards and forwards across the landscape of church activities, each murmuration morphologically anomalous across time, space, substance, and causality. One had constant reference to Walker’s tome just to keep dates and names pinned correctly at a location.

Characteristics and significances of a location — geography, elevations, slopes, geology, rivers, fauna and flora, prevailing weather, usages over centuries, defiles, availability and quality of water, crops, herding, character of the women, birth rates, native metalurgy, mines, corridors for communications and their decision points, ethnic, linguistic, and religious precedents and predicates — Walker omits from his narrative. Personal and group profiles and evals, ditto. Yet, geography — physical, horticultural, climatalogical, procreative, personal, and theological — is the very ground of historiography.

So, Walker’s massive assemblage says nothing about the who and the why and very little, actually, about the what. Just a lot of thats. The facts are there, the truth is too, one assumed, but if the latter is there, God help the one who has to burn it out of hiding inside the facts.

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly . . . .

Walker’s A History Of The Christian Church was as much a beating as a blessing. Just so is the relationship between facts and truth.

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The real help in the academic field of Church history are Paul Tillich’s lecture notes on the history of Christian thought. This work Paulus’ wife, Hannah Tillich, copyrighted posthumously to her husband, in 1967 — Paulus departed this breathing world in peace during October of 1965, the year I matriculated at Paulus’ former posting, The Union Theological Seminary In The City Of New York, and from which I graduated in 1969 — then allowed its publication as one volume in German (1971) and English (1972).

Carl E. Braaten edited the volume, which is titled A History Of Christian Thought. Carl was friend and student to Paul Tillich during the latter’s final professorship, at The University of Chicago.

One surmises the title chosen for a volume comprising Tillich’s lectures on Christian thought alludes to Walker’s title on Christian history. A lesson to be learned from such a juxtaposition or parallel is that an accurate and clear retailing of what men think of themselves and their lives, across their tenure in these parts, is more useful to one, student or otherwise, than is a chronology of their births, meetings, and deaths.

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For well over a century, the country’s education capacity was well below the need. Our first engineering school, for example, was West Point, whose graduates built out our national and private infrastructure to our West Coast, Canada, Mexico, and as needed, beyond.

By @ 1950, our education capacity arguably matched the need and was growing with the population to keep it that way. Then suddenly, private and especially public education capacity — conjuring federal stupidity and mostly tier-minus talent — sprang way ahead of education need and has been making tracks in that direction ever since. So today, capacity far, far exceeds need with respect to education for Americans.

Simultaneously, population needing — as opposed to wanting — education, especially post-secondary education, slows in growth, or does not grow, and certainly does not match the continuing growth in education capacity. The country does not need more credentialed brigands in schools or in either of the three branches of government or in industry.

Education capacity is falling in on itself for lack of its being needed. This should not be surprising. It should be welcomed. Supply is adjusting to need.

Reason and rationalization are at work, never taking a vacation, no matter how many toxic individuals seduce us with dreams to achieve the vision of what we want.

You’ll get what you need, girl, and that’s it, not what you want. Stuff your visions. Find, feel, and face facts. From them, and with hard work beating them to smithereens to see which ones are genuine and last, you can discern truth.

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OK, I graduated at four divisions of East Germany U: primary division, secondary division, university division, and graduate division. Now it all makes sense, including why I declined to seek a degree in post-grad division in order to teach in it or in graduate division. Enough is enough. You have an excuse, Steven?

Not an irony: the mandated industrialization of education in USA was copied, structurally but not essentially, from the Prussian model: time in assembly-line station, whistles to mark a widget’s movement to the next assembly-line station, vertical authority chain meta-metaphor, etc. So, East Germany U is accurate taxonomy of the current US system of education.

Homeschoolers are in train of replacing that model with a native one.

Full disclosure: my theological mentor is a Prussian, Paul Tillich. My pedagogical cynosures are 18th Century Scotland and their prius, Saivite India.

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If the number of post-secondary schools aligned with the number of persons needing a post-secondary education as well as the number of persons qualified to teach post-secondary education, the world would be spared moonings by the likes of this welfare queen.

There is just no way even a country of 350 millions produces enough students or teachers to need and operate the number of post-secondary schools that exists in this country.

Excess capacity invites low-grade raw material and produces masses of cheap, crummy product, just to excuse a plant’s continued existence. China is in this situation regarding their military formations and so are we regarding our professional formations. They are awash in terrible equipment and commanders; we are awash in terrible schools and clergy, teachers, sometimes-doctors, lawyers, bureaucrats.

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Black Americans are right to want segregation. Integration was forced on them by grandparents and parents of the youth from whom today they want to be segregated. Who can blame them?

They can live at peace with descendants of Europeans, connecting as a sub-culture perfectly amiably, as they have done before and as they do today at the macro-scale. They have their own ways of thinking and doing, their own body chemistries, their own conceptual patterns, manners of dress, culinary tastes.

Putting them in Euro-American schools, especially post-secondary schools, is unfair to them and to the Euro-Americans they are compelled to rub up against as if one is the same as the other. They are not the same. They should not be expected to be the same. They do not want to be the same. They cannot be the same. So what? Let them be who they are.

Euro-Americans fear that if black Americans are not the same as they are, they, Euro-Americans, are in danger. That fear is ungrounded. Euro-Americans can handle themselves and so can black Americans. Both are Americans, that is all. They can be themselves and live separately and happily while touching at points where both are comfortable, strong. Living equally is Communist cant, not Christian doctrine or practice.

Equality never occurs nor can ever occur in nature. Preaching equality, diversity, welcoming is toxic rubbish. All should be filled with self-confidence and the love of God for God, and be treated fairly, respectfully, as embodiments of Divine Nature, which is Love.

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E Pluribus Unum happens.
Ex Variis Unum cannot happen.

Mankind can find happiness in unity,
not in diversity.
Sathya Sai Baba

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GERMAN politician forcibly dragged out of parliament after accusing Leftists of having blood on their hands for flooding the country with violent Muslim invaders

Sarah Imgrund: Homeschooling scholar-mom takes on Harvard prof who wants to crack down on homeschooling

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Totalitarians are always breaking eggs and never making omelets. In fact, they have no other ideas regarding how to behave. They are aggressively and irredeemably stupid:

• Deepak Nagpal: ‘Not a strategic threat’: In speech, Chinese envoy assures India as well as issues veiled threat

That, of course, is classic gaslighting.  Its purpose in this case: to tie India to China rather than to USA and Russia.

Xi Jinping endorsed this explanation for the Soviet collapse in a 2013 address to party cadres. “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?” he asked his audience. “An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce!” The party leadership is determined to avoid the Soviet mistake. A leaked internal party directive from 2013 describes “the very real threat of Western anti-China forces and their attempt at carrying out westernization” within China. The directive describes the party as being in the midst of an “intense, ideological struggle” for survival. According to the directive, the ideas that threaten China with “major disorder” include concepts such as “separation of powers,” “independent judiciaries,” “universal human rights,” “Western freedom,” “civil society,” “economic liberalism,” “total privatization,” “freedom of the press,” and “free flow of information on the internet.” To allow the Chinese people to contemplate these concepts would “dismantle [our] party’s social foundation” and jeopardize the party’s aim to build a modern, socialist future.

Tanner Greer: China’s Plans to Win Control of the Global Order