Classic History Personal Blog

The 2008-2009 recession was pretty rough on me. I found a job working in a furniture warehouse, and I was very thankful for it. I was the only one there who had never been to jail. But the people I worked with were great people.

I worked there for a few months before finding a job at a jewelry shop. I worked in the back, sizing rings and doing other types of repairs. That was a very fun time in my life and there were a lot of young people I was friends with, and we had a lot of fun together.

But I wanted a better job, one using my degree, and one that I could support a family with. And I wanted to live somewhere I could spend the rest of my life. So I found a new job in a different town, and it felt amazing. I had a one bedroom apartment that was extremely cozy, and I loved being there...

If I had an infinite amount of time in my own life, and if I had infinite resources and help from people smarter and more hard working than myself, I would organize three great projects that I feel would benefit mankind greatly. One would focus on our present existence, one would look deep into the past, and one would attempt to bring us forward into the future.

The first and most important thing I would do would be to simply build relationships with people in my life, and build community in my own local area. I know this sounds like a small thing and might not seem like a large project, but I think its just as important as anything else. Small things add up to something amazing when done consistently over time...

Earth is billions of years old. And human civilization is over 6,000 years old. There are very unique aspects of current human civilization that may only persist for a relatively short amount of time. One of those unique characteristics is the industrial output of Carbon Dioxide (CO2).

Meaningful and substantial emissions of CO2 began in Western Civilization around 1820, when our economies began to take off. This emission of CO2 from human industrial activities comes primarily from transportation vehicles, factories, and electrical power plants. This is all common sense to anyone alive today, and therefore this article will be quite a waste of time for those people to read. I just thought it should be written as to what this very brief moment in the history of mankind is like...

A major historical event is perhaps happening in south Texas in the very near future. A ship will be launched in to Earth's orbit. The spacecraft consists of two stages. The first stage will land in the Gulf of Mexico, while the second stage will boost into orbit and land off the coast of Kauai, Hawaii.

I suspect that Kauai was chosen as a landing zone because of the existing ballistic missile detection systems, specifically at Barking Sands Missile Range...

My wife is fairly confident that she contracted the Covid-19 virus when she visited the doctor on a Monday. By Thursday, she was feeling very bad and called her doctor for advice. Of course they advised her to take a covid test, and one was scheduled for the next morning.

I was at work and asked if I could have that Friday off. I packed up my computer and took it home with me at the end of the day in preparation for working from home, should my wife indeed test positive. The procedures had been communicated to us, that if we were in contact with someone who tested positive then we would have to isolate for five days and then take a covid test as well.

My wife went for her test Friday morning, and I stayed home and made breakfast for our two children. During breakfast, I noticed our three year old son starting to feel very bad. He threw up his breakfast. This was very unnerving for me since neither of our children vomited much even when they were infants...

Optical illusions. Two arrows, the same length but pointed in opposite directions. Our minds are tricked into seeing them as having different lengths. People in undeveloped countries are not tricked by optical illusions such as this. Why not?

It is because they do not live in a world where everything is plumb and square. We live in a world of dimensional lumber. Most everything is standardized. Windows are square, floors are level, everything is precise. Our brains are wired by this world from the moment we enter into it. And we are trained to expect form and regular dimension in everything.

Now imagine what civilization has done to our other senses. What have clocks done to our sense of time? What have airplanes done to our sense of distance and space? What have perfumes and deodorants done to our sense of smell? What has public education done to our sense of family? What has diversity done to our sense of community..?

SpaceX continues its Starship program, with testing being done in south Texas. It is one of the projects I am most excited about. It will be twice as powerful as the largest rocket ever (Saturn V), will hold 1.5 times the propellant and burn it at double the thrust. It will also be fully reusable.

The first orbital test flight of this system will likely happen this month. The booster and upper stage for this test flight are nearly constructed, as is the orbital launch tower. This has all been achieved over the past two years, a rapid development pace. There have been several sub-orbital flights to test reentry profiles, most of which ended in spectacular explosions, although still major successes with a great deal of system architecture proven...

Every day I put our three year old boy to bed. He knows about when bedtime is, and he starts wanting to do all kinds of things. He asks to go outside for a walk, stand on the porch and listen for owls, or play with trains. He'll ask to eat a popsicle and watch Little Bear. He picks up a book and asks to read just one story.

After he gets into bed he wants to pray for something, and then he wants to hear at least one story. Then he wants me to rock in the chair as he falls asleep. He just doesn't want the day to come to an end. ...

I started my first roadtrip when I was 19, heading west on I-40. All my life I had traveled with my family about 1000 miles to see our extended family. We would usually stay in a hotel to break the drive into two days. My dad would get a nice hotel such as a Holiday Inn. So when the end of the first day of my first roadtrip came, I found a Holiday Inn to spend the night in, costing $90. I remember lying in bed thinking, "What am I doing staying in such a nice hotel?!" It was just what I was used to. I knew this just wasn't going to work.

On the second night I made it to New Mexico. I found a National Park in to mountains to camp in. It cost $6 per day. I laid in my hammock, looking up at the brightest stars I had ever seen. I had learned something already. The hotel was filled with rushed business people, the National Park was filled with families who smiled and talked to me about who I was and where I was adventuring to...

My whole life I have thought as though God was constantly reaching out to us, asking us to take His hand and let Him guide us through life. And we can all ignore Him, but have a relationship with Him when it suits us. He'll always be there right? This surely is the case, but there is a different way to live.

You could instead live as though you are trying to attract something beautiful. You could be more aware of your actions and how they might bring joy to some other creature and make them want to be with you. Desperately trying to attract God would mean a totally different life.

Just pretend for a moment that you are trying to attract a fairy to your side...

Everything is dying. Civilization is in a constant state of falling. I am slowly dying as I'm writing this and you are slowly dying as you're reading it. Nothing lasts forever. Every empire will fall and every human will ultimately pass away.

So then what is life? And how does humanity continue to advance? We have the incredible ability to create new life. We can create new ideas and new culture. And some of us are lucky enough to have families of our own. So this is what all of us should do with every day, in some way or another. ..

Music makes you feel what culture and society's values were many years ago. You can understand who a people were and what their values were just by experiencing their art. It also so contagious that people will remember this history because the love to music so much. They will make sure to pass it down through the generations.

This type of history cannot be faked. Someone can write down bogus information of something that did not happen, or they can manipulate the truth if history is in written form...

Humans are the only creatures who can create something out of nothing. We can all come together as a culture and agree on some idea that currently does not exist. Then we can all turn this idea into reality.

We can all hold a melody in our minds, then come together as a choir or an orchestra and all create this music seamlessly together. We can write down the idea of a building, agree on the design, then come together in coordination and build it...

In my own experience, I can barely even notice that a pandemic is happening. Some people are wearing facemasks out in public. Other than that things are pretty normal in my area. As I have stated before, there are major effects on the economy and people's freedoms in other parts of America. Rates of suicide, alcoholism, divorce, and home evictions are all well above average.

If you watch the news, we are being told that there are dark times ahead and we all must put our lives on hold for who knows how long. The CDC predicts there will be an additional 450K deaths from the virus by February. The message is generally one of terror. Here are some examples of what the news media is telling us every day...

It's easy to complain, easy to find problems and obsess over them, easy to find communications from the news media or elsewhere that will try to dramatize something in order to get your attention. In the face of problems, what do you do?

Go build the world you want. Its easy to find things you don't like and complain about them. Its healthy to stay informed, but more than half of the time your mind should be focused on what you want to create...

I feel like the world I was born in does not exist anymore. And there is a growing sense that a major change is just around the corner for the entire world.

Free speech is explicitly enshrined in our constitution. Yet we are living in an age of increasing censorship. Anyone, including doctors, with the opinion that the current 'pandemic' is not very lethal is not allowed to speak their opinion on the major information platforms. This includes the vast majority of the news media, as well as social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Even writing this article makes me feel like I will be inviting censorship of this website, as the dominant internet search engine is doing the same.

I feel this is because many of the powerful people believe, and have stated, that the 'pandemic' presents a special opportunity to reshape the world. It’s an excuse to expand government control and take away people's freedoms under the guise of saving them from a horrible disease...

Why has politics infiltrated everything? It is in church, work, academia, our schools, and entertainment. The news media is almost entirely dominated by Leftist politics. The studies and history of our planet's climate are mostly politically motivated. Any deviation from specific ideas is seen as heresy. The viral contagion that we are dealing with now has become entirely political. I don't understand it.

And then there is what has become a major issue of 2020: race relations. Why would politics have anything to do with this? The government cannot pass a law making everyone be friends with each other. Race relations are when people build relationships with each other in real life. I can understand how a leader could inspire people to love each other, but that does not involve the government and especially not any laws. It all comes down to the people.

I know it's an election year and people try to bring more attention to all kinds of issues during this time. But I want to make the point that this is increasingly the nature of our culture in non-election years as well...

This is simply an update on the Covid-19 situation with respect to Sweden. In any experiment, there needs to be some kind of a control subject. That is, there needs to be a specimen that had nothing done to it at all, so as to see what would happen naturally, with no intervention.

The country of Sweden is as close to a control specimen as we have. They did not shut down their entire country the way most others have. They did not mandate that people were face masks. They simply educated their population on the disease and took some steps to isolate their more vulnerable elderly population...

How do you know when your own philisophy has gone too far? There is increased political tension in America now between the Right and the Left.

For those reading in the future, the Right is defined as conservatives. Primary conservative issues today are immigration, border security, free speech, deregulation, and gun ownership rights. The primary issues on the Left are currently ensuring an equality of opportunity for anyone regardless of ethnicity, religion, etc. (something that conservatives agree with). The Left also creates an endless list of government programs to give various types of aid to those that they see as in need of it.

Both sides have legitimate virtuous goals. But how does one know when you are taking your ideology too far? On the right there are very clear markers that indicate when things are taken too far...

Some people are saying that in our hospitals there are decisions being made to take some patients off of ventilators because they are too old or were previously ill and are unlikely to survive. I have seen no evidence of this and doctors in our federal government reporting to President Trump have repeatedly stated that this is absolutely not happening. There are many such reports that seem plausible, but weather or not they are true is another matter.

Hundreds of years ago, diseases worse than this would strike every five years. Something like this hasn't really happened since the 1950's. So this is somewhat of a new phenomenon that our culture is trying to understand. We are now hearing that it is likely that between 100,000 and 250,000 Americans will die from this disease (about 0.006% of our population)...

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo states that experts are telling him that the peak of infections will be 14 to 21 days from now. NYC will need around 140,000 hospital beds to make sure the healthcare system is not overloaded. Cases across the state of New York are doubling about every three days, standing at 25,665 as of Tuesday, March 24, 2020.

Today, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared the entire country of India to go under mandatory lockdown...

We don't know what the world will be like in 1 month. Everything could be back to normal and this disease mostly stabilized. Or we could have 25% unemployment and hundreds of thousands of people dead. There is no telling. My instinct is that we are overreacting to the infection. But it appears that I am likely wrong. In either case the damage to our economy is going to be immense. The fiscal deficit to our federal government will be around 3 trillion dollars for this year, perhaps more. The total size of the American economy is 20 trillion dollars per year.

We already have plenty of people that are out of a job and this will go on for at least one more month...

This article is written as an account from an average person alive in the Spring of 2020 during the Coronavirus global pandemic. If anyone would like to add your own feelings or perspectives please do so in the comments section below. Accounts from everyday people will be extremely valuable to anyone reading this in the future.

The Virus originated in Wuhan, China, sometime during the Winter of 2019. The government of China quarantined the city of over 8 million and its acomanying province but not before it spread to the rest of China and the rest of the world. We are being told that the virus possibly originated in a bioresearch laboratory or perhaps from people eating bats. ...

Delayed gratification is a concept frequently applied to personal finance, physical health, and relationships. It means giving up something today in exchange for something more meaningful or greater in the future. The idea goes that successful people think of how today's decisions affect their lives 5 years into the future.

But the ultimate form of delayed gratification is structuring your entire life to benefit your children's lives or the lives of those in the generation following yours. I can see the effects of this in my own time in history. Many great people before my time made inventions, created new idea or perspectives, and fought and some have died to give me the freedoms I currently take for granted...

How is the modern era going to end? What will the transition to the next era in history be like? And what will the next era in history be?

We are currently over 100 years into the modern era at this point and I believe that whatever is going to end it can only be delayed at this point. I wonder if we will just experience the consequences of all the decision making over the past 100 years no matter what we do. In other words, we are caught up in the gears of history and are mostly at their mercy.

In the world that I live in, I see nothing but good people all around me. So how could anything bad ever happen? Yet there are whole societies out there that I have no idea about. It would take a tremendous effort for me to learn about all of the cultures in the world, or even in my own country of America. So the truth is that maybe I just don’t know what kinds of decisions people are capable of...

Its not just nostalgia, every day was like Christmas in the neighborhood I grew up in on the edge of a small town in America. Its not easy to describe the feeling of all of us playing street hockey, building things in the woods, and hanging out in someone's bedroom listening to all the new music together as soon as it came out. It was a strong sense of community and fun, a feeling that nothing truly bad was going to happen in the foreseeable future.

There were a million new things to try or do and we would all experience them together. When I went out in the woods to work on our forts, I never went alone. Every evening me and my friends would ride our bikes or roller blades around the neighborhood. In the summer we would visit our homes one by one and eat ice cream at each one. Most everyone else who lived there walked in the evenings as well, so almost everyone knew each other...

I wanted to briefly write some of my ideas regarding what is today a heavily debated issue worldwide. When I was a kid it was called Global Warming, today it is referred to as Climate Change. The idea is that human activity is responsible for changes in the Earth's average temperature over time.

There is an enormous amount of research on this subject to learn from. I will summarize what I have learned thus far. Since the time we began to take accurate measurements of temperature, the 1800's, the Earth's temperature has been rising. But archeological evidence shows that 2000 years ago the Romans built coastal towns and sea ports at a higher elevation than the current ocean level...

This morning I watched video from southern Texas of a SpaceX prototype spacecraft, called Starhopper, making a successful testflight. The flight was about 1 minute long. It flew to an altitude of about 400' and traversed horizontally about 200' to a secondary landing pad.

The system being developed will likely be able to deliver cargo to orbit for about 1/10^th of the cost of current vehicles. At the rate they are developing, the system could be operational by 2022...

I was recently walking through a normal American neighborhood when a man walked out from his home to speak with me briefly. He asked what type of work I did and how many children I had. I asked about his life, he said his wife had passed years ago and he was now 94 years old. He grew up on a small farm near Murphy, North Carolina and was drafted into the US Army and sent to Europe to serve in World War II...

Thus begins a personal blog for Classic History. I thought it would be good to include short whimsical blog posts so that anyone reading my articles could better understand what kind of person is writing them.

Writing is also a healthy exercise in that it helps to open up your mind and release ideas. So I'm sure that in writing about more benign things I will come up with ideas for new articles...