This Week On Cultural Courage
Our theme this month has been water and stewardship based: Great Lakes, kayaking, lighthouses and civil service. Orange published a vibrant depiction of lighthouses that line the shores of our state of Michigan.
The life of a Keeper wasn't for the weak nor for the weary. Your life was completely dedicated to ensuring the safe passage of vessels on the water, repairs and aiding shipwrecks.
A life of isolation, Lighthouse Keepers were the people that people needed and many times at the most crucial of times.
The Great Lakes are really inland freshwater oceans, and we have countless tales of wrecks on the perilous waters. In the summer of 2018 Lake Superior struck back out our shorelines, with swells up to 60 feet in some regions. We even had reefs with names such as The Rock of Ages, where Michigan’s mightiest lighthouse was built in 1908.
After a cold winter’s night shift at a lighthouse, winding down with a whiskey was in order. Orange has designed a very cool whiskey glass in the spirit of keeping the light alit with a motto. I like to think that Cultural Courage fits that mold as well.
Truth will ultimately prevail where there are plans taken to bring it to light.
— George Washington
The whiskey glass can be purchased at our store.
Continuing with our August theme I published our monthly installment of No Safety Net, No Internet series. Our energies are restored from our time out in nature, and my wife and I had a chance to encounter young families starting on their camping adventures just like we were with ours 15 years ago. Our outing in northern Michigan ended with a rare encounter with an eagle, a blue heron and a black bear with her cub, all in the span of 2 hours! While I am not necessarily superstitious, I often wonder if there are omens in those encounters, and despite the “it’s coincidence” mantra that ran through my head, I looked into Chippewa and Potawatomi folklore about those creatures.
Our state has a national park called Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and this was our homebase for this excursion. Sleeping Bear Dunes has its own legend as well. A little bit of synchronicity with that coincidence, as you’ll find out. Plus some pics of the gorgeous summer waters of Lake Michigan. Magic.
OZFest Morning Mission
The point of where politics and social trends intrude on liberty is one way you can define what we concentrate on with OZFest Morning Mission. Sadly what occurs in our state is eroding on our liberty in ways that force us to speak out. Our Live Streams are a deep dive into issues that we see as attempts to shutter our thinking, and cut us off from our heritage of freedom. What diminishes our cultural courage sets us and the next generations on a course of behavior that our Founding Fathers wouldn’t recognize.
Our elections are the primary means with which we express our will and how we wish to be governed. They are a contract, and a temporary contract, between the politicians who are to act as our representatives and ensure that we remain free to pursue actions that maximize our liberty. That is far different from a “leader”. We guide the politicians. That was the original intent of US and state constitutions.
In Michigan our elections and economy are in peril, and on Tuesday I did a recap of several long running topics of election fraud, voter registration fraud and the renewable energy wrecking ball crushing our job market. We also returned to our theme of rationing and shortages. Two years ago Orange and I completed our first documentary called Rationed State, where we saw our leaders turning to valuers of patriotism and sacrifice for the greater good as a mechanism to acclimate us to planned shortages.
OZFest Morning Mission airs each Tuesday at 830 AM Eastern. You can find us on our Rumble channel at https://rumble.com/ozfest/live
SC Podcast Release
On Fridays we release an episode of our Severed Conscience podcast. Mao established the Barefoot Doctors in rural mainland China. While they had some medical training, they also gathered statistics for the CPP government. Michigan’s newly minted Healthy Climate Corps has an eerie echo to it.
What makes me paranoid is that we have, by law, vastly altered our election laws to only recount ballots, not audit the validity of a ballot. As we said in our documentary, a controlled environment is one where you are convinced that false choices are virtuous ones.
You can find our podcast on Apple, Spotify and Spreaker. Many times the ideas we present here as articles find their genesis in our preparations or discussions on our podcasts.
Coming Up On Sunday Nights Radio
This Sunday we will be revisiting several themes that you have either read on Cultural Courage or have heard us discuss on live streams. AI and social media influence has been a topic of ours since the inception of our Severed Conscience series. While I am a grizzled software developer - for 32 years and no, I don’t have a Karl Marx Whopper Beard - I think AI is vested with too much “stars in the eyes” fandom. The decades of science fiction has really primed us to just accept that AI is brand new, better, all knowing authority that will soon achieve sentience.
That makes it a powerful tool for a reason most don’t consider: those in power can easily lie and say the AI, always superior, informs them that the decisions they carry out are for the best. We devoted several chapters to that in our book Severed Conscience, and an entire 90 minute episode from the documentary video series.
We have fans of Mao still to this day who look for the silver lining in the decades of tragedy of Maoist China. Chi-Man (Winnie) Yip, Professor of the Practice of Global Health Policy and Economics describes how teens with junior high education could be armed with smart phones and AI and be your next PA. This harkens to the Gary Plan during Frederick Taylor’s days that would radically change education in America as Scientific Management became the driving force of our society. Join me as I weave this together with history, music and a bit of Cultural Courage ideas for better ways to educate our kids.
Join me this Sunday on Rumble, replay is available if you already have plans ;)