The Thanksgiving Edition: A Reflection on Progress

Foreign.

Ladies and gentlemen, hello everyone and good afternoon and good evening. This is Blair and Martin on episode 105 of the Secular Foxhole podcast.Today, this Martin and I, again, we're just going to talk some various topics that we both have come across and we want to discuss and we want to mention.This episode is during Thanksgiving week here in America and we look forward to celebrating that day as far as the bountiful harvest and the great food that we will consume, so to speak. And let's go ahead.

First Thanksgiving celebration in Virginia Plantations. Is it 16, right.

In December that I don't, you know.

I'm saying because when was the Mayflower so called that the Christians are talking so much about?

Well, it wasn't bad.

There were some years later.

Yes. Yeah. What history has distorted is that America.

Was, it was for a quest for good.

Plymouth Rock was the, you know, the alleged founding, when it's actually the people that went to Virginia. I'm getting over a cold and flu, so I, I still have a bit of a raspy throat, but.

Tea with honey.

That's right. I do have some, some great New Zealand honey. I can't think of the word, but it starts with an M. But yes.So the distortion of the religious people that Plymouth Rock and all that stuff was America's founding is, if you'll just take a moment to think, you'll see that they established a theocracy and not a constitutionally limited republic, which came much later, of course, but nonetheless, that ended in the way it ended, which wasn't very pretty. Nonetheless, here we are.

Have you already got your turkey or how you say, the bug?

Well, no, what, what, what we're going to do is we're having a restaurant make us some platters. And so that's, that's our unique plan for this Thanksgiving.And, but today's episode, I just, again, I, I love going to human progress.org and looking at their positive develop, you know, things that they report on that no one hears about.And I've got some links that I'll send to Martin from the Ayn Rand Institute's new ideal website, which are appropriate for today and this time period. But let me jump right into one of the Human Progress stories that I want to, I, I'll discuss.Let's see, it says the SE shells, MAUs and Cabo Verde eliminate measles and rubella. That's a pretty significant development for those islands. I like that.And we have how people, as this blog post called, From Waste to Wealth, the alchemy of Innovation. It's about how innovation is turning waste products into reusable materials for, for human benefit and other things.And, but also what else do we have? Let's do look at. Let's look at their trends. What do we see under the great enrichment. It says the world is now richer than ever.In 200 years the economy has grown more than a hundredfold. And the reason is, and this would be my own opinion, but I will.

Interrupt you now, Blair, but it's not due to tariffs, right?

No, not tariffs. It is called capitalism. The thing that everyone loves to hate, yet they. They continually survive on it.But so that, that is the moral conundrum that has to be figured out between. For the whole human race. The morality of altruism. I've said it before on my show, and I'll say it again, is the morality of death.And throughout history there have been very small pockets of life affirming ideas. And in my personal view, they stem from Aristotle's ideas.Yes, he had some bad ideas, but he laid the foundation for human human being to be able to think for themselves. Which is a staggeringly, incredibly monumental achievement that will.Has served mankind for more than two millennia and will serve mankind for the rest of mankind's existence.

And in the future we'll have some scholars talking about Aristotle, right?

I believe that is correct. I hope to have that arranged early next year.

Great.

With a publication of a new book that's coming out. So I won't get into those details right now, but hopefully that happens in the first quarter of next year.And then when we go back to human progress and we see the trends and under the category, are we running out of resources? Contrary to pessimistic predictions, resources tend to become more abundant and cheaper over time.So you see the change in 50 global commodity prices from 1980 to 2017. The percentage has dropped. Let me see. From. I. This is. Well, I can't honestly read that chart, but I can understand.I just understand that they have gone down.

Is that due to mining technologies? And.

I'll be honest, that's probably part of it. But I did not have time to research the articles as in depth as I wanted to because of other family obligations.I know you know what they are, Martin, but I don't want. You know, that's.

That's totally okay. That's why I asked because as a former purchaser, I. I bought and purchased raw materials for production of welding electrodes.So I was looking at different commodities and, and prices. For example, nickel was a price that changed I think twice per day according to the exchange. And you had others materials.So it's good to know that one commodity, but it's more than a commodity, is gold and silver. And that's increasing in value.

Oh yes, absolutely. And I think those of you who can afford purchases of gold and silver and bullion, or what I call the Troy ounces of each, you should do so.But I also want to do one more category from them from humanprogress.org and Alex. We have to tip our hat to Alex Epstein or Epstein, the brilliant independent thinker who is an advocate of fossil fuels.Under the, under the headline A Safer World, Human Progress says the probability of surviving a natural disaster has dramatically increased as countries become wealthier and technologies become more available. So of course the news media, every, every, every brainstorm, every this, every that is, you know, they tend to make you want to feel horror.And they want, they want. Their, their aim is to make you afraid. And that is simply.And it's, it's certainly tragic, tragic for the people who are involved and have to be unfortunate enough to be involved in those things. And I don't discount that at all. But the, I believe the death toll has steadily decreased over the last century, as Alex points out many times.But again, so we're thankful for those innovations due to capitalism, which keeps on chugging in spite of everything and everyone denouncing it.And the other couple of things I wanted to point out especially for this Thanksgiving, is I have to tip my hat to the Ayn Rand Institute, who, although they keep being sniped at by their detractors, whoever they will go unnamed, they produce quality material on quite a regular basis.And I wanted to say they have published one of the lectures from their OCON conference earlier this year with Dr. Onkar Gate called Saving the Enlightenment.Dr. Gatte diagnoses the problem at its root, our cultural crisis are the aftermath, or is the aftermath of a crucial philosophical gap left by the Enlightenment. Agathe argues that a key feature of our cultural landscape, quote, is a blind rebellion against an orgy of self sacrifice, unquote.People see that these things are especially like the COVID lockdowns. People were up in arms about that, including myself. Yet the government, if you will, got away with it. And so why did that happen?Because the dominant moral code is self sacrifice and not egoism. So that's one article that I'll give the Martin the link to. And then we have.They have a real good article, an audio podcast on what's called Patrick Deneen and the rights war on freedom. Patrick Deneen is a Catholic philosopher who teaches at Notre Dame and I think his book is called why Liberalism Failed.But I denounce the title even because we don't live in a liberalist or liberalist society. The further the state grows, the less liberal, the less actual progress we're making. And that's not just my opinion. Look all around you.So again, this, this is a 30 or 40 minute video on, on that subject. So those things are, are well worth your time. And you know, there's a few other things.Again, I, I tip my hat to the Institute, Ayn Rand Institute, for all the work they do and the excellent rigorous scholarship that they produce and put on their their website called the New Ideal. And really, that's really it for me.Martin, I just had those few things I wanted to bring up on our Thanksgiving edition to be a lot to be thankful for.

Yep.

And that's you wanted to mention again, taking time to do these episodes does cost time and money and we appreciate any donations that you care to send us. Martin, you want to take over with that idea on how to do that?

Yeah, we'll include that in the show notes. Again you could find it on if you use the Captivate player that we have as a hosting podcast hosting company.

Very good host. Yeah.

Where you could click on support and you'll go to support page where you could send a donation and it's linked with the secure service called Stripe. So that's one way of doing it. And I will include that in the show notes also.And in the long run I'm for this as we have talked about bitcoin and parts of bitcoin called satoshis that you could send a boostogram or a super comment if you're using TrueFans FM. Great service for a new modern podcast application. So. And you could also stream satoshis during your listening and then we will see that also.So that's another way of doing it. And then of course you could do it. You could ask us for our PayPal and other ways of doing it. You talked about silver.You know they could contact you, Blair, and send you silver coins and whatnot. So we are all for it. So and spread the good word, get new listeners and maybe. And we will talk about that.I can't promising anything now but you have created an artwork using AI with a fox and a microphone and I will try to upload that. I can't promising anything but if not anything else I will include that and put it on my Instagram and you could see that.And then we will talk with you, the listener. What do you like and how we could develop this over time. And also other things when it comes to the podcasting.I will look into more of this chapter thing that you could illustrate an episode with different segments of a podcast.

I know that'd be a good thing too.

Yeah, it would be great. For example, but I have, for example, the new logo.

I. I'm sorry, the part of the new logo. I need to figure out how to put that. JPG out on our POD page.

Yeah, we will see if that's possible and how you do. But if I update it, it will come automatically. But I will test it out for a separate this episode and then you could do the shift.The important thing is that it's according to the specifications so you don't break the RSS feed because that's the. That's the standard, really simple syndication, the feedware. And Apple has certain specifications about the size and the pixels and whatnot.So I will test that out.

Okay.

And yeah, fair enough. Yeah. And that's in order to get this system working, this podcasting 2.0 features. Then we have new features to the RSS feed.For example, as I said, the donation, the funding tag, you could have a live item. We have played around and thought about that maybe having live session or live streaming in the future.It could be the location thing where we are sending from. But we are sending both from United States of America and from Sweden in a way. But I have put it in America because we are American.I am American in spirit. So that's the thing to do. And we have other things like this transcript, as I said, you could read text and search for it. For example.I learned that from Robert Wheatley that he said. I think he mentioned that in the episode that his partner. And you have to give me the name Carrie Anne. Thanks, Carrie Anne.She reads podcast episodes. So she prints out the transcript and read it. And that's a good thing. You could do that also. And that's also if you use a good service.Here we are now recording all the tools. It's included the transcript. And then you could also, you could buy separate services for transcripts and chapters.So Captivate has a service, an AI service called Captivate Assistant, I think it's called. So and this is a good service. And if you're using like Apple Podcaster, that's now included. So that's a great thing.So it's almost if you think like music and Lyrics. So you will see now I'm showing on the screen here when we're talking to each other, you could see when we're talking with the transcripts.So it's rolling on the screen if you're using Apple Podcast, but that's their standard, so they are doing it by themselves. But then you could include your own transcript if you have used another service. So. So things to talk about that in.In enhancement for the listener in different ways.So again, we appreciate you out there, you, the listener, giving us reviews, ratings, sending donations, giving a, you know, suggestion or asking a friend to listen and whatnot. And we also wanted to have tips and suggestions for guests and topics.But there, Blair, you are doing a great work where having returning guests, new guests, authors, finding topics and the positive things, because sometimes it's easy to get, you know, a bit down, be a sad puppy with things. Everything's going around in the world. But we have to look at the bright side, as we say in the. What is called Monty Python.

Oh, yeah.

And maybe we'll talk about that as a special thing in the future about John Cleese and others that have been speaking out about freedom of expression. I think that's. I'm really positive here now. I will wrap up soon.But here in Sweden, some positive things are happening regarding satire, comedians and pointing out what's going on in the society.

Yeah, good.

But then again, you need fundamental ideas, you need a system of thoughts regarding philosophy and you need think tanks and institutes and others that are talking about that. And then listen to a podcast, read a good book and.

Yeah, that's right. I just thought of this, Martin. And yes, although it's partially sad, it's also my favorite reggae singer, Jimmy Cliff. Yes. Passed away at 81.And although that is unfortunately sad news, the joy that he brought me over the many years that I've listened to him, all the great songs that he's sung and produced.

That's interesting. I didn't know, but you listened to Raggy.

That's.

Yeah.

Oh, well, I just listened to one or two reggae artists, Jimmy Cliff being the most prominent one that I listened to. And he sadly, he passed away, but he is again, his music will live on.And I just thoroughly, thoroughly, thoroughly wanted to thank him for again, the pleasure he's given me. So again, that's all I know.

And then. Yeah, that's good. And then I could yoke at van, then you could send me link to him. And some of the reggae people, they used certain.How to say product. And then you could send a boost of 420. And I will include that in show notes. And for the record, I don't use it myself, but I'm for legalization.

Very well. Yes. So with that note, I guess we will puff our way.

Yeah. Be high on life. Yeah. And enjoy the cranberry sauce.

Yep, that's right. And the turkey and everything else. And the stuffing. And the great dinners. Everyone, thank you very much for listening. And please keep listening.And please do consider sending us donations. We definitely appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Bye for now.