Some Thoughts about Science Fiction….

Posted on September 5, 2009 | 3 comments

I am writing a science fiction novel on Facebook on an account named Summers Progress. In it I feature a number of my own inventions. Perhaps none of them will see the light of day outside that fictional universe. I am not sure. I see people casually discussing what amounts to surrender to the Taliban. From a scientifc progress point of view this is quite different than delivering Iraq to the influence of an Iran which is at least eager to compete in science no matter how much else I may find reprehensible in its regime.

In recent months we have had  the new Star Trek movie introducing a new young cast and we have had the release of GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra on our movie screens. I think people are hungry to believe in a new and better future. The role of Science fiction in shaping the dreams and hopes of young people is a complicated one which we cannot easily fully analyze and understand. But it does play a role. I hope that as the world struggles with all its current problems it can still make time to perfect its dreams of the future. Perhaps in some ways those are blueprints of many future policies. 

This post first appeared on my Facebook page on March 27 of this year.

This is the kind of topic that I will surely have to revisit and take in small pieces in other notes if this series is long enough. However, there is a place somewhere in the wide universe for an overstretched brief personalistic essay about the future generally. Maybe this is the time and space for such an essay I have taken the lense of science fiction and have ended up focused on really a small part of the future itself. Howver, the future itself is still my topic.

I often or even usually have a strong or weak religious and spiritual element in these Facebook Notes. I usually do not single out religious groups by name for the purpose of distinguishing them from the point of view I am taking. However, in this case I am taking the somewhat unusual course of discussing both Christianity and science fiction and how they relate to our apprehension of and planning for the future. I think that I have a decently adequate basic nonadherent’s understanding of the following three religions: The Church of Jesus Christ Scientist (Christian Scientists), The Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints (Mormonism) and the Scientologists. I can assure any of you that I would be happy to influence thinkers in any of these groups but that I am not taking a position which is anywhere particulary near to the orthodoxies of any of these religions. Indeed it is I believe within the range of Catholic and Orthodox Christianity.

I do believe that Space is within the meaning of the heavens and heaven as are other things which Jesus indicated when he said that “The Kingdom of God is within you”. I do believethat Jesus as a fully human man was a poet, a liturgist, a prince, a lector, a rabbi and among other outstanding achievements he created a body of achievement that could be classified as science and engineering — all his human attributes do not detract from his claim to divinity. Nor do they answer the poetic ambiguity in the verse from the epistle “Though he was at one with God he did not claim equality with God as something to be grasped at…”. I do believe the Scriptures I cal the Sacred Scriptures have a call on us to care for the Earth, for our fellow man, for our families and (that at the state) we have now reached Space colonization is exigent in order to fulfill those obligations. Nonetheless, I do not intend this note to be primarily a religious or Scriptural Facebook Note.

One way in which I subject my own talents in predicting the future to public scrutiny is that I play a variety of viewable online games in which prediction is a vital skill. These games include fantasy football at NFL.com, the NCAA Bracket Challenge on Facebook and various kinds of online Texas Hold ’em Poker. I am not the very best but my play is fairly respectable. Outside of online gaming I have demonstrated other signs of function in the current technological milieu. I have earned a couple of degrees, some licenses, some commisions and certifications and they all demonstrate that I am not drawn towards futurist endeavors because I cannot find anything I am able to do anything worthy in the present. Nonetheless, I would proudlyidentify myself as a humanist rather than a scientist.

I have thought about the future a great deal. It seems that a lot of people have. We all express a certain faith in the future everytime we put milk in the refrigerator, puchase stock, go on a job interview or call someone to set up any kind of date, meeting or get-together. In fact probably nobody reading this really thinks that the known universe will cease to exist in the time it would take an ordinary person to read to the end of this note. In that sense faith in the future seems pretty universal.

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BRINGING A BABY INTO THE WORLD AND HELPING THE BABY MAKE HIS OR HER WAY IN THE WORLD IS A GREAT ACT OF FAITH IN THE FUTURE FOR A NORMAL OR BETTER THAN NORMAL PARENT.

However, beyond simply believing that life will go on for somebody or something somewhere, most of us think we ourselves have some continuity beyond this throbbing or fleeting instant we call the present. I am writing about the future in a bit more specific way than this however. I am trying to discuss the future as a kind of grand subject.

I like to think about forming the shape of the human and earthly future as well as trying to influence it myself. I am deeply unhappy about many signs of how the future may turn out. However, I am also very optimistic about what is possible. A decent number of historians and antiquarians read futuristic literature and science fiction. Certainly, I have read a great deal of history and seen a lot of antiquities. However, science fiction and futuristic writing have played a big part in the formation of my mind and the filling of the time I have had available to read. It is tru that Styar Wars is a science fiction classic franchise and big money in our time which is set long ago and is full of Biblical and royalist allusions to past societies. But it outlines launches, gravity wells, spaceships, linguistic analysis, imaging systems and countless other things which were new with seeds and roots in the time Lucas began the series andwith fruit and flower in the future as far as we are concerned. A substantial minority of science fiction is set in the past in that sense but in a cyclical sense still maps a reality technicaly set more or less in our foreseeble future. Star Wars is actually less, as some of it is not anywhere near our technical capacity.

One of the intersting things about Michael Crichton the writer of books such as Andromeda Strain, Terminal Man, Jurassic Park and State of Fear is that he was a medical doctor. This is why his series ER was so sound in so many ways. There is an authenticity in his imagined science because he was able to live and function in the world of real science in his time. While a devout Roman Catholic, I belong to a struggling old secret society which gives a particular double interpretation to some scripture passages as coded preservations ofsome amazing achievements of Jesus in science and engineering. For us Jesus’s lofty goals and the ideal on which he founded his church are more and not less credible because of the other ways in which he exerted leadership and showed genius in his world. In a certain minimaly similar way writers like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Michael Crichton have some increased appeal as writers of their type of imaginative fiction because they could do real science in the real world.

We often find science fiction refereshing because it is devoid of some of the reminders of religious, national and familial obligations which surround is. That is true even for those who generaly are and seem to be pushers of family, nation and religion with their incumbent obligations. People such as I am still enjoy Dune’s vacation from the Roman Catholic Church to the Orange Catholic Bible. In instances where they are similar there is still no actual Orange Catholic community that either the Protestant House of Orange or the Catholics of our own time have to actually get along with. However, to notice that sense of fictional escape is not to say that tradition, religion and hard nosed reality have nothing to contribute to both the making of science fiction and to its enjoyment by its readers.

It has been also on the promise of really remaking the future that leaders as diverse as Adolph Hitler, Mao Tse Tung (Mao Zhe Dong), Vladimir Lenin, Lech Walensa and Thomas Jefferson have made their claims. Not all to the same dgree but to a greater degree than most leaders who have not lived in the last ten centuries. Contrary to the vast body of modern opinion I would argue that in many ways almost everyone born in the last thousand years shares a basic sense of desperation and insecurity that was far from being the norm prior to that time. Humanity spent a great deal of its early formative period expanding at a walking pace across and from Africa, across Europe and Asia and then across the vastly long journey of the Americas to Patagonia. Then there were crude and slow crafts and dogs and horses that brought in Australia and remote lands and mountains not safely reachable before then. Then the vikings in the tenth and eleventh century to a degree far greater than any history book will ever tell visited large and small islands in all four hemispheres (East and West, North and South) often leaving there only slaves and captives often of mixed ancestry from varied culture with whom some of their genes and technology were mingled. They also drove waves of refugees in ships from burning towns ro new islands in almost every part of the world. All of this happened before 1492 and the age of Discovery. Since about 1100 the Earth has been a fairly old and settled place as far as hunmanity goes. The mythical and infinite earth of great undiscovered creatures and lands with unknown and incaculable potential really died in about 1100. Since then all leaders of all places have sort of known that many of the happiest and most hopeful options for their descendants were foreclosed and that we all had entered a phase of negotiations (whether lethal or peaceful) with other humans. Most humans have never lived on the edge of the unknown lands but their existence did affetct allhumans at some level. Their experience did define the possible for leaders everywhere. Population control, vertical integration, oppression, xenophobia and tedium always had to compete with the whispers of the wild and undiscovered world and the vast genetic and historic cultural ties which linked all humans to the process of discovery. There have always been serious planners and as long as there were truly unpopulated lands around their plans could be different. Since then we live in a different human experience than formed us and only serious colonization of the solar system can address that basic change in a way that preserves some of the best of who we are for the future.

Both adventure and resources await our species throughout the solar system. There is little doubt in my mind that we damn ourselves quite seriously if we fail the challenge of securing access to both the adventure and the resources. Yes, I believe God has given the Moon and Mars to Earth’s people as part of our manifest destiny to colonize. It is part of becoming who we are meant to become.

If we had self sustaining and vibrant colonies on the Moon and Mars trading with Earth. Peopled by growing populations and settlers then our lives would resemble that of our human ancestors for long ages past. Most of us would not go to space and would not live their but we would know that we were living in a world of expanding possibilities. Inddeed it would be better than much of the past because almost all could see that were were bringin life where no life had been before. Being both sane and optimistic would again be really possible. The prospect of interstellar travel right now is a near impossibility. The possibility of interstellar travel in the future of a moderately badly run human society with real colonies on the Moon and Mars is substantial. The possibility of interstellar travel in the future of a society descended from us if we have a few centuries of colony driven development on the Earth, the Moon and Mars is very hight indeed. Once honest people can say to their children that our species is on its way to colonizing the worlds around as many stars as it seems right and convenient to colonize then our whole frame of reference will have changed for what the Human race is about and can expect.

We find science fiction in Dante’s Inferno and the rest of the Divina Comedia where the pilgrim with his guide takes a single path down through the center of the Earth where the pits of hell are deepest and the follows the same line past the center of gravity as down becomes up. Now he follows Beatrice through Purgatory to the high mountainous realm of heaven. The science of understanding gravity in a sphere is the central device. We find science fiction in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when Dr. Frankenstein freed from the Medieval prohibition against dismembering corpses is able to put his monster (named Adam after the man God made) together form spare parts and give him life. We find science fiction in bits and pieces in old Greek mythology.It reaches some heights in Jules Vernes fictional depths as Captain Nemo adventures in 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. There is a poetic wildness to science fiction in CS Lewis’s Perelandra Trilogy named for its second book. But while I read all hese things I also read the vast body of more hard-core genre science fiction.

CS Lewis wrote of the various reasons for writing science fiction. On class of novelists and short story writers he chose to distinguish from himself were the “engineers” who tried to tell stories set around the use of potentialy useful future technology. Arthur C. Clark who wrote 2001: A Space Oddyssey made famous by the great Hollywood film was many things but certainly he was an engineer writer. His hard science fiction told of communications sattelites, space stations, moon landings, computers of the type we call artificial intelligence and other things before they existed. Besides deiscovering shipwrecks, at least one of which was full of treasure, he wrote many novels and short stories. His treatment of starships in 2001 is sort lost in the presence of working portals, one of which was left on the moon at the dawn of mankind. But in several of his novels he describes human s seeding the stars in ships that travel fro hugely long periods of time run by computers which retrieve crews from suspended animation and then help them rise to new function when they reach the star. He may even discuss the use of frozen embryos in providing the bulk of the population base. This is very far from Star Trek’s warp drive or Star War’s hyperdrive or Dune’s Spacefolding Guildsmen.

I have never published a novel and most of the of the ones I have written could be classified as unfinished. However, I have written several set in the period when the solar system is being colonized. A future I feel should be our focus of attention. I have set one or two in the period when human civilization well established in the whole or much of the solar system is invaded by interstellar aliens. I have written very lirrle about humans going to other stars. Partly this is because I feel science fiction ought to entice us into the right future when it is engineering science fiction and our thoughts should be on colonizing the sloar system. However, in my view of the future I have a pretty good idea of how starships ought to come into play.

The most important factor about interstellar travel initiated by the human race is that it would be by far the best if it came after about 500 years of intense development of the Solar System. When there are thousands of operatiing populated spaceships, a dozen or more space stations and large factories and ports on the Moon and Mars fed by Lunar and Martian farms and with labor and finace experienced in space then interstellar travel and starships will have a different appeal than they can as we live in a world where perhaps none of the things listed above will ever happen. I believe we can begin to envision many of the steps we have to undertake. I have included some drawings and illustrations that I have posted in the Crater Cap Concept Colony Group as milestone on that projected road.

Humanity must perfect the colonization of craters in varied situations.
Robotic ships on Mars starting the process will be a kind of simple practice for interstellar colonization as well as being the basis of much of the future economy.
Craters will become huge complexes of cities and farms in some cases. But robots can start the all-important capping process.
Eventually systems like my catapult idea would tie Earth to continuos and efficient launches into space just as imports fom space colonies and prodution for space in space will create a huge part of the economy.

What we need to do to get to be a species that lives engaged with the universe of our perception is first to dwvlope this solar system. This process will of course vastly impact our societies and culture. Not doing it is already having an impact. I believe this process can involve creation of entire Earethly eco-systems in canyons. It can be largely humane and part of a larger blossoming of human culture. One of my new Facebook friends Shaun Waterford is developing (and has largely developed) asystem of underwater habitats. I think colonizing the Moon and Mars can lead toa great synergy and cross-fertilization of ideas with those who want to explore the great potential of responsibly colonizing the pelagic ocean floor, seamounts and underwater coastal flats. Most problems will be different between spae and the sea. However, a huge number of problems will be the same, similar or have complimentary solutions. So what could life in space be like?

A view from above of a mature crater cap colony. The white sheet is the uppermost of numerous layers in the crater cap. It allows the features to be studied from space. The blue discs are solar power centers. The two railways intersect with a single airlock on the surface sheet. The colony has almost no profile, farms, towns and mines are below the surface.
If colonization is centered in craters there will still be plenty of astronomical observatories, laboratories, pipelines and spaceports which allow the colonists to have an exposure to their unearthly surroundings which over a lifetime amounts to something we can scarcely imagine. However, in the Crater Cap Concept Colonies life could be very much like earth except that it would be lived in an earthly ecosystem and by earhtly pople under conditions of one sixth or one third gravity. There is norassurance it will be well done but if it were done well life could be pretty good there. Good in the minds of ordinary folk who are not as interested in science fiction as I am — is a possibility in space colonies.
Using entranceds to mines that radiate from the crater with its central fertile fields and pure cliff dwellings that draw from traditionms such as the Anasazi and Nabateans beautifula nd functional residences with extra safety from breached caps would not use the fertile floors of the crater colonies. Each country and colony could devlope a unique architecture i each miniature world that a crater would constitute.
Many animals could adapt to life in these crater colonies. Chickens could roost high on the walls and fly though the pressurized air in low g. with their aerating feet and droppings they would help in the phese of turning the floors of regolith into real soil.
Larger crater rims would have parks around some of the more massive foundations of the cap. These parks would be outside themain warm and wet circulation of airin the colony.
This would enable a cooler driier microclimate to make for a more pleasantly diverse living environment.
Fish living in bodies of water on the moon and mars would be able to fill a normal idf assisted ecosystem. Then children vould carry emergency vaccum suits in sealed cans as a weight when venturing into this wilderness area. They would benefit from the incidentla weight training. Adults might be allowed to determin e their own risk and decide to use the suit/weight cases or not.

There is of course a lot more to the future than we can address by looking to space colonization. I am very much aware that John Hope Franklin has died this week. He was a black man and a scholar of African American History as well as being an active leader and scholarly planner
of the civil rights movement. John Hope Franklin died at ripe old age. However, the possibilites for collaboration between various groups and peoples would be much more promising if we were colnizing space and greatly increasing real and potential resources. Jesus said “I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly.” Frankilin spent a great deal of time trying to figure out ways for varied people to live together in a way that seemed more abundant to him. There is no guaranty that we will act wisely and fairly in a world of objective abundance but objetive abundance is part of what all people of goodwill should be working towards.

Science fiction is one of the arts of our own time and place. We are invited by it to look at what we can do and how e can do it. I do hope though that because somuch of our fiction is interstellar we are not distracted fro the great adventure in our solar system which really is calling to us and which will shape much of our destiny.

The End

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Politics and the lost cause of a woman from Alaska

Posted on September 3, 2009 | Leave a comment
I have a lot on my mind today. It seems that there are a lot of political issues on my mind and these are seen in light of a good number of other factors, influences and issues.  One thing is that I like to think of myself as having a fairly high degree of intellectual honesty. I look for occasions and opportunities to test my basic honesty and to evaluate how honestly I have assessed previous situations. In that vein of assessment there has been an obvious opportunity for me to test my instincts. That is my chance to see how long it would seem to me that President Obama had been President of the United States by the time that the anniversary of the 9-11 attacks came around. I think my feeling is not totally off base from my earlier frame of reference. However, it does seem that he has been POTUS for a while. I am icreasingly willing to blame him for the bad things that happen on any given day.
That is relevant. Because when I voted for George W. Bush for his first term as President it seemed clear to me that he had not been President long enough to be really the president principaly  responsible for the tragedy of that day. I still see that Bush inherited a mess and I still see Obama as mostly working on an inherited economic problem but I am able to see thepercentage of blame for each president increase in my own mind as regards problems which emerge in the middle of September in their first year. Not a real clear definite change in opinion but it is some of that change which Obama was talking about during the campaign.
I did not vote for George Bush for his second term because I could not get to the embassy in Beijing during the allowed time period when I was teaching in China that year. I would very probably have voted for him if I could have voted at all that year. I tend to believe that it takes a while to really formulate and put in place a program of governance.  It seems likely to me that President Obama will be most effective following his re-election if that happens in 2012. That is the structure of the American Presidency today. I would have wanted to give Bush 2 a chance to really establish Homeland Security initiatives and to see if he could come up with a working program for Faith Based Initiatives  in reaching out to communities and populations most in crisis.
I was a solid Bush supporter who had once been a Democrat voting for Dukakis. I had left the party when Clinton was trying to start a war on Catholics, was barbecuing wierd religious kids in Waco and shooting families at Ruby Ridge for wanting to be left alone. I have never wanted to rejoin.  I have friends in many parties throughout the world. Conservatives in Britain and Communists in China are among the  groups with whom I have had the most dialog in the last decade. I do not belong to either.
However, the candidacy of Governor Sarah Palin  really excited me. I think she had a lot to offer. I am reproducing below some of the thoughts I had before last year’s election.   
The post reproduced first appeared on Facebook on my page on October 15,2008.
It is a season of winning and losing. I returned from a weekend at the Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting and have watched Tampa Bay beating the Red Sox, NFL teams struggling to win and the prognosticators saying that Obama is likely to win the election. The election is different than the sporting events. It occurs in a political arena where we either are or should be trying to build something to make our world and nation better. Once a President is elected there will not be such clear standards as to who must be beaten. It will not be so clear what a win is and how to measure it. If you think the wrong guy won it is harder to lose gracefully becuase more than pride and one’s salary is at stake. Nobody can ever say exactly what is at stake. Even historians have trouble deciding what came of an election after the fact. The President has no magic wand for remaking the coutnry according to dreams he may have. But we know a successful President will shape the way all of us and future generations live to some real extent.

I have decided to write a note exploring both the idea of success and the idea of losing gracefully in one piece of writing. It is true that we all live within a great number of pre-set limits and conditions. Most people at least claim not to be worried by most of them. We know some insects can live in suspended animation for years at a time, sperm whales can swim unaided into deep ocean trenches to hunt the giant squid, some trees live with their neighbors and relatives in peaceful adult coexistence for venturies if they can survive the traumas and trial of youth wheteher a male or a female most of us can find other living creatures which seem to have more sexual fun and a better deal than any humans we associate with of our gender. Except for artists (in the broadest sense),shamans, a few saints and the occasional lunatic most of us don’t empathize enough with other creatures to really feel the sense of watching some animal or being and knowing the sense of not having somethng they take for granted. Beyond interspecies differences, we can be aware that Charlemagne, Alexander the Great, Plato and Sun Tzu were all completely unable to win the World Series or the NASCAR trophies that we watch others compete for or avoid watching people compete for each day. The world rushes by each of us according to the age and space in which we live and there are no persons who have all human options open to them. Thus, whenever we speak of success and even of the most extreme kind of success we are speaking of a limited and relative kind of thing.

In fact, a rather well known line of poetry encourages us to see our limits in achieving the greatness we percieve in a good and happy way. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp else what’s a Heaven for?” On a clear night the naked eye can see Arcturus many billions of miles away while a naked and unaided body can leap and grab an object not much over twenty feet from one’s naked resting eyeballs. Therefore, there does seem to be rather a disparity between the reachof purely physical perception and the grasp of grip. However, its hard to measure exactly how much further away is the farthest thing we can touch with our finger tips from the farthest thing we can grasp in our hands. Such a difference seems subpoetic somehow. So perhaps reach is meant in its broadest literal meaning as the underlying foundation of this metaphor. Some of us compare our actual achievements to goals analagous to those objects just at our fingertips and others of us tned to compare our achievements to goals as practically remote as Arcturus is distant. While I don’t think loftier goals always mean a less happy person they may certainly break down smugness and self satisfaction.

What about all the many how-to books of the self-help variety that tend to promote success as a goal which is relatively universal and easily identified? Can success reaslly be at all ambiguous or mysterious if so many agree on what is meant in the writing, publishing and purchase of all these books?

Perhaps one reason that sports and other games are so widely enjoyed by so many kinds of people is that in these games success can be identified more easily than in life. While in practice winning may not be the only goal that players and coaches address it is certainly one of the major goals in everygame. And even when a team or player is involved in a game or competition where winning is not a realistic goal and is not reall sought, winning remains the standard by which their efoorts are measured and assessed. This sort of game theory applies readily war. One hopes for and should seek victory but often it is best to put up a great fight and lose utterly than simply to lose utterly. The conqueror’s desire for revenge will not often cause as much harm as will be avoided by having taught them to fear renewed hostility, having reduced their forces, having proved unpredictable and having proven that one can stand strong for commitments given. The way one achieves these secondary objectives however is usually by trying to win.

In some kinds of play winning is not so clear and not so important. Often there are still victories involved but they are the victories of the type whiich actors describe in doing a scene. They are subtle kinds of plays for and calculations of dominance and position. Some forms of feminism have tried to hide the fact that in most cases and at most times women will avoid forms of direct contest in zero-sum competition with their husbands, potential husbands and potential sons-in-law. There are very good reasons for that. Nonetheless, in Greek which was so dominant over so much of culture for so long the women had their Heraklion games as a counterpart to the Olympic games and competed fiercely in athletics with one another. I think society is much richer when women speak the language of competition as men experience it. A little man to woman competiton in formal systems can add some spice as well. But men competing directly with women in hard fought games will never be the main course of a healthy society. Danika Patrick enhances INDY racing’s appeal because she is the sexy, good-looking woman who gives the guys a good run for their money. Other women come and go and she keeps the door open for them. INDY could probably handle another ten women of her caliber or better. But another 25 women like her would hurt its appeal. I watch the sport more because of her, but I enjoy watching her and the men compete in a man’s sport.

Coed soccer with little boys and girls is laying a foundation for a better future I think. Any good future will involve a lot of single sex competition. Cheerleading is a kind of sport and artform used to emphasize the really maco qualities of a given sport by accenting the fit and able females cheering for it. Male cheerleaders exist and can be important but they support and supplement the women involved. Men can also benefit from learining some female-dominated skill sets. It can be refreshing to everyone if old Widower Fred puts on a good social event as his wife once did. If men are throwing most of the dinner parties then that group of dinner parties will surely be in decline.

All of the kinds of success that I have mentioned are distinct from the big life-defining measure of overall success. Those seem different as well from the suceess measures of a society. I think that in my own life there has been a pretty good level of mixture between success and failure, winning and losing. I have had more than a few victories of various kinds. However, most of my life I have felt very aware that I could not overcome many of the difficulties that seemed most important to me. By most of the standards I value my life has been largely a failure. In may ways, things have gone mostly from bad to worse. I would describe myself as divorced, childless, unemloyed, not really solvent, physically challenged unhappy and without much rapport with people. While sincerely mean all of those things they are not the whole story. My situation is actually very complex. Even as a young child however I began to calculate that I was not likely to have a very happy life. My experiences and studies since then have mostly made me believe that as a child I was insightful rather than pessimistic or emotionally or mentally damaged. I think that the modern era has so much literal and metaphorical blood on its hands that it must take refuge in the idea of depression as mental illness. Modern society cannot begin to make ammends for all the evil it does, therefore it must say that thoses it injures have something wrong with the apparatus that records and evaluates injury. Painkillers are given when really the assault causing the pain and the wounds resulting should be the focus of attention.

The world has always been a place of great suffering and much that is wrong and evil has often happened here in every age of humankind. But I do think that as a species there are almost always fewer chances for the best tmes and structures of the human race to reassert themselves. The most squalid slums and refugee camps endure for generations now. Vast mountains of waste are produced by the rich and inflicted upon the environment. The healthiest expressions of each religion are often driven out and held out by the pincer action of secularism and fanaticism. I think a lot of things are getting worse.I favor the advance of technology and I don’t blame all problems on technological change. However, I think that it is less of an offset than some people technical advancement is probable in many scenarios. Knowledge tends to expand we should not celebrate ourselves too much as a result.

If we had a culture building sustainable seamount and undersea colonies on a big scale, turning waste into energy, colonizing mars and creating vast parks near all major megalopolises then I would say that such a technostorm was offestting most of the evils of the modern age. Instead, I see the human race as getting poorer over all.

In the coming Election I will be very glad to vote for Sarah Palin and won’t mind voting for McCain. If they lose I will see the election of Obama as a very bad thing for the futrure. I have discussed why in other notes. I believe that we will be losing some thing that cannot be quickly remedied.

However, it does not seem much worse or as bad as many other events that shaped history. I think that from a philosophical point of view I am getting more and more accustomed to losing gracefully. At a personal level I find that society exists as a place where my values are often destined to lose. When I do have a play to make I often think that I am in a situation where even a solid win will be a loss. But of course I may lose and often do. I have not been very active in this campaign season and I have not regretted not being a Republican. Yet I will be sad to see the lady from Alaska lose no matter how gracefully she does it.

 The End.
I see the Palins struggling with notoriety and am wondering how they will deal with it all. So many people have injuries in this administration. I hear that Robert Gates, Justice Alito, Jusitce Sotomayor, Hillary Clinton and many others have had injuries and I see the Governor of Alaska resigning. If I was paranoid I would see a pattern of limited mayhem marking the administration of President B. Hussein O.  Life is hard all over and I am able to see that Obama supporters have things to change. But I am still sad that the little lady from Alaska is not bringing her lovely smile to the Naval Observatory and the world stage. That is one area that has not changed within my mental framework about politics.
For now I will just muse, blog and think. Maybe one day I will do more.  But we will be in a very different place than we would have been. Where we will be standing remains to be seen.   

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Society, Mental Health and Relationships

Posted on September 2, 2009 | Leave a comment

I think we have quite a few people who voted for Barak Hussein Obama because they were very upset. I think that we have a lot of people yelling at town hall meetings because they are very upset. These two groups of people also wanted to change things but they are certainly upset and the emotional baggage is just as important as the ideas andvalues that they would like to see expressed.

We also live in a world where increasingly large numbers of people take medicines to relieve symptoms of emotional discomfort if they have access to them. I do not object to people taking medicines that relieve emotional symptoms and I also am able to accept the expression of emotion in politics.  However, I think we as a human race have a need for emotional bonding in communities and families. I think we have a need to be able to call on emotional reserves to sacrifice in our striving for greatness in may challenges we face. Sadly but certainly peoples and nations need to have healthy agressive emotions to fight for their defense, integrity and survival.

Because I think that all these energies are important I cannot accept the idea that emotional states are sort of irelevant. Nor do I think that people should be governed simply and purely by their emotions. So as I think about all this I return to a post from last summer. It reminds me that emotional health can be seen as part of a larger social architecture.  

The following post was originaly posted on my page on Facebook on July 12, 2008.

Most of all my life I have had the sense that “things” were generally very bad. I have usually felt that that there was a sort of waking nightmare that had taken over the world. There is no doubt that I also had many dreams come true and many moments of joy. But I was forced to confront both the possibility that I was defectively attuned to bad things going on and also the possibility that the overall tone of things on Earth in my time was not very good.

At a very basic level, there have been many people in human history who have had worse days and seasons than most people reading this note will be having on the day that they first read it. That is almost guaranteed to be true. However, the overall tone of things can be bleak and unpromising and that could still be true.

Let us consider all the things that have been developed to help people make it through the challenge of relating to one another. Obviously we cannot really examine a significant percentage of those methods used for working things out in all cultures throughout the world. Instead we will consider a representative sample of half a dozen technologies for coping with and resolving interpersonal stress.

Lets discuss:
1. Jesus’s directions for dealing with conflict in the Church.
2.Dueling
3. The pracitce of Penance as it existed in the medieval Catholic Church.
4. Freudian Psychoanalysis.
5. That body of disciplines known as Wu Shu, Kung Fu and Tai Chi Chuan.
6. Carnival, Mardi Gras and festivals generally.

While we discuss these six topics in a ridiculously brief note we will also look at some of the other issues and institutions that impinge on our discussion. A sort of main point will be that getting along with other people is a challenge that has often commanded very serious attention. A certain tone of casual informality can be as freakishly wierd as anything else humans have ever done.

1. Jesus’s words are distinctly out of sync with the unbalanced teaching on forgiveness which has dominated much Christian preaching for a long time. In Matthew 18:15-19 is a teaching which is quite in accord with the teaching of Christ Jesus elsewhere during his ministry. The steps are roughly outlined below:
First someone in the church must sin against you. Then you must notice it and decide to act. Then you must confront the Christian privately face-to-face. The person must refuse the remedy you see as just. Then you must select two Christian witnesses (who have also heard a correct doctrine of patience and forgiveness) and tbey must agree to go with you to the offender. Then the three of you must confront the offender. Then the offender must reject the remedy you see as just. Then you as the offended Christian must bring the case before the Church and if the church finds against the offender and he refuses to do the just thing then they shall excommunicate that Christian. This is a very active, formal process which has almost nothing to do with just struggling to internally bear with slings and missiles of outrageous fortune. Forgiveness makes things better because it comes when they are better. Many will not forgive when amends are made, Christians must do so. Very slim evidence in recognized serious Christian thought or Holy Scripture supports a general teaching of the kind of unilateral forgiveness that is preached as the remedy for everything.

2. Skipping right ahead and out of context, there was a vast institution of dueling which made up an enormous force in shaping polite society throughout many countries and during many centuries. Dueling was very common in Louisiana up until the end of the War Between the States, or the the Civil War or the War for Southern Independence or the War of Northern Agression. This custom made it possible for men with large egos and refined sensibilities to get along despite all the evils of a given time and place. It certainly allowed for evils of its own but at its best it was far from a license for wide open bloodletting on a wholesale basis. Some say that in late antebellum Louisiana on in 400 challenges resulted in a homicide. Lots of steps — published challenges, choice of seconds, interviews between seconds, choice of grounds, time and weapons and the hiring of an attending physisican — stood between potentialy mortal offense and mortality. Abolishing duelling has not stopped people killing eachother but it has eliminated a huge and complex infrastructure for working out grievances.

3. While the pracitice of reconciliation as a modern Catholic Christian rite is rooted in our secttion on Jesus’s practice for resolving dispute, and in apostolic words related the “mysterion”, “semaeion” of healing the sickand praying for their healing in the Middle Ages of Europe Penance reached a kind of apogee. It was tied to a culture that understood the Doctrine of the Two Swords. It was tied to well-defined and developed practices of Exorcism and Interdict and it was tied to the rich culture of pilgrimage of which Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales gives us some idea. It was also tied to all the glory, horror and productive dialog of the Crusader and Jihadi. The energy of this vast complex of institutions lagely came from the fact of humans taking offense at the behavior of other humans and taking seriously the need to resolve the conflict and right the wrong.

4. A recent means for dealing with the injuries arising from civilization and its discontents is the psychoanalysis of Freud. This arose from the glorious last gasp of the Hapsburg Empire and its community of elite Jewish intellectuals. Psychoanalysis was often known as “the talking cure” in its early days. Whilre the Austrian, Austro-Hungarian and greater Hapsburg Empires knew many moments of glory in war, exploration, and invention they were a great power built more on diplomacy, marriage and legal procedure. While jews served in the armed forces and had guards they were the largest ethnic group without regimantal status in the Imperial military at any time. Perhaps it is natural that from them should have emerged a man who found talking things out to resolve internal conflict very important. But it must be remembered that Freud sought to free people to live a life more fully in the open and more expressively as themselves. Further his professional, therapeutic and literary edifice built on the sense of human injury was immense.

5. Leaping quickly elsewhere, we come to examine Wu Shu, Kung Fu and Tai Chi Chuan. Internal meditation,physical fitness, religious education, warrior training, and a basis for self-assertion have been developed into a single complex of disciplines in China. From China they have diseminated to the rest of North East Asia ,then evolved and expanded directly from China as well as from Japan and Korea. It seems that this whole complex of knowledge and skill falls neatly into the category of dealing w the interanl causes of conflict and the resolution of actual conflict. A vast amount of very productive effort is spent to gain or create self-mastery and then teach those with self-control to handle the conflicts which arise between them and others. Good health, balance, artistic motion, and deterrent against attack all belong to the practitioner of Kung Fu.

6. Humans have always sort of known that no matter what we do with our serious and formal efforts to organize ourselve and our societies the result will not be totally fair or entirely decent. Therefore wise societies find ways to combine inversion of normal rules and status norms with new kinds of commerce,uninhibited dancing and loosening of moral sensibilities. This behavior occurs at Mardi Gras, carnivals and Festivals. Many people in the modern world seldom experience one of these. Arguably few of us get a reasonable dose of these events. Therefore we live trapped in the full-time observation of our particular social absurdities. I actually am a sincere conservative who values the contribution of the community in Hollywood, New York,  Cinecitta, Ballywood and many other places who bring us carnival like experiences on discs, in film and on the airwaves. Nonetheless, There are values in the mixture of marketing products of hard work to visitors and religious prayer on the one hand with street dancing, sexual naughtiness and  spectacle on the other hand which will never be reproduced on artificial media. The movies and TV can help but festivals and carnivals really do some of the basic work of individual and community healing. Like all these listed techniques there are risks in this one that I may visit in another  post but I do think that this feature of life has real importance. 

What I would say is that lots of folks are miserable because the world they live in is really bad. they are miserable because people feel free to do great harm to them and others all their life without consequence. They are miserable because the means for dealing with problems make them worse and those in charge of normalcy are entirely nuts.

I think it is time for change bigger than most of us can dream of, I really do. But I do not think it likely that I will live to see it. I am not sure it will come at all, only sure that it is needed.

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Some thoughts on healthcare….

Posted on September 1, 2009 | 1 comment

Today I am coming back from a vacation and after canoeing, swimming, being with family and other things I am feeling a lot more healthy than I have been lately. That has me thinking about healthcare. I think that a lot of other people are probably thinking about the same topic these days.  

This Post which is a bit parable and a bit bad joke was posted  by me on Facebook on my 44th birthday on June 15, 2008.  It is meant to suggest that we take a hard look at healthcare as many are doing. It is not meant suggest any solutions in and of itself. 

It is my conclusion tthat 44 year old today enjoy many of the benefits and opportunities that 42 year old people enjoyed in my parents generation. A booming set of industries in abortion, stolen organs, cut drugs, insurance fraud, nursing home abuse and the pinching of legitimate first response and family care medical people forbodes dire things for some. But after years of careful study I feel that I have proven that because of medicine as it is, a 44 year old oday can live almost the same quality of life which a 42 year old enjoyed when my parents were that age.  As a 44 year old how can I be anything but grateful.

In our hotter world as the idealist rural practitioner finishes his seven hours of paperwork to prepare for half an hour of patient contact, he feels unhappy. Two of last week’s patients  who are admitted to the hospital received a mixture of laxatives and amphetamines when he prescribed antibiotics and the bank is foreclosing on his house. But he is being selfish. The evidence is all around him. His patients are all living people, could they be if modern medicine were not great?

As I wait to see him he is distracted by the news that the blood components he prescribed last week came from people murdered for body parts in a foreign country. However his professional limited partnership group assures him that this only happened because the regular suppy of blood components was contaminated by addicts to a new ilegal recreational drug which in turn was cut with five different poisons coming from the shadows of a new gang — possibly linked to Al Quaeda.  He tries to report his concerns to a government public health line for physicians. After five attempts he hears the voicemail explaining that health is not really public and he should seek a free market solution to his problem.  However he can call back on Tuesdays between 11:00 and 11:09 a.m.  He comes out and looks at my file and talks to the Assistant Sub Vice Advisory Practical Nurse. This country doctor and I are old friends so he actually waves his stethothoscope in my direction. I leave the pink slip to my car with his receptionist and walk to the drug store, hoping the robbery will go well and they won’t notice the name on the prescription and be able to arrest me later. I thank goodness for the advances in medical science and our increased quality of life.

The End

I have suggested a few policy points on Politico’s “Speak to Power”.  These ideas are not being considered seriously so far as I know.  However, I still believe in them and while I am sure this summary will differ from the other summary submitted to Congress it has many of the same ideals and ideas.

So…

A Dozen Policy Points on Healthcare:

1.Medicare and S-CHIP programs should be mostly preserved.  Medicaid should be reformed but not abolished.

2.  Americans should each be allowed to join three  or fewer family associations and pay in one percent of their taxable income tax dedudtibly to each and these should be able to buy health insurance, get loans and make investments in a structure designed by the government to address the Healthcare situation. One investment which would qualify for some Federal support would be a Community Clinic.

3. A National Wellness Agency should be established. One mil of all FICA revenues and  small fee of say $1.00  collected from everyone entering the United States would be devoted exclusively to this NWA. The NWA would have various chartering regimes for Community Clinics being especially generous to those already existing in getting Agency approval.

4. The NWA would have a subagency devoted to collecting, inspecting and dating unused medicines from institutions and deceased persons and would distribute them to Community Clinics.

5. Every physician who received federal financial aid would be required to spend one day for every thousand dollars of Federal loans and five days for every thousand dollars of Federal grants working for an approved Community Clinic after basic medical school graduation and before any extended residency or specialty training. The National Wellness Agency would oversee this program. 

6.  The National Wellness Agency would receive a dedicated tax of one mil of every health and life insurance premium collected in the United States. This money would largely (but not exclusively) pay for a  coordination program linking Community Clinics to  school nurses, fitness centers, foodbanks,  shelters, eldercare and daycare facilitites as well as other community institutions.

7. The Community Clinics would have hours reserved for only those invested in the clinic or owning cheap Community Clinic Insurance which would be available to all including fugitive felons and ilegal aliens on confidential basis. The Community Clinics would also charge a visit fee of five dollars and a file fee of twenty dollars per year to any one able to pay and not insured. Half of one percent of the revenues of each clinic would be paid to the National Wellness Agency. Insurance would be about ten dollars per household per month and would cover clinic fees if current. 

8. The National Wellness Agency would also receive a small dedicated of perhaps one percent on all imported alcohol, tobacco, firearms and high performance recreational vehicles.   These funds would be largely dedicated to the Volunteer Support Program.  Meals and seminars would be provided where possible for Health and Medical Professionals volunteering at  Community Clinics. The Clinics would keep track of hours and the volunteers would receive a check at the end of each year for the federal minimum wage or one fifth of their normal hourly rate of pay — whichever was less.

9. The National Wellness Agency would offer a  lottery for tests, specialists and referals for all those holding  Community Clinic insurance.    The NWA would also interface with research instituions, charity hospitals and other players. These agencies would also be required to dedicate at least one percent of the value of Federal funds received to the network of deserving cases.

10. The National Wellness Agency would train community workers in churches, clubs and sports leagues and sponsor nutrition, hygiene and other programs. This  activity would be paid for in large part by a one mil tax on the wholesale  and a one percent tax on the reatil of all  prescribed pharmaceuticals. These community workers would be trained to transport persons needing care to the Community Clinics. Clinics would work with other nonprofit organizations of all types to create medical transport with donated vehicles and other assets.

11.  Emergency Rooms and Ambulances would be required to give some triage preference to those coming from Community Clinics over those coming from the open street.

12. Corporations which sponsored a Community Clinic would receive a Wellness Program Support Package from the NWA tied to their level of support.

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Senator Edward Kennedy

Posted on August 26, 2009 | Leave a comment

This is a brief original blog to note the passing of Edward Kennedy the Senior Senator from Massachussettes.  His father served as Ambassador to the Court of Saint James. His brother Joseph was killed in an experimental aircraft in the midst of World War II.  His brother John Fizgerald was President of the United States of America after having been a Senator and was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.  His brother Robert was Attorney General and a United States Senator who was gunned down during his bid for the Presidency of the United States. His sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver  and her husband founded and oversaw the Special Olympics. His niece Maria Shriver Schwarzenegger is the First Lady of California. His nephew John Fitzgerald Kennedy Junior was a publisher of “George” a political magazine and died in a plane crash. Given the wealth of his father it is not surprising that with this record of untimely death and public service  many people have called the Kennedy family America’s royal family. While I do not see that as an apt description they are certainly a special family which deserves some recognition.  

Edward Kennedy was a strong and committed voice in the legislation of our country.  He played a significant role in electing Barak Hussein Obama to the Presidency. He was an example of leadership in an era in which leaders are rare. Kennedy was the kind of man who becomes a national monument no matter how one feels about any of his ideas or policies.   

Edward Kennedy is going to be buried in Arlington National Cemetary. My cousin Severin Summers III who was killed in Afghanistan will also be buried there very soon. So he will be linked in my mind by this coincidence to my own family.

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Women and Sexuality in some kind of context

Posted on August 25, 2009 | 1 comment
This post first appeared in April of this year on Facebook I wrote all of those notes without any sources and have left them as written in almost every case where they are posted here. There are some errors in some posts and if they are caught I will try to figure out how best to show corrections…..
In one of Leon Tolstoy’s fantasticaly long and eloquent novels a smart young woman uncomfortable with her own sexual appeal says to another character, who is I believe a very self-assured Russian Prince, “Why do people have balls? Wouldn’t it be much more sensible if people simply spent the evening in conversation?” To which the Prince, who is an acomplished social dancer, replies “Infinitely more sensible and infinitely less like a ball.” A society that lives only in words and conversations does not live at all. Women and the way they appear to men is not primarily a subject to be debated. It is primarily the greatest engine and most pertinent mystery of human personality and society.

Tolstoy was a Christian, a dabbling Freemason, a bit of a socialist and an apologetic royalist. There have been many other humans of great intellect with deities like Pan, Aphrodite, Venus and a hundred others who were much more explicit in declaring the enormous importance of sex and the sexual recognition of women. When the founding fathers discussed the work of building the United States several key leaders including Jefferson wrote that the work of Population was one deserving time attention and resources. The American revolution was largely fought to allow the people of the United State a few centuries to breed and and build families and hope that over that time a better set of technologies would emerge to deal with high population density. Sex, family, courtship, childbirth, marraige and the like are of enormous importance to any sane public policy. All of these things especialy involve women as women.

I wrote a Facebook Note a while back on manhood.There are many reasons why such an undertaking was wiser, safer, more comfortable and easier than my current attempt to write a note about womanhood. Yet in this year of trying to get a basic smattering of my thoughts out into the world through Facebook Notes I would not have done very much of this at all unless I also included one of these rambling and personal essays in which the topic was womanhood. Womanhood is actually a topic which matters as much as any other possible topic in my opinion. However, the reasons for not writing an essay which is both wise and honest are numerous and powerful reasons. I can think of no more worthy challenge for my limited talents. I can think of few topics less likely to be personaly rewarding for me. However, this year’s (June 2008 through June 2009) Facebook Notes are a unique set of documents. I am trying to set out my thoughts more or less comprehensively in one venue. That will leave me free for whatever comes next in a certain way that I have not been before.

I will ramble among various perspectives and points of view in discussing this topic as I have with all the other notes in this series — or nearly all. However, I think I will start by discussing a few different aspects of sexuality and womanhood which may differentiate and distinguish the parameters of this discussion from almost any and perhaps from anyone else whom any reader may have read discussing this set of topics. I am more than a little confident that this is not the same essay one has read elsewhere. There is an originality in an early submarine even though boilers, sheet metal, rivets and propelors are old technology. When discussing the realm of the human condition an essay can be very original ev en when many component observations are commonly known. However, in the social sciences and humanities such originality is overlooked as it is in science very often. Engineering and math are the areas where patterns and combinations are likely to be recognized as original work if they are original work.

First, human females are truly shockingly extraordinary. They are not only very different from men they are different from other female earthlings. Women distinguish our species so enormously that it is simply inevitable magic. The combination of human extreme bipedalism (walking on two feet) and the shape of chidlbearing hips combine with prominent breasts to create a figure which is very extreme sexual dsiplay compared to men’s beards and very little else is so specifically developed as sexual flesh. This is somewhat different from our nearest biological relatives the apes. It is very distinct from the myriad examples of ducks, deer, chickens, lions, turkeys and other well known species where the male expresses the physical “come hither” material in the sexual dialog. In most species there is either no sexual dimorphism meaning there is asexual morphism — meaning males and females look mostly alike OR the male wears the plumage.

Having shown a major difference we are only geeting started. A heathy adult female can have coitus on any day at any period of that day. Most females are penetrable (in species like large animals which penterate) only infrquently and are fertile only on these realtively rare occasions. Healthy adult human females are fertile and infertile every month when they are not pregnant or lactating to supply a dependent nursing heavily. The variations between fertile and infertile periods within the month are not common to the whole species nor linked closely to the weather but vary from woman to woman. Further, there is very little physical difference between fertile and infertile women so that estrus is largely hidden. This is also a very limiting set of sexual characteristics which human famles share with few if any other females on Earth if taken as a whole.

To add another level of complexity to the totality of the factors in the paragraph above the human female fertility cycle matches the length of one of the most obvious cycles on earth that of the moon but is not tied to its periodicity. It generaly runs according to the woman’s own biology but does tie in and sychronize to some degree with women she lives with and is somewhat (but very subtly and eraticaly) related to sexual stimulus from men especialy in very young women.

Additional to all the other differences there is the difference between the baby dlivered by a woman and an adult human. That difference is called the “degree of neotony”. Almost no creature has a greater degree of neotony and when one combines this degree of neotony with the degree of involvement and care a young human will generaly accept and seek from its mother this creates a greaer demand and matched capacity for mothering per individual human than almost any other earthly species.

These are actually only a few of the reasons why women are objectively one of the most fascinating and compelling subjects to which one could apply the human mind. I actually believe that one of the greatest windows for insight into the state of well-being, progress and potential of any society is to look at women as women within that society.

Here is a woman functioning in Acadian or Germano-Acadian home ‘s kitchen and living room where she plays a vital role in social and economic development in the family and community. The painting is in turn painted by another woman, my great-great-grandmother Regina Oubre Hollier. Dhe is drawing from childhood memories for the composition.

There are a great number of things to learn if one wants to understand womanhood and perhaps in the modern age we are losing the last ties to many of them. Among the most influential men of my own lifetime a few of them have been distinguished in large part by something having to do with sex and womanhood. These include Karol Wotija/ Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, Hugh Heffner, Bill Clinton, Prince Charles Arthur George Saxe-Coburg-Gotha- Battenburg-Lyons-Windsor (or whatever one chooses to call the current Prince of Wales) and John F. Kennedy. However, unlike many religious people what strikes me about the modern era is how sexles and lifeless it is not how we are all a bunch of sex maniacs. These men while very different from one another are perhaps more normal in that sex is a pulsing shaping force in their public biography. Most modern biographies are perhaps best described as freakishly wierd. Sex is not a side note to the decisions people make in public office. Sex is very much a part of a sane governance.

In a royalist or aristocratic high republican or a number of other regimes the family has a stature which can tie together the privacy of sex, affection and home with the qualities of a public institution.The modern era has largely abandoned this whole vast set of institutions and patterns which tie these huge parts of the world together.

The point of all this is not that women should have no meaning or existence outside of their role as sexual coun terparts to men and mothers to children. However, the point is to show thattheir is almost limitless capacity for development and discussion in that aspect both of women and of the idea of women. To know woman one must first renounce that kind of asexual androgyny which has had a great deal of credence and influence in the world of my lifetime. Men and women are profooundly different and that difference is vital, useful and profoundly energizing in a decent and healthy society.

There are many layers of sexual exchange and perception between men and women. The Bible is one of the sources for wisom and the perception of ages regarding the relations of men and women. In the iconic story of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis in the Bible Adam is the first man and his words upon seeing the first woman are memorable. As Genesis 2: 22b-25 states:
” When he brought her to the man the man said.
“This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh;
This one shall be called “woman” for out of “her man” this one has bee taken.”
That is why a man leaves his mother an father and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body.
The man and his wife were naked but they felt no shame.”

The extreme intimacy of the passage is in comparison to the anmials with whom Adam cannot marry or form an intimate partnership. But it remains a very intimate passage. There is almost nothing that has been mor under sustained attack for millenia than this excited, intimate and personal recognition by man of his mate in women. Real moral science ia very demading and elegant pursuit and thus is more often abandoned than pursued. However, real moral science must always take a careful measure of relations between the sexes.

I think it deserves to be said in this context that I believe in a moral struggle as a desirable thing. I find that those who are not struggling have usually settled for something bad. One of the powerful shaping forces of humanity as it is remains the strong belief that anything related to the relational structure of humanity must either be very ancient, fixed and setled or else a really blank slate upon which any given generation can write or draw whatever it wants. For me I think that the entire mystery and meaning of humanity is something quite different. Humans have numerous intrinsic qualities that cannot really be changed much in any generation. Yet one may face the future with confidence when aware of these strictures of the past and present. A generation and an individual can compose any vast number of varied tunes using these notes given by nature. By preserving and fully working the great musical tradition one can even enhance the range and delicacy of notes available to future generations of musicians. Sexuality and the role of women is one of the great musical worlds in which the human race can operate. It is an area where we all practice some form of art whether or not we even acknowledge it.

What evolution, the idea of original sin, reincarnation, eugenics and quite a few other theories about the proper living out of humanity have in common is the idea that we pass on something different to the future based on our actions. Humans may not agree on what the mechanism for passing things on is, nor what ought to be passed on, nor how that which is passed on relates to present behavior. But in many different ways and at many different levels of intensity we remind ourselves and are reminded by those we put in charge of our most serious thinking that we are changing the present of future generations by how we live out our own present here and now.

This is a rather serious business and humans are able to make rather substantial changes in the population in relatively short periods of time. One of the most notable struggles of human race is our struggle to define and make ourselves as a species. That our greatest project is ourselves is a perspective which gives great importance to waman’s involvement in the human adventure. One of the characterisitics of the modern era is that we expect the totality of sexual relations to be easily defined. Consider that terms like: harem, concubine, paramour, mistress, courtesan, sister-wife, rival, Abbess, novice, midwife, maid, lady-in-waiting, placement, princess, Queen, Official Mistress and countless others once denoted roles which were available to women in many cases simultaneously and which in huge numbers of places have all disappeared down to the last one. I write here not so much to change the world but more as any defeated soldier may write when he decides that before his life ends he wants to make really clear how badly he views this new order and the triumph of what he fought against. So for me I see layer upon layer of both personal defeat and the coming to an end of much of what makes the human species human. It goes back to my recurring theme thayt life has mostly been a nightmare.

One thing about sex and womanhood being very near the core of the human moral struggle is that the issues related to womanhood and sexuality are subject to the same regional and epochal variations as are other part of the human moral drama. From my point of view I may say that all humans are severely confused and diseased in their understanding of these things. However, I would not say that they or we all suffer from the same delusion or disease. We may all be in error but we are in distinct errors across the species. A loose translation of the Bible called the Catholic Living Bible translates a passage as follows:
Luke 11: 45-47a
“Sir,” said an expert in religious law who was standing there, ” you insult my profession, too, in what you just said.”
“Yes,” said Jesus, “the same horrors await you! For you crush men beneath impossible religious demands that you yourselves would never think of trying to keep. Woe to you!””

Sex is an area where evil intentions , evil plans and hate often come dressed up as morality. One of the greatest problems humanity faces is the problem of overcoming the advantages acrued by evil in human affairs once evil is recognized as a real thing. I think that for me sex is an aspect of the human condition which accentuates hoew badly flawed our species is and yet, at the same time, is the point of glory at which we can most resemble the species we were once meant to be.

Sex remains the great risk and gamble on which we still place the most on the table. Where we can never entirely wipe out our divine destiny whether we believe in it or not.I think of Lawrence Summers my distinguished nonrelative ( as far as i know) who has had his name on the money of the United States of America and beeen president of Harvard and I think of the uproar and probable beginings of the move to boot him from the presidency of that famed institution. He merely suggested that the difference in representatation in hard sciences and maths and engineering between men and women migh have something to do with natural predilections varying by sex. He did not say women could not be good engineers, scientists or mathematicians. This is a story where I think the female faculty at Harverd is 100% justified in being very vigilant to the point of near para noia in guarding access to these fields for women candidates. I think Lawrence Summers — aside from having phenomenaly good taste in last names — was fully justified in speculating that there may be proclivities varying by sex which were relevant here. I think in that regard both sides in the dispute acted as relatively wise and intelligent people. Nonethless, I would favor the Swedish Parliament funding a Special “Silly Goose Award” comparable to the Nobel prizes they already give out and making all parties to this public dispute designated recipients. “Sex” it has often been said “makes fools of us all”.

Just the other night I watched the Miss USA Pageant and there is speculaation that one of the finalists was effectively disqualified by the very verbaly abusive ( on the web later) Perez Hilton for saying that she personally believed marriage was mneant to be between a man and a woman. Mr. Hilton is misogynistic scum. That is a quality which abounds in male humans. His audacious moral hideousness in going into an inner sanctum of hetero-sexual celebration of attraction and oing all that he has done is vile. But so is covering over millions of cases of rape with non-notification laws on abortions for teenage girls. So is the female genital mutilation of millions of women throughout the world to destroy their sexuality. So is the killing of countless girls and women without prosecution by their families and lovers every year in the worst situations and without hope of justice all around the world. I am not sure the ladies of Harvard can afford quite the ivory tower they live in. However, in that way they resemble their male counterparts.

I do not believe that the story at the begining of the book of Genesis was written by Moses after visiting the origins of the human species in a time machine. I do not believe the writer had a Ph. D. in biology. I do not believe it is a book coded from another book which was largely a straight first hand bio-history of its time — that is what I believe about the Gospels. I am even willing to say that he early stories are myths which is a word that atheistic relativistic scholars love to use for them. However, I do think that they are true stories written to pass on ancient coded trruths and insights which come from miraculousy ancient parts of the human story. Why is so much in the Bible coded?

That is a question for a long an important note on another occasion. In this note we will examine a bit more of Adam and Eve. There are three phases of the sexual relationship betwwen the two. in very general terms I mean for one could argue for a dozen phases.

The first is the phase in Genesis 2: 22-25b which I have already quoted this is the relationship between Man and Woman which God intended as unique to the human species. This really reflected the Image of an ultimate divine nature. The qualities of that relationship are intimacy, passion, empathy, excitement sex, good bodily self-image and fertitlity. It sounds tiring to those of us with enough mileage but otherwise one who can think can see the logic and goodness of it.

To preserve this humanity needed God’s friendship and to avoid eating the fruit of the knowleddge of Good and Evil. The writer here is using code for cannibalism. Yes, that again. The passage says that iti is a tree in the middle of the garden of course humans are in the middle of their own world always. That on the day one eats it humans will die and again if humans are eaten then the human eaten will die. It brings knowledge of Good and Evil and we actually have a lot of data across many centuries and cultures to show that eating human flesh is a passage which brings cunning, insioght and moral guilt into human minds in a unique way whether the society endorses or forbids cannibalism.

The last set of relations is the abusive marrasige and the loss of God’s friendship which define behavior which is in the survivable margin for humans as we currently are. These last two phases of the story are descibed in Genesis Chapter three. We all are still living in the last phase at best from the story’s own point of view.

It goes far beyond my capacity in time and space in tis note to show instances of cultures where men have driven their lands into desert and ruin to make sure that women were sastarving and dispossessed and fit into one of three (to them) acceptable catgories hyper-breeding terrified slaves, spies or religiously deluded cattle reared as food. rthis of course has always included the need to kill and maim some large number of men who cannot overcome (or heroicaly resist overcoming) their lover for mothers, sisters, and female lovers. Some of the time homosexuals have led this misogynistic elte.

Life is often hell and human society often a sewer which exceeds my capcity to espress and usually it involves building things on one of two principles men hating women or women hating children. Often this is dressed up as religion or ideology but it is really about that. This engine allows the most foul and wothless kinds of people to amss almost all available power and resources. It has happened occasionaly since time imemorial.

The sexualy intense path of paradise requires lots of restriction and guidance in the real world. It always has unless you believe we may have had an unfallen Eden somewhere in the pre-historic past. But it is the path which produces real joy and love, wealth, pressure for progress and other necessities. I presume that almost everyone alive today is someone iI would consider fundamantally insane. But I do not take such a dim view of insanity as some do. Homosexuality is a condition of some sons of women which is in my view tolerable when thaose who are homosexual know it is alimiting thing and have the humility to see it as a speciai status with some rewards and some disease like qualities requiring a routine of self -care, or when they publicly acnkowledge it as a kind of loss in bio-sweepstakes in which they make the best out of a less than first place postion. But when they think as Mr. Hilton does they are evil men encouraging other evil men in a way which opens on to an ininite pool of evil.

Women are tied to certain kinds of inferiority too. the way a man is supposed to feel superior is in the act of achieving coital satisfaction. Unthinkably in allowing the killer and crusher in him to feel fed by her sufferings in pregnancy and child birth and then letting the good and protective part of him make it up to her in other ways. Women are supposed to have a capacity for maistakes as a class which is no the same in men. If women stopped getting pregnant and being a little optimistic about it when everything was bleak and horrible there would never be a brighter tomorrow. What is wrong is that there have for hundreds of centuries been people racing to the bottom giving women less and less of their share for breeding expenses as it were. There is a lot more I could say on this subject. Men have also been maimed and crippled by women in many ways and that is also part of the drama.

I believe that we all face a need for learning more and better views of marriage, culture , midwifery and other subjects. However, only when humanity is able to see that women were maent to inflame men and so were made by God and yet we cannot handle it can we begin to handle it. I truly think that both medical contraception and the church sponsored studies of natural family planning in recent centuries can bring us much closer to what we are menat to be. And yet I would be lying if I said that I believe the Catholic Hieracrhcy or Gynecolgists have handled the test very well. I think there is a massive sexual crisis on Earth and that is a separate note because it relates mostly to the last 1,500 years where as what I have discussed is about all humans at all times. In the West our current disoprder is usually to be blindly iresponsible and lie about why. In the East it is to use responsibiliuty as an excues for racing to the worst positions because they are sustainable. I think that anyone who believes in a God, Gods, Fates, Karma or Providence should be very afraid to account for our species’ sexual legacy. The rest of you, well you sort of amuse me –maybe that is your cosmic purpose.

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A Personal and Objective Take on Outer Space

Posted on August 24, 2009 | 2 comments

This post originaly appeared on Facebook in January but two new drawings have been added and a few typos corrected in this version.

Outer space is that portion of the universe that is farther from the center of the Earth than the highest reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere. It makes up more than 99.99999999999999% of the universe which we can physicaly perceive. If we were to divide up all of the physical space we can see or detect equally among all the inhabitants of the Earth the amount of space occupied by all humans alive today would make a minute and entirely insignificant portion of the share belonging to each person. However, most of that space is dark empty and has hardly any atomic particles in it and it is so far away that physicaly using those particles in any way in the next 100 generations can’t be reasonably imagined. But even our solar system alone would allow us to use a fraction nearly as big as that we started this argument with or maybe bigger. In the solar sytem most of the oxygen is in outer space, most of the carbon is in outer space, most of the hydrogen is in outer space, most of the helium is in outer space, most of the metals we call precious are almost cerianly there and the metals we need for highly specialized uses abound in outer space. It is almost certain that there is more liquid water under the ice of Jupiter’s moon Europa than there is on Earth. Nothing between the Sun and the orbit of Pluto is intrinsically beyond the reach of our own basic technology to reach, tag and return from roboticaly. Cost, law, design glitches and time are clearly identifiable obstacles. I said these things were not intrinsically impossbible by rearranging and refining existing technology. Given thse basic facts, I believe that an aggressive space policy is in the interest of all humans and of the Earth and all its species so long as it is mostly a wise policy or even largely a wise policy.

What inspires me to write this note today is the small concept group which I mentioned in my last Facebook note. I believe that the development of outer space is as important as anything else that confronts human beings in our age. The concept group is called Crater Cap Concept Colony Group. It is not the only group of people exploring the possibilities of space as a group and it is not the biggest such group either. However, it is certainly the only one that I have founded on Facebook. So that rates it an important mention in these notes.

Space colonization follows a chain going from observation, to exploration, to travel and exploration and then to stationing. After these things comes colonization. Space colonization has the chance to be the biggest change in human economy since the development of agriculture. The coming of agriculture was not an unmixed blessing but it was one of the most justifiable of all social changes in human history. Had humanity not become agricultural sooner or later things would have become much worse than they have gotten so far. Life today awaits at a crossroads as great as that of agriculture.The great works of irrigation for large scale agriculture created the mighty powers that ruled ancient China and Egypt and created societies that could pour weatlh into purchases that enabledother peoples to change from nomadic hunting or nomadic herding to a combination of nomadic herding and carrying trade goods. It enabled fisherfolk to increase their population by adding waterborne trade to their fishing economy. It enabled warrior bands to enter int0 long-term contracts with landholding kings and to earn a living partly from keeping the peace.  Agriculture really made a different human world and remade much of the world as well. The best hunter-gatherers were actually richer, healthier and freer than the new farmers but in the end the choice of the species as a whole to emphasize agriculture was a choice vital to both survivial and any real chance of prosperity. I think that space colonization requires a simlar leap and offers similar sets of consequences. I don’t really expect to live to see a working colony on the Moon or Mars. However, as long as I do live I will apply some of my energy to that transition humanity must make towards becoming a space colonizing species. The Crater Cap Concept Colony is the model I think we should be pushing towards making a reality.

While astronomy has always been a discipline that was a significant teacher and leader into fields of knowledge for much of the human race’s journey into development — it must yield to the leadership of those who will build permanent and sustainable colonies. On the day when Humans have a few colonies on the moon with tens of thousands of residents each it will be very easy to make huge progress i astronomy. However, aiming only for a golden age of astronomy will not necessarily bring about lunar colonization. The larger possibility must find the rank and leadership in these areas.

Craters are distinct features which can be studied and which have common characteristics. They exist on the Earth, the Moon, Mars, asteroids, several moons of our solar systems planet and can be theorized to exist in or near many other objects around our sun or other stars. Capping a crater has an intrinsic economic and resource wisdom to it because one is using the enormous energy already expended in creating the bowl and only creating one side. Frequently one could achieve enormous benefeits in blicking our cosmic rays and radiation. All of these benefits are true even for asteroids. However, in larger round objects like the Moon and Mars it is very likely that one could use the gravity to create a highly functioning biospheric hemisphere. In terms familiar to some, one could make a terrarium including one or more aquaria. Whether or not there is air or liquid water on the heavenly body would have little to do with the success of the crater cap colony. People could live in these and that is the basis of our little concept group.

just a crude drawing of a robot for for the Mars early phase
Second drawing of MATCHES (Mars Access to Crater Habitat Exploration Ship)
Last of MATCHES drawings.
I also think that once there is a crater colony (or certainly a few crater colonies) thriving on the moon then one would have a basis for many industries.  Things manufactured on the moon would be esily lifted and deployed to Mars colonization, to space ships, to Earth orbiting stations and to asteroid miners. One sixth gravity is economic magic that would make all solar system operations entirely different. Producing goods in . pace and dropping them to earth is intrincsically cheap. Thus carbon fuels highly refined could be lifted to the moon wherthe will be mixed with gasses made impure for colonies by various accidents and industries. These fuels would lift six times as much from the Moon as the would from the Earth and these fuels would not affect Earth’s air and climate when burned. Very precious things would be “downported” by Earth to maintain a balance. In the distant future components of landing craft returning to Earth would be built with precious metals needed by agencies and nations on Earth. This would create a flow of commerce to bring our population base into outer space. Within a few centuries perhaps a significant minority of cities and farms could be in outer space without any flash bang science that includes things we cannot imagine.

Once we have a couple of crater colonies on the moon we would need geosynchronous sattelite and another base perhaps at an L point between lunar and Terran gravity. These would be the places where all aging nuclear waepons were diposed of by either being loaded on spacecraft for second or third explosions or used in initial explosions to launch really massive spacecraft to move very fast on the way to other colonies and smaller robotes on their way to the stars.

None of this is pure fantasy. I think we should divide up most of the surface of the Moon and Mars among all of earth’s nations unequally, sell some as new national sites and keep a good portion as a permanent UN mandate. Failing to act wisely now either means we willl lose humanity’s greatest economic opportunity or else nd up with a really horrible policy made under more pressing conditions. I am not optimistic that we will make good choices. But I think our behavior in this century will determine the human future’s outlook for all of foreseeable human society.

I am committed to specific goals but I support all who are sincerely striving for a human future in space that is wise and sustainable. Good luck and God Bless to all of you out there. I am not a likely expert or member of the space community but I cherish this hope for an expanding future. Perhaps the amateurish perspective will cost me a few Facebbok friends. I lost two inj the first year and have lost four lately. However, I am grateful for the professionals on my list at the time of this writing.

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Dragons

Posted on August 22, 2009 | 1 comment
This is a sequel in many ways and a companion piece in every way to the post titled “werewolves” which appears a few posts earlier. They both come from the same Facebook group. That group was founded by someone else but is now administered by me. Like all recycled posts so far there have been no substantive corrections or changes in the first version posted here.
First Original Post:
 
If one goes back to very ancient images of dragons such as the ones carved in jade in ancient china they were representations of what could easily have been currently existing creatures. Thus in a sense all crocodilians susch as crococodiles, alligators, kaimans and similar creatures are dragons and so were Kimodo Dragons, monitor lizards and iguanas. They were part of that process by which humans embraced their environment. These totem animals would connect societies of tribes and clans which came into contact with the world and some were used as familiars and domsesticated as pit guards in the ancient world. In this ancient human pre-literate world the body of knowledge of composite dragon lore was exchanged and espanded by retelling confusion and exaggerated dance and art. These dragon people would have been comparable to hawk people, wolf people, cat people and many other webs of clans and societies that bound people together and often determined whom one might marry.

Among the legends that was part of the world then was a bit of firebreathing because on the rearest occasions while dragon people were out gathering small cracodilians swamp gasses would ignite and they would find the young near the neast just after the unseen firebreathers had left. However, even with these rare miracles the medicine and magic of dragons was not very strong. For a long time they were second rate totems behind wolves, lions and hawks even in areas where they would later dominate.

Later dragons would become the most important totem for many peoples and one of earth’s most universal symbols. That change would come about in a major revolution of ideas that was one of the most significant changes of the prehistoric world. I will get to how that happened in the next post.

Second Post a few days later in the same group.

    It is sort of a matter of definition that all the things listed in the description of this group are hard for lots of people to believe that they sort of persist as beliefs people don’t believe in and yet we all know that this is more complicated. Dragons are in a category where the story that I am about to tell has not really been told much at all and yet it is likely to proven impossible in the minds of many people and it is very complicated. Unlike the werewolf stroy which is really kind of simple and pristine the dragon story is by its nature very confusing and complicated. The original phase grew and developed lore that included some fantastical and fictional pieces. Even in the first post above on this topic of dragons in one sentence I typed “rearest” kinstead of “rarest”, “cracodillians” instead of “crocodilians’ and ‘neast” instead of nest. Sometimes just such a small error could create hege misunderstandings in the ancient system of communication of the mythopoeic arts of ancient animal societies. The next phase in the Dragon story comes to be after werewolves had begun to emerge in dominance and had begun to drive vampirism into unimportance in many places. While this is not a discussion of Vampires per se its possible to say that many vampires were “snakepeople” they belonged to snake societies. They had high priests who had the art of milking poison from deadly snakes and using it to kill secretly. They emulated the qualities of the snake ass sneaky and deadly and they aspired to master the imortality of the snake who could survive sheeding its skin. They wished to persuade their vicims to accept death because of snake magic imortality and they wished to live many human lifespans which they did by shortening human lives by killing people and drinking their blood.These snake people were hunted and warred upon by the werewolves. In the very ancient world when an animal society was in trouble it would become a sub-society of a larger animal society. Had the werewolves been losing the war they would probably have become part of the bear society. What happened instead is that the snakepeople brought all their knowledge, magic and medicine into the dragon society. This made the dragon society much stronger and more powerful and it changed the way that the dragon people saw the world.But that is only a part of the change. Just as not all vampires had become snakepeople not all snake people became dragonpeople. But dragonism itself was about to be greatly changed. Dragons guarding great secret wealth in caves and rocky chasms which are very huge and breathe fire were about to become part of the lore forever. Fossils revealed by earthquakes and other events revealed the giant stone dragons of many ages earlier. These dinosaurs skeletons were powerful prroof that heir dragons were descendants of mighty gods who had the secret to real power over the world. In some of these same fossil pits the dragon societies found oil seeps and began to mine coal. The theme of imortailty was affirmed by these indestructible gods of the our totem which were dead but still breated fire.Using live small dragons at these holys sites and startin g fires with fosil fuels they used vampiric systems of deceit and murder to create places where people would sacrifice their neighbors and children to a combination of smalll dragons fossil fuels and a few stone dinosaur teeth. In this event cluster the dragons found power to dominate much of the ancient world. The learned to mine coal and gather oil, to lie to dceive and to klll many at once. Because the old morals of the dragon society were against many of these behaviors they developed the theme of light and dark magice which became common in other magical circles. The dark places where the stone gods were found was the place where death magic came from. The fierce but balanced outdoor world where the old (in terms of society lore) living dragon species existed was the source of life magic.

    The dragon people also saw a kind of IQ test in which they felt superior to people who made up absurd fictional animals from found dinosaur and pre-human fossils. They developed a crude kind of science for recognizing that dragons had once covered all the Earth in many forms.

    Their knack for elaborate theatricality made it possible for them to convince ancient peoples that villages destroyed by dragon pirates were destroyed by giant firebreathing dragons. These dragon societies were still very strong among the Vikings who raided and conquered much of the world in the Eleventh century AD. The societies never completely disappeared but became more secretive and less relevant in the last 1,000 years.

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As American as Mom and Apple Pie….

Posted on August 22, 2009 | 1 comment
This was first written on Facebook just before Mother’s Day this Year. Somehow the healthcare debate, economy, war, death of a cousin in battle in Afghanistan and other matters have me thinking about a planned family vacation next week and other thigns related to family. So I chose to repost this here.
There is a saying that nothing is less controversial in America than a speech praising Mom and apple pie. I may not get around to discussing apple pie that much in this note. But I will say not all mothers are always sweet and a higher percentage of apple pies are sweet. I am definitely pro Apple Pie. With al their faults I am also pro mothers. I think humanity should probably plan on continuing to have mothers and a lot of people seem to agree.

This is not the most sentimental Mother’s day message ever written. But it is related to the day we are soon or recently to be observing when this comes out. It is also my 51st Facebook Note. My earliest is dated June 1, 2008. So if I post this one and one other by June 1, then I will really have averaged on a week. If that happens I can do one in early June as kind of transition. So let’s turn our focus to Mom, America and Apple Pie. However, we can go in reverse order. I have always tried to honor Mother’s day. Usually I send cards at least to my Mother, sisters who are mothers and grandmothers. However, this year I will be doing less than usual. It is not the leanest year I have ever had but in many ways it is one of the leanest. I am writing about motherhood in the context of finishing this series of Notes. That also affects the tone and flavor of what I am going to write.

As for my actual Mom and I could list a thousand true facts and make it seem like we had a relationship that is one of the greatest in history. I could list a thousand true facts and make it seem like we have had a really horrible relationship. I think that my awareness of that reality has made reluctant to accept family horror stories or sentimental family word portraits at face value.

While these notes are not nearly the darkest and most grim things which I have written they are much darker and more grim than most of my Mother’s Day cards and poems. I think I can be pretty sure that I won’t write about Mother’s Day in this vein very often. I have already written about mothering numerous times briefly in this series of notes. However, I have not done so with quite this degree of focus and attention.

I am very conservative in many ways. I find that people’s perceptions of what to expect from me if they see I am REALLY conservative in many ways have been very wide of the mark in terms of what I actually do think. So I want to state a few things which I believe and would like to see which are not what one might expect of a Christian Conservative:

1. I favor well-regulated and taxed and paternalistically managaged and limited prostitution. But I favor seeing prostitution outside licensed regimes as mala in se ( a moral crime) and not just malum prohibitum
( a regulatory crime).
2. I favor women’s officers minimum quotas in every law enforcement agency which investigates and prosecutes domestic and sexual crimes in any significant scale.

These two facts fit into a general peception that it would be idiotic, unjust and wierd to structure a society based on the belief that every woman will have one and no more than one sexual partner in her life. I believe that there is in every sense a difference between personal moral ideals and policy but ought not to be a wall of separation.

I do not think that people are generally capable of sane conversations about equality any more. We need a lot more legal discrmination of many kinds at all levels of governments. Quotas where the scale is sufficeient and the quotas are low are a wonderful idea. On the subject of motherhood I think that in any large “vice squad” some small number of the policemen should be required to be the SONS of prostitutes.

One of the patterns that fascinates me the most in life is the pattern of shifting constantly away from truth and reality into that which is meaningless madness by and large. It is possible for motherhood to become caught up in and largely absorbed by madness. However, nothing can make motherhood mostly meaningless. Motherhood is one of the concerns which largely drives the world and human development. For a society to have no real policy regarding motherhood is simply to accept social collapse.

That does not mean that it will happen quickly and notably. I do think that humanity is collapsing bit it is collapsing slowly. Further it will not be so very unpleasant because everyone can happily blame someone else.

I do not really think that society has any priorities that are really much higher than the preservation and enhancement of motherhood. I cannot say I think that using stoneage techn ology here while space age technology is used all aorund mommy makes a lot of sense. I think may we should try to ceonserve cultural values while bringing the profession of motherhood into at least the early bronze age.

I think that as my tone has changed to become ever darker and grimmer in these notes it has liberated me to show how low an opinion I really have of so much of the human world. I want to propose a set of policies which I would not have imposed by force as cookie cutter conformity on all countries, states, or societies which ought to be involved in “working out their own salvation”. However these policies are a put forward as a model in much the way that various model codes of law, most prominently America’s Uniform Commercial Code is put forth. Here are ten laws I would want to enact if I couldin as many places as possible.

1. All secondary schools should offer a long course in the science of Natural Family planning to all girls and a short course to boys without reference to whether or not they teach contraception.
2. One mil of every country’s government budget should be devoted to coupons like US Food Stamps which all mothers and only mothers can use to but listed goods and services.
3. Everyone should have one percent of their gross taxes rebated to their mother for her whole life.
4. There should be a Bureau of Mother’s affairs which acts a safety net providing special support to mothers in multi-level marekting, cottage industries, commercial gardening and poultry and e-commuting.
5.There should be a flat fee of x dollars to every mother for every baby born but with the award being x only for a mother producing the children in a marrige with the father dead or in the home and below the target number of children per woman. There would be discounts for all deviations from that most perfect situation but no woman would receive less than .5x for any baby. This would not be intended as primarily a support but the money as an award.
6. Mothers should receive an additional prize if all of their children pay taxes and are not in the correctional system for five years continuously.
7. A man who marries a widwed mother or one who is divorced without his assistance and who has been divorced for a period of time should get a tax credit and a bonus if she has children at home.
8.The Bureau of Mother’s Affairs should also protect visitation and custody right for all men and women who have them and have standing in divorce and child custody proceedings.
9.Polygamy should be decriminalized under a set of laws which are not equal but proudly discriminatory and regulated by agencies not existing today and single mothers would be most eligible as brides under the marriage license guidelines.
10. All married people ought to get their wedding anniversary off every year as a paid holiday.

I think that really there is also something about motherhood being taken seriously which is conducive to some degree of ehtno-chauvinism and something like racism perhaps. However, my memories of my mother include her managing the campaign for an African- American woman who was running for an office that nobody like her had ever run for before. It was pretty serious work and they lost by a fairly huge margin at the time. My mother has worked really hard and has done a lot of good things. I do not think that human families are wonderful abodes of love and goodness. Some get close but many are living hells almost every second of their existence. But the good that can be done in families is very large and cannot be done elsewhwere in many cases.

I favor moving towards a world where most people in the world would belong to at least one Family Association so I will put forth some guidelines for how a family association might work in a reformed United States:

1. Aside from the mandatory 1% rebate to Moms everyone would have the option to transfer up to one percent of their gross income tax free to up to threefamily associations to which they belong. Once one belonged to the asociation the transfer would be mandatory. The associations would each receive one percent of all members estates upon their deaths.

2. All family associations would be required to deposit a fourth of total revenues in recognized State and Federal programs which would be a kind of super credit union investing in regulated family business low interest loans especially near family homes. These businesses would be allowed to hire family members preferentialy. Richer associations would at least receive sub market interest instead of he total fiscal loss of taxes.

3. Each family association would be specilly licensed corporation with the by- laws establishing a trust, a genealogy protocol and an official membership roll.They would be required to deposit ten percent of each years income in their family Trust. Each trust should be allowed to manitain small farm with day labor jobs on a regulated basis for family members as part of their investment if they can afford it.
A portion of the interest from the trust would be required to be used to purchase insurance products selected from a menu by each association.

4. The Association would have limited legal standing in all legal matters involving two or more family members on opposite side of a civil action and a right of notification in all criminal and administrative matters. These actions would be made a bit cheaper by rights of agency given to special licensed contractors.

5. Association members would be allowed to donate a small amount of money to caregivers through the family association and have the association pay Social Security taxes and help them earn credits in the system. This program would only be for those already working for more than six months without pay for relatives and would only pay minimum wage.

So why change all this stuff?

Why not just encourge mothers to be good and loving for no damn reason at all?

Because I think that humanity is going to hell in a handbasket and this might be a small part of returning to zero and then making the progress many people seem to think we are making. They think that mostly because they are insane.I am not really hoping to change the world with these notes. Mothers Day writing is usually about love and that is good. But I have a telent for hate which my religion keeps me from really developing. Among my favorite people to hate are successful men who do not want to include mothering in the benefits of industry. I really do have agreat capacity for hate, i think I am toeringly talented at the exercise of that point of view.

I am not tagging Sarah my sister who is on this list or my Mom who is on this list. I cannot really justify reading this over a good Helen Steiner Rice verse (yes I really do like Rice’s Mothers Day verses) but I if you are reading it Happy Mother’s Day and I love you. For the rest of you Mom’s out there Happy Mother’s Day. Now do us both a favor and go read a really sweet and sentimental mother’s day poem that rhymes and eat some apple pie even if you are not an American.

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Conservative Ideas in America and the Day of Obama’s Election

Posted on August 21, 2009 | 2 comments
 This blog post was firstposted in Politico when Obama was elected to the Presidency Conservatism it is worse than you think if you are one, but you probably aren’t!
Content: I feel a certain amount of sympathy for Barack Obama. I choose to start with that line because I consider myself to be one of the people most opposed to Barack Obama within the spectrum of legitimate politics. However, I don’t think that there is any doubt that we have reached the point where Conservatism can be looked at as something which has merited the term “crisis”. America is in a crisis and I believe that it will prove to be a very grave crisis. However, conservatism is in a far greater crisis. For argument’s sake let us say that the terms right and left, Democrat and Republican describe a real political dynamic which matters in this country. I would argue that on the right in this country we have lots of politicians who use the label “conservative” but actually we have a collection of Libertarians, Tax Avoiders,  Moderate Neo-Fascists , Ultra-Reformed  Protestant Theocrats, and Anglophile Antiquarians who collectively squeeze a weak and demoralized conservative group of Americans who hardly matter at all.  Some of these five never discussed groups would be Conservatives if there really was a Conservative Movement for them to be part of , on the other hand many fundamentally despise Conservatism.I voted for George Bush the first time and almost certainly would have voted for him the second time if I could have made it to Beijing’s American Embassy in time to vote. However, I missed that election. I voted for Mcain-Palin in the most recent election. I also voted for Mary Landrieu a Democrat this year. Through my life I have voted for a collection of Democrats, Republicans and Independents.  My sympathy for Barack Obama comes into play in this regard. Like Obama (and a lot of other people)  I have had to make the best choices I could at any given time. By the time I was old enough to vote I had forged a lot of bonds and relationships which included fundamentalists, communists in other countries, resentful Moslems, white supremacists, black radicals and lots of other people who don’t fall into the neat safe categories that President mills like mid century Yale Law normally produce in quantity.  If I were to have made a run at the US Presidency there would be people some folks would like as little as I like Rev. Wright and David Ayres. Despite all that colorful background I have lots of self-respect and more oddly yet, I think of myself as an authentic American Conservative. Arguably, I am one of the only American conservatives who could be optimistic abpout the Obama example. Beacuse if such an oddly positioned person of such a background as Barack Obama can be President of the United States then maybe I could at least get elected parish assessor, city dog-catcher, county councilman, water-district representative or something else somewhere in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Somehow I don’t think Obama’s election signifies anything nearly that hopeful for someone like me.  I am able to accept that there is not likely to be a government paycheck in my future. That is unless you include the kinds of fellowships and part-time job checks form school boards and universities which I have gotten in the past. I don’t hate liberalism but I know that Liberals are more likely to take a political interest in those with odd and quirky backgrounds than conservatives are. I am able to say that I have won a few elections. I won a seat on Dorm Council in College, I was elected as Outstanding Graduate in my department , college and university for that particular commencement exercise at a different school. Then In China  a few years ago I organized elections among my student for various class and subgroup offices. Then there are a couple of elections where I was elected to post that I can’t discuss here by groups that like their privacy.  None of those races seem very much related to the Presidency or even a governorship however. In most of these races my political philosophy was not a central aspect of what people were electing me for or voting against. Many people hold office for other reasons than political philosophy. People vote for friends, members of their race or class, to keep seniority in a legislature or because they are personally opposed to the candidates opposition. But in  the big leagues there are always some questions of political philosophy that become important. I would argue that Conservatism is usually not on the menu.I think that a coherent expression of American Conservative political philosophy would require at leason very long book. If someone hasn’t read any of the books which have helped to from my opinions then an article or two would not make the great sweep of ideas stand clear. Here I am going to do someting very different. I am going to propose ten unthinkable planks in a platform in an agressive conservative movement. I don’t think that conservative means passive. Some of these would even require constitutional ammendments. I believe that these planks would probably unpopular and are largely undemanded but that is because Conservatism is largely dead. I think that passing something along these lines would be essential to setting our country on a good conservative path. I believe struggling for something like this would be essential for rebuilding a conservative movement.

So here are my unthinkable Ten:

1.The Aboriginal Americans Ammendment: The Eskimos, Indians, Hawaiians, Chamorros and Samoans should be given a single grant in treaty of one or two percent of all Federal Governmnent lands (not state or private lands) . These lands should be under a perpetual and largely green treaty which would allow some activities and not others in perpetuity.  The American Indians should have several federal territories with representation in the House of Representatives and not in the Senate. The other four groups should  have one relatively contiguous teritory with representation in the House of Represnetatives but not in the Senate. Each of these Territories should award one transitional elector for each member of the House of Representatives an also one long-term elector who  would serve in at least three Presidential elections and who would have standing to join together and have several specific perogatives in the Senate. Those elgible to vote as Aboriginal Americans could choose tov ote either as Aboriginal or generic American Citizens. At the time of this creation a final trust fund should be st up and there should be included some bonds and securities maturing over time. Then there would be a final treaty settlement of all  grievances between the United States and aboriginal peoples.

2.The First Lady Ammendment: The First Lady should be recognized as a junior but joint Head of State. She should receive a perpetual constitutional earmark of revenues  for use in grants and programs for women and mothers. She should be specifically authorized to undertake purely ceremonila diplomacy any where in the scope of American diplomacy. Whenever a woman is President of the United States then the majority of the ear-marked funds should go to a trust and earn interest. A skeleton amount and skeleton tasks only be reserved for the Presidential consort husband.

3. The Defense Department should be required to allot a greater percentage than ever before to its Junior ROTC program. These programs should be able to be chartered by public and private schools. Students would take a class a day, would go to camp two weeks a year with their State or Aboriginal Territory National Guard Unit and would spend a month  with the Americorps each summer. In return for this volunteers would recieve healthcare, have a varied scholarship account and eat at a training table at school. 

4. Puerto Rico Should be made our fifty-first state and the last admitted without a constitutional ammendment. A part of Puerto Rico anda part of the US Virgin Islans should be set aside for a Fedral Carribean territory similar to but separate and less represented than the Aboriginal Territories. Those elible to vote as Old Carribean Americans would have to choose not to vote as generic Americans.

5.The State of Utah should receive a Charter rescinding the requirement that it abolish Polygamy. It should be given ten years to set up a domestic regime of polygamy that will answer for all serious concerns such as underage marriage and would recognize plural marriage responsibly in Utah without exagerated full-faith and credit elsewhere.

6. States with highly regulated casinos and a history of vigorous related law enforcement should be allowed to develop a regime for licensing the use of recreational drugs with physicians present and federally license detox-release requirements. Casinos would collect both a high state and federal tax for this drug use.

7.The Federal Racial Classification scheme should be abolished. Especially the not very popular and mostly made up Hispanic race based mostly on one’s father’s last name. There should be a recoginized Permanent Committe on Race, Ethnicity and Kinship. The US Census Bureau should be put under the direction of this body which should also have the authority draw up congressional districts. All retired Presidents generally and Vice Presidents over 70 years old would be lifetime members of this committee. Americans would all have the right to transfer one percent of their income tax witholding and four percent of all their property taxes to family associations which would be chartered by this commitee. These family associations would all share in a seireis of federal programs providing surpluses, grants and loans for them to use especially in stting up daycare, healthcare and eldercare programs.  These family’s would self identify their race and ethnicity.

8.The Navy should develop a Navy One Program . This would be a sailing longship on which the frist family would entertain and a permanent destroyer escort. This ship would also  offer high honor Junior ROTC, regular ROTC and  Naval Academy work study positions on this ship.

9. A working Federal Death penalty program should be developed and it should be applied regularly when required or clearly indicated. Piracy and Terrorism should be principal causes for its use.

10.The federal government should create a full scale set of Mother’s Incentives working with but not entirely dependent upon the First Lady’s bureaucracy. Companies, cities, towns, and States would receive generous incentives for providing small gardens, job-sharing programs, cottage industries and very flexible positions for mothers with young children. These programs would provide a further annual bonus to married mothers with young children.

Yes I am aware most of you think that thses things have nothing to do with conservatism. Unfortunately that is because most Americans no longer have any idea what Conservatism. I don’t mind so much if these things make you want o hurl ridicule or even vomit. However, if they do then maybe you should consider not calling yourself a conservative. 

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