Sunday, July 31, 2011

Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain, Aguirre and Cato

Annie Proulx in her short story "Brokeback Mountain" chose as a last name for the ranch boss the Irish surname "Aguirre." I searched and found the Aguirre coat-of-arms which has for its motto one of Cato's sayings (paraphrased) - "If you must give up ALL ELSE at least be certain to retain your honor." That motto fits into the grand scheme of the story. I would love to know if Annie Proulx was conscious of this motto and deliberately chose the surname Aguirre.

Saturday, July 30, 2011

What are your impressions seeing this photo?

Guythigh1980s

Please EVERYONE. Study this photo and give your candid impressions. If this fellow were in a store I would not even notice or think twice. My wife agrees. But what are YOUR impressions and then I will explain WHY I posted it and asked for your feedback.

A Personal Relationship with Jesus

I don't think ANYONE spoke in terms of "a personal relationship with Christ" during the first 1000 years of Christianity.  I doubt that Martin Luther or John Calvin used that phrase. If one looks at the 1st and 2nd "Great Awakenings" in America in the 19th century and especially at the most famous sermon of those awakenings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinners_in_the_Hands_of_an_Angry_God one does not see such language. As for Paul and his epistles, Paul was a brilliant man who faced many problems with great success but I dont really understand why people see Paul as the sock puppet of the Holy Spirit. I think Paul said a lot of things from his own subjective point of view and it is not clear that every word that came from Paul's mouth was the incontrovertible word of God almighty.

Google Plus Hangout Issues

 It is IDIOTIC to use the term GRIEFER because that might mean that a 19 year old Republican does not care for the views of a 62 year old Democrat AND it is idiotic to punish people for exercising their 1st amendment free speech rights AND it is possibly a civil rights violation.. so if anyone wishes to SILO themselves with only like minded people then just REMOVE someone from your circles but do not REPORT them and get their account suspended simply because they do not see things the way you do.

since the whole situation will PROBABLY be handled by BOTS... then it is just the word of "the tyranny of the majority" against the word of the dissenting minority ---- since there will be 500 million on line or more (just like Facebood) so there will be NO human subjective arbitrator....
why not let a hangout have MODERATORS with power to bounce, boot, ban (but not to discredit disable someones account) ... I mean it works in IRC ... let the person who STARTS the hangout have moderator powers.. why make things so complex or punitive

A hangout is started by ONE PERSON initially and older computers can only support 5 people while newer more powerful computers can support 10... so what is the big deal. The person who starts it should have a say in booting people... and people who are booted can jolly well start their OWN hangout... and by the way.... what happens in Google Plus will have EVERYTHING to do with what state and federal and international laws decide should some issue escalate to that level. Something like G+ may come to be construed in the same fashion as the FCC construed broadcasting licenses, as a public trust obligated to give time to those with dissenting opinions. And users in France, for example, will come under French laws (e.g. it is forbidden to deny the Armenian holocaust circa 1917).... just giving examples.... Why in the world would I want to start a Hangout if I cannot control who participates in it.... I could always go to ustream.tv and create a secret password only channel... for example...

Look at ustream.tv and paltalk and see how they handle such issues since they have been around a LONG time.

You know, one expert in constitutional law criticized G.W. Bush for having a Manichean mentality that the world is clearly divided into the good guys and the bad guys... and this who topic of Griefers is making the same Manichean assumption that it is an objective, indisputable and easily defined issue of who are the good guys and who are the bad guys..... just saying.....

Or, just make Hangouts INVITE ONLY with first invites by the person who starts the hangout and others can invite and that way everyone should be happy... SUPPOSE I see a hangout and I am lonely and so I join the hangout NOT REALIZING that it was started by 9 lesbians so they see right away that I am male.... and they report me.... Hangouts are not labeled by topic... so now they all report me and I have a black mark against me.... and I didnt even say one word.... please explain the fairness of that hypothetical scenario

America had a hundred or more years of history using what seemed like a perfectly REASONABLE literacy test (how can you vote responsibly unless you can read up on the issues)... the literacy test was used in the South as we all know to make it impossible for people of color to exercise their civic right to vote... 

Hence it is not inconceivable that there are those who would use whatever reporting features may be implemented in an unjust and persecutory manner as a weapon of oppression .... so it makes little sense to speak in theory about the polite way that everyone would use such reporting tools ... 

Regarding reading tests for voters it is ironic that now with television and radio one need not be literate to be well informed about political issues.

Perhaps there should be private Hangouts. Last week I was in a hangout with one person for two hours discussing personal matters concerning a bitter, contested divorce and also concerning her fiancee. Had someone come in, a stranger, we would not have wanted them present because of the nature of the discussion. So, what is the option for two or three people who desire privacy. I suppose Gchat would have allowed a private conversation but we happened to choose Hangout. 

I dont understand why Hangout cannot optionally be on an invite only basis.

Emergency calls on Blackberry at 3 a.m.

Grandma and Auntie now insist that my phone should ring even at 3am in the unlikely event that Grandma (who is healthy as a horse and plays Majong all night) is having an attack

Of course, it would make MORE sense to get her one of those "I have fallen and cant get up" necklaces
and then the emergency medical team would show up with a stretcher in 20 minutes... but NO it makes MORE sense to wake me up at 3am and have me call 911...

Knowing Grandma, she would not wear the emergency alert or she would not put battery in it... AND THERE is no guarantee that she will have her cell phone handy and charged..... AND if she suddenly feels she is passing out then she might have 3 seconds of consciousness to press the emergency alert button (which she will never wear) BUT she certainly will not have enough time to whip out the cell phone and find my number.....

ANYWAY on Blackberry..... GO TO the Address book contact of the person who can wake you up at 3am ...

Click on Ring Tones
Click on Phone
You should see the default of CURRENT PROFILE .... which is not intuitively obvious (of course) but means
that IF the phone is set to a current profile of SILENT then the call or email will not ring..... BUT, if you CHANGE the setting to RING ALWAYS
then it will ring through the current profile is set to SILENT even at 3am 

You may do the same for texts and emails I think... which should help if your control-freak boss needs to own your soul

IT IS also possible to create a GROUP called FAMILY or 
COWORKERSfromHELL or 
FriendsWithBenefits or whatever you please and then set the phone to RING ALWAYS so that when the phone is set to silent then everyone added to that group will ring through..... 

HERE IS A VERY CONFUSING part...... 
IN the address book contact entry there is a Category
and one might easily confuse category with CONTACT group... but not so.... 
CATEGORY lets you see all doctors at once, or dentists, or girl friends,..... etc.... 

TO ADD SOMEONE TO A GROUP you need to go to the sound settings and scroll down to CONTACT ALERTS which is where you ADD a contact alert group like FAMILY or WORK... AND once you create that you go there and ADD contacts as members of that group... set the PHONE to some tone (like Calypso or FurElise or MapleLeafRag) and say RING ALWAYS rather than CURRENT PROFILE and if necessary do it with email/text/etc and that way at night you set current profile to SILENT which is symbolized by BLUE ZZZ to denote snoring. But since you made the contact group RING ALWAYS then I THINK the group membership overrides the contact setting..... 

This is all so unnecessarily complex but that is how Companies and programmers and engineers choose to do things.... and they dont even create a WIZARD to walk a mere mortal through the procedure.


Friday, July 29, 2011

What is truth

And now to recreate the post which disappeared in the browser crash:  David, IF it is the case that your arguments/reasoning are objective and re-creatable in the sense that anyone/everyone even the unlettered slave boy in Plato's dialogue the Meno could follow the same syllogistic reasoning and be convinced THEN the majority of the world would be Eastern Orthodox BUT obviously, there are only 300 million east. orth. and many of those are ouzo slurping Greeks and vodka swilling russians who only show up to church on pascha/easter and havent the foggiest idea what the first seven ecumenical councils are about... and there are one billion roman catholics most of whom do not even own a copy of the 900 pg catechism much less know what it says or means... and even giants like hans kung and pope benedict/ratzinger do not see eye to eye. sorry for lower case but shift key is making browser crash and i am a palsied old man whose short term memory skips a beat every 47 seconds..... but is it not more reasonable to admit that there is no mathematically precise theoretical proof for doctrine.... and even geometry is not universal because there is euclidean, hyperbolic, elliptical, reimann etc and no one can prove with certainty which actually represents the noumenal nature of space (or time-space/matturgy)

Defriending those who disagree

David: I had a great reply which disappeared when my browser crashed so I have to recreated it in some more stable gmail or something and past it here.  But dont you see how COWARDLY you are because you are saying "oh you are on the warpath and so I am out of here because I only want to SILO myself with people who totally agree with me and humor me."  I went to school with a man who SEEMED to all outward appearances to be a fornicator and drug user but then God is the only knower of hearts. The draft was still active so he went to a seminary and became an Episcopal clergyman. At some point he converted to Catholicism and became a Catholic priest. He also worked in a security capacity where he became an expert in firearms and the use of lethal force. Sometimes he will advise people to "rachet up your rosary a notch."  At other times he hints that in his farm is a huge arsenal of assault weapons and IF the liberal Democrats should ruin the nation to the point that law and order is replaced by mob rule then he will defend himself with his arsenal. He also had weird photos on his facebook page of himself in strange red robes with a hood aiming his assault weapons.  One day I challenged him to demonstrate even a SHRED of Reformation piety in the literature of the first 1000 years of Christianity (the Philokalia for example.)  He said that he had no use for such frustration in his life and defriended me. His tactic with others was to threaten defriending if they did not agree with his dogma. And the great irony is that on the Catholic radio yesterday a Jesuit explained that a Roman catholic priest cannot bear arms as a military chaplain and cannot even be a surgeon because a patient might die..  same with greek orthodox... if a priest drives a car and is involved in involuntary manslaughter he can never celebrate liturgy agaiin.... i am not capitalizing cause the browser crashes..... so if you go away and come back,.... i am not ON THE WARPATH ... i simply do not see things the way you do and I see a kind of sophistry....   we should not silo ourselves and defriend peoople who disagree.... we should state our arguments and at a certain point agree to disagree... sorry for rambling lower case but i cannot stand browser crashes.

Tautology and Equivocation

David:
Eastern Orthodox also claim to be the "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic" church. The term "catholic" (Gr: kata + holos = "according to the whole") doesn't necessarily mean "universal" in the sense of uniform or monolithic. It also means "complete," "entire." That Church is "catholic" which contains a complete form of therapy, which has preserved the complete teaching and practice. There are differences in detail b/w Russian, Greek and Arab Christian Orthodox practice but they remain "catholic."

William:
David, well said BUT.... are you telling me that you cannot see the sophistry in your argument which is not YOURS but has been passed around for centuries? We deconstruct a term into a definition which MUST be true because it is a tautology; an EQUIVOCATION. We all differ BUT we dont differ and we are universal even though we are not everyone or everywhere because they are false Christians or Christians in name only. Perhaps tautology is not the right word but we become HYPNOTIZED by these arguments until we become robotic parrots constantly repeating these trite shop-worn platitudes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wi​ki/Equivocation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wi​ki/Tautology_%28logic%29

Here is a slightly different example from one of those Internet Catholic radio stations my wife listens to for hours each day.

Suppose someone says to you "There is no absolute truth!" Well if that statement is TRUE then that statement represents absolute truth and contradicts itself - THEREFORE there must be one absolute truth because it is logically impossible to state with absolute certainty that absolute truth does not exist.


Catholic Means UNIVERSAL

... More bull-shit rhetoric, buzzwords, sophistry, casuistry! Haven't you out grown that yet? I can feed you lots of tasty crap. Christianity is not a religion it is a way of life, a "PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP" with Jesus (what the HELL is an IMPERSONAL relationship?" Get to KNOW Jesus. Get with God's PLAN. Are YOU "right with God?" "Are YOU saved."  Steven, I memorized the "creed" in Greek and Church Slavonic. "Universal" and $2.50 will buy you a coffee at Starbucks. Few of the Protestant denominations are in agreement with one another in their beliefs yet all argue vigorously that they are catholic in the sense of universal. Baptists will boast that there are 1.7 billion Christians on the planet and count Roman Catholics as Christians but privately they will say that "Catholics are not CHRISTIANS" because they practice idolatry and believe in salvation by WORKS and they are not born again and saved because they did not roll around on the floor in a fit of glossolalia only to promptly return to the vomit of their adultery and intoxication and false witness and pride.  In ancient Greece there were professionals who played word games and they were called SOPHISTS.  For a fee they would teach you trick words to "make the weaker argument defeat the stronger." 

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Get Out of Hell Free Card

Let us look at some righteous men of the Old Testament: Abraham, Enoch and Lot, Elijah (Elias) and Elisha (Elisaeus) . If there was no "born again" experience then whence their righteousness and rest assured that it was the righteousness that they wrought in their lives by exercise of their own free will which attracted God's attention to them. Enoch and Elijah were SO righteous that they never died but were stimply taken to heaven. If one counts Jesus' live ascent into heaven that makes three. It is believe that Enoch and Elijah will return at the end and will lie dead, martyred in the streets of Jerusalem. Where was Esther's born again experience. Her uncle, Mordecai, wrote to her saying "You have it within your choice to help your people survive the plots of Haman. If you chose NOT to then God will arrange for the help to come from elsewhere but you will have no share in the reward."  In the Book of Ezra where was the born again experience of Kin Darius, BELOVED OF GOD, who chose to help the Jews rebuild their temple.  I am a stupid old man dizzy with prescription pain medication at 2 a.m. and with a failing short term memory and I can still remember and paraphrase all this stuff as fast as I can type. It is not rocket science. It is all right under your noses but you are in denial. You want to be like the wealthy many with all his silos full who said to his soul "eat drink and be merry" but little did he know that the very night his soul would be required of him. You are lulled into complacency by the false security that you feel your cherry-picked verses offer you. Look at 19th century America and the two great awakenings and that most famous of sermons "How Fearful to fall into the hands of an angry God" .... surely you must realize that in the 19th century Protestant piety bore no resemblance to the feel good ministries of Joel Osteen and others. Otherwise, instead of long fire and brimstone sermons they would have just coaxed people to say "the magic words" - "Lord Jesus, I invite you into my life... etc..." and bingo, an instant "get out of hell free card."

Born Again Experiences in the Old Testament

Peter Priel raises an important question. I see Sole Fides and "born again" and "the eternal security of salvation" as the satanic spawn of the Reformation headed by a lecherous and morally bankrupt Martin Luther.  Luther of his own free will took lifetime vows of obedience, chastity and poverty as a Dominican and yet he totally ignores verse like "better never to vow and all that to vow and not pay" and "make your vows and pay them to the Lord." Luther ignores the clear teaching of Jepethah who vows if granted victory in war to sacrifice the first creature he sees upon return to home and it is his daughter that he sees and she FORCES him to carry out his vow, since a vow is very serious. By Luther own argument the Eastern Orthodox church had survived without a Pope so Luther could have retired to the Greeks to live out his monastic vows but instead Luther rewrites religion to condemn celibacy as something demonic and unnatural even though Jesus says "some men make eunuchs of themselves for the sake of the kingdom of heaven."   Now with regard to rebirth, it is EXPLICTLY STATED that God gave Saul "a NEW heart" and yet it is also stated that God regretted having made Saul a king. David in Psalm 51 said "create in me a new heart and renew a right spirit within me."  There was none greater than Moses and Elijah and yet we see no hint of a rebirth. On the other hand we know that prophet Jeremiah as well as Samuel were sanctified in the womb so apparently they were "born again" before they were ever born." Adam and Eve were never born and yet we assume they were forgiven and saved when Christ broke the bonds of hell asunder. I think it is Ezekiel where we read "if a man lives all of his life in righteousness but in his last days turns to wickedness then all of his righteousness will be counted for nothing but if he lives his days in wickedness but in his last days repents and turns to righteous then his iniquities will be counted as nothing." All this seems to indicate that it is our final estate which determines our eternal estate.  Nothing could be more demonic than to tell someone that their salvation is eternally guaranteed because then they become complacent. Charles Stanley is famous for his doctrine of "Eternal Security of Salvation." One depressed parishioner asked his pastor "If I commit suicide will I go to hell?" and the pastor answered that his salvation is assured so he will not go to hell even if guilty of suicide. So the man when home and ended his life.

To be born again

For me, the notion of "born again" is rubbish and rhetoric and an emotionalism which makes no lasting difference. I realize I am a heretic in that I agree with Pelagius who held that each human being is born with all that is necessary to perfect themselves morally if only they have the will and apply themselves. Pelagius argued that IF the sin of one man, Adam could somehow taint all future generations with "original sin" including people who had never heard of Adam then it should be possible for Christ's crucifixion and resurrection to SAVE all human beings even those who have never heard of Christ. Plenty of people have some emotional experience which they believe is a "born again" experience only to later backslide and apostatize and perhaps become an even worse person than before the experience. Victoria Osteen, wife of Joel Osteen is a prime example in the altercation which occurred in the first class seating of a plane when she discovered some soil on her seat the size of a quarter. The monks and nuns of the first centuries would have competed with one another to clean the spot themselves rather than become violent with the stewardess. In fact, they would have taken coach seating so they might donate the savings to the poor. Once while arguing with a Protestant convinced of his "once saved always saved" guaranteed ticket into heave, I asked him "What would you do if you got to the judgment in heaven and God told you "I never knew you, get thee to the outer darkness" and he angrily said "The I could call God a dirty filthy liar because their are various verses which GUARANTEE my salvation."   Paul told his flock to "work out your salvation in fear and trembling." How can "fear and trembling" have meaning if all you have to do is snivel and as Jesus to forgive you and invite Jesus into your heart as your "personal savior."  When Jesus questions the apostles on various matters he stresses "men of flesh and blood have not taught you these things but the Father has given you to me." And again Jesus said "you did not chose me but I chose you and I loved you first."  But Jesus says "you are my friends IF you do as I say (which is works.)"  And Jesus sternly warns that "you shall be judged by every word that proceeds from your lips" and how could such judgment apply to those who had payed their lip service to Jesus and won their eternally guaranteed salvation.... AND... for those who were never "reborn" how could it apply to them to "be judged for every word" since surely that would imply the possibility that they might be saved, and then they would be saved minus the born again profession of faith. 

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Over Qualified

I interviewed for a job with a lawyer who is in WALKING distance of my apartment (and distance was important to him).  I was willing to work for minimum wage and I don't need health care. He angrily looked at me and said "It gets pretty hectic can you handle that?"  I explained that in my 40 years of experience I have worked in manufacturing, wholesale, retail, service, engineering, medical and not-for-profit and I have experienced everything there is to experience and survived. He didn't hire me. No one hired me for 2 years and so I took age 62 early social security retirement before they decide to change that.  One personnel director (in an all black office in Harlem) said I would not be happy working there because as an older person I would have a GOOD work ethic whereas all the young employees are very chatty and have a poor work ethic.  The Craigslist add mentioned that a Masters in Social Work is a plus. She told me I am over-qualified. I said "How can I be over-qualified when I lack the masters degree?" She quickly said it was a typographical error. People tell me I am over-qualified and I say "who ISN'T over qualified after working 40 years?"  That organization in Harlem is HCZ, the Harlem Childrens Zone, founded by Geoffrey Canada.  She hesitated and said that they MIGHT hire me to go in the basement, take all the student records, design a spreadsheet and key them into the spreadsheet.  An hour after I got home I Googled and found a bunch of state and federal laws which say you cannot hire some guy off the street to throw together a spreadsheet. I said that Geoffrey Canada with all his media fame should approach Apple or Microsoft to fund a national standardized cloud application with encryption and backup to conform to state and federal laws for storage of the information of minor children. I never heard back. Oh well.

Over Qualified

I interviewed for a job with a lawyer who is in WALKING distance of my apartment (and distance was important to him).  I was willing to work for minimum wage and I don't need health care. He angrily looked at me and said "It gets pretty hectic can you handle that?"  I explained that in my 40 years of experience I have worked in manufacturing, wholesale, retail, service, engineering, medical and not-for-profit and I have experienced everything there is to experience and survived. He didn't hire me. No one hired me for 2 years and so I took age 62 early social security retirement before they decide to change that.  One personnel director (in an all black office in Harlem) said I would not be happy working there because as an older person I would have a GOOD work ethic whereas all the young employees are very chatty and have a poor work ethic.  The Craigslist add mentioned that a Masters in Social Work is a plus. She told me I am over-qualified. I said "How can I be over-qualified when I lack the masters degree?" She quickly said it was a typographical error. People tell me I am over-qualified and I say "who ISN'T over qualified after working 40 years?"  That organization in Harlem is HCZ, the Harlem Childrens Zone, founded by Geoffrey Canada.  She hesitated and said that they MIGHT hire me to go in the basement, take all the student records, design a spreadsheet and key them into the spreadsheet.  An hour after I got home I Googled and found a bunch of state and federal laws which say you cannot hire some guy off the street to throw together a spreadsheet. I said that Geoffrey Canada with all his media fame should approach Apple or Microsoft to fund a national standardized cloud application with encryption and backup to conform to state and federal laws for storage of the information of minor children. I never heard back. Oh well.

RIM Enterprise Server to go Multi Platform

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/blackberry-bes-goes-cross-platform-lets-it-manage-iphone-ipad-and-android/48099

RIM appears to have accepted that it’s living in a pluralistic mobile world and that it can no longer use BES to force companies to only support BlackBerry devices because on Monday at BlackBerry World 2011 RIM announced plans for a multiplatform upgrade to BES that will allow it to also support and manage iPhone, iPad, and Android smartphones and tablets.


Rising Iphone Corporate Popularity

I just heard from someone inside a HUGE international law firm that all the lawyers will soon be given iphones and that RIM (Blackberry) is on the way out. And yet Android seems so much more OPEN than iphones. Perhaps the iphone offers more corporate security?

The world of knowledge at our fingertips

Everyone thought Thomas Jefferson was a crackpot to found Universities and libraries for farmers and blacksmiths since why do such people need the education reserved for the wealthy, privileged elite. But Jefferson realized there could never be a government "of the people and by the people" unless ALL the people are learned and can make reasoned choices.  I think Internet Wi-Fi should be universal and free as a public trust so that children everywhere regardless of economic status may have the wealth of human knowledge at their fingertips. Only then will we all realize that underneath all our seeming superficial differences of ideology, orientation and ethnicity beat similar hearts and kindred spirits. Oh, and Wi-Fi notebooks should only cost $100 and be issued to all school age children. Dangers on the internet you say? Well there are liquor stores and drug dealers and hookers around every corner but it is the children who learn to JUST SAY NO and live responsibly surrounded by temptations who triumph over the temptations and not the ones who live in cages and cant wait to get out and kick up their heals.

World Peach and Distributed Social Networks

Friendika is written in PhP (Facebook also uses PhP) which allows Friendika to be hosted as a POD on many operating systems. The entire goal of distributed open source social networks is that each person who has the means and desire may have their stuff on their own machine at home (or on some $20 per month website host provider) and allow some friends to join their POD (as SEEDS) if they like. Each pod connects with all other pods and yet each podmaster retains complete control of writing and photos. I suppose the ultimate idea would be if ALL flavors of social network, FB, G+, Diaspora, Friendika, etc. would have some common API so that ALL interconnect but such will come to pass only when proprietary and open source folks decide to cooperate rather than to compete.  In fact, it would be NICE if all 8 billion of us would decide to cooperate. We would save all that money that we spend killing each other and then patching up the survivors with prosthetics.

Progress of Google Plus

My only real concern is this business I hear about complaints lodged against "griefers" (yes I understand the concept in game-ers but I feel it does not apply to HANGOUTS) which suggests to me that the young hoy poly might gang up on the elderly left wing intellectuals and get their accounts suspended simply because they express minority dissenting opinion. I.E. I am concerned about the preservation of constitutional free speech amendment rights so I dont think it is fair that there should be report flags such that if twenty teenagers decide to enter into collusion and get one senior citizen's account suspended. I think that BOTS should also be ably to tally tattle-tail-ism and out those malicious people who attempt to use report or spam or grief buttons in a malicious fashion.  Malice is a two way street and there is something called "tyranny of the majority."  Our civil rights bill would never have been passed solely my majority vote.

Other than the above concern I think G+ is amazing. I was able to join a hangout with two other like-minded people in my age group and it is awesome how the camera turns to the person with the microphone!

I am aware of the disputes over pseudonyms and I have come to understand the position of those who choose to use them but it does not affect me personally since long ago I resolved to use my real name everywhere on the Internet.

I continue with my life on Facebook and the one difference I notice is that there is a 'flavor' or 'ambiance' created when several people interact in the same thread where everyone sees everyone else's posts.  On the other hand when I want to discuss something private I have to use a more private application like Logitech VID whereas if I use circles properly than in theory I would not have to leave G+ for such intimate conversations.

Yesterday I did raise the question of HOW free we are to say what we please in private, limited threads and to what extent we might be monitored by the morality police bots (or whatever G+ uses to enforce rules.)


Monday, July 25, 2011

Squid Sex

I watched a nature documentary on squids mating. There were super macho squids who squid wrestled for the honor of boinking the lady, but meanwhile a transvestite male squid assumed the outward appearance of a female and got close enough to deposit his load. Studies showed that the wily, devious-devising transvestites sired more offspring than the Barnacle-Bill-Squidward types. However, the female loads up on 10 or 20 seed pods and then CHOOSES which ones to use, ... so I suppose it is a little like cybersex; you can send your pic but you will never know if it was used when by whom for what.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Death With Dignity

The "Death with Dignity" Law -  physician assisted death with optional organ donation. Each year so many desperate people take their lives INCLUDING 300 medical doctors per year. In a world where there are no social services and only the wealthy can afford health care it makes sense to allow people to apply for assisted death. They would undergo exams, write a series of petitions, take anti-depressants, be interviewed and evaluated, and if their resolve was undeterred after a year or two, they could have a peaceful death with dignity AND donate their organs to others who still desire to live and have the financial means to make continued life possible. Since it is impossible to eliminate suicide through criminalization it is wiser to control and monitor it through legalization.

Short-Sighted Human Indifference

Try telling people that our sun will disappear as a white dwarf in 8 billion years BUT after 100,000 years it will expand in size sufficiently to make life on Earth impossible. If you suggest to people that human technology may find a way to extend human existence by altering the Earth's orbit and then by sending out ships manned by self repairing robots with all of earths life and knowledge digitized and frozen (like a Noah's ark) seeking a habitable planet.... why people will LAUGH at you and say that they do not care because they will get to live out their miserable little lives eating, drinking, sleeping, cheating one another and they could care less what happens in 100,000 years ... so the bottom line is that no one gives a darn... 


Same with Venice, which is crumbling by the action of the sea. Engineers have devised a plan to save Venice but it would take 30 years and no miserable politician has a term of more than 6 years so no politician would make and effort to implement that plan because it would not personally advance their own self-serving career. So, let Venice crumble and let human culture go to blazes just so long as I get to live out my own selfish little existence of 80 years.


Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Do we have access to truth or only the shadow of doubt?

IF one considers that in a criminal case the touchstone is "BEYOND any shadow of a doubt" then it is certainly NOT the assertion that the jury has access to TRUTH (whatever truth might mean) but rather they approach the verdict much as calculus has nascent and evanescent approaches "as close as one pleases" to some limiting value.

Hate Speech and Corporations

Your mention of corporate entities caught my eye because I have been having discussions about Google's rules against "hate speech." Someone just now made the point that in their understanding one may only be guilty of "hate speech" against an individual but not against a corporation and I suspect they are mistaken in this notion. I pointed out that in certain countries, say, France, there are actually laws against such things as "holocaust deniers" and in the case of France that law pertains to denials of the Armenian holocaust. Furthermore since social networks have membership around the world various issues of international law may arise. I understand it has become popular to pursue libel cases in Great Britain since their laws are more favorable to the plaintiff.

I have been on the Internet every day since 1998 and I notice how easy it is for discussions to deteriorate into ad hominem and name calling.  I am just curious if others have given consideration to how difficult it is to define much less enforce policies regarding hate speech. Facebook has 500 million members and of necessity photos and posts are monitored by BOTS which make programmatic decisions about conduct.  


Scumbag Church and Hate Speech Chapter 2

One reader posts:

Hate speech is hateful, cruel, and without merit. This is why religious can get away with saying homosexuals are worthless, but one race can't say the same thing about another race. It's an issue of justification. 'Because I say so' isn't enough. Scumbag church is justified, the fallacy and hypocrisy is clear.

 
William: 

Ah, but if a programmed BOT is doing the monitoring OR if a number of people conspire to click REPORT on a post out of simple malice, then there is some possibility of account suspension. I am not disputing about whether they are scumbags although perhaps it is not my place to judge but rather I simply question the prudence and wisdom of using certain disparaging terms when one might convey the same notions couched in neutral language and reasoning which lead the reader to feel contempt.

I would assume that each of us is the author of everything we post or re-post and we may be held accountable for it in Facebook or Google Plus or any social network. For example, certain countries have passed some very specific laws about obscure things like "holocaust denial." In those countries even reposting something which might be construed as, say, denial of the Armenian holocaust might be construed as a criminal offence.

Is it hate speech to say SCUMBAG CHURCH?

I dislike ministries which stress wealth and Adam Smith's notion of "the invisible hand of God" creating prosperity based upon doctrinal belief, AND I respect your right to chose to label them as a "scumbag church" BUT my question concerns how Google Plus proposes to distinguish valid points of criticism from what it calls "hate speech."  It has been my habit over the years to excoriate and vilify ideologies which I detest with terms like "scumbag" or worse but now I am giving serious consideration to moderating my vocabulary so that I will not be considered guilty of "hate mongering" or inciting others to something inappropriate. I personally do not find your term offensive at all but now I realize that the Terms of Use of various social networks open up a can of worms as to what exactly constitutes "hate speech."

If I say that I 'hate spinach' then will some BOT suspend my account on the grounds of "hate speech."

Does TV/Internet Ruin Our Minds?

Heisenberg wrote a book on Quantum for the layperson in the 1950s in which he said something amazing. Once a technology like atomic energy, or cell phones, or i\Internet is developed you CANNOT shove it back in Pandora's box and say "Oh, sorry world, you should not use this."   

Back around 400 B.C.E people like Socrates and Plato actually expressed mistrust in the written word BECAUSE the author might not be present to EXPLAIN what he means and the words would get twisted. 

As late as the 1st century Bishop Irenaeus who first declared that there should be EXACTLY four official Gospels (using Ezekiel's vision of a flying wheel with four faces).. Irenaeus also expressed grave concern that the written word was dangerous in the absence of living people who could give the guidance of tradition in the interpretation.  

IF anything had the power to trash our brains it would be TELEVISION and perhaps it has trashed us with things like reality shows, Judge Judy, and Dr. Phil (not that they are not fine people but for entertainment we WALLOW in the details of other people's dysfunctional lives, and that is not healthy.)


Monday, July 18, 2011

We have learned something when ...

90% of St. John's Annapolis was doing long readings and then finding something intelligent to say in a seminar or class (or demonstrate a theorem at the blackboard). The only way I could imagine cheating was having someone else write one of my essays, and I felt everyone else was an incompetent idiot. No one had a mystic vision of esoteric insight equal to mine so I was stuck with writing all my own papers. I could not settle for less. 

JOKE: a railroad has a rule against gambling. A rabbi a priest and a minister are playing cards when they spot the conductor headed their way so they sit on the cards. The conductor asks the priest "were you playing cards" and the priest said "no" .. the conductor asks the minister "No" he replies. Then the conductor asks the rabbi who says "So who would I play with?" 

I never cheated once in college.

As the years passed I gradually came to the conclusion that I have only begun to understand something when I can spontaneously explain it to someone extemporaneously for an hour or two from memory and maintain their interest. Only when we have internalized something to the extent that it becomes second nature have we really learned something. Memorization, rote learning, is a waste because a month after the exam one forgets everything and their is no passion.  Occasionally someone becomes fascinated about history or literature or religion from what I say and they ask me if I am a teacher.  The subject matter has to come alive within you like a fire kindled in a furnace and it must have an intensity sufficient to ignite that same  fire in the mind of another. Until you achieve this you have learned nothing.


Ad Hominem Attacks

Aha, indeed, name-calling and profanity constitute an attack. On the other hand, someone made a clever post about the nine circles of Dante's Inferno resembling G+ circles which I found amusing because I had to study Dante in college. I wrote what I felt was an interesting post about which three historical figures are in the mouths of three-headed Satan at the center. One fellow posted to say it was the most uninteresting thing he had ever read. I was curious to know if he is a teenager (which in a way is an unfair ad hominem characterization since there are intellectual teenagers)... I went to his profile where he boasted having lived in Nebraska for 25 years. So I explained (tongue in cheek) that living in Nebraska for 25 years means he is SUPPOSED to find Dante boring because he will most likely only find monster truck rallies interesting and reality shows and Judge Judy and Joel Osteen. Now THAT is an unfair ad hominem characterization because I have not met every Nebraskan and certainly there are people in Nebraska who like the classics and perhaps there are even teenagers in Nebraska who like the classics so I am unfairly stereotyping people on the basis of age and geographic location and in a sense making an ad hominem attack.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

China's Enmity Towards Dalai Lama

I suppose China has had a centuries old desire to claim Tibet as its own, why I do not know. The Dalai Lama symbolizes a free Tibet. China holds the Communist/Marxist notion that religion is bad because it undermines the authority of the state.China sincerely believes that they have done the Tibetans a favor by liberating them from a superstitious way of life.  I think China should simply ignore the Dalai Lama because by raising fierce objections they simply draw the world's attentions and sympathy to the Dalai Lama. Destroying a culture is considered to be a form of genocide/ethnocide even if no people are killed. The Tibet which produced the Dalai Lama is gone forever and IF Tibetan Buddhism survives it must transform itself. There are no more villages where a 4 year old child can be found as a future Lama and no age-old monasteries steeped in tradition where such a child could be raised to be a Dalai Lama.

If Health Care is Not a Right...

Ayn Rand and Piekoff dont appeal to me, BUT each year 250,000 copies of *Atlas Shrugged* are sold because there is a new young generation who _discover_ Rand.  - Basically, the argument of the link is that health care is not a right of all but a privilege of only the rich. I can understand that argument but then it seems to me that physician assisted death should be legalized because without health care life can become a living hell and so can old age. IF people could apply for assisted death and optionally donate their organs if they choose then they would not have to suffer. So many people attempt suicide each year which is a painful and humiliating fate and many FAIL and wind up more disabled and a burden upon the conservatives who do not care to spend money on social welfare or public assistance.


Thursday, July 14, 2011

Conventiol Warfare and Rules of Engagement are Ineffective

It should be very obvious to even the average intellect that the culture which survives will be the culture which has not forgotten how to kill and how to die. Victory and survival will go to the most ruthless. The greatest military machines the world has ever seen have not been able to defeat a nation of illiterate goatherds plus those goatherds are the worlds largest supplier of drugs in the world and that drug traffic weakens our societies and raises a huge war chest of illicit funds for future assaults. We are so squeamish in our concepts of ethics that we bring soldiers up on murder charges. When your enemy is an ideological meme that survives generation after generation then the women and children are the greatest enemy for they are the breeding ground for each successive generation which embraces that ideology. Why would America PIONEER the development of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction if they could never bring themselves to use such weapons in an effective manner?  There is no such thing any more as a just war. Conventional warfare and rules of engagement have been rendered meaningless.  Do you really think that Pakistan will cease its terrorist campaign of attrition against India until it brings India to its knees or until India wakes up and realizes that survival means a world in which Pakistan and Afghanistan and the Pashtun are a fading memory. For that matter I doubt that Israel will survive in some peaceful coexistence. Israel will not simply conquer the surrounding countries but will annihilate them or else those surrounding countries will annihilate Israel. How many centuries of terrorism can all these countries endure?  It would be MORE humane for one side to eliminate the enemy altogether than to let centuries of terrorism continue. And what I argue here pertains as well to the enemy cultures. Their only hope is to annihilate those who see their only hope of survival as annihilation of the enemy. History is a window of rapidly opening and closing opportunities for annihilation. Rest assured that a window of opportunity will open one day for your enemy and they will seize it in a heartbeat and feel certain that what they do is pleasing to their God.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Should We Let God Run The World?

Michelle Bachmann publicly claims that God talks to her each day and has told her to be president. How will President Bachmann resist the temptation to ask God every day about how to run the country? Surely God knows how to balance the budget and make world peace. If Ms. Bachmann can communicate with God then surely many other people have this marvelous ability. So why do we NEED a president or a congress, senate, supreme court. As long as we have a few people around to ask God we should be just fine. Of course then we will have a THEOCRACY. What do all of you think about the idea of God running America and the world?

For all the criticism the Pope takes he never seems foolish enough to announce at a press conference that God has personally spoken to him and told him what to do. Perhaps Ms. Bachmann should be a consultant to the Pope.

I dont think she sincerely believes what she says. If she DID then I would say she needs a psychiatrist. If it is the case that she is simply a liar then she should be mentally fit for politics.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

The Progress of Language

We started out with Neanderthal grunts and croaks -- we progressed to Shakespeare, Edward Gibbon, and yes, even William F. Buckley Jr. (take a look at some of his prose) .... but finally we will come full circle to grunts, croaks, emoticons and txtspeak .... I have been in IRC channes with powerful SUPER ADMINS who sat there all day long posting the most pathetic, immature, childish crap, out of pure boredom... IRC could be a beautiful medium for meaningful discourse, but it is filled with warez/porn/scammer/cyberbully/punks ... much of the Internet is garbage.... this is sad, very sad.  .... oh and we say "meh" what the hell does "meh" mean.... good Lord... and GW Bush gives a speech and says "the NATION of Africa" GODAMMIT it is a CONTINENT with about 50 nations....   you know IF you wanted a hair cut or a massage the law states that you must go to a LICENSED trained barber or masseuse.... BUT when you want someone to run the country ... ANY clown can in theory be elected.. they dont have to have experience as Governor... they dont need a law degree, they dont need to be about to read financial statements or even balance their checkbook... 

The misuse of emoticons and textspeak

I spent a solid year in IRC Undernet #philosophy and one fellow COMPULSIVELY ended each and every long long post (most of which was in postmodernist style) ENDING EACH AND EVERY POST WITH :)    :)   :) 

 ... AND I could not understand why any grown adult with some sort of education would write as if they were some five year old moron... but now, I see it more and more and more and people, INTELLIGENT people who are saying meaningful things will end the sentence with :p   

... so does that mean if you were addressing a senate investigation committee or giving an address at a college graduation that at the end you would stick out your tongue and make a farting raspberry sound???  

What the hell does it MEAN when you use those emoticons with every other sentence....  when you use something constantly, it loses meaning.


It is like some kind of mental illness which is slowly taking over even the most intelligent and educated parts of society. 

What would you think if you read an address from the president and at the end you say :-P  .... 

Good Lord! Take a look in the mirror and get a hold on yourselves.. what sort if idiocy will come next....

I ACTUALLY had a 60 year old woman PRONOUNCE LOL to me as in (Loll rhymes with Doll) .. it is an ABBREVIATION for Laugh Out Loud... it should not become a word LOLL in conversation.  

And a boy on a skate board said to his friends some textspeak SPELLED OUT  L-M-F-A-O  but at least I give him credit for spelling it out and not saying LemFO ... but wait a year and people will be saying LEMFO, and AFEK (away from keyboard)

Harmful because our world is degenerating.... Abraham Lincoln had ONLY ONE YEAR of formal education... and yet was able to write prose which was the equivalent of the King James Bible in tone and solemnity.  

Dwight David Eisenhower wrote a long book of memoirs and his editor commented that it was so well done that it required very little editing.   

In fact, look at the Federalist Papers and some of the editorials written by farmers (not scholars) and notice the exquisite style. You should take a look some time at what common country folks wrote in the 19th century. They did not have the resources that we have of all human knowledge being on line. Most classics prior to 1923 are in public domain and downloadable for free and available in MP3 from http://librivox.org ... but how many avail themselves of these treasures. They are devouring Harry Potter novels which are poorly written.

I am glad that I will be dead soon because this world which I see is declining, degenerating in so many ways, and no one even realizes it... no one feels any shame or has some sense of dignity or self respect.  No one gives a damn... and this thread will be appended by dozens of people who will insist that it is perfectly ok and in fact emoticons are NOT sufficiently used.... and television will be filled with more and more reality shows, and Judge Judy, and Dr. Phil, where the masses will seek a moment of relief from their dysfunctional lives by wallowing in the details of OTHER people dysfunctional lives as they fight on stage and claw each other and discuss their incest and addictions and depression.  


Lawyer Jokes

I had a lawyer friend in New Haven in the 1980s who was sensitive to the several lawyer jokes I related. But in all fairness to the profession he said to me "IF the day ever comes that you or anyone gets in deep, serious trouble with a civil or criminal lawsuit then you will be very glad to have a good lawyer on your side."  And he is perfectly right. Lawyers are not an evil but rather a necessary good PRECISELY because "we the People" are a vicious, greedy, ruthless litigious society. I once saw someone slip slightly on a subway platform and the first words out of his mouth were "I will sue the City!"

The Magic Wand of Uncreation

"Consciousness is a lamp which illuminates the darkness of mere being" - Jung 's autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections)


Our problem is not to discover consciousness, our problem is to escape it.

If you were suddenly given a magic wand to wave... which...if you chose to wave it... would totally un-create you.. that is... your soul or self or existence or consciousness would never have been.... and would never be... i.e. pure non-existence...


The magic wand of uncreation...never to be reborn again (and never born a first time)... never to suffer the delights of heaven... nor the torments of hell... nor life on this planet.... would you wave that wand... would you choose to be un-created?


Corrolary question.... Do you feel deep down in your heart of hearts... that uncreation is utterly impossible..... i.e. that your consciousness will ALWAYS exist in some fashion... whether you want it to or not?


What Is Interesting To Whom?

To be honest I am spending most of my time back and forth between G+ and Facebook. G+ is a tremendous learning curve. FB is where I have 1080 friends many of whom are alumni from St. John's Great Books Program and others are people who share such liberal arts "great books" interests. Someone posted a clever pic with nine G+ circles as the nine circles of Dante's Inferno which I had completely forgotten about. Another fellow posted that such was the most boring thing he had ever seen. I checked his profile to see whether he was over 13 and I saw that he has been living in Nebraska for 20 or 30 years. I explained to him that it is ok for him to find Dante boring and he is SUPPOSED to find it boring because he lives in Nebraska and perhaps what he finds interesting is Monster Truck Rallies and Hog Calling Contests ...   (this is a true story) ...  I suppose the reason I bring this up is that Social Networking is my only means to contact people who take an interest in things like Dante, Plato, Wittgenstein, etc.  It occurs to me that only a fool would assume that the quality of "interesting" is objective for each topic and is assessed equally by every reader regardless of their education, experiences, etc. So only a fool would bother to post that some thread is "boring" since obviously if it were universally boring to everyone it would attract no replies or +1. Fashion models are interesting in nail polish and eye shadow. Hunters are interesting in ammo and the mechanical details of firearms. Programmers find something about Linux or Python fascinating. Entomologists talk for hours about insects. Lawyers find intellectual property legislation fascinating. -----  Regarding Diaspora, I will start logging back in, I feel guilty for not having logged in for several days. I did manage to add +Linus Torvalds the creator of Linux and I dropped hints to him and to Google Devs about doing things that might help Diaspora* enthusiasts. No reason why there cannot be an integration between ALL social networks both distributed and centralized (monolithic?).

Monday, July 11, 2011

The Use of Lethal Force

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/07/11/arizona-lawmaker-points-loaded-gun-at-reporters-chest/

My comments in a Facebook Group:

In states which REQUIRE weapons to be concealed the mere act of bending forward and letting ones suit jacket fall open to reveal a pistol in a holster may be deemed in court as a threat. There there are other states where weapons must NOT be concealed.

Ayoob wrote a series of books for the layperson on carrying a weapon. Ayoob stresses that IF you ever use lethal force, you must be prepared to possibly lose all your property and even face jail time BUT that should all be preferable to losing your life (i.e. you must truly feel that your life is at risk.)  Also, an old retired policeman told me that IF someone approaches you and says "give me all your money" that is not illegal. You have to say "and what will you do if I dont" ... only when you see a weapon or hear a threat can you use lethal force. And if they turn and run you cannot shoot them in the back since at that moment your life is not in danger. AND if you shoot them several times then that may be considered excessive force assuming that the first shot was sufficient to incapacitate them. Very high powered handguns used by FBI/CIA etc are designed to hit the chest and instantly destroy the nervous system so that the perp cannot even squeeze the trigger of a gun pointed at you. Lower caliber may or may not instantly disable. A civil war surgeon made a study of how long a mortally wounded soldier may continue to fight and it was something like 30 minutes given the weapons of that day. We know that Amado Dialo died INSTANTLY in that hail of bullets because there was hardly any blood. The heart must continue to beat for there to be blood pressure and bleeding.


Open Source Distributed Networks

I have been on Diaspora* for a month. I think they have made a lot of progress for a small number of developers who are not heavily funded.  I enjoy the Diaspora* experience. I think there will always be a need for some kind of open source distributed social network. I think Google should make efforts to help ALL social networking apps communicate with each other... stop and think... in the 1980s everyone was developing their own proprietary back end file management system (Btrieve, Dbase)... but NOW there is a SQL standard and each brand of SQL (Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL) differ only in minor ways in non ansi features like triggers and procedures. Google should release an open source app that can be installed on anyones machine and communicate with all other social networks.

A Media Whore in the White House

I grew up watching Buckley on * Firing Line* and admiring his powerful intellect. There are political observers who say that a Buckley or a Goldwater could not arise in our current cultural and political climate and I am sure they are correct but I wonder exactly WHY.  I do remember Eisenhower and I could not imagine Eisenhower doing the night-time talk show circuit or doing stand-up comedy at a Dean Martin style roast - but in our times politicians are expected to entertain us and be photogenic. When I saw Sarah Palin and William Shatner on stage doing a routine I said to myself "Shatner is *SUPPOSED* to be a media whore since showbusiness is his livelihood but what would we want a media whore in the White House?"

Most Stupid People are Conservative

I have encountered a greater number of cordial and open-minded people on the left than I have on the right. There is that famous anecdote about John Stuart Mills who corrected himself  saying "What I MEANT was that not all conservatives are stupid but most stupid people are conservative."  Polymaths tend to be more open-minded and curious, willing to try new things whereas conservatives are by nature less curious and want to maintain some status quo. --- During the civil rights era, Wm. F. Buckley Jr. pointed out, tongue in cheek, that blacks ADMIT they are backward since they have formed The National Association for the *ADVANCEMENT* of Colored People - an argument which Buckley later abandoned and which I find disingenuous and reprehensible.

Augustine and Orthodoxy

Augustine has bothered me for years because the Old Calendar Greeks I was with called him a heretic; the Russian Orthodox called him "blessed" but not "saint"; Martin Luther found so much ammunition in Augustine for the Reformation that some say Augustine laid down the foundation for the Reformation; and only during the Counter-Reformation did the RC Church reexamine Augustine in a new light. I just now found this article by an Orthodox scholar 

http://www.goarch.org/ourfaith/ourfaith8153  

In college the one thing I found WEIRD in the confessions is when Augustine wishes that his former heretical Manichean friends could SEE him praying and see his gesticulations and posture and facial expressions and somehow by convinced or persuaded by such theatrical emotionalism. I think that one of the great weaknesses in modern Protestant piety (of certain denominations) is the sudden shallow emotional appeal of a "conversion" or a "profession of faith" that must of necessity be short lived. If you can only be a Christian on stage and in the spotlight then it lacks the substance of a way of life, a daily struggle of working out ones salvation in fear and trembling. 

Friday, July 08, 2011

Our notion of SELF: Anatman Kandas and Karma

I am rushing around so did not have time to read all posts. Ancient Buddhist doctrines circa 3rd century BCE speak of the principle of "anatman" or "non-atman/non jiva/non soul" and describe the "skandas" which are a bundle of sensory perceptions. Anatman was a challenge to the Hindu notion of atman self or jiva .  For those Buddhists that which we call self is but an illusion or gestalt of those skanedas. HOWEVER, imagine a billiard or pool table with balls racked up, struck by the white ball, and they scatter in certain directions based upon the velocity and spin of the striking ball. This is the anatman notion of KARMA.... how the activities of this current non-self aggregate gestalt will determine the nature of the next incarnation or gestalt.  If ideologies are memes which live for centuries, the minds of adherents being the cells of that brain, and if those memes morph and evolve... well... I must rush, but I think you get the gist of what I suggest.

How to Fix Congress

Proposed Congressional Reform Act of 2011

The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only 3 months & 8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was in 1971 - before computers, before e-mail, before cell phones, etc.

Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, 7 took 1 year or less to become the law of the land... all because of public pressure.

If you agree, forward this to a minimum of 20 people and, in turn, ask each of those to do likewise.

In 3 days, most American citizens will have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed around.

Proposed Congressional Reform Act of 2011

1. Term Limits..
12 years only, one of the possible options below:
A. Two Six-year Senate terms
B. Six Two-year House terms
C. One Six-year Senate term and three Two-Year House terms

2. No Tenure / No Pension.
A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

3. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.
All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system and Congress
participates with the American people.

4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan - just as all Americans do.

5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

6. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

7. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

8. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12.
The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen; Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S.) to receive this message. Maybe it is time.

THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS!
If you agree with the above, pass it on.


The Lesser of Two Evils Compendium

Machinegungirl

This discussion unfolded in Diaspora* inspired by the photo of a child firing a machine gun. 

I am experimenting with creating a longer post in G+ with photo attached and perhaps trying out BOLD and Underline.

*The Lesser of Evils*

Someone posted a Youtube of a small robotic gun about the size of a german shepherd dog equipped with a machine gun and operated by a human at a computer. The accuracy of the weapon was impressive as it fired at distant human sized targets with pinpoint accuracy. In the course of time, combat as well as deep space exploration will become increasingly robotic. 

I realize what I am about to suggest will be controversial and perhaps even offensive, but the way I see it, the human race cannot survive with sharp ideological polarization bent upon transforming or annihilating the opposing ideology. Therefore, the perhaps the only hope for LONG TERM survival of the species is for one pole (side, ideology and which it does not matter) to seize a window of opportunity in which with certain technological superiority it can annihilate the opposition and thereby homogenize the survivors. I am not trying to be humorous. 

Imagine an entire world of, say, Canadians and Australians. Now PERHAPS in a century or two those Canadian-Australians would once again polarize over some ideological difference and we would be back to the mayhem of war. But certainly when one half of the world is pitted against the other half of the world with Terminator-Robocop automatons then no one will win and no one will survive. The above argument makes ethnocide seem the lesser of evils (although still an evil.)

*Be Neither Sad Nor Happy*

Last year a hypothetical scenario dawned upon me of HOW a Nazi victory might in the long run of say three centuries have meant the long term survival of the human species (and I do see Hitler and the Nazis as an extreme evil): 

Let us say Hitler HAD conquered the world and through a rein of terror and genocide had homogenized the entire world so that religious and racial differences were gone. Now let us say that over the course of a century after Hitler's death, the world revolted against the despotic regime and established a one world democracy. The extreme evil and tyranny of Hitler's conquest would have eliminated all the sources of religious, cultural and ethnic strife. Would such a harmony achieved by evil means lead to a long term survival which would be seen as a greater good?

Of course we know that Hitler and the Nazis were defeated.... BUT America seriously considered using the H-Bomb to destroy Russia and China (a murder of 300 million people) to make the world a safe place for Democracy. At present we see the warlike tension between various nations and factions and we see that many groups may have access to nuclear weapons. Therefore in theory the victory of the good Allied side which took place in WWII might ultimately lead to a diverse and polarized world which destroys itself whereas the monstrous regime of the Nazis might actually have homogenized the world into something peaceful and then fallen away in decay. 

There is an ancient Chinese story about a man who is sad because the barn door was left open and his only horse escaped. The village wise man said "be neither sad nor happy for you cannot see the ultimate outcome" .... the horse befriended a herd of horses and brought them back to the barn so now the man rejoiced but the village wise man again said "be neither sad nor happy" ... the farmer's only son chose the most beautiful horse for himself but was permanently crippled while trying to break the horse, so again the farmer was sad and again the wise man counselled "we cannot know the ultimate outcome of anything" ... but then the King passed by seeking young men as soldiers to die in a distant war, and when they saw the son crippled in his bed, they left him as useless, and the farmer rejoiced... but again the wise man said "be neither happy nor sad for you cannot know the end."

*The Mercy of an Eye For an Eye*

Although, in all fairness to the earliest centuries, when a rule of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth was instituted it WAS more merciful than the blood vengeance described by, say Tubal-Cain who demanded that if Cain's blood vengeance was to be 7 fold then Tubal-Cain would be 70 fold (70 times greater) and so if one person was murdered than an entire clan or tribe or town would be murdered. The Americans did this in the Philippines around 1902 (under Pres. McKinley)... one American soldier was killed and so the American soldiers rode on a train and annihilated each village they came to.

*Pure Racism*


Alex: 

Sorry William, but your thesis is pure racism. 
You are stating that ethnical, culural and religous diffrences are the cause of war. It's not, scarce ressources are! 
Ethical, culutral and religous diffrences are only used to justify a war, they are newer the reason for it. Hitler didn't invade Russia, because the people there were slavic, but for "Lebensraum im Osten" i.e. to expand the living evironment for the Germans. 
We also had a long age of war between homogenous european nations. You don't need much diffrences to start a war, but you better find some, if you want to convince your people to die for it. 

William: 

Number 1, nothing is pure. 

Number 2, what I have described is simply a "what if" scenario. Granted that resources and "living space" or liebensraum (aha, I started to write it before I noticed it in your thread") -- The scenario I describe is totally **academic** because Hitler lost, the Nazis vanished, the Germany and Japan of today are not the Germany and Japan of the 1920s. I will give you an irrefutable example. Neanderthal roamed the earth for 400,000 years but we Homo sapiens have been here only 200,000. For 50,000 years Neanderthal and Homosapien coexisted. It is theoretically possible that Neanderthal were the first victims of genocide. The two groups competed for the same resources. Certainly on the surface religious differences were the cause of the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades. On the other hand, if the entire world tomorrow converted to Islam I do not thing there would be peace for there would still be discord between Sunni, Sh'ia, Sufi, Kurd, Druze etc. All I am really trying to say is that what seems like an evil event might lead to some good centuries later and what seems like a good event might lead to catastrophe centuries later. We tend to view advances in science and medicine as good and we see the lives of primitive hunters/food gatherers as short and filled with suffering. BUT, with each century our species becomes weaker and more dependent upon antibiotics and ultra purified water, our lifespans become TOO long because we have no natural enemies AND what is worst of all we live many years into an old age where society has no use for us and we have no way to support our needs apart from the charity of state social welfare. We become weak because there is no survival of the fittest or natural selection. For thousands of years the Neanderthal, Australian Aborigines, Bushmen of Africa, natives of the Americas, lived with no health insurance and those who survived were robust, hearty. 


Consider the irony that America and the rest of the world decries notions of racial superiority, ubermensch, genocide... AND YET... it is America who pioneered weapons of mass destruction, including the H-Bomb, thousands of times more destructive than the atom bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, AND they accused Robert Oppenheimer of being unpatriotic for objecting to the development of the H-Bomb as a possible plan to bomb Russia and China out of existence killing 300 million people to make the world safe for Democracy. Each and every nuclear submarine possesses a destructive fire power GREATER THAN ALL 5 YEARS OF WORLD WAR II BOTH SIDES COMBINED. 

America grew in its early centuries by means of black slavery and genocidal policies against the Native Americans who owned the continent and had no concept of private property. Look up "the march of tears" which relocated Cherokee and others, hardly different from the Batan Death March.

Furthermore, although we decry notions of racial superiority, we feverishly develop methods of genetic engineering which might in theory allow us to create a superior human strain. Also we labor to develop artificial intelligence and robotics so that in theory one day all of our sci-fi horror stories might come true since the new superbeings or the superintelligent automata might consider their creator humans as an inferior and dangerous infestation. 

Add to that the fact that China AND India have far too many male babies because female babies are considered less valuable. Everyone wants a boy for various cultural and economic reasons. Humans are often capable of inhumane agendas.


Racism 2

William: Consider the irony that America and the rest of the world decries notions of racial superiority, ubermensch, genocide... AND YET... it is America who pioneered weapons of mass destruction, including the H-Bomb, thousands of times more destructive than the atom bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, AND they accused Robert Oppenheimer of being unpatriotic for objecting to the plan to bomb Russia and China out of existence killing 300 million people to make the world safe for Democracy. Each and every nuclear submarine possesses a destructive fire power GREATER THAN ALL 5 YEARS OF WORLD WAR II BOTH SIDES COMBINED. 

America grew in its early centuries by means of black slavery and genocidal policies against the Native Americans who owned the continent and had no concept of private property. Look up "the march of tears" which relocated Cherokee and others, hardly different from the Batan Death March.

Furthermore, although we decry notions of racial superiority we feverishly develop method of genetic engineering which might in theory allow us to create a superior human strain. Also we labor to develop artificial intelligence and robotics so that in theory one day all of our sci-fi horror stories might come true since the new superbeings or the superintelligent automata might consider their creator humans as an inferior and dangerous infestation.  Add to that the fact that China AND India have far too many male babies because female babies are considered less valuable. Everyone wants a boy for various cultural and economic reasons.

Is It Racism?

Alex: Sorry William, but your thesis is pure racism. 
You are stating that ethnical, culural and religous diffrences are the cause of war. It's not, scarce ressources are! 
Ethical, culutral and religous diffrences are only used to justify a war, they are newer the reason for it. Hitler didn't invade Russia, because the people there were slavic, but for "Lebensraum im Osten" i.e. to expand the living evironment for the Germans. 
We also had a long age of war between homogenous european nations. You don't need much diffrences to start a war, but you better find some, if you want to convince your people to die for it. 

William: Number 1, nothing is pure. Number 2, it is simply a "what if" scenario. Granted that resources and "living space" or liebensraum (aha, I started to write it before I noticed it in your thread"  --  The scenario I describe is totally academic because Hitler lost, the Nazis vanished, the Germany and Japan of today are not the Germany and Japan of the 1920s.  I will give you an irrefutable example. Neanderthal roamed the earth for 400,000 years but we Homo sapiens have been here only 200,000. For 50,000 years Neanderthal and Homosapien coexisted. It is theoretically possible that Neanderthal were the first victims of genocide. The two groups competed for the same resources. Certainly on the surface religious differences were the cause of the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades.  On the other hand, if the entire world tomorrow converted to Islam I do not thing there would be peace for there would still be discord between Sunni, Sh'ia, Sufi, Kurd, Druze etc.   All I am really trying to say is that what seems like an evil event might lead to some good centuries later and what seems like a good event might lead to catastrophe centuries later.  We tend to view advances in science and medicine as good and we see the lives of primitive hunters/food gatherers as short and filled with suffering. BUT, with each century our species becomes weaker and more dependent upon antibiotics and ultra purified water, our lifespans become TOO long because we have no natural enemies AND what is worst of all we live many years into an old age where society has no use for us and we have no way to support our needs apart from the charity of state social welfare. We become weak because there is no survival of the fittest or natural selection.  For thousands of years the Neanderthal, Australian Aborigines, Bushmen of Africa, natives of the Americas, lived with no health insurance and those who survived were robust, hearty.  


Thursday, July 07, 2011

The mercy of an eye for an eye

Although, in all fairness to the earliest centuries, when a rule of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth was instituted it WAS more merciful than the blood vengeance described by, say Tubal-Cain who demanded that if Cain's blood vengeance was to be 7 fold then Tubal-Cain would be 70 fold (70 times greater) and so if one person was murdered than an entire clan or tribe or town would be murdered. The Americans did this in the Philippines around 1902 (under Pres. McKinley)... one American soldier was killed and so the American soldiers rode on a train and annihilated each village they came to.

Be Neither Sad Nor Happy

Last year a hypothetical scenario dawned upon me of HOW a Nazi victory might in the long run of say three centuries have meant the long term survival of the human species (and I do see Hitler and the Nazis as an extreme evil):  Let us say Hitler conquered the world and through a rein of terror and genocide homogenized the entire world so that religious and racial differences were gone. Now let us say that over the course of a century after Hitler's death, the world revolted against the despotic regime and established a one world democracy. The extreme evil and tyrrany of Hitler's conquest would have eliminated all the sources of religious, cultural and ethnic strife.  Of course we know that Hitler and the Nazis were defeated.... BUT America seriously considered using the H-Bomb to destroy Russia and China (a murder of 300 million people) to make the world a safe place for Democracy. Now we see the warlike tension between various nations and factions and we see that many groups may have access to nuclear weapons. Therefore in theory the victory of the good Allied side which took place in WWII might in theory lead to a diverse and polarized world which destroys itself whereas the monstrous regime of the Nazis might actually have homogenized the world and then fallen away in decay.  There is an ancient Chinese story about a man who is sad because the barn door was left open and his only horse escaped. The village wise man said "be neither sad nor happy for you cannot see the ultimate outcome" .... the horse befriended a herd of horses and brought them back to the barn so now the man rejoiced but the village wise man again said "be neither sad nor happy" ... the farmer's only son chose the most beautiful horse for himself but was permanently crippled while trying to break the horse, so again the farmer was sad and again the wise man counselled "we cannot know the ultimate outcome of anything" ... but then the King passed by seeking young men as soldiers to die in a distant war, and when they saw the son crippled in his bed, they left him as useless, and the farmer rejoiced... but again the wise man said "be neither happy nor sad for you cannot know the end."

The Lesser of Evils

Someone posted a Youtube of a small robotic gun about the size of a german shepherd dog equipped with a machine gun and operated by a human at a computer. The accuracy of the weapon was impressive as it fired at distant human sized targets.  Combat as well as deep space exploration will become increasingly robotic. I realize what I am about to suggest will be controversial and perhaps even offensive, but the way I see it, the human race cannot survive with sharp ideological polarizations bent upon transforming or annihilating the opposing ideology. Therefore, the only hope for LONG TERM survival of the species is for one pole (side, ideology and which it does not matter) to seize a window of opportunity in which with certain technological superiority it can annihilate the opposition and thereby homogenize the survivors. I am not trying to be humorous new imagine an entire world of, say, Canadians or Australians. Now PERHAPS in a century or two those Canadian-Australians would once again polarize over some ideological difference. But certainly when one half of the world is pitted against the other half of the world with Terminator-Robocop automatons then no one will win and no one will survive. The above argument makes ethnocide the lesser of evils (although still an evil.)

Social Networks and Privacy

One of the Diaspora* Developers started a thread for feedback so I said that Diaspora* for me is very satisfying in the sense that it gives me a similar experience to Facebook (meaning simply that I can make new contacts, post in threads, etc) so he became FURIOUS and shouted IT IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE FACEBOOK. So I said, Well, it does not have the advertisements (but I ignore those)... but still there is a fundamental model of a social network....  Some like me (and there are many) write all the time and we WANT people to invade our privacy and even hope that they will STEAL what we write (I put everything I will ever write in public domain years ago) so people like me do not care whether a social network is protecting our privacy or harvesting our interests or targeting us in advertising campaigns. Although I do totally understand the concerns of people who worry about privacy or ownership of intellectual property (kind of in the same way that as a male I understand or try to understand how a woman feels with menstrual cycles, pregnance, etc...   I try to understand but one will never FULLY understand unless one is born as a female... )

Wednesday, July 06, 2011

Power and Benevolence

Agreed, people are not "evil" - Socrates said that "all people by nature desire the good" for no one ever says "A is better than B. B is inferior  so therefore I choose B over A. People like bin Laden actually believed that they are doing something pleasing to Allah. Even during the Spanish Inquisition, they believed that a Jew or Muslim would spend an eternity in torment BUT if after only a few hours of torture they would confess the one true faith and be baptized, then they could be executed and go to paradise for eternity.     

I spent literally 50 years watching Sci-Fi/Horror when suddenly a few years ago it struck me like a bolt of lightening that any species that could develop a technology to travel light-years and enslave or destroy Earth MUST of necessity developed the compassion and equanimity to use such Godlike power for benevolent rather than malevolent ends otherwise they would have long ago destroyed themselves.


The "Greedy" Corporation

This week I noticed the expression "greedy corporation" and began to ponder how a corporation is by definition "for profit" and seeks to MAXIMIZE profits. Now surely there are criteria to distinguish a greedy/selfish corporation from an admirable corporation, BUT here is the fascinating thing: as a society, a culture, in one breath we praise private enterprise, free-market competition, small government with less regulation, etc. but in the next breath we may point to some figure or corporation as greedy, evil, etc and perhaps we do so out of jealousy. Perhaps Micro$oft, Zuckerberg, et al. are not really evil or greedy but simply successful and enviable.

Catch 22 and Kafka's Metamorphosis

The "catch" in Joseph Heller's novel, Catch-22, was allegedly a clause in military regulations stating that anyone who realizes they are crazy cannot be that crazy. It is quite possible that actual sociopaths cannot grasp the fact that they are sociopaths. I watched a documentary where a sociopath in prison was interviewed. He had held up a number of banks at gunpoint. Repeatedly in the interview he was asked how is victims might have felt. He realized that part of the point of the interview was to assess him as somehow abnormal but he repeatedly rationalized all the reasons why his actions/feelings/perceptions are perfectly normal and he is just like everyone else. Supposedly, Franz Kafka's short story, "Metamorphosis," about a man who wakes up one morning to discover he is a large insect, is actually about someone who suddenly comes to some true realization of how they are different and alienated from society.

Psychopathology

There is a riddle which is supposed to detect a sociopath: A woman has two sisters. One of them dies. At the funeral she meets a nice man who dates her. Next week, she murders her other sister. Why?   If anyone spontaneously answers "To get another date" then supposedly they are sociopaths who see people as means to some end and to be manipulates or used like pawns. Psychopath is sometimes synonymous with sociopath except with the word psychopath we tend to think of a Hitchcock thriller with strident violin music. I read one Jungian text which stated on page one: Psyche = soul, Pathos = suffering, Logos = reason hence "psychopathology" means "finding the reason for the suffering of the soul." 

Conspiracy Theories

William: Perhaps the main purpose of various religions: pursuit of happiness. When people are unhappy about their current situation, they will pursue a new way to happiness regardless its authenticity.

Someone: Perhaps the main purpose of various religions is to control the masses for the ends of the power brokers. Religions create rules and a power structure. Then often require an additional 'tax'. The fundamentals behind the teachings of religions are often caring and benevolent but those fundamentals get altered to suit the desires of the leaders. \holy books are created long after anybody can remember the original teachings. 

William: In my life I have come to the conclusion that all corporate human endeavors whether business, political, religious, academic are by OUR very nature corrupt and corrupting but corporate endeavors are all we have because WE are all we have. On the other hand I see humanity as too stupid, inept, short-sighted to really pull off some vast Big-Brother conspiracy of George Orwell magnitude.


So Help Me God

Consider how ridiculous we make ourselves seem with "IN GOD WE TRUST" - first of all, we cannot prove that God does or does not exist. Second of all we know that God is a being who by definition cannot lie (and there is a BIble verse for that) so WHY oh why would we NOT trust a being incapable of lying. Now, we are in a court of law to determine the facts of some incident or crime. We say that we TRUST in God who is all knowing. We raise our right hands and say "SO HELP ME GOD" ... now IF you have some direct contact with an all knowing being who cannot lie then why on earth are you having any court proceeding since you may just inquire of God regarding the guilt or innocence of the accused.  Furthermore we know that "God helps those who help themselves" so why do we TRUST in God? Do we TRUST that God will do everything for us and spoon feed us? That is pathetic. Why do we raise our right hand. Is that not insulting and discriminatory to all who have lost their right hand or been born without hands? The whole business is the most pathetic kind of superstition and should be done away with. By the way, the Muslims in their Qur'an DO NOT say that God (Allah) cannot lie. One verse says that Allah may ABROGRATE OR UNDO any command and he will replace it with something better. So Allah is not even bound by his own word.

Tuesday, July 05, 2011

Watering Down the Trinity

No... what I am saying is that America has watered down all concepts of religion with its efforts to mix religion and politics. If you look at Greek Orthodox liturgies they are extremely and overtly Trinitarian. To some degree that is watered down in Roman Catholicism in the West after 1054 and the Great Schism between Rome and Constantinople. Dogma/doctrine becomes even MORE watered down with Martin Luther's Reformation in the 16th century. Many founding fathers of American Constitution were DEISTS and Jefferson clearly had the intention to erect a wall between CHURCH AND STATE.  Muslims are not pleased to call Allah GOD, and for Muslims it is a sin called SHIRK to ascribe a partner (Jesus) to Allah. America should wake up to the 21st century and remove all religious references from state and federal activities. G.W. Bush was asked at a public forum whether Muslims and Christians and Jews worship the same God. Bush hesitated for a moment and everyone held their breath that he would say something politically correct, and then they breathed a sigh of relief when Bush said OF COURSE THEY worship the same God. But I think many Muslims would dispute this.  I know for a fact that there are Muslims (and Hadith) which forbid answering a non-believer (infidel) when he/she says As-Salaam-Alaikum since that is reserved only for Muslims so a Muslim is advised to either answer nothing or say SAME UNTO YOU (which is meant to reflect back to the infidel the curse, since their blessings are curses) ... the Roman Empire was more than happy to add a new Deity to their pantheon when they conquered a new people and all they asked in return was that those people equally honor the Roman pantheon and especially the notion of the Caesar as a God. When Jews and Christians refused to do these things it was considered a politically subversive act.

More on IN GOD WE TRUST

Jean: Jesus Christ is the Son of God and God the Son. 
Christianity really is about the Trinity of God, but Jesus Christ is easier to worship because he is personified, whereas the Father and the Holy Spirit aren't. 
So when you say "in God we trust", you englobe the whole Trinity, all three facets of God. 

Then again you have trinitarians and nontrinitarians… As soon as you mention some religion you'll always offend some people. 

William: Baloney! I say that is ignorant rhetoric. I choose to see IN GOD WE TRUST as something that should be offensive to all people both believers and non-believers for the simple reason that no one ever thought to use such a motto UNTIL Senator McCarthy decided that Communism was a threat and Communism was synonymous with atheism and Democracy is synonymous with Capitalism and Capitalism is synonymous with only a certain flavor/denomination of Christianity.  The first 800 years of Christianity and the first seven ecumenical councils were all in some way related to very minor points regarding the persons of the Trinity and the natures and wills of Christ so I feel that those councils in the early centuries would have found "IN GOD WE TRUST" very offensive and something that the Roman Empire might seek as a compromise to include all pantheons. Each person has the right to believe as they see fit but no one has the right to shove their beliefs down the throats of all other citizens.


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