hunter
hunter's JournalI think it might be possible to bring this civilization in for a soft landing...
... but our current economic theory and practice has us in a graveyard spiral.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graveyard_spiral
We've probably got the instruments we need to successfully bring this airplane safely down on the river, but the cornucopian and anthropocentric faithful are paying no attention to the ecologists. They are flying by the seat of their pants and mocking those who have seen these curves before.
The concept that humans are nothing more than an innovative eukaryotic life form just like all the other eukaryotic life forms who have profoundly disrupted existing environments throughout earth's history is anathema to them. Mankind is the center of their universe. Unseen godly powers created this garden for us to exploit and it's inconceivable that we would be "allowed" to die like ordinary animals in the ordinary fashion, exponential growth followed by collapse.
At the last second, seeing the ground or ocean expanding rapidly in front of the windshield, they do not accept reality and will simply die for their faith.
It's a morbidly fascinating thing to watch... who needs horror films when we've got this reality?
It's funny how people will eat fish contaminated with mercury...
... but a little bit of tritium freaks them out.
Mercury has a half life of just about forever, and it comes from coal fired power plants, mine waste drainage, and other industrial sources. Look at the warning labels of certain fish species in the supermarket. That's a problem far worse than any tritium dumped at Fukushima. And frankly, I think commercial fishing ought to be outlawed, just as commercial hunting was outlawed in the USA.
The world could suffer a Fukushima sort of accident every year, and it still wouldn't be as hideous as the environmental damage done by the ordinary operations of coal fired plants.
Do I think we should "replace" coal with nuclear? No. I think we should shut down 90% of the industrial economy, sit back, and watch the flowers grow.
No cars, no wars, no airlines, and plenty of time to read a book, grow a garden, chat with neighbors, go to school, or take a hike. Like to travel? Walk, bicycle, take a slow train or sailboat to anywhere at all. No hurry.
Things we must do as humans are few. Feed everyone, shelter everyone in safe environments, teach our children, limit our population, and provide appropriate health care. Everything beyond that is optional and ought to be avoided if it is harmful to other people or the earth's environment.
We could have a twenty hour work week, long vacations and retirements, universal health care, housing and education for all, but instead we turn our lives into a meaningless race to nowhere, destroying ourselves and our world.
I didn't say the pledge when I was in school, adding to my well earned reputation as a freak.
My mom was Jehovah's Witness until they booted her out of their church. And then we were Quakers. The Quakers were the only religion that accepted my mom's particular brand of talking-dirctly-to-God-and-He-answers crazy. Catholics and JWs not so much. Short-circuiting the hierarchy by asking God directly and hearing the answer is not allowed in many religions. The Quakers are okay with that. Say what you will, they nod their heads respectfully and move on.
When I was teaching in public school not many teachers were leading the pledge in homeroom so the principal decided to do it over the intercom with a few volunteer students (set up by patriotic parents) to lead. Great honor to speak into the microphone.
In my classroom it was a moment of respect. About a third of the students participated, the others were quiet. Probably a third of my classes had parents who were not US citizens, a third were afraid I'd call their parents if they disrupted my class, and the rest were patriots like their own parents, terrified I might call home if they disrupted the ceremony. Your kid disrupted the pledge. Horrors!
It was in my contract that I should lead the pledge but nobody ever said anything about participating myself. The "under God" part still irks me. According to my upbringing a guy could go to hell for that.
Is the second ammendment a good thing? No. Hand me my black Sharpie marker. I'll take care of it.
I think anyone who owns a gun ought to be required to do a six week military boot camp, adapted to their physical abilities, but mentally and physically challenging in every way. Anyone who drops out, gets kicked out for anger issues, being a racist asshole, whatever... sorry, no gun license and three years before you can try again.
In addition gun owners would be required to do six weeks of national service every other year, not necessarily related to military or police types of duty, but working closely with a diverse sampling of the entire U.S. population -- white, black, young, old, immigrant, Christian, Muslim, Atheist, wealthy, poor, urban, rural, LBGT, etc. These gun owners would also be on call for military service at all times.
Licensing requirements for a very limited variety of hunting rifles and shotguns would not be so strict, but still require training and exams, rather like a driver's license.
Possessing a gun without a license would result in a mandatory one year prison sentence.
Parents often pass authoritarianism onto their children.
I was raised to "Question Authority," even to push back and disrupt it whenever it became abusive, or to flee if the fight became hopeless.
That's probably why most of my ancestors came to the United States and why they often ran into the wilderness just as soon as their feet touched the ground. Most of them didn't leave any official records of their arrival. Entire crews abandoned ship in San Francisco, for example, and many of those ships are still there buried beneath the city.
The most interesting thing to me is how religion played a part in it. Claims of human authority could be canceled out of any moral equation by direct appeal to God.
The authorities are telling me one thing, God is telling me another. I think I'll go with God here...
Mostly that worked pretty well as this God is the "love your neighbor, don't kill him or steal his stuff," sort of God, with all those rules superseded by the "you're not somebody else's stuff, you belong to God" sort of God.
Wives and children are not the property of their husbands, workers are not the property of their bosses, and slavery is evil.
One of my ancestors escaped authoritarian Europe as a mail order bride. Unfortunately she ended up in Salt Lake City as one of multiple wives. The Mormons were convinced that polygamy was okay with God, but she was not. So she ran away with a U.S. government surveyor and established a wilderness homestead.
Certainly it may have been God telling her to do that, a conflict with her own religious beliefs, but more immediately she didn't like sharing a husband with other women in a patriarchal authoritarian society. Running off with the dashing young explorer must have seemed a wonderfully romantic and exciting thing to do. It's unknown if their first kid was the offspring of temporary Mormon husband or her forever husband, and it doesn't matter.
One of the hallmarks of authoritarianism is some rather twisted beliefs about punishment. Authoritarians train their children to accept punishment, and they use punishment as a tool to enforce conformity to their authoritarian social structures. Some children rebel and escape these structures, but many grow up to become authoritarians themselves.
My own childhood was more of an anarchy than anything else. Neither punishment nor reward were used as tools of behavior modification. I don't respond to either. Every day was full of random shit and random reward, true hunter gatherer style.
Some days you get the sweet berries and salmon, some days the bears chase you away. I probably would have benefited from a little more family social structure, two of my siblings ran off when they were sixteen because there was just too much chaos in the household, but I do know that an authoritarian household would have likely destroyed me or set me loose on the world as a fifteen year old street kid. (My own runaway siblings got good jobs and found neat, very quiet places to live. How boring!)
Part of any family culture is genetic and the family culture adapts to the genetics.But I also think there are some authoritarian family cultures that are malignant and abusive and passed on from generation to generation.
It's difficult enough to get me onto an airplane...
...I think before I went into outer space I'd want a body adapted to space travel.
I'd be tolerant of vacuum, temperature and radiation extremes, and photosynthetic too so I could soak up calories from sunshine. In short, I'd be tough enough to run around naked on the surface of Mars.
If the human race or our intellectual progeny survive (doubtful) they'll probably look at our visions of human space colonies and chemical rockets the same way we look at Jules Verne's moon travel by giant gun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon
If there's any future for intelligent life from Earth it belongs to our machines; machines that will quite a bit more intelligent than we are.
Humans, if we are lucky, will be living as hunter-gathers with built-in internet connections and medical kits. Telepathic communication will be a reality and people will live as long as they want to. Then they will delete themselves or upload edited versions of themselves as artificial intelligences. As artificial intelligences, smaller than grains of sand, they will occupy any sort of body they can create, and they'll be able to travel anywhere they please within the boundaries of known physics.
The universe is probably full of such entities already. It's a giant celebration that never ends, a place some primitives would label "heaven."
Occasionally someone who is still human will want to travel in space, and they will, but only as the ward of their intellectual children. Want to bounce around on the moon in a human body wrapped up in a spacesuit, just like Neil Armstrong? Sure, we can arrange that. But seriously, spearing a salmon for dinner in some Northwestern American stream, or taking your dogs for a walk on a beach, that's a lot of fun too.
Our health care system is rotten.
People who have money and cancers that are not really treatable get inappropriate medical care and die in very ugly and expensive ways, while people who have cancers that are treatable but have no money die because their cancers are not caught early or they can't afford appropriate treatment.
We desperately need a national health care system that is blind to wealth and gives appropriate and effective medical care to anyone who suffers the misfortune of needing it.
The past is as mutable as the future and we exist only in the now.
In other words, "now" shapes both the future and the past, and neither is any place you can visit.
You are free to change either the future or the past, but so is every other little bit of matter-energy in the universe, and this all collapses into a consensus of "now" which is the only thing that actually exists. There are probable pasts, and probable futures, but there isn't any "there" in the past or future to go to.
Wherever you are going, here you are, and wherever you've been, here you are. From our forward leaning cultural perspective which models the past as something immutable, an anchor of sorts in an incomprehensibly fluid universe, we say "Wherever you go, there you are."
This is a consequence of all things being energy. Energy doesn't experience time. You are energy, everything is energy, and it's all moving at the speed of light, which is the only "speed" of anything, no slower, no faster. What we see as energy, and what we see as mass, is all about perspective and relativity. The three dimensional universe + time we perceive is not the canvas upon which this universe is written.
Our perspective is a consequence of our genes and our evolution. There's no reason for minds like ours to comprehend anything not directly related to the propagation of our genes. Most of us have minds flexible enough to get beyond the simple model of a flat earth and a dome of the heavens; we can understand that the earth is spherical, and our planet is orbiting the sun, which orbits the central mass of the galaxy, etc., etc., etc. with all sorts of complications. But it's incredibly difficult for us to grasp non-intuitive things like how all the math of quantum physics, Special Relativity, Maxwell's Equations, etc., etc., fits together. There are various models of the universe, some better than others, but still no "Universal Theory of Everything," which may be beyond minds like ours for the simple reason that the universe is very big and we are very small.
Hunter doesn't leave the Church, the Church leaves Hunter.
Nope, I've never been physically removed from a church (unlike like my mom) but I still go with the attitude that I don't belong to the Church, the Church belongs to me and my community. If the Church hasn't yet been brave enough to ask me about that money they don't get from me, then I don't expect they ever will be.
I'm pretty sure they know.
My parents, and my wife's parents started using birth control after they'd birthed a few more kids than they could comfortably support. This was the 'sixties. After that they were birth control using heretics.
I'm pretty comfortable as a gay rights activist, father of only two kids, and overall heretic.
I've got a lot of the same feelings for the Church as I do the USA itself. It is an integral part of my community. Unlike the USA, I can pick and choose how I support the Church. If I stop paying my Federal taxes because I don't want them to spend my money on war then the IRS gets on my case. If I don't put any money in the collection basket, nobody asks. I'm utterly shameless about that.
I'm fortunate to live in a community with a somewhat liberal Church. I've lived in and visited places where the Roman Catholic (and even the Episcopal Churches) seem to be competing with the right wing fundamentalists to see how many people they can label as outcasts to throw under their Jesus bus. My parents used to live in a place like that. Attending Mass more than once or twice a year there was intolerable to anyone politically left of Bill O'Reilly or Newt Gingrich, even anyone still exercising half a brain. Mass was attended regularly by a bunch of Fox News watching fossils who held a secret suspicion that Vatican II was the work of Satan. My Italian great uncle, a guy who loved everyone, and everyone loved, a guy who had gay friends in Hollywood long before that was cool, a giving Christian in so many ways, got possibly the worst funeral ever. I can summarize in a single sentence paraphrasing what the fossil priest said, "This dude wasn't a good Catholic and is probably going to hell so be afraid and pray for your own soul."
Um, okay, Father. I'm not afraid of supporting civil rights and loving my neighbor. How about you? You could feel the whispering snark in the air, almost as bad as when one of my childhood friends married a fundy. "Obey your husband," the fundy preacher said. Nope, that ain't going to happen in this matriarchal community. Little do you know, husband, your bow hunting days are over. You're going to be a vegetarian like your wife. And it was so. One of my brothers ended up in a similar situation, but fortunately surfing wasn't a sin in her religion. My brother surfs while his wife and kids ride horses.
This poor Priest didn't last long at my great uncle's wake. Everyone was drinking and laughing and being very Irish. After Father left a few virgins may have been lost. If it happened in my great uncle's strawberry patch or next to his bait worm farm then my great uncle is probably still laughing about it. If you are very quiet you might hear him.
Prosperity is when everyone has enough to eat, a safe place to sleep...
... an effective public health care system, universal literacy, with liberty and justice for all.
Everything else is bling.
We can still achieve a prosperous society, but it won't be anything like our present stratified consumer society.
The USA is a wealthy nation, but it's never been a prosperous nation.
Profile Information
Name: HunterGender: Male
Current location: California
Member since: 2002
Number of posts: 38,311
