Objections, to President Obama’s lifting of the Bush administration ban on federal funding to international groups that perform abortions and his voicing of support for human embryonic stem cell research, seem to have set my gray matter to working and wondering in a Cartesian sense: “I think, therefore I am.”
We can philosophically fashion in our thoughts great concern for a single cell that has no capacity for thinking on its own, and at the same time register less regard for a colony of cells that shares a common skin, has a birth certificate, and does as much thinking as any of the rest of us.
However, this concern for the fate of a single cell is not necessarily extended to just any old single cell. Little mention is ever made of a single cell of the nose, toes, gonads or ovaries. The focus is confined to the fate of a single cell called an embryo---the term suggesting its potential to someday be aware all on its own.
But the concern accorded to the non-think embryonic cell is not typically extended to some equally capacious cells called egg and sperm. And even an embryo may be allowed to perish from the chemical abortion that can ensue from birth-control pills.
Please excuse some aside thinking, but can anyone explain why church pews on Sunday are no longer filled with families of nine and ten? Hum . . . and has anyone had a long wait in line at their pharmacy while right-to-life protesters demonstrate against the dispensing of murderous birth-control prescriptions? But thank God, there have been some objections voices over a new and more potent version of the pill that is provided for morning-after. As some have said: How irresponsible; if not abstinence, at least regular precaution could be taken in advance.
And while protesting in defense of embryos, we may ignore the fate of completed humans that are painfully aware of the destruction they face: from collateral damage of war, starvation in some forsaken land, disease born from eschewal of promising embryonic-stem-cell research, executions on death row that can be accommodated within our awareness, or just some near death by waterboarding.
Oh well, some must suffer that others may live until they and their gray matter are pronounced deceased---certified dead as dead may be, though many of their other cells may still be alive and kicking. Brain dead, you dead, we say.
Not that I myself may find the time to go, but does anyone know where right-thinking people will be holding their next protest or silent vigil? I’d be there, but I will most likely be at home holding my own rendezvous with hypocrisy---the partial kind.
]]>The expression of the following opinion might be as little welcomed by some as was a 1959 telecast of author Abby Mann’s Judgment at Nuremberg. The TV program’s dredging up of slightly-old Nazi war crimes was in Mann’s words “considered a breach of good manners in polite society in America.”
A feeling of responsibility goads me to unmannerly suggest that more recently some officials may have perpetrated the crime of torture in our name. In determination of the facts and to salve a communal conscience, we might conduct our own judgment in Washington D.C.
Desmond Tutu could be brought in to advise on the enactment of our version of South Africa’s Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act and establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to hear and record testimony from perpetrators, victims and witnesses of torture, and grant full amnesty to all that came forward and testified truthfully and completely. Fess up, indicate you’re sorry and you go free to live in peace and comfort. If you don’t, you stand trial and face the possibility of being locked away forever.
Short of this, maybe we could all just watch the old movie version of Judgment at Nuremberg. Mann’s film deals with the push-come-to-shove morality of people under threat---the possible sacrifice of principle over security that President Obama rejected in his inaugural address: “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”
In the forward to his movie script, Mann discloses that by the late 1950s and star of his witting of Judgment at Nuremberg, “it was considered a breach of good manners in polite society in America as well as in most quarters in Europe to bring up the subject of German guilt or the victims of the Third Reich . . . .”
This sentiment developed into threats, cajolery and intrigue intended to prevent the 1959 airing of a television version of Judgment at Nuremberg. Tension in Germany between Soviet and allied forces over control of Berlin was stirring cold-war fears, but thanks more to momentum than to courage, Mann’s TV episode was broadcast.
A trailer to the 1959 TV drama and 1961 film version informed viewers: “On 14 July 1949, judgment was rendered in the last of the second Nuremberg trials. Of the ninety-nine sentenced to prison terms, not one is till serving his sentence.” This trailer had been scripted within the decade following the last trials in which life imprisonments had been decreed for some of the ninety-nine.
The telecast of Judgment at Nuremberg stirred an unprecedented public response. Most vividly remember by Mann was a letter from a veteran of World War II and Korean. It simply asked, “You mean to tell me those men you wrote about are walking around free? What’s the matter with us? What’s happening to us?”
Film director Stanley Kramer had also seen the TV drama, wondered what was happening to us, and contact Mann with an offer to register this concern in a movie on the judgment to be made at Nuremberg and all of Germany, America, and elsewhere. Mann agreed and was pleased to find out that the great film actor, Spencer Tracy, wanted to play Judge Dan Haywood.
It would be nice to say, and the rest is history, but it is not---to which Dick Cheney clearly testifies in a CNN interview:
http://www.truveo.com/Dick-Cheney-on-WaterBoarding-Torture-with-Wolf/id/3161118071
If Cheney had said this from the prisoner’s dock at the first trial at Nuremberg trial, in which Nazi second in command Herman Goering was sentenced to death, they would have hanged Cheney.
]]>Automobile industry needs to change gears:
In introductory remarks to his first press conference, President-elect Barack Obama on November 7, 2008 said, “The auto industry is the backbone of American manufacturing.” Automobile manufacturing and the requisite system of busy roads are an essential part of the nation’s economic system, however the nation also needs a new and improved electrical transmission highway that is so packed full of electrons that the nation can go totally electric.
The large manufacturing capacity of organizations like GMC, Ford and Chrysler and its labor force is an essential part of our economy whether they are producing cars for private use or as in World War II addressing a national need by manufacturing tanks, planes, ships, munitions, SPAM and more.
Today, more economic and social activity whizzes around our nation and the world via electrons bouncing around in computers, cell phones, HDTVs, and on the web than travel by car down the highways and byways of the nation. The automobile is as important today as footwear long has been, but it is of no more or less importance that flip-flops, uggs or old-fashioned lace-ups. They help us get around and get around we must---but not always.
Our major industry needs to turn a part of its production capacity to the manufacture of equipment that produces a plentiful supply of electrons, and thus enable the nation to go totally electric by capturing and utilizing the same energy that over the eons turned an accumulating biomass into fossil deposits. This is the sun, wind and gravity that are a free natural resource, which transports them selves for nothing and will provide power for the nation’s largest consumption need: fixed-place facilities such as homes, factories and other public structures. It is far more economical to bounce electrons back and forth at 60 cycles than to find, fight over, mine, transport, refine, distribute, market, consume and dispose of the waste of fossil fuels.
To accommodate going totally electric, the nation needs a new energy grid that facilitates the dispersed production of electricity from wind turbines, parabolic-mirror solar concentrators, sea and surf displacement generators, and thermal wells. This system needs to have a peak-plus capacity; the plus power being used for the online electrolytic production of hydrogen for fuel cell and turbine electrical generation when the skies are cloudy or dark, and the wind and sea are still. Electricity from thermal wells is continuous and, when combined with heat captured as a byproduct of smelting ore, casting metals and disposing of waste, has an estimated capacity to generate up to a third of the nation’s current electrical needs.
The development of this infrastructure is essential if this nation is to once again provide American citizens with personally meaningful, financially rewarding and culturally beneficial jobs, management positions, and investment/ownership opportunities. Electric power inexpensively delivered to individuals and organization will provide the foundation of real wealth that underwrites value for some of the flimsy paper floating around in Wall Street’s house of cards. Regardless of how much money is poured into the investment funnel, value is not going to trickle down to give this nation’s citizens the opportunity to work at the American Dream and enjoy its bounty.
To right the current economic mess, we need to look beyond upping the seasonal sale of consumer goods and toying with the market. The nation needs to invest in what foundations the production of all goods and services---human and physical energy. Doing this will put money in the pockets of consuming workers and provide low cost power to the business and industrial community that will find it of great economic benefit to stay and produce within our shores.
How quickly must the nations go totally electric? Within the same time period that it took the Greatest Generation to turn America into the Arsenal of Democracy: one four-year term of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration. At the dawn of World War II, FDR called his war production advisors together and informed them that he want American industry to produce 4,000 airplanes per month. Some demurred and insisted that it would take a year, but FDR persisted and in a short time the nation was producing 4,000 a month and they made some of the older aircraft look like kites. In addition, the nation produced thousand of tons of trucks, tanks, ships, munitions, SPAM and two things that citizens had never even hear of before, atomic bombs.
With a supply of electrical power that is almost free, what might the future show us: overhead trolley cables above interstates that let semi-trucks secure long-haul power, home greenhouses that facilitate the growing of edibles, heat produced inexpensively enough to feasibly produce biofuels from non-edibles, plug-ins on parking meters to charge battery powered hybrid cars, and maybe a free power lunch on a National Electrification Day commemorating the capture of electricity from the sun, wind and gravity at a cost only marginally more expensive than the air we breath.
The Army Corps of Engineers and Combat Engineers in the challenging times of World War II had a motto that well reflected the can-do-spirit that made the WW II arming of America possible, “The difficult we do today, the impossible will take a little longer.” Aside from deciding to take the nation totally electric, there is nothing about the task that is comparably difficult or close to impossible as was that faced at the dawn of World War II---yes we can.
]]>My interest in politics goes back to a time when I thought that the president had to be named FDR and the pope Pius---this election harkens back to the seismic shift in politics that gave the nation the New Deal.
There are obviously things that are different now from back then. Notable to me is that none of the candidates have proposed making the changes that circumstance now require---the system is broken and needs to be fixed and tinkering with interest rates and tax rebates does not address the underlying problem.
This nation has abandoned its manufacturing capacity and participatory buying our way out of the problem is not going to be possible. This is not a problem but rather an opportunity to move beyond the cancerous economic system that fakes progress in terms of using up resources, polluting the environment and hauling what is left off to the landfill. We are not gong to be able to go to Wal-Mart to buy our solution. We need to rely on American ingenuity and rebuild our decaying infrastructure and construct a new one that supports an improved way of life---dingdong, free-market economics is dead.
This great nation of ours needs to match FDR’s WPA, PWA, and CCC with the building of a national energy grid and generating capacity that outdoes TVA of the New Deal. This nation needs to go totally electric with an advanced energy grid and dispersed electrical generating system that delivers free electrical power to all Americans.
This can be achieved by the dispersed production of electricity from wind, geothermal wells, solar cell and thermal turbines, surf and hundreds of other ways not yet even dreamed of. Such a system can be backed up by on-line fuel cells and turbines that run off of electrolytic generated hydrogen that is produced from a peak-demand-plus system. There needs to be no concern about efficiency---daily more energy bounces around us than can only be fractionally captured.
Like the dramatic developments of World War II, we need to make this happen within a period of 4 years. As a great people, these can be the most exciting times of our lives. This will allow us to free ourselves from hostile international entanglements. Go electric, totally electric.
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A presidential candidate all choked up? With a Clinton it would depend upon what “choked up” means. Now does choked up mean it “is” what it is, or does it mean it never “is” what it is?
Anyway, in this political season a new voting block seems to have been discovered and exploited---the victims of domestic abuse. With no more cost than some dry-cheek tears to signal “I can feel your pain” and with no public “thank you” to be given in recognition of their support, some victims of this silent breaker of hearts and killer of the human spirit were moved within the security of a voting booth to silently mark a secret ballot in denotation of their very real and very personal suffering.
Now having been cryptically used as well as abused and with their plight neither being openly condemned nor its redress made a conspicuous part of the candidates agenda, these continuing sufferers might aptly be termed a silent minority.
Excuse me, I think that I am getting sick to my stomach and going to have to throw up. I seem to be suffering from mental bulimia---for this terribly flawed and liberal Democrat, some things are hard to swallow and keep down. But what foolishness; it is best to keep in mind that only a prominent person bent of being world leader can sincerely express genuine concern for this great land and the welfare and wellbeing of all of its people.
]]>People do many things in life that they never attempt to explain in terms of motive or underlying cause; they just do what may or may not be assessed good or bad by others. And what is daily done will usually go unassessed by everyone, including the person that has done it.
Mother Teresa devoted her life to the good service of others, and this humble woman did not boastfully claim great piety or God’s favor by parading her religion alongside what she did. In fact, this good woman lived a doubt-filled life of selfless service to the poor, sick, orphaned, and dying. To these she gave the comfort she could not find for herself—as she wrote to her spiritual confidant: “the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see—Listen and do not hear—the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ...”
Some politicians and their holier-than-though supporters boastfully attribute and code-talk signal that their actions and intent are specially directed by God to and through them by their one, true and slam-dunk religion. They may fool those that long to be fooled—on TV, was that a cross or bookcase in that political Christmas card, or a bookcase intended to look like a cross to those in the know? I have heard of Bible code; do we now have Season’s Greetings code? Sorry, I should have said Merry Christmas.
Perchance it has been written for those that think it of import: Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that. But now ye rejoice in your boastings: all such rejoicing is evil." ~ Jas. 4:14-16.
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A sow’s ear is not going to be made into a silk purse and a tragically mistaken war in Iraq is not going to be fashioned into any kind of victory worth winning. It was a blunder to go into Iraq and it is more of one to stay there.
We need to turn the mess created by George W. Bush and his administration over to the people that live in that part of the world. We have created enough enemies in the area and staying there only creates more.
The contention that our leaving Iraq would cause it to become a haven for terrorists disregards the fact that it is a haven because we are there. Also, if in our absence groups like al-Qaeda were more likely to establish a safe haven, then they already have them in those nations in the area in which we do not have a military presence.
The overwhelming majority of people of nations in the Middle East have no more of a desire to be taken over by terrorists than do an overwhelming majority of people in our country. Our continued occupation of Iraq promotes a grave threat to our nation and the longer we stay there the closer we inch toward antagonizing and radicalizing some unknowns that are going to light the final fuse that will bring massive destruction and chaos into our own land.
Fight them there or fight them here? George W. Bush has repeatedly justified his mistaken venture into Iraq by saying, THERE. Thus he proclaims to nightly-news watchers throughout the world that he is going to use Iraq as a killing field. In this shooting gallery of his choice, Bush enrages people and makes of them enemies that are not fond of losing via collateral damage their loved ones, their homes, their neighbors, their cities, and their lives.
If we cannot work with the nations within the Middle East and the world in establishing and maintaining a stable situation for citizens in those lands, then our faith in common man has been misguide and it is but a fortuitous quirk that this Great Experiment of ours has blundered along for this extended period of time.
To continue to “GO IT ALONE,” is to continue down the dead-ended path to our own destruction, and Pogo will be proven to have been right, “We have met he enemy and he is us.”
]]>Economic growth to what end? Regardless of whether the state’s means are to be justified by their ends, the Machiavellian problem becomes one in which the means and their measure become ends within themselves. Thus, we have growth not for the greater good, but growth regardless of for what or for whom.
If free-market growth were to occur biologically within our body, we would call it malignancy and either attempt to control it or get rid of it altogether. From a perspective of Mother Nature, we humans could be considered the pathogens that she would pluck from planet Earth and send to the land fill, or mutate into beneficial elements that have self control.
Oh, so Mother Nature, like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, is but an invention of our imagination, however the Good Earth is not and we best attempt to keep it that way.
“We have met the problem and it is us,” ~ Eco Pogo.
]]>A good deal of “scam science” comes out the propaganda mills in Washington and Washington that Karl Rove used to give us George W. Bush—these operations are rather ridiculously called “think tanks.”
These are “rent-a-mouthpiece” operations that make their members big bucks by telling the general public anything that will serve the religious, corporate and political interests of those that buy them. Thinks-tanks such as the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), Project for the New American Century (PNAC), and Discovery Institute will be happy find that privatization of Social Security is a wonderful idea, global warming is a scam, efforts to save the Florida Everglades are unnecessary, invading Iraq was a great idea, and Creationism-Intelligent Design only took God six days to do.
You too can start your own tax-exempt Think Tank. Just put some pages out of the web that attack something that is rational, include one or two nice pictures, list a bunch of folks as experts (either living or dead), and include an easy way for people to send you money—they call it getting involved.
If your think-tank cause is not supported by scientific research, just say that it is. If experts in the field have come to censuses about something that you do not like, just say that they have not.
And be sure to make it look like you are not someone out on a broken limb that is sawing it off—insist that there is a groundswell of opinion that is with you. This astorturfing should be supported by expert opinion from someone in or Forest Lawn Cemetery (oops, that cemetery is too close to Hollywood—list another one).
Remember, you are not trying to convince real thinking people that you know what you are talking about; you are just trying to get some fellow culturopaths to go along with you and send money or at least repeat your shtick.
]]>Maybe some folks, particularly the religious right, remain ignorant of the disastrous consequence of global warming because its gradual increase is keeping them as blissfully unaware as a frog that has been placed in cold water that is gradually brought to a boil. Before the frog realizes it, he is in hot water.
It could be just a part of God’s master plan, and we are already in hell and God is gradually turning the heat up.
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