This I Believe

I have been thinking about what I would write to the "This I Believe" program on NPR for a long time. Listening to the essays on the radio and through podcasts, I've often considered going through the exercise of writing one myself, but what I would write has been an assorted variety of whatever is on my mind at the time.

I believe in a lot of things, but when I started thinking about how I would explain my beliefs to my new son when he gets older, I realized that I could sum it up to say that I believe that nothing is absolute.

I would normally dive into the topic of beliefs by explaining the difference between things we know and those that we just suspect without concrete evidence. In a classical science versus religion debate, you can separate beliefs as ideas you hold to be true in the absense of proof, versus ideas that are supported by observable facts and can often be recreated by an experimenter. Belief in religion, by definition cannot be proven.

Some people believe that religion and science are, by their nature and definition, opposed to one another. They believe they you can't be a scientist of faith or a true member of your religion and also accept science. While there are areas were science and faith directly contradict on another, the vast majority of the ideas that religion deals with and the tenets that make up science do not have anything to do with each other.

While I believe that science holds the best hope of answering questions and solving the great mysteries of life, it does not and cannot answer some of the important questions in life, from the simple to the profound. Should we treat each other nicely, is murder wrong, or is it wrong to benefit at the expense of someone else's suffering.

You can't prove or disprove a moral code.

By my definition, religion is not confined to matters of organized faiths. I've never liked the idea of a group of people persistantly proclaiming that they know the unprovable truth about the deepest mysteries of life and humanity and everyone else is deluded. Because faith has no prove, I believe it has to be approached as a tenative or possible thing. In fact, religion's best power is the ability to have people explore their path in life and make corrections when things are going off track. But beyond major religions, I believe there are many other mysteries in life that are worth exploring. Ghosts, reincarnation, telepathy, human energy, and precognition are all areas that are more like religion than science. That doesn't mean they aren't interesting or important, just that no one has written a book and organized a church around them.

Sometimes science is seen as a way of exploring religion. Experiments have been done to measure the weight of a human soul, for example. Other times, scientific discoveries have threatened religious doctrine, such as when Copernicus described how the earth goes around the sun. Religion and science survived the battle that arose from that new idea, but both were changed.

Not anchoring your beliefs, yet being certain of what you know and not adrift in confusion is a good way to live your life. I believe it's best not to deal in absolutes. Even science rewrites theories from time to time when new evidence arises. Keeping your mind open and not getting stuck in absolutes is the best way to greet the new things that you encounter in life.

New Intellectual Property Model for BioEnergy Tech Development

I sent the following letter to Barack Obama and his Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

I would like to see a new form of technological development applied to bioenergy and alternate energy development. It would borrow elements from the aircraft and ship building during WWII.

During that time, the rules governing the competing goal of intellectual property rights (proprietary ownership of methods and designs) and rapid development through sharing knowledge were re-written. We need to share technological information in order to bring energy source changes to the public quicker.

A wiki style forum to share ideas in particular fields would have the advantage of bringing all the designers and developers abreast of the latest developments, as well as producing a consensus design that will provide standardization (and therefore more rapid diffusion) of the emerging technology.

In order to reward creativity and incentivize design efforts, we need to come up with a hybrid intellectual property rights formula. I propose that we use government money to fund selected pilot plant projects, with the stipulation that all design development will be instantly published and widely disseminated. This allows private individuals, research organizations, and private industry to develop technology without shouldering the huge capital expense of R&D. In exchange, technologies developed will be un-patentable, or patented for free public use. In some situations, we should offer patents that do not allow the patent holder to restrict use of the technology by others, in exchange for some licensing fee.

Using this plan, an example would be development of an algae energy plant. We could set the pilot plant up at some medium sized city's wastewater treatment plant, and start the job of turning the waste stream into clean water and algae based bio-fuels (ethanol and biodiesel, as well as livestock feed). University based researchers could test strains of algae, industry representatives could try equipment to convert the algae to lipids and starches, and engineering or research firms could be brought in to administer the pilot plant (and in the process learn how to plan and sell the plants to future customers).

Please consider the need to alter the current rules of intellectual property in order to speed development of our future alternative energy technologies.

Thank you.

Mike Jones

What Happened

I would add a couple of words in there to make it more salty, but I'll keep it clean.

I read former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan's book, What Happened.

I am not impressed.

If you did not like Bush and ran out to buy this book in order to hear all the dirty little secrets about the Bush administration, hoping to hear about how corrupt and incompetent they are, this is not that book.

This is a book where a boot licking weasel tries to have it both ways. He's trying to essentially say that everything we believed was right, but we just botched the execution. I'm not particularly impressed with Scott as a great thinker of the day, especially after listening to his analysis. In the few times where he actually brings up a thorny and interesting subject, rather than taking it on and analyzing it a little, he says "that would take a whole other book to explore that subject." This is code for, "if we looked closer at that, we'd see even more glaring flaws in our ideology, so let's just skirt by the issue." More than anything else, it's a regurgitation of the endless stream of talking points that the Bush Administration is so famously known for, a strange continuation of the endless right wing propaganda, while also trying to somehow point out its flaws and explain why he wasn't responsible for where it went wrong.

Some times, he does incredible reversals. He talks about this horrible contentiousness in Washington, and how Bush wanted to rise above it and play a more honorable game, but the evil media or the evil entrenched politics of Washington sucked him into behaving just like everyone else. Then he starts bashing the Clinton administration. He has the gall to say that all this attack politics got completely out of control in the way that the Republicans continually attacked Clinton, and then to imply that it was Clinton's moral failings that brought it all on, or worst yet, the way Clinton defended himself helped cause the partisanship.

He spends a lot of time talking about what an attack dog Rove was and how he put politics above all other considerations when it came to making decisions. At the same time, this is the guy he strove to impress more than anyone else and he heaps praise on him for what a smart operator he is.

The way he spins the run up to the Iraq war is that Bush never really cared about Weapons of Mass Destruction, that all he really cared about was spreading Democracy and Freedom in the Middle East, but that he did not feel the American people would buy that, so he was a little disingenuous about why he REALLY wanted to go into war.

He gives little glimpses about how the personalities in the White House inter meshed and worked together. He says that Vice President Cheney would never give his opinion to President Bush in front of anyone else, and even within the staff, no one really knew much about what he thought or just how much influence he had.

I hope Scott makes enough money from this book to live on for the rest of his life, or that he has a plan for a career outside of politics, because there's nothing in this book that will endear him to either party. In the end, it's a sad book, of this lonely little man that just wants acceptance for himself and validation of his ideas to a polarized public that is unlikely to give him either.

Genghis by Conn Iggulden Book Review

Sometimes you get an unexpected bonus. I checked out an audiobook, Genghis: Birth of an Empire and started listening to it without reading any background on it.

After a few chapters, I finally thought "what is this story about?" The main character was a guy named Temüjin and he did not seem to be headed for any greatness. Before I spent too much time on a story that might not be anything like what I expected, I looked it up.

I knew the book was fiction, but it's that genre of book that is fiction in the sense that no one could have know the dialogue or minor action. The background or overlay of the story is accurate. I guess you could call it fictionalized history or historical fiction.

Genghis Khan lived around the year 1200. As you can imagine, there are not very good records of this time. However, he apparently dictated his history at some time in his life. All original versions of his history in his native language are lost, but a Chinese translation survived. This is what Conn Iggulden's book was based on.

This is a story that really grips you. You can imagine the harsh conditions and the tough life that the Mongol people endured. Temüjin was betrayed and abandoned with his family when he was 12 and not only managed to live, but went on to unify a group of tribes that had been warring against each other for as long as they could remember. The book takes you up to the betrayal of the Chinese ambassador and the defeat of the Tatars. There is a second book that should take you into some of the other conquests, I am definitely going to listen to it.

It was fortunate to find this book as an audiobook. The problem is that the names mess you up. They don't pronounce their K's, so the tribal leaders were actually called "Han". The images that stick in your mind when you listen to the story are the way they shoot their arrows when all 4 feet of the horse are off the ground, so that they get a steady shot.

It's not hard it imagine a life this harsh, with survival of the fittest making the tribes grow stronger each year, and constant warfare honing the warrior skills to a peak. The only thing that was missing was for someone to come along and unify the tribes into a single unstoppable unit.

It seems like a time long past and no longer able to give us lessons for today, but strength coming out of adversity and failure being a primer for success are two things that could be considered pertinent for today. Also useful, the thought of a unifying leader that can bring everyone together and make for an unstoppable people.

Automaker's Bailout

Here's the letter I sent to my Congressman and Senators:

Automaker Bailouts:

The automakers need a bailout, but apparently, they can afford expensive pop-up ads in AOL asking me to contact my member of Congress to lobby them to help the Automaker Industry.

It motivated me to write to you, but not in support of them. This is the same industry that has spent millions in lobbying the Congress over the last 25 years to keep CAFE standards low so that they could continue to make crappy cheap cars that use fuel like you are flushing it down the toilet. Rather than leading the world with engineering, they dragged their heels and argued that it just couldn't be done. They've been telling us for years that they can't make more fuel efficient cars.

A year ago, I started looking for a car to replace my 20 mpg Jeep Cherokee. I wanted to buy something that got better gas mileage, and had found that most cars now got worse gas mileage. So if I want to buy a car that won't bankrupt me with the fuel charges when gas gets back up to $4 a gallon, there is no smart American choice.

We can put a man on the moon, but we can't make an 80 or 100 mpg car? We can supply the world with trucks, tanks, boats, and planes during WWII, but we can't figure out how to make a plug in hybrid or electric car? We can figure out atomic energy, but we can't figure out a solar car?

Detroit deserves to die on it's own capitalistic rhetoric, if nothing else. In February of this year, Bob Lutz, GM's Chairman, made a very public statement that global warming was a crock. This was probably just after he approved of taking another couple of mpg's off of the efficiency of the latest truck they make. These people are the problem, not part of the solution. They are why we are so addicted to foreign fuel, and why we are having such a hard time with energy consumption in this country. Hard core proud capitalists are the first to invoke "too bad" or "they should have known better" or "survival of the fittest" when someone else falls on hard times, but they see it entirely differently when it's their own bad decisions that endanger their industry.

If we have to bail them out, if everyone is set on doing that, I believe it should come at a high price. I think they should be forced to fast-track develop high mpg cars, as well as electric and alternate energy cars, and prohibited from ever producing another Hummer or Excursion.

In addition, I believe that if they are going to get bailed out, that their top executives, who unarguably have failed at their job of keeping their companies sound and steered in the right direction, should be limited in their compensation. If we bail them out, and then the next week, I see an article talking about how Bob Lutz got his $300 executive bonus, you should expect to get many more letters from constituents.

We've just elected a lot more Democrats to Congress and will finally have an intelligent President we can be proud of, so let's not lay a big rotten egg with the first major decision of the new Congress and President and allow these auto industry jokers to get a fat bailout without a whole lot of conditions. They should almost wish they hadn't asked for the bailout when they see the conditions. The biggest irony is that if you force them to make efficient cars, Americans will start buying their cars again, and they will get healthy due to natural market forces. You almost have to legislate good sense back into them.

2nd Civil War

This is my first Non Book Review.

I checked out the book The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America by Ronald Brownstein.

Then I succeeded in not reading it for 30 days until I had to return it to the library. This Non Book Review is an attempt by me to explain why that was a good thing.

I read the first couple of chapters and felt this sinking feeling. The book’s title pretty much says it all. This is a book about American polarization. If you’ve been alive and aware of current events in this country for the last 16 years, you know how we’ve been divided to the point where we really hate each other.

This book rubs your nose in that.

I wanted to find out why we were in this mess and what it would take to get out of it.

I skipped forward to the later chapters, hoping that by then, the conflict would be solved, everyone would be singing together with their arms around each other, and the author would explain where everything went wrong and how we could make it so it would never happen again.

Unfortunately, there is no happy ending. Fear and hate are two commodities that don’t need a bailout.

It's A Love Story

If you haven't see the video for this new Taylor Swift song, it's at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4xmxb9K8RI on YouTube. I didn't know who Taylor Swift was a short time ago, now I see her in the gossip and entertainment news with increasing frequency.

She broke out on the country music scene two years ago when she was 16. I thought it was Clair Dane when I first saw the Love Story video. Her story is pretty interesting, and I was pleased to find that she writes her own songs.

As I grow older, I keep in mind the infuriating comments of older people I have heard. The comments fall under the category of how stupid young people are, derision about the choices made and the mystifying behavior they display. I had the sense at the time that those comments were being directed at myself and my contemporaries to know that they were wrongheaded, petty in spirit, and lacked insight and understanding. In particular, when whithered old crones with their tiny pursed lips spat distaste and condescension about the music my generation loved, I knew that they had closed their mind to the truth and rejected the best things we loved without opening their heart to knowing and cherishing them with us. I vowed never to fall into their trap, to try to keep my mind and heart open as I aged and try to be one that still remembered and understood the passions of youth.

Listening to Tayor Swift's Love Story reminds me of that vow and makes me realize something else about the age divide. There are things that young people know better than their elders. Passion is a product of youth, something you can forget as you get older. Now that's not absolute, it's not fair to say that you lose all passion as you age, but your passions shift from music and romance to politics, your job, your church, keeping your house nice, and raising your children, among other things.

When you are young, you are really good at romance. I say this even though I remember my own and other's awkwardness, whether by shyness on one extreme or embarrassing yourself on the other extreme. It's true, you may not be as smooth and polished when you are young, the words you come up with may not be worthy of publishing to inspire others, but you are an expert at one thing. When you're young, you open yourself to your loves and throw yourself into them with abandon.

I can rationalize this and say that young people have never been hurt or humiliated yet, and that allows them to leap without reservations. That's true in many circumstances, but not always. Not to get too technical, but scientist have also found that your brain does not easily produce some of the chemicals that it did in youth. I can't find the reference, but it talked about how children love gifts, but older people rarely get as excited about receiving presents when they get older. I've noticed this in myself.

So I think it's fair to say that you lose something as you get older, something besides just innocence. You lose some of the capacity to appreciate the sweeter things in life.

When I see how someone young is finding their passions in life, whether they are creative or romantic, I can't help but get a little wistful. I don't think it's over when you get older, I think this is what the young have to teach the older people, to remember the excitement of discovering the things in life that thrill you. One thrill I know is just seeing that love catch fire for the first time in someone young.

Inexperience is a great thing.

Population Control

I listen to several science podcasts that keep mentioning population control. If the issue is food prices, energy production, urban sprawl, light pollution, species extinction, or global warming, it usually comes down to overpopulation.

I remember the fear of overpopulation back in the 70s prompted some to illustrate the problem with graphs showing how growth takes off. This is the first time I knew and understood about exponential curves. Growth, even a very small percentage, is exponential. This means that it accelerates and eventually the curve gets so steep that it is practically straight up.

In developed nations, the curve is not growing as fast as in less developed nations. Some say it's because undeveloped nations need their children as a source of cheap labor, but there really is not much understanding of the phenomenon.

I came up with an idea about 5 or 6 years ago, when thinking about overpopulation, abortion, teenage pregnancy, and other child raising issues. I sometimes come up with solutions to multiple problems by starting with the statement, "This would never happen, but..." If you throw out the downside of a solution, such as the fact that it may impact on someone's personal freedom, or no one in power would ever agree to it, or the general public would never stand for it, then you can come up with some interesting solutions. Let's try to ignore the fact that China has a sordid history of mandating behaviors that are against the population and sometimes quite scary when you consider personal freedoms.

This idea started as an argument that in this country we always line up on opposite sides of the ideological divide and take diametrically opposed positions on issues, when often there are solutions in the middle that borrow from both ends of the spectrum. Never mind that these bridging crossover ideas never see the light of day. Abortion foes do not believe in killing a fetus. Abortion rights advocates want women to control when they have children, in part so that men cannot enslave them into raising children rather than making their own decisions and choices in life. I've always thought quietly to myself that if people can't control their urges or plan their reproductive schedule any better, that abortion is about the only way to prevent rampant overpopulation. We seem to think that most abundant animal species need us to help "cull" their population, but we never seem to feel that way about people. That's because people are special.

I've always wished we could just take abortion off the table. Find some solution that satisfies both sides. After all, abortion is only chosen because the baby is not wanted. What if we could do something that would guarantee that all children were wanted? How about if we only conceived when we really wanted to? Let's forget for a moment that many of the religious fundamentalists that are most up in arms about abortion are also very against birth control because they think it promotes promiscuity. What you really need is to have everyone that does not want a child to easily and reversibly be made infertile. For this to really have the maximum effect, you need to have this apply to not only women, but men too.

OK, so let's assume that there is some kind of simple procedure developed in the future, maybe some kind of silicone plug that is inserted into your tubes, that can later be removed and full fertility would be restored. It's fiction right now, we need some science to come about to make this possible. Then let's say that all people, as they reach puberty and become able to conceive are given this infertility treatment. What happens then?

Further stipulation would be that these 13 year olds would all be given the treatment and that they would be able to reverse it only after they turned 18, when they had their full rights as adults. No more teen pregnancy, no more babies having babies. The thing I really like about this is that it empowers men in family planning. Men cannot be faked out or blackmailed or lied to in the matter of pregnancy.

You could take it further and say that you only get to reverse the treatment so you could conceive when you were financially secure, in a committed relationship, and drug free (and not a criminal). So not only are all children conceived wanted by their parents, they are also brought into a stable environment. Imagine all the country's children automatically knowing one thing, that they were wanted by both of their parents, and also not having to grow up with a drug abusing, or absent, or criminal parent. Imagine all children having a stable home where hunger or want were not present.

It would solve so many problems. The only thing is that we humans are pretty attached to our problems, and not yet ready to give them up.

How Soon We Forget

I was listening to a This American Life episode where they were travelling in Pennsylvania to document the character of this swing state's campaigning.

This is a state that voted for Kerry in 2004, and for Gore in 2000, not to mention for Clinton in '92 and '96. McCain thinks he can win it and is spending a great deal of time there.

The podcast had a section on Hillary supporters for McCain. They were very fired up, very against Obama, and very involved in campaigning for McCain. I listened to their speeches and reasons for switching the party they support, and I declare them to have no memory of history.

Working in an office with conservative people, and serving industries full of conservatives, and living in a reddish state next to a beet red state, I spent the 1990's listening to right wing rhetoric. For those out there that were either so deep in a blue territory, or who were too young or in a coma, let me remind you what this was like. Conservatives hated the Clintons. You might think that they would focus their hatred on the Clinton actually in power, but you would be wrong. People hated Hillary Clinton. I didn't understand it at the time, and I still don't, I'm just repeating and reporting what I heard. I did not see anything wrong with Hillary Clinton, and used to tell die hard Hillary haters that I thought she was a hottie, just to watch them cringe.

When the 2008 primaries came along and Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy, my primary reaction was weariness. I never realized how tired of all the nonsense, bile, and kooky conspiracy theories I was. I also knew that even though Bush's ratings were low and the political winds were favoring a change to the left, that having Hillary on the ticket would supercharge the right. I figured we had to get ready to listen to an avalanche of hatred, fear, and stupid stories (easily debunked if you spent about ten seconds on Snopes).

These people on the right hated Hillary with a fervor that was not to be believed.

Yet as soon as she was knocked out of the primaries, the first thing they did was to use her speeches in the primaries to try to discredit Obama. I remember at the time thinking, "You don't even like her! Why are you telling us to listen to her?"

So when I hear someone that formerly supported Hillary talk about supporting McCain, I really have to wonder at their sanity and awareness. Why would you help the very people that reviled your candidate? This doesn't make any sense at all. It must be some kind of Stockholm syndrome, because I can't think of any logical explanation for it.

A Uniter, not a Divider

8 years ago, when Bush first publically uttered the title phrase above, it was a calculated ploy to pull voters over to his side.

I was listening to the news on the radio a few mornings ago, and as usual, they were covering the campaign. They had an audio clip from a McCain rally, and the clip started with a derisive comment about his opponent, followed by the booing of the crowd.

They cut to an Obama rally, where you had a stirring comment by the candidate followed by cheers.

What a contrast this provided. On one hand smear, fear, and anger, on the other hope, ideas, and cheers.

This is the politics of division and derision come to roost. I had high hopes for McCain, a person I was firmly behind in 2000, a man I believed had honor, when this election started. I thought that this would finally be an election where the ads weren't all about how "my opponent is the devil". It started out that way, and it felt like about the time McCain seemed to borrow and bring on some of the scummy architects of Bush's victories that the campaign dove down for the mucky bottom.

You get tired of hearing someone spew anger, hate, and fear and smear. It really became apparent when they brought out Sarah Palin, and she turned out to be an Anne Coulter clone. Is that all they've got? Hate & fear?

The problem with the politics of division is when the people you are setting up as "them" become the majority. Since you can't ever tell when that will be, it's best not to rely on it permanently. You have to recognize when pushing the same buttons doesn't have the same old effect it always did.

What you really want and need in leadership is a person that understands the shared threads of many of the people out there and tries to bring them together in common purpose. Someone that can point out the problems, but offer a concrete solution or at least a good attitude of how to respond to the problem.

It feels like the people are choosing hope over despair, action over fear, and coming together over tearing each other apart.

Sabotage by Failure

I was listening to a debate about health care the other day. The subject was whether the government should or should not be responsible for Health Care. The anti panelist was arguing that after the government failed so utterly at Katrina, "you want to turn over health care to the government?"

The next pro panelist immediately responded with the point that having a bad administration screw something up and then using that to justify your position for something that you don't want to do anyway is awfully convenient.

I just tried to find another reference, which escaped me. I was listening to a book review (sorry, can't remember the book) that had some strange and disturbing assertions. The thesis was that conservatives liked to get into government to run it into the ground, thus making it impossible for government to interfere in business. The interview also talked about how President Clinton went into office with plans to provide health care, and the budget deficit was so bad that it was impossible to implement any health care plan. The book that was being reviewed was supposed to show how conservatives like big deficits because it limits the size of government.

This is juvenile. If there is any truth in this assertion, if people either consciously or subconsciously are trashing our government institutions in order to profit more and more easily, this is disheartening. I understand wanting to get ahead, I can even understand greed. But greed that is so short sighted that it's easy to see how it destroys the very society that you hope to live luxuriously in.

Trouble in Sector 34

In our town it's tornado sirens. At 11 a.m. on the first Monday of every month, they test the tornado siren, and it always had the same effect on one of the women in the office. You could almost see her making the calculation of where her son was. There are a few sounds that always make you freeze and consider. Alarms. You hear a huge echoey variety in movies, always there for chilling effect. There are also fire, rescue, and police sirens, going off at random in your neighborhood, making you wonder momentarily if all is not well.

I was listening to a report about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) recently. Parts of these reports up to now have been about how some people think that when they turn this machine on soon that it will spawn black holes and it will be the end of Earth. Physicists say this is absurd, this machine is just supposed to usher in a new golden era of understanding in physics. Detractors are doing everything from lawsuits to death threats in order to stop the collider from being turned on. They hear that alarm signal in their head, the end of the world is near. The most recent report was about how the collider has had a setback during its startup. Apparently a relay blew out and they have to warm it back up from 2° above absolute zero (thats about Fahrenheit 451 below zero) before they can repair it. The atom smashing that will unlock the secrets of the universe will have to wait for a few more months. One of the reporters that is following the LHC closely got a cryptic message that there was "Trouble in Sector 34" at the LHC. Obviously, the 7 mile diameter ring is divided into sectors on the engineering drawings for maintenance purposes, and the relay that blew out is in the 34th sector. The interviewer remarked that "Trouble in Sector 34" sounded like a movie title, some sinister X-Files kind of movie, maybe.

So in this case, with the LHC, we have both figurative and literal alarms going off. This is also going on with the economy and government. For years, people have put out warnings that have gone unheeded. With the financial meltdown, it makes you wonder who keeps reaching over and muting the alarms until things got so out of control that the special effects explosions start happening and the ship starts going down in flames. You always wonder when you see scenes where the pilot is in the distressed cockpit with multiple alarms going off and they are still steadily working toward averting the disaster. You want a cool hand under fire. You want someone that continues to work for solutions while the alarms are bleating in their ears. That's what the siren song teaches us.

BSG

My wife subscribed to Netflix.

We tried it once before and didn't really like it, but we're trying it again.

Since you get a better deal by watching more movies, I didn't want to be limited by making decisions each time we returned some movies. I started filling up the queue and realized that Netflix has many older movies and TV series than you find in a Blockbuster store.

I believe that good TV shows that get popular have the strongest following of people that have watched the series from the beginning. I speculated that pilots are probably the best a series ever is, the first season is probably the best of the seasons of a series. Why not go back and see some of the TV Series that I suspected that I would like, but never got into the first run.

In particular, the remake of Battlestar Galactica sounded like something I would like. I watched a few minutes of the series when flipping channels around, but it didn't make any sense to me. So I rented it and watched the pilot last week.

I like the story much better now.

SPOILER ALERT

The background of the story makes it much more interesting. The Cylons had already had a war with the humans and lost 40 years before. The Galactica was due to be retired and decommissioned. They used the same setup from the original series, but explained it as the fact that no computers could be networked because the Cylons could co-opt networked computers.

The Cylons hack the 12 colony's computers and kill their defenses prior to launching a massive attack. The ancient Galactica barely survives.

Glossing over much of what happened, they barely evade the Cylons and limp off to seek the mythical Earth. Faster than light drive, Cylons that look and feel like humans, a implanted chip that keeps a human traiter under tabs, and a power struggle all stand to make for a very interesting story line.

But I may not watch any more. I like the way it starts, why spoil a good thing.

Capitalism and Terrorism

As always when I get an idea, it's a compilation of several things I've heard recently.

Let's start with minerals. I recently spent a week in Creede Colorado, where a silver boom created the town in 1890 and a silver bust stopped the development of the town cold in 1892. Silver, lead, and zinc were mined steadily, keeping the town alive, but not booming. Now metal prices are such that the mines may be reopened. This would bring jobs and development back to the city. My cousin recently bought a cabin in the area. We visited over Labor Day and hiked in the pristine mountains and fished in the unspoiled streams. While my brother is usually a pro-market, capitalistic minded person, he expressed dread that mining would return to Creede. Why? If development is always good, government should not regulate or restrict businesses, and market forces should always be allowed to dictate public policy, why shouldn't the mountains around Creede be mined for their maximum mineral potential? After all, doesn't America need these minerals? We can't expect the environmental concerns of a small portion of the population to deny resources that happen to be in their area to the rest of the population. Like drilling oil in the gulf, for example.

The U.S., the old colonial powers, and other big or strong nations, have always seen their need for resources to transcend national boundaries or the interests of local governments and native populations. Our history in the Middle East, in connection with our need for oil, has also followed this pattern.

Rather than having morals, ethics, and principles that we hold to be true for all men, we have a history of applying a different standard to people in other countries as well as to people that stand in the way of our progress.

For those situations where Americans were the actors, you often had big U.S. corporations operating in small countries. You did not find large crowds of American citizens standing up in protest when these companies were using heavy handed tactics to get what they wanted. People here for the most part were unaware of how U.S. companies operated overseas. When they were aware, they did not care. Any exploitation, displacement, or disruption was happening to "those other people". After all, we were benefiting with oil, minerals, crops, or other lucrative goods. Why spoil a good thing just because some strange people in some other part of the world with unintelligible languages and incomprehensible cultures were being "inconvenienced"? Shouldn't the market dictate what happens in the world? If they did not want to be dominated, they should have developed their resources themselves and used the money to create a strong military defense. We can't help it if they were weak and disorganized. They were in the way of us getting to their resources. We did not regulate or rein in our rogue capitalists that operated in this fashion. We either encouraged or ignored their actions.

Now we live in an era of terrorism. We wonder what they have against us, because most Americans prefer to remain blissfully ignorant rather than pay attention to the way we have treated other countries. Sometimes mistreatment was a corporate policy while in search of resources. Other times our government committed mischief, crimes, or atrocities in search of an edge or advantage in the Cold War. If you lived in a country that had been exploited or disadvantaged by the U.S., you would see things quite differently. Maybe you would not hate America, maybe you could understand why things were done the way they were done. If you buy into the premise of survival of the strongest, you would also feel that the big guys can take care of themselves.

So when members of a country radicalize, call for jihad, and start taking actions against the western world, we in the western world finally turn our attention to these countries in horror and wonder why they do not rein in their radicals. We can't comprehend why they sometimes actually cheer the efforts of the extremists.

Why should we be surprised at their actions, revolted by their inability to keep those on the fringe under control? For people of the Islamic world, our application of capitalism is terrorism against them. Why does it surprise anyone that they consider turnabout to be justified?

Fanning the Flames of Hatred

We love to hate.

I know this is somewhat in direct opposition to the Symbiosis posting I just made, but something happened today that set off quite a rant in me.

I heard the news that after a month of negative ads by the McCain campaign, Obama's numbers have slid downward to below McCain's.

It's as if the country was asked to believe the worst accusations about a person and they came right out and jumped right on the task.

One thing that I have really despised about the Bush era in general, but some of their biggest supporters in particular, is their constant and persistent call to find something to hate about "the other side". It's somehow even better if it's not true, all it has to do is appeal to what people want to believe, not what they can be convinced of by facts. And just as hordes of people obediently forward emails of stories that are unbelievable at first glance, they usually don't take the time to dive into the stories they hear to determine whether they have any semblance of truth in them.

The sad thing about this is how easy it is for good people to fall prey to the siren song of hating your fellow man. I had a good friend years ago. He was a free spirit, probably lived outside of the law in some respects, had a healthy dose of disrespect for authority, and was fun-loving and funny. The last time I talked to him he told me, "I've been listening to a lot of talk radio lately. I really hate liberals." What I didn't say that day, partly because I was stunned by the statement, and partly out of respect and a desire not to have a fight with my friend was "What do you mean you hate liberals, you ARE liberal." Seriously, this guy was one of the most tolerant and liberal people I've ever known. Where did this sudden blindness to all that he believed in and loved turn into this hatred for "liberals"?

People are not shy to speak up about their hatreds. They feel vindicated and justified in thinking and believing that other people are somehow worthless and reprehensible. I'm talking about the divide in America, not about how Americans feel about other people in the world or how they feel about us. The bad thing about this trend is that I hear many people of faith spewing out this hatred, feeling perfectly justified in doing so, and not at all able to see the hypocrisy of being told by their religion to love one another, but feeling free by their associates to hate any and everything about those "others".

When we see radical Islamic fundamentalists espousing hatred toward America, we feel alarmed and repulsed. How can these supposed men of the cloth preach such tenets that are obviously contradictory to their religion? Yet we are blind to the hatreds we hold ourselves. Why is it so clear to see hatred in others, and so hard to recognize it in ourselves?

This is a trend that has to be recognized and reversed. Everyone hears how those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it. I think it's much worse than that. I think that many that are perfectly aware of history are more than willing to repeat it, because they think "This is different." We look back on the 1930's and we dissect the rise of Nazism and smugly say, those Germans were sure stupid to follow Hitler. We even have this parable crafted for children about standing up to oppressive tyrants. You've probably heard variants of "I stood aside, because they weren't coming for me" stories. The punch line was when they came for you, no one was left to stand for you. Hitler had the perfect tool to recruit millions to his cause. He gave them what they wanted: something to hate.